Journalism: April 2005 Archive Page

None of these dedicated reporters and editors is paid for their efforts. In fact, most of them don’t know the first thing about professional journalism. All however are as passionate about their craft as the top earners at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News or the BBC. What’s more, they’re convinced they can offer better journalism than anything professional news organizations currently supply; one stripped of all bias, covering areas long ago neglected by a mainstream media and produced by thousands of committed citizen correspondents all over the world. This is the dream of Wikinews.

Objectivity, no political agenda and the puritanical pursuit of truth? Surely that’s a pipedream? It’s certainly not a historical trait of American media. Yet if the lessons of the last year have taught us anything, it is that we dismiss citizen journalism at our peril.

[...]

“We were both kinda addicted to Star Wars Galaxies,” explains Ilya a little defensively. “I would travel [in the game] and claim I was with the press so they shouldn’t shoot me. But they still did.”

It’s not being glib to say that Ilya’s Star Wars Galaxy experience translates well to Wikinews. All the interactive and community skills that today’s 20-somethings have learned online provide the underpinning of this new participatory media. And given all the time and effort Ilya spent “practicising” being a journalist – learning style guides and how to structure a news story, who’s to say he’s any less equipped to start plying the trade than many journalism graduates? --Matthew Yeomans
--The Birth of WikiNews (Citrizens Kane)

Robert Pittman, who created MTV, attributed the station's success to the ability of viewers in their late teens and early 20s to process multiple facets of information simultaneously. In television, success brings imitation....

"When Mary Lynn Ryan, who was CNN's producer at the time, did this the news ratings skyrocketed," Grimes said. "So it appeared as though Robert Pittman was correct: if you are from 12-22 years old, your brain has learned how to process all these competing messages simultaneously, but people in their 30s and older have not learned how to do that."

Bergen, however, hypothesized that Pittman's theory was not correct.... "The human brain is today as it was in the 1880s, the 1580s and in the time of the Greeks and Romans. It has not changed," Grimes said. "We are no better able to parallel process conflicting information now than we were 300 years ago. So this notion that Pittman had that people have learned how to do that is nonsense." --Distracting visuals clutter TV screen; viewers less likely to retain content (EurekAlert!)

We'll be starting our own TV turn-off week, one week late.

Tonight, my son asked to watch The Incredibles again, but I told him we'd play together instead. While my wife took a nap, the kids and I read books aloud, played hide-and-seek, "Simon Says," and a game of my own invention -- "The Obedience Game." Just about anything can be fun if you enjoy the people you're with.

Computer turn-off week? I'm not ready for that...

AP started as a cooperative. Today, it is a cooperative in name only. It’s time to take a lesson from music swappers and invent the new AP – a digital cooperative, a Napsterized news service.

The 21st Century news business needs a peer-to-peer network that lets local operations drive cost out of their non-local news packages, divert resources to local web content creation and operate on a level playing field with bloggers, citizen journalists and internet pure plays. --Bob Benz and Mike Phillips --Time for a change: The Associated Press as Napsterized news (Online Journalism Review)

This is a reasonable attempt by the mainstream media to "get it" when it comes to the internet. Another detail that caught my eye:

Confronted with the rapidly growing need for web-specific content like Flash files, audio clips and other multimedia elements, AP has chosen to spend more of its members’ money to create that content rather than facilitate content-sharing among its members.

I'm planning to introduce a Flash unit in an upcoming (Fall 2006, if memory serves) New Media Projects course.

Nowadays, news consumers have an almost unlimited choice. They don't sit down with a newspaper for an hour to read it cover to cover. Instead, they bounce from site to site, story to story, link to link, customizing their newsgathering experience, clicking on whatever stories from whatever publications appeal to them. They don't stick around long, but they do visit. It may be difficult for newspapers to figure out how to make money on them, but that doesn't mean that consumers don't find the product appealing.

People haven't been abandoning newspapers (and magazines). They have been abandoning the print medium. --Adam L. Penenberg --The New Old Journalism  (Wired)

Nothing terribly new here, but it's still notable to see support for The Basics in a publication like Wired.

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

[...]

We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market. --Paul Graham --The Submarine (PaulGraham.com)

The Wall Street Journal on April 11 wrote that ?despite the occasional controversial article, many of the reader-written sites look more like church bulletin boards than, say, the New York Times.?

Let?s not dismiss church bulletin boards. When I wrote editorials in Omaha, Neb., I watched a Republican candidate win his way into Congress via a campaign conducted mostly on church bulletin boards. I suspect that in the most recent U.S. presidential election, church bulletin boards delivered far more votes than the New York Times did. We should hope that our work rises to the level of influence and inspires the loyalty of a church bulletin board. --Robert Niles -- Printer-friendly version Virtual roundtable: Grassroots journalism leaders discuss the nitty-gritty (Online Journalism Review)

From the intro to a "virtual roundtable" with Mike Noe, Lauren Ward, and Lex Alexander, " some people who actually are making grassroots journalism work for their publications."

"God forbid, if someone shot the President, which network would you turn to? It will be cable, the Internet--something other than General Hospital being interrupted." --Sam Donaldson, former ABC News anchor --Donaldson: Network News Dead (BroadcastingCable.com)

The school argued a need for it's services by citing lower test scores in Marlborough, Hudson, Maynard and Clinton than in surrounding areas.

Set to open it's doors in the fall to 276 sixth- and seventh- grade students, the charter school plans to expand it's enrollment to 826 students in grades six through 12. --Schools department may join charter school lawsuit (Shrewsbury Chronicle)

Nobody's perfect, but three misuses of "it's" for "its" in two paragraphs suggests somebody doesn't know the rule.
Via Joanne Jacobs.

"Certainly, I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp away." --Rupert Murdoch, "old media" mogul. --News must adapt to web, says Murdoch  (Guardian)

This year, the prize went to the Associated Press staff for, as the Pulitzer organization's site says, "its stunning series of photographs of bloody yearlong combat inside Iraqi cities."

I looked at the twenty photographs and broke them into groups on the basis of content. Here are my results:

? U.S. troops injured, dead, or mourning: 3
(2, 3, 11)
? Iraqi civilians harmed by the war: 7
(4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 18)
? Insurgents looking determined or deadly: 3
(6, 15, 20)
? US troops looking overwhelmed or uncertain: 3
(7, 12, 14)
? US troops controlling Iraqi prisoners: 2
(16, 17)
? Iraqis celebrating attacks on US forces: 2
(1, 19)

Equally telling is what the photos don't show:

? US forces looking heroic: 0
? US forces helping Iraqi civilians: 0
? Iraqis expressing support for US forces: 0
? Iraqis expressing opposition to insurgents: 0

Not only do the twenty photos consistently portray the American invasion and occupation of Iraq as an unmitigated disaster, but, as Michelle Malkin notes, at least one of them (number 20, depicting the insurgents' shocking execution of Iraqi election workers) has been exposed (by Powerline, Belmont Club, and others) as the result of at least some degree of coordination between the AP photographer and the insurgents themselves. --"GaijinBiker" -- Analyzing the AP's Pulitzer-winning photos (Riding Sun)

The conspiracy theories surrounding photo 20 (a picture taken during the execution of election workers) are a bit overblown, but the assessment of the ideological content of these photos is thought-provoking.

Of course, it's a truism of journalism that the most unusual and striking events get the biggest play. It's not news if a dog wags its tail, for example, but it is news if a dog attacks a toddler.

It is important that you understand that the concept of Toothing - beaming a sexual text message to a random phone on a commuter-packed tube train - is a bit like going into a crowded nightclub, throwing a brick at the dancefloor with a love letter attached, and hoping that the person it hits will agree to sleep with you. It?s technically possible, and it?s not going to happen. That made it even better when the whole world fell for it.

The whole world. --Toothing (The Triforce)

Wired confesses it was hoaxed.

For years, the Vatican has had an arrangement with major agencies, including Catholic News Service, whenever there is big news: A cell-phone alert tells them to check their e-mail inboxes for an urgent Vatican statement.

So after the pope died, reporters' cell phones beeped and the e-mailed death announcement began appearing less than a minute later -- or longer, depending on the order of arrival. In fact, chaos reigned in the press office for several minutes; those who had not received an e-mail pleaded desperately for confirmation from the agencies that did. There were a few screams -- not of grief, but of being late on a story.

The Vatican spokesman showed up much later, to fill in the details.

In the Internet age, which was born during Pope John Paul's pontificate, the Vatican also marked his passing by changing its home page to the theme of "Sede Vacante" ("Vacant See.") The site featured an elaborate series of pages detailing the highlights of Pope John Paul's life and papacy. --John Thavis --With death of Pope John Paul, Vatican changes many procedures (Catholic News Service)

An interesting insider's look into coverage of the pope's death. Normally, when reporters start filing stories about the reporters covering an event, you know nothing's happening. This is one of the few such stories that I think really serves a purpose other than filling the newshole. (And it implicitly answers the objection Matt Kirschenbaum raised about the AP story covering a smiliar topic.)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.