Journalism: November 2005 Archive Page

--Volunteers work smoothly for Operation Santa Clause [sic] (Tribune-Review [Online])

Dear Santa,

For Christmas, what I need most of all is a good copyeditor.

Love,

Pittsburgh Live.com

Okay, okay... To err is human.

I shouldn't be so harsh on whoever typed the headline. It's gloating blog entries like this that annoy professioal professional journalists and make them think of bloggers as "the enemy." But as I deal with the final crush of rough drafts from my students, I've been upbeat and constructive and positive as much as humanly possible, and that takes its toll on a guy.

So I've briefly unleashed the unflinching grammar bastard who dwells within. That felt good.

Now it's time to go back to being Professor Helpful.

In a matter of minutes Thursday morning, while they were in Herald Square hosting NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a balloon crashed in Times Square, injuring an 11-year-old girl and her disabled older sister.

Lauer and Couric didn't mention the mishap.

[...]

Couric and Lauer spent the last 10 minutes of the coverage reading from the sappy script, although they did note viewers at home were seeing last year's footage of the M&M's balloon, which depicts the candies in distress.

"Now, because of today's windy conditions, these characters are on video, and if we told you they were not in a panic, we'd be full of hot air," Couric joked.

Sure, you can make an argument why they shouldn't have mentioned the crash. But the fact that someone was injured in a similar incident in 1997 was enough to make the crash worthy of mention on-air.

If it was possible for NBC's cable network, MSNBC, to report the accident - before NBC's own parade coverage ended - then someone should have gotten a word to Lauer and Couric. --Richard Huff --NBC leaves Matt & Katie to twist in wind (NY Daily News)

How does it taste when your credibility melts in your mouth, not in your hands?

Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question.

[...]

So where did the information come from, then? The culprit appears to be a Hollywood Reporter article on another interview with Stringer, which appeared a few weeks ago and also appeared to attribute pricing and availability information to the Sony CEO.

However, on closer inspection, the article was actually citing an anonymous source within Sony - a fine detail which the CNN article apparently missed, setting the whole rumour mill rolling once again. --CNN drops PS3 price story as Stringer comments are confuted  (Games Industry)

Via Bobby Kuchenmeister, a former student of mine, and a regular commenter, who finally got a blog. Hooray!

Framing a story is like building a house. Just as you determine how many rooms the house should have, you focus on the main idea of your story and what you want to say. A poorly framed story is vague and pointless, and your writing suffers. Good adjectives cannot make up for a bad story or bad idea.

"This is a tool (not a rule) to get a handle on the story and break it down," Roberts said. "Framing makes the story easier to write. If you lay the foundation, you're free to be a much better writer."

One of the leaders in the training movement across the country, Roberts had conference participants pick a story and find ways to make it better. Focus the story by deciding the main idea and, after reporting, run the information through this checklist: news, context, impact and human dimension.

• News is the event, new information, basic facts; it tells the reader what happened.
• Context is the story's background and history, its relationship to things around the news, the bigger picture; it tells readers what's normal, surprising or how similar things are dealt with elsewhere.
• Impact tells readers what the news affects or changes, now and in the future; it tells readers who benefits, who suffers and what they can do about it.
• Human dimension illustrates or portrays how the story effects the lives of real people; it provides details, textures, emotions, colors to convey experience.

--Michael Roberts --Story Framing: Four Vital Ingredients (Poynter)

All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity. --Charles Johnson & Roger L. Simon --Excuse us while we change back into our pajamas (OSM.org)

I've been watching this one unfold from a distance.

A company called Pajamas Media (a reference to CNN president Jonathan Klein's dismissal of the typical blogger as "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas") to Open Source Media. Bloggers noted that this name conflicts with the name of Christopher Lyndon's "Open Source" radio show, and began tracking changes to Open Source Media's version of the name-change story.

Johnson and Simon have rightly pointed out the problems with Dan Rather's arrogant response to bloggers who pointed out flaws in the CBS coverage of Memogate, so it was rather surprising to see that it took some time for Open Source Media to admit that the company made a big mistake. (See Lyndon's description of the name problem.)

The Pajamas Media website, however, still contains material dismissing "Pajamas Media" as a temporary name that they will soon shed.

Why We'll Be Changing Our Name

When the bloggers who started this company first came together it was almost natural we would call ourselves Pajamas Media. It was a playful tip of the hat to that moment when bloggers exposed the misreporting of CBS anchor Dan Rather. At that time, an ex-executive for CBS tried to dismiss us as riffraff in "pajamas." But the bloggers were right, CBS was wrong, Rather retired (without apologizing) and the rest is history.

But as we have gone forward putting together this company, it has become clear to us that we do not wish to be defined merely as gadflies in opposition to mainstream media. We owe our readers and our colleagues something bigger, an alternative to the structures we have lived with all our lives. It's not enough to criticize. We also have to build something new. To do that, we needed a name that would allow us to grow. And that name we are in the process of deciding.

What a PR fiasco. It wasn't as if the people involved suddenly decided to change their name and picked one at random. They planned this, but didn't plan well enough.

While they responded slowly in terms of the blogging cycle, they still cleared it all up within a week, which is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things.

The most subtle and cogent analysis by a rhetorician of how The Times or CNN frames its stories has all the pertinence to a reporter or editor that a spectrographic analysis of jalapeno powder would to someone cooking chili.

This is not a function of journalistic anti-intellectualism, though there?s certainly enough of that to go around. No, it comes down to a knowledge gap ?- one in which academic media critics are often at a serious disadvantage. I mean tacit knowledge. There are, for example, things one learns from the experience of interviewing people who are clearly lying to you (or otherwise trying to make you a pawn in whatever game they are playing) that cannot be reduced to either formal propositions or methodological rules.--Scott McLemee

--Meet the Press (Inside Higher Ed)

The driver of the police van starts to pull out, momentarily blocking your view of Ide and the protestors. The two young men behind you come forward for a closer look.

"Did Tony just give her the finger?" asks the young man in the sweatshirt.

"I don't blame him," says the second young man.

As you move to a new position, you pass near the young man wearing the sweatshirt.

You glance at your watch and notice that court will be in session in a few minutes. You know that you've got a seat reserved, but you know judge Dickerson doesn't like people coming into his courtroom late. Given all the noise out here, the judge might be in a bad mood.

Do you

A) Talk to the young men
B) Talk to the woman with the megaphone
C) Head right into the courtroom

[In class Friday, you will be given the next chunk of the story.] --Lab: Court Reporting (EL 227: News Writing)

I'm in the process of creating a "Choose Your Own Adventure" exercise for a courtroom reporting exercise in my News Writing class.

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to hand students a packet of information based on the choices they make. There will be a few other quick choices, then when the court breaks for lunch, they'll have an hour to write up their notes.

When court reconvenes, I'll shift into role-play mode, and I'll perform for them what happens in the courtroom.

They'll have to take notes on this sequence, and incorporate these events into the story that's due at the end of the lab.

Wish me luck!

From Tammany Hall, robber barons and the sinking of The Maine to Vietnam, Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal, editorial cartoonists have exalted, lambasted, praised and skewered the rich, the powerful and the foolish.

Since the history of newspapers, cartooning has been a rich and vital contribution to American political commentary.

With the advent of news on the web and new design technologies, who will carry on that tradition?

Washingtonpost.com is looking for the next star of cartoon satire - a "Herblock" for the digital age.

We're proud to announce the 2005 Washingtonpost.com "Editorial Shorts" Digital Animation Competition.

Can you use the emerging tools of digital animation to be the new voice of American satire? --Editorial Shorts: Digital Animation Competition (Washington Post)

Still, when asked what art forms speak the most to us, games don't rank at the top. Ranked 1 to 6, where 1 is the most emotional, the order was: movies, music, books, video/PC games, paintings/artwork, and last cars. (OK, so I have a thing for cars?)

Heavy gamers have more of a feeling for movies. Lighter and younger gamers are more moved by music.

For genres, I thought MMOs would top the list, but RPGs are the runaway winner ? by far the most emotional genre of videogames. --Hugh Bowen --Can Videogames Make You Cry? (bowenresearch.com)

This is a teaser article, advertising a full-length report. While I'm very interested in the subject, journalists should be careful of how they use this kind of study.

Was the study peer-reviewed? What was the methodology? What is the author's purpose in publishing it (and selling copies on his eponymous website)?

I'll have to look into the death of Aeries from Final Fantasy VII. Interactive fiction fans seem to place the fate of Floyd the robot (from Infocom's 1983 Planetfall) in the same category.

By studying journalism, you carry with you tools for assessing arguments, and a dogged determination to find the truth in yourself and in others.

I love this work, but it is work. Living up to the standards of this difficult, competitive field is taxing. I have a long, long way to go. --Amanda Cochran --A journalist's lessons (Girl Meets World)

Amanda is a junior journalism major here at SHU. I've asked her to speak to my "News Writing" class today.