Journalism: March 2006 Archive Page

Such pictures fill my weekday world at five.
The yellow crime tape flutters at the scene
Of yesterday’s event. You’re there, on screen,
Square-jaw’d Slick Goodhair, you’re reporting live.
But first, “Are you depress'd? Or weak, or dumb?
This pill, this car, this show, this boy, this chick,
This beer, this low-carb pizza on a stick
Will banish pesky thoughts.” Oh, bliss… I’m numb!
“Tonight! Police continuing their hunt
For signs of blue-eyed Dumpling Goldilocks;
But first, the Mayor Quoteworth talks and talks;
The traffic’s bad; no rain; replay that punt.”
That I may live in thee, secure and whole,
Stay on, TV, and teleprompt my soul.

--Dennis G. JerzSuch pictures fill my weekday world at five (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My students are doing a Sonnet Slam tomorrow, and they asked whether I was going to contribute a poem. I hadn't planned to, but I figured what the heck.

I had my colleague, Al Wendland, peer-review it for me.

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday. --Ben Domenech Resigns (post.blog)

That was quick.

Newsweek Educational Program (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

A big part of the CCCC convention is the exhibit hall, where publishers offer their latest titles. I peeked in before the exhibit hall opened, and found the chaos very interesting. The exhibitors work for hours to set up booths that I might spend 2 seconds glancing at as I walk by. The scene reminded me of how much goes into preparing this convention.

While chilling out in the lobby, I spent some time talking with the rep from Newsweek, who is here to exhibit materials from Newsweek’s education program. I liked what I saw of their current unit on popular culture and an older unit on innovation. My initial sense is that the materials don’t really represent the way students really work. It makes perfect sense that Newsweek would want to introduce students to samples of its work (the same company also publishes The Washington Post). Newspapers have a vested interest in the literacy of a population, since in addition to all the other benefits literacy brings to a society, more readers means more subscribers, which means more ad money.

But students don’t start their research with Newsweek or The Washington Post – they start with Google. The rep at this conference admitted he couldn’t show me very much evidence that the Newsweek educational program was taking advantage of new media.

The Newsweek materials include stand-alone subject guides that anthologize recent articles on a particular theme. It also includes a newsletter that presents study questions, vocabulary guides, and current events quizzes, keyed to each week’s issue of Newsweek. (Apparently the woman who writes that newsletter gets a FAX of the magazine over the weekend, just before it goes to press, and she’s supposed to have her newsletter finished by Monday, when it’s sent out to teachers.)

When I teach journalism, I do have students read current issues of the paper, and as part of the discussion about sources, bias, and credibility, we have wandered into topics such as nuclear proliferation in North Korea, the Swift Boat Veterans’ attacks on John Kerry, and the Danish cartoon controversy. But I don’t really teach those events. That news writing class had 33 students, which is huge by Seton Hill standards, and very large for any writing class. While I’d like to see students engaging intelligently with the world around them, the only part of that course I think I could cut to make room for more current events would be the exercises I assigned that had them covering events on campus. But that first-hand reportage taught important lessons that students simply would not be able to get out of a book. Getting out there and doing their own local reporting fits perfectly with the educational practices that serve millennials best.

Still, that doesn’t mean there is no place in my curriculum for a current events-based resource. I never assign students the kind of rhetorical persuasion that asks them to use current news reports to support a particular stand on a hot issue. Some students choose to write those kinds of essays on their blogs, of course, in which case I will help them out. But it’s not a genre that I actively teach.

Looking at these materials makes me wonder whether I should give it a try.

There never has been a better time to get into Web journalism. We are making money, we are hiring, and we are actively searching for new, innovative ideas. After ten years, there are no veterans in this field. This is your chance to be among the first. --Anthony Moor --Go to the Web, young journalist! (Online Journalism Review)

Think back to John Henry racing a steam drill and forward to Garry Kasparov trying to outmaneuver IBM's Deep Blue in 1997 to the Onion tweaking the genre with its accountant battles Excel story.

But the latest twist on the meme takes it to the meta-level by raising the question: in the future, will you find your man vs. machine story relying on a human-edited source or from an algorithm? --Ryan Singel --Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War (Wired)

The opening to this article is more creative than the body, but it's still a useful overview.

By always placing the most recent version of its articles at a static URL, Wikipedia concentrates the power of its inbound links on a particular topic to a single URL. A reader searching for information on Hurricane Katrina who clicks through to Wikipedia from Google gets Wikipedia's latest information on the storm and recovery efforts (or lack thereof). They don't get a months-old dispatch with no clear link to the latest news.

What if a news organization, employing professional journalists, wrote their news website like a wiki? I'm not taking about turning over the page to readers. I'm suggesting that -- instead of distinct daily takes -- news stories could be covered with encyclopedia-style articles that staffers would update with new information whenever available. How many more inbound links would such an approach get? --Robert Niles --Search and you will find ... an old news story? (OJR)

This is an excellent introduction to an issue that's bothered me for some time. At one point, The Onion used to publish its new articles in a root directory, and then move them to a new archive directory to make room for new stuff. Thus, if I linked to a story with the URL "news1.htm," a week later that article would be replaced by some other news story with the same name, and the content that I wanted to send my readers to would be in a different location. I could get around that problem by linking directly to the archive location in the first place, but webmasters who didn't understand why moving URLs is a bad idea also don't understand why they should bother changing the way they do things. (I once tried to explain it to the editor of a newsletter, and got a snippy response, to the effect, "Why should we bother to do this work for you?" I stopped reading, and linking to, that publication.)

Blogs essentially publish the same material so that it is visible in multiple ways. You can see this entry at the top of my blog home page as soon as I publish it; you can see it categorized along with other entries with a simliar content, and you can see it as a stand-alone page at an URL that will not change. Other blogs also sort content by day, week and/or month.

I use Wikipedia whenever I come into a story late, and I'm looking for context.