Journalism: October 2007 Archive Page

Ear Studio:

Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. When complete, it will be a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms will be used to parse the daily output of the paper (news, features, editorials) and the archives, as well as the activity of visitors to NYTimes.com (browsing, searching, commenting). The resulting refracted view of The Times will be displayed on 560 vacuum-fluorescent display screens installed in the lobby.

What if FEMA gave a press conference, and nobody (but FEMA) came? FEMA employees lobbed softball questions during a staged media event. Reuters:

No actual reporter attended the news conference in person, agency spokesman Aaron Walker said.

A spokeswoman for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has authority over FEMA, called the incident "inexcusable and offensive to the secretary."

"We have made it clear that stunts such as this will not be tolerated or repeated," spokeswoman Laura Keehner said. She said the department was looking at the possibility of reprimanding those responsible.

The agency had called the briefing with about 15 minutes notice as federal officials headed for southern California to oversee and assist in firefighting and rescue efforts. Reporters were also given a telephone number to listen in on but could not ask questions.

In Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden reports on the National College Media Convention:

In his opening remarks, Mattingly, a religion columnist for the Scripps Howard News service and director of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities' Washington Journalism Center, described six possible models for student newspapers, ranging from a university public relations model (with an adviser charged by the administration to actively screen all content), to an educational model (with an adviser that helps guide content but with student editors making nearly all of the decisions), to complete independence. "Whatever the rules are, know what they are," Mattingly advised the students in the audience, stressing the need to know how the rules apply when it comes down to the "moment it's a really bad story -- which at Christian colleges means sex, drugs or donors."

The student paper at Seton Hill follows the educational model. If the paper got into the habit of publishing shoddily-written and poorly-researched attacks on the administration, my role would be to correct the shoddy journalism, rather than adjust the anti-administrative slant. I'd be just as critical of students who turned the paper into a cheerleading section, if they were too timid to go after the hard news stories that might make some groups on campus unhappy. 

Good journalism will sometimes make certain groups unhappy, and those groups can and will complain, which is why I tell my students their research has to hold up under scrutiny. Because Seton Hill is a private institution, articles the Setonian publishes are not protected by the First Amendment.  But as long as a contested story is fair -- for instance, student gripes are presented alongside official responses, and the story does not include libel or a violation of privacy rights -- then a request to remove or censor a story becomes an issue of academic freedom. I cannot teach journalism unless students have the freedom to make their own editorial judgments. On the few occasions when SHU employees have panicked and asked me to intervene and remove or prevent a story, the academic dean has been very supportive of my position.

Greg Beato, from Reason Magazine

Online it attracts more than 2 million readers a week. Type onion into Google, and The Onion pops up first. Type the into Google, and The Onion pops up first.

But type "best practices for newspapers" into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At a time when traditional newspapers are frantic to divest themselves of their newsy, papery legacies, The Onion takes a surprisingly conservative approach to innovation. As much as it has used and benefited from the Web, it owes much of its success to low-tech attributes readily available to any paper but nonetheless in short supply: candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend.

While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn't ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion's journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful.

From Language Log:

Much of the blame for the public's poor understanding of science must go to a little studied but culturally pivotal genre: news report headlines. Short snappy headlines provide the lazy reader with just enough information to totally misconstrue a story.

There's a reason why the writing in newspapers doesn't look like the writing found in scientific journals. 

Newspaper readers have needs and values that differ from the those of the scientific community. Scientists require a huge level of precision in order to get their jobs done, and they are used to writing for other scientists (or perhaps college students who want to be scientists).  The documents that scientists point to as examples of clear, accurate writing presume an incredible amount of prior knowledge -- not just vocabulary words and factual knowledge, but abstract concepts like the scientific method and the relationship between applied and theoretical research.  Science papers are almost completely devoid of verbs other than "is," and science papers are almost all credited to large groups of participants (even though only a small number of participants will actually have helped write the document that bears their name).  I don't note these points in order to complain -- these are just features of the scientific world.

But science is a vast subject.  While a nuclear physicist might have a good sense of whether a particular animal study experiment is well-designed, the nuclear physicist might be unable to assess the significance of this or that particular animal behavioral observation.  So while scientists rely on their own specialized genres in order to communicate with others within their specialty, even a trained scientist must rely on a good science writer to produce generally-accessible representations of knowledge generated in distant scientific fields.

I used to write for an engineering newsletter, and I saw first-hand that few scientists are gifted with the ability to explain their work in terms that Joe Sixpack can understand. Back in 1992, when virtual reality was all the rage, I interviewed Randy Pausch, the CMU professor who recently became famous for giving an inspiring talk about how he is facing his impending death. But few people of any profession share Pausch's ability to communicate. 

Often, then, the journalists are often on their own when it comes to translating a two hours of academic rambling into an 800-word news feature that attempts to make the latest scientific discovery seem relevant to the average reader. 

But Language Log's complaint about headlines highlights another problem. Reporters generally don't write their own headlines.  For large papers, there might be a sub-editor whose job is to write all the headlines, but for middle-sized papers, the layout artists are the ones with control over the page.  They may scan the article quickly and come up with a headline that fits -- both in the sense of being appropriate to the topic, and also that fills the given amount of space.  When a story is sent out over wire services, so that hundreds of regional and local papers can reprint it, each paper will probably reprint it with a slightly different layout, meaning that the headline might need to be longer or shorter to fill the given space.

So, even if science reporters meticulously research an article, and check to make sure that their own original editors don't give the piece an inaccurate headline, once that story gets syndicated, the author has no control over the headline that will appear above the story.

Journalists have to write for a general audience, and news articles tend to simplify in order to make complex subtle points seem interesting and relevant to the general reader. A reporter who is writing on a deadline is far more likely to call up an expert on the phone and get some quick quotes than to sort through scientific studies that were written for an expert audience that does not include journalists.  Even journalists who specialize in science reporting may find themselves writing about astrophysics in the morning, human cell biology in the afternoon, and plate tectonics the next morning.

I just started a unit on science reporting in my introductory news writing class.  Tomorrow we'll start discussing It Ain't Necessarily So (which offers numerous case studies of incidents in which the media have distorted the public perception of science by latching onto a partial truth, sensationalizing, and/or editorializing).  Yesterday I invited SHU math professor Josh Sasmor to speak to my class yesterday. His final take-home message was that reporters have an obligations to be critical of the statistical evidence handed to them by their sources. (He said they should take each statistic with "that much salt," miming a something the shape of a salt lick.)

The Associated Press and other news syndicates have long made spot news articles generated by local newspapers, available to other publications. Now the NY Times is reporting on a new outlet that will provide original investigative journalism.

As struggling newspapers across the country cut back on investigative reporting, a new kind of journalism venture is hoping to fill the gap.

Paul E. Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall Street Journal for 16 years, and a pair of wealthy Californians are assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets.

The nonprofit group, called Pro Publica, will pitch each project to a newspaper or magazine (and occasionally to other media) where the group hopes the work will make the strongest impression. The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations.

Nothing quite like it has been attempted, and despite having a lot going for it, Pro Publica will be something of an experiment, inventing its practices by trial and error. It remains to be seen how well it can attract talent and win the cooperation of the mainstream media.

Newsweek:

The assumption that all videogames are toys for children rather than entertainment for a variety of different audiences is one of our pet peeves. It may seem innocuous, but it's not only the foundation of continued attempts at the state and national level to regulate the sale and marketing of videogames, it's also an excuse for developers and publishers to coast on the innocuous, the inoffensive and the tried-and-true rather than push the medium forward in multiple directions for multiple audiences--including adults. In other words, it's not just videogame outsiders who hold this belief: many insiders do as well.

Your grade for the peer-review exercise depends on the quantity and quality of the constructive feedback you provide to your peer. (So smile at the good and frown at the bad, but don't make your peer feel very sad.)

In the process, you will get specific, concrete peer feedback, which you can use to revise your paper (and perhaps raise your final grade). But for me, the real value of the exercise is that the experience of hunting for and fixing problems in a peer's paper will help you develop self-editing skills that you can apply to any writing situation.  ("Newswriting Peer Review Guidelines.")

After I teach a subject for the third time, I know enough of what to expect that I can start writing a detailed handout that encapsulates the lesson, so that when I teach the classes in future years, I can reduce the amount of class time I spend lecturing on a subject, and instead refer students to the handout as part of the preparation for a workshop. I don't generally use handouts as a replacement for classroom instruction, but when the handout is a detailed checklist, that can really help students as they revise.

I feel a sense of accomplishment getting this handout posted, since I managed to get it to the students in time for it to be useful.  The revision of the first full-length news article is due Friday, so I'll have something substantial to evaluate before midterm grades are due next week; students will be able to revise again (if they wish) after the break. 

The stress level always goes up before midterms, but I'm feeling better than I've felt in weeks -- the pneumonia that laid me flat is finally tolerable, to the point where I'm well enough to feel guilty about all the tasks I permitted myself to put off while I was sick.  Tomorrow I'll turn 39, and I'll spend most of the day grading papers. Such is life.

Mark Dery, on 10 Zen Monkeys

Reporting -- especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press -- is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can't figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the Web, and fewer and fewer Americans care about current events and the world outside their own skulls. But the other part of the problem is that Generation Download thinks information wants to be free, everywhere and always, even if some ink-stained wretch wept tears of blood to create it.

Lawrence Lessig talks a good game, but I still don't understand how people who live and die by their intellectual property survive the obsolescence of copyright and the transition to the gift economy of our dreams.

The Denver Post:

The Colorado State University editor who used the F-word in the student newspaper will keep his job.

My biggest reaction to the editorial was not simply that it used the F-word, it's that the editorial was so poorly framed -- it consisted entirely of four words, "Taser this ... F*** BUSH."  I'm sure the phrasing was simply intended to be topical, but it nevertheless seems to suggest that Bush was somehow responsible for the recent incident in which security guards used a Taser on a student who disrupted a speech by John Kerry. There are plenty of less sloppy, more coherent ways to make a statement about politics. 

I feel for the other students who lost their jobs after the paper lost advertising income over the incident, and I don't think McSwane showed good judgment, but the whole point of having a student paper is to give students the opportunity to make decisions on their own, and to take responsibility for those decisions. McSwane and his staff have certainly had the opportunity to learn from the experience.

While doing some advanced preparation for an upcoming unit on statistics in my news writing class, I learned something new today (from Wikipedia).  When coming across a statistic that looks like slam-dunk evidence of bias or wrongdoing, an activist will have a motivation to present that data to journalists in order to advance a particular perspective. The problem comes when the well-meaning activist does not really understand statistics, and so presents an inaccurate interpretation to a journalist. It's the journalist's obligation to check out any statistic he or she uses in a story, often by contacting an expert who is not directly connected with whatever research is being cited, so that the expert can offer an independent interpretation of the data.

One of the best known real life examples of Simpson's paradox occurred when the University of California, Berkeley was sued for bias against women applying to graduate school. The admission figures for fall 1973 showed that men applying were more likely than women to be admitted, and the difference was so large that it was unlikely to be due to chance.^[16][3]

	Applicants	% admitted
Men	8442	44%
Women	4321	35%

However when examining the individual departments, it was found that no department was significantly biased against women; in fact, most departments had a small bias against men.

Major	Men		Women
	Applicants	% admitted	Applicants	% admitted
A	825	62%	108	82%
B	560	63%	25	68%
C	325	37%	593	34%
D	417	33%	375	35%
E	191	28%	393	24%
F	272	6%	341	7%

The explanation turned out to be that women tended to apply to departments with low rates of admission, while men tended to apply to departments with high rates of admission. The conditions under which department-specific frequency data constitute a proper defense against charges of discrimination are formulated in Pearl (2000).