Recently in the Journalism Category

I guess I won't be linking to any many more NYT articles.

NYT has disabled their special access for webmasters

To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child's play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein's book asks is "How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?"

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think. If you can't trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.--Clay Shirky

Many have defined the problem -- people are abandoning old media for new in droves -- but nobody has come remotely close to figuring out the formula to monetize this audience in a way that ensures the range and level of news and periodical content and offers the rich experience advertisers will pay a premium to be part of.

Pulling it off would take characteristic Apple hardware/software flair -- and a bit of uncharacteristic magnanimity. But the "X" factor is Jobs himself. Whatever you believe about his health, Jobs will not live forever. We're guessing that he, like all high achievers, believes that yesterday's accomplishments, however fantastic, are also yesterday's news. If he is looking for One Last Thing, saving journalism would be the Holy Grail. --Wired

A man and a wife saw what happened and the man ran with the baby's mother to help her pick the child up from the ground, police said. CBS Chicago

I presume this was the level of detail in the police report, so the journalist is just echoing what's in the report.  But "husband and wife" or "man and woman" would be more parallel. Given the context of this particular story, "two people" would also be fine.

Looking forward to this promising resource.

I've wrapped the blogs up,  tidied them up, corrected & updated them and put them into 1 handy ebook for you to download and take home. It means you have have an all-in-one desktop reference to giving your multimedia journalism more spark, and getting in the entrepreneurial mindset.

Chapters include: video, audio, storytelling and branding.

It'll be available from Monday, it's 100% free and there's no registration or anything. Just click on the button and you'll be able to download it outright. --Adam Westbrook

I'm gearing up to introduce my journalism students to a news project that requires a basic knowledge of math. I don't want to make it too frustrating to them, but I do want to emphasize how easy it is to be misled by the math.

Margin of Error deserves better than the throw-away line it gets in the bottom of stories about polling data. Writers who don't understand margin of error, and its importance in interpreting scientific research, can easily embarrass themselves and their news organizations. --Robert Niles

via

Don't hate on the TV media just because they helped the nation fall for the Balloon Boy Hoax. Back in the day, the print media were the obvious target.

On April 13, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article in The New York Sun, chronicling how Monck Mason, leaving England for Paris drifted off course and had traveled across the Atlantic in three days, landing safely on Sullivan's Island near Charleston South Carolina, while riding an ``egg-shaped gas-filled balloon'', named the Victoria.

The story caused such a stir that an excited mob quickly gathered outside of the editorial offices of the Sun, hoping to land a copy of the historic edition. Not until two days later did the New York daily publish a correction, noting the story was pure fiction. The published correction read: ``We are inclined to believe the intelligence is erroneous.'' -- The Morning Delivery

In a bid to save money, the station is planning to reassign the technicians who operate the electronic prompters that feed scripted news copy to the anchors while they're on the air. Instead, the station wants its anchors to do the job themselves.

[...]

"Instead of orchestrating coverage, fact-checking, handling breaking news, paying attention to the [newscast], engaging reporters, questioning authorities, covering bad writing and technical mistakes, anchors will now spend most of their time" running the prompter, said one newsroom employee, who asked not to be identified because he's not authorized to discuss the change. "It's kind of like a literal one-man band -- singing, banging a drum, crashing cymbals, playing a trumpet and strumming a guitar . . . except we're not playing show tunes here." Washington Post

I just drafted a new handout on writing editorials. I couldn't find anything online pitched at the proper level, so I had to write it myself. (I'll probably be able to use a version of this in my freshman comp class too.)

Presume that your opponent has good reasons for disagreeing with you. Talk to people on the other side, and include some of their eloquent, well-argued points. Carefully and respectfully explain why your position is nevertheless more accurate (or ethical, or practical, or inspirational, or whatever).

• Avoid trying to make your opinion seem stronger by distorting the other side, either through exaggeration ("Animal rights groups would rather millions of people from cancer than have one animal die during a scientific experiment") or by using unflattering labels ("nicotine addicts who oppose my right to breathe fresh air..." "reactionary tea-baggers whose pathetic world-view is threatened by Obama's heroic economic vision..." ).
• Making "the other side" look evil or stupid may fool people who don't know what you are talking about, but people who do know something about the subject can (and will) write a letter to the editor correcting your misrepresentations.

The AP recently raised eyebrows last year when it announced its intent to charge bloggers who quote from an AP story, and again more recently when it announced vague plans to track the spread of AP stories through secret embedded codes.

The AP's position is that if search engines are making money delivering customers to AP content, then the AP should get a piece of the action.  Here's a suggestion that might actually work, without trampling the fair use doctrine in the dust, and without relying on magic digital pixie dust tracking technology.

Financial wires have long charged higher rates for the timeliest delivery of such information as stock quotes, so the approach is not without precedent. As more and more news organizations wrestle with the need to create premium products, the AP's experiments will emerge as valuable case studies in high-stakes bets.

Time-based pricing could take any number of forms, including early access to an index of stories that would enable participating search engines to begin crawling the news sooner than the other guys.

Another option under discussion is the earlier release of actual stories, in effect setting up some AP customers as places that users would come to rely on for the earliest look at AP content.

What's interesting about these ideas is that they could generate much-needed revenue without jeopardizing journalism's civic purpose of wide distribution of news. --Bill Mitchell (Poynter)

I've been a journalist for 27 years, and I love that romantic old notion of the newsroom as much as the next guy. But I recently canceled my two morning papers--The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal--because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without even looking at them. Fact is, I only care about a tiny percentage of what those papers publish, and I can read them on my computer or my iPhone. And I can rely on blogs and Twitter to steer me to articles worth reading. --Daniel Lyons, Newsweek

In all media that boasts your byline remain impartial, and don't do anything stupid. But is it in the best interests of the paper? Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander points out the the Post (along with just about every other mainstream publication) has at times come under fire for being partisan. These guidelines aim to cut off those accusations before they can be made (and already senior post editor Raju Narisetti has closed his account). But in this age of self-branded journalists, where power and readership loyalty is often the result of an audience's personal connection with the writer is it really a good idea to remove all evidence of personality from the reporter's product? --Glynnis MacNicol

Katie Couric's annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric's salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news. --Michael Massing, Columbia Journalism Review

Of course, the situation was just as bad when the top three anchors were all men, but Massing does have a point.

I am not too happy about the way wild conclusions drawn from this self-published research periodically pop up in the media. Kudos to Liberman, from Language Log, who tries (yet again) to explain.

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men ... have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the '70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there's a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives."  Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading.  Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females.  But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences.  The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause. --Mark Liberman, Language Log

It's a transparent ploy to get Google rank via incoming links, but it's also a great piece of investigative reporting. By Chandler Phillips.

"We would hire you here at Edmunds.com. Then you would go out and get a job as a car salesman and work for three months."

"Selling cars?" I asked unnecessarily.

"Right."

"Where would I work?"

"Wherever you can get hired. That would be up to you. We were thinking you should work at two dealerships. The first would be a high-volume, high-pressure store. Then you could quit and go to a no-haggle dealership. You could tell them you didn't like the pressure at the first place and you'd probably get a job on the spot."

The editor explained that they wanted me to write a series of articles describing the business from the inside. Of course I would learn the tricks of the trade, and that would better prepare me to write advice for Edmunds.com. But the benefits of the project would be greater than just information. I would live the life of a car salesman for three months. That would give me an insight and perspective that couldn't be gained by reading books or articles or interviewing former car salesmen.

"So what do you think?" the editor asked. "Interested?"

Google's FastFlip is the newest media toy.

The service is meant to duplicate the look and feel of perusing a printed publication. The stories are displayed on electronic pages that can be quickly scrolled through by clicking on large arrows on the side instead of a standard Web link that requires waiting several seconds for a page to load. Readers can sort through content based on topics, favorite writers and publications. --BusinessWeek

I did find myself flipping through more pages than I might otherwise have seen, but I didn't like that I had to click through in order to copy text or interact with the page in any way -- it's just an image that you're seeing, rather than an embedded page.

When I saw news.google.com for the first time, or Feedly, I got the sense that I had stumbled across something important.  I might return to the site the next time I'm bored and looking for something to blog about, but I don't see it as anything that will change my media habits.

Factual errors in live TV reports led to a security incident on the Potomac river today.

Erroneous live cable news reports on CNN and Fox had said that the Coast Guard was firing shots on the river. CNN reported the Coast Guard had fired 10 rounds at a suspicious boat, and showed vessels circling in the water -- near the bridge President Barack Obama's motorcade crossed on the way to a memorial at the Pentagon earlier Friday morning.

The Associated Press reported that an exercise was under way in the river and did not report that shots were fired.

In a statement released by the Coast Guard, officials said the problem arose when media reporters overheard radio calls made during the training exercise. --CBS

I didn't watch any of the footage, but I'd bet one of the reporters said the smoke was delicious.

In many ways, the Times' blogs are no different from anyone else's. But there's one organizational trick they employ very effectively: Division of Labor. Times bloggers don't work on their own. They don't handle every aspect of their blogs. Who does what is divided up to bring specific expertise to bear on different parts of each post. The result is I can crank out more posts, and those posts are better overall, than if we writers did everything ourselves. I know, not everyone wants to have other people involved in their blogging. But there's a reason people work in teams. --Paul Boutin

The economic reality of working in journalism in the present economy: good people are losing their jobs.

For the past several years, largely as a result of free news and classifieds on the Internet, ad revenues and circulation have been sinking for newspapers nationwide. Sun management and their bosses at the Chicago-based Tribune Company, which owns the paper, have responded with repeated rounds of buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in print content. A newsroom staff that numbered 500 in 1992, when The Evening Sun was still being published, had been whittled down to about 200 before the April cuts.

As a result, staffers lived in a state of fear, mostly keeping their heads down, trying to do good work under less-than-ideal conditions. "Everyone is miserable," says one writer who has survived all the cuts and asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. "Whatever shred of morale there was has disappeared." --Evan Serpick, Baltimore Magazine

It's not easy teaching journalism classes in this climate. I am sure to emphasize how journalism skills transfer to other careers, and I've been considering ways to beef up the "new media" component of our "new media journalism" major.

As US newspaper publishers mull charging readers on the Web, a Pennsylvania daily announced plans on Monday to put some content behind a pay wall.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said "PG+" would be a "members-only website with interactive features and exclusive content" available to subscribers for 36 dollars a year or for 3.99 dollars a month. --AFP

In the 90s, consumers declined to pay for the same content as the print edition, shoveled online. We'll see whether professionally-produced extras are worth the money to consumers.

Listen to a short news broadcast, such as the NPR Hourly News Summary. These stories will typically include audio clips from newsmakers, and perhaps the noise of crowds or nature. But we're just focusing on the sound of the radio journalist's voice.

Don't try to sound like "an announcer."  Forget the barking style of voice that radio announcers always seem to have in movies when they "interrupt this program with a special bulletin."
 
Radio News Delivery.mp3
(By the way, a typical radio story is just 50 seconds long, which is about how long it took me to read the following.

A radio newscaster's voice begins each story on a high pitch, with the first sentence of the story ending with a slight drop.
 
The second sentence starts at exactly this same pitch, which is an important audio cue that we're still on the same subject.

Note this slight boost of energy in the third sentence, which is important because the tone can't keep dropping forever.

Although I wouldn't do it when delivering a hard news story, I'm about to hang my voice, indicating I've got plenty more to say.

My speech is formal but conversational, with both high and low pitches within each sentence, though the general trend has been downward.

You can always tell the final sentence in a radio journalist's story; it slows down just a bit, and its pitches are the lowest of the whole piece.
 
For the New Media Journalism program at Seton Hill University, I'm Dennis Jerz.

Dude! Your shirt looks just like the blue walkway and the brown sand! How do you do that?

From the MailOnline, via.

People on the road can turn an LOL into a great big O-M-G. -- Katie Couric, advocating a "designated texter."

A reprint of a good article that has since disappeared behind the Technology Review subscription firewall. Probably too dated to assign to my news writing students this year, so I guess I'll just refer to it in lecture.

The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone's lost kitty.

It also explains why TV news seems so archaic next to the advertising and entertainment content on the same networks. Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns. --John Hockenberry

TV news emphasizes the immediate and the emotional.  This screen shot shows how the NBC news affiliate in Miami allows readers to rate stories by emotions.

Notice that this mechanism does not reward stories for being fair, informative, accurate, or even newsworthy. 

I stumbled across this feature while reading a story about the 11-year-old reporter who got a one-on-one interview with the president. Miami is apparently "bored" with that story, though the city is "laughing" about stories on Cuba running out of toilet paper, an elderly couple starting a fire while doing the nasty in bed (illustrated by the image of a sexy young couple in bed, since apparently no sexy hidden camera footage of the newsmaking and whoopee-making elderly couple was available), and a man who pretended to be disabled so a hired nurse would change his dirty diapers.

[The] story is told of a music critic who was sent to a concert hall in Chicago to review a performance. When he found the hall burning down, he went home and went to bed. In the morning he explained, "There was no story. The concert hall burned down."

I trust these stories are apocryphal, but they serve to illustrate the difficulty of defining news.

There is some truth in the statement that good news is not news. Good news is the stuff of life. It is what happens to most of us most of the time. We survive. We prosper.

But if happiness was all we had to read about, we'd be very bored indeed. -- Jack Smith, LA Times (1987)

Here's how Ebert ended a review he wrote yesterday:

It's said that Richard Harding Davis was dispatched by William Randolph Hearst to cover the Johnstown flood. Here was his lead: "God stood on a mountaintop here and looked at what his waters had wrought." Hearst cabled back: "Forget flood. Interview God."

A wonderful story. Checking out the quote online, I found a blog entry by Dennis G. Jerz of Seton Hill University, reporting that I have related this same story four times in print since 1993, sometimes changing it slightly. Good gravy! My only defense for using it once again is that it's more interesting than anything else I could write about "The Answer Man." -- Roger Ebert

He's talking about "Forget Flood. Review Movies."

Good luck with that, Rupert.

"We intend to charge for all our news websites," Mr Murdoch said. "If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media," he added, predicting "significant revenues" from charging for differentiated news online.

I think it probably makes sense to charge a bit in order to get unique content early, before it's released to the general public.  Maybe some tech and business bloggers would pay a little bit in order to get an advance peek at high-profile investigative reports, so that they have time to research their own localized version of the story, ready to be put on their own websites along with a link to the original story.  Maybe if Blogger Joe pays to access News Source X's premium content, Blogger Joe can post a permalink to the premium content, within some reasonable restrictions, so that spammers lose their license if they simply copy the entire stream of premium content and post it on their own site.

I think it's far more likely that Big Media as we know it will change drastically, rather than consumers the world over will ever get used to paying for content they've been used to getting for free.

I'm all for training students in fact-gathering, clear writing, and getting a sense of the outside world. But I'm wondering if the time-honored student newspaper is still the best way to do that.

Has your campus found a more contemporary way to get students the benefits that newspapers used to offer? Maybe a way that doesn't automatically doom them to the ashbin of history? -- Dean Dad, Inside Higher Ed

Here's the comment I just submitted:

At the first meeting of a journalism class this past January, I tore up a copy of the student paper.

I'm the adviser for that paper, so I softened the blow a bit by first assuring the students that I thought it was a good issue -- well designed, with accurate and lively content -- and that it was serving its on-campus audience well.  We have no intentions of dropping the print edition, or even scaling it back. But I did feel the need to dramatize the deep, permanent changes that journalism had undergone during the past year.

I was hired in 2003 to start a "new media journalism" program at a small, private liberal arts school.  Our NMJ students regularly blog, and I've taught classes on podcasting, web design, and gaming culture.  Our program aims to provide students with core writing skills and transferable new media skills -- not the least of which being how to use a complex software tool, and the ability to integrate several such tools (and whatever new tools they will encounter after they graduate) with their core writing skills.

Even in the middle of a huge shakedown in the journalism business, our recent graduates have been hired in the past year at a major network in New York, and at a community daily here in southwestern Pennsylvania.  Some have found jobs in related fields (technical writing, editorial assistant, paralegal), while others have opted to use their skills in grad school or the Peace Corps.

Combining words and technology can be a tough sell; some of our best writers in the program have made it known that they can hardly stand computers.  But I refuse to prepare students for a profession that will not exist by the time they graduate.

The Associate Press has for some time claimed that people should pay for reprinting the title of an AP article and linking to the full text. I stopped quoting from AP stories when the AP claimed bloggers needed a license to quote more than 5 words from an AP story.  (Keep both of these things in mind, if you have students post research projects online!) 

Now they're announcing plans to do what looks to me like gaming the search engines. I hope Google and other search engines account for this practice, and penalize search results from organizations that trample on the principle of fair use in such an outrageous manner.

I can completely understand a position that states web authors don't have the right to copy the full text without permission. The fair use defense in copyright law does not apply if a critic or commentator reuses more than 10% of a work  But this new policy goes well beyond existing copyright law.

Each article -- and, in the future, each picture and video -- would go out with what The A.P. called a digital "wrapper," data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web. Newspaper executives have said that by taking the lead, The A.P. ensures a unified approach, saves publishers from having to design their own software and circumvents possible charges of collusion against the papers. -- Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times