500 Words http://docucinema.com/500_words 500 Words on Thursday by Lee Schneider Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:16:45 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 500WordsOnThursdayhttp://feedburner.google.com Check Your Sources http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/500WordsOnThursday/~3/gS0Ef5HfVI0/ http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/02/check-your-sources/#comments Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 Lee Schneider http://docucinema.com/500_words/?p=1937 Whether you are an aggregator, originator or curator, it’s good to know where your stuff comes from.

Storified by Lee Schneider
Mon, Feb 06 2012 00:17:44 ·
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Check Your Sources

Whether you are an aggregator, originator or curator, it’s good to know where your stuff comes from.

  1. Fiction writers get paid to make things up. Journalists are supposed to bring us the facts, and even if they have a point of view, you should be able to pick out the facts in their story and make your own informed judgement. 
    The best tool in the toolbox for that, in my opinion, is sourcing. As a journalist, your source is the person (or book, or article) telling you what you and your audience need to know about your story. Fact checking matters. Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder, brought up the issue of fact checking in his Craigconnects blog.
  2. And Seth Godin, writing in his blog, sharply criticized non-original forms of ‘news’ created by people who are re-posting and recycling stories and creating an echo chamber of reporting about what others are reporting.  He called it ‘The New Lazy Journalism.’
  3. When stories get trapped in an echo chamber online the people doing the repeating rarely if ever check the facts set out in the original story. If the first person is wrong, then everybody else is, too.
    Look what happened to the New York Times recently. William Broad wrote a piece in the Times Magazine about how yoga can wreck your body. The yoga community was pretty quick to contest Broad’s facts. 
    Here’s a clip from yoga teacher Mark Stephens’s newsletter.
    It will be a few weeks before the yoga community has the opportunity to read Broad’s forthcoming book, The Science of Yoga, but we can already see from his NYT article that this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist can be fairly charged with unbalanced and selective reporting in the case he makes against yoga.  It’s also not at all surprising that only one of one his seven advance reviewers, David Gordon White, has any claim to yoga expertise – and White is an insightful philosopher and historian of religion, not a yoga teacher or asana expert.

    I posted this clip to Facebook, and yogis responded there too, both teachers and students.  Sarah Mata-Gabor, a respected yoga teacher in Los Angeles, also took to Facebook to point out that the New York Times writer Broad failed to make a distinction between the poses of yoga (called asana) and the deeper experience of yoga, which certainly has nothing to do with pushing yourself past the point of pain and getting hurt. 
    This is how the web becomes a powerful fact checking tool. Writers are responsible for the quotes they pull, and if they quote something that isn’t accurate, it’s their problem – and people will notice. 
    I discuss fact checking, and also the practice of these new forms of journalism, with Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify, in the latest be global podcast. 

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]]> http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/02/check-your-sources/feed/ 0 http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/02/check-your-sources/ Green in the City http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/500WordsOnThursday/~3/Xxn8hd8ywUU/ http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/green-in-the-city/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:58:42 +0000 Lee Schneider http://docucinema.com/500_words/?p=1932 You don’t think of crowded, gray-toned cities as farming centers, but that’s exactly what’s happening in New York, Detroit and San Francisco.

Storified by Lee Schneider
Fri, Jan 27 2012 21:31:18 ·
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Green in the City

You don’t think of crowded, gray-toned cities as farming centers, but that’s exactly what’s happening in New York, Detroit and San Francisco.

  1. The future of farming is developing on New York City’s rooftops. This is great news for companies like Brightfarms, which is shrinking the distance from farm to store by literally putting the farm on top of the store. It’s also good news for Grow Studio, which designs urban farming environments. 
  2. New York isn’t the only city that has farming on its to-do list. At the San Francisco Green Film Festival you can attend the premiere of a movie called Urban Roots about the urban farming movement in Detroit.  

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]]> http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/green-in-the-city/feed/ 0 http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/green-in-the-city/ Collaboration http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/500WordsOnThursday/~3/uQPrL14aPAA/ http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/collaboration/#comments Sat, 21 Jan 2012 07:02:46 +0000 Lee Schneider http://docucinema.com/500_words/?p=1914 Does collaborating on a project mean you really don’t get any work done?

Storified by Lee Schneider
Sat, Jan 21 2012 02:03:04 ·
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Collaboration

Does collaborating on a project mean you really don’t get any work done?

  1. Groupthink is bad, certainly, and it’s true that meetings can be time-wasters. The real work often gets done alone.  A recent New York Times feature piece made this point well. 

  2. But today much work happens in front of a screen, and often it’s a screen that we share with co-workers who are not in the same room.  Some of them we may never meet in person. These kinds of online collaborations, the kind driven by Trello and google.docs and Salesforce, are the perfect form of collaborative solitude, I think. They combine the best of both worlds.

    It’s not a perfect marriage, but it works. As William Gibson might have said, ‘the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.’

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]]> http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/collaboration/feed/ 0 http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/collaboration/ Beth Kanter on Pinterest http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/500WordsOnThursday/~3/k4Y88CDIYzw/ http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/beth-kanter-on-pinterest/#comments Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 Lee Schneider http://docucinema.com/500_words/?p=1896 Another way to share images online that is probably better than Flickr.

Storified by Lee Schneider
Tue, Jan 10 2012 23:47:19 ·
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Beth Kanter on Pinterest

Another way to share images online that is probably better than Flickr.

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]]> http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/beth-kanter-on-pinterest/feed/ 0 http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/beth-kanter-on-pinterest/ Pity the billionaire http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/500WordsOnThursday/~3/cyT0McMO3h8/ http://docucinema.com/500_words/2012/01/pity-the-billionaire/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:35:59 +0000 Lee Schneider http://docucinema.com/500_words/?p=1889 Good thoughts on the divide between the 1 percent and the other 99.

Storified by Lee Schneider
Tue, Jan 10 2012 16:35:57 ·
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Pity the billionaire

Good thoughts on polarization.

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