Common Sense Journalism

Police scanners online

2009-07-16T17:23:00.001-04:00

Yet another tool: Shoutcast has eight pages of police scanner channels you can monitor.

Newsrooms note: Using social media to help you

2009-07-16T12:27:00.003-04:00

Working with a small daily this summer, and we were talking about maybe changes in timing of back to school and holiday shopping, which could affect when to do the traditional tab, sales timing, maybe try some new stuff online, etc.

In typical fashion for a news org, the speculation and anecdote began around the table (you know, the old "editor's gut" way of doing things).

The paper has a Facebook page and Twitter. So as a practical example of thinking about and using social media/wisdom of crowds, I said, use your audience.

Because I can pay a bit more attention to it, I am doing it here, on my Facebook page, and in a poll on another site.

So let me ask. This year for holiday shopping are you:

-- Planning to shop at the normal time (mostly Oct/Nov/Dec.)
-- Already shopping looking for deals
-- Going to let the deals determine when I shop
-- Waiting till last-minute, hoping for deals
-- Not shopping at all; can't afford it

Answers in comments, if you would.

And an early happy holidays!

Quick hits

2009-07-15T15:57:00.003-04:00

Good post by Jim Spanfeller, president and CEO of Forbes at Paid Content: What the Future Will Look Like for Journalists.

I kind of like the term "entwined content" -- stories told in prose, video and data at the same time. Maybe he's been using it, but I hadn't heard it.

And David Sullivan has aroused from his blogging nap to put up another good post at "That's The Press, Baby":

The problem is that where we are is incoherent regardless of whether it's print or online or cellular or whatever. Department stores became incoherent in the late 1980s when no one could figure out what they really were about (selection? price? service?). Trying to adapt to a new world, newspapers cannot figure out what they are.

Read 'em and retch

2009-07-15T03:21:00.004-04:00

The rash of e-mails about S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford's disappearance have been released. Among them are some media missives that will make you retch.

http://media.charleston.net/2009/pdf/govstaffemails_0713009.pdf

It runs almost 600 pages and 11MB.

Among my favorites is David Gregory of "Meet the Press": So coming on Meet the Press lets you frame the conversation how you really want to ... and then move on.

And Micael Ryan, editorial page editor of the Augusta Chronicle: Y'all are making it tough on those of us who support the governor.

Audience in investigations

2009-07-15T02:35:00.002-04:00

One of my former students, Mary Hartney, who now is at the Baltimore Sun, helped put together this presentation on getting your audience involved in your journalism.

Some of this is common sense, but there are some new apps in here I hadn't heard of. I love new toys.

All Shirky, all the time

2009-07-14T13:37:00.002-04:00

OK, I can't help it if I keep pointing out stuff by Clay Shirky. He keeps explaining, as clearly as anyone, what is happening in journalism.

His latest on the Cato Web site, has these key points (I also recommend checking back to see the responses scheduled later this month from Phil Meyer, Paul Starr and Steve Yelvington). The key points:

Journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it’s also about assembling a public to read and react to those stories. A public is not merely an audience.
Journalism written for that fraction of the population that follows the news closely has always been subsidized. For the last century, newspaper journalism had direct subsidy from advertisement and cross-subsidy from sports fans and coupon clippers who never really cared about the city council or the coup in Madagascar. The packages containing news have been so bundled and cross-funded that we’ve never really known precisely the size of the audience for actual civic-minded reporting, or how much direct fees from that audience would amount to.
This leads to the second change in subsidy: high leverage in having a small number of professionals vet, edit, and shape that raw material.
The ability to get out of the “phone call” model of reporting — one paid journalist talking to one source at a time — and to instead bring in everything the internet has taught us about automation, syndication, parallel effort, and decentralization will increasingly characterize successful new models of journalism.

If you're into video, here are two recorded talks by Shirky that help untangle social media and its effects and opportunities for journalism. The second one, which is actually a 2005 talk, is especially good for journalists to pay attention to.

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

Philanthropy and Journalism

2009-07-13T04:03:00.003-04:00

There's been a fair amount of talk about philanthropic models for journalism. But I found this talk on TED* by Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, to be insightful in another way; in defining the challenges facing philanthropy, she also nicely defines a lot of the challenges facing journalism.

It's only 12 minutes. Take some time to and consider her five part framework:

Closed vs. open
Small vs. big
Slow vs. fast
Fragmented vs. connected
Short vs. long

and its implications for the communications business, and, specifically, journalism. So how do we get there?

(*The nice thing about having people who are smarter than you are but share your name is that they sometimes point to really neat things when that Google Alert on your name pops up to their blog. So thanks to Doug Fisher, a computer science prof at Vanderbilt who I have followed all these years, for the pointer.)

AP style update - bondholder

2009-07-10T08:53:00.001-04:00

A quick AP style update. The wire service now says bondholder as one word is the preferred form.

In case that was troubling you ...

Doug

New microformat markup for news

2009-07-10T08:24:00.006-04:00

Worth paying attention to ...

The AP, Media Standards Trust and some others are pushing for a new microformat markup scheme for online news sites stories that would provide a fair bit of new information about each item.

This would include more precise dating and location information, what republication rights are associated with the story, and a "statement of news principles" under which it was published (though the slideshow example on the Media Trust site (eighth slide in) seems pretty lame, such as "it isn't plagiarised," "the quotes aren't made up" and "there is no direct conflict of interest" - gee, ya think so?).

Part of the point of all this is that Google is now supporting the microformats in its search results.

Media Trust has a full site dedicated to this at Value Added News, complete with an example of how it can operate in copy (hint, lots of "span" tags). The hNews specification is built off hAtom, which itself is built off the Atom version of newsfeeds.

(Which then raises a question in my mind - since many news orgs use RSS and not Atom, is there a problem here? Help me out, folks. This is beyond my technical expertise.)

Things are still in development. But the question to me is how do you implement this in smaller newsrooms? Are their editorial systems up to this? Certainly, staffs are going to need a quick way to input only the minimal amount of such information, with as much as possible machine generated. This may be fine for big organizations like AP and Media Trust, but I'd like to see more discussion about how it might be implemented in community news organizations -- and that needs to be in the kind of nontechnical language that harried managers and editors in those organizations can digest quickly.

Reuters style online

2009-07-09T11:55:00.001-04:00

Reuters now has put its stylebook online.

Dean Wright, the global editor for ethics, innovation and news standards, says, among other things, that it's an effort at transparency.

For the "no-link" crowd, something to consider

2009-07-07T22:48:00.002-04:00

Simon Owens found one of his posts promoted to the front page of Huffington Post this week, and suddenly the unique visitors to his Bloggasm blog were coming in by the boatload.

It's a good, if not empirically rigorous, example of the idea that the Web is, well, a web, and part of the way things work is that you get to link to me and me to you -- and we both benefit.

This, of course, is not the way Judge Richard Posner and some media folks see it -- they would rather bottle things up, at least initially, so that news organizations retain the "exclusive." The logical problem is that people are less likely to link to you (as they are with the Wall Street Journal, which puts its paywall up to direct links, but does allow a Google workaround). And then they are less likely to find you while others find a way to paraphrase or write around your material.

So you are left with the "long tail" Chris Anderson has written about. The problem there is that the long tail is about pennies. The dollars are in the here and now, and they are very fleeting.

Social media advice for newsrooms

2009-07-07T21:48:00.002-04:00

Dan Honigman has some excellent, practical advice at his Old Media, New Tricks blog about how newsrooms should approach -- and interact with -- social media.

It's not just the same old stuff that essentially boils down to "ya gotta be there" without a lot of practical tips about what to do once you are there - or how to prepare for getting there.

One of the things I love: [B]efore you put your news organization out there, it’s good to have a game plan. It’s not only enough to figure out who will be the front man for your newspaper, Web site or broadcast site in social media, you must first figure out:

- Voice
- Content
- How to interact
- Touch points across your organization

Read it. There will be a test.

Earl Finckle - Mr. Weather - dies

2009-07-06T16:37:00.003-04:00

When I worked at WOWO, Earl Finckle, who died this past Friday, was the voice of weather. His slightly raspy, down-home voice fit right in at the station, which pumped his forecasts out across the Midwest and near South with its 50,000 watts.

Listeners didn't seem to care that Earl wasn't in Fort Wayne -- or most of the other cities where he was the voice of "the weather." Or that sometimes the telephone line noise almost drowned him out. More often than not, when people in Fort Wayne talked about the weather, I remember hearing back, "What does Earl say?"

His Central Weather Service was in Chicago, and there's something right with the karma there -- the city of broad shoulders was home to the man on whose intellectual shoulders rested many the fortunes of farmers, pilots, and just plain folk wanting to know if it was OK to go to the lake.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Finckle died Friday in Highland Park Hospital. He was 81.

You'll find several snippets from his forecasts on the airchecks on the WOWO history site.

It's a reminder that no matter how many computers, databases, interconnected networks and flashy green-screen graphics, one of the most powerful forces has always been a person's judgment to make sense of it all and personality to make us listen, read or watch.

Thank you, Earl, for reminding us of that day after day, even though we didn't know it at the time.

How not to do PR - Sanford-Palin style

2009-07-06T12:20:00.003-04:00

We've already seen the shambles that has been S.C. Gov Mark Sanford's revelations ad nauseam about his Argentinian affair.

And then there was the rambling news conference by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin saying she would step down because she's a lame duck -- a news conference that kept the pundits atwitter all Independence Day weekend.

Now, Palin's lawyer is out with a letter threatening legal action against anyone who writes about the allegation that Palin is under federal investigation in connection with her involvement, whatever it might have or might not have been, in construction of the Wasilla Sports Complex while she was mayor.

As Politico notes: Still, the decision to issue a public statement reciting all the facts in the case now all but ensures that there will be mainstream media accounts of the situation.

Who exactly is advising these folks? Have the Republicans opened a whole new PR agency, Bumble, Fumble and Stumble LLC? First rule of "crisis" management -- and this is a form of crisis -- don't give anyone an opening to keep talking about the stuff you don't want them to keep talking about.

Instead, with this letter, Palin's lawyer now invites everyone to comment on it and, in the process, spotlight the supposedly defamatory information.

The late Molly Ivins famously said about newspapers that it wasn't their dying that angered here, "it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off."

Ivins was no friend of the GOP, but one could imagine her trotting out that line to characterize the Republicans were she still alive.

AP style - car pool vs. carpool

2009-07-06T00:13:00.002-04:00

Your new 2009 AP Stylebook is still warm off the press, and already you have to make a change in it.

AP has now accepted carpool, one word, as the accepted verb form.

Car pool, two words, remains the accepted noun form.

New convergence newsletters

2009-07-02T14:17:00.004-04:00

I have been remiss in reminding you that new issues of The Convergence Newsletter are out;

May-June: Our convergence and communities issue has two articles about creating online communities - one is a Q&A with Pegasus News founder Mike Orren, and I wade in with some obsrvations on what it takes to create online community through what we've learned at Hartsville Today.

June: Our international issue features an eye-opening piece by Fulbright scholar Alice Klement on the challenges of teaching convergent journalism in Ethiopia where power outages have to be figured into all the other challenges.

Why two issues in June? Yeah, we got a bit behind, partly because we need your articles. Please send proposals to convedit@mailbox.sc.edu. And in September, we'll have a good summary by Edgar Huang on his research into HD streaming technologies.

New internships for a new generation

2009-07-02T14:10:00.004-04:00

Bet these job requirements weren't in the job or internship you originally applied for:

- At least 150 followers on Twitter
- At least 200 Facebook friends
- Administrator or creator of at least one Facebook group
- A blog with a Google Page Rank of 2 or higher

But they are the requirements for a social media intern at the Phnom Penh Post. The entire description and details are on thomascrampton.com.

He's got a similar skills set up for an Asian internship with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

So, how many journalism/communications schools are teaching these kinds of skills?

Quick hits

2009-07-02T12:33:00.005-04:00

Two quick things to read as we approach the holiday weekend:

Just had a chance to read Malcolm Gladwell's review/critique in the New Yorker of Chris Anderson's newest book "Free," due out next week. Obviously, I haven't read the book yet, but I have read a lot of the buzz and some of what Anderson has written in advance, and I think Gladwell does a good job of grounding this discussion in reality. As Gladwell writes:
Anderson wants to take “too cheap to meter” seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own “too cheap to meter” revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson’s argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true. ...
Strauss’s optimism was driven by the fuel cost of nuclear energy—which was so low compared with its fossil-fuel counterparts that he considered it (to borrow Anderson’s phrase) close enough to free to round down. Generating and distributing electricity, however, requires a vast and expensive infrastructure of transmission lines and power plants—and it is this infrastructure that accounts for most of the cost of electricity. Fuel prices are only a small part of that. As Gordon Dean, Strauss’s predecessor at the A.E.C., wrote, “Even if coal were mined and distributed free to electric generating plants today, the reduction in your monthly electricity bill would amount to but twenty per cent, so great is the cost of the plant itself and the distribution system.”

This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.
UPDATE: A Squidoo site has been set up to aggregate lots of the arguments for and against "Free." As you can tell from above, I think Gladwell brings some reality to the debate. I also think Mitch Ratcliffe's argument that free is part of a business strategy but not an entire business plan carries some weight. And Seth Godin is right when he says the editor's role to sort through all this takes on more importance -- something I'm not sure newsrooms understand as they jettison copy editors instead of retraining and repurposing their talents, which can be a good match for this. One thing, of course, is certain, there will be lots of arguments about this - and none of it is really new. Back in 2002, Clay Shirky was writing about the paradox of the amateur. (And here's the short link to Fin O'Reilly's post that kind of runs out of the margins in the comments.

EveryBlock has just released its source code. Playtime, everyone! Everyblock is a love child of the meme that an important part of journalism in the future will be data driven and that a major function will be collecting that data and presenting it in a way that users can construct their own stories. (See also Dan Conover's excellent think piece "2020 Vision: What's next for news.")

Happy holiday weekend!

Unleash the copyright beast against the 'Beast'?

2009-06-30T03:04:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, I pointed to the misguided comments by Judge Richard Posner, who suggested we ban linking -- and -- paraphrasing without the rights-owner's consent.

Now, from Cleveland comes a suggestion that is a tad more reasonable, but still troubling. Under the headline "Tighter copyright law could save newspapers," columnist Connie Schultz is promoting the work of the brothers Marburger who suggest resurrecting the old AP v. International News Service case and using the concept of "parasitic agcregators" to deny the ability of sites like the Daily Beast and Newser to rewrite and aggregate other news outlets' copy.

One suspects the real target here, however, are the hundreds of TV and radio stations who have done this long before the Intertubes and who have long been a bone stuck in newspapers' craws (and which Schultz briefly mentions).

So the Marburgers -- David, a First Amendment lawyer, and Daniel, an economics professor -- came up with the essence of a two-point plan (PDF) as relayed by Schultz:

Aggregators would reimburse newspapers for ad revenues associated with their news reports.
Injunctions would bar aggregators' profiting from newspapers' content for the first 24 hours after stories are posted.

For some papers, that last point may be the only value proposition they've got going in a world of otherwise largely "processed" news, and it's probably better than a total paywall. But not much.

There are so many ways to evade it. Are we going to have the "paraphrase police" out in force?

And are there really that many aggregators that are parasites to the extent they are cannibalizing traffic? (The authors pointedly say Google is not the problem.) And then there is this from Schultz herself:

Newspaper industry leaders are marinating in a brew of inaction and indecision. John Sturm, president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America -- the chief lobbyist for newspaper publishers -- says his board of directors is considering various plans of action and hopes to agree on one "by the end of the year."

Let's hope some sanity prevails before then.

New views of plagiarism in a new age

2009-06-29T14:39:00.002-04:00

If you want a good give and take -- and some eye-opening comments on how some folks view plagiarism in a completely different light in the social media age -- check out this from early last week about Chris Anderson's upcoming "Free" and its apparent liberal use of Wikipedia entries and some other sources without credit:

http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/

The comments are the most interesting.

Lifestreaming

2009-06-29T12:15:00.004-04:00

Well, Steve Reubel of the well-read Micro Persuasion blog has taken the plunge into "lifestreaming."

Somewhere between Twitter and blogging, lifestreaming is, to my mind, blogging for the peripatetic.

OK, it's a little more than that. It's really about being able to more quickly inject yourself and your thoughts, etc., into the ever-growing stream of online social networking/conversations. It's about "The Flow," as Stowe Boyd described it.

I have noticed that I am starting to get as many comments on this blog's posting on Facebook as on here. That's an interesting sign that has me looking at things like Posterous or Tumblr. We'll see. For now, when I write I tend to write a bit longer. But the idea of being able to manage the hub and "spokes," as Rubel puts it, through one site is interesting.

Rubel has a bit more on why he's "lifestreaming" and specifically notes that blogging just seems too slow and "needs a reboot." Since he's been at the front of documenting a lot of the changes for the past five years, it's worth paying attention.

Posner's solution: Ban linking, paraphrasing

2009-06-29T11:32:00.002-04:00

The old saying is that bad cases make bad law.

The danger is that ridiculous thinking out loud by respected jurists could make very bad law.

Let's hope the legislative and judicial communities do not take up the suggestion from U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner that it may be time to expand copyright law to ban not only linking, but paraphrasing, without the rights-holder's consent.

This is seriously flawed in so many ways.

Let's just consider what this would do to search, the only really practical way to begin to even find, let alone comprehend, the vast amount of information being created. So could a search engine link to any company's copyrighted page, for instance?

Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch had an effective response in the Washington Post:

Much of what Posner wants to outlaw is public discourse. Why is it okay for people to talk about the day's news in a bar or barber shop, but not online? People should be able to discuss the day's news on the Web without fear of violating copyright law. The natural way people discuss things on the Web is by quoting and linking to the source. (Except maybe Posner, he doesn't seem to link to much of anything in his blog posts).
Posner never squares his position with freedom of speech or fair use rights. He doesn't even mention them. Yet those are precisely the rights which allow me to paraphrase his argument without his permission so that I can disagree with it.

Posner calls sites linking to newspapers "free riders," but Schonfeld notes that a link in itself is valuable in driving traffic to a site.

We'll just assume the judge has had his little joke and is chuckling at the hand-wringing. If not, put a stake in this vampire of an idee.

WOWO history

2009-06-29T08:50:00.009-04:00

Early in my career, I had the great fortune to work for Group W - the old Westinghouse Broadcasting in Philadelphia and Fort Wayne.

Fort Wayne's WOWO, at 50,000 watts, clear channel was the most fantastic place to work in the mid-1970s. DJs with great pipes and great personalities like Ron Gregory, Chris Roberts, Calvin Richards and Bob Sievers. And a great newsroom with folks like Dugan Fry, Jerry Hoffman, Bill Fisher, Ed Kasuba, Debbie Lowe and Art Salzberg -- and immediate on-air access to the famed Group W network.

Now, Randy Meyer has put together a wonderful tribute site to the old "WOWO 1190." He's done it up right at http://historyofwowo.com. It's got airchecks (the 1973-75 one of Calvin Richards and Ron Gregory (MP3) was the beginning of my stint there - a snippet of one of my newscasts is very near the end - 43 minutes in), some of the great old jingle packages (MP3), photos, etc.

If you really want a taste of what music-news radio in its heyday was like, head on over to the site. I've got to go rooting through the attic to see if I have anything left to send Randy. Anyone else out there with old WOWO mementos, consider contacting him as well.

Use common "action" words

2009-06-25T11:01:00.003-04:00

Too many news Web sites still use "journalism" terms as they try to move people around the site.

"Multimedia," for instance - when was the last time you said "let's go out and shoot some multimedia of the kids playing"? Or "video," "audio," etc. Yeah, none of those are greatly offensive or confusing, but they work against you online.

Simply put, your online site is a retail store - much of the psychology of retail applies. You want users to do something; to do that, use common action words: "read," "watch," "listen." Use labels like "photos and video" instead of multimedia. And try things like "your photos and video" and "our photos and video" to be more conversational (or even use "pictures" instead of "photos').

I've been working with a small daily S.C. paper this summer, The Item. It's started adopting this nomenclature. What do you think?

Getting it right on Sanford coverage

2009-06-25T10:40:00.004-04:00

Kudos to The State newspaper for getting it almost all right on covering the tragic story of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The paper very effectively used its Web site to get all sorts of information up quickly. Once it got confirmation that the e-mails between the governor and his Argentinian paramour were legit, it posted many of them. As a result, it got lots of exposure including debriefs on the late-evening news shows locally and on cable.

It put up a timeline to help people digest the story.

It posted a link to a Twitter search for "Sanford."

It made sure all the elements were accessible from each page.

It put up a poll, etc. (About all it didn't do was play the theme from "Sanford and Son," a rather tacky little move done by "The Takeaway on public radio.

Now, a few minor observations -- not really criticisms, but something to chew on:

The State is a McClatchy paper. Things tend to "go away" into the archives after a week or so. I would hope that does not happen here.
I would hope that once things die down, the paper creates a "microsite" for all the coverage. And I would hope the paper would give it an easy-to-think-of URL, such as thestate.com/sanford
It would have been very useful if the stories all had a "sanford" tag - or "sanford affair." Too many news organizations still don't use tagging. Yes, microsites are useful, but the tagging gives another way for people to easily access the thread of a story.
The timeline is good, but why isn't it interactive? This is another way to help people easily organize "the story."

Again, we have to remember that "the story" is no longer an individual river of text or a specific path through a Web site. Your users will define "the story" by how they meander through all the elements (for me, the story is the e-mails, but for someone else it might be Sanford's political orientation and presidential aspirations dashed, and for yet another person it might be Jenny Sanford and how she has handled this). The more we can do to give them the navigational and interpretive tools, the better.

None of this, however, takes away from the fine job The State has done.