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Back to the newsroom, off to Seattle

2011-01-26T00:13:33Z

When I left the Los Angeles Times in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis — a time when the newspaper industry’s future looked particularly bleak — I wondered wistfully if I was walking away from my last newspaper job. I’d worked for newspaper companies my entire career, and despite their sometimes frustratingly slow advance into the digital age, I’ve always loved newspapers and the work they do.

Turns out, I’m not finished with newspapers. Or they are not finished with me.

I am starting a new job next month at The Seattle Times as assistant managing editor, digital. I’ll be guiding editorial efforts on the paper’s online products, including SeattleTimes.com. The Times has earned a reputation for innovation in local digital journalism, and I am looking forward to being a part of the talented team that makes it happen.

I’ve missed the newsroom, and I can’t wait to get back there.

Photo: Clock at Pike Place Market, Seattle, by Flickr user mikeensor (Creative Commons)

Posted from Boston, Massachusetts, United States.

Libraries: An appreciation

2011-01-25T23:53:01Z

If I couldn’t be a journalist, I think I’d be a librarian. I decided this after spending a lot of time in libraries in the last couple of years and interacting with some very smart (and completely unstuffy) librarians.

Maybe it’s because, as it turns out, journalists and librarians have a lot in common.

Fundamentally, we’re both interested in making information useful and meaningful to the widest possible audience. Beyond that, practitioners in both fields are committed to public service, free speech, open access, transparency in sourcing, etc.

Librarianship might not be the hippest profession — one more thing we share, I suppose — though, as my former LAT colleague David Sarno points out, this is changing.

Librarians with an eye to the future speak not of books but of an information commons — an open network of places, both physical and virtual, where people come not just to receive knowledge but to create and share knowledge with others.

In the U.S., public libraries are seeing record numbers of visitors. Even circulation is up.

Unfortunately, budgets are down. Libraries are a convenient target for cash-strapped local governments looking to save money.

But cuts to public libraries, especially in bad economic times, are short-sighted. They hit job seekers, community groups and people engaged in independent study, among others.

It’s time civic leaders took a closer look at libraries and the services they provide and imagine how much poorer our society’s information commons would be without them.

Photo: Seattle Central Library by Flickr user pmorgan (Creative Commons)

Posted from Boston, Massachusetts, United States.

Flash in the pan?

2010-08-20T15:09:29Z

I am an ex-Flash user. I uninstalled the Flash plug-in on my primary browser about a month ago, and I haven’t looked back. Here’s how it happened:

Back when Apple announced that its forthcoming iPad would lack Flash support, it sounded to me like a boneheaded move. If a device built for consuming multimedia doesn’t support the web’s leading format for multimedia presentation, what good is it?

But after using my own iPad for a while, I decided I didn’t miss Flash nearly as much as I thought I would. (And I discovered that a lot of web apps I’d assumed were Flash-based were actually built with JavaScript.) Which got me thinking: Could I do without Flash on my main computer as well?

I use a woefully underpowered first-generation MacBook Air that I’d rather not replace just yet. I’d done about all I can think of to squeeze a little more performance out of it, including installing a solid-state hard drive and upgrading the OS to Snow Leopard. Still I found many common activities, particularly web browsing in multiple tabs or windows, painfully slow.

So I decided, as an experiment, to remove the Flash plug-in from my primary web browser, Google Chrome. I still have it in Safari, which I fire up when I need to look at Flash content.

After about a month, here are my impressions:

The speed increase on web browsing is much more dramatic than the performance boost I got by adding Snow Leopard and the SSD. And since most of my computing time is spent in a web browser, that gives my old laptop a new lease on life.
Fewer obnoxious ads! That alone might make this “upgrade” worthwhile.
YouTube and Vimeo both have stable HTML5 video players, though most of the commercial content on YouTube is available only in the Flash player.
The Wall Street Journal’s video player works beautifully. (NYT and CNN not so much.)
Interactive charts in Google Analytics and Google Finance, sadly, are Flash-based and don’t downgrade gracefully.
The Google Maps API is JavaScript based (though there is also a Flash API) so most of the apps produced by my former colleagues at the L.A. Times’ Data Desk still work without a hitch.

In short, for me, the performance jump is worth the occasional inconvenience, but YMMV.

What do you think? Could you live without Flash?

Continue the discussion here

2010-03-30T02:42:56Z

Thanks to all who turned out today at UBC Robson Square for my workshop on online tools and techniques for journalists. I’m creating this post as a way to continue the discussion online. If you have questions or comments on the topics we discussed, please share them in the comments, and I will do my best to respond.

~~A podcast of the session will be available in the next few days, and I’ll link to it when it’s ready.~~

Update 2010.03.29: The podcast — er, vodcast? — is now online. Also, here are all of my links from the presentation.

Checking in from Canada

2010-03-07T05:31:27Z

In the four months since my last post — yes, I’m a terrible blogger — I’ve moved to Vancouver and started teaching at the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Among other things, I’m coordinating the school’s Integrated Journalism course, required of all first-year students, and advising some second-year students on their theses.

It’s been a terrific experience so far, and I highly recommend the school’s Canwest Global visiting professor program to other professionals looking to take some time away from the field and work with some seriously smart and engaged student journalists.

And did I mention Vancouver is awesome?

Photo: Cherry tree in bloom in Stanley Park.

Posted here and there

2009-11-09T23:32:17Z

The problem with writing for several outlets is that your stuff lacks a home on the Internet. But it’s nothing that a little aggregation can’t fix. In case you missed it, here’s some of what I’ve been writing in the last few months:

Today at De Nieuwe Reporter, the Dutch online journalism blog I write for, I posted a piece on InfoCamp, a terrific unconference I attended last month in Seattle. It’s about what online journalists can learn from information scientists. (And yes, it’s in English.)
I’ve been enjoying using TwitterTim.es, an aggregator that lets you build a personalized “newspaper” featuring the posts tweeted most frequently by people you follow. (Here’s mine.) Intrigued, I interviewed Maxim Grinev, the site’s tech lead, for Online Journalism Review.
I weighed in on the question of whether SEO practices make for dumb, boring headlines, also at OJR. (By the way, I’m working on an online course on writing headlines for the web for the Poynter Institute’s NewsU. If you have some instructive experiences to share, please let me know.)
Finally, I wrote about recently launched redesigns at Germany’s Spiegel Online, where I worked this summer, and my alma mater, the Los Angeles Times, also for De Nieuwe Reporter.

Also, as I’m doing more writing and consulting in various places, I’ve updated my about page with the customary disclosures.

What would you teach aspiring journalists about the internet?

2009-10-02T19:20:41Z

It’s officially official: I’m headed to Vancouver in January to spend a semester as the Canwest Global Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. I will be teaching online journalism as part of the school’s integrated journalism course.

I’m looking forward to helping students think critically about the internet as a platform for news, and I would appreciate suggestions on how best to do that. In other words, if you had this gig, what would you teach?

Police radio play-by-play lands German Twitterer in trouble

2009-09-02T11:02:32Z

I did this online journalism-related write-up last week for Spiegel International. It didn’t run there, so I’m posting it here (with permission, of course):

When a 71-year-old pensioner killed three people and wounded a fourth in a shooting spree last month in North Rhine-Westphalia, the police response unfolded in real time on Twitter. A user of the microblogging site, who was listening in on official radio communications taking place at the scene in the town of Schwalmtal, posted a running report of the suspect’s standoff with authorities.

The Twitter account was soon deleted, but not before much of user @JO31DH’s minute-by-minute account was repeated in blogs and other Twitter posts: “1 confirmed dead in rampage. … The commando unit has arrived on site … The forces will move to Hermmann-Löh Street in Amern … The helicopter is on Pletschweg … News channel N24 is also in Schwalmtal now.”

While listening in on police radio transmissions is legal in some countries, including the United States, it is forbidden in Germany and carries a penalty of up to two years’ imprisonment.

In the midst of the two-hour standoff, with reports coming in that the suspect had taken hostages, Philipp Ostrop, an editor at RuhrNachrichten.de, tweeted, “If there’s really a hostage situation in Schwalmtal, can the perpetrator follow along with @JO31DH on what the police are up to? Is that such a good thing?”

Other posts warned the user that what he was doing was illegal.

The anonymous twitterer claimed protection as a journalist: “I call myself the press. That’s enough… Now shut up.”

The next day the would-be journalist posted a contrite message on his blog (now also offline but quoted by the Rheinische Post): “I would like to formally apologize. I see, in spite of everything, how these social networks can be misused. I don’t feel good about this. I hope things will soon settle down and others won’t repeat this stupid idea.”

The newspaper later reported that authorities had identified the Twitter user and would file criminal charges. According to police, the man did not threaten the operation because the commando unit on the scene was using secure mobile phones to communicate.

Search trends and geography

2009-08-22T16:55:49Z

I know it’s been around for a year or more now, but I still can’t stop playing with Google Insights for Search, that small window into the universe of data that Google collects on user behavior. It’s a trend-spotter’s dream, and — particularly with its geographical filters — a potential source of story ideas for journalists.

For example, I can see the fastest rising search terms in Los Angeles and Berlin in the past week.

But what I’m finding fun right now is plugging in brand names and seeing where they’re strong. I offer, by way of example, some vehicle brands and maps showing search volume in the United States:

The four-wheel-drive Subaru line is understandably popular in mountainous, cold-weather states:

Saab has some fans in New England, but that’s about it:

Another ailing GM make, Hummer, still gets some interest in Nevada and Texas (I suspect the bump in interest in Michigan may be mostly from concerned GM stakeholders):

Toyota’s Prius, meanwhile, is especially popular in eco-conscious places such as California and Vermont:

And the Vespa scooter craze seems to have taken hold on the West Coast and, inexplicably, Utah:

When you look at popularity over time for all five brands, you can clearly see how interest in the brands associated with fuel-sipping vehicles spikes during periods when fuel prices are high. No huge surprises here, but it’s fun to see how well search data tracks real-world trends.

Have you used Google’s search trend data for story ideas? Share your tips in the comments.

Breaking the silence here

2009-07-16T23:05:06Z

I haven’t gone totally off the grid. I just stopped contributing to it for a while. I needed to recharge my mental battery. Now I’m back and playing catch-up. Here, briefly, is what I’ve been up to the last few months.

April was “conference month” on two continents:

International Journalism Festival, Perugia, Italy: I participated in a panel discussion on networked journalism and gave a presentation on alternative story forms.
International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin: Just watched and listened.
BarCamp NewsInnovation, Philadelphia: I led a discussion on information overload (notes here).

In May I visited old friends and colleagues in L.A. and Kansas City and family in Atlanta and Boston. I also traveled back to my alma mater, the University of Missouri (from which I’d graduated exactly 10 years earlier), to attend IRE’s excellent Django boot camp. I highly recommend this to anybody who wants to build web interfaces to newsy data. IRE offers a couple such classes a year, including at its annual conference. This one was run by a fellow Mizzou J alum, NYT’s Brian Hamman.

In June I went to Japan with my little brother. It was mostly a leisure trip, but in Tokyo I sat down with some folks from a telecom think tank to talk about paid content on mobile devices. There’s a write-up here.

That piece marks the start of an occasional column I’ll be writing for De Nieuwe Reporter, a Dutch blog that covers developments in online journalism. (I volunteered to write in Dutch, but thankfully they were happy with English. Which is good because I write Dutch at a pre-K level.)

Now I’m preparing to leave for a two-month Arthur Burns Fellowship in Germany. I’ll be working in Berlin for the web-only international edition of Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading newsweekly (and operator of the country’s most popular news website). I’ll also spend some time traveling within Germany and investigating trends in online journalism there. The orientation is next week in Washington, D.C., and I’ll arrive in Berlin Monday, July 27.

Stay tuned. I promise to check in soon.