Who knew that there was a Snuggie-vs-Slanket contingent when it came to pub crawls? I wish that I could:
a) organize a faux-blanket-wearing pub crawl
b) video it
c) post it on a newspaper site as a video story
Jun 132010
Jun 052010
Oh, I feel for the good folks at the Bedford Times & Citizen.
But what do I feel? Something between sympathy and schadenfreude, I suppose. (via)
In related newspaper news, film and TV prop departments re-use their props!
There are a lot — a LOT — more examples in this Picasa gallery. (via)
Jun 012010
I’ve had my share of embarrassing moments — some of them even as a reporter. Mostly, for me, it’s been when a long interview has droned on and on, and I’ve suddenly been caught daydreaming, unsure how the sentence just ended, with someone staring at me, expectantly waiting for an astute followup question.
Oh, there have been a few headline, um, foul-ups. But at least it’s never been like this:
Man, you have to feel for the guy. He’s really trying!
I like that he’s the one who posted this video, too.
May 222010
I really enjoyed this behind-the-scenes essay by a copywriter — albeit, an unusual one.
Jason Toon works at Woot, a company that sells only one thing (a different thing) every day, and usually at a pretty good price. He writes the ad copy that appears with each of these products, and they are usually funny, isightful, and, well, different.
Today, for example, Woot is selling a pair of mice, once white, one pink. Instead of just giving the specs for the mice, though, Toon has written a little story about his-and-her mice, atop a wedding cake. It goes from endearing to odd and then all the way to pathos.
He does that every day. Except, of course, when the site has what it calls Woot-offs: a time when they sell maybe a dozen or two products, one after the other, in a single day. Those require a little more than the usual amount of work, and Toon didn’t think he could do it.
Turns out, he can:
That morning would have looked like any other to you. Me, at my desk, pondering the minutiae of some hard drive or LCD monitor or robotic vacuum cleaner. You wouldn’t have seen the crushing weight of the 25 product descriptions I had to write before I could claim my next sleep. I felt like I could barely breathe. I tried to commit every detail of my comfortable desk to memory, to savor during the unbearable hours at whatever my next job would be. I started typing, a doomed man, my doomed fingers dancing a macabre funeral march on the keyboard.
…
Along the way, I’d gained an enormous respect for hacks and hackery (in the old sense of cranking out anonymous creative work by rote, not in the computer-age sense). I’d always flattered myself with the self-designation of an “idea man”, a superior intellect whose brilliant visions were too valuable to waste his time actually carrying them out. But as I pounded out those two dozen joked-up pieces of marketing ephemera, my awe only grew at the comic-book illustrators and pulp novella writers and dance-craze tunesmiths who just got the job done, in the days when their professions earned them no respect and not much more money.
In a sense, although he doesn’t say so explicitly, he’s also describing journalists, or even bloggers. Not every word I write is golden — far from it — but there is a certain sense of accomplishment in just sitting down, banging something out, and Getting It Done. And then looking back over what you have written and noticing, with a professional’s eye, that maybe you did happen to turn a nice phrase here and there.
It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s something.
Read “The Hack Hustle: The Inspiring Story of the Slacker Behind the Woot-off“
May 152010
Now this is a classic magazine scoop — but it’s from the Village Voice. I’ll let the lede speak for itself:
Two years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.
He recorded precinct roll calls. He recorded his precinct commander and other supervisors. He recorded street encounters. He recorded small talk and stationhouse banter. In all, he surreptitiously collected hundreds of hours of cops talking about their jobs.
Aside from small talk and locker-room banter, as well as juvenile jokes like “cocking the books” (drawing lewd penises inside other cops’ memo books), the officer also revealed a pressure-cooker culture where officers and their supervisors were under intense pressure to look really, really busy, but also to record fewer crimes.
The result? More “stop-and-frisks” but also not actually investigating real complaints.
The Village Voice has done a wow job of putting it all up — including two long articles and selections from the recordings themselves.
I haven’t finished it, but it’s gripping stuff, so far.
May 072010
So, if newspapers are fanatically devoted to being correct with everything you do, and if they want to be absolutely sure that incorrect information is corrected as soon as possible, how come we don’t see something like this every day:
Correction
Incorrect and misleading information appeared on Page Two of yesterday’s paper. Although the forecast called for a high of 7 C, the actual high temperature turned out to be 3 C, and the sky was overcast instead of partly cloudy.
This compounds last week’s error, which called for yesterday’s high to be 21 C. A recent cold front wiped out all the forecasts from Wednesday through Saturday, along with plans for a staff picnic. We regret the error.
Actually, I would love to see tracking of how accurate weather forecasts are. I know people have studied this in the past, but I’d like to see weather sites archive and promote their accuracy. It should be relatively easy in a database-driven world.
Related: Under the rubric of “People in glass houses” and also “schadenfreude” I kind of enjoy visiting Regret The Error, a website devoted to chronicling the very best of newspaper and magazine corrections.
May 042010
Perhaps Western news organizations have produced their own video infographics, but Al-Jazeera’s was the first that I saw.
I’m glad to see an English Al-Jazeera, by the way, because I think it’s important to encourage a diversity of voices in the media. From what I’ve read, it was originally staffed with journalists pinched from the BBC, and I believe that news culture still exists.
Which, I suppose, is more than you can say for Fox.
May 012010
Yesterday, a woman accused in the abduction and death of a child appeared in court. Or, was scheduled to. But nothing that actually happened in court can be reported, thanks to a sweeping gag order imposed by the judge.
Media are arguing against the gag, including this excellent editorial, but I’m not going to get into the free speech vs. fair trial argument here. I just want to note how the Toronto Star, with a simple graphical element, drove home the point of censorship.
In Rosie DiManno’s column, she writes about how the whole town knows the details — people talk, after all. They gossip and compare notes, and phone each other. The coffee shops must be abuzz.
But none of that can appear in print. So, where the relevant details in a well-reported column might go, DiManno (or a designer) has put long black boxes instead.
It’s a classic visual image, one that screams censorship, and it’s a great, elegant way to make the point of the column. Good job, Star. I would love to see how you handled this in print, but I think you’ve done an excellent job online.
Apr 282010
This is for all the journalists out there. One of the joys (?) of working at a newspaper is that people expect you to be perfect on a day-in, day-out basis.
It’s good to always keep on your toes, and I agree that accuracy is the foundation of any good journalism. But when readers find something in your paper that you haven’t gotten right, they’re quick to call or email and to irately take you to task for it.
This can be good — letting you know that you’ve goofed, however embarrassingly, is key if you’re going to correct it.
But this can also be bad. Sometimes readers want to get into very arcane grammatical discussions with you. Sorry, the serial comma just isn’t CP style.
And sometimes they think you’re not doing it right just because you’re not doing what they want or expect. For example, give me one good reason why a TV grid is relevant information in this day and age. But readers will piss and moan that your 75-cent paper is suddenly robbed of all value should you so much as shrink the crossword by a half-inch.
Anyway, I’ve found a website that is devoted to these cranky complaint calls and emails. In any newsroom, some of the crankiest cranks get passed around on the voice mail system, or forwarded along via email so that everyone can get a kick out of the crazy old bat who drunkenly berates you for canceling Marmaduke but then, after three minutes of vitriol, manages to find it on the page, and yet still signs off with an accusatory tone, because it should somehow have been easier to find it.
Yes, we’ve all got those tales, and Paper Haters is the place to send them, so that newsrooms around the world can share. Sometimes, it’s a chance for reporters to vent with people who just aren’t happy with the coverage of something, but there are some gems. Try this email:
I just wanted to let you know, that your story and pictures on WRESTLER, state champ from TEAM X High School, were perfect … Athough this was great, the other local wrestling coverage stunk.
Or this one:
Miss REPORTER, you are a Socialist Liberal Democrat scumbag and when the journalism business goes through another wave of lay-offs, I hope you’re at the top of the axing list. Journalists like you are what’s wrong with this country.
But the best are always the voice mails. I love this guy:
Part one: What about the Kentucky Derby 1
Part two: What about the Kentucky Derby 2
Or, see if you can gear up your brain to make full sense of this woman.
Apr 082010
I just wrapped up teaching a couple of intro journalism classes at Brandon University, and the best part of it (besides the inquisitive, engaged students) was the time that I got to spend delving into internet-based journalism. There’s a ton of really exciting ideas floating around out there, and the students and I spent the last few weeks of the semester brainstorming and debating what the future might hold.
So I can only imagine how awesome it would be to get involved with a new course at Columbia University that is offering a half Computer Science, half Journalism degree.
Yes.
The hope, according to this piece on Wired.com, is that these graduates will be able to bridge the gap between tech and journalism. Sure, many journalists love playing around with multimedia, video, and interactive websites. But who’s going to build the next generation of such technologies:
“Some people coming out of high school or college possess technical savvy, but more often than not, the skill set is bordered by an ability to use Wikipedia, Facebook and Gmail,” said Grueskin, noting that while Columbia journalism students are taught to edit multimedia and maintain websites, “almost all of those skills rely on using existing software or programs to do digital journalism. We hope and expect that graduates of this program will be more able to innovate and create the solutions the news business so sorely needs.”
Wired has a list of technological solutions that the grads might apply themselves to, including automated journalism, data visualization, deep data mining and something they call “digital trust.”
It sounds awesome. And I can’t wait to learn more about this course’s curriculum, and then to incorporate some of what they’re exploring into my own class discussions.
(Oh, and also I hope that it filters out into my day job.)
Mar 192010
Television stations in the United States get exclusive access to their frequencies so that they can broadcast news and entertainment. But they’re supposed to be acting in “the public interest” in return for that largess. Are they?
A study by the Norman Lear Center took a look, studying 11,000 stories on eight local television stations in L.A. over two whole weeks. They found that most of each 30-minute newscast was “frittered away,” in the words of one commenter. Strip out the ads, the weather, the sports and there’s not much left. Local government issues, for example, get a mere 22 seconds per half hour.
Here’s one video that takes an overview of the study:
The FCC Commissioner, commenting on the study, said that he was “flat out alarmed.”
Read more about it on the Norman Lear Center’s page — including the study itself and several more videos. As you can imagine, it’s gotten plenty of coverage in the non-television media, but I found about it on the L.A. Times, where columnist James Rainey was biting in his assessment that “local news is neither very local nor very newsy”:
You’re sure to learn about the Guitar Hero championships. (Slammin’ video. No analysis required.) But don’t expect to find out much about who’s running for Assembly or just how much library hours will be reduced by the latest city budget cuts. …
Try to recall an evening newscast that didn’t include an animal in a predicament or at least one story gift-wrapped in yellow police tape. A regular diet of this stuff might reasonably have you cowering in your house. Never mind that statistics (so meddlesome, those numbers that provide context) show crime in fairly sharp decline in recent years. …
The sports guy gets ever more jocular. And the weather gal never wants for time to show the latest cutoff low on the map in her latest low-cut top. …
As USC released the study last week, former KCBS reporter Bob Jimenez derided the way local news operations wallow in a culture of “kicks, guts and orgasms at 11.”
Rainey also dug into the files that local TV stations are required to submit to the FCC, files that are supposed to show how they are acting in the public interest, by covering important stories. Well, the stories that the stations deem as locally important and in the public interest are laughable. Or would be, if it weren’t so sad.
Mar 122010
If you’re familiar with slide-shows on the internet, you’re likely familiar with the fluff — the Top 10 lists that make you flip through each item as a separate page; the endless angles of ‘gadget porn’; the galleries of red carpet celebrity shots.
There are great slide-shows out there, collections of really awesome pictures, but they tend towards the easy-to-curate. That is, someone will put together a slide-show of images from the Olympics, or scenes from Haiti. Some of the photos can be jaw-droppingly good, but they sort of stand alone.
Well, msnbc.com’s Bill Dedman has changed the game. He’s an investigative reporter, but his latest work isn’t a 10,000-word opus, in fact it isn’t a story at all. No, Dedman’s latest work is an investigative slide-show.
With a staggering 47 slides, Dedman tells the story of Huguette Clark, daughter of what you might call a “robber baron” from the Gilded Age. Yes, the 1920s. He rivaled Rockefeller as the richest American, lived on Millionaire’s Row beside the Vanderbilts, and pretty much bought himself a U.S. Senate seat.
His daughter (from his second marriage — a scandal in itself) inherited something over a billion dollars, in today’s money. She has several mansions, owns the largest apartment on New York’s storied Park Avenue, and once bought a castle in Connecticut but never spent a night there.
In an interview on Poynter, Dedman shares how his investigative feature turned into a slideshow — and how it’s turned out great:
I like to talk stories through before I write them. As I was collecting photos of the Clarks, I kept showing them in a little slide show to my family, to my mother (81) and my daughters (7 and 10). It really helped tell the story.
I put the photos online to show our projects team at msnbc.com, and photographer Jim Seida said, why don’t we just publish it as a slide show? I was skeptical at first — would that crimp the writing? — but in the end I was advocating doing it this way when the photo team was skeptical. I thought far more people would read through it this way, and it would be worth an experiment.
We’ve done slide shows for years, of course, but the slide show is not our usual medium for telling an investigative or in-depth story.
I clicked through just so I could get a look at it and pitch the idea at my own newspaper, but I ended up reading the whole thing. As Dedman noted in the interview, he had to lose as a lot of depth and context from the story, because the captions were limited to about 50 words. But in other ways, that terse approach also focused him on what was most important or most interesting.
It’s a great tale about a forgotten famous family. And a great way to tell it. Check out the slideshow here: “The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery” (Click launch to launch the pop-up slideshow.)
Give the behind-the-scenes interview a read, too.
Mar 052010
I’m personally on the fence when it comes to newspaper websites allowing comments. I feel that there are a lot of great viewpoints out there in the public sphere that don’t get heard, and newspapers have a duty to seek them out. Comments on stories are an easy way to fulfil that repsonsibility.
On the other hand, comments on the Internet? Have you read any? Yikes.
For a while, I thought that the solution might be to require that commenters use only their real name. Perhaps require that they have a credit card or other ID to sign up. Not to charge, but to verify a real, actual name. Like letters to the editor.
But there’s something to be said for anonymous/pseudonymous comments, too. Sometimes people have valid reasons for not exposing their identity.
On this site, I automatically allow any and all “true” comments (ie. no spam) — so long as you’ve commented once before. Once you’re trusted (and, assuming you use the same nickname and email address) your comment is automatically approved. The volume of comments on this website is low enough that it’s easy to police for any offensive comments. And there haven’t been any yet, anyway.
But for some large newspaper websites, I imagine it’s a full-time job just to moderate comments. And so they delegate the duty to computers and to readers (asking them to “flag” offensive comments, for example). That doesn’t always work, as you will have noticed if you read comment sections on, oh say, the Washington Post.
Now, the Post is feeling some heat. No one’s threatening to sue, that I know of. But the vitriolic comments are starting to scare off potential interviews.
Any first-year reporter knows that lots of people are timid about “being in the paper.” They’re worried that they will be portrayed in a way that they don’t approve of. They’re worried that they’ll be misquoted, or that they’ll be taken out of context, or that the story will attract unwanted attention.
Most reporters know several techniques to soothe these fears. Now, though, sources need to be worried about how anonymous internet commenters will snipe at them. And it’s costing the Washington Post at least one source, according to this column:
He wasn’t happy with the comments that readers posted on washingtonpost.com about the story.
You could hardly blame him …. among the comments were these hard-to-stomach posts:
“What scum….Scam-acne-face-Sutherland and all his little minions, scum….special place in Hell for them,” wrote someone who went by the screen name griffmills.
“They should be hung up by their private parts and shot,” wrote billdinva2.
Sutherland said such comments were “why I was so hesitant in doing an interview” in the first place. “Lesson learned,” he wrote, “I will never allow for another interview.”
Thoughts? I guess you could, uh, comment.
Mar 012010
Nice reporting by the Seattle Times on the United States’ worst-ever avalanche disaster, which killed 96 people.
Exactly 100 years ago, on March 1, 1910, a train mid-way through a mountain pass got stuck in the snow. Really stuck. For nearly a week. At one point, it was snowing a foot an hour. All the snowclearing equipment couldn’t keep up. Men hired to shovel the snow just gave up, quit and walked away.
Some people managed to hike back to the nearest town. Others stayed on the train, which had burned through most of its fuel coal trying to keep crew and passengers warm.
That’s when the avalanche struck.
Here’s a news video about it, but give the article a read, too.
Feb 282010
I’ve previously posted about the Weekly World News archives being hosted online by Google, but here’s a particular gem:
(from Winston Hearn, via Coudal)