Innovate this

Listening and following back on Twitter

2009-05-06T10:22:00.005-04:00

@johnrobinson: I admit I'm suspicious of media folk who join Twitter, attract 100s of followers & follow only a handful. They're talking but not listening?

@smalljones: @johnrobinson don't fear the followed, they are simply stuck in broadcast mode.

@ryanbruce: @johnrobinson Very few people can pull off not following people. Then they are simply a 140 character newsletter.

@jiconoclast: @johnrobinson I think your instincts are sound. Many media folks see Twitter as just another one-way publication medium.

@robyntomlin: @johnrobinson Agreed. There needs to be give and take or it's just broadcast. Best when it's a conversation.

@johnrobinson: I mean, I love addressing an audience, too, but reading you guys is much, much more entertaining and informative.

@BIF: @johnrobinson To me, the value of Twitter is listening in on what folks are talking about. Plus we've gotten some great stories via tweets.

@kiyoshimartinez: @johnrobinson Dunbar Number reality & having a good signal/noise ratio could be a good reason. Not everyone has equal value to you.

@johnrobinson: @kiyoshimartinez I got that. But 1,000 followers and 32 followed?

@chrislowrance: @johnrobinson Personally speaking, I keep my list short because otherwise I can't keep up with everyone.

This is an old discussion in Twitter years, hashed out by many in the pre-Ashton and pre-Oprah days, but still a stumbling block for some users on Twitter.
It seems particularly difficult for some people in the media, those most likely to consume massive amounts of information and to suffer the guilt of not being able to consume it all.

Some points:
1. No, there are no rules on Twitter. But there is etiquette. Following back is generally accepted good Twitter etiquette.
2. Unread tweets piling up in your Twitter stream are not like unread magazines piling up in your living room. You don't have to feel guilty about failing to consume all the information.
3. Following back on Twitter is not like accepting a connection on Facebook or LinkedIn; it's a looser connection. It's not like following back gives away all your social and personal data, as can happen when you accept a friendship on Facebook. Your words are already out there on Twitter, if you have an unlocked Twitter account and you're trying to broadcast your messages. (Of course, you can always have another, real, friends-and-family private Twitter account.)
4. Half the value of Twitter is for listening and reporting. People cannot send you private, personal messages if you don't follow them back. So if you ever plan to use Twitter for gathering information, asking questions of others that they might not want to answer publicly, you should follow people back. Or if you want to be accessible to people offering you unsolicited information privately, you should follow people back. If you ask a question and seek information, without following people back, you will place a barrier of frustration in front of your sources. Many of them won't try to to get over that barrier.
5. There is a thing as the Dunbar number, a theoretical limit to how many relationships people can sustain. And there is such a thing as a time limit on how much online social networking can fit into a balanced life. And there is such a thing as a tension between broad, shallow networks of contacts and deep, narrow networks of contacts, and even gender differences about what people prefer. Those anthropological and psychological implications are part of the fascination of social networks. You get to choose. But take time to understand the implications of your choices.

Self-promotion: Read more about listening to Twitter and figuring out the Twitter news cycle at twitter cycles.

The big hump in the long tail

2009-03-14T14:43:00.006-04:00

Everyone's linking and talking about Clay Shirky's latest thoughts on journalism this weekend. He makes valid points about how news and information have changed in our digital world. He predicts an explosion of experiments and new models to replace news on paper.

He's a big hump in his own long tail in our attention economy, and his words draw attention to a subject near and dear to my heart.

At the same time, I can't help but feel his post is essentially a Cliff's Notes version of Phil Meyer's "The Vanishing Newspaper," written in 2004. Perhaps that's good: His name brings awareness to a new audience.

Still, I worry about the costs in our attention economy. I hope we can move on to examining the next steps instead of merely walking ground that's already been covered.

As a companion piece, many people are pointing to Steven Berlin Johnson's talk at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin. Johnson, one of the people behind aggregator Outside.In, notes that news, analysis and information exploded during the last presidential election, and he notes that local news is quite available in his Brooklyn neighborhood through local bloggers.

His point: The digital revolution has given us more information than ever before.

I don't doubt it, for some places and people. But we need to acknowledge that his examples illustrate, again, the big hump in the long tail. ~~Objective~~ Independent information in this last election season for local judges' races, or small county commissioners' races, was quite difficult to find, outside of media-rich places like Brooklyn.

Local, ~~objective~~ independent information in other places is drying up faster than you can say the word "layoff."

Indeed, the future is coming, and it isn't evenly distributed yet. Society needs to find a way to distribute reporting, analysis and information-gathering resources away from the big hump to the longer tail, so that we don't gorge in some places and starve in others.

Brilliant photographers always remind us that the best shots are those taken when everybody is looking the other way. They say, "Turn around. Look elsewhere."

That advice goes for those seeking answers about journalism as well.

So try looking in different directions:

What Philip Meyer was thinking four years after "The Vanishing Newspaper."

What Matt Thompson says about "us" versus "them."

What reporter Meranda Whatling worries about before she goes on a cost-saving furlough.

What Shannan Bowen and others are launching in Wilmington, N.C.

What Jim McBee and friends are doing to provide a new marketplace for journalists and publishers.

What Steve Buttry is learning about top newspaper editors on Twitter.

What some good people have been hatching in Charlotte.

Computer-aid journalism: GIGO or the next wave?

2009-01-06T01:31:00.006-05:00

John Mecklin of Miller-McCune research writes an intriguing post about Duke University's search to fill an endowed chair of computational journalism.

He makes many points worth considering.

Let's take one, for now.

"If you live in one of the 11 American cities EveryBlock covers, you now can enter your address, and the site gives you civic information (think building permits, police reports and so on), news reports, blog items and other Web-based information, such as consumer reviews and photos, all connected to your immediate geographic neighborhood. In the not-too-distant future, (Duke's James) Hamilton suggests, an algorithm could take information from EveryBlock and other database inputs and actually write articles personalized to your neighborhood and your interests, giving you, for example, a story about crime in your neighborhood this week and whether it has increased or decreased in relation to a month or a year ago."

Intriguing idea. Charlotte is covered by EveryBlock, and my neighborhood blog has a widget with an Everyblock feed. Could EveryBlock's data be combined with tools like Tansa or similar to "write" stories or create readable, understandable lists of local information that wouldn't be shared any other way? Like zoning cases? Or city council actions that affect a small, specific neighborhood?

The idea intrigued me so much that I considered offering it to Howard Rheingold for his master's degree students to explore. He recently tweeted a question asking for ideas for those students.

Then I did a little homework. The latest zoning minutes available today from EveryBlock for Charlotte are from May 19, 2008. The latest city council meetings are from July 21, 2008. EveryBlock lists frequency updates for both kinds of information as "sporadically," and the source as the Charlotte city clerk.

What that lag shows is the need for a real person to contact public officials to remind them of the need for sharing information in a certain way, with a certain audience. EveryBlock isn't funded to be a government watchdog and to make that call.

Charlotte's feeds for crime, building permits and food inspections are relatively up to date, and light years beyond what less-wired, lighter-funded nearby governments are doing.

But the quick reality check shows that even in a year, or two, or five, as the tools advance, technology will not replace human contact that reminds government employees to provide public information to the public.

If nobody's watching, it won't happen.

The need for speed

2008-12-22T10:20:00.007-05:00

By now everyone in the world has written about Twitter and the Denver plane crash Saturday night.

But from earthquakes and Mumbai, we already knew Twitter can break news.

Let's move on to the next headline: Twitter and links to live information can make newspaper websites look horribly slow, in these days of tight newspaper staffing.

This isn't a little inside dirty newspaper secret: Readers everywhere are seeing the problems. Local newspapers and websites must retain an old-fashioned commitment to speed to retain any credibility with audiences.

If there's a plane wreck or other big breaking news in our town, on a lightly staffed Saturday night or any night, we have to own it and remember the world is watching our coverage, in real time.

I was working in the Charlotte newsroom Saturday night and watching Twitter. The first our newsroom heard about the crash was a Tweet from Ryan Sholin. It alerted us to be prepared for remakes of pages and to watch for clear, reliable information coming out of Denver. But that information was painfully slow.

A couple of intriguing side notes: Readers appear to expect a high level of quality, speed and accuracy from newspaper websites, as if those sites are public utilities, even when they're getting the information for free. And as Ryan Sholin noted in a Tweet Saturday night, now the whole world gets to watch and try to figure out what's true during the early confusing scanner and live reports of breaking news. Newspapers have the experience to know initial reports are often wrong, and we can use that experience to help guide others through the firehose of live information.

What follows are some comments from the Denver Post's initial online story.

8:06
I hope everyone is alright, but why would the Denver Post allow spelling and grammatical errors in articles posted on the web? It is painful to read news articles like this.

9:08
It's hours after this occurred, and this is all you have posted?
The Rocky, Channel 4, 7 and 9 ALL have much more complete stories. Is this what we have to look forward to when you're the only paper in town? Sad.

9:18
Three hours after this plane crash occurred, and you've got a total of five sentences posted, and some of it is gramatically suspect. This is why journalism, especially print journalism, is dying. Meanwhile aviation-oriented websites from airliners.net to flyertalk.com to pprune.net are reporting this story with speed and enthusiasm -- if you want to know what's going on, go there. I guess the "professional journalists" aren't as vital as they think. Tonight they seem to not even be working.

9:19
John, that's why newspapers are dying. It takes longer to put out news in a paper than you can get on TV or the Internet.

10:27
Man, some of the people here sure do expect a lot from a newspaper that is providing it's services at no cost to any of you.
If you notice a grammatical or spelling error, why don't you email someone at the paper and let them know? Or were you all those annoying kids in elementary school that when the teacher asked a question you would shoot your hand up yelling "OOOOOH! OOOOH! I KNOW, I KNOW! OOH! OOOOH!"
Get over yourselves.

Twitter visuals: They matter

2008-12-07T13:32:00.021-05:00

Now that everyone's a-Twitter, a quick look at the visuals. While part of Twitter's beauty is its simplicity of setup and use, visuals still matter.

A few points, many obvious, but important:

1. Twitter avatars are small. Most people looking at your Twitter avatar will see it about the same size as a mugshot in the current skinny Charlotte Observer: 44pixels wide, or 3.6 picas or so. If you're using your face, crop tight. Consider radical crops that only expose eyes, or other pieces of you.

2. Twitter avatars are displayed in groups. So the color and design, or lack thereof, need to be simple and clean to stand out to be remembered. My three favorites, from designers, are in the Twitter block at the top. Can you pick them out?

3. Twitter avatars and backgrounds convey your brand, your visual sense and the amount of time and care you put into your product. If you use a standard theme, you're demonstrating your lack of originality and commitment to your brand. If you don't want to take the time to do a quality background that will tile (or not) and look good (settings/design/backgroundimage), then consider not using a background image and only changing your design colors to be easy on the eyes. Consider color-blind people and others with accessibility issues. Consider recruiting a friend with visual issues to test the ease of your avatar and page.

4. Technical tip: At times, it appears Twitter doesn't like photos in .gif format. Try .jpg instead.

5. Fun matters: Laughter, whimsy and fun matter on Twitter. Putting on a Santa hat, no matter how cheesy, or changing your avatar to reflect a season in some other subtle way will help endear you to your community. But numerous changes will confuse your followers. If your avatar reflects a standing brand, take care in changing too frequently: A touch of seasonal color might be all you need.

6. Numerous websites exist that will customize avatars for you, and trends, fads and fashion come and go. Dress accordingly.

Journalism education: Begin anywhere

2008-11-23T12:14:00.004-05:00

"Before it was InDesign, it was paste-up and darkroom courses."

"J-school == glorified trade school."

"A few can teach themselves."

"lynda should replace formal education."

"for some students class definitely gets in the way."

"the important point is that you have a whole community of 'tweeple' now to to help advance your learning."

Some journalism students held a discussion on Twitter late Saturday night about journalism education. The ideas go beyond the young students.

These days, all smart journalists are looking at how they should retrain themselves or update their skills, and many have moved beyond waiting for their company (or their school) to hand the tools to them.

The question even for experienced journalists: What kind of class should I take? Should I just focus on the software? Is a community college course in HTML as valuable as a certificate program like the one offered by UNC's journalism school? Should I just focus on the technical tools I can learn on my own? Who needs a high-priced program anyway?

Funny thing:
I remember having these same conversations 25 years ago. It wasn't on Twitter, and didn't span a group from Alaska to Florida, but the questions remain quite similar:
"How will counting headlines by hand help my career in a world of new technical innovation?"
"How will writing programs on sequential punch cards help me in a world of new computers?"(Yes, I punched cards.)
"These professors are old and out of touch. I can learn everything I need at the school newspaper. I'm switching my major to something else." (Some did, successfully).

Those memories have a point: No matter what software you learn now, you will have to learn something new later. No matter how good (or bad) your journalism school or company is, your education and career are in your own hands. To continue to be marketable, you need to demonstrate a continued ability to learn, to cross discipline boundaries, to make connections and to think.

I can't tell who will get more bang for their buck at the moment: Those who pick up skills online or in a tech class, or those who go for broader programs at established schools like UNC. But as one young tweeter said: Having community support and role models, tweeple or otherwise, helps immensely.

Begin anywhere.

CLT Wordcamp roundup

2008-11-16T12:10:00.006-05:00

The Wordcamp conference at The Charlotte Observer was a great success. Jason Keath of The Stratius Group organized the event, presented on Wordpress blog basics and got a Wordpress keynote speaker, Mark Jaquith. The Observer contributed space, some volunteers and some organizational help. Steve Gunn led The Observer effort and made the partnership happen.

More:
Slides from keynote speaker Mark Jaquith, plus links to deeper stuff.

The official CLTWordcamp blog.

Ben Ullman on The Ultimate Tweetup.

Corey Creed of Hippo Internet Marketing on what he liked.

The Guy Trapped in the Elevator speaks.

Short story in The Charlotte Observer. (Ben Ullman noted the story did not mention Wordpress. Good point.)

And yes, My Other Blog is on Wordpress.

Where to get online election results

2008-11-04T10:22:00.003-05:00

North carolina results.

General N.C. Board of Elections site.

South Carolina results.

General S.C. Board of Elections site.

Chrys Wu on where to watch.

New York Times dashboard.

More here.

Searching dirty

2008-10-25T12:50:00.005-04:00

Librarian Genie Tyburski teaches an online class through the University of North Carolina on web research.

Sounds dull and dry, right? Uh, no.

Try, for example, using some of her suggested search terms on Google to find stuff that people don't want you to find:

"not for public dissemination"

"not for public release"

"official use only" (variations include FOUO and U//FOUO)

"company confidential"

"internal use only"

For Genie's class, I tried some of these search terms combined with *NC*. I found a local political candidate's profile, with his home phone number, marked "not for public release."

That's one general theme that emerges from Genie's class: Information that is supposed to be private can sometimes inadvertently leak onto the web, through careless coding, or scanning, or editing, or incorrect placement on a server.

We've debated in class the legality and ethics of finding such information, and concluded that using the tools to find such information fall into legal, ethical realms like much of the reporting labeled "investigative." The ethical questions get sticky when you weigh what to do with the found private information.

Regardless, Genie's tools should be familiar tools for reporters and other journalists. Read her article and play around with the search terms sometime.

And check the updated "Reference" sidebar here for links to other resources, including Power Googling.

Finding election information

2008-10-20T18:49:00.003-04:00

So you're looking to study up before voting? Or do you just need to check something that you're editing?

The Charlotte Observer's vote guide is here.

The Raleigh News and Observer's election coverage is here.

Indyweek.com, the website for The Independent in The Triangle, has election information here.

The League of Women Voters has PDF documents covering state and local elections here.

The Mecklenburg Board of Elections has early voting information and other stuff here.

You can also check the links in the "Politics" sidebar. If you have suggestions of links to add, please comment.

And while you're surfing elsewhere, beware. Lookalikes and wannabes proliferate. For example, you can get great information at FiveThirtyEight, but do not confuse it with 538.com or 538.org. At 538.com, it'll prompt you to download special toolbars for access to maps. Don't do it!

Help from the academy

2008-09-20T11:27:00.004-04:00

Ryan Thornburg of UNC poses some questions for discussion at his blog, "The Future of News," about how universities can help newsrooms. His questions stemmed from a panel discussion at the Online News Association's recent meeting.

Unfortunately, the panel discussion had morphed into a session of preaching to the choir, with most people in the room being from academia, instead of being working journalists who could learn from academia.

Too often, working journalists tend to see academic people as falling into two camps:
1. Isolated, slow, behind-the-curve ivory-tower inhabitants, or
2. Incubators for products that have to be pitched like all the other vendors competing for our dwindling dollars.

As Ryan Thornburg quoted Paul Volpe, the deputy politics editor at washingtonpost.com:
“Pitch me.”

Unfortunately, with that approach, the transaction becomes all about the sizzle and not about the steak. Many of us have had experience with stories that landed on 1A not because they were good, but because they had a good sales pitch in a meeting. And many of us have had experience with software that landed on websites not because it was good, but because it had a good salesperson.

And then let's go back to No. 1 for a moment: Many of us have had experience with journalism classes that taught out-of-date skills or that were staffed with professors unaware of new technical developments.

But a middle ground exists. As we all deal with sad, sad news of losing good colleagues or jobs, academic works can help us remain focused on the long view. And academic research can give us independent views on business models, trends, staffing and management. That's quality information that can fuel important decisions.

So if you need to be reminded of what we're all trying to do, go back and read Phil Meyer.

If you need research information into attitudes, skills and diversity among staffers over time, check out the Newspaper Research Journal.

If you're looking for information on new technical developments, keep an eye on business incubators and information-related academic fields like online learning and information science.

Go give Ryan a comment on his blog. Give the academics a chance to help us.

And chin up, head down, ears open.

Send good thoughts for all.

Hurricane Twitter

2008-09-07T15:23:00.005-04:00

The Biloxi Sun Herald twittered Hurricane Gustav. The Wilmington Star-News twittered Hanna.

Leslie Wilkinson twittered the July 30 earthquake in California. She was among the first in the nation to do so.

So obviously, news organizations and individuals are seeing the power in Twitter.

Plenty of examples exist on how to use it, and plenty of people have written about the mechanics.

So try it out. Create an account and follow some of these people to see what's going on: @ckrewson @robyntomlin, @andrew_dunn, @saragregory, @shanbow, @smalljones, @romustgo, @johnrobinson, @cnewvine (AP!), @rmathieson, @acarvin, @CNN_Newsroom, @SNOhurricane, and even @frankdeloache in Salisbury.

Read @andrew_dunn's case study of Twitter during Hurricane Gustav. Check how @ckrewson separates his "personal brand" from a professional brand at @PhillyInquirer. @KaylaC does the same separation in Charlotte with @WCNC.

Beyond those mechanics and examples exist some intriguing points about networks, community, professional and personal brands and separating the two, boundaries among parents and children and managers and employees, self-awareness, self-obsession, transparency, privacy, the Dunbar number (Google it), signal-to-noise ratio....

Start thinking about all that while reading Clive Thompson in the New York Times magazine on digital intimacy.

I could go on. But I won't right now, because I crave some real face-to-face community. But let's talk about it more. And try it.

A yellowed clip predicting the future

2008-08-17T13:45:00.003-04:00

This old clip from The Pierce Report on Charlotte in 1995 gives a great history lesson on building community online. Steve Snow was talking about building links among people 13 years ago and struggling with funding questions. We're still discussing those questions.

Related links with lessons:

Dallas Morning News, 1999:

Freelance article on politics and funding, 1997.

Letter from Steve Snow offering sage advice.

Case study from the Charlotte library. "It's not about technology, but about people."

Gentle curmudgeon nudge

2008-08-13T11:44:00.003-04:00

Goals with this post:
To be gentle, positive and collaborative, and yet to add a little perspective. Besides, sometimes I just can't keep my mouth shut.

Gary Nielson posted a link on his Facebook page to a story in The New York Times headlined, "TV networks rewrite the definition of a news bureau."

I beg to differ.

The story does have one phrase that seems to show that someone in the writing and editing process was aware that this kind of shoestring journalism has been going on for a long time (Hemingway in Paris, anyone?). Here it is:

"Though the style of reporting has existed for years, it is being adopted more widely as these reporters act as their own producer, cameraman and editor, and sometimes even transmit live video."

I respectfully, and gently, suggest that perhaps someone should have asked for a reworking of the top of the story, and an elimination of some words like "newfangled" and "new breed."

Instead, the story would have been more valid if it had taken the approach that new tools allow this kind of reporting to be much faster, cheaper and visual. Imagine some quotes, too, from a reporter like The Observer's Steve Lyttle, who was a one-man band with a typewriter and film camera many moons ago in the Monroe bureau. He's adapted and now reports online.

That example would invalidate phrases like this one: "Old-school journalists may bemoan the changes. ..."

On the contrary. If a return to the lean-and-mean reporting structure pre-1980s helps save journalism, I'm willing to bet one would find many old-school journalists who would embrace change and add their experience and skills. Let's stop this old-school vs. new-school dichotomy, which seems more damaging to journalism than the blogger vs. traditional media company dichotomy.

The reporter is about 23, according to Wikipedia (yes, he has a Wikipedia entry.) Being 23 is a great thing. But being 53 is also a great thing, and a little editing or seasoning of the story with some perspective would have presented a more valid picture. And perhaps it would have inspired others to embrace this "newfangled" reporting, instead of creating a "hogwash" reaction among the curmudgeon tribe.

In addition, the story perhaps implies that all this technology could eliminate the need for rewrite and producer positions back in the main office. Certainly it seems that many folks on the business side would like to think so. But take a look at the quality and success of Peter St. Onge's "Primary Source" blog during the May N.C. primary. Peter, essentially, was a rewrite man and a linker. And a darned good one, with 50,000 hits that month.

So let's try to be a little less breathless, and a little more seasoned. Experienced editors have perspective to add. We should add it.

It's something unpredictable

2008-08-04T19:11:00.002-04:00

Three blogs, three young Carolina journalists.
You've probably heard of a couple of famous-in-the-blogosphere young journalists. These three aren't so famous, yet.
Check them out the next time you need a shot of inspiration. Some young people are intent on journalism's reinvention -- and its continuity.
Andrew Dunn, at "Breaks the News."
Sara Gregory, at "The Water's Fine."
Shannan Bowen, at "A (Young) Reporter's Notebook."

Learning about layout from blogs

2008-08-02T11:44:00.003-04:00

This just in from Social Median:
Learn about blog layout from the world's top 50 blogs, as measured by Technorati.

Key quote:
"When taken together these sites have a readership bigger than all newspapers in the western world combined."

See some numbers about how they design at Subhub.

Making readers' opinions work

2008-07-27T13:32:00.007-04:00

Readers and commenters at the McClatchy Next wiki are abuzz about anonymous comments at newspaper web sites and blogs.
Don't click away -- I know this subject has been done to death. I promise a different approach.
Many of the comments have been fueled by the vitriolic name-calling recently in comments at Etaoin Shrdlu, the blog of McClatchy's vice president for news, Howard Weaver.

Let's face it: Weaver's public blog and position make him an easy target these days, much like Tony and Peter and Par were in previous days. I'm sure he doesn't feel quite as rich, but I'm sure he feels just as targeted with anger.

So let's take a different path, as job cuts hit editorial departments and as McClatchy sites look at new technical toys for enabling and highlighting comments.

Let's take a look at what works: The Observer's letters to the editor, and a couple of Observer blogs. I'm sure there are other examples of print features and sites that work, but I offer these up as ones I know best. I'd love to hear about others.

One of the major reasons I was attracted to The Charlotte Observer 20-some odd years ago was the vibrancy of the editorial pages. Much of that vibrancy came from the letters to the editor.
These days, Lew Powell is still editing those letters (as far as I know. I've been away from work email for a few days), and The Observer still kicks butt with the feature.

I'll be more specific: The Charlotte Observer still kicks The News and Observer's butt and many other papers with its letters to the editor. The Observer's printed letters cover a wide variety of subjects, are concise, quick and to-the-point. The News and Observer has plenty of letters online, but they're less concise. A recent printed News and Observer also had fewer, longer letters than The Charlotte Observer's daily printed product.

In addition, some Charlotte Observer blogs have fostered vibrant, often thoughtful commenting communities, with questions and thoughts that resemble the salons, not saloons, of days of yore.

So let's find out why, while we still have Lew Powell with us and while those bloggers still have time to engage those communities.

Then, perhaps, we can figure out how to make money from those communities without destroying them, or share their content on a wider basis, or emulate their success to give other readers a place for thoughtful comments that they seem to crave.

Here's the letters policy, in part:
"Please sign and include your address and daytime telephone number. We edit for brevity, grammar, clarity and accuracy, and we reject letters published elsewhere. Letters typically address a single idea and do not exceed 150 words."

Yes, 150 words.

That policy is backed up by Lew, (and others on the editorial board. Added 7/30). Here's what was published for the Sunday, July 27, edition:
12 letters
11 subjects
At least 7 with reference to specific previous stories, editorials or letters.
8 from male writers
4 from female writers
1 from a writer under age 13.
The longest letter included 147 words: the letter from the young person.
3 letters included less than 50 words.
All letters are signed with a name and home town. Phone numbers and addresses are not published.
(This example actually was produced by esteemed Editorial Page Editor Ed Williams, who retires this year. Lew was on vacation. But they back up each other's standards, and Lew says he won't let Ed get letters published more than once a month after his retirement. Added 7/30.)

Stuff I don't know:
How many letters are received each week? How many are rejected? How many have to be edited to that 150 word limit or shortened further? How many are from repeat writers? How could new tech tools ease the workload, integrate the letters more with online comments, or enrich information, links and visuals to the letter writers, so readers can know more about specific letter writers while protecting privacy for those writers who want it? Is it worth the time it would take? Does Lew call every letter writer each time they write?

Compared to comments on blogs, Lew's published version of the letters gives me a chance to hear what people are thinking on a wide variety of topics, quickly and concisely. It's what's left out that's important here.

No wasted words.

Blogs, on the other hand, give commenters unlimited space and quicker interactivity with other posters as well as the original blogger. I can't afford the time to visit them frequently, but here are some details about two of my favorites.

The Naked City, from Mary Newsom: The latest post, "Any hope for '60s suburbia?" poses a detailed question in 121 words and asks for comments. It was posted Thursday, July 24. As of Sunday, July 27, at noonish, it had 31 comments. 10 comments used pseudonyms or names. 20 used anonymous. One was pure spam, but the others were generally thoughtful and positive.
32 visitors came to the blog as of about 1 p.m. Sunday, July 27 (the slowest day of the week). 1,146 came on Thursday, the day of the last posting. 1,746 hits came on Tuesday, with a posting done at 6:05 p.m. The timing of comments and hits appears to indicate that many readers are using RSS feeds to watch for new postings. (Hit stats are from a Sitemeter bug at the blog. I wonder whether that immediate feedback tool will disappear with our site redesign. Will be a shame if that happens).

And another:
Sacred Space, from Jane Pope: The latest post, "Are we born cruel or kind?" poses a detailed question in 126 words and asks for comments. It was posted Friday, July 25. As of Sunday, July 27, at noonish, it had 42 comments, one of which had been removed by the author. Comments frequently referred to specific other commenters by their pseudonyms or names. Only two people posted completely as anonymous.
Gamecock made 15 comments.
Iztok made 8 comments.
Pete made 7 comments.
Others made one or two comments.

Things I don't know about Sacred Space: Hit counts. But I'd suggest that Gamecock and Iztok get a little credit for those hits -- not from just themselves, but from all the other readers coming back to watch their dialog.

Something else I don't know: How much total time these bloggers estimate they spend on writing and moderating comments, and how they are moderating comments. Are they autopublishing any comment, and then catching up later to edit? Or are they approving each comment separately? (Surely not).

I do know both Mary and Jane have had to remind -- and perhaps scold -- commenters to remain civil. Mary has had to delete the worst of the inflammatory, nasty comments. I assume Jane has had to do so as well. If one wants a well-kept saloon, or salon, setting some standards is necessary. Real people seem to work better than automated technology, in this case.

So what's next?
It's clear that creating online (or print) communities with a high level of discourse and value requires some human intervention. It's clear that creating enclaves of reasoned thought is possible even in a broader online (or print) free-for-all of anonymous comments.

Not so clear, and worth discussion:
Could some advertisers aiming at specific audiences be missing out by not advertising on some of our blogs? Will our online redesign give an opportunity for such ads in a not-in-your-face way? Is there a sales rep. in the house who can gather some more numbers and target tasteful advertisers who aren't already spending money with us? How will we preserve the time for folks like Lew, Jane and Mary to moderate, edit and encourage those communities? How much time are those communities worth? How can we avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater as we streamline our staffing? And how can we connect some of these subject-specific communities for cross-pollination? (Some of the most frequent commenters do jump around or migrate from blog to blog already.) How can we reward the most thoughtful commenters? How can print benefit from the online comments?

Interesting questions, as we go forward.

Let's hope we make the right decisions.

Turning the pages, online

2008-07-20T18:33:00.009-04:00

The Sporting News is launching an e-edition, emailed to subscribers and delivered in an electronic page-turning format. The publication, now based in Charlotte just about a block away from The Observer, has hired some talent from The Observer and elsewhere, with big names in visuals, including Charles Apple.

Mygazines is offering myriad magazines, with the same kind of page-turning feel. Its version of In Style is in the picture.

Scribd offers a similar service, community-based, where readers can upload and download publications in a page-turning format, comment on each other's documents and see most-viewed, most likes and top users.

Smaller publications like The Raleigh Downtowner are offering similar technology to view their work, or they're offering PDFs.

It makes sense in a publishing world of diminishing resources to leverage and reuse the design work already done for a publication. But do the designs of print and web really work together? Is there a way to please both the lovers of print and the lovers of online interactivity at the same time, without having to redesign or re-template for different mediums?

And now, with the IPhone and similar toys, online publishers are forced to reinvent design to fit the small screen, with varying levels of success.

I tested Mygazines on the big consumer of magazines at my house: an 18-year-old who loves visuals, fashion and the computer. Results: too slow to load, and not clickable enough. If it's on a screen, there better be plenty of links.

We didn't even get into the other benefits of printed, glossy magazines -- the passalong ability and portability of visual, beautiful information.

Update Aug. 16: The Magazine Publishers Association has sued the owner of Mygazines, which is incorporated on Anguilla, a British territory in the Caribbean. Details here.

So as all kinds of publishers try to cut costs and leverage work, it's a bit heartening to see that design still matters, and fitting design to the medium is still relevant.

And as I was thinking about this post, something called S3 or "Simple Storage Service" from Amazon went down. Visuals in all kinds of places, from Twitter to Scribd, disappeared. The Internet still worked, mostly, but many sites lost the visual elements of their services.

Change is sometimes frighteningly fast these days, and glitches will happen. As journalists a block away in Charlotte try to make a go of new technology with an interesting format, I wish them luck. We all need it.

Again, we live in interesting times.

More:
(Added July 26) Steve Cavendish, graphics director at the Chicago Tribune, critiques the Sporting News PDF version.
(Older:)
Jakob Nielsen on differences between print and web design, 1999.
Coding Horror, aka Jeff Atwood, on the New York Times' Reader and its format vs. the web format.

Roger the rock

2008-07-07T23:50:00.004-04:00

Former Observer copy editor Fred Vultee, now a professor at Wayne State, wrote this tribute to Roger Mikeal for Roger's going-away page after 39 years at The Observer. Fred, who continues to edit us from afar here, said we could share.

John Updike already wrote my favorite Roger Mikeal story, except that he wrote it when Ted Williams retired. What Updike remembered was not necessarily how Williams played in the spotlight, but how he played "on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill."

Stories about Roger are like that. They're less about who's on first or what's a trend than about whether things we've decided to do are going to be done well or ill.They're about Roger reminding the religion editor that the history of religion didn't begin with the Second Temple. Or Roger reminding the city desk that the stylebook doesn't have a separate entry for First Names on Second Reference in Stories By Writers of Staggering Genius. Or Roger making sure that every story passes under the right number of eyes before it goes off to print.

Given his clock skills, you'd think Roger's favorite athletic figure would be Dean Smith. I'm not sure Roger even has a favorite athletic figure (although if the world is ever held at gunpoint and threatened with execution unless someone can spell "Krzyzewski," Roger is the guy I want in the hot seat). Roger has favorite poets (Gary Snyder), favorite Eastern philosophers and favorite guitarists. He is alleged to have roomed with a 19-toed mandolin genius while at State. He not only knows whether Travis picking should be hyphenated, he can do a fairly good job of it (the picking, I mean; nobody's ever questioned his hyphenation skills).

That might make Roger sound like a renaissance man of detail (like knowing whether "Renaissance man" is capitalized). He is. But like Ted Williams, he also manages to be in the middle of things when the home team needs some runs in a hurry. So here is a true Roger story.

It was the Saturday before July Fourth (or the Fourth of July), 1994. Roger was not only on vacation but attending the wedding of one of his sons. USAir set one down a little too hard in a microburst out at the airport, killing some three dozen people.

People converged on the newsroom, whether they were called in or not. It was suggested that Roger might not even hear of the crash until the next day. It was pointed out that calling Roger would be really tacky.

And then it was noted that either Gene Kelly was in town or somebody else had just shown up at the desk wearing a tuxedo.

That's how Roger won an Oscar for Best-Dressed Slotting of a Disaster Story. Until there's a Pulitzer category for lifetime achievement in running a copy desk, it's the best we can do.

The early online shift

2008-07-05T12:45:00.004-04:00

As we make changes at The Observer for The Desk, take a look at how the AM copy desk works at the Los Angeles Times, and how the early-morning online shift improves the social lives of copy editors.

Andy Bechtel of UNC spent some time there recently, and he interviewed the "senior copy desk chief for the web." It's here, titled "Q&A: How the L.A. Times edits for the web."

The hours and pace remind me of the copy desk at The Jacksonville Journal, a PM newspaper and my first daily job back in 1982. It was staffed by what I saw as a bunch of old guys who wanted to golf in the afternoon. They worked from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.

And don't everyone line up for that shift all at once. Or at least share. Here's a key graf:

"Because fewer hands are touching the copy, we have recruited slot-capable editors to our ranks for the most part. After a year, we have trained four editors and sent them back to their home desks to help spread their Web knowledge to their print peers. We’ll keep rotating people in and out on six-month stints."

Letter of recommendation

2008-06-21T11:25:00.004-04:00

Dear (recruiter/hiring manager/grant reviewer):

I'd like to recommend ________ for your opening.

She's young, diverse, tough, talented and laid off from the newspaper industry, a business both she and I love.

She seems to have moved through with lightning speed the grief and anger of losing her job to thinking about her next steps. I'd like to help her. I'm sure she can help you.

She wants another job in the newspaper industry. I'm not so sure that's her best move.

At the moment, for her, I'm sure she feels like the timing stinks and that she's unlucky after making all the right moves early in her career.
From my perspective on the other side of 28 years in this business, I'm thinking she's lucky.

Others have lost their jobs after 10, or 20, or 30 years in this business, and some of those have managed to bargain for what they care about more than anything: a continued voice in an industry designed to make a difference for society. Many of them will continue to write or edit, and have their work appear in newspapers and their websites on a contract basis.

This oh-so-young journalist can be in a different place.

By taking a step back and thinking deeply about why she loves newspapers, she can broaden her options. While both of us would love for her to land at another newspaper, we know that move could just delay the inevitable: another round of cuts, later, and being in "the last-in, first-out position" once again. I know another journalist in that position, one who landed a spot at our paper after a layoff at another, only to be in yet another city, with yet another new mortgage, facing yet another career move, while raising a young family.

My hopes for this young journalist are different.

In many ways, she's so like me, 28 years ago. She's from a background that encourages hard work and education for success. She's entered the work world at a time of massive change when only the strong succeed. I know she will.

In 1981, I put on my gray Reagan dress-for-success suit, degree and internships in hand. I was ready to go anywhere and do (almost) anything for a job at a daily paper. I'd rejected the higher-paying public relations after falling in love at my school newspaper with the people, the power and the willingness to try to right wrongs. I found that daily job. Now, I know that newspapers aren't the only places that offer that environment.

Sometimes these days, newspapers feel more like morgues.

For this young journalist at this time, she can share a resume that demonstrates an ability to learn all kinds of information software, and to use it to tell stories. No matter the medium. No matter the tool. No matter the information. I know she burns with the same motivations I have: to work with smart, fun people, to work in a business that's trying to make life better for others, and to learn new stuff.

As this young journalist moves forward, she'll learn more about what it takes. I hope it won't take her 28 years.

She'll learn that being tough, fast, strong, smart and confident are not always enough. She'll learn that strong communication, good teams, friends and family help one make better stuff, and she'll learn that the balance of personal and professional realms is the toughest job, especially for women.

She'll learn that being among those affected by massive social change gives one a chance to reinvent oneself, before too much of life's commitments anchor her down.

And she'll learn it's OK to cry.

She might learn that newspapers aren't the only place she can make a difference.
I hope she lands at a newspaper, and I hope she has the long, rewarding career that I've enjoyed.

But if she finds another place with smart, funny, driven, passionate colleagues, all with a goal of changing the world, I know she'll be OK and she'll make a difference.

Interactivity

2008-06-11T12:08:00.005-04:00

Sometimes, you just have to "see" a story to get an idea of its scope. Merging video, text, photos and graphics gives such a richer story than just reading an article or watching a video.

StarTribune.com proved the power of this with its "13 Seconds in August" project looking at the I-35 collapse.

Now, the folks at DesMoinesRegister.com have shown us -- in ways made possible only by using the power of the Web -- the terrible damage to a town destroyed by a ferocious tornado. The Des Moines team has assembled graphics, photos, data and stories into an amazingly interactive package that's worthy of emulation.

Charles Apple, at VisualEditors.com, quotes the Registor's data editor, James Wilkerson, about how the project came together:

For base data about the properties, I scraped the county assessor’s web site using a perl script and put the results in a spreadsheet. There were about a thousand records for Parkersburg.

One of our graphics people, Kelli Morris, walked the route of the storm, taking pictures and talking to survivors. She then used the property spreadsheet to link to “after” pictures and built a library of survivor stories from her data and stories we published. We later went through all of the properties for which Kelli had pictures and downloaded the “before” photo from the assessor’s web site.

A parcel map shapefile was not available in a timely and affordable manner. So another graphics person — Craig Johnson — built his by hand. He then built the Flash display using some dummy xml data. Putting Kelli’s spreadsheet in mySQL, I built an xml page in php, which was used to fuel the final display.

The end product is something I believe is truly unique and visually powerful. It also shows what can be accomplished by graphics folks who understand how to use data and think ahead about how to best weave it into their work.

Wonderful example of the power of merging data and multimedia.

Connecting the dots

2008-06-08T14:17:00.004-04:00

The lead story in The Observer today was a good old-fashioned pork-barrel project with a new twist. The Associated Press Managing Editors Association created a project to train reporters in how to use new online research tools through the Sunlight Foundation. ~~The Observer's~~ McClatchy's Lisa Zagaroli participated and reported on government pork projects in North Carolina.
It's a step forward for the group of newspaper leaders, especially since the Sunlight Foundation is led and funded by new media people: Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Pierre Omidyar, founder of EBay.
We live in interesting times.
And a second connect-the-dot: The Observer's Forrest Brown spoke Saturday in Greensboro for the Society of Professional Journalists' Citizen Journalism Academy, about reporting and writing basics. I haven't talked with him about it yet, but have it on strong (Twitterfriend) authority that he was good and funny. I can't wait to hear more.
So connect the dots, and think about the nonprofit, nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation's mission. They seek to use:
“new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts."

And another thing: A relationship button?

Mass Comm law 101

2008-06-07T12:08:00.003-04:00

Remember that journalism law class you took? When was that? Where was that?
Ryan Teague Beckwith of Raleigh's Under the Dome offers a shop to get a tuneup.

How online journalists see themselves

2008-05-31T12:57:00.004-04:00

Ryan Thornburg of UNC surveys online journalists in North Carolina, with a little help from Phil Meyer, Teresa Edwards and McClatchy's own Julianne Mulhollan.

A snippet, about the "Gannett" effect:

"Several panelists from Asheville ... contacted me to say they really didn’t work online. In their email signatures and in phone conversations, the job titles that they chose for themselves never included the online elements we found next to their names on the paper’s masthead. Among this group who declined to participate in the survey were people who I found had created online-only content for the Citizen-Times during the month the survey was conducted. I’m fascinated that despite what I perceive as obvious participation in the creation of online news, they still declined to self-identify as someone who worked primarily online."

Watch for more results at Thornburg's blog.

Go, Trevor

2008-05-25T12:37:00.004-04:00

Trevor has five more days to get about 200 hits to keep an upward trend at Fantasy Baseblog.
The math looks like he'll hit it. Help by giving him some blog love.
And yes, this is unabashed PR for a colleague. Isn't that what the social web is for?

How to keep eating and doing journalism

2008-05-17T16:04:00.003-04:00

As gloom and gossip bloom, take a few moments to wander over to Global Vue, a blog for a class at UNC fall semester, and read and think about some other ways that journalism can pay for itself.

See how easy it is to add Twitter to a site?

2008-05-09T07:10:00.006-04:00

OK, so I'm ~~coming a bit late to this whole Twitter thing and am~~ still trying to figure out its ~~appeal~~ potential ...

But, imagine if every reporter were texting updates from meetings, from crime scenes ... from the newsroom. And all those Tweets were collected on a page on Charlotte.com ... Talk about the latest in breaking news!

We all know frequent updating draws users back to news Web sites. With enough of the right people contributing to a Twitter stream, you can't get much more frequent than this...

Thoughts?

Hat tip to WCNC's excellent Twittering of the election. But does it just have to be for "big nights"?

Walls, tweets, politics and language

2008-05-08T21:48:00.004-04:00

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.
--Robert Frost

A few examples of journalists breaking down walls:
1. Kayla Castille of WCNC in Charlotte urged the station to use Twitter to report on the N.C. primary. Read the story behind the results here.
2. Chris Krewson of The Philadelphia Inquirer used Twitter for Pennsylvania's primary and continues to engage his local community through the Twitter network. Read about it here.
3. April Bethea of The Charlotte Observer responded to a request by Rogelio Aranda for a few grafs from a county commission meeting. Rogelio had heard about someone speaking up at the meeting against inflammatory remarks about the Hispanic community made earlier by a county commission member. Rogelio figured that information wouldn't fit in the main paper, but knew readers of The Observer's Enterese Charlotte would care. April wrote nine grafs, Rogelio translated, and the blog linked to other reaction elsewhere. Hits went up.

Being on the (b)leading edge is not easy. But it's not impossible.

What j-schools should teach

2008-04-11T14:57:00.004-04:00

Mindy McAdams at the University of Florida challenged her blog readers to share ideas about measurable skills that journalism students (and journalists) need.
The problem for j-schools has always been to teach up-to-date skills that will help students get jobs while at the same time giving them longer-lasting skills and ideals.
I learned how to use a proportion wheel and count headlines at the University of Georgia. The longer-lasting skills came from ethical discussions over beer after work at The Red and Black.
So too much emphasis on the latest technology -- Flash, or editing video for a particular outlet like Youtube -- won't last. The first, primary skill any student or worker needs is the ability to continue to learn.
Still, here's a small list, from a journalist and mom of a soon-to-be college freshman, broken into core classes and j-school classes. The j-schools can't and shouldn't do this work alone. Full colleges need to evaluate core requirements for the new generation of "net natives," who live on Facebook but just might not know how to make a balance sheet.

Core curriculum:
1. How do you identify and evaluate "good" information? Students should learn this skill starting in elementary and middle school. But public universities can't count on that education being deep and strong enough for future journalists. This class can be part of a library sciences curriculum, a liberal arts curriculum, or a science curriculum. Genie Tyburski asks that question in the syllabus for JOMC 714 through the UNC j-school's distance-learning program this fall.
2. How do you write a business plan or grant proposal? (Echoing Amy Gahran) This question can naturally evolve from students' (or their parents) efforts to get into college in the first place, or their efforts to pay for it. Navigating the maze of financial aid forms is just the first step. I know a freelance photographer mom who has told her musical college son that he can do anything he wants -- as long as he can get someone else to pay for it. That's the grant-writing part. The corporate/capitalist side is knowing how to quantify the cost of a business idea, write a business plan and make a sales pitch. Prerequisite: Accounting 101, Excel proficiency.
3. How do you organize, archive and share research? New tools are rapidly evolving here, from Google apps to institutional software available to students at specific schools. Plan a course for freshman year (or for re-entering grad school students) that mirrors middle-school organization classes -- electronic "notebook" checks, note-taking and citation-saving skills. Teach how to break down deadlines into small checkpoints. Teach the importance of deadlines for personal time management, not just for external requirements.

Journalism curriculum:
1. How do you evaluate and bring sense to raw data? Database information is proliferating, and is often available free from nonprofit organizations like the Sunlight Foundation or directly from government sources. Many organizations are finding new, cheap ways like Caspio to publish that information, but few are crunching, mashing up and analyzing the data. The easy way out is to stick it in a database ghetto on a website and watch the web hits come. Journalists need to evaluate that information and the sources and know how to mash it up into maps and categories to find patterns. Example: Binyamin Appelbaum, Ted Mellnik and friends at The Charlotte Observer demonstrated that skill with home foreclosure information long before other outlets jumped on the mortgage crisis. Prerequisite: Accounting 101, Excel and perhaps Access proficiency.
2. How do you continue to find and evaluate new tools for searching and sharing of information? Tyburski's class at UNC in the past has envisioned what life would be like without Google. Former colleague Leslie Wilkinson blogged for class about the challenge. Many journalists have at one time or another had to deal with email being down or having another crucial tool unavailable. This track would focus on alternative ways of finding and sharing reliable information when the standard methods don't work. Evaluating Twitter and mobile tools is key as technology and business evolves. Figure out how to find new tools and evaluate their effectiveness in terms of efficiency and usability.
3. Where do you draw the ethical and legal lines these days? Mindy lists an online ethics class. Going a little further and playing off Amy's post again, give students some up-to-date case studies involving business and ethics. As media companies try to find new ways to make money and also explore new roles for "citizen journalism," explore where the ethical line is now. (How to test and measure success in this class? Toughie. It would be a seminar class, with discussion, group work and papers.) Real-world examples:
A. Private corporations are buying up student newspapers. What are the ethical and business implications of the move? Will it affect what information campuses can produce and receive? What are the implications for other media in college towns?
B. The Hoya at Georgetown wants to go independent, but the college wants the paper to change its name so the college can retain the Hoya name. What's right there? How much is a name worth?
C. Should ads for egg donors be allowed in campus newspapers but ads for condoms be disallowed?
D. Should a newspaper publish the last names of children in a photo caption submitted by a reader if the reader prefers no last names because of concerns about privacy and safety?
E. Should a newspaper ignore or publish photos from an event staged by an activist group to bring publicity to their cause? Is there one standard if the photo comes from the wire versus a "citizen journalist" with the activist organization itself?

Be careful out there

2008-03-27T08:42:00.005-04:00

Update your virus software. Be careful what you download. This might be innocuous, but there's a reason companies have IT people.
At home, you have to be your own IT cop. Don't think you're immune if you have a Mac. The more popular they become, the more likely they are to be targets.

Worth repeating: Alltop for journalism

2008-03-20T07:41:00.003-04:00

Repeating an earlier post for a colleague (you know who you are):
Do you want to be able to go to one site and find the stuff being written about journalism in an online world? Want to know what's out there besides Romenesko? Go to Alltop for journalism.
Want to be able to steer reporters to good online sources for information about parenting, education, business, venture capital, whatever? Go to Alltop for everything.

Child care, design and subtraction

2008-03-18T07:35:00.005-04:00

Great ideas come out of the SXSW festival in Austin, a tech/music/film event.
Jeffrey Zeldman, an interaction designer, proposes a couple of disparate ideas worth your time.
Zeldman, who Tweeted frequently during the recent conference about missing dinners or events because he was playing with Barbie dolls with his child, throws out the idea of a child-care co-op for future conferences. It's a wonderful idea that can help broaden the diversity of attendance at similar events.
And he concludes the post with links to a couple of videos about design. My favorite part: Michael Lopp of Apple talking about how good design is the taking away of features, not the adding of more gizmos.
The tie between Zeldman's ideas? Usability.
Go there.

State of the News Media: Skills and attitudes

2008-03-17T07:27:00.003-04:00

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its exhaustive 2008 report.

Couple of quick highlights:

Attitudes:

"More than half (55%) of national executives felt their reporters substantially shared their values. Only 30% of reporters feel this way about their top owners and editors. And the gap is even greater between executives and newsroom staff. At the local level, only 23% reporters felt their bosses shared their values, versus 47% of executives and 31% of senior editors who felt this way about their reporters."
--Amy Mitchell and Tom Rosenstiel, commentary on journalists' attitudes.

Skills:
Top four traditional skills needed for online: 1. ability to learn, 2. research, 3. teamwork and 4. (tie) reporting and photograpy.

Thoughts on Innovation from a Disney exec

2008-03-12T20:16:00.011-04:00

CNET asked Chris Heatherly, vice president of technology and innovation, Disney Consumer Products, The Walt Disney Co., how he defined innovation. "I think innovation is understanding people and what they need and giving them the most perfect solution you can to their problem even if they might not know they have it yet."

Heatherly talks about why companies like Apple, Google and Target have succeeded in their industries; why it's imperative to have management that nurtures the innovative spirit; and some examples of what's worked and not worked for Disney. He also discusses which comes first: technology or the art?

(Oh, to be a Disney imagineer and dream up ideas all day long! Talk about creative story telling.)

Some highlights from the piece:
"I think too many people confuse innovation and technology. I have seen a lot of designers try to make a mediocre concept innovative by putting Bluetooth or some other whiz-bang technology du jour in it. That's not innovation. It's cheating. Innovation is about solving problems for people."

"What are the most important areas of innovation in your organization (product, process, IP, marketing, etc.)?
To be a creative company, you have to have a creative core, whatever that means for your company. For Disney, that's people like storytellers, animators, and Imagineers. For a company like Apple, it's designers and engineers. The people at the core of what you do have to be the heart that pumps innovation through the vessels of the organization. ... Pixar is very clear that it is about telling stories and that everyone who is there is there for that purpose. Technology plays a really important role for them. They like to say that 'art challenges technology and technology inspires art.' They don't look at technology as being a second-class citizen to their artists. It's a respected peer. There are lots of other parts of the organization that have to be part of an innovative mission."

RSS without the RSS

2008-03-11T07:40:00.003-04:00

Have a colleague you've been dying to teach RSS? Want them to discover what you've been reading online about journalism?
Now you can forget the RSS and send them to one place.
Yeah, it's overload. Yeah, not everyone's there. But it's an easy way to share stuff with folks who just don't want to go learn that Google Reader thing right now.
Check it out.
My favorite new find there: Celebrity English. Headlines: "Jennifer makes an error in parallelism."

Design, function and congratulations

2008-02-23T11:29:00.004-05:00

Congratulations are in order for some Observer folks who won awards in the recent Society of News Design competition: designers Luke Trautwein, Jason Benavides, and alum Leslie Wilkinson, plus photographers, photo editors, editors and copy editors Wendy Yang, Todd Sumlin, Theoden Janes, Bert Fox, Barbara Russell and Chip Wilson.

But why should design matter at this time in our industry?

It matters more than ever. Read a smart McClatchy Interactive guy, Darren Abrecht. He writes about why haircuts matter, why design matters and how words like digitization, functionality and interfaces affect people, emotions and art.

Check him out.

Another Twitter victim

2008-02-17T14:33:00.004-05:00

Succumbed to the pressure of Twitter to keep in touch with Leslie in L.A. and Rogelio here in Charlotte.
Ran into an unexpected success story right away.

Ro had emailed me a link earlier this week to Tommy Tomlinson's blog, which I admit I don't regularly visit. Tommy was asking readers to describe Charlotte in six words.
I couldn't visit at the time, but came back Sunday morning to see 193 comments. That's bigger than anything I've ever seen at charlotte.com blogs.

Had chosen on Saturday night some different people to "follow" on Twitter that I don't normally read via Google Reader. There's a small group of incredibly wired folks who travel in the same circles on the web, and one can fall into the trap of reading the same people all the time. This time, I chose Jack Lail as one to follow, from just over the mountains in Knoxville. He's more from Neil Mara's or Ted Mellnik's generation of wired journalists, and I wanted to hear a new, "old" voice. Within the hour, Lail started following my "tweets" because I was following him.

I "tweeted" early Sunday about Tommy's 193 comments, and Lail picked up the idea on his blog. How cool: Tommy's idea leaped the mountains.

So, in the spirit of Twitter, some small, further thoughts:
--Twitter is a great signpost to other content, in combination with tiny urls.
--It's a great playground for headline writers and others who enjoy the challenge of conveying information in tiny bits. Copy editors can rule there.
--Busy moms trapped in cars schlepping children are there. (Steve Gunn note.)
-- Newspapers are there. The smart ones fragment their feeds. NYT lets me follow arts coverage only, or business, or metro.
--Some content ideas are perfect for Twitter when they wouldn't find an audience elsewhere. Charlotte's feature pages are soliciting emails from readers on their six-word descriptions of their lives; I'm betting Twitter would've been a better tool.
--Twitter can be one tool to help give a voice to those who only have cellphones to get their word out.

Others have written plenty about Twitter and "micro-content." Posts worth revisiting include Rich, here, and Howard Weaver, here and Weaver on the six-word game, here.

Like other new tools, Twitter likely will have explosions of interest and then settle down, with many orphaned accounts. It's possible mine will be one of them. Life intrudes.
Still, it's a powerful, fast way to share ideas with little maintenance, and something else journalists should put in their arsenal.
It seems to work best bite-sized, like the New York Times feeds. So I'd love to carve up charlotte.com and start hurling tiny urls, instead of one big lump feed. But I do have that day job and some other stuff to do, so we'll see. Thanks, Jack, for giving me a success story. Thanks, Paul, for making me laugh at Austrian sock puppets discussing the plight of workers. Thanks, Leslie and Ro, for dragging me into Twitter. I think.

"Stop talking, start walking."
--Jimmy Carter, 1980

A cautionary tale - at the Washpo

2008-02-15T17:31:00.005-05:00

Very long story by the Washington City Paper, worth the read, about the divide between digital and paper at The Washington Post.

Summary quote:
"It’s all about control—the news people and the Web people are grappling over who hires whom, who edits what, who pays for what, and who gets what first."

The story offers specifics, deep within, about technical and workflow barriers, particularly with photos.

There's no mention of the departure of technical whiz Adrian Holovaty from The Post, but you can read more about his thoughts on the divide via the long tail of the web here. Holovaty himself showed class in his departure announcement.

Kansas City wins at SND

2008-02-14T08:29:00.003-05:00

Congrats to sister paper The Kansas City Star for winning an award of excellence in SND judging in Syracuse.
Results for other papers are unclear at the moment: the SND judges are designers, not database experts, and they want some time before posting the full results database. They're great at posting pictures though.
Please note: Kansas City uses CCI to produce their paper. The winning front page uses a tried-and-true formula for breaking news: great photos, played well; a locater map, a breakout box. What looks like the planned centerpiece was squished downpage while retaining its graphic elements.
Six of the Top 10 list of winners use CCI: the Los Angeles Times; The New York Times; The Boston Globe; Hartford Courant; Chicago Tribune, and the San Jose Mercury News.
Thought for next year's SND judging: invite a database geek or two to help get the full results posted faster. It's possible, as The New York Times demonstrates with election results.
Or develop one from within. Avoid fields; jump fences.

Of prom dresses, chicken and journalism

2008-02-11T08:24:00.000-05:00

Shopped for prom dresses last weekend. All dresses were made in China. Had a minor discussion about the likely sweatshop conditions behind those swirling, sparkling swaths of beauty, then moved on.
Then read about chicken and saw Ro's tweets about considering vegetarianism. Recalled visceral reaction after reading "Fast Food Nation."
Then read Carl Lavin on a journalist finding funding for her own investigation about the cost to Chinese workers who are making products for us.
Maybe we should make our own prom dresses, grown our own local food and find money for our own journalism? Take a cue from the local food movement and our parents or grandparents in World War II?
But then when would we blog, Twitter, Ning and Facebook?

So about that business model...

2008-02-01T08:35:00.000-05:00

Former Observer business editor Jon Talton rants about what's really wrong with newspapers.
He got a link from Romenesko, so you've probably already read it, and it's not the business of this place to focus on the negative.
But Talton is worth a read not only because his words can be so biting but also because he approaches the topic from a business point of view.
And many discussions are finally moving beyond lamenting the death of a business model to looking for solutions. Online advertising might not be enough (Project for Excellence in Journalism).

Let's hope the vision is broad and progress has begun.
Other links:
American Journalism Review on nonprofit journalism.
TechCrunch on whether government should support media companies.
Columbia J-dean's response.

Really want to dig deep and be surprised? Go to Charlotte's Urban Planet forum for outsiders' views. As always, consider the sources, put on your thick skin and look for the hope.

Lessons and links from science bloggers

2008-01-22T20:30:00.000-05:00

Bloggers from the 2008 N.C. Science Blogging Conference have returned from last weekend's chilly event to their homes and keyboards, sharing their presentations, photos and thoughts online. What's so cool is that anyone can continue to learn from this conference from the comfort of their own monitors, wherever they might be, and whenever they can.

In addition, the conference has a heavy dose of participation from the
smart minds at Science Blogs, supported in part by Seed magazine. The networked circle of science represents one new way of aggregating and filtering information beyond the traditional methods of big-company media sites. NYU media professor Jeff Jarvis has made much of Glam for doing the same thing (perhaps with a larger emphasis on advertising and content that attracts ads). Glam doesn't impress me; its college fashion blog can't hold a candle to the Daily Tar Heel's The Good, The Bad and The Fab.

Oh but wait. We were talking journalism and science, not fashion.

I respectfully submit that Science Blogs serves as a better model for distributing, sifting and making findable strong content than sites like Glam. Ads play a supporting role, rather than being the goal.

And conference organizers are also demonstrating a new model of sharing strong content with "reverse publishing," creating a downloadable or paperback book of the best science blog posts of 2007. You can read the background of how the idea came to be at Bora Zivkovic's A Blog Around the Clock. The "publisher" of the compilation is Lulu, and the editors are Zivkovic and Reed Cartright, with input from the readers of Zivkovic's blog.

But back to the conference. The main jumping-off point of the group is a wiki.
Below are random links gleaned from various conference bloggers. They're filtered through what I find interesting and not too far above my head. Most bear a relationship to journalism; some don't. Of course, your mileage may vary.

How to report scientific research to a general audience
From Cognitive Daily, out of Davidson.
(Alternate title: How to report anything to a general audience.)
My favorite line:

"Visuals need the same treatment as words."

Peer-reviewed research
(How to dig through all the crap to find the ponies.)
(Or how wearing a badge can change the life of your blog.)
Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research
Research Blogging

Citizen Science
(Who knew? We thought it was all about us, the journalists and citizen journalists.)
Purple loosestrife detectives and reporters, at the U.S. Geologic Survey.
Cornell University's Citizen Science toolkit from a citizen science conference.

Public Library of Science and one of its online peer-reviewed journals, PLOS One.
Again, who knew?

A ring of science blogs
(Fix a big cup of something and stay awhile).

Politics
Questions for the next president.

PDF organization
Organize all your pdfs and papers as if they were songs on Itunes. Unbelievably valuable for people in distance-learning classes, but only if they're smart enough to have Macs. At Papers.

The Institute for Southern Studies
I remember this group from my days as a student journalist in Georgia. It's great to see they're still producing research galore. One of their most recent reports is about the "devastating costs" North Carolina is suffering from war, and it comes after the launch of the N.C. Military Foundation, a public-private entity to lure more defense contracts to North Carolina.
This site is worth digging into, keeping in mind the organization does have an agenda. It's intriguing to think about comparing its research with that available through The Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense at Earmark Watch Dot Org.

Flickr groups to identify plants
(These will change my life and possibly put my aunt, The Plant Oracle of the Mountains, out of business).
ID Please and What plant is that?

Invasive species blog
(And you thought mussels only stopped development.)
Invasive Species.

Committing Journalism in Fewer Than 140 Taps

2008-01-21T09:18:00.000-05:00

The Times calls it "microjournalism" — using Twitter to instantaneously file reports from the field. The story focuses on how a few writers are using text messages to Twitter in order to report from the campaign trail.

Microjournalism is the latest step in the evolution of Mr. (John) Dickerson, who worked for years at Time magazine, and has moved from print to online articles to blog entries to text messages no longer than 140 characters, or about two sentences. “One of the things we are supposed to do as journalists is take people where they can’t go,” he said in an interview. “It is much more authentic, because it really is from inside the room.”

Some might consider the idea of a barrage of text-messaged snippets about the presidential election the final dreadful realization of the news media’s obsession with “sound bites.” And spending time with the Twittered campaign reporting can mean wallowing in skin-deep observations, anonymous trashing of candidates and more than you would want to know about the food and travel conditions for the reporting class.

But it is genuine, and at times enlightening, which is more than you can say for the candidates themselves, who have also taken to using Twitter to update their supporters. (The septuagenarian Ron Paul, for example, is an ardent Twitter user, it appears, though he has a penchant for exclamation points that would make a teenager blush. Typical Ron Paul Twitter message: “Thus far in the race, I’ve received more votes than Fred Thompson or Rudy Giuliani. Freedom is popular!”)

ACES meeting in Rock Hill

2008-01-20T12:03:00.000-05:00

A quick reminder that the Southeast chapter of ACES is holding a meeting from 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, at the Rock Hill Herald. There's no charge, but organizers would appreciate an R.S.V.P. For more details, go to the ACES message board or e-mail Holly Kerfoot.

Among the planned topics:

Doug ~~Fischer~~ Fisher, a USC professor who writes one of my must-read blogs, Common Sense Journalism, will lead a discussion about moderating a small-town citj site such as Hartsville Today.
Teri Boggess of the N&O talks about "Sports as News."
The N&O's wire editor, Jon Wallace, will dive into the campaigns with a discussion on what copy editors can do to give readers the news they need in forms that are easily digestible.
"What's Up" — an opportunity for copy editors to talk about issues in the field, or just get to know colleagues at other papers.

Learn from science bloggers

2008-01-18T07:19:00.000-05:00

The 2nd N.C. Science Blogging Conference is this weekend. It reaches far beyond the Carolinas and even far beyond science.

Go visit the organizers' wiki and blogs, and substitute the word "science" with "journalism" and see what happens.

Try that especially at the group's link to a Scientific American interactive article from Mitchell Waldrop, author of "Complexity."

Or start at the event wiki or the Facebook event.

Two cups data, one cup journalism

2008-01-08T22:57:00.000-05:00

Matt Waite of Politifact is a smart guy. Go read him. Part of his latest:

"Are we really building a business model, or even a component of a business model, around making public data searchable? Because guess what? Google is too. That’s right. The search giant is dealing directly with government agencies to help them make their own data searchable. Sound familiar? Think your data ghetto can compete with Google? Do you think people are going to remember your newspaper.com url over Google? Really?"

"....That said, here’s how we can get out of the data ghetto: add some journalism to it."

Like Charlotte did here.

More on Google's efforts from my UNC class research last semester:
"The search engine company has launched technology and standards to make public records more findable on the Internet and is making agreements with states to help get public information in to the hands of the public. The most recent agreement was with the state of Florida, opening records about public schools, water and waste permits, employment data and consumers' commuting patterns. Google is offering its services for free for now. ...
Google has also initiated agreements with plainlanguage.gov hosted by the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Energy Department's Office of Scientific and Technical Information and the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics." Reference.

More:
Ensuring government is only one search away here.
Agencies work with Google here.
Dense code but clues to the future here.
Hiding in plain sight: Why important government information cannot be found through commercial search engines (again, density warning): here.

H/T to Waite's post from John Hassell, from the Facebook group "The Exploding Newsroom," now a blog.

The Poz remembers The Post

2008-01-03T07:45:00.000-05:00

Another former Charlotte Observer staffer, Joe Posnanski, writes a loving obit for The Cincinnati Post on his blog.

It's long, but it reminds me of the days of the sitcom newsrooms and of the hardware and software we used to produce the news. The Poz talks about Teleram, the place that stories arrived in the "mainframe" computer system, written by folks on TRS-80s, lovingly called "Trash-80s." Don't they look like enhanced Blackberries?

(Sidenote: the fragmented, miscoded stories in Charlotte went to Teleram Bad. I kid you not. Can't find a story? Check Teleram Bad.)

Joe's column shows how newspapers were a part of young people's lives back in the day. Perhaps the next generation of columnists are growing up with the parents blogging in the living room, instead of helping to roll and deliver the afternoon dead-tree product.

The Poz started as a clerk-reporter at The Observer many years ago. Now he has a couple of sports books and a column in Kansas City. And his family questions his judgment in spending time blogging, even though he has a Facebook group, "I'm a Pozcar Voter," with 33 members.
Shows how easily the addiction to telling stories finds a new TRS-80.

Image from Vintagecomputer.net

RTFRSS

2007-12-29T14:59:00.000-05:00

Howard Owens lays down a challenge of 11 objectives for non-wired journalists in 2008. He'll award a $100 Amazon gift certificate to anyone who meets the goals.
Other j-bloggers have joined the chorus, including Mindy McAdams and Amy Gahran.
The most important goal, in my view: Start using RSS.
As Mindy McAdams says, "I am continually shocked when I meet journalists who say they don’t read blogs. It’s inconceivable."
Indeed. But before RSS, I found keeping up with voluminous postings daunting. RSS is efficient, fast and easy. It's so important that I'd recommend RSS classes on company time for all newsroom staffers, particularly department heads and above.
This goal is not about anyone feeling stupid or out of touch. I know a technically savvy staffer with his own blogs who is just learning about RSS and pingbacks and all that stuff. He's learning now, because he knows that keeping up with what's online is crucial to his career.
The challenge from Owens launched many questions and online comments. How much company time should be spent learning and teaching this stuff? Is spending two hours a week on Youtube really worth it? (I'd say no). Should people who take their own time to learn this stuff somehow be compensated beyond those who only spend company time? Does everyone have to know all of this stuff, or can groups and organizations use the power of their size to specialize? Will the challenge launch a thousand blogs, adding to the noise level with no extra light?
Despite all the important questions, I repeat: Everyone in a news organization should know how to use RSS.
In addition, I'd add: editors and reporters should know how to follow a Twitter feed. They should know how to shoot a picture with a digital camera and upload it to a blog -- before a news event requires that they do so. Reporters should monitor Facebook and be able to judge story value beyond, "Well, there's a Facebook group about it."
Anyone who would like to experiment with posting to a blog and uploading a photo is welcome here at Innovate This. See Andria or Rich for how to get started.
And yes, those who learn this stuff should be rewarded. An Amazon gift certificate will in no way compensate for the time. But a continuing career will.

Who is reading the sports print section?

2007-12-29T14:56:00.000-05:00

Free new research from focus groups of young readers in the Pittsburgh area is available from the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State. Click on "Newspaper Sports Sections Face Readership Challenges."
Not much interest in NASCAR there, but still some interesting findings:
"All participants said they look to the Web as their primary source of sports news and information, with nearly all listing it as a major media news and sports source. Group participants listed ease-of-use and access to computers as the main reason why they go to the Internet."
The research includes information about what women want from sports as well.

The 12 Days of Christmas, and then some ...

2007-12-23T21:27:00.000-05:00

Happy holidays, all!

Drop-in for guests

2007-12-19T09:02:00.000-05:00

Some J-bloggers have launched a blog carnival. Blog carnivals have been around for awhile, and they represent some interesting ideas. I can't help but think of Charlotte's crazy, out-of-control Carnevil, though, when I hear that word.
So here's another idea. Not sure whether it'll fly, but it's worth a shot. I'd love to host a holiday drop-in, with no end time, for anyone who'd like to share innovative, positive ideas here.
It could be a post about how you learned a new skill, since many of us are working on that now. Or I'd love to hear from a blogger who has built a strong community, and how she did it. I'd love to hear how it feels to reinvent yourself while reinventing journalism.
I'm happy to edit and do technical posting, and I bet Rich would be too. This place is public, so a second set of eyes is a good idea.
Some of our team members have other stuff going on now, so help is welcome.
Interested? Let me or Rich know. My neighbor-dog, who is waiting for a walk, appreciates it.

Ouch. Copy editor alum nails us.

2007-12-14T20:55:00.000-05:00

Fred nails us about the stars and bars.
But I like his headline.
The telling detail: The story to which he refers likely did not go through our copy desk, even though it appeared on our website.
Update: Not true, says the copy editor who edited the story originally. It did go through our desk, and the copy editor stumbled across the "stars and bars" phrase but didn't check it with other sources, he wrote with chagrin in a note.

Dead deer, live puppies and the regionals

2007-12-13T08:38:00.000-05:00

An ode of appreciation to all who work with regional publications.

I dipped into a little live production yesterday while hiding in the CCI war room. I resized some kid pictures and also resized a puppy who needed a home.
It was the the only "cute" moment of my day, soliciting an out-loud "awww" from my colleagues.
That's the secret of regional work, and we can become immune to too many puppies, reader-submitted Christmas cards and cute kids after awhile. Walk away for a bit and come back, and you realize the emotional appeal of those sections. Leslie said the human highlight of her day yesterday was judging reader-submitted Christmas card entries, for the main paper.
Steve Yelvington posted back in March about the importance of asking readers to share their pictures of their dead deer and big fish and how many papers are doing it wrong.
"The typical suburban operation is uninspired and under-resourced, staffed by editors who are just going through the motions and reporters who are either at the very beginning or the very end of their careers. The zones are far too large. To fill columns and get pages down to the plateroom, editors pick up stories from adjacent zones.
Boring. Lifeless. No people you know. No dead deer."
Well, not in Charlotte. We'll never have enough staffers, of course, but we are doing many things right.
We're lucky to have staffers who understand that community good will and strong ties are important if we want trust and sources when we need to ask hard questions and do hard stories. It's not just about advertising.
Yelvington quoted Mary Lou Montgomery, who edits the Morris-owned Hannibal (Mo.) Courier-Post, who changed the way her paper handled such news when she realized the paper was losing touch with readers. Before the change, she said about her paper:

We don’t do dead deer. (We do in Charlotte, but we try to avoid putting dead deer next to cute kids).
We don’t use Polaroid pictures. (No, but we do use digital family snapshots).
We don’t print long lists of names, such as those attending a reunion. (We do in Charlotte, but we often don't boldface the names).
We don’t use pictures without accompanying names. (Well, uh, sometimes we do).
We stopped inviting pictures of the first mushroom finds of the year. (We do odd vegetables, even in the main features section).
We stopped taking pictures of the pee-wee league ball players. (Right, but we run readers' team snapshots.)
We started downplaying the beauty pageants and baby contests. (We do the debutantes, and sometimes the young women are our colleagues' children).
We stopped printing happy birthday pictures of children as part of the news package. (Never have done them. Should we?)
We stopped paying correspondents to submit “chicken dinner” news. (Well, "pay" might not be the right word).
We stopped taking pictures of newly elected club officers. (We run reader snapshots).
We stopped describing wedding gowns. (You have us there).

So amid all the buzz about "new" citizen journalism and engaging readers, we can say we've been doing some things right. For a long time. As we slog through voluminous Scrapbook files, we should remember the work is about keeping community ties strong, so we can do the big stories with credibility and trust, with our community members understanding we care about their whole lives.
Sometimes innovation is about recognizing traditional work with continuing value in a fast-changing world. Thanks to all who slog in regionals.

Cute puppies courtesy of doxieone.

Meet the Panoramist

2007-12-12T08:02:00.001-05:00

Gary O'Brien has launched The Panoramist. Go there.

A Word, if I may

2007-12-10T14:11:00.000-05:00

OK, I'm not sure this technically counts as an innovation, but I liked it as a way to add interactivity of sorts to ye olde fiber media. At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the copy desk chooses a word of the day and features that word on the bottom of 1A, its definition and a refer to the page where it appears.

And, the feature seems to have some high-placed fans. From the paper's Words to the Wise blog:

"A Word," a copy-desk-generated feature that runs on A1 of the newspaper and in installments on this blog, has a highly placed fan in Milwaukee. Mayor Tom Barrett recently ran into Journal Sentinel Editor Marty Kaiser and told him this story:
In the Barrett household, the first of his four children to find the newspaper's word of the day in the paper gets a dollar. A teenager pooh-poohed the idea, until a younger sibling piped up that he'd earned $19 in the last few weeks.

I'd think a logical next step could be a contest that asks readers to write the best sentence using all seven words from the previous week.

From FaceSpace to network neutrality

2007-12-08T20:00:00.000-05:00

Final class projects for Deb Aikat's global communications online class at UNC are in (mostly).
If you're up for reading class papers, you probably can find something interesting from this most diverse class. Classmates link to each other, and the blogs have abstracts about the topics, so you can dig around as much as you like or come back later. Full papers are linked pdfs.

Subjects include:
Hip Hop as a voice for youth in the global village
Supporting Network Neutrality
Collecting Secrets: A look at Internet privacy issues
Digital communications in the K-12 curriculum
Newspapers: Here Today, Here Tomorrow
Social networking issues
The impact of citizen journalism on mainstream media
Paying for News
E-Government
Newspapers: Adapt or Die
Democracy for Mexico's Press?
Child pornography and Internet regulation
Arab film censorship
Animal rights activists and communication technology
Planned Parenthood: Federalizing an Idealogy
Flaws in an International Nutrition Icon: The Food Pyramid

Conversations with readers

2007-12-07T08:45:00.000-05:00

Here's another pointer to the Google Group discussion thread about Rethinking the Merc. Rich mentioned earlier; it's worth another shoutout as an example of newspaper employees engaging readers in a dialog, beyond a controlled Q&A.

Click on the most active discussion, comparing the Merc to the L.A. Times. Readers said they want more about the Venezuelan election, which played on Page 2 of The Observer. I bet our audience had similar thoughts.

Another example: The Meck Deck has thoughtful posts about gentrification in my neck of the woods, spinning off Victoria Cherry's story Thursday. I couldn't find her story quickly on our web site (admittedly, big news pushed down old stuff quickly), and I sure couldn't find thoughtful reader comments. The Meck Deck reaction to her story (with a link to the original story) had top billing at Outside.In for Charlotte.

The Meck Deck commenters look familiar, from the old threads at Mary Newsom's blog. Giving them space and reason to talk on our site adds to the value of our place. I hope they come back.

Humanity, generosity, change

2007-12-04T07:26:00.000-05:00

Excerpts from a Rebecca Blood interview with Trine-Maria Kristensen, a Danish blogger and expert on social media. H/T to Deb Aikat's online UNC class:

"How do you think blogs can be used by businesses? Why is this important?

Humanization. "...Relationships are not build with brands but with people. We can forgive people — we can't forgive brands."

Generosity: "Generosity. Individuals inside the organization telling customers what they know. Not in order to get something back but to show that they are "large" in the good sense. (In Denmark "to be large" means that you share a lot, and are generous with your time, knowledge, fairness.)
This is important because the more knowledge you give away the more you get back. If knowledge is internal and hidden it is worthless. Mutual generosity is the glue in strong relationships."

Change. A company can use the feedback from a blog to actually change something. Or they can use the blog to talk openly about change, problems, dilemmas, difficulties or things that are just not good enough. This is important because in order to understand and embrace change we need information and to talk to someone we trust."

Trine-Maria's blog is here, but most of it's in Danish. If anyone finds an online translator for full web pages from Danish to English, please share.

Spreading the toys around

2007-12-02T16:05:00.000-05:00

(aka If Google News can do it, why can't we?)

Kris Kringle: I keep track of the toy market pretty closely. Does that surprise you so? ... Macy's sending people to other stores? The only important thing is to make the children happy. Who sells the toy doesn't make any difference. Don't you feel that way? -- "Miracle on 34th Street"

Ro pointed me to a feature on El Nuevo Herald's Venezuela page. If you scroll down a bit, you'll see a NewsGator widget that features updating links to relevant content from other sites (such as the NY Times and Yahoo News).

Such a feature allows news sites to get Google (and Yahoo) at its own game. Plus, a quick tour of NewsGator's site shows a number of options for creating widgets that would, say, list top Charlotte.com stories. If I'm a Charlotte blogger, or MySpace user or even a corporate site based in the area, you bet I'd consider adding some sort of customizable widget to my site.

MÁS ARTÍCULOS

A New Deal for journalism

2007-12-01T13:32:00.000-05:00

What would happen if John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller and Dorothea Lange were looking for work today?

Can you imagine Fortune magazine sending James Agee and Walker Evans to the South for eight weeks nowadays to report a story that never published in the magazine?

What would happen if we had a New Deal or Federal Writers Project for journalism now? What would happen if we had a program modeled after Teach For America for journalism?

If you have ideas, I'd love to hear them for a class project at Global Vue.

Photo courtesy of Dorothea Lange dot org.

Reporting within "walled gardens"

2007-11-27T23:47:00.000-05:00

A reporter has entered the hallowed halls of College Confidential to seek out students willing to talk anonymously.

The reporter wants to talk to students about college application questions regarding school discipline and convictions. I don't know whether he's also seeking out people on Facebook groups.

Is this innovative cyber-reporting? Is this invasion of a walled garden where students feel as if they're safe posting anonymous (or pseudo-anonymous) comments? Is the reporter setting himself up for a fall seeking anonymous information at a place where sock puppets sometimes visit?

To the site's credit and the reporter's credit: The reporter apparently contacted a moderator, who posted this, in part:

"While we have verified that this is a legitimate LA Times request, we always suggest caution when divulging personal information."

Notes from the Intertubes

2007-11-26T17:14:00.000-05:00

The latest in photo manipulation: content-aware resizing. And I thought Photoshop's rubber stamp tool was cool...

Over at VisEds, Robb Montgomery and David Dunkley Gyimah post a clip on what it takes to be an "interactive multimedia video journalist." Whatever you want to call it, it's a pretty cool clip (imagine a news segment produced by the director of "Se7en." Much different from anything you'd see each night on the TV news. But is something like this feasible in a world filled with deadlines?

Given that we're in the midst of a redesign, I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion here (or even in my nook of the newsroom) about how the Merc is going about its redesign. I like the idea that they're trying to make things transparent, opening up the discussions, etc. I'm not sure I like the three-section idea they're going with. But desperate times do call for desperate measures. What do y'all think?

Here's the Merc's Rethink site ...
And the blog about the redesign (which features a lot of talk about "how to stay innovative").
There's an interesting Google Groups thread.

Finally, I'm not sure who to credit, but there's a pretty cool (and helpful) Google Maps mashup of Mecklenburg's missing people. Wonder if we could use these sorts of features as a springboard to a full-out crime map a la Raleigh or Chicago. Now, we need to get advertisers on board to sponsor these sorts of Web features. With all the investment we've made in video, why do we still not have ads accompanying the videos? I'd much rather watch those than have to deal with one of those accordion ads that floats down from the top of a page, or from that annoying guy who pops up at the bottom of the home page and starts talking to me.

Meet the editor

2007-11-26T17:09:00.000-05:00

The editor over at NYTimes.com is answering readers' questions this week -- er, rather, the editor of the Times' Web newsroom. Whatever. It'll be interesting to see what kind of things she goes into.

Fiona Spruill (right), a graduate of Duke University, joined NYTimes.com in 1999 as an intern and has served as a business and international news producer; a night editor; an editor of the site's home page, most notably on Sept. 11, 2001; associate editor; and deputy editor in charge of the features sections. She became editor of the Web newsroom in July 2006.

Travel and learn vicariously

2007-11-20T07:48:00.000-05:00

A challenge over the next few days: Walk away from boring football on that other screen and go read the personal journals of some traveling Charlotte Observer folks. These are personal sites not affiliated with The Observer. You'll get lots of inside baseball but also travel vicariously.

From Cambridge
Mary Newsom is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writing about her Nieman time. She's getting to hang out with people like Tom Fiedler, former editor of the Miami Herald, and she's continuing to study urban design and transportation while walking to class. Her husband, Frank Barrows, former m.e. at The Observer, is studying sports statistics (surprise, surprise). And daughter Maggie is Live Journaling (surprise, surprise), and jealous that her mom gets to read "Pride and Prejudice" for class.

From Cuernavaca
Reporter Deborah Hirsch is writing and posting photos about her time as a Rotary International scholar.
Blow some stereotypes by reading about Yom Kippur in Mexico. She's using Wordpress and posting lots of photos (hint, hint, Mary). She's also occasionally sending dispatches to Observer blog Enterese Charlotte, like a report with photos on the recent floods.

Local calendars: Our neighbors want them

2007-11-19T08:13:00.000-05:00

As the busy holiday and art seasons approach, and as the political year of 2008 nears, our neighbors are crying out for decent social calendar tools.
Someone, or several someones, will figure out the right tools, and then steal our ads or find another way to make money from it, if we're not there first.
I could include many links of what some papers are doing, but the reality seems to be no one has it right yet. Let's keep looking and sharing.
If we share information, we can evolve faster.

Style note: Sign of the times

2007-11-16T10:53:00.000-05:00

"Let's follow most business usage and make writedown one word, without a hyphen. That's an exception to our style dictionary."

Headsup: The Curmudgeon

2007-11-14T21:03:00.000-05:00

What a treat it is to wander into Fred Vultee's "Headsup: The Blog." He's a world-class curmudgeon, and his blog posts have heds (not heads) like these:

Horse gone. Lock barn.

Shut up, Grandma. You too, AP.

Want proof? Go to seminary

Keep opinion to self

Of fallacies and mushroom clouds

Fred worked at The Observer on the copy desk and national desk a bazillion years ago, and Roger Mikeal calls him one of the best copy editors he's ever known. He teaches at Wayne State now, and taught many young journalists while working on degrees at Missouri. Amy Fiscus and Adam Isaguirre were among his students.

And Fred still reads The Observer, with a well-intentioned curmudgeon's eye. He's worth reading, because he's ~~skewering~~ editing us from afar. For free. And nothing is holding his sarcasm back.

Sneak a peek into class

2007-11-09T09:25:00.000-05:00

Amazing insight, links and research are coming out of a class at UNC on the global implications of new technology.
A diverse group of classmates is talking about Facebook, privacy, online defamation, Mexican politics, computers in schools, the funding of journalism, access for those with visual disabilities and all kinds of interesting stuff.
Free learning! Start anywhere and follow the class links.

A journalist hero is something to be

2007-11-07T08:50:00.000-05:00

"I’m tired of talking about and worrying about the future of journalism. It’s time to help make the future. Directly. Hands on. Starting today."
--Matt Waite

Matt might not want the term "hero," but I couldn't resist the reference to a John Lennon song, updated by Green Day, with 2.5 million views on YouTube. (Update, Dec. 3: A link to the video originally appeared here, but then gave a "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" message. Apologies. If you like, let Youtube know that permalinks would be better than ones that expire).

"Role model" might work better. Matt's up for a Knight grant to build a way for tiny papers to deal with the Internet more easily. He's one of the people behind Politifact in St. Pete.

Visit and learn.

It's not just about advancing your career or keeping your job. It's about using all the available tools in order to make a difference.

Blogging from the beach

2007-11-06T07:34:00.000-05:00

Myrtle Beach Sun-Times editor Trisha O'Connor is blogging.
In fact, she's been blogging since April.
I knew Trisha long ago, when she worked at The Observer and was a single mom with two teenage girls. Her ability to balance life and her dedication to journalism were inspiring. She loved to share the gossip in the hall outside the newsroom.
And she kept Mike Weinstein in check.
Check her blog out -- she has some posts with community response about anonymous postings, whether the community wants video and other questions for the new times.

Blogging from Ifra Newsplex

2007-11-04T16:18:00.000-05:00

Randy Covington, the director of Ifra Newsplex at the University of South Carolina, is blogging at ifra-newsplex.blogspot.com. In a recent post, he examines the role of Facebook in coverage of the Ocean Isle Beach fire.

Newsplex also has a revamped Web site.

h/t Doug Fisher

Bike versus car (And you can too!)

2007-10-29T10:51:00.000-04:00

Apologies to Mr. Colbert on the title.

Wonderful visual presentation of bike-car wrecks from The Oregonian.

We could do it in Charlotte and Raleigh, with information at sites like this one and this one and this one.

I spent about two minutes at the last one and made the (not so pretty) chart shown here. The hard part: The crash data site says, "For a detailed review of crashes in specific locations (e.g., corridors or certain intersections within a community), it will be necessary to obtain such information at the local level."

But it's possible.

Here's another example of mashing up publicly available information to make it useful for readers, from Marc Matteo with McClatchy in California.

Utopian ideas: Foundations could give rewards or grants to creators of such projects so they can take the time to write project "cookbooks" for other papers. Or foundations could fund time for local reporters and graphic artists to develop their own projects, without eviscerating slim newspaper staffs. The ideas are spinning off Ed Wasserman's critique of Propublica.

Reader submissions from activists

2007-10-24T08:23:00.000-04:00

When should news organizations display reader-submitted photos from activists? When should we link to outside websites affiliated with specific causes? Can we institute some common policies that approach visuals, words and links the same way?
How can we find the time to research any conflicts of interest from readers making submissions and check their credentials? Should we?
And what can we learn from how such activist sites are using technology?

The Rainforest Action Network targeted Bank of America in Charlotte for an action Tuesday, with protesters climbing one of our city's ubiquitous cranes, dangling precariously after posting a large banner that made great visuals. The Charlotte Observer's online staff smartly solicited readers for photos and video of the very public event, likely increasing hits by making a slideshow to accompany a story.

The story did not link to the Rainforest Action Network's website, which explains in detail why it is targeting Bank of America. In the past, such a link would likely be seen as crossing over the boundaries of reporting and publicity.

However, on the visual end of things, we included a photo by Luke Smith of RAN in our slideshow of reader-submited photos. It was one of the better photos, silhouetting the banner and crane against a cloudy, pink-tinged sky. Very similar photos -- if not the same ones -- are posted on the RAN's Flickr group, shot by ranflickr. (One of them is on this post, under a Creative Commons license). It's unclear how much Photoshopping went on to enhance the sunrise, if any.

Other reader-submitted photos did not identify whether contributors had affiliation with the network.

So the questions remain: When is it right to link to an outside site that is seeking publicity? When is it right to include visuals submitted by readers with an agenda? How do we determine whether those readers even have an agenda when we have limited resources?

I don't know the answers; I do know that policy should be clear and apply in a logical way to words, links and visuals.

Many readers are submitting amazing fire photos from California. Our policies should be clear for such catastrophic events in the future as well. Can we make sure we avoid any unintended consequences, such as volunteer firefighters getting sidetracked by gathering photos and videos? How can we make sure submissions aren't Photoshopped beyond our internal policies? Should we care?

What else can we learn? I'm awestruck by activists' use of the Internet to distribute visual PDF documents to support their causes, map their plans and build their networks. I hope we've marked Nov. 16 and 17 on our newsroom calendars to be on alert to more publicity-seeking RAN events, since they're telling us about their plans on their website. I hope we talk about about policies on covering such events in advance.

Why does enterprise software stink?

2007-10-23T11:27:00.000-04:00

Khoi Vinh, designer director for NYTimes.com, asks an important question about why enterprise software is so hard to use. Newsroom production systems aren't his only target -- payroll and HR systems get their share of blame.

In part, he asks:
"What is it about the world of enterprise software that routinely produces such inelegant user experiences? Presumably, IT managers are enthusiasts of technology and the Internet as much as designers, if not more so. It’s understandable that they may fail to explicitly grasp the design principles that inform good interfaces, but surely that same exposure should make them aware that the software they’re buying and rolling out is not as easy to use, right?"

For the full article and comments from design heavyweights, go to Subtraction.com

I know a fine once-upon-a-time designer who is now a big-time IT manager. Is it hard to remember principles of design when dealing with vendors and budgets? Or are there no simpler, secure choices? What can we do to make it better?

Real-world illustration: Adrian Holovaty, database wizard, is using his Knight Foundation grant to launch cool new things with a team of two database people, one people person and one amazing "interaction" designer, Wilson Miner. Some folks talk about Holovaty's work without recognizing Miner's contributions. They shouldn't.

Idea lab launches

2007-10-17T12:01:00.000-04:00

Media Shift, PBS and money from the Knight Foundation help launch a new idea incubator at MediaShift Idea Lab.

The site looks like it will be a great place for examining how to support and find quality, objective journalism online. Its focus is on the process and the questions -- other newly announced sites like ProPublica and The Center for Independent Media say they'll provide the journalism. Almost all of the new ventures have some form of foundation money, except for a new private effort, MinnPost, in Minneapolis.

It feels as if we're entering a new stage. Hold on tight.
(And yes, I'm cross-posting here and in a class blog. Extra credit in class never hurts.)

Carolina wins SNDies

2007-10-16T08:46:00.000-04:00

UNC's photojournalism program gets honored through the SNDies online multimedia journalism again.
Mindy McAdams has the headlines and links. UNC's dean of the j-school, Dr. Jean Folkerts, visited The Observer recently and expressed a wish that the great work from the program would have a wider audience. So go visit.

Technology leaders 90 percent male? Please...

2007-10-16T08:42:00.000-04:00

On women and technology: Can we please get a grip? I don't know exactly how many women are in silicon.com's list of Top 50 agenda setters for technology, but at first glance it looks like about four.
Any credibility the list had with me evaporated after seeing those numbers.
If someone thinks that 90 percent of the people setting the technology agenda are men, they are out of touch with a large part of the audience and customers.
Broaden the vision.

Deadline nears for money for innovation

2007-10-12T09:26:00.000-04:00

Come on, y'all.
The deadline for the Knight News Challenge is Oct. 15.
Someone's asking for $800,000 to do what is already being done at Urban Planet with maps on proposed developments.
Someone else is asking for $90,000 to build RSS feeds for a network of youth activism bloggers.
Someone else -- the techie behind Politifact in St. Pete -- is asking for money to build a free-for-five-years content management system for small-town newspapers. That's my favorite idea so far.
They're giving away money for ideas. Disclaimer: I'm not in this fray. I have a kid to launch into college in 2008. If you know someone with a great idea and who is ready to gamble, urge them to take a leap of faith. We'll all benefit.

Tags bring traffic

2007-10-11T06:52:00.000-04:00

Visits to a Wordpress class blog skyrocketed when I tagged a post "Google ads." I couldn't understand what was going on until classmate and co-worker Leslie Wilkinson helped me navigate through some of Wordpress' tagging search.
We're in an online class together through the University of North Carolina's journalism school, which offers a certificate in technology and communication.
Leslie wrote a post about the Wordpress features at her class blog. Pardon our self-absorption: we're learning, learning, learning.
A reciprocal link from a smart blog about cognitive psychology helped too.
The event shows the need to provide taxonomy and tags to the zillions of bytes of information we're pouring into the Internet bucket. People seek organization and structure in the world, and we benefit through increased traffic if we help people find our stuff.
As we go forward, I hope reporters and photographers -- the stuff generators -- realize the potential of giving their work some organization and tagging from the beginning, and we spread the work. Taxonomy isn't just for librarians and copy editors anymore.
More later as we continue to learn and play tag. We promise not to tag everything with the G-word.

Anonymous postings harmful?

2007-10-05T23:31:00.000-04:00

Another fun tidbit from the APME meeting blog:

More than 60% of the editors surveyed said it would be harmful to good journalism to invite users to participate without using their real identities; only 43% of the readers surveyed said it would be harmful.

Is it a safety issue? Is it a credibility issue? Is it a civility issue? Panelists weigh in.

More praise for Fort Myers

2007-10-05T19:46:00.000-04:00

The Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press, which seems to be an incubator for new ideas at Gannett, won APME's first Innovator of the Year award for its "culture of innovation." This is the paper that has mobile journalists armed with laptops, audio recorders and wireless Web connections out patrolling neighborhoods for "hyperlocal" news. The paper also earned a lot of buzz (on this blog and elsewhere) for its crowdsourced story on sewer problems.

I like the idea of both these things -- allowing community members to get involved with investigating a story and unleashing reporters from their desks. But, man, it seems Fort Myers is getting a lot of traction from one story a year ago and a lot of ribbon-cutting stories. (Have you heard of other crowdsourcing success stories? Know of any people who admit to being devoted readers of hyperlocal news?)

Am I being too cynical?

(Oh, the other finalists for the APME award: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle. The AJC was nominated for its newsroom overhaul. The D&C got the nod for its RocDocs, which gives online users access to data, maps and investigative reports assembled by the newspaper.

Map this, the local edition

2007-10-04T15:53:00.000-04:00

I thought it only appropriate to point out the use of Google Maps today on today's Charlotte.com story about a fatal shooting in Dilworth.

Details TK.

Brick walls, brain drain and dreams

2007-10-04T08:15:00.000-04:00

You know those days when you read the comic "Dilbert" and you could swear Scott Adams has a spy in your office?
Many journalists might have felt that way when reading Alan Mutter at "Reflections of a Newsosaur." He wrote about the brain drain that traditional newspapers face as young journalists get frustrated with the pace of change.
The comments tell the story: Several anonymous postings say, "Yeah, that's my shop."
Add some perspective and seek the positive: The post has 10 comments, two of which I recognize, one of which I respect. Many other journalists are out there, quietly working to be the change.
What the elders and managers need to remember: Brick walls can drive talent away. Many young people have never experienced the frustrating lack of success that can sometimes accompany work in a corporation.
Then the elders need to do what dying professor Randy Pausch did in his "Last Lecture." Give perspective and help others fulfill their dreams. The short WSJ version of the Pausch lecture is here; if you want the nine-minute version, search YouTube.

What readers want

2007-10-03T08:25:00.000-04:00

Jim McBee of SmartNews, formerly of Bluffton, used LinkedIn to ask contacts how they would improve their hometown paper. I believe he plans to share his research at SND Boston in just a few days.
Read about it and more at his new blog, Lamentations. And check out his links, including The Blogslot. The j-blog world is mighty crowded, but Jim has interesting perspectives, and is trying to change journalism in nearby Fayetteville, so he's worth watching.
I'm linking permanently under journalism links.

Putting newspapers on the map

2007-09-26T13:03:00.000-04:00

From a story in the U.K.-based Press Gazette:

From the eating habits of herons to homicides in Los Angeles, newspapers are using Google Maps to accompany stories, to get readers involved in reporting those stories and to document events in real time online. ...

The Grantham Journal is using a map to track a rogue heron that has taken a fancy to the town’s pond life. Readers and journalists plot the heron’s whereabouts.

The LA Times has a map documenting every murder on its patch. It is possible to filter the map using various parameters from cause of death to age and race. The map links to photos and comments, and readers can subscribe to customised RSS feeds from the map. ...

There are flight-tracking maps, weather trackers and a blog, Google Maps Mania, dedicated to documenting useful and unusual ways in which the technology is used, including a map that traces the actual locations used in the famous car chase through the streets of San Francisco in the film Bullit. ...

So, how do you get a Google Map on to a newspaper website? Well, you can simply create it and link out to it, as the Grantham Journal does, or you can embed the map into your website by copying the code the map generates. ...

It is technical, but once you understand the basics, it is essentially a copy and paste job. It is possible to include local search within your map, create “mapplets” – which means you can embed externally hosted applications – or overlay information such as road traffic, directions or, as The Daily Telegraph, Grantham Journal and LA Times examples illustrate, anything of very specific interest to your readers.

Busy, busy international web

2007-09-25T07:43:00.001-04:00

Tim Johnson, Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy, talks about how Chinese website design is vastly busier than U.S. website design. He describes the "hot and noisy" design with a Chinese word, renao.
Interesting comparison, but I think he hasn't been watching what's been happening to mainstream media sites in the United States. We're all getting hot and noisy. Here's hoping we preserve (improve? create?) usability and findability, as local aggregator outside.in has. Some are saying it's the new Facebook.

Why we should post to YouTube

2007-09-20T13:19:00.000-04:00

This video posted Monday by The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun of a student getting Tasered by police during an appearance by John Kerry made it into YouTube’s "most viewed" list by Tuesday.

The video, shot by a freelancer, was also used by several national news shows on television. Since the paper posted the video to its site, it has attracted more than 20,000 hits, compared with the average 1,000 hits per video (about 3,500 on football game days). But the real coup came from YouTube, where the video drew more than 840,000 hits.

"One of our managers sent it to YouTube," Executive Editor Jim Osteen said. "The thought there is — if it is on YouTube, it brings traffic to your site because it says it is from The Gainesville Sun. There is a certain strategy there."

The video shows how newspapers can use new media and the YouTube buzz. Through these channels, the name and story of the newspaper was reproduced nationwide within hours.

h/t: E&P and Editors Weblog

Adgets (C'mon, you knew they were coming...)

2007-09-19T16:19:00.000-04:00

The trend du jour: Interactive -- read: user-generated -- ads, or (I kid you not) Adgets.

From Business 2.0:

A Canadian firm NewspaperDirect is offering the Adget, a new kind of ad that allows online readers to interact with a business - make an appointment, book a restaurant table, even order a product - without ever leaving the newspaper site. Want to arrange a test-drive at a local dealership while browsing the sports section? The Adget can do it.

Uncluttered sustainability

2007-09-19T06:57:00.000-04:00

(That's not what the picture shows).

Tech President gets the big prize of $10,000 from the 2007 Knight-Batten Awards. Bluffton Today, former employer of Jim McBee, gets a notable mention.
You can gain hope and learn lots from looking around at the other winners and notable entries.

And you can learn lots by looking at previous sites noted for their innovation, like Baristanet. That "community journalism" site has joined the ranks of online sites assaulting readers, like The Washington Post and the Gaston Gazette, which both took money from Ford Motor Company for a drop-down ad with video this morning. The ad hindered usability by covering up search boxes. (Please, Ford web crawlers: come to this blog and get a clue).

Look around at the sad evidence of a failed effort at BackFence, or what passes for news at YourHub. Keep your fingers crossed that places like Loudon Extra will make money and encourage local reporting.

Seek hope in Dan Gillmor's ideas for sustainability.

Grants can buy some time, but that time needs to be spent pounding on sustainability. It goes beyond newspapers and community blogs to public TV stations as well.

Take a moment to toast and visit sites like Davidsonnet, Under the Water Tower and the fledgling Ballantyne Daily.

Then keep thinking about the uncluttered sustainability of real, complicated, expensive story-telling, like The Morning Call's multimedia narrative about one homeless man named Earl.

Mr. Feeny, where are you?

2007-09-15T13:22:00.000-04:00

There are reasons some Gen Y people love the '90s TV show, "Boy Meets World," beyond nostalgia. Give this clip one minute and 21 seconds of your time, and you'll see why.

African-American citizen journalists: "We are taking this into our own hands"

2007-09-14T08:21:00.000-04:00

I'd love to hear what Mel Watt thinks about these guys, or what these guys think about Mel Watt. I can't wait to find out who gets the "Lawn Jockey awards."

Found this through a Youtube "citizen journalist" A.Man.I, who was linked in JOMC 713 class at UNC, props to student Amanda Carol Toler.
A.Man.I's website is called My Urban Report and has links to sites like Acting White and Afro-Netizen.

The bottom line: Can a citizen be a journalist? I wouldn't bet against this guy, and it's great that this kind of work can happen when the "name" journalism schools and student papers have inadequate minority numbers among students.

This guy certainly has more street cred than the following Fox TV station. While I applaud the efforts to reach out to the community, I can't help but think that the audience will feel that corporate media just wants content for free. We can steal the technique, but make sure it's mission-driven with the idea that we need help to cover all communities well.

If your mother says she loves you....

2007-09-13T13:29:00.001-04:00

...check it out. If your correspondent speaks with a French accent and says he graduated from the Sorbonne, check it out.

Will Bunch connects the dots about Alexis Debat, who apparently has conducted "fake interviews" with folks like Nancy Pelosi, Alan Greenspan, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Kofi Annan.

Online Journalism Awards

2007-09-12T17:00:00.000-04:00

The Online News Association has posted the list of this year's finalists. Lots of nods for breaking-news coverage of the Va. Tech shootings. (For my money's worth, the best online coverage came from a site not listed -- the Collegiate Times.)

The list of finalists, though, is a good source of ideas. (Loved the Freep's media-rich look at Aretha Franklin's "Respect.")

Grumpy truth-seeking about preps and video

2007-09-12T09:27:00.000-04:00

More than a week after the end of Independence High's historic winning football streak, I sought video to embed here or share on Facebook.

Apparently, WBTV has a channel on Youtube. People can subscribe. They can leave comments and even get real live answers to their comments from real live people. OMG.

They didn't use audio and video of the actual game, so emotion and excitement are a bit lacking. With this report, they missed what former Observer Sports Editor Gary Schwab calls "The Moment."

So did we. We're moving ahead with talking heads video on preps, but without the visual and audio to capture the moment, how many hits are we actually drawing? And then getting to return?

Amateurs for the opposing team captured the audio and video, and displayed it on Youtube below. Warning: it's one minute and 15 seconds of jubilant fans shouting. Certainly captures emotion, though I get a glitch with 14 seconds remaining to play in the video.

Note: I can't embed video from our new video setup at charlotte.com, but I can email or Digg a video. Allentown (a Tribune site) has the email capability as well, but no embedding. Were we hoping for embedding capability with new video software? Should we just spend time and (very little) money on setting up our own Youtube channel and linking back to ourselves like WBTV?

Adding to grumpiness: In looking around, I see video ads in Charlotte for Lending Tree and Bojangles. Comparing Kansas City: They have intrusive, tacky, looping ads for car dealers, including KCcars.com ... they in no way compare to the elegance of the online French Peugeot ad I saw recently. And I sure hope those companies are paying, and not just giving us "reader contributed" videos to see what they can get for free.
Who is this "channel" and technology for?

Adding to grumpiness II: In looking around in Charlotte, I cannot find a trace of our good videos and stuff related to the history of school integration, even though we had an update Sunday. Only way to find it is to search for the writer, Tommy Tomlinson, and get a link off his stories. You have to know it's there, and who wrote the story, to be able to find it.

And now, a word from our sister paper

2007-09-07T22:05:00.000-04:00

Similar to (but not as cool as) the Salt Lake preps site that Rich pointed out is the Kansas City Star's Varsity Zone.

Just wanted to show that this type of thing is feasible on the McClatchy platform, autonomous as we may be. And perhaps most importantly, it calls for reader submissions right at the top, which is crucial for rounding out coverage of prep sports.

Widgets (I'm smelling a trend)

2007-09-06T16:41:00.000-04:00

On the heels of our friends in Allentown, USA Today and The Washington Post are offering widgets to users.

USA Today's widgets can be added to a user's personal page, blog or social networking profile and display updates from the paper, while also generating ad revenue. Right now, the three they have all deal with travel -- updates on travel deals, airport and air travel news, and travel stories. But more are due soon, with news about pop culture, top headlines and celebrities.

The Post's widget lets users review media coverage and opinion writing on the presidential candidates and the major issues of the '08 campaign.

As The Editors Weblog notes, these easy-to-implement tools can be readily monetized (although USA Today's spokeswoman said no advertisers had signed up yet). Plus, they're good for building the brand.

"We're measuring how much traffic gets driven back to our site, but that's not the only metric," said Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com. "Having a cool widget on Facebook is a good thing for us, because it uses a small space to show off a feature that says you can get valuable info from washingtonpost.com."

Historic "bloggers" and their training

2007-09-05T08:54:00.000-04:00

I have many colleagues who feel that bloggers -- or Flickr freelance photographers -- are not "real" journalists with proper training. A question from a professor sent me on a quest to examine the training of journalists from history. Their stories make good fuel for discussion.

Information from Wikipedia, so remember to add a grain of salt. Can you think of others?

Ben Franklin: Candle maker's youngest son, 15th of 17. Attended primary school for two years, continued his education through voracious reading. Became apprentice to his brother, a printer, at age 12. Brother denied him the chance to write when he was 15, so Ben created a pseudonym disguised as a middle-aged widow and began writing letters to the editor. (Anonymous blogger). The letters were published and became the buzz in town. (He built an audience). When his brother discovered the ruse, Ben left his apprenticeship without permission and became a fugitive. (Not part of the establishment). He had to leave town and start all over in Philly. There, at age 21, he created a Meetup/philosophy group called Junto, which spawned many other similar groups in town. (Flickr and Meetup networking).
Surely would have had a blog.

Mark Twain: Started training as a printer's apprentice when he was 11. At 16, began work as a typesetter for his brother's paper (these guys back then would have to know how to spell). From age 18-22, worked as a typesetter in a variety of cities -- these jobs until the 1980s or so were often itinerant, traveling types of jobs. The people moved from town to town as they heard about better work and cheaper beer or mojitos. Traveled extensively. Had family money to do so.
Surely would have had a travel blog, with much opinion.

Ernest Hemingway: Six months at The Kansas City Star, after high school. Joined ambulance corps when he couldn't join military. Traveled.
Might have blogged, using microcontent, between fishing trips and mojitos.

Margaret Bourke-White: Plainfield High School in N.J. Father was a naturalist, engineer and inventor. Mom a homemaker. Studied herpetology at Columbia, where she developed an interest in photography. Married, divorced a year later. Attended several colleges -- Michigan, Purdue, Western Reserve (now Case Western?), Cornell, where she graduated and became an industrial photographer at Otis Steel. Two years later, became associate editor of Fortune, at age 25. One year later, became the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union. Hired by Henry Luce as the first female photographer for "Life" magazine.
Probably would have had a "visual" blog or website, elegantly designed, if "Life" would let her.

The dangers of 'most e-mailed' lists

2007-09-04T17:24:00.000-04:00

Over at NYTimes.com, the list of stories that have been e-mailed the most is the "big kahuna, a significant driver of interest," Martin Nisenholtz, senior VP of digital operations, has said. (One site, ljworld.com, goes so far as to show readers the list of most e-mailed obituaries.) I love these sorts of features because, most times, I can find a really good read there without having to exert much effort actually looking. And, not coincidentally, the lists of "most e-mailed" and "most blogged" stories are usually the ones people are talking about later that day.

Such tools let editor- (or producer- ) driven sites to also allow readers some say in matters of news judgment, without turning the site over to them, as at such reader-ranked sites as Digg.com.

(And, in the news vs. hits category, I give you one of the most prominent stories at the moment on Charlotte.com: "Man (in California) charged with ransoming mother's cat.")

I've always found it interesting just how high Charlotte.com plays national/international stories. Are people really coming to the site for this sort of information? Yes, the "Paris Hilton-esque" stories are usually among the most-read, but is that because people are clicking on them from Google or Yahoo? Is it because the "Today's Talk" section is among the most prominent on the page? (If you put the four top high school sports, or Panthers stories, or local biz stories in that spot, with a photo, would they get similarly high numbers of hits? Would that be better serving our readers than putting Paris and Lindsey up there?) Does making those sorts of stories -- stories that can be found on almost any news site -- so prominent make it harder to find our exclusive content?

....

I'm sure there's some sort of clever transition I should make here, but really, this whole post was just so I could share this story from the Onion about the terrible effects such "most read" lists can have:

"Your reputation is everything here at the Times, and if you want get known, you've got to deliver what readers want: differences between men and women, and photos of cats," national political reporter Adam Nagourney said. "I suppose I could be most e-mailed, too, if I sat in front of my computer all day making up cutesy names for government officials, like some redheaded Wednesday and Saturday columnists I know." ...
Executive editor Bill Keller said he believes that the Most E-Mailed list is causing "troubling" changes in the Times' editorial focus, as reporters increasingly neglect less attractive assignments.

"I've always encouraged our journalists to follow their instincts," Keller said. "But now I'm considering a more hands-on approach, especially since I've received no fewer than four 800-word pieces on 'man dates' in the past week alone."

We're all journalists now

2007-09-03T10:31:00.001-04:00

"Journalism is an endeavor, not a job title; it is defined by activity, not by how one makes a living, or the quality of one's work. Although we are not all engaged in the practice of journalism, any one of us can be if we want to. In that respect, we're all journalists now."
--"We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age," by Scott Gant, available to read online free at Google Books.

Dan Gillmor said the same thing in a Wired article with the same title three years ago. His book, "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People," avoided the Us vs. Them arguments so prevalent these days.

The difference now: Gant's book sits on prominent shelves in major bookstores. Friends, neighbors, politicians, P.R. people and children of journalists understand that a major shift has occurred in the journalism force. We can all be spies on Stalkbook, otherwise known as Facebook, and we can all be journalists. It has to cause uncertainty among those who count on journalism for salaries, and for those who worry about who is being granted and denied access to news. See photographer Gary O'Brien's thoughts from the Minneapolis bridge story in an earlier posting by Leslie.

At the same time, as business and government make access more difficult for a dwindling number of professional journalists, it's heartening to know that others are accumulating skills. A firefighter with a camera might get a shot that the photographer from the paper is forbidden access to; employees of a contractor delivering soldiers' bodies from Iraq get shots heard around the world despite government rules. They lose their jobs, but tell the story.

The amateurs will make many missteps. We all have. But it makes me wish for a "master journalist" designation, much like many communities have master gardeners. In exchange for further training, the master gardeners volunteer by spreading their knowledge in the community. Each one, teach one.

About the photo: The photo is from Flickr, and is of Maurits Burgers, a vlogger with xolo.tv and also a beta tester for Joost. He has an interesting video of a Flickr meetup in the Hague, Amsterdam, in the top 10 videos at his site. It's called "1st haags bakkie," poorly translated as "first CB-set in the Hague."