Month: January 2010 Page 3 of 6

On January 19, 2010

In Media, Politics

I’ll be spending my evening in front of the tube, mostly with New England Cable News (all is forgiven, sort of), in preparation for writing something for the Guardian later tonight. If you are not sufficiently distracted, I’ll probably post an occasional observation to Twitter.

Sree Sreenivasan on journalism’s future

On January 19, 2010

In Media

Sree Sreenivasan

Columbia School of Journalism professor and dean Sree Sreenivasan, who describes himself as a “tech evangelist/skeptic,” will be speaking to Northeastern journalism students in a few moments. I will try to live-blog this as best as I can, though at the moment my connection seems a bit flaky.

Here are Professor Sreenivasan’s tips on social media. Perhaps his most important observation that didn’t make it into my notes below is that journalists should use social media mainly to “listen,” not to “broadcast.”

3:10 p.m. “I consider myself a print guy who happens to like some aspects of the Internet,” says Sreenivasan. He reads two newspapers and subscribes to five magazines. “I’m hoping there will still be print for many decades to come.” Believes there will be print for some time, but it might be “more expensive,” “more specialized” and “more niche-ified.”

3:16 p.m. Sreenivasan finds that when he talks with prospective journalism students, “there’s a sense of optimism and excitement about the media that isn’t shared by older people.”

3:23 p.m. Sree is sharing a post written for Mashable by one of his students called “8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist.” Perhaps the most important trait: be entrepreneurial.

3:24 p.m. “I may be the only Indian in the world who can’t do math.”

3:27 p.m. Need to be able to do video, photos, audio slideshows. Sree’s involved in a start-up called DNAinfo, which covers New York’s neighborhoods, and it involves the heavy use of multimedia skills. Also need to be a blogger and a curator. “Be a great pointer.”

Being a good pointer is in “direct conflict” with what a traditional journalist does. You have to be able to point to your own work, talk about it, and point to other people’s good work. Hard to do because journalism “has traditionally been such a competitive field.” If readers believe you can be trusted to be a good follower, they will follow you.

3:30 p.m. “The Tra-Digital Journalist” is a phrase coined by one of Sree’s colleagues — “a traditional journalist with a digital overlay.” Traditional journalism skills are as important as they ever were.

3:33 p.m. “I have news for you. All of you are going to be radio journalists whether you like it or not. Only it’s not called radio. It’s called audio.” Check out Blog Talk Radio, which allows anyone to have a talk show. “Problem: not everyone who wants to have a radio show should have a radio show.” It’s a great way to practice.

3:39 p.m. Following the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Sree and other members of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) interviewed some 50 guests via SAJA’s channel on Blog Talk Radio.

3:52 p.m. “It’s really important to add these vitamins to your media diet”:

Mashable (the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times of social media)
MuckRack (follows only the tweets of journalists)
LifeHacker (“how you can use technology to improve your life,” explains Sree)
ReadWriteWeb (how the Web is changing)
PaidContent.org (the future of the newsroom and how people are going to pay for our content)

3:53 p.m. Need to learn skills now. “When the plane lands in the river, it’s too late to learn about Twitter.” Students should join LinkedIn now, for instance, even though they won’t need it for job-hunting until later.

3:59 p.m. Facebook can be used as a tool for journalism. “Learn to use it better.” In a course he teaches on social media, he tell students it’s a professional tool, and they should take more control. Three advantages:

Find sources and stories
Connect with your audience
Bring eyeballs to your work

Human attention is an increasingly scarce commodity, and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can help command some attention.

4:04 p.m. “Facebook is the greatest time sink in human history.” You should put people in lists and label them. If you’re a Washington Post reporter, you can see what Senate staff members are talking about, or State Department employees. “You’re not learning everything that’s going on, but you’re learning something.”

4:08 p.m. “LinkedIn is one of those things that everyone is on, or should be on, but they don’t know how to use it better.” If you’re writing a story about the Red Sox, you can use LinkedIn to find not only people who work for the Red Sox, but who used to work for them, and who live near you. Also, you can pose questions to your community, a useful reporting tool.

4:11 p.m. Some acronyms: BAW (bored at work), CPA (constant partial attention), CCT (conference call time), CMS (content-management system) and Bit.ly (a link-shortener that provides you with analytics).

4:14 p.m. “The power of Twitter is not in the tweet. The power of Twitter is in the retweet.” To be a successful tweeter, you should do everything in 120 characters, because “I want people to retweet my work.” He’s often wanted to retweet something, but he doesn’t because he has to edit it. “Don’t make me work for you.” “Make it as easy for them as possible.”

People are often skeptical of Twitter because of the 140-character limit. Yet there are virtually no newspaper headlines that are longer than 80 or 90 characters.

“Success on Twitter is listening, and then listening to the right people.”

4:18 p.m. One of Sreenivasan’s students was stuck in Haiti when the earthquake hit. He was able to let his wife know he was all right because someone tweeted it.

4:23 p.m. @Digidave, founder of Spot.Us, is a former student of Sree’s.

The scene on the ground

On January 19, 2010

Sign-holders outside Danvers High School

We voted at Danvers High School a few minutes after 9 a.m. The town consolidated all eight precincts there a year or so ago, yet it wasn’t all that crowded — sign-holders and poll workers outnumbered voters. We might have caught an odd lull because, as we were leaving, there was a line of cars waiting to get in.

Not fat, not a lady, but Nate Silver is singing

This may be the last polling analysis of the Massachusetts Senate race worth paying attention to before the voting starts tomorrow. According to Nate Silver, Republican candidate Scott Brown now has a 74 percent chance of winning. As recently as last night, Silver very tentatively gave Democrat Martha Coakley a 58 percent chance.

What happened? A series of polls throughout today that just got worse and worse for Coakley. Silver explains:

Coakley’s odds are substantially worse than they appeared to be 24 hours ago, when there were fewer credible polls to evaluate and there appeared to be some chance that her numbers were bottoming out and perhaps reversing. However, the ARG and Research 2000 polls both show clear and recent trends against her. Indeed the model, which was optimized for regular rather than special elections, may be too slow to incorporate new information and may understate the magnitude of the trend toward Brown.

What I like about Silver is that he’s not a pollster — rather, he’s someone who looks at a wide range of polls and makes sense of them. His record in the presidential campaign was outstanding.

This is very bad news for the Coakley campaign.

Why NECN didn’t carry Obama’s speech

In Media

I watched President Obama’s speech at Northeastern University online Sunday, so I didn’t realize until later that New England Cable News hadn’t carried it. I e-mailed NECN spokesman Skip Perham, and here is his response:

Over the life of the Obama administration we have consistently carried his policy speeches live.

We made the decision not to cover Martha Coakley’s rally featuring President Obama because it was a pure political event. We made the same decision about candidate Scott Brown’s event in Worcester.

If you take a look at NECN’s Sunday-afternoon schedule, you’ll see that it says “Paid Programming.”

Now, there’s an old cliché that elections have consequences. One of those consequences is that a speech by the president of the United States in your own back yard is by definition more newsworthy than a speech by Curt Schilling.

Was Obama’s speech purely political? Yes. But if NECN wants to amend its guidelines so that it will be able to carry all live speeches by the president within 10 miles of its headquarters, I don’t think station executives will have to inconvenience themselves more than once or twice a decade.

Democracy and the Senate

Both the Boston Globe and the New York Times today run stories on the fate of health-care reform in the event that Republican candidate Scott Brown defeats Democrat Martha Coakley in tomorrow’s special election for the U.S. Senate.

In light of that, I want to address the notion that it would be somehow undemocratic if the House could be persuaded to pass the Senate bill, thus avoiding a return trip to the Senate, or if a compromise measure were rushed through before Brown can be sworn in.

First, let’s look at the composition of the Senate itself. Even if Brown wins, the Senate will comprise 59 Democrats or their allies and 41 Republicans. Only in the upside-down world of the modern Senate would that be considered anything less than an enormous advantage.

What gives the Republicans clout, of course, is their unprecedented strategy of filibustering vote after vote. As Paul Krugman recently noted, a study by the political scientist Barbara Sinclair found that the routine filibuster is a very recent phenomenon, and entirely Republican in origin.

If the Republicans are going to insist that 60 votes are needed to get anything done, then rules reform ought to be the first order of the day. My preference would be an insistence that filibusters be carried out the old-fashioned way, Jimmy Stewart-style, on the floor of the Senate. Harry Reid could play Lyndon Johnson, forcing everyone to stay in the chamber until human biology brought an end to the charade.

My second point is that we tend to forget what a distorting effect the Constitution’s two-senators-per-state rule has with regard to whose voice gets heard. I ran some numbers a little while ago; in states with one Democrat and one Republican, I awarded half the population to each. Using that formula, I found that Democratic senators represent 196 million Americans, and Republican senators represent just 110 million.

Thus the Senate’s 60-40 margin in favor of Democrats would widen to 64-36 if the one-person/one-vote rule were followed. And a Brown victory would barely affect that margin, as it would be 63 percent to 37 percent.

There’s no question that a Brown victory would have an enormous psychological effect. It’s hard to know whether congressional Democrats would push something through in order to put health care behind them once and for all, or if they would decide instead to give up on the whole effort.

But that’s a matter for another day — perhaps Wednesday.

Ups and downs of higher education

In Media

Two headlines on reports about the same survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Boston Globe: “Public college presidents feeling salary pinch” (Associated Press)
New York Times: “Pay Rises for Leaders of Colleges, Survey Says” (staff report)

Faces of the disaster in Haiti

On January 17, 2010

In Media

This heart-stopping video/slideshow by the Boston Globe’s Bill Greene and Maria Sacchetti is a vivid illustration of the situation on the ground in Haiti right now.

The Globe has gathered together all of its Haiti coverage here. It includes stories, photos, audio and resources.

Coakley supporters cross the line

On January 16, 2010