Year: 2010

Margaret Marshall’s legacy

Margaret Marshall

The big local news of the day is that Margaret Marshall, chief justice of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, is retiring in order to take care of her ailing husband, retired New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis.

But before Marshall joined the SJC, she was general counsel for Harvard University, using hardball tactics to make accusations of racial discrimination go away. I wrote about her Harvard days for the Boston Phoenix in 1999.

My take back then was that Marshall was not the liberal firebrand her supporters were hoping she’d be. Yet she will forever be known as the author of the Goodridge (pdf) decision, which paved the way for same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. It is a magnificent legacy, and Media Nation sends her best wishes upon her retirement.

And speaking of Lewis, I’ve read two of his books on the First Amendment, and they are both first-rate: “Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment” and “Freedom for the Thought We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.” Highly recommended.

Eileen McNamara to write for Boston magazine

Eileen McNamara

In a very smart move, Boston magazine announced today that it has persuaded former Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara to write a monthly column. Romenesko has the details and the press release.

McNamara, who won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, is now a journalism professor at Brandeis University. Says McNamara:

These are challenging times for the city and for the commonwealth. I am eager to rejoin the public conversation and excited to join the talented team of journalists at Boston magazine.

Like many others at the Globe, McNamara in 2007 took an early-retirement buyout while the paper was going through several rounds of painful downsizing. Her voice has been missed, and I’m glad to learn that we’ll be hearing from her once again.

Hacking their way toward journalism’s future

I was going to try to write up last night’s Hacks/Hackers meeting at Microsoft’s Cambridge headquarters. But I can’t do any better than Kyle Psaty, who covers it for the BostInnovation blog. Hosted by Matt Carroll of the Boston Globe, the gathering brought together about 75 journalists and technology folks. What follows are just a couple of quick observations.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of Flowing Media showed off a new data-presentation tool taking campaign-finance information from MapLight.org and slicing and dicing it in a number of different ways. Interesting, though the tools Viégas and Wattenberg demo’d struck me as a little exotic. Globe technology reporter Hiawatha Bray was very excited, so I’m sure those more technologically adept than I will find uses for it.

Somewhat more down-to-earth was a project called Pinyadda, a website that combines journalism, community and social networking. Based on the presentation made by Austin Gardner-Smith, the Boston-based company’s vice president for product and development, Pinyadda may be groping its way toward a just-right space between Digg (too dumb) and NewsTrust (too hard). I’m hoping to find the time to play with it and see for myself.

I learned a few things, met some interesting people, ate some free pizza — what more can you ask for?

Sciacca to succeed Convey as Herald editor

Boston Herald media reporter Jessica Heslam has the story: managing editor Joe Sciacca will succeed departing editor-in-chief Kevin Convey, thus ending any speculation that publisher Pat Purcell might make an outside pick. Sciacca speaks:

I can’t think of a more exciting time for the Herald as we launch new initiatives for print and online. We will continue to deliver the ambitious reporting and unique perspective that Herald readers have come to rely on.

Congratulations to Joe, a longtime colleague on “Beat the Press.” And since I can’t leave this without at least a little bit of dangling speculation, will Sciacca have time to keep his television gig now that he’s at the top of the Herald’s masthead?

Kevin Convey leaves Herald for New York’s Daily News

Big news today at One Herald Square: Kevin Convey, a longtime Herald veteran who’s been editor-in-chief for the past three-plus years, is leaving to become editor of New York’s Daily News. He replaces Martin Dunn, whose departure was reportedly prompted by his wife’s battle with cancer.

I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but Dunn was editor of the Herald for a very brief period in the early 1990s.

Convey’s new job entails a switch of tabloid loyalties. In Boston, the Herald is allied with its former owner, Rupert Murdoch. Herald publisher Pat Purcell, who bought the paper from his old boss in 1994, helps Murdoch run regional properties such as the Standard-Times of New Bedford and the Cape Cod Times.

In New York, the Daily News — owned by real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, who also has significant Boston ties — has been entangled for years in a steel-cage death match with the New York Post, whose owner, of course, is Murdoch. Here is the Daily News’ press release, along with Convey’s reaction:

I am looking forward to the challenge of editing the Daily News, which has some of the most talented people in the newspaper business and the web anywhere in the world. It is a great privilege.

Convey’s a smart guy who took over the Herald at a time when the paper, and the news business in general, was shrinking drastically. During the 1990s, he was part of the triumvirate that ran the paper, serving as managing editor for features along with editor Andy Costello and managing editor for news Andrew Gully. The trio was known, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not, as the “Micks with Dicks,” a commentary on their aggression as much as it was on their ethnicity.

Convey became editor-in-chief of Community Newspaper Co., which published about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, when Purcell added it to his holdings in the early 2000s. After Purcell sold CNC to GateHouse Media a few years later, Convey returned to the Herald, serving as the paper’s number-two while editorial director Ken Chandler, tarted it up and made it more gossipy — more of a tabloid, if you like. After Chander moved on, Convey took over.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote about Convey’s Herald in 2008.

Best of luck to Convey, who’s a good guy, and whom I generally found to be helpful and accessible back when I was covering the local media for the Boston Phoenix.

Needless to say, it will be fascinating to see who ends up succeeding Convey at the Herald.

Update: Well, that didn’t take long.

Correction: Ken Chandler’s name now fixed, thanks to an alert reader.

A first-rate overview of journalism’s fate

The week’s best listen is NPR’s “On the Media,” which weighs in with a special program on the future of the newspaper business. At least that’s what they call it, but the show is really broader than that, hitting all the right themes on the fate of professional journalism.

Among the topics: whether the government should play a role in saving the news business; whether newspapers should charge for online content (a tired topic brought to life by a smart interview with one of my über-bosses, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger); a conversation with James Fallows of the Atlantic about his recent article on Google’s news initiatives; and whether a renewed focus on local news will help bolster newspapers’ bottom lines.

Grab the MP3 and listen. It’s as good an overview as I’ve come across in recent months.

Howie Carr actually finds a new line to cross (II)

Good thing I covered my asterisk when writing about Howie Carr’s gig at a Republican fundraiser in New Hampshire. Because, as I suspected, he has done it many times. The former journalist sleepwalks his way through the details here.

To repeat: this is solely about Carr’s status as a Boston Herald columnist — not his job as a talk-show host for WRKO Radio (AM 680). It’s long since become accepted that radio folks will do such things, even though I don’t think they should.

A morally repugnant ban against a journalist

Hollman Morris

This past March, Media Nation celebrated when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reversed a Bush-era ban on South African scholar Adam Habib, who had been prevented from traveling to the United States on unproven and undocumented charges that he was somehow tied to terrorism.

Now the Obama administration — and Clinton’s State Department — are doing what appears to be exactly the same thing to Hollman Morris, a Colombian journalist. Morris, the Washington Post reports, was recently denied a visa to enter the United States so that he could spend a year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow.

Morris is not exactly a favorite of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing strongman with a miserable human-rights record. The Uribe government has accused Morris of playing nice with the FARC, a left-wing guerrilla movement whose viciousness is beyond question, and which the U.S. government regards as a terrorist organization. By most accounts, though, Morris is guilty of nothing but practicing journalism — which, in Uribe’s eyes, is bad enough.

Not to get all conspiratorial, but it should be noted that the Clintons have longstanding ties to Uribe. In fact, when then-presidential candidate Clinton’s chief political strategist, Mark Penn, was thrown overboard in April 2008, it was over his own unsavory dealings with the Uribe government.

What makes the ban against Morris especially repugnant is that, according to the Spanish news agency EFE, his and his family’s safety has been threatened, and he has been living “under protection” for quite some time. Now the Obama White House has placed him in even greater peril. Fortunately, Morris is currently traveling in Europe, and it sounds like he has no plans to return home anytime soon.

The ban against Habib appeared to be based on nothing more than his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq — hardly a novel view. The exclusion prevented Habib from speaking at an academic conference in Boston, a circumstance that led to a 2008 Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award for Condoleezza Rice and Michael Chertoff, then the secretaries of state and homeland security, respectively.

Likewise, in the absence of any evidence from the Obama administration, it appears that the ban against Morris is motivated by nothing more than a desire not to offend Uribe and the incoming president, Uribe protégé Juan Manuel Santos. Needless to say, Hillary Clinton is an early contender for a 2011 Muzzle.

More coverage: Nieman Foundation curator Robert Giles recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times on Morris’ behalf. The Boston Globe editorialized against the ban. Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab has a good round-up of other coverage. And we discussed the Morris case last Friday on “Beat the Press,” on WGBH-TV (Channel 2).

Crowdsourcing the pain of transcribing audio

The trouble with recording interviews is that you have to transcribe them. So after one of my forays to New Haven last week, where I interviewed people in connection with a book I’m working on about community news sites, I had a ton of audio and the unpleasant task of translating it all to text.

I decided to crowdsource the task through an Amazon.com service called Mechanical Turk. More about that in a moment. But first I want to explain my reluctance to try it.

I think the results are better when I do it myself. I have to listen carefully, which helps me seal the best stuff inside my leaky brain. I know what we were taking about, which means that I’m not flummoxed by names and unusual phrases, as any transcriber would be. And because I have an idea of how I’ll use the material, I can decide on the spot what to transcribe verbatim, what to paraphrase and what to leave out altogether. So I knew I could potentially be giving up a lot by turning the task over to others.

Some years ago I used a transcription service near Harvard Square when time was of the essence and when, most important, someone else was paying the bill. This time, faced with many hours of work, I decided to take advice given me last fall by Zach Seward and try MTurk. Seward, then with the Nieman Journalism Lab, told me that lab director Joshua Benton had used it to transcribe this talk by New York University’s Clay Shirky. I was impressed.

I posted a query on Twitter, and several people responded by sending me a link to an online guide by Andy Baio. I decided to try it with two interviews — a 65-minute recording with New Haven Independent founder and editor Paul Bass, made on his reasonably quiet back deck, and a 35-minute conversation with New Haven alderman Michael Jones, at an outdoor café on a busy street.

My first step was to go through the cumbersome process of converting my Olympus recorder’s WMA files to MP3s, and then dividing those MP3s into five-minute chunks so that a number of different people could apply themselves to the task. By the time I got around to doing the second interview, I had stumbled upon EasyWMA, a $10 utility that took the pain out of conversion, and had finally taught myself enough about Audacity, a free audio editor, so that I could painlessly produce five-minute bits.

I was surprised by how quickly the crowd swarmed over my files — in less than a day, I had everything I needed. Unfortunately, the quality was extremely uneven. Some of the mistakes were bizarre or unintentionally hilarious. How “state of Connecticut” became “state of Kentuckian” is one I’ll never figure out. And here’s a choice excerpt from my conversation with Bass. First, the MTurk version:

They had a Sunocompass call with WBR few weeks ago to get the advice, how the membership strives. The taste and ever didn’t undership strives because I felt that if the widely suceessful they might get thirty to fourty thousand dollars.

Now, what he really said:

They had us on a conference call with WBUR few weeks ago to get advice on how to do membership drives. In the past I hadn’t done membership drives, because I felt that if they’re wildly suceessful they might get you to $30,000 or $40,000.

Following Baio’s advice, I’d set a price of $2 per five-minute excerpt. You have the option of rejecting unusually bad work, refusing to pay and letting someone else take a crack at it. I decided to accept everyone’s work, including the person who produced what you see above. But I blocked two people (including the one I just cited), so that if I use the service again, they won’t have a chance to work on my stuff.

Overall, I paid $41.80*, $3.80 of which went to Amazon, the remainder to the folks who actually did the work.

Between file conversion and preparation, downloading transcribed interviews, listening to everything again and cleaning up the transcripts, I don’t know how much time I saved. Not much, probably. Yesterday I transcribed two interviews myself, and I thought the results were much better.

On the other hand, I purposely chose my Bass interview for MTurk because it was long and he talks very quickly. It was also an unusually substantive conversation, and I knew there wasn’t much I wanted to leave out. Most of the transcribers did an OK job.

My bottom line is that, in the future, I would probably reserve MTurk for situations in which I have good audio quality and need a full verbatim transcript. Even knowing that I’ll have to do a fair amount of retyping, it’s still better than starting from scratch.

But if I’m producing normal interview notes, I’ll handle it myself.

*Addendum: Jack Shafer of Slate told me the price I cited doesn’t mean much without comparing it to the price of a professional transcription service. So I contacted a good one and was told it would cost about $140 an hour — or about $230, nearly six times as much as what I paid. That’s a huge mark-up. On the other hands, the results would have been more usable.

Illustration via Wikimedia Commons.