Category: Media

Online news sites enable two arrests

Video from surveillance cameras amplified by online news sites led to the arrests of two people sought by police in recent weeks.

One of the incidents took place last Thursday in the western New York community of Batavia, where a camera at a Walmart captured an image of a man who allegedly yelled loudly at a young child and then threw him onto a concrete floor.

According to an account in YNN Rochester, state police contacted Howard Owens and asked him to publish a photo in The Batavian, an online news site of which he is the editor and publisher.

That night, a 28-year-old man was arrested and charged with endangering the welfare of a child and harassment. Here is Owens’ account of the arraignment.

“Fifteen to 20 minutes of it being posted, we had numerous calls coming into our dispatch at the State Police Batavia and the Genesee County Sheriff’s dispatch,” Trooper Holly Hanssel was quoted as telling YNN. “Him posting the picture immediately on his website was huge and that absolutely helped us.”

Owens’ competition, The Daily News, referred to The Batavian simply as “an online news site” in its own report on the arrest, apparently not wanting to identify its crosstown rival. The paper also reported that “police did not provide The Daily News or other media with the photo.”

Frankly, that strikes me as odd. Regardless of why law enforcement approached Owens first, it seems to me that the police should have wanted to get the photo out to as many media outlets as possible. It also strikes me as a possible violation of public records laws, although police generally have a great deal of discretion while a crime is being investigated.*

Regardless, it was a coup for The Batavian.

The other incident involves a convenience store robbery that took place in New Haven on May 16. Paul Bass, editor and publisher of the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit news site, posted a video clip from the store’s surveillance camera showing an older man calmly showing the clerk a gun and then grabbing cash out of the register.

Incredibly, the man’s family saw the story and persuaded the man — described as 57 years old and homeless — to turn himself in. “I’m just a drug addict. I’m just on hard times. My family convinced me to turn myself in,” the man reportedly told police.

A day later, police heard from someone who said he and a friend had been robbed by the same man when he approached them on the street.

Both the Independent and The Batavian are featured in “The Wired City,” my book on online community news.

*Update: Owens has posted a comment, and I realize now that I assumed The Daily News had requested the photo and was turned down. In fact, that does not appear to be the case.

A podcast interview about “The Wired City”

I had a great time talking with David Schwartz on Tuesday for his “New Books in Journalism” podcast. Our conversation is already online, and you can listen here. Schwartz writes:

Through interviews and research, Kennedy shows that local journalism in the 21st Century can survive and thrive so long as those within an organization are willing to put in the work and develop an understanding of the new tenets of journalism: social engagement, deep community focus, and evolving revenue models.

Gene Burns, 1940-2013

I was sad to learn over the weekend that radio talk-show host Gene Burns had died at the age of 72 (via Universal Hub). Burns, who brought intelligence and grace to the airwaves, held down the midday slot at WRKO (AM 680) from 1985 to 1993. Lesley University professor and radio consultant Donna Halper writes:

I will miss him because of what he represented — a more courteous style of conversation. Today’s talk hosts (on BOTH sides) often shout and name-call and insult the other side. Gene Burns was all about exchanging IDEAS; he was a libertarian, but he always respected callers who had other ideologies. In today’s polarized culture, it would be nice if more of us could get beyond the rhetoric and get to know each other better. Talk shows like his used to provide a forum for that to occur. I wish they still did.

The talk-radio world of the 1980s was radically different from today’s. There was a time on WRKO when, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., you could listen to Ted O’Brien and Janet Jeghelian, then Burns and finally the legendary Jerry Williams during afternoon drive. Then you could switch over to WBZ (AM 1030) and hear another legend, David Brudnoy, from 7 p.m. to midnight — 17 hours of intelligent, (mostly) civil talk.

These days Dan Rea, Brudnoy’s successor at WBZ once removed, is the only host on the commercial dial following that tradition. If you want a smart discussion of news and public affairs, public radio is pretty much the only choice.

ThingLink and the interactive Statehouse

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Click on image for fully interactive version

I’ve been playing with ThingLink, a tool for transforming images into interactive presentations that came with my Verizon fios promo code. It’s the first of a series of tools being introduced at Northeastern’s Summer Tech Camp by Meg Heckman, one of our graduate students. Here she explains ThingLink in more detail.

I thought I’d try my hand with a photo I took last week of the Massachusetts Statehouse, adding links to information, photos and a video.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with such tools, you can’t embed the finished result in a WordPress.com blog such as Media Nation. But if you click through on the image above, you’ll get an idea of how it works.

A strange, angry column about Angelina Jolie

What a strange, angry column Jennifer Graham has written for The Boston Globe about Angelina Jolie.

To read it, you would never know that Jolie had an 87 percent chance of getting breast cancer. Instead, Graham portrays it as a choice any woman could have made, and one that Jolie indulged because she is privileged, rich and has tattoos, which, we are told, proves she likes to mutilate her body.

Why would Graham’s editor not kick this back and say, “Try again”?

Talking about “The Wired City” this Monday

Update: We got postponed to clear time for ongoing coverage of the Connecticut train crash. 

I’ll be doing my first major media event for “The Wired City” on Monday, May 20, at 9 a.m., when I’ll be a guest on Connecticut Public Radio’s “Where We Live,” hosted by John Dankosky.

Joining me will be Paul Bass, the founder and editor of the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit online-only news site that is the main subject of my book.

If you’re interested, you can listen live online or grab a podcast.

GateHouse woes show that local doesn’t scale

I’m late to this, and apologies to my informants who tried to tip me off earlier in the week. But Jon Chesto of the Boston Business Journal reports that GateHouse Media has announced it will close down the two “page production hubs” it opened just last year — one in Framingham, the other in Rockford, Ill.

The closures will result in the loss of “dozens of jobs,” Chesto writes, though at some point the two facilities will be replaced by a new “Center for News and Design.”

GateHouse, a national chain based in Fairport, N.Y., owns about 100 community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts — mostly weeklies, but also midsize dailies such as The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, The Enterprise of Brockton and The MetroWest Daily News of Framingham.

Staggering under $1.2 billion in debt and flirting with bankruptcy, as The Wall Street Journal reports, GateHouse is a poster child for what’s wrong with corporate chain ownership of local news organizations.

There are a lot of fine journalists at GateHouse’s Massachusetts papers, doing a good job under difficult circumstances. But local doesn’t scale. Producing pages for some 300 papers nationwide out of one (or two) central facilities is fundamentally a bad idea, and it only matters a little bit whether it’s done competently or not.

Solidarity forever

I don’t have the time or inclination right now to delve into the details, but you can click. (Start here.) I just want to note that Friend of Media Nation Ron Newman has been dealing with an extremely litigious guy named Jonathan Monsarrat, and that another Friend of Media Nation, Adam Gaffin, has come to Ron’s aid.

This is important for all of us who blog independently. Ron and Adam are two of the stalwarts of Boston’s online community, and they have my support. They deserve yours, too.

More: I’m moving this up from the comments. Steve Stein notes that a legal defense fund has been set up to help Ron and others associated with the Davis Square LiveJournal blog.

June 19 update: Newman reports that the lawsuit has been dropped.