Category: Technology

A multitasking, multimedia journalist

Thomas MacMillan covers a finance committee meeting in New Haven City Hall.

Back when I was covering city council, school committee and board of selectmen meetings in the 1970s and ’80s, the only tool I brought with me was a notebook and a pen.

How times have changed. On Tuesday evening I connected with Thomas MacMillan, a reporter for the New Haven Independent, so I could watch him cover a finance committee meeting. (Click here for a video feature on the Independent, a non-profit community news site.) We met outside the aldermanic chamber in New Haven City Hall just before 6 p.m., and I followed him to the front row.

MacMillan accepted congratulations from a few city officials for a national reporting award he won last week, then settled in to live-blog the debate. He was a bit harried — he’d just come over from covering another event, and he hadn’t had time to write the introduction. A few minutes later, though, he was good to go.

For the next two hours I watched as MacMillan posted a series of updates on what was going on, pored through budget documents, moderated and posted reader comments, periodically jotted a few things down in a notebook (how old-fashioned), and took photos.

Alderman Darnell Goldson, who was sitting in our row, whispered, “Hey, Thomas!”, and pointed behind us, where an otherwise-dignified looking man was wearing a lighted-up Christmas tree on his head. His aim was to protest Mayor John DeStefano’s proposal to save money by not erecting a tree on New Haven Green this year. MacMillan turned and shot.

And when two aldermen got into a semi-heated discussion about cuts to the education budget, MacMillan pulled out another camera and shot some video, although he ended up not using it.

Despite my front-row seat, I would have had little idea of what was going on if it weren’t for MacMillan’s updates, which I read on my BlackBerry.

I left at 8; the hearing ended at 9:30. Later, MacMillan took his blog items and notes and turned them into the story that you can see today, and posted a few photos as well.

What MacMillan did last night was impressive but not unusual. The technical skills he brought to bear on his assignment were nothing that couldn’t be mastered in a few weeks. It’s the mindset that matters. Journalists today must be prepared to juggle a variety of tasks and to perform them with minimal supervision.

And to think that there was a time when the biggest challenge in covering a meeting was to stay awake.

From talking about it to just doing it

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When I first started teaching a course called Reinventing the News a few years ago, I envisioned it mainly as a seminar. The idea was that we would look at some case studies of where the news business might be headed and blog about it.

I quickly realized that wasn’t good enough. The spark for me was a student who had just come back from her co-op job at the Patriot Ledger of Quincy. She had assumed the most complicated tool she’d have to use would be a notebook. Instead, she was tossed a point-and-shoot digital camera and told to teach herself how to capture and edit video. She liked it so much she ended up changing her career goals from print to video.

It was with some trepidation that I began adding three weeks of Web video to Reinventing a year and a half ago. First, I had to teach myself how to do it. And it required exposing some vulnerabilities. I knew some students would be starting from zero, but I also knew that others were already better at video journalism than I’d ever be. Nevertheless, it proved to be well worth it.

Last week we finished the most complex version of Reinventing I’ve offered, and my students had to pull together a variety of skills for their final project. The assignment was to use free online tools to create a multimedia story. The elements:

  • An 800- to 1,000-word story about a digital media project that had caught their eye, written up as a blog post with relevant links.
  • A slide show of six to 10 still photos, posted to Flickr and embedded in their blog.
  • A two- to five-minute video they shot and edited, posted to YouTube and also embedded in their blog.
  • An explanation of how they used social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to find sources and report their story.

At the end of it all, they were asked to note the location of their story on a Google map and link to their blog post. The result is the map I’ve embedded above. I invite you to explore. These young journalists did a terrific job, and I am very proud of them.

If you click on “View Reinventing the News: Final Projects in a larger map,” directly under the embedded map, you’ll find the list of students on the left-hand side. Click on a name to find his or her spot on the map, each one of which is linked directly to their project. Hmmm … Google could make this a little bit simpler, eh?

I’ll be teaching Reinventing again this fall, and I will continue to refine. My first thought is that I ought to dump the brief wiki exercise I offer and instead delve more deeply into how to handle comments. Any thoughts you have would be welcome.

Open systems, open society

Apple’s attempt to ban a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist from its iTunes Store is an extension of the same mindset that led it to keep Adobe’s Flash software off its new generation of closed devices — the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad. And it shows that Steve Jobs and company are poorly cast in their role as a savior of the struggling news business. Or so I write in the Guardian.

Apple’s heavy-handed approach to speech

I’m trolling for Boston-area stories about Apple’s heavy-handed approach to allowing and banning apps for the iPhone, the iPod Touch and now, of course, the iPad. If you know of any, please pass them along. I would love nothing more than to give Steve Jobs a Muzzle Award, but I need a local angle.

What prompts my request is this outrageous example involving newly minuted Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore, who was unable to get his app approved because his work “ridicules public figures.”

I’ll be in the market for a new phone in the summer of 2011. It’s looking less and less likely that I’ll be going with Apple, much as I love its technology.

Talking back to the news with NewsTrust

Who doesn’t like to talk back to the news? That, in its essence, is the idea behind NewsTrust, a site I’ve been involved with almost from its inception in 2005. The basic idea is to rate news stories on journalistic criteria such as sourcing, fairness and depth. You can rate news organizations, and other reviewers get to rate you as well.

Last week Mike LaBonte, a volunteer editor for NewsTrust who lives in Greater Boston, visited my Reinventing the News class to lead a hands-on demonstration. Dividing the class into four groups, we reviewed a story in the Washington Post on a day in the life of an Iowa tea-party protester.

It was a difficult story to rate, and my students were of two minds. On the one hand, the story was woefully incomplete, and the reporter allowed the protester to make all kinds of ridiculous assertions about President Obama and health-care reform. On the other hand, the story had value if viewed not in isolation but, rather, as part of the Post’s ongoing coverage. As a result, student reviews ranged from a high of 3.5 (out of 5) all the way down to a 1.7.

We followed that up with a class assignment: each student was asked to find, post and rate at least three stories, and to write about the experience, as well as the positives and negatives of NewsTrust, on her or his blog. Here is our class wiki, which links to everything.

Unlike previous semesters, we did not participate in a news hunt on any particular topic. Thus you’ll find stories ranging from the death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and the pending retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens to lighter fare such as why yoga appeals mainly to women.

Students have differing views about the value of NewsTrust as well. One positive aspect, it would seem, is that perusing NewsTrust restores some of the serendipity that existed back when everyone read a print newspaper every day.

Yet Mark DiSalvo observes that Google News and the people he follows on Twitter already put news stories in front of him that he might not otherwise know about, and with less technological hassle. “Google News has better customization tools, and the people I follow on Twitter are already people whose taste I trust,” he writes.

Hannah Martin writes that NewsTrust makes her think about the news in a more critical and discerning way. “What I liked about the reviewing experience was it forced me to really analyze my news on its journalistic value, which, as bad as it sounds, is often something that slips my mind,” she says. “I browse the headlines of nyt.com, read what looks important, and accept it as fact, rarely stopping to count sources or assess context. The process of reviewing though, forced me to think through all the elements of each piece, and consider what, as a journalist, should ultimately be there.”

My own view is that NewsTrust is potentially valuable as a crowdsourced front page — an alternative to letting the New York Times or the Washington Post tell us what the most important news of the day is. The problem is that the software is time-consuming and not particularly intuitive, even though it has been improved over the past year.

And though NewsTrust claimed more than 15,000 registered users by the end of 2009, most of the stories you’ll find seem to have been posted and rated by just a small handful of regulars. This is not surprising. Studies have shown that two much-bigger crowdsourced sites, Wikipedia and Digg, are the handiwork of small numbers of unusually active users.

I hope NewsTrust will continue to grow, because the idea is sound. The challenge is that crowdsourcing only works when there is a crowd.

How Facebook is driving the push for real names

Could Facebook — or at least the Facebook ethos — help turn the tide of negativity when it comes to online newspaper comments?

Richard Pérez-Peña reports in the New York Times that an increasing number of news organizations are requiring commenters to use their real names, or at least providing incentives to do so. They credit Facebook and Twitter, where most people use their real names, in fostering a change in attitude. Pérez-Peña writes:

Several industry executives cited a more fundamental force working in favor of identifying commenters. Through blogging and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, millions of people have grown accustomed to posting their opinions — to say nothing of personal details — with their names attached, for all to see. Adapting the Facebook model, some news sites allow readers to post a picture along with a comment, another step away from anonymity.

Several months ago I led a workshop on social media for the New England Newspaper & Press Association. The most interesting idea to come out of the workshop, I thought, was put forth by a weekly-newspaper editor who said he had been posting links to many of his stories to a Facebook group and encouraging readers to comment there.

The Facebook group, he said, had turned into more of a real online community than the comments at his newspaper’s Web site, where anonymity had transformed even mundane matters into fodder for nasty rhetoric and personal attacks. And it’s not just real names; it’s the entire online persona people create on Facebook, with pictures and personal information, all of which encourage users to act more like human beings when they start typing. I was so excited that I instituted a real-names policy at Media Nation as soon as the conference was over, though I’ve held off from taking the Facebook route.

But what about the notion of sending readers away from your Web site, where you presumably have some advertising you want them to look at? I would argue that if you become a trusted source for your readers, they will reward you by coming back and providing you with more traffic than you would otherwise get.

Besides, as Pérez-Peña notes, advertisers generally don’t want to be associated with the kind of vitriol that characterizes anonymous comment sections.

Facebook is a great technological solution for small organizations that don’t have the wherewithal to offer a registration system of their own. But Howard Owens has managed to put together a registration system accompanied by a real-names policy at the Batavian, the community-news site in western New York that he owns. Owens writes:

Real names may not prevent people from spewing misinformation and defamatory bile, but at least if readers trust that the person making such assertions is using a real name, they can judge it accordingly, or fact check the source themselves.

Owens goes on to note that if the Cleveland Plain Dealer had had a real-names policy, it could have avoided the ethical dilemma in which it finds itself over a judge whose e-mail address was being used to post anonymous comments about cases in which she was involved. (The judge claims, not too convincingly, that the anonymous poster was her daughter.)

The Plain Dealer outed the judge, Shirley Strickland Safford. And last week Saffold sued the paper for $50 million, claiming the paper had violated its own privacy policy.

Of course, that’s something of an inside-out argument — that is, the Plain Dealer wouldn’t have done anything unethical if it didn’t have private information it could handle unethically. The best reason for real names is to foster a civil discussion. Along with strict moderation, real names can help fulfill the promise of a comments section that helps build community and readership.

The future of journalism and the law

This Friday I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion titled “The Future of Journalism: Law and Ethics in a Changing Media Ecosystem.” It’s part of an all-day conference called “Journalism’s Digital Transition: Unique Legal Challenges and Opportunities,” sponsored by the Citizen Media Law Project and to be held at Harvard Law School.

Our panel, to be held from 3:10 to 5 p.m., will focus on issues such as whether shield laws can be crafted so that bloggers and citizen journalists can protect their confidential sources, and if the shift toward nonprofit journalism means fewer First Amendment rights. (Among other things, non-profit organizations may not endorse political candidates.)

The other panelists:

The moderator will be Phil Malone, clinical professor of law and director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Neither revolutionary nor retrograde

Click on image for larger view

The case for Apple’s iPad seems clear enough. Some 700,000 were sold on Saturday, which was double what had been predicted.

The case against the iPad is based on two different but related arguments. First, critics say the iPad is designed mainly for consuming rather than creating content, and that it thus represents a corporate-driven attempt to put the Internet genie back in the bottle and return us to our former status as passive couch potatoes. Second, the iPad is a closed system controlled entirely by Apple, and will therefore stifle the sort of innovation that gave rise to such phenomena as Google and Twitter.

Both propositions are true. Yet they strike me as overblown.

The case against the iPad as a consumption-oriented device is summed up well by Jeff Jarvis, who writes — accurately, I think — that a principal reason the device has been the recipient of so much media buzz is that media executives see this as a chance for a do-over: this time, moguls will control the content and consumers will pay for it. Jarvis writes:

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them.

Yet the iPad isn’t just a repository for paid apps; it’s also a pretty good machine for browsing the Web. If you are currently reading the New York Times on the Web rather than paying for electronic delivery through Times Reader, for instance, well, the iPad will let you keep right on doing that.

As for participation and conversation, the iPad’s virtual keyboard is pretty lousy (based on my brief encounter with it at the Apple store in Peabody on Saturday), but it’s good enough for posting to Twitter and Facebook, or even for writing short blog posts.

Besides, as Howard Owens notes, “The vast majority of people … are media consumers, they are lurkers, not creators.”

The tech argument against the iPad strikes me as even more esoteric. The idea is that by requiring developers to write apps within a rigid, closed universe, to get them approved by Apple and to share revenues with Apple, Steve Jobs is stifling the innovation that gave rise to both the personal computer and the Internet.

At BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow waxes rhapsodic over the days when the Apple II Plus came with schematics for the circuit boards, and quotes something called the “Maker Manifesto” in writing, “Screws not glue.” Doctorow’s point is that we should be able to rip our devices apart and customize them the way we like. Needless to say, Doctorow is not talking to too many people — just his fellow hackers.

Now, I don’t find either Jarvis’ or Doctorow’s critiques to be entirely without merit. But I’m proceeding on the assumption that the iPad is not going to take over the world. The iPad is an auxiliary device that will not take the place of computers. It’s also only one model for how to make a tablet computer. As Jarvis notes, Google is said to be working on a model, and it’s likely to be far more open than Apple’s. We’ll see if it’s as popular.

Personally, I’m not all that impressed with the iPad. I got to spend about 10 minutes with one on Saturday. Granted, that wasn’t really enough time to put it through its paces. But it was enough to see that the display is no better than that of a good-quality laptop; that the virtual keyboard is fairly unusable (you’ll be able to buy a plug-in keyboard, but wouldn’t you rather have a netbook?); and that it’s too heavy to wield like a magazine or newspaper.

Even for pure media consumption, it’s not necessarily better than a laptop. I’d rather take an iPad into the living room. But a laptop is better for propping up on the kitchen table during breakfast, because you don’t have to hold it up in front of you. I might get a later, presumably lighter, version. But I’m not salivating.

The ridiculous amount of hype that has surrounded the iPad, to which I am now contributing, has made all of us think this is more important than it really is. It’s not going to save the traditional media, however much media executives may wish it, and however much Jarvis and Doctorow may be gnashing their teeth.

Mapping a class project

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I love this. My Reinventing the News class has put together a Google map of their favorite places within a mile of Northeastern. Each student wrote a blog post, took some pictures and then plotted it on a map, with a link.

The result — a “Newcomer’s guide to NU” — is a modest but useful example of how to use mapping as a journalism tool. The idea is to provide multiple points of entry for readers, which encourages them to explore and to come back.

The project was a bit of a high-wire act. I was having a hard time creating the map during the weekend, which may have been due to problems Google was having. Then, when everyone began adding to the map during class on Monday, we had barely controlled chaos, as random addresses began weirdly showing up and disappearing. Yet I think the end result turned out rather well.

Google Maps may not be the most sophisticated mapping tool available, but it’s free and ubiquitous. Understanding how to use it is just one of the skills today’s young journalists need to know.