Media Nation

Bringing the public into the conversation

New Haven's mayoral debate was held at the Metropolitan Business Academy.

Debates are easy. Civic engagement is hard.

That might be the lesson of last night’s multimedia mayoral debate in New Haven, sponsored by the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit news site, and La Voz Hispana, a Spanish-language newspaper.

As with several previous events organized by the Independent (most notably an education forum starring school-reform critic Diane Ravitch last November), the debate featured several different ways people could watch and participate. You could just show up, of course. But you could also watch one of two different livestreams, one provided by NBC Connecticut, the other by the New Haven Register, the local daily; post comments in real time; or add your thoughts after the debate. As of this writing, 15 comments have been posted at the Independent and 20 at the Register’s website.

Four candidates are running against Mayor John DeStefano, who’s been the city’s top elected official since 1993, and who may be vulnerable this time around because of budget problems, a rising crime rate and a sense that the electorate may be experiencing what might be called DeStefano fatigue.

But with five candidates on the stage, five journalists asking questions and another four journalists live-blogging the proceedings and interacting with those posting comments, keeping track of what was going on proved to be a bit of a challenge. (Fun fact: One of my colleagues at Northeastern, journalism professor Laurel Leff, has been working at the Independent this summer and was one of the live-bloggers.)

And though the hall itself was reportedly packed, it’s unclear how many people were watching at home. About 20 members of the public posted comments to the “Cover It Live” section during the debate, not counting me.

Of course, it would be easy enough to put together a more streamlined debate, but that would involve nixing the civic-engagement part of it. And getting people interested in local affairs is a key goal at the Independent — as it should be at all news organizations, since people are not going to pay attention to the news if they fundamentally don’t care about what is happening in their communities.

In fact, the Independent recently won a national award for the Ravitch event and for several issues-oriented webcasts it’s hosted in collaboration with the NBC affiliate. Yesterday, Independent publisher and editor Paul Bass spoke with John Dankosky of WNPR Radio (who also participated in last night’s debate as a live-blogger) about the New Haven mayoral race and his vision of how media technology can be used to involve the public in the conversation.

It’s something that the preening panelists at last night’s Republican presidential debate in Ames, Iowa, might think about.

New Haven Independent photo by Thomas MacMillan. Republished by permission.

Boehner puts words in Obama’s mouth

It looks like House Speaker John Boehner put out a fake quote attributed to President Obama, and that no one is going to call him on it.

Here it is in the New York Times: “President Obama likes to talk about being ‘the adult in the room’ — but there’s nothing ‘adult’ about political grandstanding.” Politico’s got it, and so does the Hill. What’s missing from these accounts is the fact that, as best as I can tell, Obama never said it, even though Boehner’s statement helpfully places the phrase in quotation marks.

If you hop on the Google, you’ll find numerous references to Obama’s being “the adult in the room.” It’s a line being promoted by his aides and denigrated by his critics. Fine. But there’s a huge difference between having someone say it on your behalf and saying it yourself. The former is a tactic; the latter is kind of icky.

As journalistic sins go, this one is kind of minor. But when the Speaker quotes the president in a derogatory way, using words the president never actually spoke, the media ought to call him out on it, no?

The New Yorker’s underwhelming iPad app

Given the New York Times’ rather rhapsodic take on the New Yorker’s iPad app, I was surprised by how underwhelming it turned out to be when I finally gave it a test. I installed it on Mrs. Media Nation’s first-generation iPad, loaded in the current issue — and found it to be almost identical to the PDF-like version that the New Yorker makes available to its print subscribers, a.k.a. the “digital edition.”

There was one key difference, and I’ll grant you it’s an important one: the digital edition requires you to move the pages around on your computer screen, making them bigger and smaller and switching around among columns, maneuvers that have long made most of us despise PDFs. The iPad version, by contrast, automatically formats to the screen. That’s a big improvement.

Other than that, though, I found the app to be rather flat and uninspiring. Yes, the Times review emphasized that it was designed for people who just want to read rather than be dazzled. But there’s a middle ground between a plain reproduction of a magazine and a distracting multimedia extravaganza. I’d have liked to see the New Yorker aim for that middle ground.

That said, it was a nice way to read Ryan Lizza’s excellent profile of Michele Bachmann — especially since the mailman hasn’t seen fit to deliver our print edition yet.

An outrageous attack on small businesses

I’d feel better about the war against craft brewers being called off if State Treasurer Steve Grossman had had a few harsh words to say about his Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission. Last week the ABCC proposed a rule that came out of nowhere, threatening the livelihoods of business owners and the jobs of their employees.

Though Grossman conceded the ABCC made a “mistake,” the commission apparently is still going to hold hearings concerning a rule that 50 percent of the ingredients used by craft brewers come from Massachusetts — a requirement that is literally impossible to meet.

Rather than hearings, what we need is a new ABCC. Or no ABCC. Take your pick.

Creative Commons and the U.S. Senate campaign

Brown headshot was taken from this picture

The Bob Massie campaign is using a photo I took of U.S. Sen. Scott Brown on its Half-Term Senator website. I just want to be clear that all content on Media Nation is published under a Creative Commons license, which means that anyone is free to use it for non-commercial purposes, with certain restrictions. I receive no compensation. The complete terms of the license are online here.

The Massie campaign neither sought nor needed my permission. A campaign official asked me if my Creative Commons license covers photos as well as text. I told her it did, and that was the end of it. Anyone else is free to use it as well — including, of course, the Brown campaign.

The photo, by the way, is from a debate involving Brown, Attorney General Martha Coakley and independent candidate Joseph Kennedy held at WBZ-TV (Channel 4) in December 2009.

To learn more about Creative Commons, click here.

Forbes tries to justify four-year error

The Boston Globe checks in with Forbes to find out how the magazine’s annual rankings could penalize Northeastern University for having a low four-year graduation rate given that it is a five-year school. And a magazine editor actually defends the methodology, saying, well, gee, we’ve got to base our rankings on something.

We also learn that 27.5 percent of the rankings are based on student satisfaction, “determined primarily by feedback on RateMyProfessors.com.” Wow. Without getting into the pros and cons of RateMyProfessors, let me just observe that the sample size for most instructors is so low that the data are entirely anecdotal.

It was a dark and Storified night

The next time I teach Reinventing the News, we will be using Storify. Take a look at how the Valley Independent Sentinel in Ansonia, Conn., covered a storm earlier this week, using Storify to bring together tweets, text, video and photos.

Someone at Forbes should have gone to Northeastern

I really should be working, but I can’t let this pass. Forbes has posted its rankings of colleges and universities, and Northeastern comes in at a very low 534th.

Dig a little deeper, as one of my former students, @rachelsarahsays, did, and you’ll see that one of the reasons for the poor ranking is Northeastern’s four-year graduation rate — zero percent.

Uh, Northeastern is a five-year school. Good work, Forbes! Or, as @rachelsarahsays puts it, “such horrific journalism.” Indeed.

Norfolk DA, OpenCourt battle over video archives

A suspect’s lawyer blurts out the name of a 15-year-old girl whom prosecutors say was forced into prostitution. Several newspaper reporters hear the name. Even though they have the right to use it under the First Amendment, it’s understood that they won’t — it would be unethical journalistically, it would compromise the criminal case and it would traumatize the alleged victim.

Despite all that, the district attorney’s office goes to court to prevent a news organization’s video from being posted online, even though the folks who run that organization say they have no intention of uploading it until the identifying information has been removed.

In essence, that’s how OpenCourt characterizes a lawsuit brought by Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey, which will be heard before Supreme Judicial Court Justice Margaret Botsford later today. The Boston Globe reports on the suit here; WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), with which OpenCourt is affiliated, reports on it here; and Open Court has its own take, with lots of background material, here.

Headed by WBUR’s executive editor for new media, John Davidow, OpenCourt received a $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant to livestream court proceedings and to make it easier for journalists, both professional and citizen, to provide coverage via Twitter and live-blogging. OpenCourt began livestreaming from Quincy District Court in May.

The issue of archiving those videos has proved to be contentious, with Morrissey’s office arguing that the archives — including the one involving the 15-year-old — could compromise “the privacy and safety of victims and witnesses.” Davidow responds that OpenCourt would be guided by the same ethical guidelines as any news organization, and that a legally imposed ban would be an unconstitutional abridgement of free speech. Davidow tells the Globe’s John Ellement:

This is really taking reporting that is done every day and then trying to take the editorial aspects away from journalists and put them in the hands of the state to decide what is published and what is not…. [O]nce we lawfully covered a story that was published, then it is up to the news organization to decide what to do with that material.

What Morrissey’s office is trying to do is to take long-established customs recognized by journalists and law-enforcement authorities alike and codify those customs into law, even though there is no reason to believe OpenCourt would act less responsibly than, say, the Quincy Patriot Ledger. It would set a dangerous precedent, and I hope the SJC does what is clearly the right thing.