Moving on at the Globe

Adam Reilly has a column in this week’s Boston Phoenix that attempts to put talk of a 10 percent wage cut at the Boston Globe in a larger context of union contracts, obsolescence and the future of the newspaper business.

What interested me, though, were the words of an unnamed newsroom insider, who demonstrated that there are some people at 135 Morrissey Boulevard who get it, and who are ready to move on:

It’s weird having white-collar and blue-collar workers in the same union, because they think differently. They’re trying to preserve something that’s dying. We understand it’s dying, and we don’t want to hang on to it. We want to go forward.

I’m not sure if this is the same source talking, but this, from later on in Reilly’s piece, is interesting nevertheless:

There’s no financial model that’ll stop the bleeding. We deliver a product whose business model doesn’t work. Printing a newspaper on paper and delivering it to people is not sustainable.

If the Globe is to survive, it needs to move quickly to an all-online or mostly online model, with the print edition subordinate to the Web. There are still a lot of smart people at the Globe, and I don’t doubt that they know this, starting with editor Marty Baron.

What we may be witnessing now, with the losses continuing to mount, is one of those turning points at which a slow transition suddenly becomes a stampede.

Using a blogging tool as a CMS

Blogging tools can only go so far, apparently. I’m the editor of my church’s Web site, and I’m planning a relaunch sometime later this summer or fall. At first I thought I would simply do it all in HTML with Sea Monkey or KompoZer.

But I realized I wanted a basic content-management system that could handle menu updates and that would provide a slicker look than I could do on my own. Mainly I need a CMS with short, flat learning curve. That rules out Drupal or Joomla, to name two solutions that webmasters who are smarter than I am get very excited about.

My thoughts turned to a free blogging platform. Naturally, though, neither of the easiest solutions is quite right.

WordPress.com offers the ability to create as many static pages as I want, and even allows me to set one of those static pages as the home page, with the blog residing somewhere underneath. That gets me 95 percent of the way there, and, frankly, it’s probably what I’m going to settle on. But customizing the template is, for all intents and purposes, not allowed. I can’t make the type size bigger. I don’t seem to be able to dump the blog-post calendar, which I’m afraid people will confuse with the church’s calendar of events.

I could try WordPress.org, but that would draw me into a world of effort and confusion that I’m trying to avoid. (See Drupal and Joomla, above.)

Blogger.com is much more flexible and easily customized. But it offers no static pages, which rules it out.

Frustrating.

Old ethics and new media (II)

The comments to my earlier post have transformed this into a substantive, productive conversation about journalism and standards in the new-media age. You’ll find intelligent posts on all sides of the issue, from outraged readers to GateHouse Media editors and executives.

I’m humbled by how much better the quality of the discussion is compared to my original post. As Dan Gillmor likes to say, “My readers know more than I do.”

Old ethics and new media

Let’s say some local yahoos decide to rent a truck, bolt a giant model of a penis to the front (complete with squirting water!) and festoon the sides of the truck with messages so crude and offensive that I’m not going to quote them.

Let’s say they decide to enter the truck as a float in a parade that is attended by hundreds of families and children.

Let’s say, further, that the people on the float decide it would be a fun idea to throw condoms at the crowd.

Of course, you already know this is not a hypothetical.

There are many ways of looking at the fallout from the “Horribles” parade in Beverly Farms, which featured three floats — including the one I just described — that made fun of the Gloucester High School pregnancy story.

Here’s another angle: the responsibility of community journalists, who are no longer armed just with a notebook and a pen but with video cameras as well.

The Beverly Citizen, a GateHouse Media paper, is in the spotlight because of a video that it posted showing all the highlights and lowlights, including some close-ups of the aforementioned penis and the signs.

Does the video go too far? I’ll take a cue from the Citizen itself. The news story, by Bobby Gates, is almost prissy in its description of the controversy. Not a single offensive sign is quoted from. As for the float, the story rather clinically refers to a “large, realistically shaped phallic symbol spraying water from the front of a truck.”

Even more out of sync with the video is a post on the Citizen’s blog that asserts the floats “went over the line” by mocking teenage girls. The signs? “And I won’t even go into the signs on the floats, which were lewd at best.” Well, OK. But the blog post was written by “dmacalpine.” And the video was shot by Dan Mac Alpine, whose camera hovered so seductively over the very signs that he (or maybe it was his doppelgänger?) didn’t think he could quote in his newspaper’s blog.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here. I do know that quick-and-cheap video is posing a challenge to community journalists, who are finding themselves embroiled in controversy for shooting footage of subjects that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if they merely described them in writing. That was the case at another GateHouse paper, the Somerville Journal, a few months ago, when its video of the Naked Quad Run at Tufts University sparked discussion and even outrage.

The current, situation, though, is different, as the Citizen is traveling much further in its video than it dares go in its written description. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Let me go back to my original question: Does the video go too far? I think it does. I haven’t checked, but I am confident that neither the squirting penis nor the worst of the signs made it on to any of the local television newscasts. I know that both were left on the cutting-room floor in a news video I watched at the Fox 25 Web site, and it’s probably safe to say that no one is going to go beyond our friends at Fox.

Except, it seems, the Beverly Citizen.

Look, it happened. Hundreds of people saw it. Hundreds more heard about it. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise. But if they didn’t think they should quote from the signs, then they shouldn’t have showed them in the video. As for the penis — well, let just say I think the written description was sufficient.

The folks at GateHouse are not bad people. They’re hard-working journalists trying to find their way in a news landscape that’s changing by the day. I’d rather see them taking too many chances than too few. I’m neither horrified nor offended by what they did. But I do think they made the wrong call in this case.

Update: The Salem News runs a front-page photo of the penis-bearing truck in its print edition. But unless you’ve seen the video, it’s impossible to figure out what you’re looking at. Here’s the News’ story.

High crimes and misdemeanors

In my latest for The Guardian, I dismiss the notion — put forth by the dean of the Massachusetts School of Law — to put President Bush and other top officials on trial for war crimes. But if Nuremberg II isn’t the answer, surely there must be some way of holding him — and us — accountable for the past seven and a half years.

Mapping the news

[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&s=AARTsJqk45NKetz9D5BTerMp52vrwyCpPA&msa=0&msid=110849334117410151532.00045173201c2c61999fb&ll=42.596565,-70.878296&spn=0.353826,0.583649&z=10&output=embed&w=425&h=350]
Among the more important skills that young journalists need to learn is how to incorporate mapping into a news presentation. The easiest way to do this is with Google Maps. I’ve put together a demonstration based on today’s Salem News, mapping the addresses where five stories took place.

This is far from the best application of mapping and journalism. I just wanted to see if I could get it to work. One glitch: Whenever I type in an address, I get a non-removable red marker. Since the Ipswich story is the last one I mapped, you’ll see a red marker partially hidden behind the blue marker. Anyone know how to get rid of that?

You’ll probably need to click on “View Larger Map” in order to see anything.

Update: Hmmm … the glitch seems to have magically disappeared.

Disability and difference

I’ve got an essay (PDF) in the current issue of ArchitectureBoston on the uneasy confluence of dwarfism, disability and difference.

Why ArchitectureBoston? Because the editor, Elizabeth Padjen, asked me. And because the assignment gives me the opportunity to discuss dwarfism as a disability that is socially constructed: take away the fact that the built environment is made for people between five and six feet tall, and the disability goes with it.

Dwarfism as disability and difference is a major theme of my 2003 book on dwarfism, “Little People.”

What Ailes a media critic

New York Times media columnist David Carr weighs in with a terrific inside look at how Fox News tries to smother even the mildest of unfavorable coverage with freezeouts, smears and, yes, doctored photos. And, he admits, it sometimes works:

By blacklisting reporters it does not like, planting stories with friendlies at every turn, Fox News has been living a life beyond consequence for years. Honesty compels me to admit that I have choked a few times at the keyboard when Fox News has come up in a story and it was not absolutely critical to the matter at hand.

Carr also cites a Fox News spokeswoman who says the most recent outrage — altering photos of Times media reporter Jacques Steinberg and his editor — was no biggie because cable news programs often engage in such antics for humorous effect.

That, of course, is pathetic. There was nothing funny about the Photoshopping; the two men were simply uglified for an audience that had no idea what they actually look like. Carr finds the plastic surgery done on Steinberg to be anti-Semitic, which is a very tough accusation. But I think he’s right.

Thanks to Carr’s column, the war between Fox and the Times is now fully engaged. It will be interesting to see what comes next.