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.

Changing your mind is … unpatriotic?

You’re going to see a lot of this, unfortunately. McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers couldn’t manage a comment on Obama’s shift on Iraq without attacking his patriotism. Here is Rogers in the New York Times:

There is nothing wrong with changing your mind when the facts on the ground dictate it. Indeed, the facts have changed because of the success of the surge that John McCain advocated for years and Barack Obama opposed in a position that put politics ahead of country.

That last bit is so awkwardly grafted on that it’s obviously deliberate. And it’s going to happen a lot. Here we begin to see the real harm in Wesley Clark’s true but impolitic remarks about McCain’s getting shot down not being a qualification for president: they are so easily mischaracterized as an attack on McCain’s military service that they can be seen as justifying questions about Obama’s patriotism.

I recommend this David Greenberg essay in Slate on how patriotism has played out in presidential politics.

Dean screamed

Why am I posting the most overplayed clip in American political history? Because Paul Krugman today writes in the New York Times, “Howard Dean didn’t scream.”

Krugman adds: “Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.” Yes, we have. And I can go along with his other examples: Krugman correctly points out that Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet, Hillary Clinton did not say she was continuing to campaign because Barack Obama might be assassinated and Wesley Clark did not impugn John McCain’s military service. (Although Clinton’s and Clark’s remarks were impolitic in the extreme.)

But come on. Dean screamed.

Fox moves from eccentric to weird

Is it just me, or do the Fox News Channel‘s recent missteps strike you as qualitatively different from what has come before? It’s as though your eccentric uncle has finally gone off the deep end, his uncertain grounding in reality having given way to something else entirely.

The latest, as you may have heard, is that Fox altered photos of two New York Times reporters to make them appear more sinister, elongating their faces, yellowing their teeth and giving one of them a receding hairline.

That follows Fox’s labeling Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama!”, and Fox host E.D. Hill’s wondering whether the Obamas’ playful fist bump was a “terrorist fist jab.”

You can dismiss all of this as right-wing propaganda if you like. I’m not so sure. It strikes me as genuinely nutty, and it makes me wonder whether the rudder has fallen off.

Think it has anything to do with Roger Ailes’ being unhappy over the nice things Rupert Murdoch has said about Barack Obama? Just wondering.

Tweaking Gmail with IMAP

It’s tech week at Media Nation. Fresh from foisting my video issues on you, I thought I’d give an update on my ongoing efforts to make Gmail dance to my tune.

Taking some excellent advice from a few astute readers, I set up Apple Mail to engage in two-way communication with Gmail via IMAP. As promised, this proved to be a far better set-up than accessing Gmail via POP. With IMAP, Apple Mail is more or less in constant contact with Gmail, syncing messages and folders so that what’s on my hard drive is exactly the same as what’s in my Gmail account.

One thing that surprised me after I first set up Apple Mail was that copies of all my Gmail messages (and I save pretty much everything except spam) were downloaded automatically to my hard drive. I suppose that’s the idea. But what about when an iPhone user sets up IMAP communications with Gmail? Do all those messages get downloaded to the iPhone, too? That doesn’t make much sense.

Now, here’s the best part. My biggest problem with Gmail is the way it interfaces with my Northeastern account. I had set up Gmail so that it would grab my NU mail. But occasionally there are delays of an hour or more — usually not a big deal, but sometimes critical. Also, although I haven’t found any specific examples for a while, I swear that there were occasions when important NU mail never made it to Gmail.

So, I reconfigured Gmail to stop receiving NU mail, and then set up a separate Northeastern account in Apple Mail using POP (no IMAP available). Now all my NU mail is downloaded directly to my hard drive, bypassing Gmail completely. And once I’ve got it, I can move it into Apple Mail folders that are then synced to Gmail and its labeling system. It gives me all the advantages of Gmail with none of the disadvantages.

I had hoped to be able to sync Gmail Contacts with my Apple Address Book. But to do that, you need an iPhone or an iPod Touch, or a willingness to hack your Mac. Fortunately, it was simple to export my Gmail Contacts as vCards and then import them into Address Book.

All of which means that I’ve attained e-mail nirvana, right? Well, not quite. Here are some issues that probably can’t be solved, and that I’m trying to decide whether I can live with or not:

  • Cloud computing is better than desktop computing. The single best thing about Gmail is that you’re doing everything on Google’s servers. You don’t have to worry about which computer you’re working on. And you don’t have to have a bunch of different programs open. I’ve now got Apple Mail and Address Book running pretty much all the time, and that’s on top of Firefox, NewsFire, Word and whatever else I’ve got running.
  • Gmail is more aesthetically pleasing than Apple Mail. And it’s not just aesthetics. Gmail lets you compose a perfectly formatted HTML message. Apple Mail is stuck in RTF, even though it seems perfectly capable of reading HTML. I often find myself switching to Gmail to compose, secure in the knowledge that IMAP will bring everything back together in the end.
  • Labels are better than folders. Apple Mail uses folders. Gmail uses labels. IMAP makes a seamless transition from folders to labels. But, in Gmail, you can assign more than one label to a message. You can’t do that with folders.
  • No more Gmail Chat. Not unless I fire up Gmail. I don’t use it that much anyway, but I like to know it’s there.

What’s my bottom line? I haven’t quite decided yet. In a perfect world, I would stick with Gmail on the Web, but my Northeastern account is enough of a complicating factor that a hybrid solution probably makes more sense.

One thing I have not yet done is take up another reader’s suggestion and take Mailplane for a test drive. I did poke around the site a little bit, and I’m not sure it would make my life any easier. If anyone has tried it, I’d be interested to know what you think.

For that clean, squeaky Gmail Soap feeling, click here.

Fair use: The video (II)

I’ve re-uploaded my fair-use video to fix the whopper of a typo that Donna Halper found. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Steve Garfield and John Farrell, the quality is the same.

I did apply some custom settings when creating a QuickTime file, and it looked terrific on my MacBook. But YouTube didn’t like the file, playing the audio without any trouble but presenting the video as a series of stills.