Tag: new media

Josh Marshall 101

Noam Cohen profiles Josh Marshall in the New York Times following Marshall’s winning a Polk Award for his coverage of the U.S. attorneys scandal. Cohen kindly quotes me at some length.

As I noted last week in a blog post for my students, Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and related sites have pioneered a new kind of investigative reporting that combines the journalistic expertise of Marshall and his crew with the decentralized knowledge of their readers.

As citizen-journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor has memorably put it, “my readers know more than I do.” Marshall has figured out how to tap into that knowledge and make sense of it.

Politicker’s “secret sauce”

The New York Times explains what Politicker.com is all about. The idea is to provide each of the 50 states with its own political-news site combining blogging with more traditional forms of journalism. New Jersey’s site, more fully developed than the rest at this point, will be the model.

Politicker is the project that recently snared Boston.com political blogger James Pindell to be its national managing editor. Sounds interesting, but I’m not sure what to make of this:

Most states will be covered by one or two reporters, one editor working on contract from inside the state, and an undetermined number of bloggers. The editors — who will remain anonymous, and will include lawyers, lobbyists and former officeholders — are the “secret sauce,” Mr. Sommer said.

Sommer is Robert Sommer, president of the Observer Media Group, which owns Politicker.

“Secret sauce” is the reason I don’t order Big Macs, and I’m not so sure I’m going to like it in my political news, either. Anonymous lobbyists? How is that a good idea?

What’s new is old again

Clint Hendler tries to be kind in his assessment of washingtonpost.com’s primary-night video coverage. But in the end, he observes at CJR.org, it was just TV. That the Grahams can now offer a fourth cable news channel via the Web is nice, but it’s not exactly the new-media breakthrough we’ve been waiting for. He writes:

Here’s an organization with an impressive roster of journalism pros, people who cover beats day in and day out. Bring all that to bear on an election night, and you can see how it might be the start of something special. At the same time, I could help thinking that this future looked rather old. I was seeing a newspaper ape a newscast.

I caught a few minutes of it on Tuesday. I logged in for Barack Obama’s speech. It was nothing special, and it was jerkier and less in sync than it would have been if I’d watched CNN. According to Hendler, if I’d stuck around I could have heard Jeff Jarvis say “There is no such thing as print journalism any more” for the nine-millionth time.

It might have been better than the cable nets, but it was too hard to watch. Level the technological playing field and I’ll pick the one I like best.

News is a (nasty) conversation

The participatory model of journalism is one of the more interesting experiments taking place in news these days. But it’s got a downside. Adam Gaffin posts this item about the comments sections being shut down at three local GateHouse weeklies — the Somerville Journal, the Swampscott Reporter and, now, the Cambridge Chronicle.

It’s a shame, but I’m not surprised. Sooner rather than later, news orgs are going to have to move away from allowing anonymous and pseudonymous comments and instead require people to post under their real names. Right now, no editor dares to take that step on the theory that the comments will disappear. But it has to happen.

Busy editors and reporters don’t have time to monitor every anonymous comment as it comes in. This isn’t about technology; it’s about common sense. Letters to the editor are rarely published without the writer’s name attached. If anything, online comments, which are posted automatically and without editing, ought to be held to a higher standard.

Inspired to be wired

If you scroll down the right-hand column of this blog, you will eventually come to a graphic I posted last week for Wired Journalists. The site, started recently by Ryan Sholin, Howard Owens and Zac Echola, is a social network for journalists who are interested and involved in changing the way news organizations do business. The mission statement opens thusly:

WiredJournalists.com was created with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind.

Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

You don’t need the best equipment, the biggest budget or even management support to accomplish worthy goals. The only requirement is a willingness to learn and a mind open to new ways of thinking about journalism.

Wired Journalists is heavily oriented toward multimedia, with journalists invited to upload their photos and videos. But it’s open to anything, and people are already forming groups about a whole range of topics. There’s also a news feed of off-site material and a central gathering point for blog posts. I’ve created a Northeastern University group, and my students in Reinventing the News will be joining this afternoon.

As of this morning, there are already 968 members, which is pretty remarkable for a site that went live just a few weeks ago.

I find the platform for Wired Journalists to be as interesting as the content. It’s built on Ning, a DIY social-network environment created by Marc Andreessen, who helped write Mosaic and Netscape lo these many years ago. One thing I’ve never quite understood about the appeal of Facebook, MySpace et al. is that they’re semi-closed environments — it’s as though everyone suddenly started pointing to the pre-Web AOL as the cool new thing.

Ning allows anyone to create his or her own social network, which strikes me as a more promising model in the long run.

The multimedia journalist

It wasn’t long ago that a local reporter could head out on an assignment with nothing more than a notebook and a pen. Maybe a camera, but only if there were no photographers available. But those days are rapidly drawing to a close.

Take, for instance, Cathryn Keefe O’Hare, a longtime print and radio reporter who’s been editor of the Danvers Herald since 2000. The Herald is part of the GateHouse Media chain, which is pushing its journalists to supplement their stories with videos for its Wicked Local sites. O’Hare shot video for the first time last Memorial Day. Now she does it regularly.

For a Flickr slideshow of O’Hare shooting and editing her story, click on the photo above.

Last Monday I met her at the Danversport Yacht Club for the eighth annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Awards Dinner. It was a routine assignment — take some notes, write it up. It was also a good opportunity for her to put together a video package. And for me to tag along and watch how she does it.

O’Hare wielded a Casio Exilim ex5600, a tiny, relatively inexpensive piece of technology that shoots still photos, video and audio. She had a simple goal: to ask some of the 450 people who were on hand why they had chosen to attend and what King’s message meant to them. She shot in ambient light, which, as you’ll see, was good enough, if not perfect. Audio is recorded through a microphone in the front of the camera.

O’Hare still finds being a multimedia journalist a challenge. She stands on her tip-toes when interviewing people taller than she. A couple of interviews proved to be unusable. “It’s more stressful than just taking notes,” she says. But she got sufficient material to put together a nice video supplement to her print story.

Three days later I met her in the local GateHouse newsroom in Beverly, where she was editing her clips into a news video. She used Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker, a free program that lets you cut extraneous material out of the clips, piece them together in any order you like, and add transitions, titles and an extra soundtrack. (The Macintosh equivalent is iMovie.) O’Hare spliced in music from the Follow Hymn Interfaith Choir, which had performed on Monday, to supplement the interviews.

To read O’Hare’s story and watch her video, click on the YouTube graphic above.

Finished videos are uploaded to YouTube and then embedded on the Danvers Herald site. O’Hare still hasn’t figured out how to do that, so she leaves it to one of the regional managing editors, Peter Chianca.

“The thing that remains true, whether it’s in print journalism or the Internet or video, you have to tell a story,” says O’Hare. “And you have to tell it as true as you can make it. And you have to try to speak for those people who can’t tell their story.”

To listen to an audio interview with O’Hare, click here.

To watch other videos from the Danvers Herald, click here.

News as community

Good news for North Shore and Merrimack Valley news junkies. Starting Feb. 1, the Eagle-Tribune papers will open up their Web sites and provide all content for free. Currently, you have to be a paid subscriber to the print edition. The papers include four dailies, the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, the Daily News of Newburyport, the Salem News and the Gloucester Times.
Here’s the announcement.

What’s interesting about this isn’t that you’ll no longer have to pay. It’s that company executives have embraced the open Web, and now understand that there’s more value to be had — and more money to be made — by building online communities around their journalism.

They’ve been moving in that direction for some time with projects like RallyNorth.net, a separate site dedicated to high school sports and, more recently, the addition of Witches Brew, the Salem High School newspaper. Add in the blogs and multimedia features that are being integrated into the site, and you have a pretty good example of the “news as a conversation” model.

The Eagle-Tribune model is regional, as befits the four papers’ mission. GateHouse Media, which publishes weeklies in just about every community in Eastern Massachusetts (as well as a few dailies), takes a more hyperlocal approach with its Wicked Local sites. Here is the chain’s site for Danvers, which also happens to be one of the towns that the Salem News covers.

Slowly but surely, the news business is reinventing itself.

James Pindell is moving on

Boston.com political blogger James Pindell is leaving to take a job as national managing editor of something called Politicker.com. Here’s the announcement.

Pindell writes the Primary Source blog for Boston.com. Some of his stories appear in the Boston Globe as well. Keep an eye on him: He’s one of the more interesting young people working in Web-based journalism today, having covered the New Hampshire primary in 2004 as editor of the late, lamented PoliticsNH.com.

As I tell my students, this may be a lousy time to pursue a traditional career path in journalism, but it’s a great time if you’re willing to be entrepreneurial and embrace new ways of doing things. Pindell gets new media in a way that most journalists don’t, making himself accessible by e-mail and AIM, and building a community around his work via Facebook.

His work for Boston.com and the Globe may be of interest mainly to political junkies. But because of his vision about where journalism is going, this is a big loss to the Globe.

Photo of Pindell is copyright (c) by Bill Fish Photography and published here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.