Two headlines on reports about the same survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education:
- Boston Globe: “Public college presidents feeling salary pinch” (Associated Press)
- New York Times: “Pay Rises for Leaders of Colleges, Survey Says” (staff report)
Tag: New York Times
Citizen media and the earthquake in Haiti
Note: This item originally included a photograph of a woman being rescued that was cited as an example of citizen media. On March 16, I was informed that the photo was, in fact, the copyrighted work of Daniel Morel, a professional photojournalist. Please see this for more information.
Update: Wednesday, 7:21 p.m. We are posting more links in the comments.
Ever since a tsunami devastated South Asia in December 2004, social media and citizen journalism have been recognized as key components of covering natural disasters and other breaking news stories. Professional news organizations can’t be everywhere; on the other hand, millions of people are carrying cell phones with cameras. New-media expert Steve Outing called the tsunami “a tipping point” for citizen journalism.
In such a decentralized news environment, the challenge for journalism has been to make sense of what is happening in something approaching real time. Most recently, social media have played an important role in bringing news of the Iranian protest movement to the outside world.
So when a major earthquake hit western Haiti yesterday, it was no surprise that news organizations, large and small, tapped into Haiti’s online community in order to provide them with the on-the-ground eyes and ears they did not have. Given Haiti’s unfortunate status as one of the poorest countries in the world, you might not think there would be much in the way of electronic communication. In fact, there is a lively and heartbreaking stream of reports coming out of the island.
I’ll begin closest to home. Last night the Boston Haitian Reporter started a live blog to gather accounts from readers and to link out to relevant information. The blog includes a live Twitter stream of news from Haiti. As the Boston Globe observes, there are 43,000 people of Haitian descent living in Greater Boston.
The New York Times, which over the past few years has morphed into one of the most Internet-savvy news organizations, has, not surprisingly, posted stories, a slideshow and a Reuters video. But the real action is taking place on The Lede, its blog for breaking news, which includes everything from staff reports to cell-phone photos posted to TwitPic. The Times has put together a Twitter list of people and organizations posting news updates about Haiti. And it is actively soliciting reports from its readers:
The New York Times would like to connect people inside and outside Haiti who are searching for information about the situation on the ground. Readers outside Haiti who have friends and relatives in the country, along with readers in Haiti who are still able to access the Internet, can use the comments section below as a forum to share updates. Some readers may be searching for the same family members.
Have you been able to reach loved ones in the area affected by the earthquake? What have you learned from people there?
National Public Radio’s efforts bear some similarities to those of the Times. NPR is concentrating its breaking-news and linking efforts on its blog The Two-Way, and it has also assembled a Twitter list.
CNN, whose iReport project is a major outlet for citizen journalists, has put together a page on the Haitian earthquake. As is often the case with citizen media, it’s not always easy to tell what you’re looking at. Some of the images are quite graphic, and are slapped with a label reading “Discretion advised.”
One of my favorite examples of professional journalists and citizen bloggers working together is Global Voices Online, a project founded at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society several years ago. Global Voices’ editors round up bloggers from every part of the world. For the most part, they labor in obscurity. But not at moments like this.
As of this morning you’ll find a compilation of tweets and photos and a digest of what bloggers in Haiti and throughout the Caribbean are saying. Here is Afrobella, described as a “Trinidadian diaspora blogger”:
Right now my heart aches for Haiti. The already-suffering island nation was just hit with a 7.0 earthquake. A hospital has collapsed. Government buildings have been severely damaged. There was a major tsunami watch, earlier. Reports of major devastation are just starting to pour in…my thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Haiti, and anyone with friends or family in Haiti.
You can also click through directly to Afrobella’s blog.
Twitter itself is a good source of raw information. At the moment, Yéle, a charity founded by Haitian-American musician Wyclef Jean, is the number-two trending topic, and “Help Haiti” is number three. If you want to dip into the Twitter torrent, try searching on #haiti.
New York Times layoffs hit Boston
Boston-based national reporter Sara Rimer is among those who will lose their jobs as a result of layoffs at the New York Times, according to New York Magazine (via Romenesko). If the Boston Globe were hiring, she’d be a great pick-up.
New GlobeReader adds puzzle and is puzzling
The Boston Globe is taking its GlobeReader product in a different direction, and I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense.
First, the good news: it’s gotten better. GlobeReader now includes a feature that lets you copy or e-mail a link, just like the parent company’s Times Reader. It’s also added the crossword puzzle, comics, a weather map and TV listings.
Now for the not-so-good. Previously GlobeReader was free to all print subscribers, including those who took home delivery only on Sundays. Moreover, you couldn’t have it for any price unless you were at least a Sunday subscriber. Given that the Globe reportedly earns some two-thirds of its revenues from the Sunday edition, the strategy seemed like a reasonably smart way of preserving the Sunday paper.
The new GlobeReader, by contrast, is available without any home delivery at all. The cost: $4.98 a week. But if you want to get it for free, you need to take home delivery of the print edition seven days a week. Otherwise, you’ll have to pay something. (I called a very polite clerk at the Globe who struggled to explain what the cost of GlobeReader would be for Sunday subscribers. It was nominal, but it wasn’t free.)
In other words, the Globe has given me a choice that it doesn’t want me to make. Several months ago, we switched to Sunday-only delivery, supplemented by GlobeReader the other six days. If we stick with Sundays-only, we’ll pay extra for GlobeReader. We could resume seven-day print delivery — but we’ve already decided we can’t afford $50 a month. Or we could pay $21 or $22 a month for GlobeReader access only. That couldn’t possibly be good for the Globe, since GlobeReader is practically ad-free.
(Conversely, this may make sense as we move into what may prove to be the post-advertising age. With no printing or distribution costs, GlobeReader is pure revenue.)
I should note, too, that the New York Times has long made Times Reader available for free to Sunday-only subscribers like us. Perhaps that’s going to change as well.
It strikes me that the new strategy, rather than shoring up the Sunday edition, will simply encourage customers to sign up for GlobeReader seven days a week — or read the paper for free at Boston.com. Although we hear from time to time that that may be coming to an end as well.
Like all newspapers, the first imperative for the Globe is to survive, and to make enough money to support a robust journalistic mission. I’m not sure this is the way to do it. But I guess we’ll find out.
The New York Times’ non-profit partners
What should we think about a partnership the New York Times has announced with a Chicago non-profit news organization that will supply two pages of news each week for the Times’ new Chicago edition?
On the one hand, the Times, a for-profit enterprise, is using material from a non-profit in order to take business away from two other for-profit enterprises, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. (Earlier, a similar arrangement was announced for a San Francisco edition of the Times.)
I’m a huge fan of non-profit journalism, but this strikes me as raising the specter of unfair competition. The non-profit, after all, enjoys certain tax advantages not available to a for-profit.
On the other hand, no one objects when for-profit newspapers run material from non-profit news organizations such as the Christian Science Monitor. My gut tells me this is different, but I can’t explain why.
We’re all debating whether for-profit newspapers can or should take the non-profit route. At least in a small way, the Times is now doing exactly that through the back door.
A landmark in database reporting
Every editor in the United States today should be poring over the database that the New York Times assembled — and put online — to accompany its horrifying story on the disastrous state of our public water supplies.
Good as the Times story is, the paper’s decision to go open source with its data is what really makes this stand out. Searchable and state and by zip code, you can look up water facilities and their inspection records in recent years. If I were an editor, I’d want to make sure I got to the bottom of every one of those inspection reports before a citizen journalist could beat me to it.
In the Times story, by Charles Duhigg, we learn about the family of Jennifer Hall-Massey. She, her husband and their two boys live near Charleston, W. Va., where coal companies have so polluted the water supply that people’s teeth are wearing away and simple exposure causes painful skin rashes. Hall-Massey blames a number of deaths and illnesses on the water supply as well.
My former Phoenix colleague Kristen Lombardi has done some groundbreaking reporting on coal and the environment for the Center for Public Integrity. Highly recommended.
Water is one of the great untold stories in environmental journalism. I spent a good part of the 1980s covering the Woburn toxic-waste case, made famous in Jonathan Harr’s book “A Civil Action” and a subsequent movie.
Unfortunately, the families whose children suffered from leukemia and other health problems were not able to prove their case, and ended up reaching an unsatisfying settlement with one of the suspected polluters, W.R. Grace.
Because of Woburn and Love Canal, water was a big story in the late 1970s and ’80s. It’s time for it to take its rightful place again. The Times’ package should be just the beginning. Fortunately, it has provided the tools necessary for every news organization to find out what’s happening locally.
9/11/09
“Portraits of Grief,” the New York Times’ tribute to the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, is still online. It was a moving tribute to the the lives that were lost on that day. It was also an early breakthrough for online journalism.
The folly of casino gambling
There’s a terrific front-page story in today’s New York Times on the sagging fortunes of the casino-gambling industry. Ian Urbina reports that casinos may well be reaching the saturation point, as more and more are chasing the same number of customers.
In New Jersey, legislators have repealed no-smoking regulations in order to entice gamblers. In Illinois, there’s actually a proposal to keep gamblers liquored up with free drinks so they’ll keep blowing their money.
Urbina writes:
“When budgets get tight, expanding gambling always looks to lawmakers like the perfect quick-fix solution,” said John Kindt, a professor of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois who studies the impact of state-sponsored gambling. “But in the end, it so often proves to be neither quick nor a fix.”
Crime jumps 10 percent in areas with casinos, personal bankruptcies soar 18 percent to 42 percent and the number of new gambling addicts doubles, Mr. Kindt said. Predicted state revenue often falls short and plans frequently get tripped up by legal fights or popular opposition, he said.
With Gov. Deval Patrick, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Senate president Therese “Ka-ching!” Murray expected to make a renewed push for expanded gambling this fall, the Times story is as timely as it is important.
Crime, bankruptcies, addiction — is this what our state leaders want?
The future of investigative reporting?
If you looked closely, you may have noticed that the cover story of the New York Times Magazine yesterday — a long, harrowing examination of accusations that the staff of a New Orleans hospital euthanized several patients following Hurricane Katrina — was a collaboration with ProPublica, a non-profit investigative-reporting foundation.
According to Zachary Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab, the 13,000-word story may have cost as much as $400,000 (perhaps a bit of an exaggeration) to produce — a huge chunk for the Times, but in this case the paper spent nothing: a grant from the Kaiser Foundation paid for much of the reporting. It’s the sort of alternative funding model that may help to ensure the future of investigative journalism.
The story, by ProPublica’s Sheri Fink, is available not only on the Times’ Web site, but also at ProPublica.org. And starting Sept. 29, anyone can run it for free as long as proper attribution is provided.
Fink’s investigation centers on Dr. Anna Pou, a cancer specialist who may have killed several patients who, in her judgment, were near the end of their lives and could not be rescued. As with much good investigative reporting, the story is inconclusive, yet absolutely riveting in describing the despair that had settled over Memorial Medical Center — sweltering, without power and all but abandoned.
Implicit is that regardless of Pou’s actions, the real blame should be laid at the feet of incompetent government officials who abandoned New Orleans to its fate for days on end.
The Times’ missing corrections
The New York Times today is loaded with corrections, including a dread “Editor’s Note.” None of them appear in Times Reader, the paper’s paid downloadable edition optimized for laptop reading.
This problem goes back months. I’ve posted about it on Twitter, and was told by a Times staffer that she was sure someone was on it. Well, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Times doesn’t take Times Reader all that seriously. Too bad.