By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
More from my Reinventing the News students:
That will be it for tonight, as I need to file with the Guardian soon. Sooner than I can manage, probably.
My Reinventing the News students are hitting the polls today. Some early returns:
I’ll try to link to more student posts as I find them.
Thought you might get a kick out of a news video I put together as a demonstration for my Reinventing the News class at Northeastern. Not gripping journalism, but evidence that modern media tools make it possible even for an old guy like me to make credible-looking video.
The breakthrough here is that I figured out how to add B-roll with iMovie 7 (also known as iMovie ’08 under Apple’s bizarre naming conventions). I used stills for the B-roll in this example, but the principle would be the same if I had used video instead.
The Associated Press reports on the launch of the New England First Amendment Center, founded by the New England First Amendment Coalition, Northeastern’s School of Journalism and the Center for Urban and Regional Policy.
Northeastern’s coordinator, Walter Robinson, explains that the center will focus on ensuring access to public records, telling the AP: “Most of the people that reporters and citizens deal with who have the information — they are not up on the law — and if people understood the law better, if we had better public education on this, then we would have better compliance.”
Adds Steve Burgard, director of the J-school: “We hope a center like this for many people will be place where they can go to learn what the law is and how they can use it.”
The center’s Web site includes a blog, to which I’ll contribute occasionally.
Here is the official announcement.
My Northeastern colleague Walter Robinson, who broke the story of John McCain’s lobbying on behalf of Paxson Communications in January 2000, talks about the McCain story in a Boston.com chat. Romenesko’s got the link, as well as links to three of Robinson’s pieces on McCain’s ties to lobbyists.
Leila Fadel has done Northeastern proud. The 2004 graduate, now Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, has won a George R. Polk Award for foreign reporting. McClatchy has assembled a portfolio of her work here.
The very first piece, an account of a heart-stopping drive from the Baghdad to the Jordanian border last October, demonstrates passion, courage and a commitment to the truth. She writes:
A few months ago, no American would have been foolish enough to do what I had just done: drive from Baghdad west through Iraq’s Anbar province, long the hotbed of the country’s Sunni Muslim insurgency, and into Jordan. The route was notorious for hijackings, kidnappings and roadside bombs, and passed some of the best-known symbols of the country’s mayhem: Abu Ghraib, Hamdaniyah, Fallujah, Ramadi and beyond.
But western Iraq has changed, and the drive last Sunday was proof of that.
In December, Editor & Publisher ran a profile of Fadel and her fellow bureau members. I found a story Fadel wrote for the Northeastern News in 2003 on how students viewed the war in Iraq. She was also a co-op student at the Boston Globe.
I don’t know Fadel, but former Globe reporter Raphael Lewis does. He e-mails:
She is an amazing woman who, at 26, serves as the Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy. Her work is quite excellent, and she was a standout student in Newswriting 1 and 2 when I taught as an adjunct at NU. I can’t tell you how proud I am of her.
What’s most encouraging about this is that Fadel shows it’s possible to succeed as a foreign correspondent at a young age. Even though the media landscape is changing, opportunities still exist.
I’ve set up class blogs for the two courses I’m teaching this spring — Reinventing the News: The Journalism of the Web and Journalism Ethics and Issues. I expect I’ll be putting a lot of energy into those sites over the next few months. If you’re interested in what we’re talking about, I hope you’ll bookmark them or add them to your RSS reader.
I’ve already posted to Reinventing the News, using two examples from today’s Boston Globe to show that print journalists are now routinely stretching themselves with video and audio. Reinventing the News will also feature student blogs once the semester begins.
Not to engage in any special pleading on Northeastern University’s behalf. But I keep looking at this photo of a building used to illustrate a blog post claiming that NU has one of “The 20 Ugliest College Campuses in the USA,” and I’m convinced that it’s not at Northeastern.
I could be wrong. I’m not the most visually oriented person in the world. But I think I’m right, and commenters on Digg agree with me. If this is the best evidence they’ve got, can Northeastern truly be said to be ugly?
Mystery solved: Jim Chiavelli, editor-in-chief of the Northeastern Voice, tells me that it’s a building on the Dedham campus. My point exactly.
The Boston Globe today runs a nauseating front-page story on sloppy restaurant inspections — reported by Northeastern students and edited by my colleague Walter Robinson, former editor of the Globe’s Spotlight Team. Good stuff. But don’t read it on a full stomach.
Congratulations to Michael Naughton and Hailey Heinz, two Northeastern journalism students whose investigative report on a dubious anti-gun initiative by Boston Mayor Tom Menino appears on the front page of today’s Boston Globe.The mayor has proposed suspending the driver’s licenses of gun offenders; but Naughton and Heinz found that few gun criminals even have licenses.
Naughton and Heinz did their work as part of an investigative-reporting class led by my NU colleague Walter Robinson, the Globe’s Pulitzer-winning retired Spotlight Team editor.