Category Archives: Media

Harper’s Weekly

Leave a reply

One of my favorite reads is a free weekly email newsletter published by the folks at Harper's Magazine. Basically it's a bunch of disparate news items crunched into a few paragraphs, and instead of trying to describe it the best I can do is share one paragraph that I think is representative:

Despite having overestimated the U.S. federal debt by at
least $2 trillion, Standard and Poor's downgraded the
Unites States' long-term credit rating from AAA to
AA-plus, prompting one market analyst to warn, "This
crisis will run and run, and could make Lehman look like
a Tupperware party." In session for a total of 59
seconds, a skeleton crew of Senate Democrats ended a
partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration,
putting 4,000 employees back to work and allowing the
government to resume collecting $200 million per week in
airline-ticket taxes. Former New York gubernatorial
candidate Jimmy McMillan of the Rent Is Too Damn High
Party and Oscar-winning actress Faye Dunaway faced
eviction from their rent-regulated apartments. "You
don't tell an American how to live," McMillan said to
reporters. "I hope you have a terrible life," Dunaway
said to her landlord. Governor Rick Perry, whose April
entreaty to his fellow Texans to pray for rain failed to
alleviate the state's devastating drought, led some
30,000 worshippers in the Response, a Christian prayer
gathering at Houston's Reliant Stadium. Though Perry and
others urged attendees to fast, concession stands sold
nachos and smoothies throughout the seven-hour event. A
San Angelo revivalist skipped lunch but bought a hot dog
around 4:00 p.m. "That's the agreement I made with God
earlier," he said.

You can get your own subscription here.

Lost in Translation

Leave a reply

One of the things I have set up at work is a system to monitor feeds from various information sources like Google Alerts, RSS Feeds, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, etc.  One thing I've noticed is that some of the local media outlets let errors creep into their headlines when they translate them for their social media feeds.  I know they try to get out a lot of info in a short amount of time so I understand typos and bad grammar creeping into the stories themselves, but I don't think it's too much to ask that headlines be done right.   Lest you think I'm referencing one or two isolated incidences let me just stroll through my Twitter feed and give you a sampling from the past week, followed by my initial thoughts upon reading the offending headlines:

@myfox8: High Point Police Officer Seriously Injured After Being Rescued from Wrecked Patrol Car http://t.co/BfEhYWK
"Please God don't let me be rescued by the same people."

@WXII: Homes Evacuated By Gas Leak At Vacant House http://bit.ly/p2qBzY  
"What does a gas leak look like when it goes door-to-door?"

Here's an interesting comparison; look at the previous gas leak story headline and compare it to this one at myfox8:
@myfox8: Hwy. 70 Closed in Whitsett Due to Gas Leak http://dlvr.it/bpXgc 
A little more accurate wouldn't you say? 

@myfox8: Fire Closes Wright Brothers Visitors Center Temporarilyhttp://dlvr.it/bx7SR 
"Did the fire have a key?" 

@myfox8: Overturned Grain Truck Closes I-40 Ramp on US 421http://dlvr.it/bvSyt 
"It's a helluva truck that can pick itself up and direct traffic like that."

To be fair, with the possible exception of the first headline, the questionable construct of the headlines won't cause you to misinterpret what the stories are about.  Also, there are probably 100 stories linked to on Twitter without questionable headlines for each headline that contains the kind of error that would make your average 8th grade English teacher turn red with frustration. And, again, I understand how much info they're processing and getting out to their respective audiences, but I still think there must be a lot of old-school editors out there shaking their heads in wonderment at what has become of their industry. 

So, is it unrealistic to hold media companies to the same editorial standards for their social media as we do for their traditional media?

A Couple of Interesting Developments at JournalNow

4 Replies

The Winston-Salem Journal's online operation caught my eye a couple of times this past week.  First they integrated Facebook with their comment system in an effort, I assume, to deal with some pretty nasty/terrible anonymous commentors on the site.  I haven't studied it in depth, but the move seems to have helped with the tone of the comments.  Truth be told they couldn't have made the situation any worse so I think it was a good move.

The second thing I noticed was this story on a man who's installed a water capture system at his house.  The story itself was interesting, but what really grabbed my attention was that it was a video.  It was produced by the folks at the Hickory Daily Record, but I could see the W-S Journal doing the same thing with their own reporters.  Seems like a smart move to me – especially with stories that lend themselves to the video format – and now that they've added the ability to share/embed the stories I think they'll be able to really take advantage of their readers' social media activities. (Maybe they've been doing this for a while and I missed it, but either way I think it's a good idea).  Here's embed of the story:

A Face for Radio

Leave a reply

Apparently I've picked up a second chin in my travels.  In other news we had great weather for PTAA's "Fill the Stands with Cans" event at the NewBridge Bank Ballpark in Greensboro last Friday (July 15) and we were able to collect a LOT of food and cash for Second Harvest.  This event was just one part of our annual food drive and we're still working hard to gather donations, so if you'd like to donate please feel free to drop donations off at any of the locations listed on our food drive website or give us a shout at (336) 294-4428 or email me at jon AT piedmonttaa.org and we'll hook you up.

.

Taking One’s Medicine

Leave a reply

If you are at all interested in taxes, and by that I mean interested in the US tax system, how it works, who pays, who doesn't, etc., then you've likely read David Cay Johnston's work.  He's a writer who covers the tax beat and I've read his stuff for years and found that, especially considering the subject matter, his work is easy to read and that he has the great ability of taking a very complex subject and boiling it down to the bare essentials so that even a layman can understand it. Reuters thought enough of him to take him on as a columnist, and unfortunately he chose his inaugural column to make a doozy of an error.  Here's the correction. He's right when he writes:

I often write tart notes at the Romenesko blog for journalists, the Columbia Journalism Review, Nieman Reports and elsewhere about what I consider flawed reporting by others. I lecture to young reporters around the world on the duty of care they need to take with facts and teach how to check and cross check. Until now I have never made a big mistake, but this is a painful reminder that we all put our pants on one leg at a time. The measure of character, I say in my posts and lectures, is whether when an error is found you forthrightly and promptly correct.

I've had to make my share of trips down the hall to report to my boss (or client, or spouse) that I've made a whopper of a mistake and I can't recall it ever being fun, and I do recall it always being a bit frightening, but I've also found that I sleep well at night, the sun always rises the next day and I'm usually a better man for it.

I still hate it though.

Shirky’s News Machine

Leave a reply

Clay Shirky has a very interesting post on the news/newspaper business.  An excerpt:

None of the models being tried today are universally adoptable; the most we can say is that each of them happens to work somewhere, at least for the moment. This may seem like weak tea, given the enormity of the current changes, but if our test for any new way of producing news is whether it replaces all the functions of a newspaper, we’ll build things that look like newspapers, and if replicating newspapers online were a good idea, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

If we adopt the radical view that what seems to be happening is actually happening, then a crisis in reporting isn’t something that might take place in the future. A 30% reduction in newsroom staff, with more to come, means this is the crisis, right now. Any way of creating news that gets cost below income, however odd, is a good way, and any way that doesn’t, however hallowed, is bad.

Having one kind of institution do most of the reporting for most communities in the US seemed like a great idea right up until it seemed like a single point of failure. As that failure spreads, the news ecosystem isn’t just getting more chaotic, we need it to be more chaotic, because we need multiple competing approaches. It isn’t newspapers we should be worrying about, but news, and there are many more ways of getting and reporting the news that we haven’t tried than that we have.

Worth the read.

Reporting is Reporting

Leave a reply

A reporter-turned-blogger who won a journalism award in the blog category thinks that reporting is reporting no matter how you report.  She also divulges her secret to scooping her media competition:

Well I use a lot of tasers and threats – idle threats. Someone asked me this the other day, they say how do you get so many scoops? And I’m like, I work harder than you, I call more people, I follow up. I’m kind of relentless in terms of making calls, building sources, creating relationships. When I hear a small thing I follow it up. I think there’s no trick to great reporting, it’s just being curious, following things up, developing sources and not just putting up whatever idle rumor is around. We don’t do that. When we write something it’s going to happen. We spend a lot of time on accuracy, on credibility, on truthfulness, and on being right about what we say is going to happen.

I've long felt that the one competitive advantage that mainstream news outlets had after they had laid off their real competitive assets (their people) was that they were the "reliable source." Of course all it takes to lose that advantage is a couple of poorly researched stories that are publicly debunked by some nosy blogger, or heck, some well informed and well connected person who exposes the errors on Facebook.  It's like you tell your kids, one lie undoes all the trust you built with a thousand truths. Now I'm beginning to think that another way the traditional news outlets can lose their advantage is by having it taken by a reporter who's spent years building her reputation by doing great work and who is now swimming outside of the mainstream media, probably because she was downsized, and is now highly motivated to eat their proverbial lunch so she can continue to literally put her dinner on the table. 

So what's the over/under on when we'll stop referring to reporters as "main stream" or "bloggers" and just start referring to them as, well, reporters?  How about when we'll stop worrying/caring if the reporting comes to us in the form of paper, traditional television newscast, carrier pidgeon or electronically on the personal-digital-device-du jour?  I'm glad I'm not the one who has to figure that out.

National Jukebox

Leave a reply

Who said you can't get somethin' for nothin'? The Library of Congress has put a bunch of the recordings from its archives online in what's called the National Jukebox.

About the National Jukebox

The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.

Way cool.

Splitting Important Hairs

2 Replies

At last night's Lewisville Planning Board meeting we were reviewing the town's 2010 update to its Comprehensive Plan.  The Comprehensive Plan is a document that is created and revised by a series of task forces made up of volunteer citizens and then sent to the Planning Board for review and from there to the Town Council for final approval and adoption.  The task forces working on the 2010 review took the 2005 version and made necessary updates and edits based on changes in the town over the past five years — changes in the regulatory environment (ex. new Federal stormwater requirements), new developments over the past five years, etc.

One of the additions made was the mention of social media as a form of communication that the town should use to engage and inform its citizens.  During our discussion of that addition we hit on the fact that hyperlinks would be included in the document for the first time since the 2010 version of the Plan will be the first to reside online and not merely in print.  What ensued was a discussion that reminded me of President Clinton's famous quote that it "depends on what the definition of is is."

One of us (it might have been me) said that it would be great to have the ability to go back and add appropriate hyperlinks to the document if new sources of information became available.  For instance if the Comprehensive Plan references a map that isn't currently online, but becomes available online at a later date, it would be great to be able to insert a hyperlink to the map at that time.  The town attorney stopped us and said he'd be hesitant to say that would be allowable, mainly because it would change the document from whatever form the task forces had created, the Planning Board had reviewed and the Town Council had voted to adopt.  I, for one, wasn't sure that adding a hyperlink changed the document since it was merely adding a link to a source that was being referenced by the original document.  Then the question of who would confirm the accuracy of the linked document arose, and it doesn't take much imagination to see that we got started down a pretty serious philosophical rabbit hole from that point on.  

We're not done reviewing the Comprehensive Plan, and I'm still not convinced one way or another on whether or not the addition or deletion of a hyperlink changes a document.  I know our attorney well enough to be 100% sure that he's right legally, but I'm not sure that I agree philosophycally with the law in this case.  In the end I think the rabbit hole we started down will lead to one very significant choice that needs to be addressed: should a document like a town's Comprehensive Plan be a static piece that is changed only when the community comes together every X number of years, or should it be a living, breathing document that is updated on a regular basis? I won't tell you what I think, although you could probably guess, but I'd love to hear what others think.