Dr. James Joyner asks “Is accuracy racist?”
President Obama spoke to the Congressional Black Caucus last weekend and the Associated Press coverage has stirred a little controversy. The reporter has explained the way he applied the quotes in question.
Finally, here’s the relevant portion of the speech:
If you were at the caucus’ dinner how would you have covered it?
Where did you have breakfast this morning? Was it on a table like this?
It’s based on Microsoft’s Surface technology, modified by the R&D Lab to create a Times-oriented user experience that reimagines the old “around the breakfast table” reading of the paper. You’ll notice that, in the demo, news is both highly personal and highly social — and that the line between “consumer” and “news consumer” is a thin one. Ads look pretty much the way we’re used to them looking, but they’re also integrated into the tabletop flow of information.
And news itself, in the same way, collapses into the broader universe of information.
Who has time for reading with breakfast? (I’d love to.) I suspect the biggest opponent will be the television, which, poor programming aside, may be hard to uproot in the short term.
The ad integration is nice. The curation, either human or algorithm, is even more important in this model. The first time Bill Gates demoed this premise it was incredible to conceive. Now the interface just looks more and more like an Apple screen. Odd how that happens.
You could be reading about a Twitter libel case on your breakfast infonewstainment table one day. They’re popping up. Be aware of what you say, and of how libel laws work.
Journalists who manage to get that addition to their breakfast nook may be spending a lot of bagel time over LinkedIn.
A new survey from Arketi Group found that the percent of journalists on LinkedIn has increased from 85 percent in 2009. Why?LinkedIn provides an easy way for reporters to connect with sources.
“It comes as no surprise more BtoB journalists are participating in social media sites, especially LinkedIn,” Mike Neumeier, principal of Arketi Group, says, “LinkedIn provides an online outlet for them to connect with industry sources, find story leads and build their professional networks.”
While more journalists are on LinkedIn than any other social network, they have increased their presence on other networks, too. The survey found that 85 percent of journalists are on Facebook and 84 percent use Twitter. Only 55 percent of journalists used Facebook in 2009, and 24 percent were on Twitter.
Google+ should be included in there too, because it will work very well once it gets passed the early adoption stage. Also, as one commenter under that report notes, there is a difference between having an account and using it. I personally use LinkedIn only sparingly. And yet I get more mail from them than anyone.
Quick hits: Kentucky athletics cracks down on student reporters. (Now with an update.) There’s a bit of muscle flexing from the SIDs and a big reaction from the student-journalists (and the APSE and SPJ). The first in a big wave of 10th anniversary stories coming up, this one examining how we’ve changed since Sept. 11th. Answer: Far more than we’d like. One hundred story ideas, nice feature idea for when you’re reaching for copy. And Forbes personalizes the Washington Post’s infographics designer.
Finally, the Associated Collegiate Press’ multimedia story of the year finalists. All of them are worth checking out. Many are worth studying for inspiration. Great work by busy student-journalists in there.
Martin Belam, on the future over the past:
What concerns me is that there are a whole generation of students who are being encouraged to pay for qualifications that will equip them to work in a 90s newsroom, because the people designing the courses and the industry input they receive are all from people who cut their teeth in a 90s newsroom.
A piece worth reading in its entirety.
Five curation tools you should know about. Pearltrees is a new one to me. I’ll check it out this weekend. The others are variations on one another, reminding you that you don’t have to be in every space. At some point these things are competing with one another. You want to be doing your work on the one that is the winner, which is to say has an ease of use, flexibility to do what you need and the place where your audience is willing to follow (or is already building a community). Otherwise you just build up platform fatigue.
What’s more, curation is a function, not your every solution. All of these things, all of them, are options, tools and components at your disposal. As a journalist your job is to amass large amounts of information, filter, screen and select. Your job here, with these many platforms, tools and doodads, is similar.
Copy editors: read the story before writing the headline.
Also, beware of sneaky copy in those pull out boxes.
Everyone knows of Twitter, and the wise ones are using it to their advantage in their professional life. But now comes Pinq Sheets:
Unlike Klout and other similar services, Pinq Sheets is keyword- and campaign-based, as opposed to user-based. And because Pinq Sheets uses Twitter’s streaming API (instead of the search API), Pinq Sheets subscribers can pull down entire Tweets, rather than just numbers.Pinq Sheets also does the dirty work for you, compiling the data in readable graphs (see below) that can easily be distributed to your clients. This is pretty stellar. When we do reporting for our clients, we find they love graphs and infographics. When we can make them pretty AND useful, so much the better. Seeing information and insights, for some, is often more valuable than reading a report.
[...]
Additional features include showing users which individuals talk about a particular hashtag or search term the most, giving you valuable insights about either your brand or the brand advocates/influencers.
“If you’re trying to market to a niche, this is the tool that’s going to tell you how to do it and who to talk to,” Jen says.
Robust tools get stronger all the time.
Big names in journalism links: How Steve Jobs changed journalism. A study on Rupert Murdoch’s troubles. The semi-retirement of Jim Romenesko and his impact on journalism.
Was Twitter a vehicle for riots in England? A Guardian study:
Analysis of more than 2.5m Twitter messages relating to the riots in England has cast doubt on the rationale behind government proposals to ban people from social networks or shut down their websites in times of civil unrest.A preliminary study of a database of riot-related tweets, compiled by the Guardian, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting.
Timing trends drawn from the data question the assumption that Twitter played a widespread role in inciting the violence in advance, an accusation also levelled at the rival social networks Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger.
That’s part of a quality series from the Guardian, Reading the Riots.
This is great video. What a country:
More details here. Hard to imagine that happening in a lot of other countries. At the same time, I suspect that people on the rope line will be a little more thoroughly screened in the future. There are reasons campaigns and politicians like to work friendly crowds. But, still, how great that there is occasionally the opportunity to just maybe have a fleeting conversation on something of substance with which you disagree about your president.
And good for President Obama, too, in briefly engaging with the guy. He blows him off at the end — there are a lot of people there to meet and greet — but he didn’t ignore him like you might imagine a politician doing. That’s nice to see. Obama also reportedly said this, elsewhere in Iowa. Pretty sure everyone wishes he hadn’t
“Democracy is always a messy business in a big country like this,” Obama responded. “When you listen to what the federalists said about the anti-federalists … those guys were tough. Lincoln, they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”
This was during a Q&A with an “invited guest” (See?) who asked how he deals with his congressional critics in the GOP. The writer’s of that story then gleefully called up every Lincoln scholar in their office that day to disabuse everyone of this notion. Sometimes ad libs are bad.
Here’s a tale designed to chill you. Should you see a traffic stop gone wrong, think twice about pulling out your camera. That video could get you sued
The amateur videographer with the colorful vocabulary who memorialized the alleged 2009 police beating of Melvin Jones III during a traffic stop may be charged with illegal wiretapping. One of four police officers disciplined for the incident on Nov. 27, 2009, Michael Sedergren, has filed an application for a criminal complaint against videographer Tyrisha Greene. Sedergren, who was suspended for 45 days, claims it was illegal for Greene to videotape him without his consent. Greene made a 20-minute film that included Jones, who is black, being struck repeatedly by a white officer with a flashlight while a group of other white officers stood by without intervening. The video also included an expletive-filled commentary by Greene, 29, who sounded alarmed by the scene that unfolded on Rifle Street.
The suspect who was beaten has a record and apparently went for one of the officers’ sidearms. So, yes, he was going to be stopped. The officer who lost his cool, and his colleagues who stood around, should have also stopped.
You’d think with dash-mounted cameras, and more than a few of these stories making the news every year or two the officers would do well to pull the guy off, but that didn’t happen here. The suspect’s mugshot — he was beaten badly — and the video are in that story, along with a thorough detailing of the legal aspects. The story comes down on the side of the videographer, who the plaintiff-officer claims “improper interception of wire and oral communication.” That makes no sense in this circumstance, as far as the stories go.
Oh look a newspaper stealing a photo from a casual photographer. A woman took a picture of mannequins at a clothing store, made a clever comment and that generated some interest from various publications. The Washington Post asked for permission to use it, and she gave them her approval. The Daily Mail asked and she turned them down.
In the comments, however, there is a great debate about copyright, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. If this were an issue in the U.S. you could say Daily Mail basically followed the guidelines and precedent in place, using a thumbnail, and that was after asking to use the private individual’s photo and being denied. Everyone is right, so everyone feels wronged.
The laws are a bit different in England, where this took place. How would you handle it here?
(Update: The story has been pulled altogether from the Daily Mail site, but the conversation on Boing Boing continues.)
About that Miami football scandal, here’s a nice look at the presentation from many of the online outlets, via the always outstanding MGoBlog and another site called Fear the Hat. Surprisingly ESPN’s site has been incredibly late to the party, as you’ll see in the screen caps. I took a look at the front page of the Miami Herald this morning. They ran the story as a lead piece on the front page, but there was no color and no art.
NBC 10 in Philadelphia is flexing a little social media muscle
The local NBC station in Philadelphia has started reporting news on location-based social network Foursquare. Initially, NBC 10 will pick one lead story a day and have a reporter check in on Foursquare from relevant locations and leave text and photo news updates. Later, this will extend to multiple stories and individual Foursquare accounts for each reporter.
That’s a fine idea. And since the Poynter piece didn’t do it, I’ll add that in addition to working Foursquare, they should also run a similar program elsewhere.
You want to have some say in your distribution? You have to know, and go, where your audience is. Expand this program to Facebook Places, Gowalla, and, really, wherever their audience gathers.
As the stage rigging began to teeter, Laura Magdziarz grabbed her 3-year-old daughter, Maggie, by the armpits and delivered a one-word directive to Maggie’s grandmother and two older siblings: “Run.”
The next thing Magdziarz remembers is being on the ground amid the debris. Her arms were empty.
Maggie was a good five feet away, crying in her tutu, which she had worn to match Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles. Magdziarz tried to stand but fell right back down — her leg was broken.
Maggie started walking to her, so she thought maybe her daughter was OK. Until she saw Maggie’s left arm — bone, flesh and blood, probably from elbow to wrist.
If you’ve not seen the video of the stage collapse in Indiana, you can find it here, along with a great piece of analysis from the local paper’s (solid) coverage. The crash is horrifying and, once again, it seems a miracle that the death toll isn’t higher. (Maggie is OK.)
If you like crisis communications here’s a solid analysis of what has and hasn’t happened after the disaster. Three of the bullet points from there:
The first rule of crisis communication is to “Be first. Be right. Be credible.” The very agencies that people are depending on for this information were not. And now that social media has become more prevalent, the days of depending on emailed press releases written by committees and regularly rescheduled press conferences are way over (a press conference was originally scheduled for midnight, and then rescheduled to 1:30 am. But they could have kept the news media up to date with occasional tweets and quick blog posts).I’m struck by the irony of the authorities asking people to use social media to give updates while they barely use it themselves. Hopefully this will convince the first response authorities start to use it themselves.
The crisis communicators responding to crises like these need to start including social media in their own responses. Not only can they get news out to the public, they can respond to rumors and bad information immediately, squelching it, and getting out good information instead.
As I’ve been saying to students, scholars, firms and pretty much anyone else who would listen, you ignore these tools at your own peril.
From the same post at ProBlogService (Which, apparently, offers blog ghost writing. Really? Really?):
The news media would be smart to start streaming their news programs on their websites during emergencies like this. I was communicating with people in Chicago, Alabama, and even Toronto about the incident. All I’ve been able to do is send them to stories on sites, but they could watch this live if the stations would stream their emergency news broadcasts.
We’re coming back to that, but first a quick trip to California, where your rights are being further eroded:
Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures “with no apparent esthetic value” is within Long Beach Police Department policy.McDonnell spoke for a follow-up story on a June 30 incident in which Sander Roscoe Wolff, a Long Beach resident and regular contributor to Long Beach Post, was detained by Officer Asif Kahn for taking pictures of a North Long Beach refinery.1
“If an officer sees someone taking pictures of something like a refinery,” says McDonnell, “it is incumbent upon the officer to make contact with the individual.” McDonnell went on to say that whether said contact becomes detainment depends on the circumstances the officer encounters.
McDonnell says that while there is no police training specific to determining whether a photographer’s subject has “apparent esthetic value,” officers make such judgments “based on their overall training and experience” and will generally approach photographers not engaging in “regular tourist behavior.”
You’re beyond a slippery slope, here.
And considering that piece from Long Beach, I’d like to go back to Indiana, where Erik Deckers reports:
If you’ve ever had any doubt about the need for a smartphone, or the power that citizen journalists wield, know this: all of the footage and images that all the newscasts are showing, and the ones that the national news outlets will be playing over and over, came from people and their smartphones. Not news cameras recording the aftermath of an event, but real action shot by real people who were on the scene.
Traditionalist newspaper reporters don’t like it, but that doesn’t matter. We’re all reporters now. Except for in Long Beach, and select Florida towns, where you can get arrested if a cranky cop runs across your path.
