Here's an interesting take from Wired via Futurismic:
Homeopapes: journalism by machine
Paul Raven @ 29-12-2009
Here’s an interesting piece at Wired UK that picks up the “OMG journalism is dying” ball and runs with it in the direction of automated machine-to-machine and machine-to-person news aggregation:

NewsScope is a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven, trading. Triggered by signals detected by algorithms within vast mountains of real-time data, trading of this kind now accounts for a significant proportion of turnover in the world’s financial centres.

Reuters’ algorithms parse news stories. Then they assign “sentiment scores” to words and phrases. The company argues that its systems are able to do this “faster and more consistently than human operators”.

Millisecond by millisecond, the aim is to calculate “prevailing sentiment” surrounding specific companies, sectors, indices and markets. Untouched by human hand, these measurements of sentiment feed into the pools of raw data that trigger trading strategies.

[...]

Here and there, interesting possibilities are emerging. Earlier this year, at Northwestern University in the US, a group of computer science and journalism students rigged up a programme called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball matches.

Stats Monkey relies upon two key metrics: Game Score (which allows a computer to figure out which team members are influencing the action most significantly) and Win Probability (which analyses the state of a game at any particular moment, and calculates which side is likely to win).

Combining the two, Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated “narrative arcs” to describe the action in a format recognisable as a news story.

The resulting news stories read surprisingly well. If we assume that the underlying data is accurate, there’s little to prevent newspapers from using similar techniques to report a wide range of sporting events.

So what is your opinion of this:
NBC criticized for 'chequebook journalism'
Last Updated: Tuesday, December 29, 2009 | 4:27 PM ET Comments22Recommend27
The Associated Press
David Goldman, top, followed by his Sean, waves as he boards a plane at the Galeao airport, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Dec. 24. (Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press)
A professional journalists' group is condemning NBC News for chartering a plane that carried a New Jersey man involved in a custody battle home from Brazil with his son.

The New York-based Society of Professional Journalists is calling it "chequebook journalism" and said the arrangement damages the network's credibility.

David Goldman, who successfully fought the Brazilian family of his now-deceased ex-wife for custody of nine-year-old Sean, granted an interview to Meredith Vieira of NBC's Today show that aired Monday.

NBC said Goldman was booked for Today before the network invited him on the plane.

The network had already arranged for the plane to bring its own employees back to the U.S. for Christmas, NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said. If NBC hadn't brought the Goldmans home, one of its rivals would have, she said.

"We've covered this story exceptionally well," she said. "Their going on the plane did not affect our coverage of the story or getting them booked at all."

Viewers told of payment

NBC News told viewers it had paid for the Goldmans' trip home, she said. The network showed pictures of the Goldmans on the plane and Nightly News featured a brief interview by correspondent Jeff Rossen with David Goldman while both were on the plane.

The journalists' group said NBC was paying for access, even if it was only covering the cost of a trip by plane.

"Paying for access taints the credibility and neutrality of what you are doing," said Andy Schotz, chairman of the SPJ ethics committee. "There is now a motive for people to be helping you, to be telling you what you want to hear."

Most news organizations say they don't pay for interviews. But critics say the commonly used practice of paying to license photos or video from a subject matter or paying for someone's travel is a way of getting around the restriction.

CNN and ABC paid for cellphone pictures taken by Jasper Schuringa, the man who helped subdue an alleged terrorist who tried to take down a Detroit-bound plane. Both also interviewed Schuringa but denied any connection between the payments and the interviews.

© The Canadian Press, 2009

Here is the longest and perhaps the pathetically best summary so far of the news paper dilemma (read my bottom notes):

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and TIM ARANGO
Published: December 27, 2009
Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.

Jason Reed/Reuters
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation charges for access to The Wall Street Journal and could do the same on Hulu.
Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.

Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.

Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all search engines crawl his sites. Also Hulu, which is owned partly by Mr. Murdoch’s company, is considering charging viewers to watch some of the TV shows it now streams free.

Magazine publishers, meanwhile, have banded together to try to create their own version of the iTunes store, aiming for a day when they can sell enhanced versions of what they have been giving away. And more and more media companies are planning to charge for apps on iPhones and other mobile devices, as well as on the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.

Media companies of all stripes built their business models on the assumption that advertising would continue to pour into their coffers. But with advertising in a tailspin, they now must shrink, shut down or find some way to shift more of the cost burden to consumers — the same consumers who have so blissfully become accustomed to Web content that costs nothing.

So will future consumers look back on 2010 as the year they finally had to reach into their own pockets?

Industry experts have their doubts, saying that pay systems might work, but in limited ways and only for some sites. Publishers who sounded early this year as though they were raring to go have not yet taken the leap, and the executives who advocate change tend to range from vague to cautious in making any predictions about fundamentally changing the finances of their battered businesses.

But one thing clearly has shifted already, in a year rife with magazine closures and newspaper bankruptcies: conventional wisdom among media companies has swung hard from the belief that pay walls would only curb traffic and stifle ad revenue, to the view that media businesses need to try something new, because the current path appears to lead to extinction.

“Content providers see that the idea that everything has to be free, supported by ads, isn’t working well, and they’re trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, but only partially,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger who has been an executive at digital media companies.

He went on: “So we’re looking at some sort of an inflection point, at least in attitude. But I haven’t seen much realistic, hard-headed thinking about how that’s going to happen, so I don’t know how much is really going to change.”

Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, said, “A lot is going to change over the next two years.” But she conceded that it was very hard to predict the shape of that change, and she said that adding pay walls alone probably would not work.

Of course, it is the established media, with their legacy of high operating costs and outdated technology, that face this problem. Leaner, newer online competitors will continue to be free, avidly picking up the users lost by sites that begin to charge.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, predicted that much of the talk of media’s mining the Web for new revenue would never become reality — and that if it did, free sites like hers would benefit. Some of the plans now being laid might work, she said, but many of them would just alienate the Internet users who click from one site to another, wherever links and their curiosity take them.

“I’m not minimizing the fact that there’s a need to experiment with multiple new business models,” she said. “I just don’t believe in ignoring the current realities.”

For more than a decade, media companies have hoped for a day when they could either control access to their products online or at least put a price on them that a mass market would bear. But that day has never come. What has changed is the level of threat they face, given the worst advertising downturn in memory.

Since the infancy of the Web, there have been predictions that by making information more plentiful and accessible, prices would be steadily driven down, with no bottom in sight. At first, it did not seem to matter: Internet advertising grew at a breakneck pace, and traditional media thrived even as the assumption of free content took root online.

But eventually, the rise of the Internet punished most media, starting with the music industry, in the form of file-sharing. That history offers an object lesson. Despite the success of iTunes and other pay services, illegal downloads remain common.

Print publications are suffering most now, but digital distribution has grown in importance for broadcast television. Nearly all of its content is now available free online, as broadcast media lose audience and advertising. Book publishers are also fighting the tide; Simon & Schuster said recently that it would delay the release of e-book versions of 35 big titles, like Karl Rove’s memoir and a Don DeLillo novel, fearing that the $9.99 digital versions would eat into sales of hardcover copies.

Cable television has been an exception, thriving on subscriber fees, but even there, executives fret that consumers are disentangling themselves from their cable boxes, free to pick and choose individual programs online and watch on their TVs. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, has advanced a plan that he calls TV Everywhere, which would allow paying cable television subscribers to view shows online for no extra charge.

Similarly, Comcast started a service this month that gives subscribers to its broadband Internet and digital cable services access to its cable programming on the Web.

These efforts are not about wringing extra dollars from the Web but about preserving the current economics of the business.

“We’re saying, since those payments you have made have found their way to the networks and through distributors that give you the connection, that we want to have you be able to watch all those networks on broadband,” Mr. Bewkes said recently at an investor conference in New York.

A leading evangelist for the coming of a new era is Rupert Murdoch, who has said he envisions a not-too-distant day when all of the News Corporation’s news properties, including Fox News Channel, The Times of London and The New York Post, charge online. He and his executives have repeatedly criticized search engines and news aggregators, saying it was “theft” to profit from publishers’ work.

The News Corporation has been shopping around an online payment software system — so far without much success — in hopes of playing pied piper to other publishers, and it is a charter member of the group of magazine publishers that have banded together, in a consortium announced this month. And there have been talks about the possibility of Microsoft paying for the exclusive rights to have its Bing search engine direct users to News Corporation sites.

“Quality content is not free,” Mr. Murdoch wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 8, days after delivering a similar message at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. “In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract customers by providing news and information they are willing to pay for.”

People who have studied the problem argue that charging online would work only if consumers were offered a much-improved product with the convenience of access anywhere, on any digital device — the core idea behind the magazine consortium and its planned online store.

By that standard, much of the talk of wringing more money from Internet users rings hollow, said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a prominent blogger on media subjects. “People who really think we have to charge or the industry is sunk would be more persuasive if they said at the same time we have to add more value than we’ve been adding,” he said.

And, most industry experts agree, entertainment will be easier to charge for than news. It may be hard to prevent free distribution of an episode of “The Office” or “NCIS,” but the product is unique, with no substitute being created by someone else.

A small number of publications already charge for Internet access, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Newsday, Consumer Reports and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. But they tend to be either specialty products or near-monopolies in local markets, and they generally do not charge enough to fundamentally alter their profit pictures.

But for most general-interest news, any paid site would be competing with alternative versions of the same articles, delivered by multiple free news sources.

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter said. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.” (end story)
One thing not addressed here is the success of electronic versions of what used to be print. Many magazines such as Road & Track, Penthouse, Smithtonian, Photography, Field & Stream, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science to name a small few have a very successful e-version of their paper produce with enhanced electronic content, for example video and hyper links to advertisers sites and additional editorial content. Scientific American and Metropolis (an architectural magazine) have tried to run on a some what different standards then the most effective one which is Zinio and as a result their experience has been disappointing. Even the Zinio client can be frustrating as many publishers cannot seem to get their head or what ever around the idea of a digital and non physical product. I have a number of subscriptions were the company also sends me a paper copy of the magazine and after many appeals seems unable to stop or even find the paper subscription which I, very tiresomely, am still receiving. However that is only until renewal comes around and then those magazines don't get renewed. There is hope and life in publishing, the publishers just have to clue in.

Here from the New York Times: How Dangerous it is to be a journalist who is doing his job well:
Kyrgyz President Blamed in Homicide


By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: December 22, 2009
MOSCOW — A prominent opposition journalist in Kyrgyzstan, whose autocratic president has been courted by the United States as an ally for the war in Afghanistan, died on Tuesday after being thrown last week from a sixth-story window, his arms and legs bound with duct tape.

Related
Times Topics: Kyrgyzstan
The journalist, Gennadi Pavlyuk, was on a business trip in Almaty, the commercial capital of neighboring Kazakhstan, when he was attacked on Dec. 16, the authorities said. He was in a coma before dying of severe trauma on Tuesday. His colleagues said he was 40 years old, with a wife and son.

Opposition politicians in Kyrgyzstan blamed the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, for the killing, saying that he was escalating his efforts to eliminate dissent in the country. Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman said the government had nothing to do with the attack on Mr. Pavlyuk.

Since taking power in 2005, Mr. Bakiyev has steadily tightened his grip on Kyrgyzstan, a poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia, and in recent years, numerous opposition leaders and journalists have been attacked. Some have died, and rarely if ever has anyone been held accountable.

In just the last few weeks, a well-known political scientist, a former senior official and a journalist were severely beaten in Kyrgyzstan. They all attributed the attacks to the security services, according to local news media.

While human rights groups have assailed Mr. Bakiyev, the United States has largely focused on maintaining good relations with him in order to keep an important air base on the outskirts of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, that supports NATO’s mission in Afghanistan.

Mr. Bakiyev announced in February that he would evict the United States from the base. After intensive lobbying by the Obama administration, he reversed course in June, in return for additional rent and other concessions.

In July, Mr. Bakiyev easily won another term as president in an election that international monitors said was marred by widespread fraud.

Investigators in Kazakhstan said Mr. Pavlyuk arrived in Almaty on Dec. 16 and checked into a hotel before leaving with an unidentified man. Two hours later, he was pushed out the sixth-floor window of a rented apartment in a residential building, landing on a first-floor canopy.

A roll of the duct tape that had been used to bind his hands and legs was found in the apartment.

Mr. Pavlyuk was the former chief editor of the Bishkek edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a major Russian tabloid newspaper based in Moscow.

Over the last year, he had become more politically active, working closely with Omurbek Tekebaev, a former speaker of the Kyrgyz Parliament who is a senior opposition leader.

To support Mr. Tekebaev’s party, Mr. Pavlyuk was planning a new opposition Web site.

Mr. Tekebaev said in a telephone interview that he had no doubt that the Kyrgyz government had ordered Mr. Pavlyuk killed because he had become more outspoken against the president. Mr. Tekebaev said the Kyrgyz security services often lured people to nearby countries and killed them.

“They do that to avoid suspicion. They do their activities outside of Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Tekebaev said. “This is not the first time that this has happened abroad to a member of the opposition. We believe that this was a political killing directed at intimidating the news media. It is an attempt at frightening society.”

Almaz Turdumamatov, Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman, said he hoped that the police in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan would conduct a thorough inquiry and bring the culprits to justice.

“The murder of any person, whether a journalist or not, concerns us,” Mr. Turdumamatov said. “Who is responsible for this must be determined by the investigators.”

Asked about the opposition’s allegations that its supporters were being persecuted, he said: “It is unfortunate that this killing happened. But it is wrong to say that this was connected to any kind of political motivation.”

In an interview in July at the presidential residence, Mr. Bakiyev suggested that journalists who had been attacked might have been involved in shady dealings or were perhaps just unlucky.

“Sometimes, things happen by chance,” Mr. Bakiyev said. “For it to have been purposeful from a political point of view, that sort of politics doesn’t exist here.”

Daniil Kislov, chief editor of Ferghana.ru, a Web site based in Moscow that covers Central Asia, said Mr. Pavlyuk’s killing had shocked journalists in the region because it was so brazen, as if it were an organized crime hit.

Mr. Kislov said the killing reminded him of the slaying of another Kyrgyz journalist, Alisher Saipov, who contributed to Ferghana.ru and the Voice of America. Mr. Saipov was shot to death in 2007 while waiting for a taxi in a Kyrgyz city. No one has been arrested in the case.

“These killings are being done by people who are absolutely convinced that they will never be caught and never be punished,” Mr. Kislov said.

Mr. Pavlyuk was chief editor for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Bishkek in 2006 and 2007, said the newspaper’s current chief editor, Aleksandr Rogoza.

Mr. Rogoza said Mr. Pavlyuk had a lifelong affection for Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, which is famous for its beauty and is one of the largest mountain lakes in the world.

“He wrote a lot about the lake,” Mr. Rogoza said. “He built a house there, and he spent a lot of time there. He just loved that place.”

Here's a funny one on science journalism from Scientific American: December 18, 2009

The "Problem" with a Public Interest in Science
A humorous warning for the media coverage of science
By Steve Mirsky


In October a blog post circulated widely in the science journalism community. Larry Husten mused at CardioBrief.org about the potential benefits to society if only mainstream newspapers covered science with as much dedication as they cover baseball. Indeed, it might be wonderful. But as a big sports fan, I know that there could be unexpected consequences of heightened media interest in science. For example, imagine all-science talk radio:

“Aaaaand good afternoon, everybody, how are your vital signs today?! Mike and the Mad Scientist with you here on QED radio, simulcast on the Nobel TV Network! How are you, Michael?”

“Fine, Mad Sci, good, the new issues of Nature and Science are out, lots to discuss, including an update on the state of the Mars rovers. Spirit has a bum wheel and has been on the disabled list, but NASA has some tricks that might get it back in the field.”

“And they published the genome of the horse! I hope that comes in handy at the Belmont, Michael.”

“Don’t bet on it, Sci. Listen, they’ve had the human genome sequenced for, what, 10 years, 12 years they’ve had the human genome sequenced and they’re still giving you and me the same meds, not personalized meds, and they’ve had the genome sequenced for, what, 10 years, 12 years.”

“Good point, Michael, excellent point. Whaddya say, let’s go to the phones and hear what science fans out there have on their minds today. Morris from Rego Park, you’re on QED.”

“Hi, Sci, hi, Mike, first time long time.”

“What’s on your mind today, Morris?”

“I wanted to float a trade by you guys. How about Harvard trades Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky for Sean Carroll and a postdoc to be named later?”

“Which Sean Carroll ya talking about, Morris buddy? There’s the physicist Sean Carroll at Caltech, and there’s the evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll at Wisconsin–Madison, and you can’t just call up and float a trade like that without saying which Sean Carroll, can ya, Michael?!”

“That’s a problem, Sci, and then there’s a bigger problem—Noam Chomsky isn’t at Harvard, he’s at M.I.T. Chomsky’s at M.I.T. Pinker’s at Harvard. He used to be at M.I.T., Pinker, Pinker used to be at M.I.T., but now he’s at Harvard. Chomsky’s at M.I.T., he’s at M.I.T., so you can’t put the package together in the first place, because Chomsky’s at M.I.T.”

“There you have it, Mo, you gotta do a little more homework before you call in, a little more housework. Here we go, Jeremy from Manhattan.” (The Twilight Zone theme plays in the background, as it does whenever Jeremy calls in.) “Hello, Jeremy.”

“Evolution’s just a theory! Global warming’s a hoax!"

“And goodbye, Jeremy. Jeremy’s meniscus is touching the bottom of the graduated cylinder there. Short Hal from Queens on the line, what’s up, Short Hal?”

“Not much, Sci, how are your liver enzyme levels today?”

“You’re a wise guy, Short Hal. Short Hal’s a hepatologist in his spare time, what’s on your mind, Hal?”

“Well, Sci, I’m talking to my friend, and he says that grad students are doing all kind of performance-enhancing substances, stuff like Mountain Dew, double espressos. And I just don’t know if you can compare the results they’re getting with the stuff that the old-timers did without these kinds of enhancers.”

“Hal, this is Mike, listen, you think Heisenberg wasn’t on massive doses of caffeine? He did his best work, when, in his early 20s? You think he was sleeping more than, what, two hours a night, three hours a night? Don’t kid yourself, there was stuff they did back then, maybe not Mountain Dew, but they had ways to keep working all night. I’ll tell you what they didn’t have back then, they didn’t have competitors coming in from all over the world to their labs to compete with them. If anything, these kids today, they’re on average better. I’m not saying that the best ones are better than, say, your Einsteins or your Feynmans, but I’d say on average the average ones are better today than the average ones were back then, pound for pound.”

“Michael, time for the atomic clock update with Burgess Shale, right after this word from Beckman Instruments. If your analytical balance botches your breakthroughs, better buy a Beckman. We’ll be right back.” (The Nobel Network’s camera picks up Mike and Mad Sci browsing the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Physical Review Letters, while the Irving Berlin song He Ain’t Got Rhythm, starting at the lyric “With a problem scientific, he’s colossal and terrific,” plays them off ...)

Note: This story was originally printed with the title "Careful What You Wish For"

Is Journalism still worth while? Well here is one use and answer:



Press Release 09-239
Computer Science Via Interactive Journalism


An innovative project teaches students computer science skills by creating an online magazine


Students participating in the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers.
Credit and Larger Version

December 10, 2009
Do only computer scientists need an education in computer science? In today's innovation-driven economy, the answer is 'not anymore'.

Since the skills learned in computer science, like complex problem solving and analytical reasoning skills, are important for building a foundation for numerous careers including jobs in science and technology, as well as jobs in marketing, journalism and the creative arts, most people will need an education in computer science. Even though the United States is a leader in the field of computer science at the college level, most middle and high school students receive no exposure to computer science. One major obstacle to educating young students in computer science is finding a space for a computer science class in an already overburdened K-12 curriculum.

Ursula Wolz, researcher from the College of New Jersey, developed an innovative solution for providing students with an education in computer science with the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Unlike traditional computer science courses where students learn computer science programming through a textbook, Wolz and her team decided to take advantage of how 21st century journalism is becoming more dependent on computer science. Wolz and her colleagues started a summer institute and an afterschool problem where students learned computer programming skills while developing an online magazine.

The summer institute not only exposed the students to computer science, but also attracted them to computer science through the interactive journalism, which showed the students that computer science skills are needed in a number of different professions to solve a diverse set of real world problems.

In their project, which is funded by the NSF's Broadening Participation in Computing program, Wolz and her colleagues designed an Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers (IJIMS). IJIMS is a partnership between The College of New Jersey and Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey. They recruited middle school teachers, mostly language arts teachers, for a one-week institute where they learned how to create an online magazine.

During the second week, the teachers were joined by rising 8th grade students and the teachers became mentors to the students. During the two weeks, the teachers and students learn how to use Scratch, a graphical, syntax free, computer programming language. Since coding in Scratch is done with graphical blocks that snap together, much like LEGO bricks or pieces of a puzzle, it is easy for computer programming novices like middle school teachers and students, to learn how to program interactive animations and videos.

During the summer institute, students researched, prepared interviews, videotaped, edited the interviews and developed Scratch projects to supplement their stories with animations or games. At the conclusion of the two weeks, the teachers and students had developed an online magazine.

There were 16 students in the first summer. By the second summer institute, the number of students had increased to 30. This strong interest in the project led the teachers and students to develop an afterschool program to run the online magazine during the academic year. The articles developed by the students for the online magazine concern a diverse set of issues. Articles span from interviews with the city mayor to articles discussing complex issues like the death penalty and animal rights.

Wolz and her team wanted to use the summer institute and afterschool program as a way to expose students to computer programming, teach them a graphical computer programming language, show them how computer programming is used outside of traditional computer science areas and to increase the students' confidence in their ability to use computing methods.

The researchers surveyed the students to see whether they had achieved their goals and discovered that they had been very successful. The survey found that students had changed their perception about computer programming.

After participating in the summer institute, the students no longer held several common beliefs about computer programmers, like computer programmers work by themselves or computer programmers are not creative. The survey also found that after participating in the summer institute, the students reported that there was a similar relationship between computer science and journalism.

Finally, the survey found that after participating in the summer institute, the students reported a significant increase in their competence in the area of computer science. At the end of the summer institute, there were a larger number of students saying that they could create a computer program as compared to the first day of the summer institute.

This unique project is a solid example of how to teach computer science skills and attract young students to computer science by using a non-traditional computer science field. By implementing a computer science curriculum outside of school hours, Wolz and her team found a solution to the problem of implementing a computer science curriculum without removing courses from the curriculum or increasing the curriculum load.

In addition, this project demonstrates how to teach the skills learned by computer science such as complex problem solving and analytic skills by using a non-traditional computer science problem. The researchers taught computer programming to students by using the real-world problem of how 21st century journalism is becoming more interactive. To work in this new interactive journalism field, a 21st century journalist will need the computer programming skills required to create animations and videos to accompany their stories.

-NSF-

Here is a roundup of the pro and cons of what we think of as journalism:
The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism |
| from the fat-lady-in-the-wings dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Friday December 04, @08:57 (Google) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/12/04/1350252/The-Noisy-and-Prolonged-Death-of-Journalis|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The war of words between the old and the new media is heating up some
more. [0]Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that)
explaining to newspapers how Google wants to, and is trying to, help
them. Kara Swisher's BoomTown column [1]translates and deconstructs
Schmidt's argument, hilariously. A few days back, the Washington Post's
Michael Gerson became the latest journo to [2]bemoan the death of
journalism at the hands of the Internet; and investigative blogger
[3]Radley Balko quickly called B.S. on Gerson's claim that (all?)
bloggers simply steal from (all?) hard-working, honest, ethical print
journalists.

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/12/04/1350252

Links:
0. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574569570797550520.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular
1. http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091203/boomtown-decodes-google-ceo-schmidts-shut-up-you-whiny-news-folk-op-ed-so-you-dont-have-to/
2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/25/AR2009112503534_pf.html
3. http://www.theagitator.com/2009/11/30/dem-thievin-blogs/

The split and competition between print media and the internet continues:
In Chicago, Ex-Editor Fights Back
By RICHARD PREZ-PEA
Internet-based local news organizations are drawing
big-name journalists, including veterans of the established
news outlets they are competing with.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/business/media/23local.html?th&emc=th

Still doing some things right some of the time:


Press Release 09-229
Science Journalism Awards Announced


Winners of AAAS Kavli Awards include television and radio stories supported by NSF


Neil deGrasse Tyson examines an unpolished man-made diamond, fresh out of the grower.
Credit and Larger Version

November 19, 2009
A television feature about growing diamonds in the lab, and a radio story that dramatizes some strange coincidences in a discussion of randomness and probability won recognition earlier this month in the 2009 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. Both programs were funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

"Diamond Factory" was produced by Julia Cort for WGBH's NOVA science NOW, and aired on public television stations in June. It features host Neil deGrasse Tyson showing how materials science offers the means to engineer diamonds with the strength and conductivity of the real thing. Along the way, Tyson variously adopts the persona of Indiana Jones and travels blindfolded to the diamond producers' top-secret location, where he learns that diamonds that can be customized in size and shape offer a valuable resource for future electronics, transportation and communications.

"Julia Cort is a master of expressing complicated ideas in a way that's easy to understand and compelling in following the story," said Paula Apsell, senior executive producer, NOVA, and director of the WGBH science unit. "The techniques she used are emblematic of the approach we take at NOVA scienceNOW, creating stories that are educational and entertaining and, critically, that appeal to families."

"A Very Lucky Wind" was produced by Jad Abumrad, Soren Wheeler and Robert Krulwich at WNYC's Radio Lab and also aired in June. It begins with the story of a girl in England, Laura Buxton, who sends a balloon into the air--but not before attaching a label that said, "Please send back to Laura Buxton." The balloon winds up touching down 140 miles away in the yard of a girl with the same name, of the same age, and sharing many other traits. The producers use this as a departure point for a spirited discussion of randomness versus fate, incorporating the perspectives of University of California, Berkeley statistician Deborah Nolan and Jay Koehler, professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jad Abumrad said the show was inspired by questions about the true state of randomness.

"What is a miracle? What is the mathematical threshold for a miracle?" said Abumrad. "These were among our questions. And we learned that given enough time, strange things will happen."

The 2009 awards are the first to be given under a new endowment by The Kavli Foundation. In recognition of that endowment, the awards--first given in 1945--are now called the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. The Foundation, based in Oxnard, California, is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

Independent panels of science journalists select the winners of the awards. The winners for each category will receive $3000 and a plaque at the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego in February.

-NSF-

Well I hope that this will make some changes into how investigative journalism occurs in Japan: From The New York Times-
New Leaders in Japan Seek to End Cozy Ties to Press Clubs
By MARTIN FACKLER
The authorities are expanding access to journalists who
don't belong to cartel-like media groups that analysts
say have produced a relatively spineless press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/world/asia/21japan.html?th&emc=th

I will again attempt to show you a video which tells of the training of a TV broadcast journalist. The actors are Michel Piffer and Robert Redford. I have reserved a small viewing room in the FLL lab of the 6th Floor of the Goucher Building and we will meet and have the class there.

For the next three classes we will be watching parts of the video Up Close & Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Why? It is a good introduction into how to enter into TV broadcast Journalism and it's a nice love story as well. We will be likely using a different classroom and I will leave a note of our regular classroom door with the the location. Hope to see you there.

Newspapers want readers' help with Web credibility
By Associated Press
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2009


ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Publishing online creates a new set of problems for newspapers. Some people ask to have stories "unpublished," while others leave nasty, unsigned comments on articles. Now some newspapers are appealing to their own readers for advice.

The readers are taking part in six "Online Journalism Credibility" projects that were sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors group and detailed Thursday at APME's conference in St. Louis.

The public's involvement suggests audiences care deeply about the credibility of newspapers, said Elaine Kramer, APME's project manager. And it shows "that newsrooms are on the right track when they try to make journalism much more of a two-way conversation with readers," she said.

Readers are still getting used to seeing stories about them and people they know get catalogued by search engines that don't forget anything. The Toronto Star's public editor, Kathy English, said she gets requests to take stories down about once a month. Even a former colleague once asked her to make some embarrassing news go away.

She surveyed newspaper practices and found many editors viewed "unpublishing" as censorship. When she wrote a column asking readers their thoughts on 10 such requests faced by various newspapers in recent months, the views of most respondents were in line with editors'.

The Knoxville News Sentinel held a community round table to explore troubling aspects of anonymous, racially charged Web comments that had been elicited by news coverage of a carjacking-rape-and-murder case. One community member described the comments as "toxic to the soul."

The News Sentinel ran video of the community session and put several readers' blog posts on its Web site. The newspaper is now more willing to strike abusive comments.

"There's not an easy answer," said Jack Lail, the newspaper's director of news innovation. "Some horrific comments do reflect readers in your community. The best we can do is set some kind of bar that communities are going to have to be above."

In Texas, The Victoria Advocate lets readers contribute blogs, comments, calendar items, photographs and even stories to the Web site. When the newspaper commissioned a study of 400 readers, gauging their trust of newsroom-generated content versus that submitted by readers, respondents appeared to value straight news much more than content with opinions, Editor Chris Cobler said.

For instance, at a town hall meeting on the subject this month, Cory Garcia of Victoria said he likes the idea of being able to blog online, but worries that civil discourse can become uncivil.

Now the newspaper is considering a disclaimer on reader blogs and might create a board of readers who would discuss Internet ethics.

"People still trust the news and get the difference," Cobler said. "The challenge is how to engage the community without chipping away at the newspaper's credibility."

As news organizations' revenue has dropped, they've felt more pressure to experiment with a type of advertising that is associated with a news story's subject matter and is placed alongside, or pops up when a cursor touches a key word in a story.

The Seattle Times tested 18 types of this so-called contextual advertising on its Web site. Then it used reader surveys and focus groups to determine whether placement of such ads affected the credibility of either the advertisers or the newspaper.

The results were mixed, but the exercise helped the newspaper "figure out where the land mines were," said Kathy Best, managing editor for digital news and innovation.

Readers didn't like an ad for jobs at Weyerhaeuser Co. that popped up as they read a story about the timber industry. They also disapproved of an ad for a land commissioner candidate that was next to an investigative story on landslides and the government's policy on clear-cutting forests. The readers said it hurt the credibility of both the candidate and the news story.

On the other hand, readers said they valued contextual advertising when it was local and useful.

In another of the APME projects, the Sioux City (Iowa) Journal asked readers how the newspaper could improve standards and accuracy in gathering and reporting news online. And the Salem (Mass.) News is soliciting input on how its involvement with social networking sites affects credibility.

The six projects will be posted on APME's Web site and are the subject of a webinar series beginning Nov. 5 through Poynter's News University.

"I think we'll learn more about how precious credibility is to readers as well as to journalists," Kramer said. "Credibility is our stock in trade. We better have it."

| Journalists Looking For Government Money |
| from the bizarro-world dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 31, @10:21 (The Media) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/31/137221/Journalists-Looking-For-Government-Money |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

We've been following the ongoing struggles of the print media, watching
as some publications have died off and others have held to outdated
principles and decried the influence of the internet. A side effect of
this has been many journalists put out of work and many others fearful
that informed reporting is on its way out as well. Now, an editorial in
the Washington Post calls for [0]a solution journalists would likely have
scoffed at only a few years ago: federal subsidies. Robert W. McChesney
and John Nichols write, "What to do? Bailing out media conglomerates
would be morally and politically absurd. These firms have run journalism
into the ground. If they cannot make it, let them go. Wait for 'pay-wall'
technologies, billionaire philanthropists or unimagined business models
to generate enough news to meet the immense demands of a self-governing
society? There is no evidence that such a panacea is on the horizon. This
leaves one place to look for a solution: the government." They hasten to
add, "Did we just call for state-run media? Quite the opposite."

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/10/31/137221

Links:
0. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/22/AR2009102203960.html
Collecting Headlines Funnier Than This


By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Published: November 2, 2009
Headlines in the satirical weekly newspaper The Onion tend to function both as punch line and setup, in that order. They are the heart of the paper, and not only the first thing anybody reads, but also, unlike headlines in real newspapers all over the world, the first things to be written. The staff devotes the first two days of every week to composing headlines, then assigns the articles that will run beneath them and provide a body of supporting jokes.

At the offices of The Onion in SoHo, headlines are conceived first, and then articles are assigned to flesh them out.
Todd Hanson, a story editor, started at The Onion 21 years ago.


Corner pen: Dummy, the office dog, has her own office cubicle.
It’s immediately apparent just flipping through “Our Front Pages: 21 Years of Greatness, Virtue, and Moral Rectitude From America’s Finest News Source,” the new, platter-size hardcover collection, appropriately enough, of front pages from The Onion, that the art of the fake headline has evolved. Early-era front-page type in the paper, founded in 1988 in Madison, Wis., had the clownish tone of a college-town humor rag: “Depressed? Try Liposuction on that Pesky Head.”

“You can see it took a little while before the paper was keyed in on the USA Today model,” said Joe Randazzo, the current editor of The Onion. (From 1998: “Inside: America Rates The Skin Colors. See Society, page 1D.”)

The paper relocated to New York in 2001, and that year, prompted partly by 9/11, the headlines took on what Mr. Randazzo called “more of a New York Times-Washington Post kind of tone — sober, important.” “We wait to chime in on a news event until after the news has chimed in,” he said. “The Onion’s charter is to be the last word, the newspaper of record. That’s a total conceit, of course, but we take it seriously, in the sense that we want to be the joke that’s making a joke about all the other jokes.”

A Tuesday in October found Mr. Randazzo and nine writers and editors gathered around a conference table in the SoHo offices of The Onion for a headline meeting. Each had a printout of 101 headline contenders, which had been submitted —mostly by one another, with some support staff and freelance contributors also allowed to pitch in — the day before.

“It’s a very specific, regimented format,” said Dan Guterman, the head writer. “You sort of learn the Onion language by rote. We spend hundreds of hours in the room deconstructing the jokes. I don’t think there’s anything comparable to the amount of material we generate and reject just to come up with the week’s headlines.”

This structured process, however, has an element of chaos, in that there is no such thing as speaking out of turn. Each person called out favorites by number, and most were rejected by consensus, or, as needed, by Mr. Randazzo.

This brain trust was all men — all 10 of them white, most in glasses, about half wearing T-shirts with something satirical printed on them, and at least 60 percent of them with facial hair. (“The dominant style” in the office of The Onion, the author Wells Tower wrote last year in The Washington Post Magazine, “is the unshaven, underexercised, Nazarene look of bookish people who probably suffered a steady program of jibes and wedgies in junior high school and carried pocketfuls of 20-sided dice.”)

The basis of some rejections was historical: “That reminds me too much of ‘Man Who Thought He’d Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit of Hope He Didn’t Even Know He Still Had’ ” — a headline from 2000 — Todd Hanson, a story editor, said about “Man Surprised He Still Had Peg to Be Taken Down.”

Others failed to meet standards of sophistication. “That’s basically a man-boobs joke, a yucka-yucka joke,” Joe Garden, the features editor, said of “November Named Male Breast Awareness Month.” Or comic rigor: “It has a finality to it that threw me off,” Mr. Guterman said of a headline about a missing tub of yogurt.

Or structural soundness: Mr. Randazzo gently deemed one headline “inert,” and quickly moved the meeting along. Or decorum: “That joke in the wrong hands could be unspeakably offensive,” Mr. Randazzo told Seth Reiss, a staff writer, about a headline that, if it had the potential to be too offensive for The Onion, is not likely to be reproduced in this newspaper.

A headline stating that the Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman was revealed to be President Obama’s best friend from high school was an obvious no-go —it would be stale long before press time — but still engendered admiring debate.

“Are we sure we don’t want to do that just to show a bunch of pictures of him and Thorbjorn Jagland on the basketball team together?” Mr. Reiss asked.

“Thorbjorn Jagland’s a great name,” Mr. Hanson said.

“It’s so metal,” Mr. Garden said.

Headlines that made it often needed little discussion. “Cherokee Tribe Makes News As Fraction of Actress’s Bloodline” was a keeper from the start.

The meeting stretched from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. and included a short lunch break during which several writers were asked to brainstorm individually on a broad idea — the enduring war in Afghanistan — that was proving to be a challenge. In the end “U.S. Continues Quagmire-Building Effort in Afghanistan” won out over “Quick and Painless Overthrow of Taliban Enters Eighth Year” and “Afghanistan Rapidly Replacing Iraq as Replacement for Vietnam as Replacement for Quagmire.”

After that, Mr. Randazzo assigned articles to support the headlines according to a vaguely rotational system. Someone jokingly suggested, with a combination of affection and envy, calling in Megan Ganz, 25, a former staff member who left over the summer to become a writer for “Important Things With Demetri Martin” on Comedy Central: “Does she have enough to do?”

This is an old story at The Onion. Another whiz kid, Mike DiCenzo, departed recently when he was hired to write for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” Ellie Kemper, a frequent contributor, got a major acting role on “The Office” this season. Before them, several alumni from the paper’s days in Madison, Wis., found great success as writers and producers of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report” and “Futurama.”

The paper’s function as a farm league has a complicated legacy, and the few who remain from the early-era Onion see themselves as defenders of its ethos. “There used to be a certain bond everybody shared, like we were in a band,” said Mr. Hanson, 41, who started at the paper 21 years ago after he dropped out of college. (“I went to the University of Wisconsin from 1986 to 1986,” he said.) “Plenty of the original staff never did have a lot of ambition beyond making each other laugh. I don’t know, but there’s something just different about people who’ve come from real-world, minimum-wage jobs.”

The Onion, a free weekly that is also online at theonion.com, has a print circulation of 400,000. It claims 1.8 million followers on Twitter.

Mr. Garden, who began writing for The Onion in 1993, said he wrestled with the notion that staying at The Onion was akin to being left behind. “A lot of the editors who went to L.A. sort of figured out the system; meanwhile, I still don’t know the system,” he said. “I’ve never written a spec script. There’s this fear that because I’ve done this for so long, there’s nothing else I can do.”

Yet The Onion continues to feel like home. “It’s different now, but there’s still camaraderie,” he said. “I don’t feel alienated along age lines, I just feel alienated — but the way I always do.”

And this is why we have this class and why journalists are there:From the New York times-
- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -

"We still get most of our information from investigative journalists. If you can't protect sources, there is a lot of public corruption and private malfeasance that will go undetected and unpublished."
- SENATOR ARLEN SPECTER, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on a bill to provide greater
protections to reporters.

.and from Slashdot:
| Decline In US Newspaper Readership Accelerates |
| from the stop-the-presses dept. |
| posted by timothy on Wednesday October 28, @17:44 (The Media) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/28/2131236/Decline-In-US-Newspaper-Readership-Acceler|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[0]Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that US [1]newspaper
circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across
the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through
September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a
success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper
Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their
ink-on-paper cousins. 'Newspapers have [2]ceased to be a mass medium by
any stretch of the imagination,' says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist
and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called
Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of
Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31
percent in 1940. 'Publishers who think their businesses are going to live
or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably
will see their businesses die,' writes Mutter. 'The smart ones will get
busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it's not already too
late.' Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers
or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers
which [3]tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly
local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a
lock on local ad markets."

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/10/28/2131236

Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603272.html
2. http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/10/newspapers-mass-less-mass-medium.html
3. http://www.leader-vindicator.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20382685&BRD=2758&PAG=461&dept_id=572980&rfi=6

We have talked about citizen journalist before and thought you might like to look at this example from the CBC:
Man who shot Dziekanski video gets journalism award
Paul Pritchard says he feels guilty he didn't help immigrant Tasered by RCMP
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 | 9:27 AM PT Comments154Recommend123
CBC News

Paul Pritchard, right, accompanied by his lawyer, Paul Pearson, held a press conference in November 2007 to demand police release his video.Paul Pritchard, right, accompanied by his lawyer, Paul Pearson, held a press conference in November 2007 to demand police release his video. (CBC)The man who used a digital camera to record the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport says he feels guilty he didn't try to help the Polish immigrant even though others honoured his actions Tuesday with a citizen-journalism award.

Dziekanski, 40, died Oct. 14, 2007, following several shocks from a Taser four RCMP officers used to subdue him after he caused a disturbance.

The incident might never have received much attention if Paul Pritchard had not decided to grab his digital camera and start recording the actions of the distraught Dziekanski before police arrived.

Dziekanski did not speak English and, after a long flight from Poland, had been left to wander for hours in the restricted zone of the arrivals area after being processed by immigration authorities while his mother waited for him in another part of the airport.

After the incident, Pritchard, who was on his way to his family's home in Victoria and had been waiting in the international arrivals lounge at the time, handed his video over to the RCMP to use in their investigation. The police promised it would be returned in 48 hours.

'I could have gone and talked to him.'— Paul Pritchard

But when the RCMP's public statements about the incident conflicted with what Pritchard and other witnesses said they saw, Pritchard demanded the RCMP return the video so that he could release it to the public.

When the police refused, saying releasing the video would compromise their investigation, Pritchard hired a lawyer, held a news conference and threatened to use legal action to get it back.

The release of the 10-minute video, which contradicted the police version of the incident, led to widespread public outrage around the world and diplomatic tensions between Canada and Poland. It also resulted in the deepest scrutiny of the RCMP in decades in the form of a special inquiry into the incident, led by retired British Columbia Appeal Court Justice Thomas R. Braidwood.
Citizen journalism award

On Tuesday evening in Toronto, Pritchard's work in documenting what happened and waging a legal battle against the RCMP for the release of his video was honoured by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

The organization gave Pritchard its first-ever award for citizen journalism, which recognizes the contributions of ordinary people in the field of journalism.

After the video was made public, Paul Pritchard said he wanted to step out of the media spotlight and find a job.After the video was made public, Paul Pritchard said he wanted to step out of the media spotlight and find a job. (CBC)But Pritchard is still questioning his role in what happened and the choices he made that night.

Two years after the incident, Pritchard told CBC News he still wonders what might have happened had he decided to talk to the distraught Polish immigrant rather than videotape him in distress.

"I don't consider myself a hero, and to be honest, I'm not completely happy with the fact that I did that," said Pritchard. "Maybe instead of grabbing a camera, I could have gone and talked to him.

"If I feel I did something wrong, or feel I didn't do enough, I think the effort I put in afterwards is enough for me to live with that … I did everything I possibly could do."

Pritchard did not testify at the Braidwood inquiry. Instead, he spent the past two years travelling abroad, deliberately avoiding coverage of the incident, he said.

When Pritchard released the video, he received a payment of several thousand dollars from three television networks: CBC, CTV and Global. At the time, Pritchard said he planned to use the money for medical care for his seriously ill father, who died four months later.
Video conflicted with police statements

The 10-minute Pritchard video, shot in three segments, showed a distraught Dziekanski in the airport arrivals lounge attempting to smash a computer and some furniture while several people attempted to communicate with him before police eventually arrive.

Four RCMP officers subdue Robert Dziekanski after stunning him with a Taser on Oct. 14, 2007, at the Vancouver airport.Four RCMP officers subdue Robert Dziekanski after stunning him with a Taser on Oct. 14, 2007, at the Vancouver airport. (Paul Pritchard) Before the video was released, the RCMP repeatedly said that there were only three RCMP officers involved in the incident and that the Taser was only deployed twice after Dziekanski attacked the officers.

But the video showed four RCMP officers rushed in and confronted Dziekanski, who backed up toward a counter. Dziekanski then faced the officers with what later turned out to be a stapler in one hand.

Immediately, there was a loud crack from a Taser, followed by Dziekanski screaming and convulsing as he stumbled and fell to the floor.

Another loud crack can be heard, as an officer appears to fire the Taser at Dziekanski again. Then, as the officers kneel on top of Dziekanski and handcuff him, he continues to scream and convulse on the floor.

One officer is heard to say, "Hit him again. Hit him again," and there is another loud cracking sound.

Evidence at the inquiry revealed the Taser was eventually fired five times at Dziekanski.

After he was subdued, the RCMP left him handcuffed on the floor, where he died before medical help arrived. The official cause of death was listed as "sudden death during restraint" in the coroner's post-mortem report.

A decision by B.C.'s criminal justice branch concluded that while the officers were involved in Dziekanski's death, there was not enough evidence to support laying criminal charges

The public inquiry into the incident is expected to release its report in the new year.

*

Check out this BBC report on hyper local news at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8303381.stm
Plus the assignment this week due 10 a.m. next Tue. is a report on student hobbies. See you next week.

The story assignment for Tue. 10 a.m. Oct.21st is a review of some sort of art event or subject. For example a movie, music concert or new CD,a T.V. show,a book, an art show or live drama or dance. See you next week.

Go over the futurismic.com and scroll down to the article about new Journalism. See if you can answer the question at the end and send it to me as an e-mail for bonus points.

There has been a lot of talk about how the web is revolutionising news distribution and it is true, however there are a few down sides. This below is from slashdot:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Misadventures In Online Journalism |
| from the dewey-defeats-obama dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 11, @10:44 (The Media) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/11/1439222/Misadventures-In-Online-Journalism |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

An anonymous reader writes "Paul Carr, writing for TechCrunch, has posted
his take on some of the flaws inherent to today's fast-paced news
ecosystem, where [0]bloggers often get little or no editorial feedback
and interesting headlines are passed around faster than ever. His article
was inspired by a recent story on ZDNet that accused Yahoo of sharing the
names and emails of 200,000 users with the Iranian government; [1]a
report that turned out to be false, yet generated a great deal of outrage
before it was disproved. Carr writes, 'Trusting the common sense of your
writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where
journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about
being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become
the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get
excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and
call it news. And then within half a minute — bloggers being what they
are — the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact
that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the
blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around
the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more
true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/10/11/1439222

Links:
0. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/10/witn-yahoo-didnt-sentence-200000-iranians-to-death-and-other-misadventures-in-online-journalism/
1. http://government.zdnet.com/?p=5547&tag=col1%3Bpost-5547

Self explanatory, really:
| Postmortem for a Dead Newspaper |
| from the what-not-to-do dept. |
| posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday October 02, @14:00 (The Internet) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/02/1550248/Postmortem-for-a-Dead-Newspaper |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Techdirt points out a great [0]postmortem for the Rocky Mountain News, a
newspaper that ended up shutting down because they couldn't adapt to a
world beyond print. While long, the talk (in both video and print) is
incredibly candid coming from someone who lived through it and shares at
least some portion of the blame. "It seems like pretty much everything
was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to
figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the
community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main
asset. ... The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a
number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those
businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong
terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with."

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/10/02/1550248

Links:
0. http://techdirt.com/articles/20091001/1900266400.shtml

Here's an example of a responsible rumour predictive blog news story:September 29th, 2009
Microsoft's Courier tablet: A Franklin Covey planner on steroids?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:32 am

Categories: Channel, Code names, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Research..., Resellers, Silverlight (wpf/e), Surface, Windows 7, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Gizmodo, Courier, Tablets, Notebooks..., Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Mary Jo Foley
33 TalkBacks

*
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
* Print
* Email
* Thumbs UpThumbs Down
*
+9
9

Since the first video and photo leaks went public last week of Microsoft’s alleged second-generation Tablet PC, tipsters have been working overtime.

Since Microsoft isn’t commenting at all on Courier (the official statement is “we don’t comment on rumors or speculation”), it’s tough to separate fact from fiction at this point.

But some tipsters are a little more connected than others. And one of my connected tipsters has shared some new info with me that I’m posting now, given that it seems more verifiable.

I say “verifiable” here, not in an official sense, but based on a new Courier video clip Gizmodo posted on September 29. Gizmodo’s new clip shows more details about the journaling model around which Courier’s user interface seems to revolve. From Gizmodo’s explanation:

“The (Courier) journal can actually be published online, and it’s shown here as able to be downloaded in three formats: a Courier file, Powerpoint or PDF. There’s also a library that looks a lot like Delicious Library, where things like subscriptions, notebooks and apps, are stored.”

That sure makes the Courier sound like it fits in with Microsoft’s uber-”three screens and a cloud” vision — via which devices, TVs and PCs all share common cloud-based services, storage, etc.

The Courier journaling metaphor isn’t so different from Microsoft’s OneNote note-taking app that is currently the showcase app for existing tablet PCs, my “connected” source said. He explained:

“The concept started as a software idea on how one would really build OneNote from scratch if you could for the Tablet form factor. That then morphed into building a tablet. If you look at the most successful pocket computer today - it is still the Franklin Covey Planning Products. So, the idea was how do you create a digital planner.”

My source also claimed that the operating system underneath Courier is — at least currently — Windows 7. (That’s not as crazy as it might seem, given that the OS underlying Microsoft’s Surface is Vista — and Windows 7 is touch-enabled.)

You can’t install Windows 7 apps on Courier, the source said, and that’s intentional.

The original Microsoft Tablets “failed because the applications were not tailored to a tablet form factor - that is, Word still had toolbars and menus and scollbars. So, a tablet needs to be like an iPhone - a UX that is specific for the form factor,” the source said.

My source said that Courier is an incubation project, meaning it’s further along than a Microsoft Research project, but still not in the commercialization pipeline. That said, he heard the delivery goal is mid-2010. That seems pretty darn ambitious to me, but he also said Microsoft is currently leaning toward using the Xbox model — in other words, making the device itself, and not relying on its current Tablet partners — so that could speed things up a bit.

I can’t verify any of what my source has told me. But I figured I’d put it out there, as it jibes with what Gizmodo has unearthed.

What’s your take? Is the Courier protoype we’re hearing and seeing bits and pieces about something you could see having wider appeal than the current generation of Tablets?

Popular Science in the August issue which i just received in digital form as a section of misleading or wrong Science Journalism stories and the following by Ben Goldacres in his blog Bad Science has something similar to say in more detail:Asking for it

July 4th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science | 41 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 4 July 2009

There’s nothing like science for giving that objective, white-coat flavoured legitimacy to your prejudices, so it must have been a great day for Telegraph readers when they came across the headline “Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists”. Ah, scientists. “Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped, claim scientists at the University of Leicester.” Well there you go. Oddly, though, the title of the press release for the same research was “Promiscuous men more likely to rape”.

Normally we berate journalists for rewriting press releases. Had the Telegraph found some news?

I rang Sophia Shaw at the University of Leicester. She was surprised to have been presented as an expert scientist on the pages of the Daily Telegraph, as Sophia is an MSc student, and this is her dissertation project. It’s also not finished. “We are intending on getting it published, but my findings are very preliminary.” She was discussing her dissertation at an academic conference, when the British Psychological Society’s PR team picked it up, and put out a press release. We will discuss that later.

But first, the science. Shaw spoke to about 100 men, presenting them with various situations around being with a woman, and asking them when they would call it a night, in order to explore men’s attitudes towards coercing women into sex. “I’m very aware that there are limitations to my study. It’s self report data about sensitive issues, so that’s got its flaws, participants were answering when sober, and so on.”

But more than that, she told me, every single one of the first four statements made by the Telegraph is a flat, unambiguous, factually incorrect misrepresentation of her findings.

Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped? “We found no evidence that that women who are more outgoing are more likely to be raped, this is completely inaccurate, we found no difference whatsoever. The alcohol thing is also completely wrong: if anything, we found that men reported they were willing to go further with women who are completely sober.”

And what about the Telegraph’s next claim, or rather, the Telegraph’s reassuringly distant and objective assertion that it is scientists who are now claiming that women who dress provocatively are more likely to be raped?

“We have found at the minute that people will go slightly further with women who are provocatively dressed, but this result is not statistically significant. Basically you can’t say that’s an effect, it could easily be the play of chance. I told the journalist it isn’t one of our main findings, you can’t say that. It’s not significant, which is why we’re not reporting it in our main analysis.”

So if the Telegraph are throwing blame around with rape, who do we blame for this story, and what do we do about it? On the one hand, we’re not naturally impressed with the newspaper. “When I saw the article my heart completely sank, and it made me really angry, given how sensitive this subject is. To be making claims like the Telegraph did, in my name, places all the blame on women, which is not what we were doing at all. I just felt really angry about how wrong they’d got this study.” Since I started sniffing around, and Sophia complained, the Telegraph have quietly changed the online copy of the article, although there has been no formal correction, and in any case, it remains inaccurate.

But there is a second, less obvious problem. Repeatedly, unpublished work – often of a highly speculative and eye-catching nature – is shepherded into newspapers by the press officers of the British Psychological Society, and other organisations. A rash of news coverage and popular speculation ensues, in a situation where nobody can read the academic work. I could only get to the reality of what was measured, and how, by personally tracking down and speaking to an MSc student about her dissertation on the phone. In any situation this would be ridiculous, but in a sensitive area such as rape it is blind, irresponsible, coverage-hungry foolishness.

Science Journalism update:

July 7, 2009 | 0 comments
Really Mass Media
In London last week at the World Conference of Science Journalists, Philip Hilts, the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T., reviewed the worldwide state of Internet and cell phone use, two of the major ways people now get news


e-mail print comment
60-Second Science
Listen to this podcast:
Download this podcast
Subscribe via: RSS | iTunes
More 60-Second Science | All Podcasts

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

Ever increasing numbers of people are consuming news via the internet and cell phones. In London last week at the World Conference of Science Journalists, Philip Hilts, the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T., reviewed the worldwide state of Internet and cell phone use:

“Internet use, it’s about 1.5 to two billion internet users, subscribers. And so there’s this discussion about, well, we have it in North America but Africa’s not got it, so we’re on two different planets and so on. That’s true, 5.6 percent in Africa now, 17 percent in Asia, but this is moving very rapidly. In Africa it’s growing 12 times right now. In Asia it’s growing almost six times right now. So the greatest growth is where we’re short in penetration.

“Cell phone use where news will be also as the smart phones get around the world and as Africa gets wired up, the cables are now going in that will be useful in Africa, they haven’t been there. 1980, we had 11,200,000 cell phone subscribers which was zero penetration. And we’re looking at 60 percent penetration now, 4.1 billion subscribers. China and India is the core of cell phone usage on Earth, and then it goes on down from there, U.S., Brazil, Japan, U.K.”

—Reported by Steve Mirsky

Here's a little extra plus for you. Take a look over these stories and try and think of a story you could write similar to one of them, about something that you find and research. Bonus points. See you all on Tue. (The two of you that did not get this as a forwarded e-mail should check with your classmates to see the html version)
Clark Richardson,1-10-22 #708
Uenosakuragi, Taito-ku
Tokyo-to 110-0002
Japan
Phone-only 03-5685-1503 International-81-3-5685-1503; Chiba - 1941 Yamada, Ohara, Isumi-shi, Chiba,298-0025 Japan. Phone & Fax 0470-66-0858
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clarkr/
"Where is paradise?"- "It is behind the green Sugidama
"And remember, no matter where you go, there you are."
-Confucius



Begin forwarded message:

From: AlterNet Headlines
Date: July 4, 2009 6:48:15 PM JST
To: carsurf@dragon.email.ne.jp
Subject: What's Behind Palin's Resignation? | Will Jackson's Kids Suffer the Same Fate? | Pollan: Our Food System Is Collapsing
Reply-To: alternet@mail.democracyinaction.org


Headlines Newsletter
July 4th, 2009
All stories, blogs, and video »




Will the Tragedy of Michael Jackson's Life Be Inherited By His Kids?
By Patricia J. Williams, The Nation
Jackson's fame and fortune ensured he had few barriers whatever fancy seized him -- including his made-to-order kids. Read more »




Sarah Palin Resigns: Is She Fleeing Scandal?
By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
What is behind Palin's resignation from office? Read more »



Michael Pollan: We Are Headed Toward a Breakdown in Our Food System
By David Beers, The Tyee
Pollan gives a glimpse at the current state of food politics inside the White House and within his own home. Read more »



This July 4th, Rebel and Agitate for Change
By Jim Hightower, AlterNet
Agitators created America, and it's their feisty spirit and outright rebelliousness that we celebrate on our national holiday. Read more »



Rolling Stone Expose Declares Goldman Sachs Behind Every Market Crash Since 1920s
By Daniel Tencer, Raw Story
Matt Taibbi explains how the company created market bubbles and then profited from the crash that followed. Read more »



"Deliver Us From Evil": The Amorality of the Catholic Church
By Greta Christina, Greta Christina's Blog
The basic hierarchy and theology of the Catholic Church is a recipe for the abuse of power. Read more »



Breadline USA: Why People Are Going Hungry in the Land of Plenty
By Sasha Abramsky, PoliPoint Press
America's poor are being priced out of a market flush with excess eatables. It's an abomination we can fix. Read more »



Summer Blockbusters: Why Do We Insist on Watching Really Bad Movies?
By Sameer Pandya, Miller-McCune.com
Maybe they are more like summer flings -- despite all the signs that should stay far away, you fall intensely anyway. Read more »

PEEK and Video: The hottest buzz and videos on the web


Michelle Malkin Freaks Out Because the Government Might Help Poor People a Tiny Bit
By D. Aristophanes, Sadly, No!
The horror! Read more »



Jon Stewart: Mark Sanford, Shut the F**ck Up
By Staff, AlterNet
Why does Sanford insist on treating us like his own private confessional?Read more »



Nazi Groups Look for New Recruits at Tea Parties
By BarbinMD, Daily Kos
Gee, what a surprise. Read more »



Cheney Orchestrated Public Response to Plame Leak
By Melissa McEwan, Shakesville
Former Bush administration officials say documents detailing Cheney's involvement must remain secret. The Obama administration agrees! Hopey changey! Read more »





Support AlterNet | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe
You are subscribed as carsurf@dragon.email.ne.jp

© 2007 Independent Media Institute
All Rights Reserved
77 Federal St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94107

CHECK THIS OUT> http://artspacetokyo.com/blog/archives/half_a_century_of_nuclear_explosions/

Well everyone else is talking about is so,I guess, so should we, or So should we all, may be better
| Ad Networks the Laggards In Jackson Traffic Spike |
| from the what-else-is-new dept. |
| posted by CmdrTaco on Monday June 29, @11:02 (The Internet) |
| http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/29/1343225 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

[0]miller60 writes "Advertising networks are being cited as the [1]major
bottlenecks in performance woes experienced by major news sites during
the [2]crush of Internet traffic Thursday as news broke about the death
of pop star Michael Jackson. An analysis by Keynote found that many news
sites delivered their own content promptly, only to find their page
delivery delayed by slow-loading ads. The inclusion of third-party
content on high-traffic pages is a growing challenge for site operators.
It's not just ads, as social media widgets are also seeing wider usage on
commercial sites. How best to balance the content vs. performance
tradeoffs?"

Discuss this story at:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/06/29/1343225

Links:
0. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/
1. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/29/keynote-ad-networks-failed-not-news-sites/
2. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/06/26/1221214/News-Sites-Slammed-By-Michael-Jackson-Traffic

When information continues to blink and wink by it is important to catch the attention of your watchers and readers. Selling important news sometimes reduces you to a pimp, but if that is your job..to sell really important news you had better know about headlines and sell lines just like the business guys do: Check it out: >http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/25/10-common-mistakes-in-logo-design/

Logo designe= HEADLINES!

And more....
| Print Subscribers Cry Foul Over WP's Online-Only Story |
| from the wonder-how-they-feel-about-online-coupons dept. |
| posted by timothy on Monday June 22, @17:24 (The Media) |
| http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/22/2119228 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

[0]Hugh Pickens writes "The decision by the Washington Post to publish an
article exclusively online has [1]angered many readers who still pay for
the print edition of the newspaper and highlighted the thorny issues
newspaper editors still face in serving both print and online audiences.
[2]The 7,000 word story about the slaying in 2006 of Robert Wone, a young
lawyer who was found stabbed to death in a luxurious townhouse in the
Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington where a 'polyamorous family' of
three men lived, is the sort of long-form reporting that newspaper
editors say still justifies print in the digital age and many editors
agree that print is still the place to publish deep investigative
reporting, in part to give certain readers a reason to keep paying for
news. 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print,' said
newspaper consultant Mark Potts. 'This just felt like a nice two-part
series that they didn't have the room to put in the paper, so they just
threw it on the Web.' Editors at The Post say they considered publishing
the article in print, but they concluded it was too long at a time when
the paper, like most others, was in dire financial straits and trying to
scale back newsprint costs. 'Newspapers are going broke in part because
news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet,' wrote one reader in a
letter to the editor. 'As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could
not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I
came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons.'"

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/06/22/2119228

Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/business/media/22post.html
2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/31/AR2009053102510.html

GETTING THE FACTS RIGHT IS NOT EASY: (and if you don't, don't do it)
Home taping didn’t kill music

June 5th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science | 94 Comments »

Ben Goldacreimage
The Guardian
Saturday 6th June 2009

You are killing our creative industries. “Downloading costs billions” said the Sun. “MORE than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material.”

That’s about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily Mail were worried too: “The network had 1.3 million users sharing files online at midday on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one file per day, this would amount to 4.73 billion items being consumed for free every year.”

Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy more music. I’d like more details.

So where do these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come from? I found the original report. It was written by some academics you can hire in a unit at UCL called CIBER, the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (which “seeks to inform by countering idle speculation and uninformed opinion with the facts”). The report was commissioned by a government body called SABIP, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy.

On the billions lost it says: “Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10 billion (IP Rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs.”

What is the origin of this conservative figure? I hunted down the full CIBER documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed “background”, among five other points, it says: “Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10 billion and 4,000 jobs.” An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release. Genius.

But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73 billion items downloaded each year, worth £120 billion. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. Now before we go anywhere, this already seems rather high. I am not an economist, and I don’t know about their methods, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value. And someone downloading a £1,000 professional 3D animation software package to fiddle about with at home may not use it more than three times. I’m just saying.

In any case, that’s £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that’s still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax. Oh but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473 million items and £12 billion (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist. I can find no public correction.

I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of ten and were widely reported in news outlets around the world. SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful.

I think it’s okay to be confused and disappointed by this. Like I said: as far as I’m concerned, everything from this industry is false, until proven otherwise.

10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media
June 19th, 2009 | by Vadim Lavrusik

Vadim Lavrusik is a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is @lavrusik on Twitter and blogs at lavrusik.com.

With news organizations beginning to create special positions to manage the use of social media tools, such as the recently appointed social editor at The New York Times, journalism schools are starting to recognize the need to integrate social media into their curricula. That doesn’t mean having a class on Facebook or Twitter, which many college students already know inside and out, but instead means that professors are delving into how these tools can be applied to enrich the craft of reporting and producing the news and ultimately telling the story in the best possible way.

And though many professors are still experimenting and learning how these tools can be used, below are the 10 ways journalism schools are currently teaching students to use social media. Please share in the comments others that you have found to be important and effective as well.


1. Promoting Content
Social media tools are bringing readers to news sites and in many cases are increasing their Web-traffic. This isn’t just through the news organizations’ own social media accounts, but those of their writers that tweet, post, share and send links to their organization’s content. Each writer has a social network, and using social media tools to promote and distribute content increases the potential readership of the article being shared.

Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, said this is one of the most basic and yet very important social media uses for journalists. Sreenivasan, who is teaching a social media skills course in the fall, said it is a way for journalists to engage their audience and point them to the information that you are gathering.


2. Interviewing
Though they are often frowned upon, email interviews have become regularly used by news reporters. But the same concept can be achieved through a Facebook message or chat, Google Talk, a short exchange via Seesmic, or one of the most useful apps in a journalist’s arsenal: Skype.

Paul Jones, a clinical associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaches journalism students how to use technologies like Skype for conducting interviews. “The thing you use for play is also the thing you use for work,” Jones said of the tool. A student can conduct and record the interview on Skype and later embed it within an online post.

Jones said that using services like Skype allows journalists to interview international sources quite easily – and affordably, not to mention that it adds a visual element to the text of the story.

3. News Gathering and Research
The power of real-time search is providing journalists with up-to-the-second information on the latest developments of any news, trends and happenings, worldwide.

Jeff Jarvis, a professor and director of interactive media at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, said it’s important for students to know how to use real-time searches to gather information and keep up on what is breaking. This includes, but is not limited to, using search on Twitter, FriendFeed, OneRiot, Tweetmeme, Scoopler, and SearchMerge.


Sreenivasan said searches on social media sites can point journalists to supplementary information for their reporting. These sites can also help in the process of crowdsourced news gathering.

4. Crowdsourcing and Building a Source List
It’s amazing how many websites don’t include their staff’s contact information, and the WhitePages really no longer cut it. Luckily, because of the nature of social media in networking, most people post their contact info on their profiles. Social media tools are becoming vital in building source lists. One can track now fairly easily down a source on Facebook or Twitter and send them a message. (Of course, picking up the phone too still can’t hurt.)

Students are also being taught the power crowdsourcing using social media. A journalist can tweet a question involving their reporting or announce that they are looking for a source via their FriendFeed and get some remarkable responses. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, earlier this month posted a FriendFeed request to his more than 2,000 subscribers to help him determine why he was receiving conflicting traffic figures for different URL shorteners, for example. He received dozens of responses to his question.


Jones from the University of North Carolina teaches his students the importance of not only finding sources using Twitter and Facebook, but keeping them. One of the important factors in getting responses is doing the same when others ask questions — you have to be an active member of the social network if you expect your peers to help you ask for help.

5. Publishing with Social Tools
There are many social media tools that journalists can use to publish information, and this variety is something that journalism professors are encouraging students to explore. Publishing via social media tools can be as simple as updating readers or “followers” on Twitter during a breaking news event or building an entire news site focused around Facebook connectivity and conversations about local news – something Northwestern University students created with “NewsMixer” as a project at the Medill School of Journalism last year.


Paul Bradshaw, senior lecturer of online journalism and magazines at Birmingham City University, said the most basic tools that students should know how to use are Wordpress for blogging and site building, Twitter for live updates, Facebook for posting articles or videos, Delicious for bookmarking, Flickr for photos or videos, and YouTube for video. All of these can be used from the field with a smart phone or laptop.

Jarvis also noted the importance of using these mediums to meet the audience where they exist: social networks. “We used to always have the audience come to us, but that’s not the cast anymore,” Jarvis told me.

According to Jones, it is important for students to practice publishing information on these networks to learn how social media works and how it can be applied. He’s teaching a class on vernacular video and virtual communities in the fall, in which all of the course material come from videos, as well as student assignments and responses.

6. Blog and Website Integration
Because so many news sites are incorporating live blogging into their daily dose of content and conversation with readers, Katy Culver, a faculty member in the journalism school at University of Wisconsin at Madison, had her students learn how to use CoveritLive, which can be embedded within a site.

Culver had her students use CoveritLive to cover a lecture on journalism ethics that had limited seating. She said the conversation on the live blog was quite fascinating and informative with students linking to content that the lecturers were discussing. She said using live blogging is a great tool for readers to get a chance to ask questions of an expert, reporter, or editor at a news organization. Tools like CoveritLive also include integration with Twitter, Qik for live video, or YouTube pre-recorded videos.


Jarvis from CUNY, who had his students use BlogTalkRadio to host live audio broadcasts, said it’s about hosting a conversation with the readers and using it within content creates an interactive experience.

This is also why it is important for students to learn how to integrate social media tools into websites. Jones had his students build a Ning social network that integrated various social tools, for example.

7. Building Community and Rich Content
Sure a journalist can use social media tools to have a conversation with their audience, but what’s the point? The greater goal is to build a community through engagement. Crowdsourcing, live blogging, tweeting — it’s about building a network around issues that matter to the community. In a way, social networks are the new editorial page, rich with opinions and ideas.

Jarvis said building community can be done by joining groups on social networks (though always be careful that you’re not somehow taking sides). Ultimately, he said, social media should help journalists do their job and be integrated into their reporting, but not take it over. Content is still king.

Jones emphasized the importance of creating rich content. “A tweet shouldn’t just be ‘I am eating a sandwich,’” he said. It should include a link with details that are useful to someone reading it. And retweets, he said makes the original tweet more rich and gives it credibility because someone else thought it was useful to share with their network. In a way, it is like the Associated Press wire picking up your story, Jones said.

8. Personal Brand
Students can’t stay in school forever — eventually they need to get jobs. Social networks can be used to build a personal brand that can help students land a reporting gig after college. But Jones emphasized this applies to students only, which is what he teaches.

He believes that a journalist is representing their organization and not their name, and that applies to their use of social media. Often times, he said, a journalists’ followers are following them because the news organization they represent has credibility, not necessarily them.

9. Ethics: Remember, You’re Still a Journalist
Sreenivasan from Columbia said there are no hard and fast rules for ethics and social media yet. But told me that what a person posts or shares or produces on social media reflects on the person’s judgment and students should be cautious. He used the example of broadcasting your affiliations on Facebook through notifications on your wall.


In some cases, a journalist may actually be joining an advocacy group as a way to gain sources, but their social network could interpret that they support the group or are involved in some way, he said. Keep in mind the horror stories of people not getting jobs because of their social media profiles and the things they put on them — remember that employers no longer just look at your resume. Also, take a look a Leah Betancourt’s post on How Social Media is Radically Changing the Newsroom.

10. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
Sreenivasan, Culver, Jarvis and Jones all pointed to the importance of students experimenting with social media tools. For example, if Flickr isn’t meeting your needs, try another tool that suits your use better. Sreenivasan pointed out that we are all still learning the best practices of social media. Journalism students experimenting with these tools can learn how to apply them once they join the workforce.

Here are a few tips from Bradshaw for how teachers can encourage social media experimentation:

- Use the tools themselves to teach the class. Use them in any setting possible.
- Do it publicly and socially. For example, Bradshaw paired students up with “Twentors” to help students that were new to Twitter.
- Less talk, more action. Put the students out there and get them using the tools one by one.