Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
The comic book of Journalism has arrived and you can take a look at the first chapter.The Influencing Machine
culturebox:
entries
12
The Goldilocks Number
By Brooke Gladstone
Posted Thursday, May 19, 2011, at 7:32 AM ET
PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE
The following comes from Brooke Gladstone's new book, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, illustrated by Josh Neufeld. Read Gladstone's explanation of the book and a first excerpt about journalistic objectivity here. http://www.slate.com/id/2291942?wpisrc=newsletter_tis
This is something that we talked about a short time ago..the use of fictitious numbers were real one are hard to find or the reporter is just lazy.
culturebox:
entries
12
The Goldilocks Number
By Brooke Gladstone
Posted Thursday, May 19, 2011, at 7:32 AM ET
PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE
The following comes from Brooke Gladstone's new book, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, illustrated by Josh Neufeld. Read Gladstone's explanation of the book and a first excerpt about journalistic objectivity here. http://www.slate.com/id/2291942?wpisrc=newsletter_tis
This is something that we talked about a short time ago..the use of fictitious numbers were real one are hard to find or the reporter is just lazy.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
The real danger of personalised news is that you don't get what you need to know only what you want to know.
The Rise of Filter Bubbles
| from the sound-of-your-own-voice dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Sunday May 15, @23:21 (Censorship)
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
eldavojohn writes "Eli Pariser gave a talk at TED which posits that
tailoring algorithms are creating 'filter bubbles' around each user,
restricting the information that reaches you to be — unsurprisingly —
only what you want to see. While you might be happy that your preferred
liberal or conservative news hits you, you'll never get to see the
converse. This is because Google, Facebook, newspaper sites and even
Netflix filter what hits you before you get to see it. And since they
give you what you want, you never see the opposing viewpoints or step
outside your comfort zone. It amounts to a claim of censorship through
personalization, and now that every site does it, it's becoming a
problem. Pariser calls for all sites implementing these algorithms to
embed in the algorithms 'some sense of public life' and also have
transparency so you can understand why your Google search might look
different than someone with opposing tastes." Hit the link below to watch
a video of Pariser's talk.
Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Tenth Annual AusCERT Conference Kicks Off
| from the gentlemen-start-your-computers dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 16, @01:55 (Australia)
| https://it.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0259231/Tenth-Annual-AusCERT-Conference-Kicks-Off?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
The Rise of Filter Bubbles
| from the sound-of-your-own-voice dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Sunday May 15, @23:21 (Censorship)
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
eldavojohn writes "Eli Pariser gave a talk at TED which posits that
tailoring algorithms are creating 'filter bubbles' around each user,
restricting the information that reaches you to be — unsurprisingly —
only what you want to see. While you might be happy that your preferred
liberal or conservative news hits you, you'll never get to see the
converse. This is because Google, Facebook, newspaper sites and even
Netflix filter what hits you before you get to see it. And since they
give you what you want, you never see the opposing viewpoints or step
outside your comfort zone. It amounts to a claim of censorship through
personalization, and now that every site does it, it's becoming a
problem. Pariser calls for all sites implementing these algorithms to
embed in the algorithms 'some sense of public life' and also have
transparency so you can understand why your Google search might look
different than someone with opposing tastes." Hit the link below to watch
a video of Pariser's talk.
Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Tenth Annual AusCERT Conference Kicks Off
| from the gentlemen-start-your-computers dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 16, @01:55 (Australia)
| https://it.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0259231/Tenth-Annual-AusCERT-Conference-Kicks-Off?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
Sunday, May 15, 2011
What drives the news in the internet age? Here is one report:
Drudge Generates More News Traffic Than Social Media
| from the nobody-cares-about-your-day dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 09, @11:15 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tcd004 writes "A report released today by the Pew Research Center's
Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the Drudge Report is a
far more important driver of online news traffic than Facebook or
Twitter. In fact, for the top 25 news websites, Twitter barely registers
as a source of traffic. The report hits on several other [0]interesting
findings about news behavior."
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/05/pew-the-drudge-report-drive-more-top-news-traffic-than-twitter-or-facebook.html
Drudge Generates More News Traffic Than Social Media
| from the nobody-cares-about-your-day dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 09, @11:15 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tcd004 writes "A report released today by the Pew Research Center's
Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the Drudge Report is a
far more important driver of online news traffic than Facebook or
Twitter. In fact, for the top 25 news websites, Twitter barely registers
as a source of traffic. The report hits on several other [0]interesting
findings about news behavior."
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/05/pew-the-drudge-report-drive-more-top-news-traffic-than-twitter-or-facebook.html
Thursday, May 12, 2011
For Journalists, a Call to Rethink Their Online Models
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: May 10, 2011
Columbia University has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships — and their audiences’ relationships — with advertisers.
Enlarge This Image
The classified section of KSL, a TV station in Salt Lake City, attracts 250 million page views a month. A study says part of its success comes from reflecting the community's moral values.
Add to Portfolio
Yahoo! Inc
Go to your Portfolio »
That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.
In a report released on Tuesday, the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University outlines those recommendations and others, all intended to help newspapers, magazines and television stations better compete in the online marketplace.
“We’re not suggesting that journalists get marching orders from advertisers,” said Bill Grueskin, the academic dean for the journalism school and a co-author of the report. “We are suggesting that journalists get a much better understanding of why so many advertising dollars have left the traditional news media business.”
And, he added, a better understanding of what the news media can do to bring the dollars back. To have a journalism school, especially one as esteemed as Columbia’s, studying ad rate cards and the online coupon craze might seem unconventional. But it is an outgrowth of academia’s growing interest in the economic foundations of journalism at a time when those foundations appear unstable. Columbia and some other journalism schools, for instance, now offer courses on the economics of journalism.
The report’s section for conclusions opens with a quote from Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and a former reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Rothenberg told the report’s authors, “Here’s the problem: Journalists just don’t understand their business.”
That possibility comes up repeatedly in the report. “Many sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace changes brought on by digital technology,” it states, before recommending a “faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.”
It also recommends that journalists “gain a fuller appreciation for how advertisers now reach their customers via social media, new-media ads and search engine optimization,” and that larger news organizations should consider creating or re-creating separate digital staffs, “particularly on the business side.”
The report is a product of several months of visits to news organizations. Mr. Grueskin, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, co-wrote the report with Ava Seave, an adjunct professor and a consultant, and Lucas Graves, a doctoral candidate at Columbia. The journalism school will hold a public discussion about the report on Tuesday evening.
The report’s authors diagnose problems for digital media. Perhaps chief among them is that advertising on the Web tends to have less value for the consumer than advertising in other formats.
“If you ever watch somebody reading a copy of Vanity Fair, they spend as much time looking at the ads as they spend looking at the content,” Mr. Grueskin said, “because the ads are actually useful for readers.” (Ads having value on their own, he added, is “something that we as journalists have a hard time getting our heads around.”)
One of Columbia’s case studies of advertising adding value is KSL.com, the Web site of KSL, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City. Thanks in large part to a robust classified ads service, the site now registers about 250 million page views each month — a staggeringly high figure for a local market of that size. Steep declines in classified advertising have affected countless newspapers and other news properties. But KSL.com has bucked the trend. Its classifieds section benefits from its ownership by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and from the fact that it started up before Craigslist in Salt Lake City.
But it also benefits, Mr. Grueskin said, by reflecting its community’s moral values and by forbidding anonymity. “If I were a publisher, I would spend some time looking at what KSL’s Web site does with classifieds versus what Craigslist does,” he said.
Mr. Grueskin said he was struck by a comment that Chris Hendricks, a vice president at McClatchy, made in an interview for the report:
"It’s almost like we are a sales and distribution company that decided we’re going to fund journalism." Mr. Hendricks’s local sales force sells space on sites like Yahoo as well as on McClatchy’s own sites.
The report’s authors assert that there are limits to the cost-per-thousand model of advertising pricing and say that news outlets and marketers together should “forge new models that integrate digital ads and social-media outreach.”
As an example, it cites the Web site of The Dallas Morning News, which has a section for high school sports. A package deal for advertising on the section during a recent football season included print ads, a player-of-the-week contest and a banquet for players at the end of the season. “That gets you out of the pure ‘five dollars for every thousand page views’ model,” Mr. Grueskin said.
The report’s authors take a dim view of online subscriptions to news, cautioning that news sites “now should have very limited expectations for its success — at least on the Web.”
They are more bullish on the prospects of subscriptions for mobile access. They write, “If publishers really hope to expunge the ‘original sin’ of giving away content free online, they may be best positioned to do so not on the computers where they first gave away their wares, but on mobile devices that offer a more welcoming environment.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 10, 2011, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: For Journalists, A Call to Rethink Their Online Models.
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: May 10, 2011
Columbia University has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships — and their audiences’ relationships — with advertisers.
Enlarge This Image
The classified section of KSL, a TV station in Salt Lake City, attracts 250 million page views a month. A study says part of its success comes from reflecting the community's moral values.
Add to Portfolio
Yahoo! Inc
Go to your Portfolio »
That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.
In a report released on Tuesday, the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University outlines those recommendations and others, all intended to help newspapers, magazines and television stations better compete in the online marketplace.
“We’re not suggesting that journalists get marching orders from advertisers,” said Bill Grueskin, the academic dean for the journalism school and a co-author of the report. “We are suggesting that journalists get a much better understanding of why so many advertising dollars have left the traditional news media business.”
And, he added, a better understanding of what the news media can do to bring the dollars back. To have a journalism school, especially one as esteemed as Columbia’s, studying ad rate cards and the online coupon craze might seem unconventional. But it is an outgrowth of academia’s growing interest in the economic foundations of journalism at a time when those foundations appear unstable. Columbia and some other journalism schools, for instance, now offer courses on the economics of journalism.
The report’s section for conclusions opens with a quote from Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and a former reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Rothenberg told the report’s authors, “Here’s the problem: Journalists just don’t understand their business.”
That possibility comes up repeatedly in the report. “Many sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace changes brought on by digital technology,” it states, before recommending a “faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.”
It also recommends that journalists “gain a fuller appreciation for how advertisers now reach their customers via social media, new-media ads and search engine optimization,” and that larger news organizations should consider creating or re-creating separate digital staffs, “particularly on the business side.”
The report is a product of several months of visits to news organizations. Mr. Grueskin, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, co-wrote the report with Ava Seave, an adjunct professor and a consultant, and Lucas Graves, a doctoral candidate at Columbia. The journalism school will hold a public discussion about the report on Tuesday evening.
The report’s authors diagnose problems for digital media. Perhaps chief among them is that advertising on the Web tends to have less value for the consumer than advertising in other formats.
“If you ever watch somebody reading a copy of Vanity Fair, they spend as much time looking at the ads as they spend looking at the content,” Mr. Grueskin said, “because the ads are actually useful for readers.” (Ads having value on their own, he added, is “something that we as journalists have a hard time getting our heads around.”)
One of Columbia’s case studies of advertising adding value is KSL.com, the Web site of KSL, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City. Thanks in large part to a robust classified ads service, the site now registers about 250 million page views each month — a staggeringly high figure for a local market of that size. Steep declines in classified advertising have affected countless newspapers and other news properties. But KSL.com has bucked the trend. Its classifieds section benefits from its ownership by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and from the fact that it started up before Craigslist in Salt Lake City.
But it also benefits, Mr. Grueskin said, by reflecting its community’s moral values and by forbidding anonymity. “If I were a publisher, I would spend some time looking at what KSL’s Web site does with classifieds versus what Craigslist does,” he said.
Mr. Grueskin said he was struck by a comment that Chris Hendricks, a vice president at McClatchy, made in an interview for the report:
"It’s almost like we are a sales and distribution company that decided we’re going to fund journalism." Mr. Hendricks’s local sales force sells space on sites like Yahoo as well as on McClatchy’s own sites.
The report’s authors assert that there are limits to the cost-per-thousand model of advertising pricing and say that news outlets and marketers together should “forge new models that integrate digital ads and social-media outreach.”
As an example, it cites the Web site of The Dallas Morning News, which has a section for high school sports. A package deal for advertising on the section during a recent football season included print ads, a player-of-the-week contest and a banquet for players at the end of the season. “That gets you out of the pure ‘five dollars for every thousand page views’ model,” Mr. Grueskin said.
The report’s authors take a dim view of online subscriptions to news, cautioning that news sites “now should have very limited expectations for its success — at least on the Web.”
They are more bullish on the prospects of subscriptions for mobile access. They write, “If publishers really hope to expunge the ‘original sin’ of giving away content free online, they may be best positioned to do so not on the computers where they first gave away their wares, but on mobile devices that offer a more welcoming environment.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 10, 2011, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: For Journalists, A Call to Rethink Their Online Models.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Here are three separate articles, all from Slashdot, reporting on the rapid change in what we think of as Journalism:
First Ever Pulitzer For Non-Print Series
| from the take-a-lesson-rupert dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Monday May 02, @21:58 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]decora writes "[1]Last year ProPublica won the first Pulitzer for an
online news site. This year, they have been [2]awarded the first Pulitzer
for a series that did not appear in print. The series was Eisinger and
Bernstein's 'The Wall Street Money Machine,' which described how hedge
funds and financiers profited from the collapse of the economy.
ProPublica publishes under a [3]Creative Commons license and hosts a
[4]Nerd Blog where they write about journalism-related hacking and
publish [5]open source tools they have developed."
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
Links:
0. mailto:decorat@mail.com
1. http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/13/2020227/First-Pulitzer-Awarded-To-an-Online-News-Site
2. http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/podcast-pulitzer-special-jake-bernstein-and-jesse-eisinger/
3. http://www.propublica.org/about/steal-our-stories
4. http://www.propublica.org/nerds
5. http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/timelinesetter-easy-timelines-from-spreadsheets-now-open-to-allThe Internet's New Alternate Reality
| from the it's-true-i-read-it-on-the-interweb dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Tuesday May 03, @05:11 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Tim Rutten writes in the LA Times that when
President Obama released his long form birth certificate last week, one
of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and —
to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House
briefing room Wednesday was the rapidity and ease with which so many
leading birthers rejected the evidence he presented. 'Until very
recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined
a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes —
dropped,' writes Rutten. 'Today, the growth of the Internet has
[1]drained the noun "news" of its former authority. If you don't like the
facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you
simply keep clicking until you find one whose "facts" accord with your
beliefs.'"
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0430-rutten-20110430,0,6735231.columnBin Laden's Death Causes Twitter Record
| from the almost-nothing-of-value dept.
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 03, @08:49 (Twitter)
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]gabbo529 writes "Twitter has been a source of breaking news since its
inception five years ago, and the social network was used at a high rate
last night with the death of Osama Bin Laden. [Sunday night] saw the
[1]highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m.
ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second."
Discuss this story at:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
Links:
0. mailto:g.perna@ibtimes.com
1. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/140411/20110502/twitter-osama-bin-laden-twitter-record.htm
First Ever Pulitzer For Non-Print Series
| from the take-a-lesson-rupert dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Monday May 02, @21:58 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]decora writes "[1]Last year ProPublica won the first Pulitzer for an
online news site. This year, they have been [2]awarded the first Pulitzer
for a series that did not appear in print. The series was Eisinger and
Bernstein's 'The Wall Street Money Machine,' which described how hedge
funds and financiers profited from the collapse of the economy.
ProPublica publishes under a [3]Creative Commons license and hosts a
[4]Nerd Blog where they write about journalism-related hacking and
publish [5]open source tools they have developed."
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
Links:
0. mailto:decorat@mail.com
1. http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/13/2020227/First-Pulitzer-Awarded-To-an-Online-News-Site
2. http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/podcast-pulitzer-special-jake-bernstein-and-jesse-eisinger/
3. http://www.propublica.org/about/steal-our-stories
4. http://www.propublica.org/nerds
5. http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/timelinesetter-easy-timelines-from-spreadsheets-now-open-to-allThe Internet's New Alternate Reality
| from the it's-true-i-read-it-on-the-interweb dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Tuesday May 03, @05:11 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Tim Rutten writes in the LA Times that when
President Obama released his long form birth certificate last week, one
of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and —
to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House
briefing room Wednesday was the rapidity and ease with which so many
leading birthers rejected the evidence he presented. 'Until very
recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined
a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes —
dropped,' writes Rutten. 'Today, the growth of the Internet has
[1]drained the noun "news" of its former authority. If you don't like the
facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you
simply keep clicking until you find one whose "facts" accord with your
beliefs.'"
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0430-rutten-20110430,0,6735231.columnBin Laden's Death Causes Twitter Record
| from the almost-nothing-of-value dept.
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 03, @08:49 (Twitter)
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]gabbo529 writes "Twitter has been a source of breaking news since its
inception five years ago, and the social network was used at a high rate
last night with the death of Osama Bin Laden. [Sunday night] saw the
[1]highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m.
ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second."
Discuss this story at:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting
Links:
0. mailto:g.perna@ibtimes.com
1. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/140411/20110502/twitter-osama-bin-laden-twitter-record.htm
Saturday, April 30, 2011
And again from the New York Times another very slanted Head Line:
- ON THIS DAY -
On April 30, 1975, the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces.
See This Front Page
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/on-this-day/April-30?th=&emc=tha213&nl=todaysheadlines
Buy This Front Page
http://www.nytstore.com/Front-Page-New-York-Times-Reprint_p_103.html
"Fell to Communist Forces"?? Well most people in the world at the time saw it from the other side of the line. Vietnamese capital of Saigon Liberated by Vietnamese forces.
The following are much funnier and thus slightly suspect as real headlines, however, you get the idea:
Proofreading is a dying art, wouldn't you say?
Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter
This one I caught in the SGV Tribune the other day and called the Editorial Room and asked who wrote this. It took two or three readings before the editor realized that what he was reading was impossible!!! They put in a correction the next day.
I just couldn't help but send this along. Too funny...
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
No crap, really? Ya think?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
Now that's taking things a bit far!
----------------------------------------------------------- Panda Mating Fails; VeterinarianTakes Over
What a guy!
---------------------------------------------------------------
Miners Refuse to Work after Death
No-good-for-nothing' lazy so-and-so's!
------------------------------------------------------
Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
See if that works any better than a fair trial!
----------------------------------------------------------
War Dims Hope for Peace
I can see where it might have that effect!
----------------------------------------------------------------
If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
Ya think?!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
Who would have thought!
----------------------------------------------------------------
Enfield (London ) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
They may be on to something!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
You mean there's something stronger than duct tape?
----------------------------------------------------------
Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge
He probably IS the battery charge!
----------------------------------------------
New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
Weren't they fat enough?!
-----------------------------------------------
Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
That's what he gets for eating those beans!
---------------- ---------------------------------
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Do they taste like chicken?
******************************
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
Chainsaw Massacre all over again!
*************************************************** Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
Boy, are they tall!
*******************************************
And the winner is....
Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
Did I read that right?
***************************************************
- ON THIS DAY -
On April 30, 1975, the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces.
See This Front Page
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/on-this-day/April-30?th=&emc=tha213&nl=todaysheadlines
Buy This Front Page
http://www.nytstore.com/Front-Page-New-York-Times-Reprint_p_103.html
"Fell to Communist Forces"?? Well most people in the world at the time saw it from the other side of the line. Vietnamese capital of Saigon Liberated by Vietnamese forces.
The following are much funnier and thus slightly suspect as real headlines, however, you get the idea:
Proofreading is a dying art, wouldn't you say?
Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter
This one I caught in the SGV Tribune the other day and called the Editorial Room and asked who wrote this. It took two or three readings before the editor realized that what he was reading was impossible!!! They put in a correction the next day.
I just couldn't help but send this along. Too funny...
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
No crap, really? Ya think?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
Now that's taking things a bit far!
----------------------------------------------------------- Panda Mating Fails; VeterinarianTakes Over
What a guy!
---------------------------------------------------------------
Miners Refuse to Work after Death
No-good-for-nothing' lazy so-and-so's!
------------------------------------------------------
Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
See if that works any better than a fair trial!
----------------------------------------------------------
War Dims Hope for Peace
I can see where it might have that effect!
----------------------------------------------------------------
If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
Ya think?!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
Who would have thought!
----------------------------------------------------------------
Enfield (London ) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
They may be on to something!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
You mean there's something stronger than duct tape?
----------------------------------------------------------
Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge
He probably IS the battery charge!
----------------------------------------------
New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
Weren't they fat enough?!
-----------------------------------------------
Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
That's what he gets for eating those beans!
---------------- ---------------------------------
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Do they taste like chicken?
******************************
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
Chainsaw Massacre all over again!
*************************************************** Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
Boy, are they tall!
*******************************************
And the winner is....
Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
Did I read that right?
***************************************************
Here is a very good example of a bad headline. Headlines should catch your attention but also describe as best they can,accurately, what the story is about.
- TECHNOLOGY -
PC Sales Off, Games Buoy Microsoft
A slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft was
overshadowed by strong sales of its Kinect and Xbox video
game products.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/technology/29microsoft.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26
As you can see 'a slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft' leads. Microsoft does not sell computers, so a slow down of zero is how many sales?? Thinking should be involved in headline writing as well as writing the story itself.
- TECHNOLOGY -
PC Sales Off, Games Buoy Microsoft
A slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft was
overshadowed by strong sales of its Kinect and Xbox video
game products.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/technology/29microsoft.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26
As you can see 'a slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft' leads. Microsoft does not sell computers, so a slow down of zero is how many sales?? Thinking should be involved in headline writing as well as writing the story itself.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
The news as you see it:Filtering the Social Web to Present News Items
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Published: April 24, 2011
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SAN FRANCISCO — News events as varied as the commercial jet landing in the Hudson River and the uprisings in Egypt have demonstrated that people armed with cellphones — not professional reporters — are often the first source of breaking news, uploading Twitter posts, photos and video to the Web. But the result can leave people drowning in too much information.
Enlarge This Image
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Burt Herman, left, and Xavier Damman, the founders of Storify, which opens Monday.
A Web start-up named Storify, which opens to the public Monday, aims to help journalists and others collect and filter all this information.
Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. They can also add text and embed the resulting collages of content on their own sites. During a private test period, reporters from The Washington Post, NPR, PBS and other outlets used the service.
Storify, based in San Francisco, is one of several Web start-ups — including Storyful, Tumblr and Color — that are developing ways to help journalists and others sift through the explosion of online content and publish the most relevant information. Investors are also betting there is a market for filtering the social Web for high-quality posts. Khosla Ventures has invested $2 million in Storify.
Even though journalists may not be the first on the scene, they select the most reliable sources, digest loads of information and provide context for events, said Burt Herman, a founder of Storify and a longtime Associated Press reporter.
“We have so many real-time streams now, we’re all drowning,” Mr. Herman said. “So the idea of Storify is to pick out the most important pieces, amplify them and give them context.”
Al Jazeera English introduced a talk show, “The Stream,” which appeared online last week and will be televised in May, that collects perspectives from social media using Storify. A recent item on the fear of Islam in the United States, for instance, included YouTube videos, Twitter posts and paragraphs from essays on Web sites and blogs.
“Storify is essentially our script,” said Ahmed Shihab Eldin, a producer and host of “The Stream.” “We knew we basically needed to capitalize on the reality that the industry is facing, which is that we no longer have exclusivity on sharing and publishing information.”
Andy Carvin, NPR’s one-man encyclopedia on Twitter for the uprisings across the Middle East and northern Africa, first used Storify to cover the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, when he realized that the reaction to the event was a story itself.
“It quickly evolved into looking at how people were discussing the media coverage surrounding it and its potential political impact,” said Mr. Carvin, senior strategist on NPR’s social media desk. “There’s a big need for tools that allow people to collect bits of social media context and organize them in some fashion.”
The tools will remain free, but Storify will consider selling ads or charging brands to use the service, said Xavier Damman, a Storify founder. Levi’s and Samsung have already used it for marketing campaigns.
Mr. Herman started Storify with Mr. Damman, who is an engineer. Mr. Herman also founded Hacks/Hackers, a group for journalists and engineers with chapters worldwide.
“We’re really trying to put together computer science plus storytelling and journalism to think creatively about how you can blend the two worlds,” he said.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 25, 2011, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Filtering the Social Web To Present News Items.
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Published: April 24, 2011
Recommend
Reprints
Share
SAN FRANCISCO — News events as varied as the commercial jet landing in the Hudson River and the uprisings in Egypt have demonstrated that people armed with cellphones — not professional reporters — are often the first source of breaking news, uploading Twitter posts, photos and video to the Web. But the result can leave people drowning in too much information.
Enlarge This Image
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Burt Herman, left, and Xavier Damman, the founders of Storify, which opens Monday.
A Web start-up named Storify, which opens to the public Monday, aims to help journalists and others collect and filter all this information.
Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. They can also add text and embed the resulting collages of content on their own sites. During a private test period, reporters from The Washington Post, NPR, PBS and other outlets used the service.
Storify, based in San Francisco, is one of several Web start-ups — including Storyful, Tumblr and Color — that are developing ways to help journalists and others sift through the explosion of online content and publish the most relevant information. Investors are also betting there is a market for filtering the social Web for high-quality posts. Khosla Ventures has invested $2 million in Storify.
Even though journalists may not be the first on the scene, they select the most reliable sources, digest loads of information and provide context for events, said Burt Herman, a founder of Storify and a longtime Associated Press reporter.
“We have so many real-time streams now, we’re all drowning,” Mr. Herman said. “So the idea of Storify is to pick out the most important pieces, amplify them and give them context.”
Al Jazeera English introduced a talk show, “The Stream,” which appeared online last week and will be televised in May, that collects perspectives from social media using Storify. A recent item on the fear of Islam in the United States, for instance, included YouTube videos, Twitter posts and paragraphs from essays on Web sites and blogs.
“Storify is essentially our script,” said Ahmed Shihab Eldin, a producer and host of “The Stream.” “We knew we basically needed to capitalize on the reality that the industry is facing, which is that we no longer have exclusivity on sharing and publishing information.”
Andy Carvin, NPR’s one-man encyclopedia on Twitter for the uprisings across the Middle East and northern Africa, first used Storify to cover the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, when he realized that the reaction to the event was a story itself.
“It quickly evolved into looking at how people were discussing the media coverage surrounding it and its potential political impact,” said Mr. Carvin, senior strategist on NPR’s social media desk. “There’s a big need for tools that allow people to collect bits of social media context and organize them in some fashion.”
The tools will remain free, but Storify will consider selling ads or charging brands to use the service, said Xavier Damman, a Storify founder. Levi’s and Samsung have already used it for marketing campaigns.
Mr. Herman started Storify with Mr. Damman, who is an engineer. Mr. Herman also founded Hacks/Hackers, a group for journalists and engineers with chapters worldwide.
“We’re really trying to put together computer science plus storytelling and journalism to think creatively about how you can blend the two worlds,” he said.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 25, 2011, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Filtering the Social Web To Present News Items.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Your So Shallow:
This is an excerpt from an interview with a great designer talking about what kind of an education designers should have and he then relates that to journalism.
Q-How should universities change?
A-The first thing to do is ask: "What is the purpose of all the technology we are developing?" And the answer is, obviously: "To help people." But the understanding of "people" is in a different school—the social sciences—than the school where the understanding of technologies are taught. Right now, people in one area don't understand what someone else in their own department does, let alone what is being done in other departments.
If you want to be broad, you have to be shallow. In fact, you are shallow, because that's what journalists are: very broad, and therefore of necessity, relatively shallow in any area.
Thank you.
This is an excerpt from an interview with a great designer talking about what kind of an education designers should have and he then relates that to journalism.
Q-How should universities change?
A-The first thing to do is ask: "What is the purpose of all the technology we are developing?" And the answer is, obviously: "To help people." But the understanding of "people" is in a different school—the social sciences—than the school where the understanding of technologies are taught. Right now, people in one area don't understand what someone else in their own department does, let alone what is being done in other departments.
If you want to be broad, you have to be shallow. In fact, you are shallow, because that's what journalists are: very broad, and therefore of necessity, relatively shallow in any area.
Thank you.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
A very nice double piece from Slate in fictional journalism;Numbers Are Hard To Come By
What journalists write when they encounter a known unknown.
By Jack ShaferPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2010, at 5:02 PM ET
In 2002, while speaking to reporters, Zen master Donald H. Rumsfeld noted that we are bedeviled by "known unknowns."
Master Rumsfeld wasn't talking about the exasperating job of journalism. He was riffing off of a pressman's question about Iraq's willingness to supply terrorists with chemical and biological weapons. But he could have been talking about the work reporters do. Every day, they bruise their brains on known unknowns—news tips, hunches, half-formed story ideas, scraps of information, and soft rumblings in the distance—in hopes of converting them into solid news stories, or what Rumsfeld calls "known knowns."
PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE
But because reporters have only 24 hours a day to perform their labors, they frequently rely on a fudge factor to mask their failure to transform a known unknown into a known known. They employ the catchphrase, "While accurate numbers are hard to come by. …"
Reporters so depend on this phrase that if you type it—or a variant of it, such as "precise numbers are hard to find"—into Nexis, your computer will catch fire. At the very least, your Nexis screen will beg you to refine your search terms to reduce the returns from the many thousands to the hundreds.
Related in Slate
In 2006, Jack Shafer looked at the estimates of how many words H.L. Mencken wrote in his career. In 2010, he asked Tim Shriver to get off Rahm Emanuel's case for using the word retard as a pejorative.
Not every journalist who uses the phrase should be shot. For example, a reporter has my blessing to use it when he needs to acknowledge that the precise number of illegal immigrants is not known because, after all, illegal immigrants refuse to sit still for a census. Likewise, a story about the size of the historical cinema box office can get away with using it because accurate records weren't kept in the old days. But even then, he should say, "The numbers haven't been tabulated" instead of they're "hard to find," because "hard to find" implies that if he had only looked harder, he would have found them.
Advertisement
But these are the exceptions. Usually when a journalist drops the phrase into his story it's because 1) he couldn't be bothered to find the number; 2) nobody has tabulated the number because nobody cares, and if the reporter writes that, he'll undermine the thesis of his piece; or 3) the story's editor insisted at the 11th hour on a number and the fudge phrase was the only thing that could be plugged into the hole.
Numbers are hard to come by pops up in lots of bogus trend stories, that genre of journalistic fraud that I've savaged repeatedly in this column. In bogus trend pieces, the phrase is almost a "tell," signaling that the publication knows that it's guilty of trying to document something as a trend when only the loosest anecdotal evidence exists to support the idea. In nonbogus trend stories, journalists use the phrase to caulk over gaps in their reporting.
Among the things whose enumeration was too difficult to pin down in 2010 were wood-fired hot-tub sales figures (New York Times, Oct. 21), the global sales of video games (New York Times, Sept. 20), dollars spent on tailgate parties (Kansas City Star, Sept. 25), the number of golfers on high-school teams (Boston Globe, April 15), the size of Brazil's acai export market (New York Times, Feb. 24), and the number of 3-D cinema screens (USA Today, Feb. 2).
Going back to 2009, the press used the dodge while discussing the number of flip-flop sandals produced (International Herald Tribune, Dec. 9); the size of the e-book reader business (New York Times, Oct. 7); sales of Nancy Drew books (New York Times, July 19); the cost of building transmission lines for wind farms east of the Rockies (Chicago Tribune, May 5); the size of Hispanic representation in corporate boardrooms, senior management, and economic-development organizations (Plain Dealer, April 19); the number of fishermen who have left the occupation (USA Today, April 9); and the number of coffee-shop employees nationally (Boston Globe, Jan. 22).
And in 2008, it was used to couch the known unknown-ness of the declining costs of solar energy systems (New York Times, Oct. 5), the number of gelato shops in the United States (New York Times, Sept. 4), the national sales figures for gelato (Dallas Morning News, July 19), and the annual number of boogie-board and surfing accidents (Virginian-Pilot, Aug. 12).
For the purpose of an elegant finish to this piece, I wish that Nexis had revealed me as one of the guilty so I could humbly attack myself. I'm not so lucky. A handful of my Slate colleagues, however, lapsed in that direction. I am as filled with forgiveness for them as I am with relief for myself.
As journalistic ills go, this one is no cancer, but it's often a symptom of journalists who chased a story and didn't catch it.Numbers Are Hard To Come By, Part 2
More about what journalists write when they encounter known unknowns.
By Jack ShaferPosted Thursday, March 24, 2011, at 6:56 PM ET
Numbers Illustration.Everybody cuts corners. Take me, for example. Today I could be writing a critique of the Libyan war coverage. I could be assessing the disaster reporting from Japan or essaying on the difficulties of getting the Syrian uprising story.
But instead of doing anything ambitious or worthy of your time, I'm going to rewrite (I mean update!) a piece I wrote in November, "Numbers Are Hard To Come By."
On the chance that you missed that piece, it's about how news outlets habitually cut corners in their reporting when they can't find solid data that support their theses but still want to run the story. They grab the nearest available—or most frequently repeated figure—and couch it with the phrase "numbers are hard to come by."
PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE
This sort of number-fudging would be praise-worthy if the next sentence out of reporters' word processors was "And because there are no good numbers, we won't bother to generalize on the topic." But I've yet to see a reporter do this, if only because it's too easy to build an audience-pleasing story on soft numbers.
If numbers are so squishy that they require this sort of disclaimer, journalists shouldn't cite them at all. Or, if they insist, the disclaimer should read, "We have no idea what the hell we are talking about." Almost anything would better prepare news consumers for the dollop of dung they're about to be served.
One of the reasons that so many numbers are, as they say, hard to come by is that in so many cases, nobody has the necessary incentive to properly tabulate them. (If this topic makes your bunnies hop, read Max Singer's "The Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1971; and Peter Reuter's splendid companion piece, "The (Continued) Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1984.)
Advertisement
I have no confidence that my ridicule will break the bad habits of my colleagues at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and other outlets. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't indulge one of my own bad habits of squeezing out easy sequels to previous columns.
So here goes—the recent things in news for which the numbers are hard to come by:
—The number of Japanese elderly living in evacuation centers (believed by some aid workers to be in the majority); Thomson Reuter AlertNet, March 22, 2011
—The number of kidnappings in Mexico ("believed to be in the thousands"), Bakersfield Californian, March 21, 2011
—The number of birds killed by feral cats in Stratford, Ontario (across Canada "untold millions"), Beacon Herald, March 19, 2011
—The number of Christians in Iraq ("as few as 150,000"), Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), March 16, 2011
—The number of Frenchmen living in London ("up to 400,000"), the Economist, March 24, 2011
—The number of guests caught bringing drugs onto cruise ships (one cruise line says 127 last year out of a million-plus), AOL Travel News, Feb. 17, 2011
—The number of sexual crimes involving teachers and students, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 16, 2011
—The number of former homeowners who lost a house to foreclosure or a short sale and have become renters (a "majority"), Contra Costa Times, Feb. 10, 2011
—The number of Down syndrome married couples (one source says it's on the rise), Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 10, 2011
—Number of science fairs (on the local level, one source says, "it's on the decline"), New York Times, Feb. 4, 2011
—Number of microcredit clients ("over 600 million"), Atlantic online, Jan. 28, 2011
—Number of threats against members of Congress ("Many members of Congress feel threats against them have increased in recent times"), Wall Street Journal, Jan. 9, 2011
—Number of video porn companies that have "retrenched or disappeared" (no estimate offered), Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jan. 8, 2011
—Numbers of Christians who have left Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine (yes, the copy says "Palestine") in the last 20 years ("hundreds of thousands"), Channel 4 News, U.K., Dec. 21, 2010
—Number of rescissions ("Consumer and industry lawyers said rescissions have risen"), Bloomberg News, Dec. 16, 2011,
—Number of e-books sold (no number estimated), Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 2010
The diplomatic cables liberated by WikiLeaks prove that journalists aren't the only ones dispensing hard-to-come-by fudge. In this cable, the State Department writes that numbers describing Russian arms sales to China and India "are hard to come by." But they're also said to be "growing."
***
Hard To Come By would be a great title for a porn video. Send mildly salacious porn titles based on the news (no hard-core!) to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Just so you know, my Twitter feed is G-rated. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Related in Slate
"Numbers are hard to come by" stories are a subset of bogus trend stories, a pet peeve of Jack Shafer's. Last year, Shafer pummeled the numbers-are-hard-to-come-by genre. In 2006, he documented the ongoing vitality of mythical numbers.
What journalists write when they encounter a known unknown.
By Jack ShaferPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2010, at 5:02 PM ET
In 2002, while speaking to reporters, Zen master Donald H. Rumsfeld noted that we are bedeviled by "known unknowns."
Master Rumsfeld wasn't talking about the exasperating job of journalism. He was riffing off of a pressman's question about Iraq's willingness to supply terrorists with chemical and biological weapons. But he could have been talking about the work reporters do. Every day, they bruise their brains on known unknowns—news tips, hunches, half-formed story ideas, scraps of information, and soft rumblings in the distance—in hopes of converting them into solid news stories, or what Rumsfeld calls "known knowns."
PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE
But because reporters have only 24 hours a day to perform their labors, they frequently rely on a fudge factor to mask their failure to transform a known unknown into a known known. They employ the catchphrase, "While accurate numbers are hard to come by. …"
Reporters so depend on this phrase that if you type it—or a variant of it, such as "precise numbers are hard to find"—into Nexis, your computer will catch fire. At the very least, your Nexis screen will beg you to refine your search terms to reduce the returns from the many thousands to the hundreds.
Related in Slate
In 2006, Jack Shafer looked at the estimates of how many words H.L. Mencken wrote in his career. In 2010, he asked Tim Shriver to get off Rahm Emanuel's case for using the word retard as a pejorative.
Not every journalist who uses the phrase should be shot. For example, a reporter has my blessing to use it when he needs to acknowledge that the precise number of illegal immigrants is not known because, after all, illegal immigrants refuse to sit still for a census. Likewise, a story about the size of the historical cinema box office can get away with using it because accurate records weren't kept in the old days. But even then, he should say, "The numbers haven't been tabulated" instead of they're "hard to find," because "hard to find" implies that if he had only looked harder, he would have found them.
Advertisement
But these are the exceptions. Usually when a journalist drops the phrase into his story it's because 1) he couldn't be bothered to find the number; 2) nobody has tabulated the number because nobody cares, and if the reporter writes that, he'll undermine the thesis of his piece; or 3) the story's editor insisted at the 11th hour on a number and the fudge phrase was the only thing that could be plugged into the hole.
Numbers are hard to come by pops up in lots of bogus trend stories, that genre of journalistic fraud that I've savaged repeatedly in this column. In bogus trend pieces, the phrase is almost a "tell," signaling that the publication knows that it's guilty of trying to document something as a trend when only the loosest anecdotal evidence exists to support the idea. In nonbogus trend stories, journalists use the phrase to caulk over gaps in their reporting.
Among the things whose enumeration was too difficult to pin down in 2010 were wood-fired hot-tub sales figures (New York Times, Oct. 21), the global sales of video games (New York Times, Sept. 20), dollars spent on tailgate parties (Kansas City Star, Sept. 25), the number of golfers on high-school teams (Boston Globe, April 15), the size of Brazil's acai export market (New York Times, Feb. 24), and the number of 3-D cinema screens (USA Today, Feb. 2).
Going back to 2009, the press used the dodge while discussing the number of flip-flop sandals produced (International Herald Tribune, Dec. 9); the size of the e-book reader business (New York Times, Oct. 7); sales of Nancy Drew books (New York Times, July 19); the cost of building transmission lines for wind farms east of the Rockies (Chicago Tribune, May 5); the size of Hispanic representation in corporate boardrooms, senior management, and economic-development organizations (Plain Dealer, April 19); the number of fishermen who have left the occupation (USA Today, April 9); and the number of coffee-shop employees nationally (Boston Globe, Jan. 22).
And in 2008, it was used to couch the known unknown-ness of the declining costs of solar energy systems (New York Times, Oct. 5), the number of gelato shops in the United States (New York Times, Sept. 4), the national sales figures for gelato (Dallas Morning News, July 19), and the annual number of boogie-board and surfing accidents (Virginian-Pilot, Aug. 12).
For the purpose of an elegant finish to this piece, I wish that Nexis had revealed me as one of the guilty so I could humbly attack myself. I'm not so lucky. A handful of my Slate colleagues, however, lapsed in that direction. I am as filled with forgiveness for them as I am with relief for myself.
As journalistic ills go, this one is no cancer, but it's often a symptom of journalists who chased a story and didn't catch it.Numbers Are Hard To Come By, Part 2
More about what journalists write when they encounter known unknowns.
By Jack ShaferPosted Thursday, March 24, 2011, at 6:56 PM ET
Numbers Illustration.Everybody cuts corners. Take me, for example. Today I could be writing a critique of the Libyan war coverage. I could be assessing the disaster reporting from Japan or essaying on the difficulties of getting the Syrian uprising story.
But instead of doing anything ambitious or worthy of your time, I'm going to rewrite (I mean update!) a piece I wrote in November, "Numbers Are Hard To Come By."
On the chance that you missed that piece, it's about how news outlets habitually cut corners in their reporting when they can't find solid data that support their theses but still want to run the story. They grab the nearest available—or most frequently repeated figure—and couch it with the phrase "numbers are hard to come by."
PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE
This sort of number-fudging would be praise-worthy if the next sentence out of reporters' word processors was "And because there are no good numbers, we won't bother to generalize on the topic." But I've yet to see a reporter do this, if only because it's too easy to build an audience-pleasing story on soft numbers.
If numbers are so squishy that they require this sort of disclaimer, journalists shouldn't cite them at all. Or, if they insist, the disclaimer should read, "We have no idea what the hell we are talking about." Almost anything would better prepare news consumers for the dollop of dung they're about to be served.
One of the reasons that so many numbers are, as they say, hard to come by is that in so many cases, nobody has the necessary incentive to properly tabulate them. (If this topic makes your bunnies hop, read Max Singer's "The Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1971; and Peter Reuter's splendid companion piece, "The (Continued) Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1984.)
Advertisement
I have no confidence that my ridicule will break the bad habits of my colleagues at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and other outlets. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't indulge one of my own bad habits of squeezing out easy sequels to previous columns.
So here goes—the recent things in news for which the numbers are hard to come by:
—The number of Japanese elderly living in evacuation centers (believed by some aid workers to be in the majority); Thomson Reuter AlertNet, March 22, 2011
—The number of kidnappings in Mexico ("believed to be in the thousands"), Bakersfield Californian, March 21, 2011
—The number of birds killed by feral cats in Stratford, Ontario (across Canada "untold millions"), Beacon Herald, March 19, 2011
—The number of Christians in Iraq ("as few as 150,000"), Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), March 16, 2011
—The number of Frenchmen living in London ("up to 400,000"), the Economist, March 24, 2011
—The number of guests caught bringing drugs onto cruise ships (one cruise line says 127 last year out of a million-plus), AOL Travel News, Feb. 17, 2011
—The number of sexual crimes involving teachers and students, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 16, 2011
—The number of former homeowners who lost a house to foreclosure or a short sale and have become renters (a "majority"), Contra Costa Times, Feb. 10, 2011
—The number of Down syndrome married couples (one source says it's on the rise), Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 10, 2011
—Number of science fairs (on the local level, one source says, "it's on the decline"), New York Times, Feb. 4, 2011
—Number of microcredit clients ("over 600 million"), Atlantic online, Jan. 28, 2011
—Number of threats against members of Congress ("Many members of Congress feel threats against them have increased in recent times"), Wall Street Journal, Jan. 9, 2011
—Number of video porn companies that have "retrenched or disappeared" (no estimate offered), Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jan. 8, 2011
—Numbers of Christians who have left Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine (yes, the copy says "Palestine") in the last 20 years ("hundreds of thousands"), Channel 4 News, U.K., Dec. 21, 2010
—Number of rescissions ("Consumer and industry lawyers said rescissions have risen"), Bloomberg News, Dec. 16, 2011,
—Number of e-books sold (no number estimated), Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 2010
The diplomatic cables liberated by WikiLeaks prove that journalists aren't the only ones dispensing hard-to-come-by fudge. In this cable, the State Department writes that numbers describing Russian arms sales to China and India "are hard to come by." But they're also said to be "growing."
***
Hard To Come By would be a great title for a porn video. Send mildly salacious porn titles based on the news (no hard-core!) to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Just so you know, my Twitter feed is G-rated. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Related in Slate
"Numbers are hard to come by" stories are a subset of bogus trend stories, a pet peeve of Jack Shafer's. Last year, Shafer pummeled the numbers-are-hard-to-come-by genre. In 2006, he documented the ongoing vitality of mythical numbers.
Monday, March 21, 2011
May this is right but don't really think so:
- TECHNOLOGY -
Times's Online Pay Model Was Years in the
Making
The New York Times's online pay model, which takes effect
on March 28, may be the most watched experiment in American
journalism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/business/media/21times.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26
- TECHNOLOGY -
Times's Online Pay Model Was Years in the
Making
The New York Times's online pay model, which takes effect
on March 28, may be the most watched experiment in American
journalism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/business/media/21times.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26
Monday, March 14, 2011
Thanks to Markus Leach for the following information:
Reactor 3 is MOX and run on plutonium oxide-not good.
For all who have been looking for realtime radiation data from Japan, you are in luck. Or maybe not, as the data unfortunately indicates nothing good. The System for Prediction of Environment Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) releases gamma radiation data online. The site is jittery and apparently not suited for major traffic which is why we represent several screen captures of the data. While it is not surprising that according to the website both Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures are entirely "Under Survey" as it makes sense that the government does not want to generate panic, SPEEDI has disclosed some tell-tale data about cities in Ibaraki prefecture, which is just a hundred or so miles north of Tokyo, and is just south of the ill-fated Fukushima prefecture. And the data is stunning: based on a N, NE and NNE wind direction (where it originates), meaning all coming from Fukushima, with a normal reading in the 80 nGy/h range, the city of Kounosu Naka is at 3,024, Kadobe Naka is at 2,416, Isobe Hitachioota is at 1,213 and many others are in the mid to upper triple digit range! Again, this is based on wind coming out of Fukushima and ultimately headed toward the capital. Indicatively, normal terrestrial plus cosmic gamma radiation is about 80 nGy/h.
Below we present screencaptures as of moments ago, as apparently the Japanese government seems to believe that abnormal gamma radiation levels are perfectly notmal:
A map of all prefectures, showing maximum gamma radation readings. Note Ibaraki at 3,024 nGy/h, and Kanagawa right below it (and downwind) at 224 nGy/h compared to low double digts for all other prefecture.
Not surprisingly, Fukushima is completely N/A, as every single reading is Under Survey, also known as censored.
But the stunner is Ibaraki. We will let this one speak for itself:
As a reference, based on background radiation measurements in the lower atmosphere at different altitudes above sea level up to 1100 m and over the land were made at a temperate latitude (40°) in the Thessaloniki region, North Greece, before and after the Chernobyl accident (26 April 1986), using a portable γ-ray scintillation detector and a Cutie-pie survey meter with an ionization chamber, the average value of the total background radiation at ground level was 87 nGy h-1(10.0 μR h-1, 25 cps), i.e. 60% from terrestrial radiation,55 nGy h-1 (6.3 μR h-1, 15 cps) and 40% from cosmic radiation, 32 nGy h-1 (3.7 μR h-1, 10 cps), before the Chernobyl accident, while, after it, the total background radiation was doubled, due to the long-lived radioactive fallout suspended in the atmosphere and or deposited onto the ground.
Reactor 3 is MOX and run on plutonium oxide-not good.
For all who have been looking for realtime radiation data from Japan, you are in luck. Or maybe not, as the data unfortunately indicates nothing good. The System for Prediction of Environment Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) releases gamma radiation data online. The site is jittery and apparently not suited for major traffic which is why we represent several screen captures of the data. While it is not surprising that according to the website both Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures are entirely "Under Survey" as it makes sense that the government does not want to generate panic, SPEEDI has disclosed some tell-tale data about cities in Ibaraki prefecture, which is just a hundred or so miles north of Tokyo, and is just south of the ill-fated Fukushima prefecture. And the data is stunning: based on a N, NE and NNE wind direction (where it originates), meaning all coming from Fukushima, with a normal reading in the 80 nGy/h range, the city of Kounosu Naka is at 3,024, Kadobe Naka is at 2,416, Isobe Hitachioota is at 1,213 and many others are in the mid to upper triple digit range! Again, this is based on wind coming out of Fukushima and ultimately headed toward the capital. Indicatively, normal terrestrial plus cosmic gamma radiation is about 80 nGy/h.
Below we present screencaptures as of moments ago, as apparently the Japanese government seems to believe that abnormal gamma radiation levels are perfectly notmal:
A map of all prefectures, showing maximum gamma radation readings. Note Ibaraki at 3,024 nGy/h, and Kanagawa right below it (and downwind) at 224 nGy/h compared to low double digts for all other prefecture.
Not surprisingly, Fukushima is completely N/A, as every single reading is Under Survey, also known as censored.
But the stunner is Ibaraki. We will let this one speak for itself:
As a reference, based on background radiation measurements in the lower atmosphere at different altitudes above sea level up to 1100 m and over the land were made at a temperate latitude (40°) in the Thessaloniki region, North Greece, before and after the Chernobyl accident (26 April 1986), using a portable γ-ray scintillation detector and a Cutie-pie survey meter with an ionization chamber, the average value of the total background radiation at ground level was 87 nGy h-1(10.0 μR h-1, 25 cps), i.e. 60% from terrestrial radiation,55 nGy h-1 (6.3 μR h-1, 15 cps) and 40% from cosmic radiation, 32 nGy h-1 (3.7 μR h-1, 10 cps), before the Chernobyl accident, while, after it, the total background radiation was doubled, due to the long-lived radioactive fallout suspended in the atmosphere and or deposited onto the ground.
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
As all good journalism should:Former MI6 Chief Credits WikiLeaks With Helping Spark Revolutions
| from the powder-kegs-need-not-apply dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 08, @00:02 (Censorship)
| https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/0339232/Former-MI6-Chief-Credits-WikiLeaks-With-Helping-Spark-Revolutions?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]EnergyScholar writes "Sir Richard Dearlove, former Intelligence Chief
of MI6, [1]credits WikiLeaks with helping spark revolutions in the Middle
East, in (what was supposed to be) an off-the-record speech. 'I would
definitely draw parallels at the moment between the wave of political
unrest which is sweeping through the Middle East in a very exciting and
rather extraordinary fashion and also the WikiLeaks phenomenon. Really,
what ties these two events together, and of course a number of other
events, is the diffusion of power, away from the states and the
empowerment of individuals, and small groups of individuals, by
technology,' he said."
Discuss this story at:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/0339232/Former-MI6-Chief-Credits-WikiLeaks-With-Helping-Spark-Revolutions?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. mailto:energyscholar@gmail.com
1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/04/mi6_dearlove_wikileaks/
| from the powder-kegs-need-not-apply dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 08, @00:02 (Censorship)
| https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/0339232/Former-MI6-Chief-Credits-WikiLeaks-With-Helping-Spark-Revolutions?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]EnergyScholar writes "Sir Richard Dearlove, former Intelligence Chief
of MI6, [1]credits WikiLeaks with helping spark revolutions in the Middle
East, in (what was supposed to be) an off-the-record speech. 'I would
definitely draw parallels at the moment between the wave of political
unrest which is sweeping through the Middle East in a very exciting and
rather extraordinary fashion and also the WikiLeaks phenomenon. Really,
what ties these two events together, and of course a number of other
events, is the diffusion of power, away from the states and the
empowerment of individuals, and small groups of individuals, by
technology,' he said."
Discuss this story at:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/0339232/Former-MI6-Chief-Credits-WikiLeaks-With-Helping-Spark-Revolutions?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. mailto:energyscholar@gmail.com
1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/04/mi6_dearlove_wikileaks/
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Well, there you go - Extremists Are Suspected in Killing of Pakistani
Minister
The minister of minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian, was
ambushed in an attack similar to the recent killing of
another liberal politician.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/world/asia/03pakistan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2
Head line writing shouldn't be insipid like the above..why couldn't it say Moderates Are.. or His Mother in law is... and probably the best would be the truth that..There Are No Suspected...
Minister
The minister of minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian, was
ambushed in an attack similar to the recent killing of
another liberal politician.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/world/asia/03pakistan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2
Head line writing shouldn't be insipid like the above..why couldn't it say Moderates Are.. or His Mother in law is... and probably the best would be the truth that..There Are No Suspected...
Monday, February 21, 2011
Ridge Meadows Photography{BLOG}: baby Jax and family |Maple Ridge newborn photography
Ridge Meadows Photography{BLOG}: baby Jax and family |Maple Ridge newborn photographyHere are some great pictures of a new member of a family of hero's
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The Economist Style Guide'
http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/06/16/the-economist-style-guide/
The Economist is rightly renowned for the
clarity of its house style. They have an
online service offering advice on good
writing practice.
It includes tips on how to avoid common
errors and solecisms, and an online quiz to
test your writing skills.
http://www.economist.co.uk/research/StyleGuide/
If you want the complete style guide in book
form, have look at the details here -
http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/06/16/the-economist-style-guide/
http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/06/16/the-economist-style-guide/
The Economist is rightly renowned for the
clarity of its house style. They have an
online service offering advice on good
writing practice.
It includes tips on how to avoid common
errors and solecisms, and an online quiz to
test your writing skills.
http://www.economist.co.uk/research/StyleGuide/
If you want the complete style guide in book
form, have look at the details here -
http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/06/16/the-economist-style-guide/
Sunday, February 13, 2011
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Fox News Brings Video Game Violence Debate To a New Low
| from the unpredictable-like-the-tides dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 10, @06:09 (First Person Shooters (Games))
| https://games.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/0534237/Fox-News-Brings-Video-Game-Violence-Debate-To-a-New-Low?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fox News took another shot at the video game violence debate earlier this
week when they asked whether Bulletstorm, an upcoming M-rated shooter
from Epic Games, is [0]the worst game in the world. The article links
violent games with an increase in rapes, and suggests there should be
greater penalties for selling to minors. Gaming website Rock, Paper,
Shotgun [1]breaks down the problems with the article's sensationalist
claims and [2]highlights the disingenuous cherry-picking of quotes.
"Scott Steinberg, CEO of TechSavvy Global, and all-round industry guru,
got in touch with me to show me the answers he submitted to Fox when they
approached him for comment. [3]The full answers are reproduced below,
because what results is a fantastic interview on the subject of adult
game content and regulation. Fox chose to use none of Steinberg’s
comments in their final piece, opting instead for the more sensational
claims of those with no expertise in the subject (neither of whom have
found time to reply to our emails). But seeing these answers also
provides further insight into how the mainstream media coverage of gaming
stories works. Far from being a reporter ignorant of the subject and
twisted by naive contributors, Fox correspondent John Brandon was
equipped with a wealth of factual information and informed opinion before
composing his frantic article."
Discuss this story at:
https://games.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/0534237/Fox-News-Brings-Video-Game-Violence-Debate-To-a-New-Low?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/08/bulletstorm-worst-game-kids/
1. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/09/will-bulletstorm-murder-your-children-no/
2. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/09/churnalism-fox-news-selective-quoting/
3. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/10/the-fox-news-debacle-techsavvy-update/
| Fox News Brings Video Game Violence Debate To a New Low
| from the unpredictable-like-the-tides dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 10, @06:09 (First Person Shooters (Games))
| https://games.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/0534237/Fox-News-Brings-Video-Game-Violence-Debate-To-a-New-Low?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fox News took another shot at the video game violence debate earlier this
week when they asked whether Bulletstorm, an upcoming M-rated shooter
from Epic Games, is [0]the worst game in the world. The article links
violent games with an increase in rapes, and suggests there should be
greater penalties for selling to minors. Gaming website Rock, Paper,
Shotgun [1]breaks down the problems with the article's sensationalist
claims and [2]highlights the disingenuous cherry-picking of quotes.
"Scott Steinberg, CEO of TechSavvy Global, and all-round industry guru,
got in touch with me to show me the answers he submitted to Fox when they
approached him for comment. [3]The full answers are reproduced below,
because what results is a fantastic interview on the subject of adult
game content and regulation. Fox chose to use none of Steinberg’s
comments in their final piece, opting instead for the more sensational
claims of those with no expertise in the subject (neither of whom have
found time to reply to our emails). But seeing these answers also
provides further insight into how the mainstream media coverage of gaming
stories works. Far from being a reporter ignorant of the subject and
twisted by naive contributors, Fox correspondent John Brandon was
equipped with a wealth of factual information and informed opinion before
composing his frantic article."
Discuss this story at:
https://games.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/0534237/Fox-News-Brings-Video-Game-Violence-Debate-To-a-New-Low?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/08/bulletstorm-worst-game-kids/
1. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/09/will-bulletstorm-murder-your-children-no/
2. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/09/churnalism-fox-news-selective-quoting/
3. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/10/the-fox-news-debacle-techsavvy-update/
Monday, January 24, 2011
Here we go again and from the New York Times with the question of telling, talking, showing what you see and hear..is it a community service and or is it journalism?
Gerritsen Beach Journal
Not Quite a Reporter, but Raking Muck and Reaping Wrath
By TIM STELLOH
Published: January 23, 2011
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Daniel Cavanagh was nervous.
Enlarge This Image
Daniel Barry for The New York Times
Daniel Cavanagh, 26, writes a blog that draws attention to local matters, whether positive or not.
He paced the living room of his duplex apartment collecting his things: a large digital camera, an iPhone, a black leather jacket.
“I’m about to get crushed,” he said, running his hands through his hair.
Then Mr. Cavanagh, 26, drove the three blocks to St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church — the meeting place of the Gerritsen Beach Property Owners Association. It was early this month, and it was the first time Mr. Cavanagh had been back to the church’s large meeting room since November, when his simmering relationship with the small, isolated neighborhood in South Brooklyn had exploded.
His blog, GerritsenBeach.net, was at the center of the controversy. The day after Halloween, Mr. Cavanagh posted photos from the day before, of adolescents throwing rocks, potatoes and other things at cars, buses and people.
In the church’s packed basement a few days later, enraged neighbors told Mr. Cavanagh that he was “destroying” the neighborhood — that if he did not like the Beach, he should leave.
Soon after, someone threw a pumpkin at the home of Mr. Cavanagh’s father. His girlfriend’s car was scratched with a key. A man waited to confront Mr. Cavanagh outside a neighborhood bar, but a bouncer stepped in.
“I was definitely the messenger,” Mr. Cavanagh said, “and they were shooting the messenger.”
But he is a new kind of messenger. Mr. Cavanagh, a computer consultant who was born and raised in Gerritsen Beach, started his blog in 2006 because his neighborhood — population about 5,000 — was rarely in the newspapers. So he started covering local meetings, photographing events and running to crime scenes.
Like many neighborhood bloggers, Mr. Cavanagh does not call himself a reporter, and he shrugs off the standards of the traditional news media — a fact that has, in part, led to the high-pitched debate in this small community, where there are no subway lines and where many families have lived for generations. Here, the blogosphere is seen as a creature of far-off Manhattan.
Mr. Cavanagh’s Halloween post logged more than a thousand comments — the site typically gets 900 or so page views a day — and earned him the title of “Vigilante Blogger” from Gawker.
But Mr. Cavanagh’s problems had started long before. He points to “Wood-Chip Gate” — as Gerritsen Beach residents often call it — as the moment when the battle lines were drawn.
In early 2009, Mr. Cavanagh posted a couple of blog entries and a video interview about what appeared to be a not-quite-legal dumping operation just off the neighborhood’s main street, Gerritsen Avenue, on land owned by the city’s parks department.
The posts infuriated Michael Taylor, the chairman of Gerritsen Beach Cares, or GB Cares, a local nonprofit group. The organization had a deal with a contractor who, in exchange for a place to dump wood chips, would allow GB Cares access to heavy machinery for other neighborhood projects.
But GB Cares did not have written approval from the parks department, instead relying, as it often had, on a “handshake deal,” as John Douglas, the group’s president, put it.
“The parks department,” Mr. Cavanagh recalled, “saw my story and said to GB Cares, ‘Whoa — you need written approval for anything you do on our parkland.’ That basically crippled GB Cares.”
To Mr. Taylor, the posts were attacks on GB Cares and a betrayal of the Beach’s culture of volunteerism. And he was furious that Mr. Cavanagh had not given him an opportunity to comment before the entries were posted.
To Mr. Cavanagh, the posts exposed how things had always been done at the Beach. He said he did not speak with anyone at the organization before posting the entries because Mr. Taylor had said his car “would end up in the creek” if he wrote about the project. (Mr. Taylor said he did not “remember anything like that.”)
Mr. Cavanagh’s approach has raised questions about journalistic standards in the blog age, and about Mr. Cavanagh’s reporting. He posted an interview with a dump site worker, for instance, but had not told the worker that the conversation was being taped, that he was a blogger or that he might publish the interview on his site.
“I did not identify myself as anything because I didn’t, and still don’t, classify myself really as anything,” Mr. Cavanagh said.
The views of professional journalists vary on such tactics.
“I don’t think it’s particularly fair, and I don’t think it’s a good long-term strategy,” said Jere Hester, a former editor at The Daily News and the director of the NYCity News Service, run by the City University of New York.
But Jeff Jarvis, a professor of interactive journalism at CUNY, said the rules of conventional journalism “don’t necessarily have to hold” for bloggers like Mr. Cavanagh.
“He’s just a member of the community who’s writing about his community,” he said.
It was Mr. Cavanagh’s community watchdogging on Halloween that created the most ire.
Around 3 p.m., Mr. Cavanagh said, he saw more than three dozen adolescents hurling eggs, potatoes, rocks and shaving cream cans at buses, cars, women with strollers and an elderly man.
Mr. Cavanagh called the police, but it took them more than 30 minutes to arrive. By then, the group — which he had captured on camera — had scattered.
At 8:48 the next morning, he posted “No Police Response Despite Massive Damage by Local Teens.” It included more than a dozen photos of the offending youths, along with images of public Facebook profiles. Status updates described pelting the police and breaking bus windows.
Two days later, when the property owners’ association held its monthly meeting, the audience railed against Mr. Cavanagh.
In a video of that meeting posted on the blog Sheepshead Bites, Renee Sior-Cullen — whose son had been shown on Mr. Cavanagh’s blog — said the boy was just a 12-year-old trying to impress his older brothers. Ms. Sior-Cullen also charged that what Mr. Cavanagh did with her son’s Facebook posts was criminal.
“It is illegal for a grown man to take a minor’s post and copy it and repost it,” said Ms. Sior-Cullen, who did not respond to requests for an interview.
Actually, it is legal — as long as those Facebook pages were public. But whether it is legal is not always the point, Mr. Hester, of CUNY, said.
Ethically, he said, “If you’re putting names and faces out there, you’re on shaky ground.”
Mr. Cavanagh and his defenders said little at the meeting in November, as Ms. Sior-Cullen questioned his motivation in photographing smiling children at local events — a staple at GerritsenBeach.net and at community newspapers everywhere.
When the association’s chairman, George Broadhead, asked Mr. Cavanagh if he wanted to respond to Ms. Sior-Cullen, he declined. “They were angry,” Mr. Cavanagh said recently. “Me speaking would not have solved the situation rationally.”
Right or wrong, Mr. Hester said, the outrage showed how strongly parents feel when their children are exposed in the media. In December, the property owners’ association closed its meeting to everyone but property owners. At the January meeting, Mr. Cavanagh was allowed in, but he was not permitted to take photographs, or videotape the proceeding.
Nevertheless, Mr. Cavanagh said, he would not change his Halloween coverage if he could. Nor does he have any plans to stop reporting.
“There’s no way a screaming person is going to stop me,” he said.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2011, on page A22 of the New York edition.
Gerritsen Beach Journal
Not Quite a Reporter, but Raking Muck and Reaping Wrath
By TIM STELLOH
Published: January 23, 2011
* Recommend
*
* Send To Phone
*
Reprints
* ShareClose
o Linkedin
o Digg
o Mixx
o MySpace
o Yahoo! Buzz
o Permalink
o
Daniel Cavanagh was nervous.
Enlarge This Image
Daniel Barry for The New York Times
Daniel Cavanagh, 26, writes a blog that draws attention to local matters, whether positive or not.
He paced the living room of his duplex apartment collecting his things: a large digital camera, an iPhone, a black leather jacket.
“I’m about to get crushed,” he said, running his hands through his hair.
Then Mr. Cavanagh, 26, drove the three blocks to St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church — the meeting place of the Gerritsen Beach Property Owners Association. It was early this month, and it was the first time Mr. Cavanagh had been back to the church’s large meeting room since November, when his simmering relationship with the small, isolated neighborhood in South Brooklyn had exploded.
His blog, GerritsenBeach.net, was at the center of the controversy. The day after Halloween, Mr. Cavanagh posted photos from the day before, of adolescents throwing rocks, potatoes and other things at cars, buses and people.
In the church’s packed basement a few days later, enraged neighbors told Mr. Cavanagh that he was “destroying” the neighborhood — that if he did not like the Beach, he should leave.
Soon after, someone threw a pumpkin at the home of Mr. Cavanagh’s father. His girlfriend’s car was scratched with a key. A man waited to confront Mr. Cavanagh outside a neighborhood bar, but a bouncer stepped in.
“I was definitely the messenger,” Mr. Cavanagh said, “and they were shooting the messenger.”
But he is a new kind of messenger. Mr. Cavanagh, a computer consultant who was born and raised in Gerritsen Beach, started his blog in 2006 because his neighborhood — population about 5,000 — was rarely in the newspapers. So he started covering local meetings, photographing events and running to crime scenes.
Like many neighborhood bloggers, Mr. Cavanagh does not call himself a reporter, and he shrugs off the standards of the traditional news media — a fact that has, in part, led to the high-pitched debate in this small community, where there are no subway lines and where many families have lived for generations. Here, the blogosphere is seen as a creature of far-off Manhattan.
Mr. Cavanagh’s Halloween post logged more than a thousand comments — the site typically gets 900 or so page views a day — and earned him the title of “Vigilante Blogger” from Gawker.
But Mr. Cavanagh’s problems had started long before. He points to “Wood-Chip Gate” — as Gerritsen Beach residents often call it — as the moment when the battle lines were drawn.
In early 2009, Mr. Cavanagh posted a couple of blog entries and a video interview about what appeared to be a not-quite-legal dumping operation just off the neighborhood’s main street, Gerritsen Avenue, on land owned by the city’s parks department.
The posts infuriated Michael Taylor, the chairman of Gerritsen Beach Cares, or GB Cares, a local nonprofit group. The organization had a deal with a contractor who, in exchange for a place to dump wood chips, would allow GB Cares access to heavy machinery for other neighborhood projects.
But GB Cares did not have written approval from the parks department, instead relying, as it often had, on a “handshake deal,” as John Douglas, the group’s president, put it.
“The parks department,” Mr. Cavanagh recalled, “saw my story and said to GB Cares, ‘Whoa — you need written approval for anything you do on our parkland.’ That basically crippled GB Cares.”
To Mr. Taylor, the posts were attacks on GB Cares and a betrayal of the Beach’s culture of volunteerism. And he was furious that Mr. Cavanagh had not given him an opportunity to comment before the entries were posted.
To Mr. Cavanagh, the posts exposed how things had always been done at the Beach. He said he did not speak with anyone at the organization before posting the entries because Mr. Taylor had said his car “would end up in the creek” if he wrote about the project. (Mr. Taylor said he did not “remember anything like that.”)
Mr. Cavanagh’s approach has raised questions about journalistic standards in the blog age, and about Mr. Cavanagh’s reporting. He posted an interview with a dump site worker, for instance, but had not told the worker that the conversation was being taped, that he was a blogger or that he might publish the interview on his site.
“I did not identify myself as anything because I didn’t, and still don’t, classify myself really as anything,” Mr. Cavanagh said.
The views of professional journalists vary on such tactics.
“I don’t think it’s particularly fair, and I don’t think it’s a good long-term strategy,” said Jere Hester, a former editor at The Daily News and the director of the NYCity News Service, run by the City University of New York.
But Jeff Jarvis, a professor of interactive journalism at CUNY, said the rules of conventional journalism “don’t necessarily have to hold” for bloggers like Mr. Cavanagh.
“He’s just a member of the community who’s writing about his community,” he said.
It was Mr. Cavanagh’s community watchdogging on Halloween that created the most ire.
Around 3 p.m., Mr. Cavanagh said, he saw more than three dozen adolescents hurling eggs, potatoes, rocks and shaving cream cans at buses, cars, women with strollers and an elderly man.
Mr. Cavanagh called the police, but it took them more than 30 minutes to arrive. By then, the group — which he had captured on camera — had scattered.
At 8:48 the next morning, he posted “No Police Response Despite Massive Damage by Local Teens.” It included more than a dozen photos of the offending youths, along with images of public Facebook profiles. Status updates described pelting the police and breaking bus windows.
Two days later, when the property owners’ association held its monthly meeting, the audience railed against Mr. Cavanagh.
In a video of that meeting posted on the blog Sheepshead Bites, Renee Sior-Cullen — whose son had been shown on Mr. Cavanagh’s blog — said the boy was just a 12-year-old trying to impress his older brothers. Ms. Sior-Cullen also charged that what Mr. Cavanagh did with her son’s Facebook posts was criminal.
“It is illegal for a grown man to take a minor’s post and copy it and repost it,” said Ms. Sior-Cullen, who did not respond to requests for an interview.
Actually, it is legal — as long as those Facebook pages were public. But whether it is legal is not always the point, Mr. Hester, of CUNY, said.
Ethically, he said, “If you’re putting names and faces out there, you’re on shaky ground.”
Mr. Cavanagh and his defenders said little at the meeting in November, as Ms. Sior-Cullen questioned his motivation in photographing smiling children at local events — a staple at GerritsenBeach.net and at community newspapers everywhere.
When the association’s chairman, George Broadhead, asked Mr. Cavanagh if he wanted to respond to Ms. Sior-Cullen, he declined. “They were angry,” Mr. Cavanagh said recently. “Me speaking would not have solved the situation rationally.”
Right or wrong, Mr. Hester said, the outrage showed how strongly parents feel when their children are exposed in the media. In December, the property owners’ association closed its meeting to everyone but property owners. At the January meeting, Mr. Cavanagh was allowed in, but he was not permitted to take photographs, or videotape the proceeding.
Nevertheless, Mr. Cavanagh said, he would not change his Halloween coverage if he could. Nor does he have any plans to stop reporting.
“There’s no way a screaming person is going to stop me,” he said.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2011, on page A22 of the New York edition.
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