A great story about encouraging journalism in isolated places from The Tyee:A New Story from Attawapiskat Program trains young journalists in remote First Nation communities to report their community's news. By Lisa Charleyboy, Today, TheTyee.ca Share article via email Print this article COVER.richardspence.jpg Attawapiskat resident Richard Spence, 24, credits his participation in JHR's Northern Ontario Initiative for sparking his interest in journalism and storytelling. Photo by Danny Kresnyak. Also in this series: LEADING TOGETHER Dechinta Bush University: Learning off the Land How Do We Inspire Indigenous Youth? Apathy is Boring Engages the Rage On the Rez in Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug The Red Road Project: Trading Substances for Substance Kids Help Phone's Healthy Communities Initiative: How to Counsel the Counselors Exeko: Uniting Kanesatake through Radio Professional Networking, Indigenous-Styles A New Story from Attawapiskat Related Journalists: Please Stop Mistaking Aboriginal Ceremony for Spectacle An otherwise strong CBC story on tourism is marred by badly chosen images. How Do We Inspire Indigenous Youth? That question drove the creation of the Leading Together series that begins today. Journalists for Human Rights launches program in northern Ontario Read more: Aboriginal Affairs, Sign Up for the Tyee Newsletter go [Editor's note: This is part of a series of reports on successful youth-focused projects resulting from collaboration between indigenous communities and philanthropic organizations. Leading Together is itself a collaboration of Journalists for Human Rights, Tyee Solutions Society, Wawatay Native Communications Society, and the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation which commissioned this journalism. Look for one more Leading Together story in The Tyee next week.] Richard Spence, a 24-year-old member of the Attawapiskat First Nation, saw the camera crews come and go in 2011 and 2012, and how they portrayed his community. "All they showed were people in sheds, mouldy houses," said Spence. Those reports almost made me shameful to be from here." Months later, when Spence was invited to learn the basics of journalism in order tell more complex stories reflecting what he knew of Attawapiskat, he jumped at the chance. First Nations peoples make up four per cent of Canada's population. Yet they represent only one per cent of Canadian media professionals. Launched in spring 2013 by media development organization Journalists for Human Rights (JHR), the Northern Ontario Initiative aims to challenge that deficit. It is doing so by sending two journalism trainers to six remote communities. The goal is to train Indigenous participants to produce and freelance their radio and print stories to media outlets. Fort Severn, Weagamow, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, Moose Cree, Constance Lake, Lac Seul and Attawapiskat are all participating. Richard Spence's first outing resulted in a report on how his nation's education authority board members took action to detect and remedy a buried oil leak posing danger to kids at the elementary school. From Ghana to Nishnawbe Aski The Northern Ontario Initiative is rooted in Africa. Designed and managed by Robin Pierro, a young documentary filmmaker and former freelance journalist, the project idea first came up when she was in Ghana working as a trainer with JHR. Since 2002, JHR has worked to strengthen independent media in sub-Saharan Africa by helping local journalists report ethically and effectively on human rights and good governance. While in Ghana, Pierro, now an international programs manager at JHR, witnessed the power of journalism to spark positive change first hand. She thought, "Why not take this model and tweak it to a Canadian context and start working on improving human rights issues in our own country?" Upon returning to Canada in September 2011, Pierro got busy developing her idea at JHR's Toronto headquarters. First step? Make respectful inquiries about how JHR could be of service. In practical terms, that meant Pierro spent a year speaking with First Nations people in their own communities, as well as other stakeholders, to gain their perspectives. JHR found not only valuable counsel but a powerful partner in the Wawatay Native Communications Society, which for nearly four decades has serviced the remote First Nations communities of Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) located in northwestern Ontario. Begun as an emergency information network that distributed CB radios and dropped leaflets from airplanes, Wawatay Native Communications Society now operates the Wawatay News newspaper, three quarterly magazines, daily radio programs, television production services and a multimedia website. If JHR could train new First Nations journalists, those graduates would have a ready outlet through Wawatay. Buy-in from all parties It took a first proposal, and then a refined version, to earn funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Key to that second-push success was Joyce Hunter, Cree from Weenusk First Nation, now the Aboriginal liaison strategy coordinator for the City of Thunder Bay. Hunter joined Wawatay as its special projects officer after the first JHR proposal rolled in. Hunter saw potential in the idea, but also recognized there needed to be increased dialogue and buy-in from the communities. "Joyce was a huge help in strengthening the second proposal," said Pierro. "She offered a unique perspective as an Aboriginal person from a remote community who worked in journalism, and Wawatay assigning her to work with me on the proposal showed their buy-in and commitment to making this happen." The Ontario Trillium Foundation approved the second pitch in February of 2013. Accenture Canada soon came on board. "We are providing $50,000 worth of free technology consulting and with that money we are building a robust online portal to bring together the journalism trainees, the trainers and the broader community," said Theresa Ebden, director of media and analyst relations Canada at Accenture. "We will have things like tutorials, a discussion board and connect these journalists in training with real editors who will really buy their stories." Wawatay News has budgeted for purchasing stories from the newly-trained community journalists and has already published some of their work. Many other media organizations have shown great interest in running the content, provided it meets their editorial standards. Two months into the initiative, Danny Kresnyak, a roaming journalism mentor currently stationed in Constance Lake, said he had gained as much knowledge as he was sharing. "People don't want to be talked to, they want to be worked with," said Kresnyak. "The main issues right now are visibility and inclusion in the process." "Community partners need to be included in the design of goals for the project to function. Both sides must work to create a mandate they can effectively buy into. I cannot just be here, take the story and leave. I need to leave a legacy for the work to be sustainable and the project to be a success." Learning by listening Kresynak said simple acts of listening and learning have been key to fostering a better relationship with the First Nations community. "Attawapiskat [where Kresnyak spent three months as a trainer] has become a lightning rod for major media stories about social problems on reserves. Many people here feel their community has been painted in an unfortunate light," he said. "As a result, many in the street don't trust journalists and there is often an opacity when dealing with outside government, band office, and local bureaucracy. Much of my effort is dedicated to shifting this paradigm." Kenny Thomas is head councillor at Fort Severn First Nations Band, where the project's second trainer, Kimberly Stinson, worked from June to September. Fort Severn is the northernmost community in Ontario. "The reason why training and journalism is important is to provide news to others and to show others that despite our hardships we are still here and enjoying life," said Thomas. "And the stories that are written are to be written in a way that people will understand and enjoy." Pierro hopes the Northern Initiative can expand into other provinces. Ultimately, the aim is to build partnerships with universities to create fellowships and implement curriculum on how to better cover Aboriginal issues. On June 13, Aboriginal Day, Wawatay and JHR won the 2013 Innovation Award from the Canadian Ethnic Media Association. As training proceeds, one person is particularly eager to see the results. "The thought that this time next year we might have six freelance writers in six different communities who are regularly contributing to the newspaper and to the magazines is really exciting and positive for Wawatay," said Shawn Bell, former editor of Wawatay. "It's going to make Wawatay so much stronger to have those stories." Richard Spence hopes to be one of Wawatay's writers. He'd like to balance journalism with attending college to become a music teacher in Attawapiskat. Before Danny Kresnyak seized his imagination by suggesting he could tell his own community's stories, Spence was without plans for his life. Not anymore. "This project helped me see that I could improve myself and improve my community by being able to write stories about it, and help give all of Canada an idea of what it's like on the rez." [Tyee] Read more: Aboriginal Affairs,

Got this from Slashdot and I highly recommend you downloading and looking over the free PDF book Verification Handbook: In the Unverified Digital World, Are Journalists and Bloggers Equal? Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 24, 2014 @10:08AM from the but-I-play-one-on-tv dept. oztechmuse (2323576) writes "As the source of news moves increasingly away from traditional channels to the millions of people carrying mobile phones and sharing commentary, photos and video on social networks, the distinction between journalists and bloggers has become increasingly blurred. Making sense of this type of information has been as much a challenge for journalists as it has bloggers. Journalists, like bloggers, have had to learn new skills in working in this environment. Highlighting this has been the release of the Verification Handbook which attempts to educate journalists in how to process user-generated content in the form of videos or images acknowledging that much of the reporting about situations, especially emergency ones, comes from the public. The techniques outlined are accessible to anyone reporting on a story, adding to the eroding gap between bloggers and journalists."

That about sums it all up.

Most Proof Reading Misses Are In the Headlines

Subject: Fw: Proof reading is a dying art 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 Really? Ya think? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers Now that's taking things a bit far! ---------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over What a guy! --------------------------------------------------------------- Miners Refuse to Work after Death No-good-for-nothing' lazy so-and-so's! They must be UNION ! ------------------------------------------------------ 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

Layout

28 Newspaper And Magazine Layout Disasters buzzfeed.com How not to edit a publication.

How Biology and Physics May Come to the Aid of Journalism

Here's a new move. Thanks to 'Data Science Weekly' for alerting me to this: Most Creative People Why The New York Times Hired A Biology Researcher As Its Chief Data Scientist To help make sense of the massive troves of data produced by people clicking around its website, the Times made a (very) nontraditional hire--Chris Wiggins, a biology researcher with a PhD in theoretical physics. If you can map the human genome, maybe you can even fix journalism. By Rebecca Greenfield 0 Comments Email It doesn't come as a huge surprise that the New York Times has hired a chief data scientist. Even 162-year-old media companies know that technology will play a huge role in the future of journalism. And, despite its age, the Times hasn't shied away from digital innovation. What's surprising, however, is that the new hire, Chris Wiggins, has spent the last 10 years steeped in biology research. Wiggins's role at the paper started less officially last fall, when he used a sabbatical to apply his skills to the newsroom. "The best thing you can do with a sabbatical is to find something completely unrelated to your research to do," he explained to Fast Company. "I've been hearing for years from my students that this is where the future is and I was happy that I found a way that I could participate in building that future while building the data science skills that I've been developing in a different domain within the academy," he added. Chris Wiggins As of last week, the Times made him a permanent fixture. Wiggins, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, will spend one day a week at the paper, leading its yet-to-be built "machine learning" team. Fast Company spoke with Wiggins about what that role will entail and how having a background in biology makes him at all qualified to lead the Times into the future. FAST COMPANY: Before we get to this biology quandary, tell us about your background. Maybe that will clear things up. CHRIS WIGGINS: My PhD was in theoretical physics. I got my PhD at Princeton at a time which is now called the second string revolution. Basically, everyone was interested in string theory, except for me. I was interested in the opposite of string theory. I was interested in how we model complex real-world problems in terms of the data that we have about them. At the time I was working in biology and that's where I've been working for the last several years doing what we would now call data science. Okay, got it. So that makes a little more sense of things. But still: what does biology have to do with media? The pain that many fields are experiencing by becoming data driven is a pain that was experienced in biology 15 years ago when whole genomes started being sequenced. I think there is a lot in common about applying data science in the natural sciences and applying data science in the real world. Real people have questions from a different domain, they have abundant data, and it's a fun and creative task to try to reframe those domain questions as machine learning tasks. You lost me at machine learning tasks, what does that mean? Machine learning sits at the intersection of data engineering and mathematical modeling. The thing that makes it different from statistics traditionally, is far more focus on building algorithms. Another difference, although this is more of a spiritual difference, is that statistics traditionally has had a stronger emphasis in explaining a data set and machine learning has far more interest in building predictive models. For example, when Netflix tells you what movie to watch or when Amazon predicts what book to buy--that’s machine learning. In a way, machine learning has crept up all around you. Like Netflix--now you're speaking our language. But how does this relate to the Times? How do you plan to apply "machine learning" to the Grey Lady and its newsroom? There's a lot of potential both on the business side and the editorial side. On the business side The New York Times is interested in establishing long-term relationships with their readers. So the Times is trying to understand what are the behaviors that seem to be correlated with loyalty, what are the behaviors that seem to be correlated with dissatisfaction, particularly among subscribers--the way a long-term relationship manifests itself at the Times is via subscribers. If we're trying to understand how people engage with the site in general and in the abstract, machine learning is both useful for gaining insights about what kind of content engages users, and also good business. There is a way to listen to your customers at scale that you can do at a website that is just qualitatively different than having a focus group or giving out a survey. And what about editorially? "Anytime anyone does anything on a website, that is an event and that person leaves a trail of data. Putting all of that data together is definitely a non-trivial task." I've worked with people on the data visualization group to think about how better to cluster the results that they look at that make the data visualization more interpretable. I've worked with business analysts to think about how to present data in user engagement in a way that is more meaningful and more statistically robust. I've worked with people from the personalization team to think about how best to test and optimize their recommendation models. There's a lot of opportunities for a machine learning group that makes all the groups stronger and draws a common narrative with people thinking about data in a high-powered way throughout the company, particularly on the technology side. It's a very technologically strong company. It sounds like they have a pretty strong tech department. People at the New York Times I found to be totally optimistic. They're not putting their heads in the sand. If you look at just the changes, even on the front-facing New York Times, they've really built out a presence in interactive news and much more video. I would say people are aware of the challenges and are really working hard to build a sustainable future for journalism. I understand that part of your role is to further extend the tech department and build a team? I'll be focusing on people who do and speak machine learning. There's already excellent data engineers; there's already excellent business analysts; there's already a great data visualization group. So it's a fantastic place now to build a machine learning group to try to make sense of those data, reframe business analytics questions as prediction problems, and to work with people who will visualize and help make interpretable the insights you gain from those types of predictive models. How do you think this team led by you will change things at the Times? News has gone from a device that shows up on your door step to a website, which just opens up a whole new universe of ways of understanding your readers and listening to your readers better. Anytime anyone does anything on a website, that is an event and that person leaves a trail of data. Putting all of that data together is definitely a non-trivial task. It gives so much immediate insight into the way people use your product, how your products can be improved, what new products you should be thinking about. I think that's a real transformation for anybody in any business. [Photos courtesy of Chris Wiggins] 0 Comments Email Rebecca Greenfield Rebecca Greenfield is a Staff Writer at Fast Company, where she covers creative people doing creative things. She was previously a Staff Writer at The Atlantic Wire, where she focused on technology news. Her work has also appeared at The Atlantic and The Hairpin. Continue February 12, 2014 | 6:06 AM

Thanks, MediaMatters

The Media..what?

Here we go with change running ahead of us:Ezra Klein Is Joining Vox Media as Web Journalism Asserts Itself JAN. 26, 2014 Launch media viewer Ezra Klein spoke last week at a conference on health care. He is leaving The Washington Post for a digital start-up. Charles Dharapak/Associated Press [David Carr] David Carr THE MEDIA EQUATION After a week of speculation, it turns out that Ezra Klein, the prolific creator of The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, will be going to Vox Media, the online home of SB Nation, a sports site, and The Verge, a fast-growing technology site. His change of address could be read as the latest parable of Old Media cluelessness — allowing a journalism asset to escape who will come back to haunt them — or as another instance of a star journalist cashing in on name-brand success. But it’s more complicated than that. Mr. Klein is not running away from something, he is going toward something else. Vox is a digitally native business, a technology company that produces media, as opposed to a media company that uses technology. Everything at Vox, from the way it covers subjects, the journalists it hires and the content management systems on which it produces news, is optimized for the current age. “We are just at the beginning of how journalism should be done on the web,” Mr. Klein said. “We really wanted to build something from the ground up that helps people understand the news better. We are not just trying to scale Wonkblog, we want to improve the technology of news, and Vox has a vision of how to solve some of that.” In making the switch, Mr. Klein is part of a movement of big-name journalists who are migrating from newspaper companies to digital start-ups. Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher left Dow Jones to form Re/code with NBC. David Pogue left The New York Times for Yahoo and Nate Silver for ESPN. At the same time, independent news sites like Business Insider, BuzzFeed and Vox have all received abundant new funding, while traffic on viral sites like Upworthy and ViralNova has exploded. All the frothy news has led to speculation that a bubble is forming in the content business, but something more real is underway. I was part of the first bubble as a journalist at Inside.com in 2001 — an idea a decade ahead of its time — and this feels very different. The web was more like a set of tin cans and a thin wire back then, so news media upstarts had trouble being heard. With high broadband penetration, the web has become a fully realized consumer medium where pages load in a flash and video plays without stuttering. With those pipes now built, we are in a time very similar to the early 1980s, when big cities were finally wired for cable. What followed was an explosion of new channels, many of which have become big businesses today. The same holds true for digital. Organizations like BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Vice and Vox, which have huge traffic but are still relatively small in terms of profit, will eventually mature into the legacy media of tomorrow. More and more, it’s becoming apparent that digital publishing is its own thing, not an additional platform for established news companies. They can buy their way into it, but their historical advantages are often offset by legacy costs and bureaucracy. In digital media, technology is not a wingman, it is The Man. Kenneth Lerer, manager of Lerer Ventures and one of the backers of BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post, says that whenever he is pitched an editorial idea, he always asks who the technology partner is. How something is made and published is often as important as what is made. It’s worth remembering that Vox got its hands on The Verge because the people working at Engadget, a tech site owned by AOL, grew tired of trying to publish through the big, slow blob of a huge corporation. The staff came to Vox for the technology and used the flexible platform there to publish its way to an audience. Vox added Curbed, Eater and Racked last year, so Mr. Klein’s new venture will become part of a growing digital emporium. And from a standing start in 2011, The Verge has grown to over 10 million unique visitors a month, becoming a big player in technology and gadgets right out of the box. “It is not as simple as journalists going to a digital site and doubling their salary,” said Jim Bankoff, chief executive of Vox. “Many of these people, including Ezra, have a vision of creating something remarkable. There is a better way of doing things and we like to think that we are using technology in service of creativity, journalism and storytelling.” Mr. Klein, who is making the move with other colleagues at The Post, including Melissa Bell and Dylan Matthews, as well as Matthew Yglesias of Slate, said he was less interested in burnishing a personal brand than building a site that will go beyond politics and policy and serve as a prism on the rest of the news. “That’s the theory, but that’s all it is until we actually do something,” Mr. Klein said. But it still raises the question of why Jeffrey Bezos, who bought The Post in August and who has personally backed Business Insider and its founder Henry Blodget, did not want to fund Mr. Klein’s venture at The Post. He is not saying, but to start, The Post has long-festering problems with its core business. It has a strong editor in Martin Baron who is making strides, but to invest time and money in building out another discrete brand — Mr. Klein reportedly wanted a big presence and staff that could cost millions of dollars annually — would be a major distraction. Recent Comments David Mendoza 32 minutes ago The reason why this new venture could be so revolutionary is because it could change our expectations about how the news should be... David Bartlett 34 minutes ago And who is doing the actual work?So many of these 'new media' websites are merely re-sellers of the news-----still those tin... HKGuy 42 minutes ago In the whole article, Carr never mentions that sites like Curbed, Gawker and Huff Post are aggregate sites, vultures that feed on the news... See All Comments Write a comment Meanwhile, Business Insider sits at the sweet spot of digital content: high traffic, low cost, with a combination of sassy voices and viral content. Kevin Ryan, a backer and founder of the site, told me that he looked at Businessweek when it came up for sale for an effective price of zero dollars and found that it paid more than six times as much just for desk space and real estate per working journalist. While the ambitions of the journalism may be very different, Business Insider now has traffic that rivals The Wall Street Journal. And the skill set is not the same. “Digital journalism is as different from print and TV journalism as print and TV are from each other,” Mr. Blodget said by telephone from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Few people expect great print news organizations to also win in TV. Similarly, few should expect great TV or print organizations to win in digital. The news-gathering, storytelling and distribution approaches are just very different.” Great digital journalists consume and produce content at the same time, constantly publishing what they are reading and hearing. And by leaving mainstream companies, journalists are often able to get their own hands on the button to publish, which is exciting and gratifying. “If William Randolph Hearst and Bill Paley were alive today, they would think they were in heaven,” suggested Sir Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital. But while the barrier to entry is low, one big obstacle to long-term media success remains: quality. The reason that Vice, Vox, Gawker Media’s sites and other players stick out is that they use their digital tools to make remarkable, unexpected content that people flock to. NBC did not team with Re/code simply because it knows the secret of the Internet. “I have more flexibility, and can make decisions on staff and stories so much quicker, that we can keep up with organizations that are so much bigger than we are,” Ms. Swisher said. Staring into the whirlpool of content plays, it is easy to forget that building a credible news organization that people trust still takes time. Gawker is 12 years old, AllThingsD, which became Re/code, was founded seven years ago, and BuzzFeed has been around since 2006. It may not take $200 million, as it did to create a cable network, or $50 million as a national magazine might require, but creating a digital media company takes years. (And $25 million, give or take.) With the price for web advertising dropping by the second and new competitors coming out of the screen at a very high rate, it would seem like a terrible time to jump in. But what we are witnessing now is not the formation of a bubble, it is the emergence of a lasting commercial market, a game that has winners and losers, yet is hardly zero sum.

Pope Points

One of the biggest problems facing modern journalism is the massive amounts of information available and how to make sense of it. A journalist often becomes a specialist in a very narrow field to which they become 'expert'. That is expert with some real limitations. So I thought that this may be a break through for big data: The Overview Project Visual document mining for journalists >http://overview.ap.org/blog/2014/01/algorithms-are-not-enough-lessons-bringing-computer-science-to-journalism< Algorithms are not enough: lessons bringing computer science to journalism by Jonathan Stray on 01/15/2014 0 There are some amazing algorithms coming out the computer science community which promise to revolutionize how journalists deal with large quantities of information. But building a tool that journalists can use to get stories done takes a lot more than algorithms. Closing this gap has been one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of building Overview, and I really think we’ve learned something. Overview is an open-source tool to help journalists sort through vast troves of documents obtained through open government programs, leaks, and freedom of Information requests. Such document sets can include hundreds of thousands of pages, but you can’t find what you don’t know to search for. To solve this problem, Overview applies natural language processing algorithms to automatically sort documents according to topic and produce an explorable visualization of the complete contents of a document set. I want to get into the process of going from algorithm to application here, because — somewhat to my surprise — I don’t think this process is widely understood. The computer science research community is going full speed ahead developing exciting new algorithms, but seems a bit disconnected from what it takes to get their work used. This is doubly disappointing, because understanding the needs of users often shows that you need a different algorithm. The development of Overview is a story about text analysis algorithms applied to journalism, but the principles might apply to any sort of data analysis system. One definition says data science is the intersection of computer science, statistics, and subject matter expertise. This post is about connecting computer science with subject matter expertise. The algorithmic honeymoon In October 2010 I was working at the Associated Press on the recently released Iraq War Logs. AP reporters toiled for weeks with a search engine to find stories within these 391,832 documents. It was painful, and there had to be a better way. Rather than deciding what to look for I wanted the computer to read the documents and tell me what was interesting. I had a hunch that classic techniques from information retrieval (TF-IDF and cosine similarity) might work here, so I hacked together a proof-of-concept visualization of one month of the Iraq War Logs data using Ruby and Gephi. And it worked! By grouping similar documents together and coloring them by incident type we were able to see the broad structure of the war. It was immediately clear that most of the violence was between civilians, and we found clusters of events around tanker truck explosions, kidnappings, and specific battles. A few months later we had a primitive interactive visualization. It was exciting to see the huge potential of text analysis in journalism! This was our algorithmic honeymoon, when the problems were clear and purely technical, and we took big steps with rapid iterations. But that demo was all smoke and mirrors. It was the result of weeks of hacking at file formats and text processing and gluing systems together and there was no chance anyone but myself could ever run it. It was research code, the place where most visualization and natural language processing technology goes to die. No one attempted to do a story with the system because it wasn’t mature enough to try. Worse, it wasn’t even clear how you would do a story starting from one of these visualizations. Yes, we could see patterns in the data, but what did those patterns mean and how would we turn them into a story? In retrospect, this uncertainty should have told us that despite our progress in algorithms, we didn’t yet understand the journalism part of the problem. Getting real work done The next step was a prototype tool, initially developed by Stephen Ingram at UBC and completed by the end of 2011. This version introduced the topic tree and its folders for the first time. And I had a document set: 4,500 pages of recently declassified reports concerning private security contractors in Iraq. Trying to do a story about these documents taught us a lot about the difference between an algorithm and an application. The moment I began working with these documents — as a reporter, not a programmer — I discovered that it was stupendously important to have a smooth integrated document viewer. In retrospect it seems obvious that you’ll need to read a lot of documents while doing document mining, but it was easy to forget that sort of thing in the midst of talking about document vectors and topic modeling and fancy visualizations. I also found that I needed labels to show the size of each cluster, got frustrated at the overly complex tagging model, and implemented more intuitive panning and zooming in the scatterplot window. A few weeks of hacking eventually got me to a system I could use for reporting. The final story included the results of this document set analysis, reporting from other document sources, and an interview with a State Department official. This was the first time we were able to articulate a reporting methodology: I explored the topic tree from left to right, investigating each cluster and tagging to mark what I’d learned, then followed up with other sources. The aim of the reporting process was to summarize and contextualize the content of a large number of documents. This was a huge step forward for Overview, because it connected the very abstract idea of “patterns in the data” to a finished story. We thought all document set reporting problems would take this form. We were wrong. Just as the proof-of-concept was research code, the prototype was the kind of code you write on deadline to get the story done by any means necessary. The data journalism community often writes and releases code written for a single story. This is valuable because it demonstrates a technique and might even provide building blocks for future stories, but it’s usually not a finished tool that other people can easily use. We learned this lesson vividly when we tried to get people to install the Overview prototype. Git clone, run a couple of shell scripts to load your documents, how hard could it be? It turned out to be very hard. At NICAR 2012 I led a room full of people through installing Overview and loading up a sample file. We had every type of problem: incompatible versions of git, Ruby, and Java; operating system differences; and lots of people who had never used a command line before. Of 20 people who tried, only 3 got the system working. We were beginning to make contact with our user community. Usability trumps algorithm We re-wrote Overview as a web application to solve our installation woes (largely the work of Jonas Karlsson and Adam Hooper). We also dropped the scatterplot visualization, the visualization that we had started with, because log data and user interviews showed no one was using it. We went all-in on the tree and had a deployed system by the end of 2012. Do you understand what is happening in this screenshot? Is it clear to you that the window on the lower left is a list of documents, each represented a line of extracted keywords? It wasn’t obvious to our users either, and no one used this new system for many months. We knew that Overview was useful, because we and others had done stories with the prototype. But we were now expecting new people to come in fresh and learn to use the system without our help. That wasn’t happening. So we did think-aloud usability testing to find out why. We immediately discovered a number of serious usability problems. People were having a hard time getting their documents into Overview. They didn’t understand the document list interface. They didn’t understand the tree. We spent months overhauling the UI. We hired a designer and completely rebuilt the document list. And based on user feedback, we changed the clustering algorithm. During the prototype phase we had developed a high-performance document clustering algorithm based on preferentially sampling the edges between highly similar documents and building connected components, documented in this technical report. We were very proud of it. But it tended to produce long lists of very small clusters, meaning that each folder in the tree could have hundreds of sub-folders. This was a terrible way to navigate through a tree. So we replaced our fancy clustering with the classic k-means technique. We apply this recursively, splitting each folder into at most five sub-folders according to an adaptive algorithm.The resulting tree is not as faithful to the structure of the data as our original clustering algorithm, but that doesn’t matter. Overview’s visualization is for humans, not machines. The point is not to have a hyper-accurate representation of the data, but a representation that users are able to interpret and trust. For this reason, it was absolutely necessary to be able to explain how Overview’s clustering algorithm works for a non-technical audience. What do journalists actually do with documents? We solved our usability problems by the summer of 2013 and journalists began to use our system; we’ve had a great crop of completed stories in the last six months. And as we gained experience we finally began to understand what journalists actually do with a set of documents. We have seen four broad types of document-driven stories, and only one of them is the “summarize these documents” task we originally thought we wanted to support. In other cases the journalist is looking for something specific, or needs to classify and tag every document, or is looking to separate the junk from the gold. Today we have a solid connection to our users and their problems. Our users are generally not full-time data journalists and have typically never seen a command line. They get documents in every conceivable format, from paper to PDF. Even when the material is provided in electronic form it may need OCR, or the files may need to be split into their original documents. Our users are on deadline and therefore impatient: Overview’s import must be extremely quick or reporters will give up and start reading their documents manually. And each journalist might only use Overview once a year when a document-driven story comes their way, which means the software cannot require any special training. We learned what journalists actually wanted do, and we implemented features to do it. We implemented fuzzy search to help find things in error-prone OCR’d material. We added an easy way to show the documents that don’t yet have tags for those projects where you really do need to read every page. And Overview now supports multiple languages and lets you customize the clustering. We are still working on handling a wide range of import formats and scenarios including integrated OCR. This is what the UI looks like today. Algorithms are not enough Overview began when we saw that text analysis algorithms could be applied to journalism. We originally envisioned a system for stringing together algorithmic building blocks, a concept we called a visualization sketching system. That idea was totally wrong, because it was completely disconnected from real users and real work. It was a technologist’s fantasy. Unfortunately, it appears that much of the natural language processing, machine learning, and visualization community is stuck in a world without people. The connection between the latest topic modeling paper and the needs of potiential users is weak at best. Such algorithms are evaluated by abstract statistical scores such as entropy or precision-recall curves, which do not capture critical features such as whether the output makes any sense to users. Even when such topic models are built into exploratory visualization systems (like this and this) the research is typically disconnected from any domain problem. While it seems very attractive to build a general system, this approach risks ignoring all real applications and users. (And the test data is almost always academic papers or news archives, both of which are unrealistically clean.) We are seeing ever more sophisticated technique but very little work that asks what makes one approach “better” than another, which is of course highly dependent on the application domain. There is a growing body of work that recognizes this. There is work on designing interpretable text visualizations, research which compares document similarity algorithms to human ratings, and evolving metrics for topic quality that have been validated by user testing. See also our discussion of topic models and XKCD. And we are beginning to see advanced visualization systems evaluated with real users on real work, like this. It’s also important to remember that manual methods are valuable. Reporters will spend days reading and annotating thousands of pages because they are in the business of getting stories done. Machine learning might help with categorize-and-count tasks, but the computer is going to make errors that may compromise the accuracy of the story, so the journalist must review the output anyway. The best system would start with a seamless UI for manual review and tagging, then add a machine learning boost. This is exactly what we are pursuing for Overview. Our recommendation to technologists of all stripes is this: get out more. Don’t design for everyone but for specific users. Make the move from algorithmic research to the anything-goes world of getting the work done. Optimize your algorithms against user needs rather than abstract metrics; those needs will be squishy and hard to measure, but they’ll lead you to reality. Test with real data, not clean data. Finish your users’ projects, not your projects. Only then will you understand enough to know what algorithms you need, and how to build them into a killer app.

This is from the editor of io9 a very interesting web site on cutting edge culture,design and ideas. Viral Journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity 12 Once you've worked as a writer and editor in the world of social media for a decade, the way I have, you start to notice patterns. For example, there are some stories that will never go viral, even if they are brilliant in every measurable way. That's because they lie in the "valley of ambiguity," which is sort of like the uncanny valley for viral journalism. If a story is circulating in social media, even if it's a fancy character study for the New Yorker or incisive cultural analysis for the Atlantic, it's always chasing the viral tornado. Before the 21st century, stories became popular because people talked about them in other publications, or shared magazine and newspaper clippings with friends. Today, stories become influential if people share them on social media like Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter. In most cases, nobody is going to read a story if nobody shares it. This leaves a lot of writers and readers wondering why the hell some stories go everywhere and some never make it past three likes on Facebook. Here is one theory, based on my own anecdotal experiences and those of many other people I've talked to in the industry. It's not a scientific theory, and you'll notice that the diagram I have used to illustrate it is something that began on the back of a napkin. Still, I think it can help us make sense of the way that virality has changed journalism in the 21st century. Viral Journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity SEXPAND RELATED Where Memes Really Come From Though history will probably remember Richard Dawkins as the activist who spearheaded a new atheist movement, there is something far more famous and… Read… Basically, there are two kinds of stories that tend to go viral. On one side of the diagram, you can see the most obvious genre of viral story: the meme, or the single, simple unit of information that we share because it's funny or makes us feel good. The purest version of the meme online is the LOLcat, usually just a picture with a caption, which is the perfect pick-me-up bit of portable content. What the LOLcat shares with self-help guides and human interest stories is an invitation to credulous enjoyment. TED videos, often seasoned with cheery platitudes, become viral for the same reason that grumpy cat pictures do. They don't ask us to think critically — just to enjoy, or be amused and enlightened without the time-consuming labor of skepticism and doubt clouding our clicks. Why do we want to share these stories? Because in some sense they are not open to interpretation. You don't have to worry whether your friends will wonder why you shared this – it's obvious. The same goes for viral journalism on the other side of my chart. These stories, like explainers, how-to guides, Mythbusters-style debunkery, and truth-telling investigative journalism, are in some ways the opposite of a stupid video or a LOLcat. They are about truth, rather than amusement. But in fact, they go viral for exactly the same reason LOLcats do. They are not open to interpretation. In fact, the main goal of a lot of these stories is to clear up confusion the way Nate Silver did during the election in his analysis of polling. A how-to story is all about leading you through a process without getting you lost. A hard-hitting investigative report that uncovers a nugget of genuine truth is the ultimate viral hit. It's a story that promises we can at last know exactly what has happened, or how to feel about something. We want to share these stories because they appeal to our urge to have the definitive explanation of what is true and right. To share a story is in part to take ownership of it, especially because you are often able to comment on a story that you are sharing on social media. If you can share a piece of information that's an absolute truth – whether that's how to uninstall apps on your phone, or what the NSA is really doing – you too become a truth teller. And that feels good. Just as good as it does to be the person who has the cutest cat picture on the Internet. So that leaves us with the stories that don't make it. These are the articles and essays that have fallen into the valley of ambiguity – reports on important scientific findings with difficult-to-interpret results, political news with a long and tangled back story attached, and opinion essays that require us to account for points of view that may be unfamiliar or strange. There is no satisfaction in knowing that the Higgs boson has sort of been found, but sort of not. And nobody wants to risk alienating friends with a piece of opinion writing that might or might not be offensive – you're not even sure. Who wants to share a story that can be misunderstood? Nobody wants to take ownership of a political article where there is no truth – only further information, and complex developments that even experts can't agree on. It's not that we don't want to be the bearers of bad news. In fact, plenty of stories that go viral are nasty, negative and mean. We just want to share stories that make us seem like we know something. Most of all, we don't want to say something that we didn't intend. And that is the danger with any story that falls into the valley of ambiguity. We can't be sure how people will take it. We don't want to risk our reputations on a story that can be taken more than one way. More than anything, the fear of a smeared reputation is what creates that dip in virality. Sharing a story means that in some sense we stake our reputation on it. That's why sharing a story is not the same thing as enjoying a story, reading a story, or even learning from a story. I know for certain that there are plenty of stories that get read, but not shared. I have seen the statistics on io9's back end. But when we measure a story's success by virality, which is what we must do in the age of social media, the content of our popular culture changes. We measure success by what people aren't afraid to share with their neighbors, rather than what people will read on their own. Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9, and this is her column. She is also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction.

This is an excellent look at the heat a real reporter has to deal with, who tries to accurately report, doing her job well from the excellent American media company (NPR) National Public Radio: A Fair And Balanced Look At Mara Liasson by November 07, 2013 5:12 PM National political correspondent Mara Liasson on election night in 2012. National political correspondent Mara Liasson on election night in 2012. Stephen Voss What to do about NPR's national political correspondent ? This is a regular issue raised by some NPR listeners who object to Liasson's second role as a contributor to Fox News. They say that she, like Fox, tilts to the right. "Would you please consider letting Mara Liasson go?" wrote listener Michael Duba in what is typical of the several complaints that come in almost every time Liasson does a story. "Her affiliation with the Tea Party channel and willingness to just go along with whatever is said by others on the fake news shows she appears on has ruined whatever small remaining shreds of credibility she had left." Joan Jones, of Madison, Wis., wrote, "If Ms. Liasson wishes to be respected, I suggest that she refrain from using Republican or 'Tea Party' talking points in her reporting. In her reporting on the Affordable Care Act in particular, you are obligated to go beyond the talking points to get to the truth of an issue." I have followed Liasson's work closely for the last 10 weeks, through four of the most ideologically and politically contentious minefields imaginable. These were the considerations to attack Syria, the government shutdown, the threat of debt default and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. As a national political correspondent, Liasson filed frequently on each. I also have looked at some of her contributions to Fox, where she is called on as an outside political expert. My conclusion on Liasson's work is simple: Applaud her. I find that her NPR stories were straightforward and based on solid reporting. Her Fox contributions were the same. She was smartly analytical, but did not take a position on issues or veer into opinion. Just as important, she did not tilt or load her characterizations of political figures such as President Barack Obama or Republican leaders. Much of the complaints about Liasson, it seems to me, are really about Fox. The complaining listeners do not like Fox's rightward stance, and especially the incendiary views of some of its prime time talk show hosts such as Bill O'Reilly. They tar Liasson by association. The criticism is partly an extension of the three years ago. Whatever you may think of how NPR handled that case, it is very different from this one. Williams did much outright opinion commentary; Liasson is strictly a reporter. NPR's senior vice president for news,, stood behind Liasson in a note to me, saying: Mara is a first class reporter. She has a keen understanding of national politics and does a beautiful job helping our audience make sense of what's unfolding in Washington and across the country. As for her Fox appearances, we reviewed this issue when we were re-writing NPR's ethics guidelines in 2011 and early 2012. We think Mara's TV appearances are fine. There too, she does a very good job sharing her knowledge, insight and reporting expertise. We view this as an opportunity for a broader audience to benefit from NPR's editorial depth. One concern about any NPR reporter appearing in another news outlet is whether she or he is put in a potentially compromising position. As NPR's : ...[W]e refrain from appearing on television discussion shows where the format is designed to produce heated, highly political debates. We go on TV to talk about our reporting and the news of the day, not to offer opinions (with the obvious exceptions of our music, arts and books critics — and, if any are hired, news commentators). If asked to offer opinions when on the air, we rely on our reporting and offer context — citing, for example, what public opinion polls signal about how an issue is playing rather than our personal opinions. From what I could see, Liasson was not put in positions by Fox interviewers that violate the handbook, though I acknowledge that my review of her Fox work was limited. Some liberal listeners of NPR may not want to hear what Jones above calls "Tea Party 'talking points.'" Listeners are right to be concerned about the uncritical reporting of misleading claims and half truths made by any political group. But Liasson is a political reporter whose job precisely is to report and analyze political maneuverings. Others at NPR are the experts on issues such as Syria and health care, which they dissect in other stories. This is not to say that political stories should not add context on issues, and many of Liasson's stories did. Liasson in all her reports was a remarkably cold-eyed analyst. Going back to the Syria coverage, for example, she : President Obama has had a tough year. He failed to pass gun legislation; immigration reform has stalled in the House. He barely escaped what would have been a humiliating rejection by Congress on his plan to strike Syria. Just this week, his own Democrats forced Larry Summers - the president's first choice to head the Federal Reserve - to withdraw. This might seem negative about Obama, but it is a fair and accurate summary of events. She is hardly kinder to Republicans. She came back in the same story to note "Republican chaos" over the government shutdown and threatened debt default. "The president is on firmer footing with the public who may not like Obamacare, but don't want it repealed or defunded," she said, reporting what polls show. She concluded: "President Obama is willing for now to let the Republicans flirt with the unpopular and dangerous possibilities of a government shutdown and a debt default." in August, Liasson said of the president's reversals over Syria that "this is a box entirely of President Obama's own making" — a harsh judgment perhaps, but again a true one. In October, , she said during the government shutdown that now it was the Republicans who were in a "box they've gotten themselves in." All this is not what some critics and I call "false equivalence": giving all sides equal time, even those who are demonstrably wrong. It is accurate analysis that captures the flailing on both sides as they maneuver for political advantage or try to avoid political blame. Or look at how Liasson on the Republican charge that Obama is to blame for the debt crisis because of his unwillingness to negotiate with them: Well, let's be very, very specific about what the president has refused to negotiate on. He said he would absolutely not negotiate around the debt ceiling. He said Congress has already spent the money. It's their job to raise the debt ceiling so we can borrow the money to cover the bills that they've already incurred. He said he will certainly not negotiate about Obamacare in terms of defunding it or delaying it. But he has said that he would negotiate over the budget. Remember, every time we've gotten up to this brink in the past, we've talked about the grand bargain, where the president would agree to cut entitlements and Republicans would agree to raise some kind of tax revenue. Those talks have always fallen apart, but the president said he's still ready to cut entitlements if Republicans are ready to raise revenues, which they say they are not. Of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who led the most extreme position of those willing to accept a default on the nation's debt, Liasson reported: It's hard to believe, but I think Ted Cruz, who's been the leader of the stop-Obamacare-at-any-cost caucus, the guy who stood on the floor for 21 hours in the Senate, he has actually come out of this a political winner. Not with the media, not with his Republican establishment colleagues who consider him an annoying grandstander, but certainly with the Tea Party base of the Republican Party, the people who make up the Republican presidential primary electorate - his stock has soared. And you can see that Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, who are the other two senators who are considering running for president in 2016, they have been standing with Cruz all along. This is not Republican cheerleading. It is clear, tough and accurate reporting. The first day that Americans could sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act could have been an opportunity to stake out a position. Instead, Liasson this way: Obamacare is not only the law of the land, it's also, as of today, a practical reality for millions of Americans. But as a political issue, it's far from settled and won't be anytime soon. She was addressing the political question, as opposed to analyzing the rollout of the act itself. But the political story is an important one and part of the rollout — and her job is to examine and explain the politics of such issues. A week ago, , Liasson confronted the revelation that some Americans were seeing their old heath care policies canceled as a result of the Affordable Care Act, in contradiction to what Obama had repeatedly promised — "period," he emphasized. "But that's just not true, in every case," Liasson said flatly and accurately. But then she went on to put the whole issue itself in the sort of admirably fair context that has been missing in so much of the debate: But that's just not true, in every case. What we're talking about here is about 5 percent of the population who are in the private individual market. They don't get their health care through their employer, or through Medicare or Medicaid. And some of them - we don't know how many of them - are seeing their plans canceled when their 12-month contracts come up because their plans don't meet the new standards for coverage in the Affordable Care Act. Now, some of these people are going to have to pay a little more; some of them will pay less. The White House says in the end, more people will end up with better coverage and in some cases, cheaper coverage because of the subsidies. But the fact is, the Affordable Care Act is a disrupter. This is why the White House wanted this rolled out after the president was re-elected. And the problem is that the president raised expectations. He went out and said the website will be as easy to use as buying a plane ticket on Kayak. He said your insurance won't change, if you like it. But health insurance is very complicated. There are premiums, and there are deductibles, and there are co-pays; and the law affects different people in different ways. So for every positive anecdote, you can find a negative one. The president made it sound so simple, and those promises are now coming back to haunt him. She added a coda the next day on that is about as insightful and honest as you can get: Well, he's got to fix the website; that's the first thing. But in a year from now, when we have the 2014 elections — and this will be the first time that there will be electoral verdict on the actual health care law. It's always been theoretical; you know, what people think about the law without the law being in effect. This time, it's on the ground. People are going to be able to touch it and feel it and experience it. He has to hope that the kinks are ironed out and that net — net — people think this law is a good thing for them.

And via The Tyee:Canada drops to 20th spot in world press freedom index By Crawford Kilian Published October 10, 2013 03:45 pm | 5 Comments Canadian press freedom has fallen from 10th in the world to 20th, according to a new report from Reporters Without Borders. As a result, Jamaica now has the highest press freedom in the Americas. According to the World Press Freedom Index 2013, Finland continues to enjoy the world's greatest media freedom for the third year in a row. Following it are the Netherlands and Norway. At the bottom of the index are Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. The report saw the US rise 15 places, to 32nd. "Its previous year's fall," the report said, "was due to the fact that the crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street movement did not spare reporters in the field. "Canada, on the other hand, fell 10 positions to 20th, losing its status as the western hemisphere's leader to Jamaica (13th). This was due to obstruction of journalists during the so-called 'Maple Spring' movement and to continuing threats to the confidentiality of journalists' sources and internet users' personal data, in particular, from the C-30 bill on cyber-crime." According to the Press Freedom Index on the RWB website, the top ten countries this year are Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Andorra, Denmark, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Iceland, and Sweden. Canada now ranks between Namibia and Belgium. Australia is in 26th place, the United Kingdom in 29th, and the US in 32nd. While the report praised Israeli media freedom, "the Israel military's targeting of journalists in the Palestinian Territory" pulled it to 112th place. Japan's ranking fell sharply to 53rd, "affected by a lack of transparency and almost zero respect for access to information on subjects directly or indirectly related to Fukushima. This sharp fall should sound an alarm." Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee. - See more at: http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/2013/10/10/Press_freedom_index/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=111013#sthash.EnwNcPkJ.dpuf

Fair and balanced hooie

I Love the quote from Graham Greene "Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."

A Free Press and the 5th

This following article is a specific American instance, however, similar dilemmas face reporter all over the world. As a free press is essential to a free society a journalist must have access to information and especially hide information that the electorate requires to give informed consent, and make informed selection in the voting process. The Reporter's Fifth Amendment Paradox Posted by samzenpus on Monday September 09, 2013 @12:39PM from the no-information dept. Bennett Haselton writes: "The ongoing case of New York Times reporter James Risen -- whom the U.S. Department of Justice wants to force to testify against one of his sources for leaking classified CIA information -- brings up a more general question about the Fifth Amendment: Why are criminal defendants allowed to remain silent, but not third-party witnesses like Risen?" You'll find the rest of Bennett's story below. In my last article about the Fifth Amendment, I tentatively made the argument that I couldn't see a principled reason why defendants should be able to refuse to answer the question of whether they committed the crime or not. My argument was that you're perfectly entitled to keep information private that is none of anybody's business -- you ought to be able to say, "It's none of your beeswax where I was on the night of the murder" -- however the fact of whether you committed the murder or not, is everybody's business, and I didn't see why the state shouldn't be able to make you choose between saying "Yes, I committed the murder," or "No, I didn't." (If you think the state would then try to convict you of lying if they were determined to railroad you, then my answer would be: If the state is going to railroad you anyway, they can convict you of the murder regardless of whether or not you say you're innocent, so that's not an argument in favor of the right to remain silent. I addressed this and several other counter-arguments in the original article.) However, the argument I'm making this time is different. I'm saying that regardless of how you feel about the Fifth Amendment granting criminal defendants the right to remain silent, there's no consistent argument that would support giving defendants the right to remain silent, that should not also apply to third-party witnesses. Here's the basic paradox: Suppose Bob may have committed a crime, and Alice is known not to be an accomplice but appears to have been a witness. If the courts ask both Bob and Alice the same question -- "Did Bob do it?" -- and both of them refuse to answer, then Bob's right to remain silent is protected under the Fifth Amendment, but Alice can be sent to jail -- despite the fact that Bob may have been guilty, but Alice is innocent! To me, that sounds crazy. (As explained at Findlaw and elsewhere, generally third-party witnesses can be required to testify in a way that defendants cannot. Witnesses can only plead the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if they believe that by answering they could incriminate themselves. If it's generally agreed that a person is a third-party witness who was not guilty of any wrongdoing themselves, they can be forced to answer.) In my first article arguing that defendants should not have the right to refuse to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed a murder, I wasn't sure of the conclusion, and I invited readers to submit arguments as to why I was wrong (I called the article "Seeking Fifth Amendment Defenders", after all, not "Let's Abolish The Fifth Amendment"). I'm still weighing the arguments coming in, and haven't decided what I believe. However, I'm more sure about the point I'm making this time: that there's no principled, consistent reason to give defendants the right to remain silent but not third-party witnesses. This is after talking to multiple lawyers, law students, and law enforcement officers and asking for any argument to the contrary. There are two counter-arguments that I've received multiple times, that deserve a response: "The defendant's rights as a presumed-innocent citizen have to be protected until they're actually convicted." This is absolutely an important principle in a free society, but generally those "rights" refer to rights that free people have as well, and that are preserved even if you've been arrested -- for example, the right to free speech and the right to be presumed innocent, are all rights that the general public enjoys as well. Insofar as the Fifth Amendment says you have the right to refuse to answer questions about the particular incident that got you arrested, that's a right that innocent third-party witnesses don't have. Even in the most progressive societies, generally speaking criminal defendants don't get more rights than the public. Why should they get that special right in this case? Maybe there's an argument why, but you'd have to at least make that argument. So all the talk about protecting the rights of a criminal defendant, is valid, but it misses the point: Why shouldn't we also give the same rights to a third-party witness who we know is innocent? "It would be very difficult to prosecute many cases without compelling testimony from third-party witnesses." This is true -- particularly in the cases of reporters like Risen, who refuse to divulge their sources' identities, so all you have is the option of compelling the reporter to testify, when you don't even know the defendant's identity yet. However, that's really an argument that if you had to choose between having the ability to force defendants to testify, and having the ability to force third-party witnesses to testify, you would choose the ability to question third-party witnesses, simply because there are often more of them and sometimes they're available even when the defendant isn't. But that's not an answer to my question, which is: Is there an argument from moral or legal principles as to why the defendant is allowed to remain silent but third-party witnesses are not? Obviously, we don't actually have to choose between requiring defendants to answer and requiring third-party witnesses to answer. If we place more importance on giving courts the power to gather information, we should empower them to question third-party witnesses -- but wouldn't that argument also apply to requiring answers from the defendant? On the other hand, if we place more importance on individual liberty, we could grant the right to remain silent to defendants who are presumed innocent -- but shouldn't we grant that same right to third-party witnesses that we know are innocent? The argument that "it would be too inconvenient to prosecute cases if we couldn't require answers from third-party witnesses", is a bit like saying that if we had to choose between the courts having the power to force Eskimos to testify, and having the power to force non-Eskimos to testify, we would choose having the power to force non-Eskimos to testify, just because there are more of them. But obviously that's not a principled argument as to why we should be able to require answers from non-Eskimos but not from Eskimos. Of course, many people's sympathy for James Risen might stem not from the fact that he's a third-party witness (to the crime of leaking information), but from the fact that his supporters are sympathetic to the cause of the anonymous leaker, who was exposing what he believed was a corrupt government. (Risen's book is subtitled "The Explosive Book on the Abuse of Power of the Bush Administration", always a way to get fans.) If James Risen knew the identity of someone who had raped and killed a child, but had gone to jail for refusing to name the suspect, probably a lot fewer people would be hailing him as a hero. But that hypothetical just makes the argument from the opposite direction: If we instinctively feel that third-party witnesses to a murder can be forced to answer questions about what they saw, why can't we make a suspect (who is, after all, a special case of a "potential witness") answer questions about what they know as well? Our courts' current stance on the "right to remain silent" -- that it can be claimed by criminal defendants, but not by innocent third-party witnesses -- seems so absurd to me that I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think it's an example of groupthink, an assumption that we accept because we're immersed in it, but that few people would ever come up with on their own if they were working from first principles about balancing liberty vs. the rights of the state. Here's what I mean by that: Suppose you had been raised in a world that was identical to our own, except that our rights under the Fifth Amendment were inverted, so that innocent third-party witnesses could refuse to answer questions, but criminal defendants could at least be required to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed the crime. My hunch is that that, instead, would seem natural and sensible. You wouldn't scratch your head and say, "Wait, that seems wrong -- it should be the defendants who should have the right to remain silent, not the innocent witnesses." By contrast, suppose you had been raised in the world that was identical to ours, except that portions of the First Amendment were inverted -- so that we could write any political arguments that we wanted to, but the government demanded prior approval of any fictional stories that we wanted to publish. I would hope that to many people, this would seem like a nagging contradiction, and over time more and more people would point out this inherent hypocrisy and call for restrictions on political thought to be abolished. That's because I think the First Amendment guarantee of free speech is something that can be derived from first principles about individual liberty -- if you want to write something and someone else wants to read it, and neither of you is harming anyone else in the process, it should be nobody else's business, period, full stop. And I just don't see a compelling argument from first principles in support of our current interpretation of the Fifth Amendment -- that we can make third-party witnesses answer questions, but not require the same of a criminal defendant. Regardless, a court has already ruled that James Risen can be made to testify, and barring a successful appeal, he may choose to go to jail rather than reveal his source. The judge writing the ruling against Risen made an interesting slip-up, though, when he wrote: The reporter must appear and give testimony just as every other citizen must. But of course "every other citizen" does not have to give testimony -- if the defendant is ever identified, they won't have to. And that's the inconsistency that I find hard to explain.

This is from the Tyee one of Canada's cutting edge online magazines that covers among other things environmental and social concerns in the West of Canada. Bill Tieleman is on it always. Spot the Political Weasel Words Keep elected officials and the journalists that cover them honest by calling out these slippery lines and clichés. By Bill Tieleman, Yesterday, TheTyee.ca Politician What other political platitudes can you think of? Politician photo via Shutterstock. Related The English Speaker's Guide to Political Journalese How to decipher the noise of political clichés. How to Talk to a Conservative about Climate Change A growing body of social science offers ways to dig the debate out of the 'left-wing ghetto.' The Elements of BC Liberal Style Upon study, the language of the ethnic outreach memo tells us much about the party's inner mind. Read more: Politics, Media, Sign Up for the Tyee Newsletter go Crash Davis: "You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: 'We gotta play it one day at a time.'" Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: "Got to play... it's pretty boring." Crash Davis: "'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down." -- Bull Durham, 1988 Ever heard awful, boring, clichéd words coming from the mouths of politicians and journalists? Of course you have -- practically daily if you watch television news and political panels! Even the revered Peter Mansbridge, veteran anchor of CBC's The National, will regularly throw out one of the laziest questions in the media lexicon: "What do you make of this?" Well, I make that it's a classic cliché that abdicates the interview entirely to the person asked. But it's hardly the only terrible turn of phrase. For example, has any cabinet minister in recent memory "resigned" because of their role in something gone wrong? No. Instead we hear weasel words like this, after the BC Liberal ethnic outreach scandal earlier this year: "When mistakes occur, and they do, we must confront them and take responsibility for them. I've talked to [John Yap], and he has agreed that he is going to step aside from cabinet," Premier Christy Clark told media in March. "Step aside?" Is he square dancing? Will he step back inside shortly? No, Yap resigned, but don't expect the truth to be told. Unless, of course, a politician is desperately trying to sound sincere in interviews. "To tell you the truth" and "to be honest" or "to be frank" are other classics -- because isn't the politician already supposed to be telling the truth? B.C. Deputy Premier Rich Coleman is a master, getting two clichés into one short sentence. "I think, quite frankly, the proponent here didn't do a great job of that, to be honest with you," Coleman said in 2011 while referring to a proposed mine. No one is immune Other annoying pseudo-aphorisms include the catchphrase "but at the end of the day," a signal that after blathering on for ages, a politician or journalist is about to finally, mercifully come to some conclusion that often contradicts what they've previously said. No less an admired columnist as Chantal Hébert is not immune to using a cliché as a journalistic crutch. Writing on federal Conservative challenges in June, Hébert uncorked this one in the Toronto Star. "With ongoing investigations into Senate spending, the upper house will almost certainly continue to give the government more than its share of headaches between now and the 2015 election," Hébert wrote. "But at the end of the day it is the abrupt loss of a chief of staff with a central role in the operations of the government that falls in the potentially more lethal category of political injuries," she concluded, cliché confirmed. Of course, if you are constantly concocting clichés there's only one thing to do -- promise to end the practice "on a go forward basis"! Otherwise, to be honest, at the end of the day, you may have to step aside. [Tyee]