Teaching Examples

Steve Safran of Lost Remote wrote a really excellent list of six straight-to-the-point lessons for online journalists to learn before their city gets flooded — based on his experience in Boston last week. For example:

Of course, the amount of video crashed our email. LESSON THREE: Prepare your IT staff for this and have a plan in place to accommodate the influx of video and digital picture emails. This stuff is measured in megabytes, not kilobytes. It can be done – it does, however, require planning.

Steve makes some very good points about soliciting and using content from users and viewers too.

Technorati tags: online journalism | disasters | news

This has been much covered already (see the Daily Koz, for example), but for the record, here is the News.com report from May 26.

The appeals court pointedly took issue with Apple’s argument that the Web sites were not legitimate journalistic enterprises. Apple had claimed that the sites were engaged not in “legitimate journalism or news” but instead in “trade secret misappropriation” and copyright violations.

Judge Conrad Rushing of the California Court of Appeal, Sixth Appellate District, who wrote the opinion, said: “We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes ‘legitimate journalism.'” To do otherwise, Rushing warned, would imperil the very values the First Amendment was intended to protect.

Technorati tags: journalism | blogs | First Amendment

From the New York Times obit for this most readable communication theorist:

Dr. Carey shunned the increasingly abstruse, highly mathematical theoretical work at the frontiers of his field, preferring instead to focus on underlying values. He drew from anthropology and sociology, James Joyce and Boston Red Sox lore, to explore the cultural dimensions of journalism in democracies. This took him from the quirks of futures markets to journalism in 18th-century France to Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist. His own most influential idea was the “ritual theory” of communications, a departure from the traditional “transmission theory,” which defines communication as getting ideas from one place to another. Dr. Carey argued that a newspaper is not a transmission of facts or truth. Rather, it is a form of drama. (May 26, 2006)

Technorati tags: journalism | obituary | communication theory

Our students are fabulous. Check out the profiles of eight local bands photographed and interviewed on location in Orlando by Alligator staffers (pop-up window opens from the link at right, “Gainesville heard at FMF”). For something completely different, see what an intern from UF created for the St. Pete Times with hard news on deadline with the help of Google Maps: Rapist on the Run.

Technorati tags: online journalism | Flash journalism | Flash | Google Maps | multimedia

Bespoke tailoring is reserved for the wealthy — or those who travel to Hong Kong — but bespoke journalism may be the wave of the future. To see what I mean, check out Circle of Blue.

Circle of Blue is a pragmatic, creative, journalism-based project dedicated to addressing the global freshwater crisis … [and] a non-profit affiliate of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California.

The first location of focus is the Tehuacán Valley in Mexico. I’m bummed that the excellent photo gallery has no captions, but the infographic is really nice (too tall for my screen, however! I had to scroll too often).

Technorati tags: online journalism | environmental journalism | Flash journalism | Flash | multimedia

John Caserta sent this link to a site he designed (as part of a team) for The New York Times. It’s a really nice example of how to visually represent data with a back-end application that updates the numbers as needed. Companies within a selected market sector are represented by dots. The bigger the dot, the larger the market cap. The visualization is divided into quadrants that represent month/year and behind/ahead of the S&P 500. Check out the Help screen (linked at top right) if you’re not a finance wizard — or even if you are. It’s a first-rate example of clear and useful help for how to use and understand the chart.

Technorati tags: infographics | information graphics | financial | Flash journalism | Flash

Adrian Holovaty said what every young journalist needs to hear, in a commencement speech at the Missouri School of Journalism earlier this month.

… the foundation is important because you need to understand the rules before you can break them. And now, more than ever, this industry needs to break some rules….

Rarely is an entire industry in a position such that it needs to completely reinvent itself.

That’s what keeps me going, personally: The challenge of coming up with the best ways of presenting news and information in this new world where the products the industry has been producing for the past several decades are no longer in as much demand. The challenge of writing the rules, coming up with best practices. That challenge is monumental — but, man, it’s fun.

Found by way of Steve Yelvington.

Technorati tags: online media | education | teaching | journalism

I love how the Internet helps me broaden my world. Today, for example, as I was catching up on my blog feeds, I found an essay by an Egyptian journalist, Fatemah Farag, at the PBS Frontline/World site.

Fatemah Farag is a senior journalist at Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. She has written extensively about police repression, the pro-democracy movement and Egyptian government policy in areas such as labor, employment, the environment and conservation.

She explains how police are struggling to contain a growing pro-democracy movement — from a first-person viewpoint, with plenty of background that helps me understand the situation better than anything I’ve read in standard news reports.

Some people like to say that without the bundled format of the daily newspaper, we are doomed to exist in narrow corridors of information that we choose — without the serendipity of the eye falling upon a headline that lures us into a story and opens doors to new worlds.

I realize that may be true for many people, especially busy people, who tailor their Internet information gathering to fit a precise profile. But it is not true for everyone.

Resolution: This fall, I’m going to teach my students to use Bloglines and require them to check their feeds at least once a week.

Technorati tags: online journalism | international

Wow, Paul Conley was really tough on Ed Wasserman’s op-ed, which I wrote about on Wednesday. I think maybe we should keep in mind that folks at the Miami Herald may have edited Ed’s piece to suit their own ends — given that earth-shattering memo their boss, Tom Fiedler, sent out.

Technorati tags: journalism | convergence

In asking whether “convergence” is the next media disaster, Ed Wasserman points out that professional journalists (so far) have had precious little input in shaping the newsroom (and the news product) of the future.

Ed makes some excellent points, but I’m afraid the overall tone of the piece might make some journalists shake their fist in the air and shout, “Yeah! That Internet stuff is a pain in the neck, and we shouldn’t have to do it!” I don’t think that’s Ed’s position, but perhaps there are too many journalists who would like to read it that way.

While it’s true, I think, that publishers and various number crunchers come up with some ideas for “converging” operations that lead directly to a reduction in the quality of journalism, I do NOT think it’s true that all attempts labeled “convergence” are bad ideas that guarantee bad journalism.

Speed, for example. There is sloppy speed that leads to errors and libel and just plain poor reporting and editing. But speed might also kill complacency and the kind of ho-hum reporting that comes from being the monopoly information service in a town. That would be a good thing.

There is a lot to criticize in most convergence efforts to date. We would be wise, however, not to toss all journalism online and other “new media” into the same basket with badly executed convergence plans and practices.

Technorati tags: journalism | convergence