Little Fish Rising

Punk Reporter Extraordinaire

2008-08-14T14:17:00.000-07:00

Boston Globe reporters busy at their desks glance up from their work. An irresistibly catchy techno beat has flooded the newsroom. A flash of day-glow green streaks past. It’s a head-banded man bounding around in shorts short enough to make Jessica Simpson blush, complete with knee-high tube socks. Trailing behind is Emily Sweeney, an award-winning, bleach-blonde, tattooed reporter, capturing it all on her personal hand-held camcorder. Trailing behind both of them – Globe security.

Sweeney had written about 123 Party in several blogs along with a big feature and some video for the Globe. Their story was right up her alley. They are a group of three people who deck themselves out in neon-colored T-shirts with very tight short shorts and hold impromptu dance parties throughout the Greater Boston area. It was after she brought Perlman onto New England Cable News’ “The Globe at Home” that the aforementioned scenario came to life in the traditionally stodgy bowels of the Globe newsroom.

“I actually had to show my I.D. to get back into the Globe building, they almost didn't let me in,” Sweeney smirked in her YouTube video account of the ordeal.

Mike Perlman, leader of 123 Party, and his group have received a lot of press, but said his experience with Sweeney unique.

“We’ve gotten to deal with some really wonderful reporters but Emily was, there’s just some kind of sparkle about Emily,” he said. “When you see Emily, the background blurs and a polychromatic disco ball drops. There is this innocent wonderful beam of light person standing in front of you.”

He went on to recite a poem about fall he wrote at age 15 that made him think of her.

After reading the final stanza:

“Subtle, jocose gusts of wind stealthily seize control
upon the amiable domain,
plummeting the temperature,
enticing the cold,
a reason to savor the transient realm of warmth while it lasts,”

He said, “Emily is that transient realm of warmth.”

Sweeney (a.k.a. Spikey Em), 32, has been at the Boston Globe for seven years. While there, she has broken almost every mold of a traditional reporter. Instead of fighting new media, she fought for it. Sweeney was campaigning her newspaper to let her blog and create video before they thought of making it a staple of the Web site.

A veritable expert in the growing field, she uses those skills to help tell people’s stories. Many of these stories, the kind that keep her excited about her job, are those of the locals that grew up in neighborhoods similar to her own beloved Dorchester.

She has never outgrown her punk roots, or more appropriately, her punk core, proudly sporting several tattoos and partially shaved, spiked blonde hair. An out lesbian who not only broke into the traditionally stodgy and somewhat puritanical Boston journalism scene, she became one of its leaders.

For the past few years, she has been the president of the New England chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. During her presidency, she has worked to make the society a go-to for aspiring journalists looking for work or scholarship money, which comes from the annual Halloween fundraising bash, Bloodfeast.

“I think she’s kind of wild and crazy. When you see her, you do a double take. She definitely has some eye-catching outfits and I think her hair style changes every time I see her,” said Laura Campbell, a former producer at NECN, who worked with Sweeney. “You think she’s sort of this wild child but when you talk to her, she’s just what you’d expect a reporter to be – a really good listener and a good conversationalist.”

Her early leaps into new media have earned her widespread acclaim throughout the industry. She has become such an authority on new media, the School of Journalism at Columbia University uses her piece “How to Become a Multimedia Superhero” as course material.

“She’s very, very good. I’ve seen her work. I link to it. I use it, and she has the right kind of attitude about new media and what makes it work and what doesn’t and I appreciate that very much,” said Columbia journalism new media professor Sreenath Sreenivasan. “Her advice is implementable and people relate to it very well. The important thing is that there are no textbooks. We’re inventing this. It’s like radio in 1912 and television in 1955 and we all have to learn together and that’s really important.”

The compliment is an honor for Sweeney, who said Sreenivasan has always been one of her own multimedia superheroes.

When Sweeney recently took time out of her busy schedule to interview for this piece, her somewhat soft-spoken and relaxed manner contrasted with the expectations of a Goth-loving girl named Spikey Em. And that, to revert to journalism slang, is her hook.

She wore a dark green cargo shirt with rolled up sleeves revealing a tattoo of a skull with hockey sticks crisscrossing through it on her forearm. Perfectly coordinated with her tattoo were the two small hoops in each ear lobe and black platform oxfords that Daria would kill for. Her warm blue eyes jumped out from under her old black and white ball cap that could not quite conceal the wisps of platinum blonde hair poking over her forehead.

Conversation started up easily, as it always does between two journalism nerds, and she explained with her quiet voice that lacked “R’s” and gesturing hands why this is the only profession (outside of being a professional hockey player) that she could love.

“I like the whole aspect of journalism -- meeting people, hearing stories, the writing process – it’s about telling a story,” she said. In an earlier e-mail interview, she said: “I like that every day is different… one day I could be covering a fire and the next day I could be covering a clown convention.”

Putting tools in the tool belt

Since she first started in journalism, Sweeney has been interested in learning about every type of medium she could get her hands on.

She jumped on the chance to host a television show early in her career to learn the intricacies of live broadcast. That is the same reason she took an internship at WBCN – just to see how radio works. To Sweeney, there is no distinguishing between types of journalism; anything that helps tell a story and make it better is part of her job.

“When I first started blogging, it was just because all my friends were on it too… sometimes when I was doing a story I would put out to certain friends, ‘Did you guys hear about this? What do you think of this?’ I would generate story ideas from it. I didn’t even think of blogging as separate. It’s the same as picking up the phone,” she said. “Same with the video stuff, I’ve always wanted to do it.”

Sweeney was the first reporter to start blogging for the Globe and the first to start shooting and editing her own video. In addition to her interest in new media, some of her greatest strengths are her drive and love for both the Globe and journalism.

“I was more worried about the whole newspaper, I’ve just been worried about journalism in general and it’s always been like how can I help?” she said. “I was e-mailing, telling my editors what I could do, what’s possible and I even had a couple meetings with higher ups who were telling me what’s coming down the pipeline.”

Her early initiatives gave the Globe a head start in a field where many newspapers are now playing catch up.

“She was very interested in integrating multimedia into her projects. She had been really pushing video,” said Globe Northwest reporter/Boston.com content editor Russell Contreras.

While Contreras came to the Globe as a reporter, his editors realized he had a wider skill set in multimedia from his experience at AP Digital in New York and asked him to start teaching others. He said his main job has been helping traditional reporters develop multimedia sensibilities and a basic understanding of things like lighting and sound.

“[Sweeney] has a camera that has a built in mic, she has limited resources and what she does is goes in and shoots video then adds music. She makes up for her equipment by her creativity,” he said. “That has gotten noticed.”

Her videos have not only appeared on the Globe’s Web site and YouTube.com, they earned her a fairly regular spot on New England Cable New’s “The Globe at Home.” Lisa Campbell, the former producer at NECN who worked with Sweeney on the 123 Party piece said that Sweeney has been a natural at video.

“She did this really creative video segment as a first time homebuyer in Dorchester and what it meant to her and what it was like looking for the place and why the one she ended up with was the new home for she and her partner,” Campbell said. “She just gets it.”

Her look

Sweeney has always dressed in her own taste. The punk clothing, tattoos and piercings were not a high school fad to her.

As it reads in automatic text below any message coming from her personal e-mail: “‘If more journalists dressed with flair, maybe newspapers wouldn't be so dull.’ -- Brenda Starr.”

As far as reporting is concerned, she said her style has only helped, setting her apart from the pack.

She recalled covering the Marshfield High School Columbine-type plot story, where two high school students were accused of and have since been convicted of planning a columbine style massacre at their school. She said that out of the herd of TV reporters standing on the steps of one of the families’ houses, she was the only one let in. She formed such an instant rapport with the father that he allowed her to sneak out of the back of the house to move her car when the police showed up to clear the street, then sneak back in for an interview.

“In Bedford and Brookline people would be like ‘Oh! That’s that reporter girl with the crazy spiked hair.’ I’ve gotten a lot of tips that way,” she said.

She said some people within the industry have told her she could move up the corporate ladder more quickly if she toned down her look. While she said she is not sure if they are right, she has never changed her look to find out.

A Globe South reporter, Sweeney covers the suburbs, even though she said she hopes to move into covering Boston proper soon. She does not believe her look is the reason she is still covering the suburbs, simply the state of the Globe and the newspaper industry as a whole.

“I know tons of journalists my age that kind of got frustrated that they didn’t move up as quickly as they wanted to who have gone to law school or changed professions or have gone to grad school,” she said. “It takes time; I didn’t think I’d be at the Globe so quickly, so I’m still psyched to be there.”

Sweeney recently married her longtime partner, Lauralee Summer. Summer is the author of “Learning Joy from Dogs Without Collars: A Memoir,” about her experience growing up homeless and eventually graduating from Harvard.

Since the gay marriage issue has been big news in Boston, Sweeney did several stories covering both sides of the issue. She talked about interviewing anti-gay marriage activists and why it never fazed her.

“Whenever I interview somebody, immediately I can see where they are coming from even if it’s whatever… they didn’t have a problem with the way I looked and I think I presented their view points perfectly,” she said. “I have my Clark Kent uniform on and anything people can say bounces off of me and I record it and I can often see where they are coming from.”

Sweeney’s former Globe South colleague Sandy Coleman, who now works at Wheaton College, immediately pointed out Sweeney’s affability as one of her strongest characteristics.

“She is really good with people. I’ve never see her get flustered or frustrated. That’s an admirable characteristic for a journalist,” Coleman said. “I just admire her approach to journalism. She’s just really good at being very patient and pursuing her stories.”

Madam President

On top of breaking down the barriers of new media and excelling in her job at the Globe, Sweeney recently took the helm of the New England chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

“She’s everywhere, she really is. She works more than anybody I know,” said Paul McMorrow, Sweeney’s Vice President and a contributing editor of Boston Magazine, who admits that Sweeney is the only thing that keeps the organization running. “She works and reports all day then online she’s either working on one of the five Web sites she’s got or editing video for SPJ stuff on her own time.”

As McMorrow once wrote of Sweeney when he was a reporter at the Weekly Dig: “When she’s not scaring the shit out of local selectmen with her top-notch reporting, Globe staffer Emily Sweeney heads the New England chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists… Which pretty much means that she spends her free time herding cats.”

Since she took over, she has tried to gear the society towards helping and incorporating young journalists while creating a community for the seasoned professionals.

The national headquarters of SPJ allows every individual chapter to set up a scholarship fund. Sweeney jumped on the idea and came up with Bloodfeast, an annual Halloween party to raise money for the cause.

The title comes from the 1963 slasher flick directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. Lewis had a master’s degree in journalism and made the film so gory he knew censors would ban it in many theaters, thereby drumming up even more publicity. Sweeney loved the journalistic undertones. When the movie “Party Monster” came out and one of the parties had the name, she decided to throw a party that had meaning beyond drinking and giving money to a club.

“She’s got this incredible enthusiasm for what she does. She really tries to spread that as much as she can,” McMorrow said.

The beginning

Sweeney has a profound connection to the place she grew up. Across her shoulders, a large tattoo with script letters reads “Dot Rat,” her eternal proclamation that she is proud to be from Dorchester. After buying her first home in her hometown she bought an “OFD” bumper sticker common among Dorchester natives who have moved to the suburbs but love proclaiming that they are “Originally from Dorchester.”

Sweeney fixed hers to read “Still from Dorchester.”

Growing up, she said she was always an avid reader of newspapers and periodicals. Her hobbies included making small “ 'zines and newspapers”. But up until college and even throughout, her first passion was ice hockey.

She began school at Northeastern University in 1993 as a pharmacy major to play on the school’s Division I women’s ice hockey team. Today she still organizes club street hockey games and plays as often as she can. After a year in pharmacy, she realized it was not for her and switched over to journalism, which she called an “open-ended” major.

“She was always a very good reporter and a perky person,” said longtime Northeastern journalism professor Bill Kirtz. “She wore her preferences, so to speak, on her sleeve. She just always was who she was.”

After journalism school, she worked her way from the Bedford Minuteman, to the Brookline Tab to the Waltham Daily News Tribune and finally the Boston Globe.

The Globe, she said, had been her ultimate goal. Now that she has been there for seven years, she is not sure what the future holds, but said she is open to just about anything. Some things she said she hopes it will include are writing a couple books and getting more experience in video work – both in front of and behind the camera.

New media, Goth and the Society of Professional Journalists aside, Sweeney’s passion rests in the actual telling of people’s stories. Whenever she recalls one, her eyes drift. It becomes obvious she is exactly where she was when she was reporting and writing the story, getting excited about it all over again.

“My first gig was the Bedford Minuteman,” she said. “I did some of my best stories there.”

As she was walking around the local strip mall (the closest thing the town has to a downtown) one day, she saw a few men wander off into the woods behind the liquor store. Her Spikey-sense started tingling and she followed them, knowing there was a story there. She saw a clearing in the woods and asked the local police about it the next day.

“They called it the Ho Chi Minh trail. Bedford has a VA hospital,” she said. “It has a drug and alcohol detox so there were some veterans going to the liquor store in the strip mall then going into the woods.”

She spent about a year going back there and meeting the homeless vets, often bringing a police officer or photographer for safety. One of the men even wrote a first person account to run with her huge feature piece that came out on Veterans Day of 1999.

“I was really excited and that’s something I’m still proud of,” she said.

Back Up and Running

2008-08-14T14:01:00.000-07:00

Now that I am finally settling into one spot, I can kick the blog back into gear. I've just moved in to a great apartment right in downtown with my boyfriend, Bryan, and now the next order of business is to find a job to help pay the rent for that wonderful apartment. To get the blog, re-entry started off right, the next post is a feature I wrote on a Boston Globe reporter who has become a front-runner in new media.

Blog on Hold

2008-05-16T04:08:00.000-07:00

This blog will be on hold until I get back from my grand world adventure. To read about it check out The last Sixty Four Days I Won't Hate Sallie Mae.

A Great Use of the Web

2008-04-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

Whenever those heart palpitations start up at the prospect of becoming a real live grown up and moving to a new city to start over, I take a minute to look at the animal shelter web sites in Austin to see what dogs are waiting there for me to save them.

Lessons learned from this:

Puppies make everything better.
The web has become a really great pet finding/rescuing tool.

I've been getting annoyed and frustrated with all things web and multimedia lately. I came to school to be a newspaper journalist, not a Web designer. (Even though, prospective employers, I am capable and willing to do all things multimedia to help your news organization thrive in the new world of journalism.) But little things like this renew my faith that technology is not, in fact, the devil and that good things will come of it. Hopefully, even, for journalism.

My classmate, Bianca, writes often and well about the great world wide web as it relates to pets but I don't think she's touched on these great databases yet. You can find web sites for any particular breed or type of animal shelter you are looking for. Hell, you can even find Hedgehog rescue groups. (I know this as the previous, proud owner of a pet hedgehog who recently went to the great beyond.)

As for me, the Austin Humane Society, linked above in the picture of Spot, jumped out at me because it is a no-kill shelter. Furthermore, dogs and cats that have been there for more than three months become members of the "Lonely Hearts Club" and become cheaper to adopt. You can bet your bottom I will have a dog named Sgt. Pepper within six months time.

Corrupting Our Youth

2008-04-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

I recently started volunteering at a pretty fantastic organization, Teens in Print: Boston.

Any student attending a Boston Public High School can contribute articles to the paper that is put out four times a year. Nestled into the bowels of the Boston Globe compound, local teens meet up there twice a week to work on articles. It is a combined effort of The Boston Globe Foundation and WriteBoston. All of the art in the paper is contributed by Artists for Humanity, another local teen-oriented organization. It basically serves to get teens interested in their community and doing something productive with their spare time. A few of the kids I met there have used their experiences to help get them scholarships to college and positions at some pretty major conferences on teen journalism.

As my job search out of J-school and student loans become more harrowing, I feel a little bad encouraging teens into this field, but I was impressed with their communication and writing skills, which will serve them well in any field.

If other cities are doing something similar, I can't find it readily on the web. This is a great step beyond high school newspapers and lets the teens really delve into issues they care about while reaching a wider audience. Also, the Globe tends to pick up a story or two every issue to run in their metro section.

A Really Angry Journalist

2008-04-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

Most journalists these days, when perturbed about low wages and too much work, will take it out on angryjournalist.com. Thomas Kohnstammm, a travel writer for Lonely Planet, decided to start moonlighting as a drug dealer and fabricating stories to get back at his employer for his low wages.

This story made me angry down to my core. Not only did this guy, claiming to be a journalist, wipe his rear with the integrity of the industry, he has now written a book about it and will probably make money off of the ordeal. He has admitted these follies as his new book, "Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism," hits stores.

Lonely Planet has been the go-to for young travelers (myself included) as a reliable source of information that can be pretty necessary when you are halfway around the world. This guy wrote an entire chapter on Columbia without ever having been to the country. It's no wonder journalists are put on the same level as used car salesman and ambulance chasing lawyers these days, even our own are working against us.

Ugh, chances are I'll end up cross-posting this one on angryjournalist.

Newstrust.net

2008-04-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

I joined Newstrust.net this week. While I think it is a great idea in theory, I'm still not sold on its ability to work in practice. I look at it as Web 2.5. It's not only interactive for the readers but also, in a sense, against the readers. What does the bible say on this one? Judge not lest you be judged -- I'm not too sure, it's been a long time since those three years of Catholic school.

It is a complicated system of readers ranking stories and the web site ranking readers and other readers ranking each other and ranking the rankings and, whew, confused yet? I know I am. It is all in the spirit of true transparency and forcing the anonymous mob with their infinite wisdom to take responsibility for their views and biases. With the complicated premise of the site, it is imperative that the navigation be simple and clear. It's not.

Figuring out how to sign up isn't too bad but then once you do the site only shows you how to review stories. The figuring out of setting up your own profile to get your member ranking up and learning how to rank and review other users is up to you. I don't have a great answer on how they could make a clear, intuitive navigation system for the site but until they do I think this will be relegated to a really, really good idea.

At the moment, the site requires a lot of work and a lot of thought on the part of the reader, which I don't think most readers are willing to do. I'm currently trying to graduate, plan a two-moth trip abroad, find a job after graduation and training to run a marathon - spending half an hour a day ranking stories and reading reviews to decide which stories I want to read just isn't at the top of my priority list and I believe a lot of people will feel the same way.

Great Multimedia How-To

2008-04-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

I found this article on Poynter today and it is by far the most concise and comprehensive how-to on building a multi-media package a I've seen. Steve Myers writes on lessons from the National Press Photographers Association awards Web contest and breaks down what makes a multimedia package good.

The winner of the overall award was "Soul of Athens", a multimedia package about Athens County, Ohio.

Myers writes:

"Many projects lacked mastery of fundamentals and didn't live up to their potential. Judges said they want to see higher production quality, tighter editing, and a clearer understanding of how to use various media most effectively."

and that

"Judges said too many multimedia presentations are hard to figure out. Consider the downside of breaking conventions, such as a back button in the upper left corner. And whatever navigation system you choose, keep it consistent. (As Gitner put it, don't keep moving the car door handles.)

The best interfaces preview the content and show users how to navigate through it, Jenkins said. The navigation on 'Soul of Athens' was one of the reasons it was named 'Best Multimedia Package' -- its design made it easy to find great content."

As he put it, multimedia isn't a baby anymore but has moved on to adolescence. And judging from my own experience in those delicate years, the word adolescence is a euphemism for awkward phase, which is a pretty dead-on description of today's multimedia. Creativity and desire to make something new and well is running rampant but journalists are still working the kinks out and learning how to work with their new tools. I think pieces like Myer's are a great step towards getting multimedia up to drinking age.

The G.I.'s Buddy

2008-03-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

I've been a little, ok, a lot in love with Ernie Pyle since I took my history of journalism class here at Northeastern. I found this article today on gangrey.com and, for me at least, it was one of those swallow-that-lump-in-your-throat-while-you-read kind of stories. If you haven't read much Ernie Pyle, do. If you don't know much about him, I think St. Petersburg Times writer Ben Montgomery gives him a pretty damn good introduction.

Montgomery opens his story with what I suppose is one of his favorite Pyle quotes:

"I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without. Ernie Pyle, May 2, 1943"

Here is one of mine that I don't think will ever leave me.

"Nobody cares how you look. Red tape is at a minimum. You have no desk; no designated hours. You don’t wash your hands before you eat, nor afterwards either. It would be a heaven for small boys with dirty ears."

From "Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II", by James Tobin. Originally from Pyle’s conversation with Red Valens on Saipan, from Valen’s unpublished memoir.

A Bloggers' Union?

2008-03-31T08:33:00.000-07:00

I found the link to this article on readwriteweb.com by Josh Catone through Journerdism.com.

Whisperings of a bloggers' union are raising the hackles and interests of people in and outside the field. Chris Mooney broached the topic in last month's Columbia Journalism Review. Both writers point out the benefits and potential need as the blogosphere continues to grow exponentially but realize the obstacles that could prevent it from happening.

Mooney writes:

How, for example, do you define and otherwise distinguish "bloggers" themselves? Bloggers are an (in)famously diverse bunch: grouping them isn’t just grouping apples and oranges, but apples and oranges and bananas and the occasional kumquat.

and Catone elaborates:

The arguments against blogger unionization are mostly two-fold: 1. blogging is still in its infancy and is barely ready for a unionized workforce, and 2. the blogosphere is built on the idea that anything goes, and organizing would undermine that premise.

While Mooney believes that this is both inevitable and necessary, Catone doesn't take a stance on either side but discloses that he makes a comfortable living as a blogger, without a union. Mooney sums up his arguments for a union with an appeal to one of journalism's most inherent values: fairness.

The paradigm shifts we’re in the midst of—in media usage and, then, in standards of intellectual property—demand that we rethink not just what writers contribute to the media marketplace, but also how they should be compensated for their contributions. Individual blogs, and Web sites hosting large numbers of bloggers, are profiting—not just culturally and intellectually, but economically—from bloggers' work. Organizing, in that sense, seems not only inevitable, but necessary; "professional" bloggers need to be compensated for their work. It’s only fair.

I personally think unionizing bloggers would be akin to herding cats, but we'll see what happens.

Gangrey.com

2008-03-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

I found this Web site off of happyjournalist.com through a link that said "Good Writing." And Gangrey.com is just that, and only that. The tagline under the Web site name reads "Prolonging the slow death of newspapers," while the About Us section simply says: "A writer's approach to helping bail water out of a sinking ship."

It's a frequently updated blog with most of the posts made by the mysterious "ben" that simply posts incredible journalism day to day and allows people to comment on it. Stories posted to the site include a New York Times piece about a bullied kid, to the story of a Marine killed in Iraq through the eyes of his two-year-old daughter.

Most of the articles posted to the site are longer, narrative, feature pieces that contain multimedia presentations, but there are also some shorter, equally well-written pieces that don't fall into that classic standard of superb journalism.

I could stay on this Web site all day and just read the original posts, not even accounting for how much time I could happily spend reading the replies which tend to include similar works of amazing journalism or debate on the merits of the piece. One reply post to a war story was an old Ernie Pyle piece, and being that he's basically my hero, the site shot even further up on my list of things I like.

Beyond the simple posting of great stories are quick posts with fun pictures from flickr, including this one, in a post titled "The Stories Around Us":
and a post about narrative songs, which have apparently been a topic of conversation on the site lately.

This one is definitely going on my RSS aggregator.

What a Concept!

2008-03-24T08:07:00.001-07:00

Northeastern University Journalism Professor Bill Kirtz covered the recent Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston for Poynter. The article is a great round up of the conference with some good tips on narrative journalism but the thing that makes me so happy about the article, is the focus on content over presentation, a concept I thought was nearly lost in today's world of video and multimedia. This is the section that will probably have me posting on HappyJournalist.com pretty soon:

"It's Just a Platform"

New York Times multimedia editor Andrew DeVigal called new media "just a platform. Story and story-telling hasn't changed." He said that because audio storytelling is the "low hanging fruit" of multimedia, many news organizations are now producing slideshows and photo galleries on a regular basis.

The easiest route is adding audio to a story tied to great narration, he said, noting that The New York Times put together an eyewitness account of Benazir Bhutto's assassination -- a photographer's voice describing his pictures -- within a few hours.

Since only 20 percent of The New Yorker's online readers subscribe, the magazine's multimedia editor, Matt Dellinger, called multimedia a great way to "extend our brand." Material is easy to find, he said, such as archival films of conductors used to enhance an article on symphony orchestras. He and other speakers noted that using subjects' own voices, like soldiers reading from their Iraq journals, is another quick way to dramatize a story. Dellinger said each non-print element "has to have its own narrative integrity. It has to add value and be complete in and ... of itself."

If multimedia is just "bells and whistles," don't use it, said Laura Ruel, assistant professor of visual communication and multimedia at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and project leader for Poynter's Eyetrack III research. Ruel said good multimedia storytelling shouldn't distract from the story. Use audio and video only when appropriate; not every story is worth telling with multimedia. And make sure users can find their way around the site.

I think this is fantastic! I have a solemn confession to make. If I'm on a newspaper's Web site, and there is a link to a video, 99 percent of the time I won't click on it because I have a crappy old computer that runs slower than cold molasses when I try to play video and it's just not worth it to me unless the content is there. Yes, we all need to know how to be multimedia journalists but I truly believe that overdoing it is just as bad as not doing it at all.

It all comes down to this editing and filtering thing I was ranting about in an earlier post. It's the job of the newspapers to present real, interesting news to readers that showcases the news in the clearest, most informative way possible. Throwing every kind of presentation we can at a reader at every opportunity I think only distracts from truly good journalism.

PULL it sir

2008-03-20T12:28:00.001-07:00

I couldn't write a blog about the Pulitzer and not include this little gem my best friend and fellow journalist, Rachel Slajda, found last year on the Pulitzer Web site. Under the Frequently Asked Questions portion of the site is the query "How is 'Pulitzer' pronounced?" The answer: "PULL it sir." Makes me giggle every time.

Anyway, to get to the actual meat of this blog, I was poking around last year's winners when I realized that the Editorial Cartoonist Walt Handelsman of Newsday won not only for his editorial cartoons, but for his editorial animations. I don't know if a big deal got made of this last April when the 2007 awards were announced but I'd call this a pretty huge step for multimedia journalism.

The journ-world was stunned and split on opinion over the recent news of a Polk Award going to a blogger for the first time ever, but I guess the editorial animation thing somewhat slid under the radar. I'm sure it caused less of a hubbub because it was one of our own creating the work and not an evil blogger (even though Joshua Micah Marshall hasn't been expelled from the fold for calling himself a blogger because he does stellar work).

It will definitely be interesting to see how the Pulitzers play out this year. I'll be amazed if they don't recognize multimedia work in some new way.

Trying to Figure Out Who the Other 8 Are

2008-03-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

My Journalism of the Web Professor, Dan Kennedy, pointed our class in the direction of 9Neighbors.com today. It's a new initiative started up by Rick Burnes to give citizens of five Boston area neighborhoods the freshest news of the day.

It's cute and it's fun and it has some very local things like jokes about Evacuation Day (which only Boston residents have ever heard of) and a feature on a local pastry shop giving away free Pies on Pi Day. But, I don't really get it. Who are the nine neighbors? And what is there mission? The About section of the site doesn't offer much help:

9Neighbors is a new way for people in the Boston area to share and discover information about the places they live.The site is run by Rick Burnes, and is a project of Faneuil Media.To find out more about the site, the things we're working on and the things we're thinking about, check the 9Neighbors blog.If you have questions or feedback for us, please see the FAQ on our Help page. You can also check the 9Neighbors Google Group.

So after clicking the links, Faneuil Media creates some brilliant mash ups for major newspapers. The 9Neighbors blog keeps readers posted on new things on the Web site, although all the most recent posts are made by Rick Burnes. The 9Neighbors Google Group has a file of their logo, that's it.

Through some round about clicking I got to Rick Burnes' blog, which I linked above. It's a fairly rarely updated blog that talks about his political views and anything else that is interesting him that day, typical, good blogging.

He posted this on February 22, 2008:

When we started working on 9Neighbors a few months ago, we were a little concerned that we wouldn't be able to find enough independent content to highlight on the site.
There was no need to worry. Check out the data below, a report on the distribution of the types of items indexed on 9Neighbors in January.
Of the more than 25,000 local news items we indexed, over 70% of them were independently produced. That's over 18,000 photos, videos, stories and other missives about our communities produced by individuals for their own reasons. All of that competes with traditional media for the community's attention.
Whatever you think of their quality and relevance, these videos, photos and blog posts represent the things people are talking about in communities around Boston.

So, my overall guess on this is that it's a creative idea of doing a lot of crowdsourcing to keep individual neighborhoods hip to everything everyone else is doing in their neighborhood, and that it is pretty much the hard work of one guy.

All of the YouTube videos I clicked on came from local media like the Cambridge Chronicle and the Sommerville Journal. Basically, I get the feel of it being your local neighborhood paper with a good bit of extras. I'm pretty convinced there is something cool going on here, I'm just not 100 percent sure what it is.

Unedited. Unfiltered. News???

2008-03-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

While poking around cyberjournalist.net for an appropriate topic for my final feature article for my Journalism of the Web class, I came upon this article from MediaWeek.com. It talks about cnn.com's launch of Ireport.com Beta, an extention of its citizen journalism initiatives launched in August 2006.

According the the MediaWeek article, written by Mike Shields, cnn.com had previously been posting about 10 percent of the IReport material it had been receiving from readers, and only after it had confirmed the information and accuracy of the material. The new arm of IReport, however, is basically a dumping ground for everything and anything readers want to post to the site.

"The new site looks and feels much like YouTube and other video-centric destinations. Wannabe Anderson Coopers can upload videos, photos and audio files through an easy-to-use interface," Sheilds writes. "CNN executives acknowledge that iReport.com’s openness is something of a departure for a news organization that prides itself on accuracy and editorial judgment. But iReports have become increasingly popular, and in many cases have even proved beneficial in the reporting of breaking news."

I think this is a huge mistake on the part of cnn.com. It could be a good idea in general, but attaching the credibility of the name of the news organization to it, I believe, will only do harm. The article even says that the editors aren't thrilled to put CNN's name on something that will lack accuracy and editorial judgement but are doing it because IReports are popular. Seriously? Come on now, cnn.com is not a 14-year-old girl that wants to fit in with everyone else, is it?

The thing that really sent me over the edge about the site is it's tag line. "Unedited. Unfiltered. News." You just can't call something that is unedited and unfiltered news! It's just wrong! There is a reason newspapers and other journalistic institutions have the reputation they do and it is the editing and the filtering that makes it! This tagline is almost as ridiculous as Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" proclamation on everything it does.

To be fair to cnn.com there will be a level of moderation on the site.

“The community will decide what the news is,” said Susan Grant, executive vp of CNN News Services. “We are not going to discourage or encourage anything…iReport will be completely unvetted.” (CNN will, however, monitor the site for objectionable content.)

Grant explained that iReport content will be clearly labeled as not necessarily reflecting the editorial views of CNN. “We’ll be telling people in lots of different ways that it’s a post-moderated site,” she said.

I know my opinion on this seems like a far cry from my previous post applauding newspapers like the Austin American-Statesman and Seattle Post-Intelligencer for opening their sites to reader blogs but what they are doing is a far cry from this unfettered dumping ground for all things video, images and more from anyone who wants to jump on the site. Furthermore, they are not calling their new initiatives hard news, they are using them effectively as compliments to the news they are already writing.

This leaves an uneasy feeling in my stomach, and basically. I just don't like it.

Reporter, Reader, Blogger? All of the Above

2008-03-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

Imagine a place where bloggers and reporters live in harmony. A place where the ethics and standards of traditional journalism blend with the sheer volume of blogger knowledge, both open to instant feedback from readers. It’s easy if you try.

Or if you are the Austin American-Statesman, one of a growing number of newspapers that are marching boldly into the unknown and opening themselves to their communities. The paper uses Pluck, a blog server, to allow readers to create their own blogs on statesman.com. Online Editor Robert Quigley merges the blogs with coverage of anything relevant in the news that day or prominently features specific blogs on days the bloggers do something particularly good.

"The newspaper business has changed to the point where our mission has changed a bit,” Quigley said. We still provide news and all that, but we are a place for opinions. We’re not just telling people things anymore we’re also listening and incorporating them,” Quigley said.

Although the days of successful print-only newspapers are long gone, the industry should not be ready to hand the reins over to the citizen journalists. The future instead resides in the symbiosis of the two, according to Steve Outing, New Media Expert and former Senior Editor of the Poynter Institute’s Web site. He said he recently attempted to launch a forum dedicated entirely to grassroots media and realized that while the volume of content was there, it was not compelling enough to hold readers without a bit of editing and focus.

With the combination, he said, “you can get something that’s pretty powerful.”

This is what Quigley and the Statesman are succeeding in doing.

When Lady Bird Johnson died in July of 2007, he said there were several reader-bloggers who immediately posted their memories and condolences.

“We pushed their coverage into our coverage,” he said. “It’s a good incentive for them because they are part of the coverage and they get good exposure. One of our bloggers got 5,000 or 6,000 page views that day, which is just a dream for a blogger."

Randall Stephens, a.k.a. spinnerbait, started blogging to promote his new Web site, Adbirds.com. He said the early experimenting of how many page views he could get to his new business, was somewhat fruitful but that the statesman.com transitioned from a business tool into a place to voice his political concerns.

“The blog was kind of designed to test some backward links, but I’m focusing strictly on activism at this point,” he said.

A conservative, he says he does not agree with the politics of the newspaper but recognizes the value in putting his message on its site.

“It’s our premier newspaper locally… As of last night I’d had around 1,500 hits,” he said.

He does, however, wish the site could give him more feedback on exactly who is looking at his blog instead of solely providing page views per month.

Even with all of these mutual benefits for newspapers and bloggers, Outing said there is still a good deal of resistance to allowing citizen journalism on professional news Web sites, coming from the professional journalists who don’t want the less-qualified bloggers being put in the same category they are.

“There’s this funny thing, Angryjournalist.com; it’s basically this open forum where anyone who is a journalist can go in and gripe. A lot of people were dissing the idea of grassroots journalism,” he said.

Don Smith, Interactivity Editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, described a situation where a tech reader-blogger beat the staff computer reporter to a story about Microsoft buying a major gaming company because he was able to use a single anonymous source – a risky move the dependable Seattle P.I. would never allow their reporter to make.

“Those are frustrations that are valid for reporters to be concerned about,” he said.

But at the same time, Smith said, the reader-bloggers can prevent the staff members from doing work they would rather not but that their readers demand.

He said that an entertainment gossip reporter got a massive number of page hits last month but it meant, “We don’t have to write about Lindsay Lohan and the latest episodes with Paris Hilton,” he said. “We get to stick to things of greater news value.

As for the bloggers, the exposure and credibility of being on a newspaper site is great – most of the time.

Eugene Sepulveda, or CommunityMatters3, did not actually know what he was getting into when he set up his Statesman blog.

“I didn’t even know there was a link on the front page of the web site until I got in trouble for the stuff I was blogging,” he said.

He used his blog to vent about the operating procedures of one of the organizations in which he is a member of the board and was surprised when his fellow board members saw it and were unhappy.

“Well I thought about it when I figured it out, whether it was a good or a bad thing, and quickly realized it was probably a good thing,” he said. “And no wonder I was getting as many hits as I did. There was this high visibility benefit to the Statesman blog.”

The mutual benefits experienced by newspapers and bloggers are not without risks. When newspapers open their Web sites to bloggers, there is no telling what these citizen journalists will post under the heading of their reputable organization. Both the Statesman and the Seattle P.I. have come up with quality control measures.

Quigley said that all bloggers are subject to the terms of service of the web site and may be shut down or have a post removed that doesn’t comply. The Seattle P.I. takes this a step further and actually requires readers to apply to become bloggers.

“They have to apply, it has to be arguing for a niche that we want to cover,” he said. “We don’t always limit someone who has a conflict of interest but we require that it be disclosed in the biography… we edit the biographies, we don’t edit what readers put in the blogs themselves.”

Reporters often end up stuck in a strange middle ground between the editors and the bloggers. In addition to sticky situations like scoops on stories, editors often expect reporters to keep blogs of their own. When reporters must adhere to the strictest standards of journalism while keeping up with all of their other responsibilities but produce the volume of citizen bloggers, it can become a heavy burden.

Kate Alexander has been a reporter at the Statesman for six years. Until recently, she covered city hall and has since moved to the state desk. She said the paper launched the city hall blog last fall and charged her and a second reporter with keeping it active.

“My concern when we first started was two-fold. One, I was concerned that we just would not have enough. The way that you make blogs effective is you have sort of this constant activity and people are visiting and commenting… and I was concerned that to have that volume it would be this additional layer of reporting,” she said.

While she still has concerns about keeping enough volume on the blog, she said it has become a great place to flesh out ideas for stories and she believes that it has enhanced her reporting.

“One thing I think that’s been really helpful is you’re able to put up a lot of… our primary reporting materials so people can see. Like a law suit for instance, or a report,” she said.

She also believes that she, along with all blogging reporters, must be able to develop a new voice and style of writing for blogs.

However, as for competition with the reader blogs, she says she is not concerned.

“By and large they are deriving everything they know about what they are writing from us,” she said of local bloggers. “On the city level, the blogs that we’re competing against, I have better sources than they do.”

Smith said this has proven to be true at the Seattle P.I. as well.

“Our reader blogs get a fraction of what our staff blogs do,” he said.

So for Smith and Quigley the benefits of delving into new media have far outweighed the disadvantages. Also for both of them, reader and staff blogs are just a small part the new territory into which they are treading.

“We’re doing a lot of experimentation. We have MySeattle pics where readers can upload their pictures. We have something called SPI that’s run by college students,” he said. “We cover a lot of concerts in town and we cover the big concerts but we don’t really cover the small bands and the small venues… and that’s what SPI is all about.”

Quigley says he knows the Statesman has only scratched the surface of the potential in Journalism 2.0. While the Statesman was Pluck’s first major client, they now host the blogs for several major papers including USA Today, The Washington Post and the Houston Chronicle.
“Soon we are upgrading to the new version (of Pluck),” he said. “It will allow more community going even further into it. There will be automatic commenting on every story. Readers will have avatars and be able to P.M. (personal message) each other.”

“We’re diving further in; we’re not pulling back at all. There’s a long way to go to reach the full potential.”

A (Not So Successful) Rebuttal

2008-03-10T11:23:00.001-07:00

Last month I wrote a post about the originally hysterical, increasingly depressing, angryjournalist.com and have discovered the rebuttal site, happyjournalist.com, via the Wired Journalists RSS aggregator. Joe Murphy, a member of the online team at the Denver Post, launched the site eight days ago and unsurprisingly, unlike the thousands of hits the angrier incarnation got in the first week or two of its exisitence, happyjournalist.com has only had about 75 posters so far.

According to Murphy's blog, this is his motivation for launching the site:

"Angry Journalist launched a couple weeks ago as an anonymous confessional for, well, angry journalists. It asks the question: Why are you angry today?

Not all journalists are angry, and in the spirit of celebrating these dark times, I give you HappyJournalist, which asks the question, Why are you happy (to be a journalist) today?"

As sparse as the original, it is black text on a white background, simply providing a forum for journalists to shout into the void of cyberspace.

Even the optimistic Murphy couldn't resist back-sliding into a bit of that journalist sarcasm we are all so well-versed in, as the prompt on the site reads "Share what makes you happy to be a journalist. No, really."

It is a glimmer of sunshine in that foreboding sky of every journalist I know telling me to run like hell from this industry as soon as they find out I'm determined to stay in it. I think poster #66, Virginia Black says it best:

I’m happy because despite the overwhelming difficulties and discouragement, there is still no other calling that has the potential to so greatly affect people’s lives by stringing words and images together, no matter the format. And because a lot of us still recognize the great good fortune involved in being a part of that.

A nice little breath of fresh air. Either that or the same thing we're all telling ourselves to resist becoming PR drones immediately. Whichever it is, check out this site, I hope it will brighten your day too.

Case In Point

2008-03-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

At the close of my last post, I got a bit into my rant on good journalism versus a good presentation and cnn.com never fails to point out what it means to be on the wrong side of that scale. I've always liked the set up of their Web site. I think it is easy to navigate, clear and visually appealing.

Here is the home page:

The headlines of the most recent news are at the top with various sections near the bottom that group the news by location and topic. The little video symbol next to some of the stories let you know that it is a video presentation as opposed to text and most stories tell you how recently they were updated. This sounds like an excellent place to easily find the news right? Well, yes, that is if you want to read the news they print.

When I look at some of the stories they post, sometimes it really makes my jaw it the floor. Today's particularly offensive example is Vatican lists new sinful behaviors. It is an AP story detailing some new behaviors the Catholic Church deams offensive like pollution and genetic mutation, which has some news value, sure, but when a professional news organization like cnn.com includes

"Sinners risk burning in hell unless absolved through confession and penitence"

under the story highlights section, I have to question what the heck they were thinking. To me that is absurd and the story belongs in the appropriately titled "Offbeat" section of the web site.

BBC.com Gets a Facelift

2008-03-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

Web redesigns have been sweeping online journalism lately and the most recent one I've seen is the new home page of bbc.com. The old one was pretty crumby and inefficient. This one has some interesting new features but still doesn't seem up to par with where bbc.com should be.

The old format, which can still be seen on any page after the home page:

The new home page:

On this new home page, you can customize your buttons, like News or Sports and where they appear on the page but for me, it still seems a little jumbled at first glance. Maybe it's the blue. Nope, I changed the page color and it is still just not doing it for me.

Despite this, it will still be the first news source I check every morning solely based on the fact that they are fair and thorough. Which leads me into my next thought that I've been chewing on for awhile. In my classes and life in general, there have been many conversations about new media and how to present things to today's news consumers and all that jazz. But when it comes right down to it, the most important thing is the quality of the journalism itself, not whether it comes in the form of an online video or multimedia package, and I really hope that journalists don't lose sight of that because I get the sneaking suspicion that a good number of them are.

The First Rule About Journalist Fight Club Is...

2008-03-10T08:38:00.000-07:00

...tell everyone you know about Journalist Fight Club, because it is really, really funny.

Boston Globe reporter and all around awesome multi-media journalist, Emily Sweeney, came into my Journalism of the Web class two weeks ago to talk to us a bit about how she had found her niche in new media. She pointed us in the direction of journerdism.com, which is a really fantastic site/blog about pretty much all things journalism, especially some great links for those of us looking for a job. While I was poking around there today, I found a link for the Journalist Fight Club which is just a really entertaining compilation of crazy journalism videos and mashups including the now famous video of singer, Bjork, beating the crap out of a foreign journalist:

and this Newsies Eminem Remix:

For the record, I deeply and truly love anything that has to do with Newsies, so I thought this was fantastic.

I was trying to figure out who had set up the site and the only way I found it was the fact that the contact me link sends you right back to Emily Sweeney's page. Even before she had mentioned the journerdism.com site to us, I had seen it on Angryjournalist.com, the site I posted about a few items ago. I just think it is great that all of these young journalists are out there promoting eachother and helping eachother get to the top instead of engaging in that if you do well, I must be doing poorly mentality.

All three of the sites are entertaining, while wide-ranging on the usefullness scale, but I will happily jump in the mix of being one more place where we all work to get our, and each others', names out there.

Another Fun Use for Google Maps

2008-02-25T12:57:00.000-08:00

Most towns have their own prestigious 5k. In Boston, we have our marathon. (Again, if you feel like donating to help me run it, I would really appreciate it. Sorry, any plug I can get in I've got to do it. ) I've written a few of these stories when the runs are to commemorate various people, events or charities. In my own running I use gmap-pedometer all the time.

Here's what it looks like.

This would be great to show out the running route of an upcoming race in town. Creating it overlaid with pictures of various stops along the way couldn't hurt. It would also be good for showing road closures. Oo! Police chases! People love them. Anyway, there are just endless possibilities for google maps in stories and this is just one more of them.

PR is a Dirty Word

2008-02-25T12:44:00.000-08:00

After my post about my new job where I proclaimed to be dipping a toe into PR, my boss, a graduated Northeastern University journalism major warned me that I may be shooting myself in the foot by admitting to some PR experience, which got us into a chat on what exactly PR means. Well, ok, Public Relations, though really has come more to mean Press Relations. And at its core, it's writing with a spin when journalism is supposed to be writing without one.

Both entities still exist in their truest forms but there is so much grey area between the two these days and not-surprisngly, it's a space where jobs are actually growing. In my current job I keep the web sites updated, write original articles and do things like keep news and events updated. I don't talk to the press, I don't try to write things just so our departments look good. Well, that's mostly true. I wrote an article on a new class our dean is teaching but it was a geniunely interesting and groundbreaking idea as he is inviting members of the community to attend for free. If you know anything about Northeastern then you know that using it in the same sentence as the word "free" is truly groundbreaking.

Furthermore, when I write, I stick to AP style. When I post things to the site, I include a source. I'm sticking to my basics of journalistic integrity but it would still probably frowned upon by most traditionalists. Anyway, I think the whole point of this post is just that I don't think it's a bad thing to keep an open mind about this stuff. Everything else in journalism is changing and at some point we've got to stop fighting it if we are going to thrive.

Funniest Steam Valve Ever

2008-02-25T12:20:00.000-08:00

Sick of editors decimating your lede? Ready to wring that copy-editor's neck? Screaming into your pillow at the underfunding and additional work your paper is piling on you? Well this is the site for you. AngryJournalist.com is designed solely for journalists to anonymously vent their woes about this industry we all call home.

The mission statement:

AngryJournalist.com is for the underpaid, overworked, frustrated, pissed off and
ignored media professionals to publicly and anonymously vent their anger. Share
your story. With any luck, you’ll feel better.

Started by Kiyoshi Martinez, a Web site assistant for 22nd Century Media, which is a group of five community weekly newspapers in the south suburbs of Chicago, the site had "more than 1,000 responses, almost 80 blog and Web site mentions and 54,000 pageloads" in two weeks, according to the web site.

Steve Outing, a former employee of Poynter, and all around new media expert told me about this when I was interviewing him for an upcoming article of mine about reader blogs on newspaper sites (I know you are waiting with baited breath now) and it's just hysterical. Here are some of my favorites:

Angry Journalist #1029:
I’m angry that the “leader” of our newsroom is barely over 21 years old and doesn’t have a degree. I’m angry that the “leader” of our newsroom blows off real journalism to finish his math homework. I mean, how am I supposed to feel good about working hard when aforementioned “leader” is figuring out how to multiply fractions and playing PacMan? I’m angry that every single person in the newsroom thinks they’re overworked when, really, they don’t do more than an hour of fucking work in a single 24-hour day. I’m angry I became a journalist, because where I work, it’s an embarrassment and a joke.

However, maybe this site isn't as anonymous as intended.

Angry Journalist #1037:
I think it’s kind of funny that #1029 bitches about me doing math homework (ever consider that I try to take shorter lunches or work extra hours to make up the time?) when she spends all day on MySpace, smoke breaks and talking to friends on her cell phone.

Another priceless outburst:

Angry Journalist #1035:
It’s so ironic that a bunch of journalists are complaining about how sucky their jobs are on a website when the Internet is one of the major reasons their career is in such turmoil.
PS - I’m angry at the WORLD!

Ha, nice point 1035. Check this site out, post, it's tons of fun.

When Google Ads Don't Exactly Work

2008-02-25T12:05:00.000-08:00

I was checking out talkingpointsmemo.com last week as I tend to do every now and then and noticed something a little goofy about the ads on the site. Directly above a story I was reading I think something about the ridiculousness of building a wall across the Texas-Mexico border, avoiding the precious territory of a country club but not discriminating against peoples' houses or back yards, was an ad encouraging you to join the Border Patrol. What? Unfortunately I didn't think to hit print screen at the moment but I found some equally funny ones today.

Check out the ad for military singles directly above the story about Col. Morris Davis' battle to testify about Guantanamo Bay. This one isn't nearly as ironic, I mean maybe this story about a military man going against the grain and testifying could get those hormones burnin' for a life mate.

This is another personal favorite I found:

This one is several ads for banks directly above an article on how bankers are effectively robbing us blind of our tax dollars. Yeah, Google, people are really going to click on those ads after reading this article. I had some other good examples like anti-Obama and super pro-Obama ads all on the same page, but I think I have soundly made my point that maybe GoogleAds with its random-word spiders doesn't exactly belong on sites like these.

Positively Shameless Begging

2008-02-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

So completely off-topic from anything media-related, I am running the Boston Marathon this year and need to raise $3,000 for Brigham and Women's Hospital. If you come across this post and have a few bucks to spare, I would truly appreciate it. Donating at my Web site is easy and secure.

Newsmap

2008-02-18T11:24:00.000-08:00

This is one of the cooler things I've seen in web journalism of late. I mean I know there is that whole it's probably not good for newspapers or classic news sites but I have decided that anything that actually gets people interested in and reading the news, I'm happy with. It's the marumishi newsmap that takes the Google News RSS aggregator and turns it into a visual smörgåsbord.The bigger stories are the ones being read at any given moment by the most people and all stories are color-coded by topic. Here is the web site's description of itself:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

Have a poke around with it, I just think it is too neat.

Speaking of my Old Job

2008-02-13T12:33:00.000-08:00

There is another angle I'm giving a go when it comes to making myself a more attractive candidate to prospective employers: working in PR. Didn't mean to scare you there, I've had one or two me-and-my-conscience sessions on this one and I think it's a good move. Given my awful (time-wise) senior schedule I decided to get a job on campus so I could still do that whole clothing and food thing.

I am now the assistant online editor for Northeastern's Center for Urban and Regional Policy and School of Social Science, Urban Affairs and Public Policy. So far, it's been great. Both CURP and the Public Policy School (more so the latter) are all about connecting Northeastern to the community around them and making a positive difference. Right there, it makes me feel okay about sticking my toe into PR since it's a project I'm a fan of. Also, I've gotten to write original articles for the site and I recently learned how to play with their content management system, EdTech. I can't see any potential employer being unhappy that I've tried my hand at HTML and similar skills, despite learning them in a not-exactly-news environment.

We'll see how it works out in the long run, but for right now, I'm pretty pumped about my decision.

Well Damn.

2008-02-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

So I stumbled across The Patriot Ledger's new web layout yesterday and was prepared to write a glowing blog about how my paper, that I gave a solid chunk of my soul to over my three years there during college, had finally caught up with the times and created a stunning new design and then I came across this article in the Boston Globe.

Last year I witnessed first hand when the paper had to cut 130 jobs to meet budget needs and now the Massachusetts sect of GateHouse needs to cut another 60, and is forbidden to fill any current vacancies.

I spent the brunt of my college career in that newsroom, dutifully returning for all three of my co-ops and working part-time while I was in my classes. I definitely learned more there than I did in any Northeastern classroom. In my final semester, I didn't really get to pick my schedule and ended up with all my classes smack in the middle of the day. These hours didn't work with the Ledger's schedule so I'm just stringing for them at the moment. Despite my slackened involvement with the paper, for the rest of my life I will want to know what is going on on the South Shore of Massachusetts (it's a first paper thing I guess) and get excited when I meet people from there.

I'll still commend the paper for their new design, it does look amazing:
It's just gut-wrenching to see them have to cut even more jobs. I know it's industry-wide really but this just hits so close to home. It's like when that spry puppy you had as a little kid starts getting older and the awful realization comes that you are probably going outlive it. The Ledger is an outstanding paper with a solid staff and maybe this new web design, along with its break throughs in multimedia and video, is a little glimmer of hope that it will pull back from the recession its been in and find a new home and a new audience on the web.

Open Mouth, Insert First Three Toes

2008-02-13T11:57:00.001-08:00

This blog title would say insert foot, but the scenario I'm about to describe didn't really require the entire thing. Two posts ago I wrote about the CAR lecture I attended at the NEPA convention, given by Bill Dedman of MSNBC.com. As you'll recall, I got a little snarky at the fact that more people in the room weren't hip to the techniques Dedman described.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when an e-mail from Pulitzer-prize winning Dedman popped up in my inbox challenging me to an Excel problem and slamming that know-it-all attitude of college seniors he felt I was exuding just a tad. Go figure, people read this blog every once in awhile. Anywho, my task was to take the raw data of a list of high school seniors and their intended colleges and turn it into a straight list of the colleges the students were attending with how many students would be going to each one.

I laughed at the challenge as I have formatted these lists a 101 times at The Patriot Ledger. HOWEVER, at the Ledger I got seriously adept at formatting the list by college or town of the senior or name and switching between Excel and the ledger's news-writing program, Ted, to compile lists to run in the paper. So I did that quick up until the point of sorting them by college and sent it off to Dedman, however ignoring his tip on using a PivotTable. He wrote back within minutes giving me a B on my task informing me that while I got most of the way there, I had not given him what he asked for. Those of you out in reader-land don't know me that well yet but one of my quirks is my anal-retentive nature about grades and I simply could not take that.

After feverishly rushing through my online PivotTable tutorial (linked above) I did it up right quick and sent it off back to him. He upgraded me to an A, saying I would have gotten the A+ had I labeled all my chart. So basic lesson of the day: learn PivotTables! More in depth lesson of the day: no matter how well you know something - you can know it better. Furthermore, I'll openly admit that about half the techniques Dedman had been describing, I learned in the class rooom. The other half though, I learned on the job from Sue Reinert, a seasoned reporter at the Ledger who recently retired. She had been our go-to on CAR skills, not one of the young bucks at the paper.

Anyway, I just have to say I'm loving this whole blog thing because even if the e-mail from Dedman was challanging my skills and attitude - I got an e-mail from a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who now knows my name, and that's just freaking awesome.

Wired Followup

2008-02-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

I feel a bit like a baby boomer who just discovered Facebook with this whole Wired Journalists thing. I have been so excited to figure out how to message my new friends and comment on their pages. In my first week or two on the site, I've already made a few new friends who are genuinely interested in networking and giving eachother a leg up. There's my new Wired Journalist friend from Nepal and then another journalism student out in Montana, Bess Davis. She's thinking about heading to Boston and has a friend who works at the Austin American-Statesman and we've just been trading advice and contacts and it's fantastic!

That's it, just want to share my little excited moment!

CAR Crash

2008-02-11T07:28:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my last blog, I recently attended the NEPA Convention, and more specifically the Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR) Seminar. The lecture was given by Bill Dedman, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist currently working at MSNBC.com. I was only able to stay for the first half and while it was an interesting and well put together program, I have to say I was floored at the topics. Well, floored at the fact that the seasoned journalists in the room seemed to be approaching these topics for the first time.

For the first part of the lecture, Dedman went over looking up non-profits on Guidestar.org, people on Accurint and described the plethora of places you could find out information on people via public documents. I thought that these skills were a given in any newsroom. Everything he mentioned pretty much was public documents used for eons (ok, that was an exaggeration) in newsrooms, that are now available online.

The attendees also seemed to get a bit huffy when he passed out a packet of skills he believed everyone in every newsroom in the country should have, ranging from looking up any of these documents online to posting a story or photo to a Web site to using Excel. I’m sorry but for lack of a better word and to follow my theme of outdated concepts -: duh!

I brought up the additional necessary skill of being able to successfully navigate social networking sites to find sources or information on subjects on stories. This perked up some of the other young’ins at the seminar who all commiserated on being their newsrooms’ go-to for myspace inquiries of facebook needs, when it is really something everyone should be fluent in.

I did get to share a fun tip that I’ve been rather proud of since I came up with it about a year ago. I was working on a story about something that had happened at Milton Academy, a wealthy private school that had gone through a sex scandal earlier in the year and had warned all of its’ students against speaking with the media. So the paper’s typical tactic of sending me (who looks to be about 17) down to campus to blend in and chat with students, didn’t work. Instead, I created a AOL Instant Messenger screen name appropriate to the newspaper, PatriotLedgerESH, and scoured Myspace for Milton Academy students.
While most people do not list their screen names in their profile, many create their own Myspace URL that take you directly to their site and use their screen name as their handle (see graphic). I got my sources and my information this way and simply messaged students from my new screen name, identifying myself as a reporter. It’s these new techniques that today’s internet opens that I was hoping to learn in the seminar. But until the old dogs of the industry catch up on the crucial basics Dedman was describing, I think these new initiatives will be left (thankfully for me, I suppose) to those of us who are well-versed enough in these sites to play with them.

Wired Journalists

2008-02-06T12:28:00.000-08:00

My Reinventing the news: Journalism of the Web Professor, Dan Kennedy, asked us all to join this new Web site, WiredJournalists.com. I was a bit skeptical at first given the low number of members - a little more than 1,100 at last count - until I realized the site has only been online for about 3 weeks.

The site is backed by media powerhouse, GateHouse Media, a company that has been gobbling up any kind of newspaper it can get its hands on all over the country for quite awhile now. It owns more than 100 dailies and many more weeklies in a total of 23 states and reaches more than 10 million readers. I have had some up close and personal experiences with GateHouse during my time at The Patriot Ledger. After the Ledger was acquired by the paper, anything I wrote for the paper would end up on GateHouse Media or in any of the hundreds of GateHouse publications that wanted the story, edited by that paper's own standards. This always left me with a bit of an uneasy feeling so I have to seriously applaud GateHouse for starting up this new endevour to not only pull it's own journalists together so that they are no longer faceless reporters and editors hundreds of miles apart but creating a place for all new media journalists to come together and help eachother.

Here is their mission statement:

So all I can say is, Bravo! I hope it works and on a wildly selfish note, I hope it's something that may one day help me get a job. Here is my self-serving opening blog on my Wired Journalists profile

And speaking of that NEPA thing, here is the link to their convention.

Obituaries 2.0

2008-01-30T12:40:00.000-08:00

Most Journalism 101 professors will tell you to know how to write obituaries and know how to write them well because it will entail about 80 percent of the first job you will get. Unfortunately (well, fortunately for some, I guess) this is increasingly no longer the case. Many community newspapers are switching from staff-written obituaries to strictly paid classified ad death notices. It's a way for newspapers to save time and money but I can't say I'm on board with the idea.

Many newspapers have taken this a step further and outsourced, in a sense, their death notices to Legacy.com. The site posts the death notices as they ran in the paper and allows mourners to sign a virtual guestbook or leave an audio message. Sounds great right? I had an experience where a woman had sent out an e-mail to her friends informing them of someone's death. One of the friends took it upon themselves to post the e-mail on legacy.com and I spent the day dealing with a frantic reader who desperately wanted to get her words off of a website over which I, or the newspaper I worked for, had no control.

Poynter Institute's Mallary Jean Tenore just wrote a great piece on the trend of some other newspapers who, instead of giving up this responsibility and privilege, are taking it a step further and creating multimedia obituaries. While these intricate obituaries are typically left for the famous or well-connected at the moment, I hope it is a trend that soon spreads to the masses and it will certainly be something I propose to which ever newspaper I end up at.

One of the stories featured by Tenore is the story of Lovelle Svart, who formerly worked for the Portland Oregonian. Svart was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and when she was given six months or left to live she started a web diary to open a discourse on death, dying, and in particular, Oregon's unique "Death with Dignity" doctor-assisted-suicide law. There is an editor's note warning about the controversial nature of the material and warns readers to turn away who do not want to read it and leave comments if they would like to respond. Here is the introduction video:

Lovelle: An Introduction from Oregonian Next: on Vimeo.

Freelancers Unite

2008-01-28T12:56:00.000-08:00

Given the measly pay of most journalism jobs these days, freelancing will most likely forever be a part of my income. In poking around to find some online communities that support freelancers, I found several paid-membership sites that didn't seem worth the time, a few tip web sites in places like about.com and one gleaming diamond in the middle of all the crap that is everything a freelancer could need. Freelancewritinggigs.com is a blog maintained by Deborah Ng.

Freelance Writing Jobs began in May 2005 as a way to help other writers, especially Work at Home Moms, find decent paying jobs.

I got sick and tired of seeing writers settle for $2 or “exposure” gigs because they felt they had no other choice. Thanks to FWJ, hundreds of writers have found gigs. While I never expected FWJ to achieve this type of success, I’m so proud of what it’s become.

She isn't so much into the multi-media of posting video and what not, but it's a well-maintained site updated multiple times a day with several external resources. One nifty feature of her site which brings in some extra revenue is ContentLink. I've never seen this before but it with a little research I found that:

ContentLinks are contextually relevant words discovered in real time on a publisher’s web page that are automatically turned into a link to the most relevant and highest paying text ad from one of Kontera’s thousands of advertisers, says the company web site.

Kontera is the advertising company sponsoring this. I wouldn't see be surprised to see it popping up on several other web sites. It's a bit annoying in text but I can't bring myself to have a problem with it when a blogger-made-good gives back to the writing community and finds a way to put a few bucks in her pocket.

We Media?

2008-01-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

I've been poking around quite a bit lately to find some online journalism communities in the hopes of not only getting my name out there, which is just too easy these days, but getting it recognized, which is a different story entirely. Among some of the more efficient tools for journalists these days there is also a lot of hype and a lot of useless information. I found one, WeMedia, that I haven't made my final call on yet but I'm thinking it's more in that second category. I stumbled on this promotional video for them on youtube.com. If you can make it all the way through, you have a better attention span than I do:

They are trying to pull together not only journalists but those in the fields of technology that can help journalism in its transformation. They have a lot of good ideas including pulling together multimedia for their web site and attempting to get people excited but beyond the fluff I don't see a whole lot of substance.

The We Media Community reflects the wisdom of a diverse network of individuals and companies from across industries who believe the power of media,communication and human ingenuity should be applied to innovate in business AND to make the world better through media.

The We Media Community is the antithesis of trade and professional associations that seeks to define, defend and extend narrow interests. The We Media Community connects traditionally isolated silos of knowledge and interests to enable ideas, expertise and opportunities to flow across industries and sectors, worldwide.

I see a lot of words that don't mean much. But this is something to keep an
eye on, it could grow into something extremely useful and productive.

Oh Hail to Thee, First Jobs

2008-01-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

As journalists in the web age, we get the overwhelming privilege of having just about everything we write, no matter how early in our careers or how poorly written, end up on the internet. I’ve certainly gone back to stories I wrote as a sophomore more than three years ago and cringed. However, Mike Rowe, host of the show Dirty Jobs, dedicated to honoring the grossest professions in America, has made me feel worlds better about this. The wildly popular Discovery Channel host and frequent voice-over master started his career out as probably the worst QVC show host in history. No real relevance here, just a beautiful chance for group commiseration... and a giggle.

It's About Darn Time

2008-01-23T14:18:00.001-08:00

I found this website in my Facebook perusing and I think it's just about the coolest, most sensible thing I've ever seen. Reuters has created AlertNet, a web site aimed at coordinating humanitarian efforts around the globe. More than that, it is a forum for journalists reporting on these humanitarian crises to come and share ideas. They have also created a central hub of almost every resource a foreign correspondent would need, including where and which humanitarian agencies are journalist-friendly. Check out this video they created to promote it.

In addition to the resource hub they also provide the "Humanitarian Heads Up", a weekly newsletter with general information, tips on upcoming protests or potential crises and possible angles for stories.

Surprisingly enough, only 6 percent of the web site's visitors are members of the media when this seems like such an overwhelmingly viable tool. It's definitely one going on my belt when I get abroad, hopefully soon after graduation to start covering anything this web site is all about.

Oh Journalists...

2008-01-23T12:15:00.000-08:00

I decided that as part of this whole, "I'm going to dive into new journalism" thing, I'd scour Facebook to see what other journalists were doing it - with mixed results. The first thing I hit on was a Facebook group called "Journalists and Facebook." It currently has 6,141 members (6,142 as soon as I get in on this) and for the most part seems to be a serious bit of self-promoting on the part of every single member. There is also a bit of reaching out to others in the same profession for advice on classes and stories.

Beyond that there is a serious amount of junk. A few people for some reason felt the need to post images of (inspiring?) ostriches and cuddling puppies to the group for motivation. There are several videos on the site - again, most of which are shameless self promotions of recent stories by various members but there was a really interesting one advertising AlertNet - a non-profit humanitarian news website run by the Reuters Foundation, which helps journalists abroad connect and work together with tips on covering crises. Expect a separate blog on that site later but in general.

It was nice, however unsettling, to see journalists working together in an attempt to help each other instead of the highly competitive beat-mentality the profession is used to. It was started by Pat Walters, a grad student at the University of Memphis who has done extensive freelance work, including with the Poynter Institute. His description for the group is "All the recent Facebook buzz has got us wondering: What can journalists (and the news organizations they work for) learn from the site?" The group has yet to answer the question but it seems to be on its way.

And as a purely entertaining side note, I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that the third most related group to this one is "I judge you when you use poor grammar." This amazing and hilarious group has 237,805 members and is focused entirely upon making fun of people who publicly use poor spelling and grammar. A particularly cruel example posted to the group's photo section:

The first member to comment on this photo, Everett Martin, writes "Permanent grammar is best served bad. =)."

Letting Go

2008-01-16T13:11:00.000-08:00

Since it is my last semester in college, my real-world job search start-up date is fast approaching and it's time to start beefing up my resume (Kind of like the end of high school when my best friend and I joined the chess club and co-founded the physics club) and find a job in the crumbling world of print journalism or the exploding mine-field of online journalism. Hmm... let's all take a minute to wonder where I will probably end up. For the past three years I have done the typical journalism student thing and worked at a small newspaper near my college, The Patriot Ledger. There, I have gained invaluable experience in the guts and meat of reporting and writing but haven't picked up the web skills necessary to get a job that acutally exists.

My first order of business: new part time job. With my thinly spread senior class schedule with no class starting earlier than 11:45 or ending earlier than 3:15, the Ledger didn't exactly have hours to match. I'll still be stringing for them but I need a steadier source of income. By chance, a guy came into one of my journalism classes advertising an assistant online editor position for measly pay (hey, I'm used to it) working at one of Northeastern's newest departments. So after interviewing and getting the job, I start monday to dive into html and javascript and all those other things I really have no idea what they mean.

Step two: Set up a blog. See perspective employer! I'm hip to the changing times. I'll also take a minute to advertise the two travel blogs I wrote recently, Me v. Europe, about a two-week, solo backpacking trip I took around Europe and Where Everybody Can Pronounce Your Name, detailing my adventures while studying abroad in the land of my ancestors, and father, who still lives there.

I wish it were still the days of old-timey, hard-nose, shoe-leather, idiomatic-laden journalism that editors today would take you out back and beat you for, but it's not so I'm going to work with what I've got to stay in this industry that I for some reason decided to be a part of.