The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Columbians

Under the heading The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Two Generations, Columbia Journalism School professor Sree Sreenivasan and student Vadim Lavrusik have recorded and posted a conversation at the Mashable group blog. I’m hoping it will reassure my students that their “older generation” journalism faculty are still pointing them toward useful things.

Sree is hardly an “older generation” journalist, if you think that means an ink-stained wretch in a green eyeshade and garters to keep his cuffs clean. I wonder if he ever had his byline set in hot type? In any case, he knows what he’s talking about.

Now Columbia’s dean of students, Sree has been on top of new media developments for the past 10 years, while Vadim has impressive credentials as an adopter of new social media tools — and both have self-promotional skills that it may take to get ahead in 21st century professional/citizen (and amateur/citizen) journalism.

Both also seem to agree on a big paragraph headed “The Fundamentals Are Critical”:

Despite the importance of technology, it’s the fundamentals of journalism that are still critical. The fundamentals include: great reporting and writing, journalistic ethics, specialization by topic or beat, investigative skills, news judgment. Also invaluable, critical thinking and critical reading…

I’ll stop quoting there and let you go read the whole page, watch the video, browse through the comments and add your own. Alas, my snowbound home computer won’t play the video, so I’ll save my own comments for a better connection.

I’m assuming their post will get a discussion growing, unless the Mashable readers with journalism interests are already worn out. Vadim’s essay on 8 Must-Have Traits for Tomorrow’s Journalist generated more than 70 comments at Mashable last month.

The Return of John Peter Zenger

The Internet Archive is offering a freely downloadable digital video of the 1953 Westinghouse Studio One television production,  “The Trial of John Peter Zenger.”

http://www.archive.org/details/StudioOneTheTrialOfJohnPeterZengerPaulNickell

The video had been removed from the archive some time ago, but is back, presumably because any copyright claims on the program have been resolved. It certainly would be ironic if a film of America’s first landmark freedom-of-speech trial ran into difficulties with modern media law!

Astute media historians will note that Anna Zenger, who kept the newspaper going while her husband was in jail, is played by Marian Seldes, niece of legendary journalist George Seldes. She also appears as a narrator in the documentary film about Seldes life, Tell the Truth and Run.

The Zenger trial also was dramatized by the radio series You Are There, which is also available at archive.org

(I’ve attempted to embed a video player for the Studio One episode here using Vodpod, but so far it isn’t showing up. I’ll leave the link for debugging purposes.)

more about “Internet Archive: Free Download: Stud…“, posted with vodpod

Searching the Lost Archives of Whim

That may sound like the title of some Indiana Jones flick or sword-and-sorcery novel, but it’s really how I spent an entertaining — if a bit obsessive-compulsive — hour this morning. I’ve written it up in some detail for possible use in a “how to find stuff on the Internet” lecture for one class or another.

It started when a student e-mailed to ask whether I knew how to find back issues of the campus Internet magazine, called Whim.

(Spoiler: If you just want to see the back issues,  see the “Old Whims” link at the top of this page — or read to the bottom to find out how it got there.)

Around the time I came to Radford, RU Whim made the transition to a WordPress CMS site. Before that, student programmers and designers had been creating a homemade, fresh-design-every-year site, not the most efficient way to build a Web publication, but a great way to learn and  show what they could do… And they did some very creative things.

You can still do very creative things within WordPress, but the students who built entire sites clearly made theirs with pride and a sense of history. (And, I suspect, a practical goal of keeping their past creations available, so that their personal portfolios could link back to them during  a job-hunt.)

Although the publication is going strong at http://ruwhim.com, it previously used http://www.radford.edu/whim

A “redirect” replaced the last actual issue of Whim that had used the university flat-file server as its home page. Goodbye history.

To find out what went on at that site in previous semesters, I used my two favorite Web tools to track down some of that history: Google and Archive.org, and this blog item is here to show students how to do the same.

First, a Google “site” search:
Putting “site:radford.edu” at the beginning of a Google search for “Whim” found me a whole directory full of archived years on the university’s flat-file Web server:
http://www.radford.edu/~archive/season01/
http://www.radford.edu/~archive/season02/
and so forth, up to
http://www.radford.edu/~archive/season17/

Next, using the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive:
The original “home” page for Whim’s own archive has been deleted, but I found a copy at archive.org — and it wouldn’t take much to re-code the archival copy to make it point back to the complete originals, not the archive.org’s sometimes-incomplete copies. I gave that a try, using an editor called TextWrangler with global search-and-replace to insert full link URLs, then pasted the results into a WordPress page.

I added to this blog’s page tabs above, and here’s a copy:

Old Whims

The archive.org spiders brought back some pages of www.radford.edu/~whim almost every year from 2000 to 2006; you can see he results here:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.radford.edu/~whim

(How did I know where to start looking? Like any person or organization on campus, Whim’s original address was www.radford.edu plus its name.)

You also can find scattered bits of Whim if you add the season numbers like “season 18″ in quotes to the end of a Radford site search in Google: site:www.radford.edu whim “season 18″

Examining search results also gave me a hint of the original “flat file”
directory structure, which is still in place for the last edition that used it:
http://www.radford.edu/~whim/tech/
http://www.radford.edu/~whim/life/

A working “Issues” dropdown menu on those pages goes deeper into the site, which looks like parts of “Season 18″ and  “Season 19″ (2006), the year before I got here. Links to the “inside pages” still work, despite the “refer” block on the old “home page”  http://www.radford.edu/~whim

For keeping an archive of more RECENT history, the student editors will have to get to know  WordPress better than I do. Perhaps there’s a way to export a “flat file” copy of the current site structure each year. I was able
to do that kind of conversion with my old blogging software (see
http://stepno.com/oldblog), but haven’t had to try it with WordPress.

If you know a site that says how to do that, please post a link in the Comments here!

Apple iPad vs. TRS80 Model 100

The forthcoming Apple iPad will have a folding case/stand available (price not announced), visible in several configurations if you scroll down the technical specs page. When closed, the case looks like a fancy leather cover for a legal pad. Open, the case could have several modes, including one that reminds me of an old friend…

Uses for iPad case:
* easel for digital photo frame, portrait or landscape
* TV stand (in landscape position)
* prop to use iPad as monitor with bluetooth keyboard
* typing stand, with on-screen keyboard… This also could be called,
* “cooler-user” mode, since it puts the iPad an inch or two above the lap or knees. (None of the info pages give a bottom-of-case operating temperature, but if it’s anything like my MacBook…)

With the case folded into a typing stand, I think the iPad looks like the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 I owned 25 years ago! (Of course the iPad should do a few more things. Well, a few hundred thousand more things.)

Apple – iPad 2010 vs TheTablet 1994

Apple’s new iPad e-everything reader looks like the electronic newspaper tablet Roger Fidler has been talking about for 15 years.

Over at the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog I embedded a player for a video of Fidler’s 1994 demo of “TheTablet,” complete with discussion of keeping newspaper branding, look-and-feel, and display advertising. Now I’ve just noticed the same video in a much more comprehensive article at the Society of News Design.

The iPad, as announced, will do a lot more than deliver the newspaper… such as running more than 100,000 iPhone apps. The painting program demonstration was very impressive… and so is the promise that iPad will let you buy and rent movies — wirelessly.

Tangling where the wires meet the Web

AP, Yahoo Near Deal on Content Use – WSJ.com.

The Wall Street Journal says the Associated Press wants tighter restrictions on Yahoo’s use of wire stories, and that negotiations may wrap up “in the next few weeks.”

Official AP quote: “The AP is one of Yahoo’s most important content partners. Yahoo values our long-standing relationship with AP and expects it will continue for years to come.”

Google’s  is also facing the renewal date of its AP contract and has stopped putting new AP content on Google News “in case a deal isn’t reached,” the Journal said.

The story also has a handy chart of  comScore figures on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft  traffic going to major newspaper Web sites — the Washington Post, L.A. Times, USA Today, New York Times and the WSJ itself. (There’s no text explaining the chart, but it looks to me like biz.yahoo.com sends the WSJ a lot of visitors.)

For students, here’s some background on the Associated Press:

http://www.ap.org/pages/about/about.html

Notice the “.org” — yes, AP is an organization, and non-profit. It calls itself “the backbone of the world’s information system,” which might be a title Google or Yahoo would like to arm-wrestle over.

The AP is a cooperative, owned by its base membership: 1,500 U.S. daily newspapers, and distributing contributions from those papers as well as its own staff of correspondents and photographers.

News Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

The WSJ article also mentions that “according to people familiar with the matter,” the newpaper’s parent company, News Corp., “has held discussions with Microsoft Corp. about a plan to remove the publisher’s newspaper content from Google’s search engine while continuing to feature it on Microsoft’s online properties.”

Here’s an earlier story from the not-NewsCorp-owned Guardian, with a few more colorful quotes (“parasite”) on News Corp.’s attitude toward Google.

Pressing the police, policing the press…

The anthology-of-stories section of Tim Harrower’s newswriting textbook has been updated for this semester, and one of the additions is a Washington Post article by former police reporter David Simon, creator of the TV series “The Wire.”

I recommend the article as a starting point for a discussion of news careers, newspapers  and the media today. Reading it led me into a string of associations linked below, including a “how news happens” report out this week and a way to tie it all back to a 1953 radio drama from other research I’m working on.

But first: Unless you are in my class, you don’t have to buy the textbook to read the article that got me started on all this hyperlinking. It’s still online at the Post:

• In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police

The 83 comments Post readers took time to append to the story — marvel of online newspapers –  aren’t in the book, so I’m linking them here, along with  more articles for perspective and some items that are just in this week.

Background: In its last season, “The Wire” took a hard look at the effect of the current economy and culture on both police and newspapers. The Atlantic magazine followed up with this critical piece by Mark Bowden, another veteran reporter (remember “Black Hawk Down”?).

• The Angriest Man in Television:

“How David Simon’s disappointment with the industry that let him down made The Wire the greatest show on television — and why his searing vision shouldn’t be confused with reality.”

Simon had more to say himself in Esquire and the Huffington Post and at a Senate hearing last year on the future of journalism. Afterward, he talked about it in an interview:

• Democracy Now interviews Simon: As Profit Motive Guts Newspapers, Communities lose Out.

January 2010 update: Back in Baltimore, there are a few new developments.  After “The Wire” played in England, a police reporter there was intrigued about Baltimore crime reporting enough to suggest a job-swap with a Sun reporter. The results:

• http://thecrimereport.org/2010/01/07/a-crime-tale-of-two-cities/
• http://thecrimereport.org/2010/01/11/a-crime-tale-of-two-cities-part-2/

Meanwhile, the PEW Center’s Project for Excellence in journalism did a month-long “How News Happens” content analysis of Baltimore news reports last summer, finding the Sun still at the center of the city news universe: “a close look at the news ecosystem of one city suggests that while the news landscape has rapidly expanded, most of what the public learns is still overwhelmingly driven by traditional media—particularly newspapers.”

Poynter Institute’s headline writer for columnist Bill Mitchell summed up the local news coverage in two words, “faster, thinner.” I’ve added the PEJ report to my “to read” pile, but Mitchell’s article looks like a less-academic starting place to understand both what it says and why we should care:

The study represents an important snapshot of news in transition, with some of its greatest value — clues to future possibilities — found mostly between the lines of the 40-page document.

PEJ credits The (Baltimore) Sun with strong, agenda-setting reporting on the topic of juvenile justice during the research period, but faults The Sun and other outlets for insufficient enterprise on most of six “major narratives” that emerged during the study…

I haven’t decided how much of this to officially assign to my classes, but I’m looking forward to the discussions when we get around to police news and “future of news” later in the semester.

If TV-culture-curious students want more sources to catch up with The Wire or the discussion of whether Simon was too angry to be fair to the Sun, opinions aren’t hard to find.

The last time I looked, you could get a discount box of DVDs of The Wire Season V, the one with the Sun as a major theme, if you didn’t see the series. I’d recommend it to journalism students, as long as they watch the more idealistic “All the President’s Men,” “The Paper” and (if they can find it) “Deadline USA” too.

In fact, for a quick fix of newspaper idealism, here’s a link to download a 50-minute mp3 of Lux Radio Theater’s version of “Deadline USA” from archive.org. You get Dan Dailey instead of Humphrey Bogart, but you still get rapid-fired dialogue and a great speech over the roar of the presses at the end.

Is flattery the future of reading, writing & computing?

OK, I don’t mean “flattery” in the usual sense; I mean “getting flatter.” (Update: New images right and below are a Skiff preview. Thanks to BSU Professor David Sumner for a pointer to yet another article by Bill Mickey.)

Whatever Apple does at its rumored announcement later this month should be something flat. After using the XO’s screen both in bright Virginia summer sunlight (as a monochrome reflective screen) and indoors as a sharp backlit color one, I hope Apple comes up with something similar to the “Pixel Qi transflective display” — or the thing itself…

Another case in point, the latest conceptual model of the OLPC XO, which I’ve  mentioned over on my less-journalistic blog under the heading:

Not the Apple iTablet or iSlate — the OLPC XO-3.

The thought that something equally cool might come in an Android-powered smartpad is intriguing… especially if it would have Verizon connectivity like the Droid phone. (Verizon does a better job than AT&T  in my classroom building and in Floyd County.)

With the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show in progress this week in Las Vegas, I’m also intrigued by what I’ve read about the Hearst-connected Skiff e-paper reader (more), Kurzweil’s Blio e-book reader (more), by the two-piece Lenovo Ideapad and by the Android-based dual-screen EntourageEdge.

(The XO-2 concept was similar, but used two Pixel-Qi style screens… but when something never gets out of the “concept” stage, it can do anything it wants..)

More on magazine concepts in Bonnier digital prototype video:

For more publishers’ prototypes and concept software — in full color and moving images — see the video links at Wired magazine, including Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated and Bonnier demos. (I added some other tabs for comparison to a post about the SI demo a few weeks ago.)

125-year-old newspaper industry mag to close

UPDATE Jan. 15, 2010: Buyer found

‘Editor & Publisher’ to Cease Publication After 125 Years.

Readers Express Shock and Broad Support
– Hope Remains?

Those are E&P’s own headlines.  Among other things, the magazine — once a weekly, now a monthly and a website — was the place where reporters, editors and other media professionals checked on news about their profession. It also was where they went to browse help-wanted ads, back when there were more of those.

This is how it has described itself:

Editor & Publisher is the authoritative journal covering all aspects of the North American newspaper industry, including business, newsroom, advertising, circulation, marketing, technology, online and syndicates.

Don’t take that word “journal” to mean an academic research journal. As its “about page” says later, it was “a trade journal for the newspaper industry,” which in recent years has made it a chronicle of the industry’s decline, while juggling its own print and online editions.

On the other hand, the fact that the magazine published its own index for so many decades has made it a valuable research resource for journalism historians. I wonder whether Editor & Publisher has a “morgue” or other resources that are being, can be or should be acquired by some J-School out there.

Very cool: I posted that question for Bill Broun, my co-editor over at http://aejmc.net/news. He fired off a quick question to E&P and got a quick answer. See his post.

Come to think of it, I wonder what it would take to get E&P added to the Google magazine search archives.

After final exams, maybe I’ll have time to see if any of these has the answer:

• While Dying, E&P Showed Journalism How to Live — Huffington Post
• Nielsen Will Close of Sell Many Trade Magazines: Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews Close — NYTimes
• Farewell, E&P (We all knew this day would come) — Steve Outing

Tablet versus Tabloid — you decide

This is the week that a bunch of major newspaper and magazine publishers announced their joint venture to create a “highly featured reading application” and “robust publishing platform” to enable all sorts of new portable digital devices, such as the much-rumored but never officially announced Apple tablet.

See the press release from Hearst, Condé Nast, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc.

Meanwhile, Time has an online video  of one prototype, while News Corp. has a couple showing off another….

Take your pick…
Tablet interface & apps:

Tabloid interface:

Tabloid apps:

Many thanks to ace photojournalist Bob Krist, whose blog pointed me to the first of these.