I’ve been putting some fun things on the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog:
For Web design or journalism students getting interested in programming, or programmers getting interested in journalism, see my bookmarks tagged with the keywords “Journalism” and “Programming” at delicious.com.
For Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture students who need one more story for their comparison papers, check the films-adapted-for-radio posts at JHeroes.com.
For journalism or Web design students trying WordPress for the first time, see the “WP Tips” tab at the top of this page and my “Not a blog” site, demonstrating that WordPress isn’t just for blogs these days.
For news writing students — or anyone — following the shooting story at Virginia Tech, try my list of New River Valley journalists using Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/bobstep/nrvj
Included are individual reporters at Roanoke and New River Valley area newspapers and television stations, and a few dedicated news-watchers who post useful updates.
The staff of the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech did a terrific job, making extensive use of personal Twitter accounts covering both the breaking news of the shooting and the community support following it. As I pointed out to my students on Friday, during a big story, “beat” definitions go out the window and everyone pitches in to get the story covered — hence some “sports” Twitter feeds passing along timely information about an event that was far from their usual upbeat Hokie news.
Posted in communication, Computers, Data, Journalism, Radford, students, Twitter, WebDesign, WordPress
Nice article, if the link works…
New Tools for Today’s Investigative Journalist
I may have chopped off a few characters at the end or the address while fumbling with another “new tool” — not one mentioned in the article. My new $90 (refurb) Pandigital Android tablet is mostly for reading, not for any high-tech news-data crunching, but it’s proving useful. Newspaper websites’ mobile editions are actually readable at the breakfast table.
Panpad (my nickname for it) doesn’t use the latest version of Android or the standard Android Market for software installation, so I can’t do my usual bookmarking yet with a Delicious.com app or send the link to myself with a Gmail app. I can copy app installers from my Droid phone via SD card, but phone-specific apps, voice-input or gps won’t work on this more modest wifi-only device, and some of the apps are meant for a newer version of Android or a faster processor.
But it’s easy enough to launch Gmail or Delicious.com in the browser for now, but I do miss the delicious-bookmarking shortcut.
The Pandigital 7-inch is no iPad in screen quality or speed either, but (unlike an iPad) it does let me tap in words with my right hand’s long guitar-player fingernails the way I did on my old Palm Pilots, and it does have the SD card slot to share mp3s and documents with my phone or Macs. It has no camera or voice recognition, but it does fit a jacket pocket on at least one of my jackets. It works with my Verizon mifi hotspot or campus wifi. And being able to tap/type right-handed is important right now while I recover from an RSI injury to my phone-flicking left thumb.
(Perhaps it’s a hidden virtue that the Panpad isn’t able to play Angry Birds.)
As for saving links “in the cloud,” while the only Delicious app I have here needs an update (new owners, new widgets), this WordPress app does work as an Android extension on the browser’s “share” button. As a result, maybe you’ll see more blog-posting here related to interesting shareable Web content, like the article linked above.
Note: Apologies if I haven’t caught all the glitches in this tap-typing — the keyboard shortcuts sometimes turn “an” to “Android, give me “for” for “do,” and change “to” to “or” while my eyes are focused on the screen keyboard. I’m also trying to make sure I’m not typing a string or l’s for backspaces, “v’s” for spaces or random “a’s” for uppercase, when I mean to hit the keys below those letters. But it’s still easier on the eyes than my 1/3-the-size Droid phone screen.
GoogleLabs has a new data-mining tool, Correlate, which allows folks with data (got data?) to use Google’s algorithms to dig through numbers and visualize meaning. Business folks will love to compare brands; political analysts will look for public-opinion trends; journalists should even more other uses. I hope they don’t all try to figure out the correlation between liposuction and property values.
Making correlations is up to you...
To teach you what this might be good for, Google Labs offers several educational tools: a Comic Book, a FAQ file, a Tutorial and a research Whitepaper (pdf).
Here’s the main GoogleBlog article on Correlate:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/mining-patterns-in-search-data-with.html
If you don’t have data of your own, Google already has had tools out there for analyzing public datasets, as discussed in this GoogleBlog article last year: Statistics for a Changing World.
Here’s the site itself: Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool, and it’s support site.
Here are the Google datamine’s top 20 database topics:
| 1. School comparisons 2. Unemployment 3. Population 4. Sales tax 5. Salaries 6. Exchange rates 7. Crime statistics 8. Health statistics (health conditions) 9. Disaster statistics 10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) |
11. Last names 12. Poverty 13. Oil price 14. Minimum wage 15. Consumer price index, inflation 16. Mortality 17. Cost of living 18. Election results 19. First names 20. Accidents, traffic violations |
Some of the analysis-visualization is based on Trendalyzer, which Google acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, whose Hans Rosling has done an amazing job demonstrating how well-visualized data — and his dynamic lecture style — can increase knowledge and understanding, from the poverty line to the air line via the wash line.
Maybe a combination of Google’s sharing tools for analysis and great examples like his will inspire journalists and journalism students. First, I wonder if his BBC feature, The Joy of Stats will convince more journalism students to take statistics courses…
Back to Google:
So what are people searching for? Cupcakes, cats, government shutdown, health care, Rebecca Black, or maybe Vanessa Fox…?
Vanessa Fox at SearchEngineLand has insights into all of these tools, including Correlate. See her take on Rebecca, cats, cupcakes, March Madness and more in this 5-minute video: What is it in our lives that we care about most? Vanessa Fox video from the Ignite Conference
Other Google News:
I was less pleased — quite disappointed actually — when Google announced it is discontinuing its historical newspaper project. I wrote about it over at the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog: Google Unplugs Newspaper Scanning Project
The Osborne I and its external monitor; photo probably from 1984. Could I have been singing its second-birthday song?
Harry McCracken, who suffered through being my editor at three different magazines, has written a fascinating history of one of the first “boom, then bust” computer companies: The one I bought my first computer from. In fact, its going bust helped get me into the computer business.
See: Osborne! at Harry’s blog, Technologizer.
I added comments to the first page of the article, but I was (ironically) writing on a screen about half the size of my old Osborne — a Droid — and it left out all the paragraph breaks, making a rather hard-to-read essay. So here’s a copy. I was also using the Droid’s “speech to text” feature, so I’ll correct at least some of the typos here. (Ironically, after posting this version, I discovered I could go back and edit the blog comment at Technologizer, so I went back and inserted some paragraph breaks.)
I was one of about 40 faculty members and grad students who bought Osborne I computers at Wesleyan University in 1982 after the university put some faculty “ideal personal computer specs” out to bid. The case, keyboard and small screen looked a lot like a portable terminal people had been using at the Hartford Courant when I was a reporter there in the late 1970s to early ’80s. I think it had a cassette tape drive built in and was compatible with the newspaper’s ATEX system. Teleram? (After posting this to Harry’s page via the Droid, I searched for Teleram. Here’s a picture and a detailed story. )
At Wesleyan the software bundle was the primary selling point for the Osborne. I recall an Apple ][, if you added to floppy drives and all of that software, would have come in at easily double the price we paid for the Osborne I with dBaseII, SuperCalc, WordStar, mBasic, cBasic , the Original Adventure game MyChess and I forget what all else.
In December 1982 (or was it ’81?) when we took delivery, the bundle also included an external monitor which would double the 52 columns screen making 104 columns (great for spreadsheets), double density disk drives and a 300 baud modem… or maybe the modem was extra. I do remember that the computer center hacked together cables we could use to plug an Osborne directly into the DEC-20 mainframe as a terminal and do file transfers.
Doing document conversion between our mainframe editor and WordStar was another thing. I became a big fan of ASCII and the print-formatting program on the DEC system. I also went to work for the university A/V wizard, Bob White, who physically hacked the insides of 24-inch classroom TV monitors to work with an Osborne so that a professor could show spreadsheets in class. I recall his trick involved cutting some sheet metal and wrapping a cylinder around the back end of the picture tube. (Kids, don’t try this at home! Ymmv.)
I became editor of the Wesleyan Osborne Group newsletter, a “support system” for campus users when the company went bankrupt, and I shared the Osborne with other students to get a discount on a 1983 summer computer course with the amazing Russ Walter of “Secret Guide to Computers” fame… starting me on the way to a second master’s and my 1986-88 hypertext research.
Russ’s courses and the newsletter plus some other how to things I had written for the Wes computer center got me my first job in the computer industry 1984 at MultiMate–also due for a 30th anniv soon) ultimately leading to working for Harry McCracken at IDG. So it’s all thanks to Adam Osborne, as I said in my post at Technologizer.
One thing I didn’t get to mention was that when I finally set to work on my Ph.D., my first faculty adviser at UNC Chapel Hill was a research wizard named Frank Biocca, whose credentials in the world of computer technology began a dozen years earlier, when he worked in P.R. or advertising for Osborne Computers.
Posted in coincidence, Computers, History, Magazines, personal, Technology, wesleyan
The latest update of The New York Times Droid app shows some improvements, but I still prefer reading the Times mobile Web site with the phone’s browser. The good news: For those of us with aging eyes and smaller Android screens, the app now does larger fonts and uses the phone’s horizontal mode.
However, you still can’t zoom in on routine photos or graphics.
I also noticed there is no linkage between clearly related stories, such as today’s item about new New York education chief being recruited secretly and her actual appointment story. Only one of these appeared in my morning “latest news” feed, so I had to go search the “New York region” feed to find the other.
On the full Times website, a “Related” sidebar takes care of the connections.
Another continuing annoyance, the Times app’s “share” button only provides the headline of the story and a compressed URL, as shown above. It copies and pasts that combination into e-mail, Facebook, Delicious bookmarks, blog posts and other services.
Unfortunately, some of them want more. There is still no way to copy and paste a story summary or selected paragraph or two into a blog post or email. Delicious, for example, expects the URL and headline to paste into separate fields, with a third field for a summary or notes and a fourth for searchable keyword tags.
Finally there is a small improvement in the app’s advertising. My earlier visits would only show me a single ad repeated over and over — an ad for home delivery of the Times, which is not available in my neighborhood, something the Times might be able to discern from the GPS data it accesses through my phone.
The small improvement is that the startup pages of the Times now show a different ad. I think it is for a hotel chain but the image is so small that I can’t read it. However, the Times subscription ad comes back as soon as I click on a story. Maybe I’m supposed to book a room at the hotel and have the Times delivered there.
Posted in Computers, Newspapers, Radford, Tablets & eBook Readers, usability, WebDesign
Khoi Vinh (subtraction.com), former design director at The New York Times, offered some design-inspired thoughts the other day on “why most of the current crop of iPad magazine apps have dim prospects for long-term success,” which has prompted dozens of intelligent comments and a follow-up post: My-ipad-magazine-stand and more-on-ipad-magazines.
The combination sent me looking for something I’d read by Bob Stein a while ago, The future of the app, and an interview he did on NPR’s On The Media.
Stein’s Voyager company was creating innovative e-books and before that video discs back before the Web was spun. Some of them were so good, I’m thinking of buying an old computer that can still play them. … which has me worried about the portability, searchability, longevity, archivability and general persistence of material created in the form of “apps” for particular computer, tablet or smartphone hardware.
I suspect folks like Bob Stein and Khoi Vinh are thinking about those issues, too… so I’m posting this here as a reminder to dip back into those discussions at their blog sites more often.
Online magazine or app publishing systems mentioned in the discussion, and related links:
Footnote: Unrelated, but interesting — The Observer on Khoi Vinh’s departure from the Times.
Related: Recent Chronicle of Higher Education article on Michael J. Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova’s Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, lamenting the way redesigns and e-comings-and-goings kill links, even on the open Web. (We were on a panel discussion of related issues at AEJMC six years ago.)
I just installed the new TIME Mobile for Android application and the first thing I noticed was a totally wrong advertisement.
That reminded me: The first thing I saw when I loaded The New York Times Android app a couple of months ago also was a totally wrong ad.
And it’s still there: Every time I read a story.
My phone is smarter than that, especially if the applications are as smart (and intrusive) as they claim to be. But apparently not.
I sense a trend here: Smart media companies putting out “smartphone” apps with dumb ads. I wonder if they’re making the same mistakes on the iPhone side?
So what is TIME trying in vain to sell me on its Android app? Why, an iPhone app for its sister publication, CNN/Money! Dumb.
And how is the Times annoying me with the same ad over and over? By repeatedly presenting an ad for something I WANT, but can’t have: A home subscription to the Times. Follow that ad’s link, type in my zip code, and I get a rejection notice.
Only my love of irony (and the replacement cost) keeps me from throwing the phone across the room.
I just uninstalled and reinstalled the Times app to confirm my recollection of the first of a half-dozen Big Brotherish messages that greeted me when I installed it:
This application has access to the following:
Your location
fine (GPS) location
If that’s the case, you’d think something behind the scenes could check my location and offer to sell me something other than an unavailable home subscription.
The install warnings say the application also has access to “Services that cost you money; directly call phone numbers.” I’m still not sure what that means, but I guess I trust The New York Times.
Like I said, irony is a hobby of mine.
The news apps for the Droid annoy me in other ways, enough to send me back to the Droid’s Web browser and the “mobile” version of the news organizations’ Web sites. For one thing, the Web version offers me more opportunity to enlarge the size of the type I’m reading. It also takes advantage of the Droid’s horizontal mode
Also, I’m a bookmark addict, using the “delicious.com” bookmarking service as http://delicious.com/bstepno to post hundreds (OK, thousands) of links to articles I’ve read, or feel guilty for not reading, or want my students to feel guilty for not reading.
The Droid offers a handy “Share This” button, with Delicious as one of the options (along with e-mail, Twitter and blogging engines), but some of these apps don’t implement Delicious sharing correctly. For example, the Times and USA Today apps plug both a story headline and URL into the “URL” field of the “Save to Delicious” screen, just they way they do when you “share” via Twitter or e-mail. That isn’t going to work with Delicious, which has separate fields for URL, title, notes and keywords. It forces me to cut, paste and edit, and I don’t always have time.
A related annoyance: The apps don’t allow me to copy a random paragraph from a story and paste it into a blog post or Delicious bookmark summary. “Sharing” means “share the headline we gave you, and that’s all.”
The Result: I’m sharing fewer stories from the Droid, more from my laptop, except when I switch to the Droid’s Web browser and the news sites’ “mobile” versions instead of the publications’ custom apps.
The Worry: As publications erect “paywalls” on their Web sites and make their Android, iPhone and iPad apps the 21st century equivalent of paid subscriptions, these news providers will take away the freedom to copy and quote easily that I (as an educator and blogger) have enjoyed for the past decade.
The good news: Buried in the last paragraph of today’s story about “jailbreaking” iPhones was some good news on the freedom to quote: “In addition to the decision on jailbreaking, the Library of Congress also granted an exception to artists who remix copy-protected video content for noncommercial work…”
USA Today also buried that news, but hits closer to home, saying the ruling will “allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos.”
That sounds like I can feel guilt-free when I cut and paste from DVDs of movies for the course I’m planning next spring semester, inspired by the “Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture” project. Yay!
Posted in News, Newspapers, smartphones, Tablets & eBook Readers, usability, WebDesign
A few months more than 20 years ago, the pleasure boating monthly Soundings published an article headlined “Computers link boaters oceans apart,” probably the first time I managed to get something about the Internet into good-old-fashioned print. The piece actually had more to do with commercial computer networks like CompuServe, Prodigy and BIX than the free-for-all Internet, but it did mention the ARPANET, BITNET and UUCP, all components of the pre-Web ‘net.
That was February of 1990, the year that computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee started defining the HyperText Markup Language and HyperText Transfer Protocol that would link Internet resources together like never before. I guess that means this is the 20th anniversary of the Web’s first “summer of code,” now an annual ritual for programmers.
Berners-Lee had proposed his “World Wide Web” idea in 1989 and spent a year at it, delivering the first browser and server by Christmas, and introducing it to an audience of physics researchers and technologists over the next year or two. The thing really took off in 1993 and 1994, after the University of Illinois’ NCSA released Mosaic, a free browser that used graphics and worked on PCs and Macintoshes, as well as the Unix machines the research community used in the Web’s inaugural years.
That was enough to send me back to grad school — for a faster Internet connection — at the University of North Carolina, home of some of the first hypertext research and some of the first Web servers in the U.S., including sunsite.unc.edu, which I had been reaching from a Connecticut boatyard over a modem, a service called BIX and a text-only browser link to “laUNChpad.unc.edu.”
In Chapel Hill, Sunsite’s boss, Paul Jones, told me to give him my resume in HTML, so I figured out just enough of the language, using (I think) an early ncsa.uiuc.edu tutorial. But before Sunsite came up with an opening, the Raleigh News & Observer launched NandO.net, and I landed a part-time job preparing news stories for the Web at what was one of the Internet’s first 24/7 news sites.
In the beginning, we were publishing Web versions of stories from all or most of the wire services the N&O subscribed to for its print editions — treating the Web site as just another edition of the newspaper, but one that could handle dozens of new or updated stories every hour, drawing on the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times wire service, Bloomberg News and more. (There must have been some very interesting executive discussions of just what publication rights were covered by those wire contracts!)
The real surprise for me came as the school year was wrapping up — a call from Soundings‘ editor, Marleah Ross, announcing that my old employer, the monthly tabloid subtitled “The nation’s boating newspaper,” was launching a Web site of its own, and that I was invited to write the cover story for the August 1995 issue, then follow up with a regular column called “Data Waves.” The goal was to tell boaters why on earth they should care about the World Wide Web.
Fifteen years later, Soundingspub.com is still online, and I’ve just spent some nostalgic weeks documenting its online beginnings, and paying tribute to its late publisher, Jack Turner. See the current issue of the aptly titled Journal of Magazine and New Media Research. My essay “Getting Under Way in New Media” is downloadable as a PDF file here, but I also recommend the other articles in the journal, including editor Carol Schwalbe’s essay on “Finishability: An Antidote to Information Overload.” (Note, as of this writing the edition’s directory is at a “current issue” address, but it will be moved to an archival page in the fall, when a new edition comes out.)
Posted in AEJMC, Business, Computers, Digital Culture, History, hypertext, Internet, Journalism, Magazines
An AP story in Editor & Publisher says advertising in newspapers’ iPad apps is doing better for publishers than website ads.
Does that also extend to iPhone and Android phone app ads?
After a month with a Droid phone I’m underwhelmed by the newspaper apps I’ve tried. I’m more impressed with the mobile versions of some Web pages, including the NYTimes.com and WordPress.
I don’t have an iPad yet, and hope its app designers aren’t building in the same annoyances:
Biggest flaw in the specialized apps:
Providing no “cut and paste” to allow smartphone-based bloggers (or other readers) to quote selectively from a story. All browsers let you copy and paste. Why don’t apps? If this is a content copy-protection scheme, I’m against it. “Freedom to quote and share” should be written into the Constitution of Apps.
Second most annoying app limitation: Providing fewer ways to enlarge text and graphics than the Web browsers do.
Third: Not using the Droid’s “landscape” layout for larger-font column views, graphic zoom, etc.
Back to advertising: By far the most annoying thing about the Times app for Droid is that it repeats the same ad on all pages and, in this early version, the ad is for something that I WANT, but know I can’t buy — home delivery of the Times, which is not available in my southwest Virginia mountain-valley neighborhood. The irony has stopped being funny.
Related things I’ve read, Tweeted about, bookmarked with Delicious or posted to some other blog in recent weeks, but neglected to mention here:
Posted in Digital Culture, Newspapers, Tablets & eBook Readers, Television, WebDesign
Tagged apps, droid, ipad, newspapers, smartphones
