Celebrating a do-it-yourself Web apprenticeship

Updated Jan.15, the day of Aaron Swartz’s funeral; I changed the headline and added a few more links

About finding things out for yourself.

I first saw Aaron Swartz in 2000, when he visited MIT as a runner-up in a youth programming contest, having accomplished at 13 something I couldn’t do at 50 — and me with most of a Ph.D. I don’t remember whether I had a chance to say “congratulations.” At least I got to applaud, and shake my head in wonder.

Many heads are shaking this weekend at the news that Aaron apparently took his own life on Friday, at 26, beset by a federal prosecution over his copying a lot of files from an MIT computer without permission, and probably suffering from depression.

The “why” of his death is just terrible and sad. I would rather celebrate his life by sharing some of his writing, especially items that reflect his passion for tracking down information, asking questions, learning and building things.

In his own words, here’s how a 7th grade assignment helped Aaron find his heroes. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/mylifewithtim

About a dozen paragraphs down, that page’s picture of Aaron and “TimBL” (Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web) speaks volumes, but so does his unnecessary apology for the quality of his writing — which was already excellent.

I suspect his skill with words — posting curious questions and articulate arguments in email lists — is what set in motion his brilliant, passionate and much too short career.

When he was 14 or so, he wrote an essay on self-education and Web apprenticeship that is no longer at its original address on a family website, but I quickly found a copy in the Internet Archive using its Wayback Machine. Here originally: swartzfam.com/aaron/school/2001/02/19/

From writing he eventually moved on to public speaking, again with self-effacing comments, and posted this script from an online talk he gave to a gathering in India. He borrowed the title from Kurt Vonnegut, another hint of how well-read this young man was: How to get a job like mine.

He was even more public after a successful campaign against legislation he saw as online censorship, and you can see him talk about it on YouTube.

I lost track of Aaron for years. I used Creative Commons and the OpenLibrary.org and the followed the campaign against SOPA and PIPA; I probably used other tools, sites and projects he was involved with, but I didn’t make the connection back to that 13-year-old visiting MIT. When news of his death started spreading from the MIT Tech newspaper to Twitter and beyond, I spent a day following his links and being amazed.

I remembered that I heard from him in 2005 or 2006 after I linked my blog to an automated “river of news” style aggregator for New York Times news stories — something he had set in 2002, using the paper’s first RSS feed. It’s probably not what the feed’s creators had in mind; I think the original idea was to help bloggers link directly to Times stories for discussion purposes, not to build alternatives to the paper’s own front page and archives. But the RSS feed system made it possible, so Aaron did it.

(At 14, his age entirely irrelevant at the keyboard, Aaron had joined an email-list working group of Web experts drafting a formal specification for a more complex “RDF Site Summary” version of RSS, but the Times earlier “Really Simple Syndication” version was good enough for this project.)

In fact, his nytimes.blogspace.com site kept running until September 2009, when the Times changed its feed hosting system. You can still find a scattering of seven years’ worth of Times links through the archive.org Wayback Machine’s copies of that aggregator page.

Even back in 2005, Aaron seemed pleased that someone in Tennessee was using the site to point journalism students to stories they might have missed.

Most of his career, before and since, was about getting people access to information online — through projects including Wikipedia, Creative Commons copyright, campaigns to make court cases and library books available for free, and a startup that became part of Reddit.com.

More recently, in the months preceding his untimely death this weekend, he had been sharing a lot of information in his @aaronsw Twitter feed and blog, on everything from economics to the deeper meanings of the Batman movies.
http://www.aaronsw.com/
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog

There’s a little consolation in knowing his work and words will be kept online through the efforts of friends at the Internet Archive and around the World Wide Web, and that his life and work may inspire more activism on behalf of the open-information causes he supported.

For now there is mostly sadness.

Tim Berners-Lee posted to Twitter:

“Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”

Others:

• Doc Searls pulled more of the responses together.
• Danah Boyd wrote eloquently about Processing the loss.
• Glenn Fleishman on his contributions to the ‘commons’.
• David Weinberger contributed Why the Net grieves to CNN.
• Dave Winer put it concisely, Aaron Swartz was curious.
• Matt Stoller explained more about Aaron Swartz’s politics

What to learn next

http://hackshackers.com/resources/hackshackers-survival-glossary/

The hackshackers.com glossary is a great place for May/June journalism or Web production  grads to browse for educational inspiration.

As summer goes on, I’ll add more links here and on my bookmark list at http://delicious.com/bstepno — add /jpop  (portrayal of journalists in film, fiction and popular culture) or /104 (news writing and reporting) or /326 (Web production ) to the end of that address to narrow the list to  course-specific links.

For entertainment, and for students in my Images of the Journalist in Popular Culture class:

• I’m expanding the “Video” tab on this site to include more than a dozen separate pages with journalism-related videos and classic films. Take a look. Full-length movies, trailers and clips are organized by decade or by special topics. Citizen Kane gets its own page. The menu headings “Video” and “Newspaper Films” are “clickable” pages in their own right.
• I’ve built a page at my JHeroes blog listing novels that feature journalist characters, from classic American literature to some recent bloggers-versus-zombies adventures.
• Old-time radio portrayals of journalists are still the main feature of JHeroes (“Newspaper Heroes on the Air”).

AEJMC conferencing via blog and tweet

While some ear troubles made me sensitive about flying to St. Louis, I still “made it to…” the AEJMC journalism educators’ conference there this past week by hanging out with my laptop and phone tuned to a Twitter “hashtag” of #aejmc11.

And, since I’m Web editor for the AEJMC Newspaper Division, I logged in and posted a list of the tweets that looked to be of the most interest to members of that division, updating the links a couple of times a day.

The division officially changes its name to “Newspaper & Online News Division” in a couple of months, so my page-of-tweets from the AEJMC conference should be timely. If nothing else, it’s a place where division members can find each other’s Twitter handles.

In the spirit of “walking the walk” of “Online,” I also did a little e-mail campaigning to invite other division officers to use the division blog to post news from the conference, and Rutgers University’s Susan Keith, teaching standards co-chair and past head of the division, came through in a big way. She posted several items after the division’s business meeting, including annual award-winners.

As for the tweets list, although it was a “blog post,” I returned to it several times during the weekend and finally had posted about 40 Twitter handles and links provided by conference goers, including conference papers, reports and slide presentations.

It was so much like being in St. Louis that I’m tempted to go out and buy a $5 Budweiser! (You have to read the list of tweets to get the reference.)

No offense meant to baristas

I’ve added some content, links and a made-up indented quote to my WordPress Notes page, after noticing one-too-many student sites made with WordPress that show signs of “this was just done for class and I left it hanging around.”

Often, they literally show a sign: The “about page” text or header “tagline” that WordPress includes on every startup installation. It’s like having a column full of “lorem ipsum” in your newspaper.

Other times, the problem is just that the student or professor set up a blog “for class” and hasn’t used it in months, or years. OK, I have a bunch of “demo” pages of my own, but I call them that and link them back to a home page that eventually leads to someplace where there’s up-to-date content.

I’m especially concerned about students looking for work in a blog-savvy, social-networked, online world. Demos, “for class” and “tried this” sites better not be all the prospective employers can find.

So… after going back into the page a dozen times adding a link here and fixing a typo there, I added this. (Quoting yourself can be tricky when you’re as wishy-washy as I am.)

“Unless something else about your site makes it clear the line is postmodern/ironic or expressing extreme gratitude to Matt and the other folks at WordPress, having ‘just another WordPress weblog‘ on your page might as well be saying ‘just another unemployed barista.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” — Dr. Bob

New tools and new rules

The last week of the semester is a great time for an inspirational speech. Rather than give one myself, I’ve found one in text and video for my “basic newswriting” students, whose semester experiences have ranged from AP Stylebook drills to reading about tornado damage in their own backyard.

During our Communication Week, they heard local reporters talk about their lives — from Beth Macy covering a cholera epidemic in Haiti and Ralph Berrier interviewing pioneers of bluegrass music, to  recent grad Justin Ward launching his career into regional TV news.

Maybe they don’t need another inspirational speech. But we’ve heard enough doom-and-gloom about the newspaper business (and I do teach a newspaper style of writing). Perhaps this will help.

Here… Listen to Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the Knight Foundation, speaking at the College of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Nebraska, whose new dean came from Knight, which is using a newspaper-generated bankroll to fund innovative journalism projects. His real message starts about a dozen paragraphs into the speech…

All you need to do is plug into the stream and you see journalism and mass communication developments coming faster and more forcefully than ever. This is the dawn of a new age in communication, the digital age, and it is even richer with invention than the dawn of the industrial age.

New tools are being invented at a mind-boggling pace. Instead of the telegraph, the telephone and the light bulb, we’re talking about microchips, laptops, smart phones, tablets. We’re talking about companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter: from digital zero to number one in the market, nearly overnight.

As the legendary journalist Hodding Carter III once said, “This is the most exciting time ever to be a journalist – if you are not in search of the past.” The same I would say applies to being any kind of communicator – advertising, public relations, you name it.

That’s what’s exciting. The students of today actually are going to create the journalism and mass communication of tomorrow….

His “New tools create new rules” discussion, alluded to in my headline, comes later. Students should read the whole speech to find out just what he means.

Here’s the full text
and an MP4 video

Launching J-students into Twitter

What feeds should journalism students follow when they first begin to use Twitter?

Here’s my top 10 list, and I’ll be watching Twitter (and the comments on this page) for other suggestions…

1. A local professional news reporter
2. A local news organization’s main feed
3. A national news organization’s feed for a beat they follow
4. A feed about a subject they are passionate about
5. Their student newspaper
6. Another campus media organization
7. A different university’s student newspaper
8. A Society of Professional Journalists feed
9. A journalism review or think-tank like CJR, AJR, Poynter, J-Lab, Nieman
10. Their university’s PR office
11. The professor who suggested Twitter might not be just a colossal waste of time https://twitter.com/#!/bobstep

OK, so I’m not great at “top 10″ lists.

Once a journalism student has a Twitter account and has followed a few people to see how it works, what next?

Wrapping up Women’s History Month in Radio Dramas

Over at JHeroes.com, I’ve had a fun month tipping my hat to Women’s History Month, exploring the audio biographies of famous women editors, publishers and reporters — partly because “women reporters” is a major theme my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture” students are exploring this semester.

This week is registration for fall semester (already!) and I’ve been trying to spread the word about that course,  a “special topics” offering that isn’t in the catalog. In the process of doing the JHeroes blog and preparing that course, I’ve discovered quite a few films and novels I didn’t know about.

For example, I wouldn’t have known that the head of the Associate Press wrote a novel, “Anna Zenger, Mother of Freedom,” fictionalizing America’s first landmark libel trial. Luckily, the DuPont radio series, Cavalcade of America, turned Kent Cooper’s novel into a radio play — one they liked so much they did it twice, with different casts.

And I wouldn’t have known that America’s first woman foreign correspondent, Margaret Fuller, was also the the editor of The Dial — hobnobbing with Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, and maybe inspiring some of Hawthorne’s women characters.

I also didn’t know how many times daredevil reporter Nellie Bly had found episodes from her life dramatized — or entirely fictionalized, including  one series of novels that has her hanging out with Sherlock Holmes.

Take a look… After visiting radio appearances by 18th and 19th century women, I’m finishing up the month with some who are more contemporary.

Telecommuting from the Blueridge to the Rockies

I couldn’t go to the AEJMC convention in Denver this week, but I feel like I’m halfway there, following Twitter feeds and other online activities…

I’ve been updating the Newspaper Division’s blog with whatever I find online that might interest its members…

• For the stay-at-homes and back-at-homes
  (Twitter feeds and an archived “live” video about some online hyperlocal innovation involving newspaper companies)
• Virtual Denver: Twin presentation of twin surveys
  (Narrated Powerpoint slides online about the educational needs of today’s journalists, plus the related conference paper, online at a document-sharing site)

I’m still waiting to hear whether the “Newspaper Division” is still that, or has added “and Online Journalism” to its name, or named a committee to write a clarifying “statement of purpose” for one of AEJMC’s oldest and largest groups… and, come to think of it, to find out whether I’ve been re-elected its Web editor despite my perennial inability to get to the conventions.

Meanwhile, I keep thinking of an Eddie from Ohio song, with this lyric…

you think you’ll find some mountains
in western colorado
fifty weeks of snowy peaks
is where you’re gonna be
but babe the rocky mountains are gradually eroding
the hills of coors are nothing more
than blue ridge wannabes…

Kudos to Bristol Herald Courier

How did a local paper in Bristol, Va., win that Pulitzer Prize for Public Service?

Here’s the prize-winning series itself: Underfoot, Out of Reach

Here’s a how-I-did-it article (technical in parts, but even non-geek students should read it to get an idea of just how much work was involved): Printable four-pages, large type

Here’s the organization that provided some of the investigative reporter‘s training in Computer Assisted Reporting.

RSS widgets for republishing

For my intro to Web Production students to ponder over spring break, here’s a demo site that uses RSS plug-ins, content management software widgets, and related aggregation services to consolidate blog postings, social bookmarks and even a Twitter account…

bobwebs & cobwebs

I do similar things on my stepno.com home page and this WordPress blog. (The former uses a free service called RSS include.)

At the end of the semester, I’ll have students use Drupal, WordPress and the hosting services of their choice to make “mirror” (sometimes funhouse mirror) images of the sites they develop for class, so that they aren’t just learning how to use our university server.