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”).

Yankee presses stop as pigs fly and YouTube shows the past of new media

I’ve been putting some fun things on the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog:

• Guardian unleashes pigs to explain social-networked news media, with hooks from Twitter tipsters and a wolf with asthma to a ton of huffing.
• Back before the new media were new: Videotex at Knight-Ridder, 1982
• Connecticut lives with fewer presses, as “Digital First” Journal Register Co. turns to nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper to keep printing — Tribune-owned Hartford Courant.

Thinking about the future of news, with or without newspapers

Darn… Cyber scholar and new media thinker Clay Shirky was almost in town today and I missed him… When someone who was there posts a report, I’ll link to it here. Until then, I’ll let this ramble from link to link.

As promised follow these links: Beth Macy and Carole Tarrant both shared their accounts of Shirky’s visit to The Roanoke Times, the “almost in town” I referred to above. I wish I’d been able to make it, but I was off at the doctor’s office learning how to avoid having a stroke — not entirely unrelated to this business of keeping up with a dozen new Web technologies at once.

Meanwhile, even a near-miss is a good enough excuse to post this link to a speech by “Digital First” newspaper publisher John Paton, who mentions Shirky in a recent speech gently titled “Old Dogs New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives.”

Paton doesn’t actually link his Web post to the article by Shirky that he mentions — not that anyone reading his speech couldn’t slap the title into Google and be there in an instant: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

I can’t help but think Paton is right about community knowledge and identification with local news, and I love his idea about the newsroom as public coffee shop… but I wonder about the extent to which the audience has to have the news habit in the first place.

Torrington, Conn., is home of his open-newsroom-coffeeshop experiment and, coincidentally, I’ve spent some time there back before the Web was spun. Back then, the two papers (Torrington Register and Winsted Citizen), apparently now merged at http://www.registercitizen.com, probably benefitted from the disappearance of The Hartford Times (RIP c. 1976) and the decline of The Hartford Courant under Tribune co. ownership since 2000. When it had The Hartford Times as well as these smaller papers to compete with, the Courant had strong bureaus in both Torrington and Winsted and stringers in all the smaller towns surrounding both cities. (I was a bureau reporter, later bureau chief, in two comparable bureaus on the other side of the state.)

For my students and colleagues in southwest Virginia: Imagine a city of 20,000 to 40,000, about the size of Radford, with FOUR competing daily papers, three of them with full-time resident reporters, plus a strong local news radio station!

Some people still living in Torrington or Willimantic, where I was a reporter, grew up with that kind of news-consumer-culture. Add a strong League-of-Women-Voters and New England Town Meeting civic culture, and whether it’s “digital first” or “print-only,” a news organization has something to tap into. (That “print-only” link goes to a recent Nieman Reports article about The Boston Courant, a small weekly that is no relation to the Hartford institution.)

How do you “grow” a civic-minded news culture or revive one that has been dormant? Before the end of the semester, I hope to get students thinking and talking about that — and this page’s links should help.

Here are a few more links for good measure: “The Washington Post — a Newspaper, and a Legacy, Reordered,” a New York Times piece from last week, and a Times letter to the editor by Rachel Davis Mersey, author of Can Journalism Be Saved? She apparently is almost a former classmate of mine. (I was pointed to her letter by Philip Meyer, who admits to having both of us as students, and who has just added an autobiography to his list of publications, and a Twitter feed. )

Finally, it dawned on me that I’ve written blog posts about these issues off and on over the years, so I’ve started my own “Old News” aggregation page — on the menu at the top of this blog.

Early online-newspaper nostalgia

• Niemanlab.org on: The forgotten history of Access Atlanta, one of the early Web’s most innovative newspapers
• CJR.org on: The San Jose Mercury, The Newspaper That Almost Seized the Future

Prodigy, mentioned in one or both of those recent articles, was the first graphical online service I used, c.1988. (The Macintosh version of what became AOL may have been earlier, but I was PC until ’88.) Early rollout served Hartford, Atlanta and San Francisco — perhaps the only time those cities have been seen as having something in common.

Designed for e-commerce over a closed network at under $10/month, it started before the Internet was open to commercial use. Prodigy restricted bulletin board discussion topics, but did have general news sections. It began to do newspaper sites under contract — just before a more flexible America OnLine and a more open Web ate its lunch.

I interviewed beta users and experts for a review/article about Prodigy in ’88 or ’89 for PCWeek, which paid me well but didn’t print it; a new editor said it was because the publication’s focus was now business apps, not “consumer” services, and despite the involvement of major companies, Prodigy was aimed at the home-computer market. (It started as “Trintex” — the three being Sears, IBM and CBS. The network dropped out before the service went online.)

So I set aside my research on networks and hypertext, and switched to writing about boats — until the Web happened and I sailed off into a Ph.D. program… paying the bills with a part-time job at another online news pioneer, The News & Observer’s NandO.net in Raleigh, and (slowly) writing my dissertation about another, http://wral-tv.com, across town.

Note: This has been updated since the original post. I’m was reading the Web that day on a Nook-like Pandigital tablet, lowcost device whose software makes it easier to post a rough draft to WordPress quickly than to bookmark. Some of the roughness may still be here.

For the record, the Pandigital has an older Android WordPress app, Tweetcaster Pro with  ReadItLater, but poor keyboard and no direct hook to Delicious.com (http://delicious.com/bstepno).

Until I get something better, I can’t help thinking how GREAT this would have seemed in 1988.

Six brief news writing tips — or are they?

Every semester I tell students in the introductory news writing class that the basics of writing in a news style will be useful in other types of writing.

Take this list, for example:

1. Keep it brief. Be concise, simple and precise…
2. Keep it simple… Use short words, active verbs, and common nouns.
3. Be friendly. Use contractions. Talk directly to the reader…
4. Put the most important thing first…
5. Describe only what’s necessary…
6. Avoid repetition.

Which Journalism 101 textbook did that come from?

Answer: None. It’s part of the “writing” section of Google’s design tips for developers of apps for Android phones.

The details of each step aren’t exactly what we tell news writers. With luck, journalists will be telling their stories on a larger canvas than a smartphone screen, and to an audience whose thumbs aren’t twitching for a return to Angry Birds. But good writing should work on both page sizes. News writers might think of themselves as designing a “user interface” for the information in their stories.

I especially like the ultra-conservative Android version of the “most important thing first” rule (emphasis added):  ”The first two words (around 11 characters, including spaces) should include at least a taste of the most important information in the string. If they don’t, start over.”

The old conclusion-first “inverted pyramid” news story’s summary lead emphasizes the first sentence. But the “two words” idea isn’t unique to Google. For online reading, usability experts with eye-tracking devices have been telling us for years that readers skim down through the start of each line. The “11 characters” reference leads me to believe that  Jakob Nielsen’s work is on someone’s desk (screen, bookmark list, bookshelf) at Google.

If nothing else, following that two-word rule might get beginning news-writing students to stop starting stories with the words “Last night…” — which could be the first two words of every morning-after story in a newspaper.

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?

Youth Radio Wins Peabody Award

An e-mail from Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning just alerted me that Youth Radio has won a 2011 Peabody Award for its Trafficked! series, an investigation broadcast on NPR, including first-person accounts by teen victims in the sex trade.

The series played on National Public Radio and was featured on The Huffington Post.

More from Spotlight:

Youth Radio is a recent recipient of a Learning Lab Award in the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition for its Mobile Action Lab, through which young people are developing mobile apps that serve community needs.

A new book—“ Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories”—offers resources and behind-the-scenes accounts of youth media production. Sarah wrote at Spotlight that the book is “sure to become an important resource on youth media production, consumption, and participatory learning.”

Grammar News, Good & Bad, at The New York Times

I just stumbled on what looked like  a useful resource page at The New York Times, the “Times Topic” page headed, Grammar News. Unfortunately, it seem the Times‘ attention to detail doesn’t extend to riding herd on the links on that page.

Several are out of date, including two to books by the late Theodore M. Bernstein, who was the Times resident grammarian back when I found his book Watch Your Language on the paperback rack at my local newsstand.  It was subtitled,  A Lively, Informal Guide to Better Writing, Emanating from the News Room of the New York Times, and I had just been offered the job of copy editor at my school newspaper. That was one of the better coincidences of my life.

How sad that the Times link to information about Bernstein’s book returns only a “404 not found” error message, the Web equivalent of just the sort of editing lapses he used to point out in the newspaper’s grammar and style.

Another old friend is similarly slighted. The late Kenneth G. Wilson, a vice president of the University of Connecticut when it was my beat at The Hartford Courant, wrote The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, a fine and good-humored reference book with some 6,500 entries.

The Times links to the address where the book was once offered for free online by Bartleby.com, but that’s no longer true. The same is apparently the case for The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Both links now go to the front page of the Bartleby site, not to those substantial reference books.

(Both volumes are still available as electronic resources through NetLibrary.com, which sells its services to university libraries like mine. The works also may be available on CD-ROM in some reference collections.)

Last, but perhaps the worst omission, the Times Grammar News page neglects to link to its own current “After Deadline” grammar feature, written by Bernstein’s successor at issuing critiques of grammar and style to the Times staff. He is Philip B. Corbett, identified on some pages as “deputy news editor,” and on others as “associate managing editor for standards,” presumably a well-deserved promotion. He is also in charge of the Times style manual.

It’s great to have his columns discuss issues that come up in student writing. Here are a few recent ones:

• Parallel Problems
• Loose Connections
• Headlines We Love Too Much
• The ‘Tweet’ Debate

I searched NYTimes.com and couldn’t figure out who his counterpart is for making sure the Web links all work, but I passed on the information above using a generic feedback form.

So what’s ‘a newspaper’?

Update: Remembering when an attempt to give away New York Times failed. See end.

Does “a newspaper” now mean any page of glowing bits that has frequently changed information organized into sections, with headlines and short summaries linked to more detail?

That appears to be the definition over at Paper.li, whose motto is “read a Twitter stream as a daily newspaper.”

So today I “founded” two newspapers:

Well, maybe I just founded one and “found” the other, or just found both. I can’t tell whether Paper.li required any action by me — or anyone with a Twitter account.

In both cases, the paper.li/feedname site (http://paper.li/bobstep or paper.li/aejmc) includes links to items from feeds the person or organization by that name subscribes to. It doesn’t mean the person even read any of those items.

A sidebar shows selections from the person or organization’s own feed, calling their author “curator” of the paper.li page.

Background: AEJMC is the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which — like a newspaper — is broken down into sections. One section is the Newspaper Division, for which I keep a Web page and co-author a blog. Coincidentally, our division is pondering whether its name “Newspaper” is still relevant in this day and Web-age.

Apologies  if anyone reading the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog came over here for more details and got only a sense of deja vu. Originally, that post didn’t have any pictures, this one did, and I was going to say more here, but getting the images to show up in two different WordPress systems was too much distraction. (Worth 1,000 words, but also many minutes.)

Update (as promised above): I must add one more thing, inspired by wondering what The New York Times thinks about having a page at paper.li headed “The New York Times Daily” with “as shared by nytimes + 199 followed people on Twitter” in smaller type beneath.

While I understand the technology and can find the list of 199, I wonder whether the keepers of the Times brand name will understand… and whether anyone stumbling on that page will realize that the stories might not have been written by anyone at the Times. Actually, most of the feeds twitter.com/nytimes subscribes to look like feeds from Times reporters, departments or associates, but their Tweets could be links to non-Times sources. In fact, while I’m typing this latest update the lead item on paper.li/nytimes is actually a story from The Guardian about that other Times in London.

When it comes to use of the “New York Times” name, I wonder if the institution has developed a sense of humor (or modesty) in the past 24 years?

That’s because when I saw that “New York Times Daily” nameplate, I flashed back to 1986 in computer land. That was when the Infocom software/game company, publishers of Zork! (and my favorite, “Leather Goddesses of Phobos”) were convinced by NY Times lawyers to change the name of their little 8 1/2 by 11 user-group newsletter, The New Zork Times, because someone thought a Zork was too much like a York, or something.

The Cambridge company’s response was a name-the-newsletter contest, with the winner to get a free subscription to The New York Times.

In the end, the winner wanted an Infocom game instead, and the headline read “NY Times Can’t Be GIVEN Away.” (Holy cow, it’s still around at an NZT archive.)