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.

Words and ways to tell a story

Libya’s Battle-Tested
Women Hope Gains Last

Am I the only one annoyed by that headline’s use of words that can be read as different parts of speech? I think I’ve just been staring at it too long. The whole is not really ambiguous; short words are necessary to fit the six-column New York Times home page grid’s narrow one-column headline space. On the even less flexible printed front page, the headline writer fit those seven short words into one line over three columns beneath the top photo.

Some “headlinese” is forgivable. And, in today’s world of constantly updated “front pages” on news websites, the headline will be gone from the Times before you read this. Still, as I stared at the last three words, I decided they and the story beneath the headline would be a good starting point for a class discussion.

First, the words :

• “Hope” can be a noun or verb, although here “Women” makes its role as a verb clear. It would take “Women’s” to make it a noun, but headline writers sometimes bend the rules.
• “Gains” also goes both ways. Are “hope gains” increases in hope, or do women hope that some unspecified gains last? Headline writers are free to leave “that” out to save space.
• “Last” can mean “to persist over time” or “in final position,” a role it plays a lot in sports headlines.  I don’t suppose anyone thinks today’s headline meant something like, “Women’s increases in hope have fallen to last place.”  The summary beneath the headline quickly removed any ambiguity, but didn’t kill my idea of using the headline and story in class.

When you click that headline on the Times home page to go to the story itself, the headline changes to this much clearer single line, thanks to the more flexible story-page layout:

Libya’s War-Tested Women Hope to Keep New Power

The word “power” is much more specific than “gains.” That helps. Beneath it is what the journalism professors call a scene-setter, anecdotal  or round-up lead paragraph. Its strong specific examples are given in similar short declarative sentences: name, occupation, verb…

TRIPOLI, Libya — Aisha Gdour, a school psychologist, smuggled bullets in her brown leather handbag. Fatima Bredan, a hairdresser, tended wounded rebels. Hweida Shibadi, a family lawyer, helped NATO find airstrike targets. And Amal Bashir, an art teacher, used a secret code to collect orders for munitions: Small-caliber rounds were called “pins,” larger rounds were “nails.” A “bottle of milk” meant a Kalashnikov.

The next paragraph of the story ends with a sentence that newswriting textbooks might call a “nut graph,” a transition from the specific examples of the lead anecdote to the more general issue being explored:

“The six-month uprising against Colonel Qaddafi has propelled women in this traditional society into roles they never imagined. And now, though they already face obstacles to preserving their influence, many women never want to go back.”

The page one story summary, also coded into metadata behind the page, is similar to that “nut graph”:

“The Libyan rebels’ unlikely victory over Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi has propelled women in a traditional society into roles they never imagined.”

For my students: Do read the whole story. Beyond the headline and the lead, notice how personal identifications, quotes and attribution are used, how small details like ages and occupations are woven into the story, and how the structure moves you forward to the end.

Also notice the byline — and add Anne Barnard to your list of journalists to watch.

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.

Smartphone apps, dumb advertising

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!

WRAL among EPpy winners

WRAL.com -- in the early days

The list of 2010 Editor and Publisher EPpy award winners is a long one, but it’s great to see WRAL.com in Raleigh, N.C., among them.

The citation is for “Best Local TV/Cable-Affiliated Website.”

We have some history, starting back in the Happy Valley imagemap days, when I was a regular visitor, first online, then in person. Maybe I should be writing a 15-years-later follow-up to my doctoral dissertation, a case study of WRAL and its site-development process; that 1999 paper was an early chapter-draft.

WRAL.com today

Anyhow, congratulations to WRAL’s John Conway and colleagues… 15 years of excellence — and in Web years, yet!

While it’s great to see an old friend on the list, the other nice surprise in this year’s EPpys is the number of site’s I’ve never visited… lots of new ideas to share with students in the fall.

NPR, CNN and Time were among the more familiar winners. Among the new-to-me sites I’ll be looking at are:

• Krulwich on Science,  the latest incarnation of a long-standing favorite broadcast journalist, Robert Krulwich (see also, WNYC Radiolab)
• idsnews.com, Indiana University Student Media
• LasVegasSun.com The Las Vegas Sun newspaper
• Globeandmail.com The Globe & Mail newspaper

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.

Hello world!

Yes, another “Hello world!” page…

I’ve used Word Press on several other sites, but now that wordpress.com offers free blogs, I’m setting this up as a demo for students.

My own blogging is generally at http://stepno.com/blog or http://couranteer.com, also known as  http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327 — and I have plenty of other pages for courses I’ve taught and organizations I belong to. Most of that is in need of updating, so I won’t do much here until I have to.

Oh no! I’ve just tested this page and it has SNAP turned on by default. But I don’t have time to figure out how to turn it off today…

Here are my earlier WordPress sites:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/stepno/

http://boblog.blogsome.com/