Media ethics and local news samples for class discussion

For the past year, I’ve been using my Droid phone to add articles and stories to my http://delicious.com/bstepno bookmark lists.

Alas, while a change in ownership has kept delicious.com alive, it has disabled all of the Droid bookmarking apps that worked with the original service.

This page is my attempt to use the Droid WordPress app as a substitute — pasting somewhat random items here for eventual transfer to my Delicious lists. The links below may or may not be relevant to a class discussion in one or another of my classes, but at least they’re here where I can get at them easily.

First, concerning the UK wiretapping tabloid case mentitoned in both my intro-newswriting and “Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture” classes. The topic is “the procurement of information by illegal means,” and this article from The New Yorker captures the current state-of-the-art, for better or for worse:

IS PRIVACY EVIL?

from Lauren Collins in The New Yorker

“…you’d almost think he’d been genetically engineered by a celebrity publicist bent on proving to the public, and the authorities, that reporters are amoral dirtbags. “

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/

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Next, concerning Patch.com, TheBurgs.com and hyperlocal or regional news treatments mentioned in class, see delicious.com/bstepno/hyperlocal

On Twitter, I’ve started a list of New River Valley area journalists, which follows their tweets about local news stories, among other things. I’m surprised when they don’t link through to a full story, or when a local TV station lets what appears to be its main Twitter feed sit unused for a week or more.

https://twitter.com/#!/list/bobstep/nrvj

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These are older stories that I may have mentioned in class before Thanksgiving.

http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/nov/12/va-nuclear-plant-in-quake-zone-gets-go-ahead/

http://reston.patch.com/d/articles/police-arrest-parents-in-drowning-at-westin

http://www.wjla.com/articles/2011/10/saudi-couple-maryam-masaad-almutiri-wafy-abdullah-almutiri-facing-neglect-charges-68553.html

http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/crime-punishment/2011/11/parents-charged-1-year-olds-drowning-death

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/crime-scene/post/parents-charged-with-neglect-in-drowning-of-baby-in-reston-hotel-bathtub/2011/10/31/gIQAdJ6NaM_blog.html

http://hamptonroads.com/2011/11/tip-when-first-frost-hits-month-stay-grass

“Frost is winter’s curtain- raiser, ushering out autumn’s last act, slaying the remnants of summer. Goodbye, geraniums. Adiós, impatiens. Bon voyage, begonias.
“Only the warm embrace of ocean and bay has spared our landscape this long. Just west of here, frost has already made the growing season a memory, its bouquet withered to mush by frigid fingers that reach deep inside tender plants and rupture their cells.”

Fire at poultry house kills at least 10,000 turkeys

http://hamptonroads.com/2011/11/fire-va-poultry-house-kills-least-10000-turkeys

Associated Press:November 13, 2011 SWOOPE, Va. Authorities are investigating a fire at a poultry house near the Shenandoah Valley town of Swoope that killed at least 10,000 turkeys. The fire occurred Tuesday night at Hilltop View Farm.

Once a tree, now firewood in Roanoke giveaway

http://m.roanoke.com/mapp/story.aspx?arcID=301089

New tools and new tools

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.

Sometimes you can’t get the story out

I stumbled on this interview while tracking down a YouTube video to explain ocular migraines to a friend. I’m lucky — the migraines I get are the “ocular” variety, only visual-effect symptoms with some minor numbness and verbal confusion, and the episodes are brief and infrequent. I’m also not on camera at the time.

California TV reporter Serene Branson gave a great demonstration of aphasia with a migraine headache attack on camera last winter, and mentioned blurred vision as one of the precursor symptoms, along with some mental confusion.

“I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn’t have the words to say it,” she said. That’s it in a nutshell. Here’s another site with a discussion of Branson’s aphasia-migraine symptoms.

Meanwhile, it’s nice to see that some YouTube uses with Flash or other animation skills have tried to document their ocular migraine experiences. So far, these two are the closest I’ve seen to mine.

Unfortunately, no one has documented what these look like when you are trying to present information to a class, read a book as part of your research, grade a stack of student papers or preview a few dozen Web design pages.

I’m glad to see that a couple of these have explicit (if obvious) advice about what to do if one of these things starts while you are driving: Stop. It would be very bad if the first onset were a blindspot that hid a pedestrian crossing the street — or a Miata changing lanes at high speed on the interstate.

Ocular-only migraines don’t have the traditional horrible headache and nausea; I had full-feature “classic” migraines like that when I was in my teens and twenties, but appeared to have outgrown them throughout grad school and my first teaching job.

The painless visual version started about 7 years ago, but rarely has happened more than a few times a year, until recently. Mine sometimes are accompanied by a slight aphasia and numbness. Other websites agree with what doctors have told me — that the dynamic visual effects put the whole thing in the “migraine, don’t worry unless they get worse, longer or more frequent…” category, not something more serious like a stroke or TIA.

(Knocking on wood again.)

Google offers data-analysis tools, liposuction for stats

Uses: Inspiration from washing machines, Rebecca Black

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

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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