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

Happy New Year, eventually

Ouch! I can’t believe I let December go by without a single blog post here!

The good news (and my excuse) is that I’ve been adding new content at JHeroes.com (Newspapers heroes on the air), my delicious.com/bstepno bookmarks, and Twitter/bobstep, as well as updating the more than a dozen journalist film pages on this site. (See the menu at top of page and in Thanksgiving break item below.) Next on the agenda, updating my course pages and home page, which has just moved to a new host.

The other excuse is that I’ve had a cold since Christmas Eve, although it didn’t keep me from 18 hours on the road for a family visit. But that’s a terrible excuse, which gets to the other good news: Doug Thompson is back at BlueRidgeMuse.com, having survived much more than a cold! (Scroll down to see my November item about his near-fatal motorcycle accident. Better yet, just go read his version.)

Info overload: Web journalism tools and events

I’ve been spending more time in Twitter — and reading Web pages linked to it — than I have in my blog lately, but even among my own students I think Twitter and this blog are reaching slightly different audiences.

So, for the information starved — or information-overload-starved — here is an aggregation of major things that have been distracting me in tweetland for the past few days.

Most of them were mentioned by participants in the Online News Association meeting in San Francisco and/or the Society of Professional Journalists “Excellence in Journalism” conference in Florida. For a hint of how much tweeting has been going on, see this SPJ Storify Page of EIJ12 tweets and the ONA tweets list of ONA12 Awards.

Next, a PBS video, parts of which sound like things I’ve been saying in my intro Web production class this semester. It’s here so that I can play it in class if I need to catch my breath.

It’s being discussed at lots of blogs, and the discussion comments may be informative. I’ll keep the URLs visible so that you can see where they are coming from:
http://www.pbs.org/arts/gallery/off-book-%7C-season-two/offbook-webdesign/
http://www.zeldman.com/2012/09/21/pbs-off-book-video-the-art-of-web-design/
http://boingboing.net/2012/09/20/the-art-of-web-design-video.html
http://gizmodo.com/5945138/the-art-of-web-design-explained
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/22/3372276/pbs-off-book-web-design-art

Two tools or topics that I really do want to catch up with, because they may help journalists (or journalism consumers) keep on top of a firehose of news information. “Spunge” discussion at one or both conferences reminded me that I’ve lost track of something with a similar goal, Dave Winer’s OPML editor and River of News project.

The other links below will have to stand for themselves with very little introduction… while I go look for the bottle of eyedrops and a 10-page to-do list hidden somewhere in the rubble here at home.

Spunge:
http://blog.spundge.com/post/31984648190/a-bloomberg-terminal-for-journalists
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/09/first-look-spundge-is-software-to-help-journalists-to-manage-real-time-data-streams/
http://davidhiggerson.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/spundge-a-tool-all-journalists-should-try-and-10-ways-to-use-it/

Dave Winer’s OPML Editor, News Rivers and Outline Comments:
(Dave mentioned in Twitter that it only would take 10 minutes to give the new tool a try. He was right. Very neat outline commenting; will have to see how it couples with news-rivering.)
http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/september/aTestOfOutlineComments
http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=dave
http://river2.newsriver.org/
http://quick.newsriver.org/
http://home.opml.org/
http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/september/anOpenNoteToDoc

Social Media tips from Liz Heron (WSJ, formerly with NYT, ABC, Washington Post):
http://newsroom.journalists.org/2012/09/22/q-and-a-with-liz-heron-on-her-share-worthy-strategies/

Internet energy explored by the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?hp

How to be a journalism student — a wiki:
http://howtobeajournalismstudent.pbworks.com/w/page/19612154/FrontPage

The bad news: Gallup reports distrust in media
http://www.gallup.com/poll/157589/distrust-media-hits-new-high.aspx?utm_source=google&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=syndication

Closer to home, a documentary film maker will be in town talking about her latest in a free event at Blacksburg’s Lyric Theatre:
http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2012/09/091712-sopac-detropia.html

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”).

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.

Full frontal nudity in a journalism faculty discussion

That’s what you might call a misleading sensational headline, but you are still reading.

The topic is a serious one: A North Carolina university’s dismissal of its student newspaper adviser over a story that might otherwise just sound like 1970s  nostalgia. A couple of months ago, the paper published photos of a streaker at a fall football game. Autumn leaves or not, the editors didn’t do any “digital fig-leafing” of the images.

Of course the university can’t comment on the details of a personnel matter, but the Student Press Law Center quickly came to the defense of adviser Paul Isom. (His position, incidentally, reported to a marketing and publicity official at the university, not to the journalism faculty.)

“They’re clearly punishing the adviser for something he not only didn’t control, but legally couldn’t control,” Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said.

The SPLC alert prompted a robust discussion by journalism faculty on an Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication mailing list — more than 30 messages in 24 hours, during a semester break. Professors addressed topics including the independence of student newspapers, community standards regarding nudity, the sensitivities of college administrators and public relations departments, and the responsibilities of student media advisers — as well as a need for student media advisers to get both their rights and responsibilities spelled out in advance.

You do not need to be a member to read the discussion here:

http://aejmc.net/pipermail/news-list_aejmc.net/2012-January/thread.html

I hope sharing the story with my intro class this semester will help me do a better job of addressing issues of sensitivity, diversity, community standards, taste and “responsibility.” Those issues aren’t just for editors-in-chief anymore, not when anyone can register a WordPress.com account like this one and start “publishing” to the world.

Along with my advice about “acting responsibly,” deciding whatever that means, I’ll also point out that student editors have a First Amendment right to ignore their advisers — but that they should be wise enough to listen, discuss and make thoughtful, informed decisions. For example, I wonder how many student publications have drafted their own editorial guidelines about possibly offensive images or language? I wonder if those guidelines were written when the publication’s audience was just on-campus, not a Web-published edition available to anyone in the world?

There might even be a nice research paper topic there for a grad student or two.

For inspiration, I’d point students to the ethics-related pages at: SPJ, SPLC and its FACT team, RTDNA and NPPA, and the College Media Association, including its page for advisers.

For the recent specific case, here are additional news reports mentioned in the journalism faculty discussion:

• http://theeastcarolinian.com/ (The school paper itself)
• http://theeastcarolinian.com/?p=2633 University fires student media director
• Greenville Daily Reflector
• WNCT.com Adviser Fired story
• WITN.com Adviser Fired story
• Raleigh News & Observer story (includes interview with adviser… N&O story has legs: Boston Herald)
• ScholarsAndRogues.com post by Denny Wilkins of St. Bonaventure, with its own discussion thread.
• Streaker isn’t college’s greatest embarrassment — by Gene Policinski, senior vice president/executive director, First Amendment Center, Nashville.

Nostalgic footnote: The first time I was on a television “Face the State” panel, it  was as education editor of The Hartford Courant, and the newsmaker was the relatively new president of the University of Connecticut, Glenn W. Ferguson. Between questions about political influence and university budget cuts, I threw in one about the Yale Daily News acknowledging that UConn led Yale in streaking that year. I thought his response — something about looking forward to Yale’s recognizing UConn’s excellence in other areas — was his best remark that day.

End of semester links for students who follow my blogs

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.

WordPress YouTube ad surprise

The video-player link at the bottom is an ad, not part of my article.

WordPress.com has made it very easy to post YouTube videos, a feature I’ve used a lot. (See the Video and WP Tips menu items above.)

However, I’ve just discovered that WordPress.com, is also embedding YouTube video ads in my pages. I knew that new visitors sometimes would see clearly marked text ads at the end of blog posts, but I don’t like the fact that these video ads are indistinguishable from the content of the page.

Since they are not shown to logged-in users, I never see them. But today I visited my Newspaper Heroes on the Air (jheroes.com) blog using an old laptop, and discovered an unrelated YouTube video at the bottom of the page — looking just like the embedded videos I sometimes use as part of blog items.

I can make all of the ads go away by paying WordPress.com an annual fee, and that’s probably what I’ll do — as soon as I balance my budget for the year. I’ve read the original terms of service for using WordPress, but only remembered a reference to “We very occassionally show Adsense (contextual text ads) on post and tag pages.” Unlike text ads I had seen, the video (or graphics) not only look like part of my “content,” they also slowed down the loading of pages on that old laptop.

If you know of a WordPress page or forum discussing this YouTube ad policy — Is it new? — please add a comment below.

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.

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.)