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

Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady Journalist

Henrietta Stackpole, a foreign correspondent with “fewer illusions…”

For any hardcore English majors among my “portrayal of the journalist in film, fiction and popular culture” students, I should mention another great American novel with a newspaperwoman lurking in its pages: Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, which is conveniently discussed at great length in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

Alas, the journalist, “Henrietta Stackpole,” is not the lady of the title, and she doesn’t get much mention in Anthony Lane’s almost 5,000 word article, itself in response to a new book, Michael Gorra’s “Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece” (Liveright).

But Lane’s article may give students some ideas about writing about literature, as well as probably convincing them that Portrait of a Lady would be a lot to bite off as a two-week assignment in the middle of a broader course, even if it might be worth it just to meet Henrietta and ponder the life of a woman correspondent abroad 130 years ago.

They may be intrigued by Lane’s references to the journalist, at first comparing her to Isabel Archer, the title character:

“… her friend Henrietta Stackpole, an American reporter, who nourishes fewer illusions about European allure.”

… and, in a discussion of James’ Victorian sensibilities:

“When Henrietta heads off to see the Paris sights with a jovial bachelor named Bantling, and we hear that ‘they had breakfasted together, dined together, gone to the theatre together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived together,’ it is precisely in not knowing what they did together by night—whether they proceeded to feast in foodless ways upon each other—that one finds, as so often with James, a pleasurable ache of dissatisfaction.”

But if I catch any students turning a phrase like “feast in foodless ways upon each other,” now I’ll know where they stole it.

Lane also quotes Henrietta a trifle enigmatically:

“… consider Henrietta, the journalist in search of a topic, who admits to Isabel that ‘I should have delighted to do your uncle.’”

That tease (words do take on new shades of meaning over the years) may convince students that a 19th century novel might be a bit too risque for classroom discussion. But Henrietta is merely debating issues of privacy and publicity with Isabel, talking about painting word-pictures of people for her article, “Americans and Tudors.” Thanks to the searchable plain-text Project Gutenberg edition of the novel, here’s a  more complete quote:

“And I should have delighted to do your uncle, who seems to me a much nobler type — the American faithful still. He’s a grand old man; I don’t see how he can object to my paying him honour.”

Alas, Henrietta was entirely written out of the one radio adaptation of Portrait of a Lady that I’ve found (by NBC University Theater), but here it is, if you want to hear an hour of Jamesian prose…

I also haven’t seen the 1968 TV series or the 1994 film adaptations to see how much attention they paid to Henrietta. Mary-Louise Parker — pre-”Weeds” and “West Wing” — played her in the 1994 Portrait of a Lady, opposite Nicole Kidman as Isabel, but those reportorial spectacles were enough to inspire me to put her picture on this page, along with a YouTube clip of the movie trailer.

Meanwhile, my more general page about journalists in novels is over at my mostly-about-radio blog, under the subtitle “Books: The Truth with a Dragon Tattoo,” referring to the two novels most students read last year. Maybe I should move that whole page over here, since I already have my YouTube collection of films about journalists pages here.

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.

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

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.

What writing is…

The “quick Christmas break research project” that I began two and a half years ago keeps leading to new things, most of which I’m recording at my Newspaper Heroes on the Air site (jheroes.com for short), which is primarily about the golden age of radio drama, and how print journalists were portrayed on the radio. But some of the radio adventures I document there were based on movies, some on history books, biographies or novels, and some on movies that were based on books.

All of those themes will fit into my fall course on Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture. So I have gone from the early “research” of falling asleep listening to Superman, Green Hornet and Soldiers of the Press episodes to checking the film and print sources of the radio dramas,  watching the movies, reading the novels, paging through the histories and biographies, looking up the old newspaper stories, and once in a while finding a jewel of a quote like this:

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting,absorbing,exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
–Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, 1940, p.5

I guess that’s reason enough to my meandering train of thoughts spill over into this “Other Journalism” blog, making it more of a “my summer reading” discussion.  A Peculiar Treasure is an early autobiography by Ms. Ferber, an author I hadn’t read until a radio item led me to a movie, which led to one book, then another and another and another.

Ferber was born in 1885 and lived until 1968, almost 30 more years after deciding to turn introspective and write that biography… which touches on her ancestors’ lives in Hungary and Germany, her parents lives in Chicago, and her birth in “that faintly improbable-sounding town called Kalamazoo, Michigan.”

“… In that way perhaps I may be able to discover what I am doing at a typewriter in a penthouse apartment on top of a roof on Park Avenue, New York.”

The books, plays and movies that got her to that penthouse interest me, too, as do her reflections on being Jewish in early 20th century America, growing up with the publishing world in New York and the movie world of Hollywood. (She also wrote ShowBoat and Giant, among other less-newspaperish works.) But my main interest is journalism and the way journalists are portrayed in her books, in preparation for my  course in the fall. So my new summer reading is books by and about Edna Ferber. And I wasn’t surprised to find where her writing career began — although 17 was an earlier age than I expected:

“There never had been a woman reporter in Appleton. The town, broad-minded though it was, put me down as definitely cuckoo. Not crazy, but strange. Big-town newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Milwaukee Sentinel employed women on their editorial and reportorial staffs, but usually these were what is known as special or feature writers, or they conducted question-and-answer columns, advice to the lovelorn, society columns or woman’s pages. But at seventeen on the Appleton Crescent I found myself covering a regular news beat like any man reporter. I often was embarrassed, sometimes frightened, frequently offended and offensive, but I enjoyed it, and knowing what I know today I wouldn’t swap that year and a half of small town newspaper reporting for any four years of college education…. I learned how to sketch in human beings with a few rapid words, I learned to see, to observe to remember; learned, in short, the first rules of writing.”
–Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, 1940, p.103

My own starting point with Edna Ferber was a pair of radio adaptations of a movie made from one of her novels, part of my investigation of more than three dozen radio adaptations of movies with journalists in them. Even though the radio scripts of “Cimarron” were short on details, they  featured a fascinating “newspaper” couple: a gunslinger-lawyer-editor, and his semi-abandoned wife, who takes over the newspaper and builds a career that takes her to Congress.

They have the unlikely “frontier” names of  Yancey and Sabra Cravat, and you can hear the rather thin radio adaptation of the Cimarron story at jheroes.com. For the 1931 Academy Award winning film adaptation, you will have to look elsewhere — but don’t settle for the 1960 version, which strays far from Ferber’s original. I went from there to the original novel, which has much more to say about American myths and themes like race, region and “the frontier,” than either movie attempted. The tale of the film adaptations itself is fascinating, told in another book on my summer shelf, Edna Ferber’s Hollywood.

From there, a little biographical and  bibliographical searching easily uncovered the fact that Ferber started writing as a 17-year-old newspaper reporter, and that her first novel was also about a young woman with a newspaper job, Dawn O’Hara, the Girl Who Laughed, which is now out of copyright and available in free e-book and LibriVox audiobook editions.

My most recent discovery: Not only was Ferber a newspaper reporter before becoming a Pulitzer-winning novelist and playwright, now she has become a somewhat fictional creation herself! A gentleman named Ed Ifkovic has turned her into a character in a series of mystery novels that involve even more famous people she knew, or might have known. The cover of one has James Dean, one of the stars of the film adaptation of her book, Giant. Another features escape artist Harry Houdini, and is set back in Appleton, Wisc., where Ferber got her start as a reporter right out of high school. That, of course, got me curious and clicking on Google again…

Fiction? Here, from the Appleton Public Library’s Edna Ferber page, is the young Ms. Ferber’s 1904 interview with Houdini.

Step Away from the Mouse

Distracting the author -- from Twain's Editorial Wild Oats

Macintosh users may just yawn when Jane Wells of WordPress starts out her “Now More Than Ever: Just Write” essay with the demise of Internet Explorer’s old version, but she gets downright inspiring after that: WordPress (and Firefox and Google Chrome) now lets users break out of the confining window-in-a-window blog-style editing interface.

I’m using the new full-screen editor to write this, and it’s very cool. It’s especially good news to me, since I’m using WordPress to write my other blog — the one that might turn into a book someday, if I can avoid distractions this summer.

WordPress is even calling this the new distraction-free writing feature, so they’ve got my number! And the feature has its own support area and discussion forum, although that might be too much of a distraction.

It was a line on one of those linked pages that convinced me to try the new feature: “But once you let go of the mouse and get to writing, the real magic starts to happen.” The other convincer was the headline on Ms. Wells’ article.

The Paige Compositor, no mouse required

“JustWrite,” you see, was the name of a word processing program that I had some fun with about 25 years ago, during a brief foray into technical writing and public relations for a software company. JustWrite was a spin-off of the long-winded “Multimate Advantage Professional Word Processor.” Just shrinking the name of the product down to two syllables was an enormous, er, advantage.

Like MultiMate and this new WordPress feature (and the Paige Compositor, above), JustWrite could be operated entirely from the keyboard. I don’t remember whether it would  know what to do with a mouse if it saw one.  Like word processors of old, this WordPress fullscreen editor even knows to switch to italics when I hit command-I on the Macintosh. And to stop when I hit the key again. No mouse needed, until I decided to insert the woodcuts. I mean, “images.”

Actually, “JustWrite” began as something called “MultiMate Jr.” back when IBM was threatening the world with a little computer called the “PC Jr.” The computer had a wireless keyboard, but was a bomb (not “the bomb”), crippled so that it wouldn’t replace business PCs, and it was cancelled.

Driving the editor to distraction -- from Twain's Editorial Wild Oats

So was our neat little word processing program, and the cancellation cost some very creative technical writers their jobs. (I think the programmers just switched to adding features to already bloated MultiMate.) But I loved the first draft of the how-to book, which was never published: Someone on the “Jr.” team had the wonderful idea of basing a kids’ word processing tutorial on the works of Mark Twain, using lots of his early references to using a typewriter as well as bits from stories kids had read in school.

I forget whether they used anything about his losing his shirt on investments in an early typesetting machine — a masterpiece with 18,000 parts. He, if not the Multimate Jr. documentation team, might have appreciated the irony.

A year or two later, the renamed and re-branded JustWrite, now an “entry-level” word processor aimed at adults, still didn’t do much better than Multimate Jr. It “shipped,” minus the Twain-centric manual, but it was cancelled within a year. A company full of Silicon Valley hubris bought our modest Connecticut outfit and made it a less fun place to work. Soon after, I retreated back to grad school to explore something called “hypertext.”

As for Twain’s problems with technology, the evidence is still there, at The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, right over the river from East Hartford, former home of MultiMate International.

The Twain House preserved the last of the Paige Compositors, which its website calls the “typesetting machine that drove the family to the brink of bankruptcy, forcing them to leave their Hartford home.”

It also has Twain’s 1904 billiard table. Sometimes, I guess, even the best writers need some distraction.

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Footnote: If you need some distraction, read some of the things Twain had to say about journalism in his Editorial Wild Oats, now preserved by Project Gutenberg in a variety of formats. It’s the source of the two images above.