Spoken like a true AP vet

I didn't have nearly as long at the AP (18 years) as Richard Pyle (49), but a lot of memories come flooding back of what a rocking place it was to work, starting with Pyle's first response to Dana Kennedy's asking him to "wax romantic" on the occasion of his and about 100 others' departure as the AP cleans out its veterans:

Oh, Christ, I don't have time. I'm up to my ass in trying to retire. It's very difficult, all the bullshit and bureaucracy, it's the worst part of it.

Meanwhile, AP's PR man, Paul Colford, says of the recent round of buyouts:

"No doubt yesterday was an unusual day at AP, with so many veteran colleagues leaving at once."

Way to go, Paul.

----
A couple of other great quotes from the Pyle interview that I identify with:

I once heard the AP described as the Marine Corps of journalism. You know, we take the beach and then everyone else comes in with the heavy artillery -- and we're in there to the bitter end as well.

I never felt office politics was a big issue. Every place I worked in the AP, the focus seemed to be on doing the job.

There's so much emphasis on celebrity coverage, even at the AP. I don't even like the word celebrity. I don't know what the hell that word means. It's disappointing. There's been a decline in standards and this new attitude about covering the news as opinion. Nobody should give a rat's ass about a reporter's opinion.

Twitter - angst over 'is it journalism'

In "The Trouble with Twitter," her angst-filled essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Melissa Hart perfectly illustrates the debate, the angst -- and, frankly, the disconnect of not understanding that everything need not be a "story."

Until we get past this little hangup, I'm afraid that journalism/journalists just risk being deemed even more anachronistic and, ultimately, irrelevant.

A few months ago, I sat across a cafe table from a local newspaper editor and watched the bewilderment on his face as he told me how the Internet has altered print journalism at his own paper. Recently some of its readers complained when they heard through word of mouth about a car accident in town but couldn't find updates on the newspaper's Web site. "We told them they had to wait until we'd investigated and could post a full report," he said, "and they demanded to know why we couldn't just Twitter the information right then." The answer, of course, is that 140 characters gives reporters just enough room to note who, what, where, why, and how in the most basic terms. That may be news, but it's not a news story.

Exactly. Or as the audience might say to Hart and this editor: "Can you hear us now?" Some things will simply be "news." They won't be "news story." The 5W's and H may be all that's needed by your audience (and absent your finding out some major new development - such as it was the mayor in the car). Those cases are the ones ripe for database journalism.

Why do we have so much trouble getting our heads around the idea that you use the best tool for the job you need to do? If you want a hole, use a drill, not a screwdriver. Other businesses get it. Why do journalists continue to cling to the idea that all they have is a screwdriver? The problem with that, of course, to continue the metaphor, is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thus, to too many journalists, everything has to look like a "story," instead of acknowledging that much of what they do is not story but factual exposition, and maybe if they stripped those factual expositions down, they'd actually have time to do stories -- you know, those things that people really do like to read, with natural, not forced, beginnings, middles and ends, and usually with some kind of complication and resolution that gives insight to the human condition or is just a "good read."

This unthinking fealty to "story" is illustrated still further in the next graf of Hart's piece:

"We're talking about laying people off," the editor added, "but hiring a full-time Internet reporter. And that person will Twitter."

Well, d'uh. Anyone think of trying to take one of those layoffs and train them to be a well-balanced journalist, one who knows when to Tweet and one who knows when to lay on the words. Why does there need to be this forced disconnect, emphasized by the artifice of having to hire an "Internet reporter"?

I worry that microblogging cheats my students out of their trump card: a mindful attention to the subject in front of them, so that they can capture its sights and sounds, its smells and tactile qualities, to share with readers. How can Twittering stories from laptops and phones possibly replace the attentive journalist who tucks a digital recorder artfully under a notepad, pencil behind one ear, and gives full attention to the subject at hand?

Well, that would be where you, as the professor, come in. The only way it cheats them of anything is if you let it. Instead, teach them when microblogging is advantageous and when it gets in the way and is downright rude. I suppose some j-profs were saying the same thing when the dastardly tape recorder meant they no longer had to concentrate on writing all that stuff down because everyone knows you pay better attention when you write it down, right. Or when the telephone came along because ... oh, you get the idea.

Still, as a method for reporting the news, Twitter strikes me as ridiculous. It begs the question: What is news? Is it a stark factual sentence, or a well-crafted story steeped in sensory details, heavily dependent on the reporter's presence at the scene?

Hmmm, a non-question. Both have a place. You could even argue that one is "news" and the other "journalism. " You could, but it'd be a waste of time. (We'll leave for another time the debate about "begs the question" from a j-prof.)

Journalism is not a zero-sum game. It's not if you do one, you can't do the other. You do whichever is best for the circumstances at hand -- and sometimes you do both - or more.

If it's true that writers read in the genres they most enjoy crafting, then give me a painstakingly crafted investigative piece any day—a provocative story that challenges the reader to accompany the reporter on a path from question to revelation. Give me The Boston Globe's Michael Paulson and his incisive coverage of the election of the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. Give me Sonia Nazario's heartbreaking series on a Honduran boy's illegal journey to the United States, printed in the Los Angeles Times.

Likely I'm being woefully short-sighted in my response to reporting via Twitter. Perhaps a news article really can be crafted, haikulike, in 140 characters.

My hat is off to those who can do it. I just don't want to read it.

So don't. It doesn't meet your needs. It meets others' needs. And, no, a news article can't be crafted in 140 characters because it is not a news article! It is a Tweet. Nothing more, nothing less. A basic version of the facts. Stop confounding the two.

Kudos to Hart on one thing - her digital photo scavenger hunt where students had to go into a neighborhood, take a series of pictures and actually talk to people to learn about them and their concerns. It was the right tool for the right time and purpose. See, that isn't so hard, is it?

Quick Hits 2 - More on AP, Emergency Mail on Twitter

More on the AP: One observer is less than impressed with AP's proposed technology to keep track of where it stories are being used. Says it's easily crackable. One of the reasons I wish folks would stop referring to it as digital rights management. Far from it.

I'd be a bit more concerned about AP's use of Attributor and its usage-tracing technology. One of Atributor's services is Fair Share, which basically compares text in your stories with others online and alerts you when it finds matches. Interesting thing - I've had some brief access to a newspaper's Fair Share account (with the paper's permission). All it's shown me so far is that too many news outlets are cutting and pasting the same stuff from the same news releases.
Maybe we should worry more about that and about boring our readers to death than about some two-bit spam site hoisting the headlines and summaries.

(This would be an interesting research study if a paper would set up a Fair Share account and give you access to its feed.)

Emergencyemail.org: I have always kept a subscription to this site. Not that it sends out that much or is overly timely, but during hurricane season, health scares, etc., it does do a pretty good job of getting the stuff from the horse's mouth to my e-mail. (You might consider it if you like getting such stuff on your mobile device.) Now, it's also on Twitter, though not with the local selectivity of the e-mail alerts.

Quick Hits - "they" and Google Voice

Nice piece in the NY Times Magazine this weekend on how "they" is becoming accepted as the gender-neutral pronoun with words like "everybody." I'm still not ready, however, to accept it as the pronoun for most organizations, companies and the like.

ust got my Google Voice account I love it. You should consider it if you have multiple phones and hard to get, but have calls you don't want to miss.

AP Style - down payment

Latest AP style update: "down payment" as two words.

(That's also the style about 10-1 when searched on Google. But I note a fair number of businesses using the one-word form, so this could be in flux before long.)

Sports news cutbacks

Just reading Street & Smith's lengthy report last week on the cutbacks in sports news coverage at daily papers.

It saddens me, as do cutbacks in journalism everywhere. But you're going to have to pardon me if I don't tear up. If it's a choice between sending yet another reporter on the road to the All-Star game or the Superbowl, or even, as the report notes, along with a team on a road trip ... and preserving a position that will ferret out wrongdoing at City Hall, I've gotta go with City Hall.

I know sports is NOT "just" about games. And I don't want to see sports coverage end. But I find myself these days reading pretty much just the analytical stuff. The rest I've gotten online or on TV.

Yes, traveling with the team can help analytical reporting. But there are a lot of political reporters who don't always travel with the candidates or office-holders and still do a pretty good job of it. Besides, looked closely at the type and amount of advertising in many sports sections these days? It was shrinking even before the bottom fell out of the industry.

Get your AP - direct

There is, as expected, lots of bluster and a few good points around the blogs today on AP's introduction of its digital rights management plan, especially AP head Tom Curley's quote in the Times that suggests the wire service will expect some kind of toll for even using a headline and linking. (Get a slightly different take on this from CJR.)

If nothing else, ya gotta love the graphic (nice use of metaphor and symbolism with that box there).


Among all the bluff and bluster are some references to AP's lack of a "home" news site (as opposed to the corporate site), largely ascribed to its members' desires to keep any traffic to AP copy on their own sites.

Not so.

AP has a home site (buried inside AP.org) on which it even sells some ads (I'm not sure the AP is actually selling those; it's as likely they are remnant inventory, but still, I wonder if there's any money coming in.) There are even RSS feeds.

Why don't you hear much about it? Well, yes, in part it is that member thing. But it's worth keeping the record straight and knowing it's there.

Local news value = 0? Not exactly, but ...

Vin Crosbie, who like Clay Shirky has a pettty good track record with his observations and predictions, is out with a column on Click-Z that suggests local news as it is practiced now has little value to the local audience.

Now, pay attention to the italics. Shirky isn't arguing that components of local news aren't important, but that the way we present them are. Essentially, as I read it, he's taking the path forged by Adrian Holovaty, Dan Conover and others who say the story as the building block is much of the problem -- that when it comes to the "factual expositions" we tend to do as "story," all people really want is the data, the info (as Holovaty's Everyblock tries to present it, or Pegasus News in Dallas).

Crosbie kind of buries the lede in his last graf:

Investigative stories are worthy and always need to be done, but newspapers and local news broadcasters must first give people comprehensive information and data -- including access to all the source data, be that the town government's reports or each restaurant's daily menu. Only then should local journalists consider writing stories.

I think we are coming to a serious crossroads on this, and this also means a serious crossroads in journalism education -- and, frankly, I'm not sure how we approach it.

J-education (as is journalism in general) is much too tied to "writing." In that it sends the wrong message -- that it's all about writing, when it isn't. What distinguishes journalism is that it's all about gathering and hunting and finding out -- and then wanting to tell people about it. Yet, what is the first real "skill" class most students get? Writing. And so we send that signal, that it's all about writing. And then others say, well, we do writing, too, so it can't be that hard. And then off we go into all the debates.

(BTW, I would debate whether writing is a "skill" as we really tend to use the word -- I think it's much more than that -- but that's for another time.)

Most journalism schools are not set up to teach a truly data-driven form of journalism. I don't know if they ever will be. It requires some finesse to teach a dual-track (or perhaps better described as a "crossover") discipline - when to do data and when to do story-- at least as accreditation standards and hours limitations currently exist.

Interestingly enough, it seems that more people examining and commenting on journalism, its business models, etc., are coming roundabout to the same conclusion. Michael Shapiro, for instance, in his comprehensive look at the free/paid debate so far for Columbia Journalism Review, suggests that what we might be able to sell are those turn-of-the-screw, process details we have largely eschewed in journalism in the past three decades in favor of "story" (only most of those attempts still were not the kind of "story" Crosbie refers to). The process is what has value to a select group of people who have to react to every change.

And Holovaty and others repeatedly have said that what we really are collecting daily is a large database - auto accidents, births, deaths, zoning disputes, crimes. The sorts of things that, say, lawyers might be willing to pay for as they prospect for clients.

You may or may not shudder at that as unsavory, but I suspect we'll have to confront the reality before long.

Report from the field - humbled by layoffs

A few months ago, one of my former students was going through a rough time. The person had been laid off twice and was going through those self-worth questions that become so common. At the time, I asked this former student to write about the experience for this blog, partly to help as therapy. I held onto it for a bit, and then it slipped into the e-mail abyss.

I found it again today and reread it, and I think it's worth posting as putting a human face on what has happened in our industry.

Only, to this story there is a happy ending - at least for now. The person has gotten another job at a newspaper. Both of us are keeping our fingers crossed ...

Layoffs are a humbling experience. I’ve been through two within three months.

The first time was a shock. I moved back to my beloved hometown with my first management job in hand and stars in my eyes. This was the prime opportunity I had been looking for to come home and to move up a notch in the journalism food chain. I left a recently purchased home and friends I’d made in my five years elsewhere in the state. I was well aware of the state of the industry, but I was hoping that I’d maybe dodged a bullet.

Not so much: After eight months, I was laid off. Profitability was the reason I was given. Trust me, had I known they were considering cuts, I wouldn’t have bothered trying for a year and a half to get that job.

I was unemployed for two months – the longest I have ever gone without a job. I learned about unemployment insurance, and I watched helplessly as the governor decried the situation at the state’s unemployment commission. I thought to myself as I filled out my unemployment papers, "How am I going to feed my family? It’s not like jobs are falling off trees these days." Every day was the same old grind: Get up, search for jobs online, fix lunch, continue search for jobs, eat dinner and work on a newsletter I put out on the side. On Mondays the routine changed a little: I would apply for my unemployment. Otherwise, that’s what I did for the two months I wasn’t working.

Weeks went by; Thanksgiving and Christmas passed me by, and the days started running together. I talked to friends and mentors in the industry to let them know my status.

About that time I saw an opening for a job in Georgia. I jumped at the opportunity, and I got the job. I enjoyed getting back to work. But the industry's woes followed me. Nearly six weeks after I began working, I was laid off again. I’d just signed my benefits statement, and my spouse and I were looking at apartments.

Layoffs are part of the landscape for the foreseeable future. It’s a way of life now for me, and after two I’m starting to wonder about my worth as a worker. At 27, I’m living at home with my parent and spouse, but I have a four-year degree. There is something wrong with that picture. For work I have options. I can stay in the industry and try again because of my relative young age, or I can go back to school for something else and get out of the industry altogether.

I love journalism, and copy editing is all I have ever done since graduating. I was impressed enough with the field to try to do it for a living six years ago, and I wish that I could stay in it. I just don’t know if I can with the dire situation that we as a people are in right now. South Carolina is ranked third in the nation in unemployment, and judging by the number of people I saw while reapplying for my benefits, I think it’s safe to say we’re in a lot of trouble. I can’t speak for the newspapers in the state, but there aren’t jobs literally falling off trees in South Carolina.

Right now, I’m taking it day by day and putting my name out in the open to see what jobs I can scrounge together. With some luck I will be able to stay in my hometown, but I’m not opposed to moving. Rather, I’m opposed to remaining out of work.

AP style updates - AA and GED

AP has added a couple of entries to its stylebook (they're there if you have the online version; you'll have to write them into your hard copy):

GED: A trademark abbreviation for General Educational Development Tests, a battery of five exams designed by the American Council on Education to measure high school equivalency. GED should be used as an adjective, not as a noun. Those passing the tests earn a GED diploma or certificate, not a GED.

Alcoholics Anonymous: AA is acceptable on second reference. Except for legal or official references, in accordance with the organization's policy use only first names and first initials of last names when identifying members in stories. Joe S. or Jane D.

I'm especially happy to see the GED one, for it settles lots of disputes about what GED means (I've heard "general equivalency degree" and "general education degree" among others during my years in newsrooms.) However, I think the AP is spitting in the wind by proscribing the use of GED as a noun (though to be intellectually honest, it generally has to do so once it acknowledges something is a trademark). The use of GED as a noun ("he has a GED") is so ingrained in our language, I can't imagine most editors objecting.

As forAA, it does open some interesting discussion. For instance, say another organization came along and wanted its members identified only by last names. Would we do it? Well, possibly if we judged the organization to be "pure" enough in spirit and objective (c'mon, folks, journalists have a long history of bending the rules based on those kinds of judgments). But that then starts us toward the discussion on where the line is and who draws it.

So what is your value proposition?

Two articles out this past week should be read carefully and together. And then, if you are in the "we've got to charge readers online" camp, step back and brutally ask yourself, "Are we really producing anything they'd want to buy?"

To me, that is the biggest point to take away from Mark Shapiro's "Open for Business," a lengthy and useful reprise of the free vs. paid debate in this month's Columbia Journalism Review. In another fascinating case of online turning things around 180 degrees, Shapiro posits at the end that, perhaps, all that "process" news that newsrooms have been running away from might actually be the stuff you can charge for.

What seems clear is that mere geography simply isn't enough. I've spent the summer in the newsroom of a small community daily, and I think if a hard look was taken at the daily content, little of it would entice a wooden nickel from most of its readers. As might be expected, much of the daily news agenda is driven by news releases, police reports, news conferences and similar events. The paper is worried about TV stations in a nearby city stealing its thunder, yet these are precisely the things on which it is easy to do so.

Follow Shapiro's with a piece at Paid Content from Bill Grueskin, former Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor and ME at WSJ.com. Gureskin argues that all this jabbering over aggregatgors like Google obscures the real problem. What is it? Well, here's his punch line:

News sites are in a heap of trouble these days, and it’s tempting to see aggregators, bloggers and other third-party sites as the villains. It’s also possible to see them as the saviors, for the users they can send to a site.

In fact, until publishers and editors figure out how to identify and engage their readers and make money off of that traffic, aggregators are more a distraction from the real crisis than the cause of it.

In other words, dear newsrooms, little of what you are doing has a value proposition for your readers. Yeah, those are tough words to hear - and I've said them enough, too. And, as Shapiro kind of glances by in his piece, they raise tough philosophical questions, such as if my newsroom can't do it all, what does it stop doing? Put another way -- Whom do we leave out, which some scholars would rephrase as whom do you marginalize? (Famously expressed by Tuchman in one aspect as the "symbolic annihilation of women.")

Mark Potts also takes up the idea:

Think newspapers are full of unique content? Well, sit down some day with a copy of just about any paper and circle what's truly unique and unavailable anywhere else. The result isn't pretty. Do the same thing with the paper's Web site, and you quickly realize that the problem is compounded by presentation that just isn't very compelling, to put it charitably.

Police scanners online

Yet another tool: Shoutcast has eight pages of police scanner channels you can monitor.

Newsrooms note: Using social media to help you

Working with a small daily this summer, and we were talking about maybe changes in timing of back to school and holiday shopping, which could affect when to do the traditional tab, sales timing, maybe try some new stuff online, etc.

In typical fashion for a news org, the speculation and anecdote began around the table (you know, the old "editor's gut" way of doing things).

The paper has a Facebook page and Twitter. So as a practical example of thinking about and using social media/wisdom of crowds, I said, use your audience.

Because I can pay a bit more attention to it, I am doing it here, on my Facebook page, and in a poll on another site.

So let me ask. This year for holiday shopping are you:

-- Planning to shop at the normal time (mostly Oct/Nov/Dec.)
-- Already shopping looking for deals
-- Going to let the deals determine when I shop
-- Waiting till last-minute, hoping for deals
-- Not shopping at all; can't afford it

Answers in comments, if you would.

And an early happy holidays!

Quick hits

Good post by Jim Spanfeller, president and CEO of Forbes at Paid Content: What the Future Will Look Like for Journalists.

I kind of like the term "entwined content" -- stories told in prose, video and data at the same time. Maybe he's been using it, but I hadn't heard it.

And David Sullivan has aroused from his blogging nap to put up another good post at "That's The Press, Baby":

The problem is that where we are is incoherent regardless of whether it's print or online or cellular or whatever. Department stores became incoherent in the late 1980s when no one could figure out what they really were about (selection? price? service?). Trying to adapt to a new world, newspapers cannot figure out what they are.

Read 'em and retch

The rash of e-mails about S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford's disappearance have been released. Among them are some media missives that will make you retch.

http://media.charleston.net/2009/pdf/govstaffemails_0713009.pdf

It runs almost 600 pages and 11MB.

Among my favorites is David Gregory of "Meet the Press": So coming on Meet the Press lets you frame the conversation how you really want to ... and then move on.

And Micael Ryan, editorial page editor of the Augusta Chronicle: Y'all are making it tough on those of us who support the governor.

Audience in investigations

One of my former students, Mary Hartney, who now is at the Baltimore Sun, helped put together this presentation on getting your audience involved in your journalism.

Some of this is common sense, but there are some new apps in here I hadn't heard of. I love new toys.

All Shirky, all the time

OK, I can't help it if I keep pointing out stuff by Clay Shirky. He keeps explaining, as clearly as anyone, what is happening in journalism.

His latest on the Cato Web site, has these key points (I also recommend checking back to see the responses scheduled later this month from Phil Meyer, Paul Starr and Steve Yelvington). The key points:

• Journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it’s also about assembling a public to read and react to those stories. A public is not merely an audience.
• Journalism written for that fraction of the population that follows the news closely has always been subsidized. For the last century, newspaper journalism had direct subsidy from advertisement and cross-subsidy from sports fans and coupon clippers who never really cared about the city council or the coup in Madagascar. The packages containing news have been so bundled and cross-funded that we’ve never really known precisely the size of the audience for actual civic-minded reporting, or how much direct fees from that audience would amount to.
• This leads to the second change in subsidy: high leverage in having a small number of professionals vet, edit, and shape that raw material.
• The ability to get out of the “phone call” model of reporting — one paid journalist talking to one source at a time — and to instead bring in everything the internet has taught us about automation, syndication, parallel effort, and decentralization will increasingly characterize successful new models of journalism.

If you're into video, here are two recorded talks by Shirky that help untangle social media and its effects and opportunities for journalism. The second one, which is actually a 2005 talk, is especially good for journalists to pay attention to.

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

Philanthropy and Journalism

There's been a fair amount of talk about philanthropic models for journalism. But I found this talk on TED* by Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, to be insightful in another way; in defining the challenges facing philanthropy, she also nicely defines a lot of the challenges facing journalism.

It's only 12 minutes. Take some time to and consider her five part framework:

Closed vs. open
Small vs. big
Slow vs. fast
Fragmented vs. connected
Short vs. long

and its implications for the communications business, and, specifically, journalism. So how do we get there?

(*The nice thing about having people who are smarter than you are but share your name is that they sometimes point to really neat things when that Google Alert on your name pops up to their blog. So thanks to Doug Fisher, a computer science prof at Vanderbilt who I have followed all these years, for the pointer.)

AP style update - bondholder

A quick AP style update. The wire service now says bondholder as one word is the preferred form.

In case that was troubling you ...

Doug

New microformat markup for news

Worth paying attention to ...

The AP, Media Standards Trust and some others are pushing for a new microformat markup scheme for online news sites stories that would provide a fair bit of new information about each item.

This would include more precise dating and location information, what republication rights are associated with the story, and a "statement of news principles" under which it was published (though the slideshow example on the Media Trust site (eighth slide in) seems pretty lame, such as "it isn't plagiarised," "the quotes aren't made up" and "there is no direct conflict of interest" - gee, ya think so?).

Part of the point of all this is that Google is now supporting the microformats in its search results.

Media Trust has a full site dedicated to this at Value Added News, complete with an example of how it can operate in copy (hint, lots of "span" tags). The hNews specification is built off hAtom, which itself is built off the Atom version of newsfeeds.

(Which then raises a question in my mind - since many news orgs use RSS and not Atom, is there a problem here? Help me out, folks. This is beyond my technical expertise.)

Things are still in development. But the question to me is how do you implement this in smaller newsrooms? Are their editorial systems up to this? Certainly, staffs are going to need a quick way to input only the minimal amount of such information, with as much as possible machine generated. This may be fine for big organizations like AP and Media Trust, but I'd like to see more discussion about how it might be implemented in community news organizations -- and that needs to be in the kind of nontechnical language that harried managers and editors in those organizations can digest quickly.

Reuters style online

Reuters now has put its stylebook online.

Dean Wright, the global editor for ethics, innovation and news standards, says, among other things, that it's an effort at transparency.

For the "no-link" crowd, something to consider

Simon Owens found one of his posts promoted to the front page of Huffington Post this week, and suddenly the unique visitors to his Bloggasm blog were coming in by the boatload.

It's a good, if not empirically rigorous, example of the idea that the Web is, well, a web, and part of the way things work is that you get to link to me and me to you -- and we both benefit.

This, of course, is not the way Judge Richard Posner and some media folks see it -- they would rather bottle things up, at least initially, so that news organizations retain the "exclusive." The logical problem is that people are less likely to link to you (as they are with the Wall Street Journal, which puts its paywall up to direct links, but does allow a Google workaround). And then they are less likely to find you while others find a way to paraphrase or write around your material.

So you are left with the "long tail" Chris Anderson has written about. The problem there is that the long tail is about pennies. The dollars are in the here and now, and they are very fleeting.

Social media advice for newsrooms

Dan Honigman has some excellent, practical advice at his Old Media, New Tricks blog about how newsrooms should approach -- and interact with -- social media.

It's not just the same old stuff that essentially boils down to "ya gotta be there" without a lot of practical tips about what to do once you are there - or how to prepare for getting there.

One of the things I love: [B]efore you put your news organization out there, it’s good to have a game plan. It’s not only enough to figure out who will be the front man for your newspaper, Web site or broadcast site in social media, you must first figure out:

- Voice
- Content
- How to interact
- Touch points across your organization

Read it. There will be a test.

Earl Finckle - Mr. Weather - dies

When I worked at WOWO, Earl Finckle, who died this past Friday, was the voice of weather. His slightly raspy, down-home voice fit right in at the station, which pumped his forecasts out across the Midwest and near South with its 50,000 watts.

Listeners didn't seem to care that Earl wasn't in Fort Wayne -- or most of the other cities where he was the voice of "the weather." Or that sometimes the telephone line noise almost drowned him out. More often than not, when people in Fort Wayne talked about the weather, I remember hearing back, "What does Earl say?"

His Central Weather Service was in Chicago, and there's something right with the karma there -- the city of broad shoulders was home to the man on whose intellectual shoulders rested many the fortunes of farmers, pilots, and just plain folk wanting to know if it was OK to go to the lake.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Finckle died Friday in Highland Park Hospital. He was 81.

You'll find several snippets from his forecasts on the airchecks on the WOWO history site.

It's a reminder that no matter how many computers, databases, interconnected networks and flashy green-screen graphics, one of the most powerful forces has always been a person's judgment to make sense of it all and personality to make us listen, read or watch.

Thank you, Earl, for reminding us of that day after day, even though we didn't know it at the time.

How not to do PR - Sanford-Palin style

We've already seen the shambles that has been S.C. Gov Mark Sanford's revelations ad nauseam about his Argentinian affair.

And then there was the rambling news conference by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin saying she would step down because she's a lame duck -- a news conference that kept the pundits atwitter all Independence Day weekend.

Now, Palin's lawyer is out with a letter threatening legal action against anyone who writes about the allegation that Palin is under federal investigation in connection with her involvement, whatever it might have or might not have been, in construction of the Wasilla Sports Complex while she was mayor.

As Politico notes: Still, the decision to issue a public statement reciting all the facts in the case now all but ensures that there will be mainstream media accounts of the situation.

Who exactly is advising these folks? Have the Republicans opened a whole new PR agency, Bumble, Fumble and Stumble LLC? First rule of "crisis" management -- and this is a form of crisis -- don't give anyone an opening to keep talking about the stuff you don't want them to keep talking about.

Instead, with this letter, Palin's lawyer now invites everyone to comment on it and, in the process, spotlight the supposedly defamatory information.

The late Molly Ivins famously said about newspapers that it wasn't their dying that angered here, "it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off."

Ivins was no friend of the GOP, but one could imagine her trotting out that line to characterize the Republicans were she still alive.

AP style - car pool vs. carpool

Your new 2009 AP Stylebook is still warm off the press, and already you have to make a change in it.

AP has now accepted carpool, one word, as the accepted verb form.

Car pool, two words, remains the accepted noun form.

New convergence newsletters

I have been remiss in reminding you that new issues of The Convergence Newsletter are out;

May-June: Our convergence and communities issue has two articles about creating online communities - one is a Q&A with Pegasus News founder Mike Orren, and I wade in with some obsrvations on what it takes to create online community through what we've learned at Hartsville Today.

June: Our international issue features an eye-opening piece by Fulbright scholar Alice Klement on the challenges of teaching convergent journalism in Ethiopia where power outages have to be figured into all the other challenges.

Why two issues in June? Yeah, we got a bit behind, partly because we need your articles. Please send proposals to convedit@mailbox.sc.edu. And in September, we'll have a good summary by Edgar Huang on his research into HD streaming technologies.

New internships for a new generation

Bet these job requirements weren't in the job or internship you originally applied for:

- At least 150 followers on Twitter
- At least 200 Facebook friends
- Administrator or creator of at least one Facebook group
- A blog with a Google Page Rank of 2 or higher

But they are the requirements for a social media intern at the Phnom Penh Post. The entire description and details are on thomascrampton.com.

He's got a similar skills set up for an Asian internship with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

So, how many journalism/communications schools are teaching these kinds of skills?

Quick hits

Two quick things to read as we approach the holiday weekend:

• Just had a chance to read Malcolm Gladwell's review/critique in the New Yorker of Chris Anderson's newest book "Free," due out next week. Obviously, I haven't read the book yet, but I have read a lot of the buzz and some of what Anderson has written in advance, and I think Gladwell does a good job of grounding this discussion in reality. As Gladwell writes:

  Anderson wants to take “too cheap to meter” seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own “too cheap to meter” revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson’s argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true. ...
  Strauss’s optimism was driven by the fuel cost of nuclear energy—which was so low compared with its fossil-fuel counterparts that he considered it (to borrow Anderson’s phrase) close enough to free to round down. Generating and distributing electricity, however, requires a vast and expensive infrastructure of transmission lines and power plants—and it is this infrastructure that accounts for most of the cost of electricity. Fuel prices are only a small part of that. As Gordon Dean, Strauss’s predecessor at the A.E.C., wrote, “Even if coal were mined and distributed free to electric generating plants today, the reduction in your monthly electricity bill would amount to but twenty per cent, so great is the cost of the plant itself and the distribution system.”
  
  This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.

• UPDATE: A Squidoo site has been set up to aggregate lots of the arguments for and against "Free." As you can tell from above, I think Gladwell brings some reality to the debate. I also think Mitch Ratcliffe's argument that free is part of a business strategy but not an entire business plan carries some weight. And Seth Godin is right when he says the editor's role to sort through all this takes on more importance -- something I'm not sure newsrooms understand as they jettison copy editors instead of retraining and repurposing their talents, which can be a good match for this. One thing, of course, is certain, there will be lots of arguments about this - and none of it is really new. Back in 2002, Clay Shirky was writing about the paradox of the amateur. (And here's the short link to Fin O'Reilly's post that kind of runs out of the margins in the comments.
  

• EveryBlock has just released its source code. Playtime, everyone! Everyblock is a love child of the meme that an important part of journalism in the future will be data driven and that a major function will be collecting that data and presenting it in a way that users can construct their own stories. (See also Dan Conover's excellent think piece "2020 Vision: What's next for news.")

Happy holiday weekend!