One Day on Earth

While I was digitally disconnected for most of the summer, this message came in from Joe Clarke Jr.. Looks like an interesting project:

I'm reaching out to Common Sense Journalism because I am specifically interested in reaching journalists around the world.  As your blog reaches a lot of aspiring journalists, I would love to introduce your readership to a global media project that I think they would support.

On Oct. 10, thousands of people from every nation around the world will film their perspective and contribute their voice to one of the largest participatory media events in history. The event will result in a feature documentary and online video archive that will showcase the diversity, conflict, tragedy, and triumph that can occur in one day on earth. Our immediate goal is to expand interest in the project; the more people we have involved, the more accurate and comprehensive a record of the planet we can create.

We hope you will support our efforts by highlighting our event on Common Sense Journalism. Please consider promoting our call to action on Common Sense Journalism: Help Document the World’s Story on 10.10.10. 

You can learn more about One Day On Earth on our website: www.onedayonearth.org

Our trailer can be viewed here: http://vimeo.com/11214910

Mark Luckie to WaPo

Mark Luckie, multimedia producer at California Watch and proprietor of the "10,000 words" blog (one of my favorites), announces he's moving to the Wasington Post.

Good luck!

Quotable

This is in a Roger Simon column about the hubub over Journolist. Simon bemoans how the now-defunct listserv of center to left-leaning journalists has given others ammunition to attack the craft:

[L]et me end with the words of Stanley Walker. He was a famous newspaper editor in the 1920s and ’30s and wrote the following, which I have edited for space. (And if he were writing today, I am reasonably sure he would have included women.



“What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

“He hates lies and meanness and sham, but keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as his profession; whether it is a profession or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it.

“When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.”


Or at least for several news cycles.

Money as a compound adjective

There are times I look at the answers on AP's Ask the Editor section and just kind of wonder ...

Here's a recent exchange:

Q. 10,000-euro project or 10,000 euro project? from Evanston, IL
A. 10,000 euros project.

OK, for years and years and years, the standard American English formation has been that when you put the money amount in front of what you are modifying you drop the "s" and add a hyphen. "A cigar costing 5 cents" becomes "a 5-cent cigar."

So, pray tell, why would this not be a "10,000-euro project"? I'm sorry, but that's what I'm teaching my editing students until someone shows me conclusively why it should be different.

(One recent form of this has been in regards to South Carolina's cigarette tax, which at least one paper refers to as a 50-cents-a-pack raise. I can almost see that one's logic, the "cents" modifying the "a pack," though I would still contend the idiomatically accepted form is 50-cent-a-pack raise.)

The meaning of "or"

Situation: A resident of the S.C. town of Awendaw sets up to video tape a Town Council meeting.

Several council members object and go fetch the town lawyer.

State freedom of information law reads (courtesy of the Sun-News story) that all or part of a meeting may be recorded "by means of a tape recorder or any other means of sonic or video reproduction" unless it's an executive session and so long as the recording does not actively interfere "with the conduct of the meeting."

Town lawyer Dwayne Green says his opinion is that "or" allows a public body to ban video taping as long as it allows audio. "Had the statute specified that any person may record a meeting by tape recorder and any other means including video, it would have specified a right to any means of recording."

Dwayne, baby, a little basic language and copy editing skill here. "Or" as used here is an inclusive term. If you can do A or B, it means you can do either one (or both, actually). It's why we don't need the ungainly "and/or" that lawyers seem to prize and that has turned into creeping crud in so much news copy.


If the language had been that the council could allow A or B, then, yes, I agree with you. But the law does not address the council's rights; it addresses the citizens' rights. And so they get to do A or B.

Jay Bender, a colleague at the University of South Carolina journalism school, media lawyer and a longtime friend, put it very nicely: "That's why people hate lawyers," Bender said, and "government lawyers in particular."

(Green said that because the law has never had a court test, he had to look to what other states had done. Bender, however, says the S.C. law is different and intends to give people wide latitude.)

Minor annoyances from the retail world

As seen on a Kmart receipt:

Any purchase payed for by check has a 10 day grace period.

Is there a copy editor in the house? And while they're making that "paid," maybe they can grab a hypen and make it "10-day."

---

So when the Kroger gas pump fails to spit out a receipt and tells you to see the attendant, why is it that if you have paid by credit card, the card number does not show on the duplicate receipt? It's on the one at the pump.

So if you have multiple cards, you have to remember which one you used, or you have to fumble for a pen and write it down on the duplicate receipt (which you probably wouldn't have needed to get anyway had the attendant put new paper in the pump printer). C'mon Kroger, show some smarts and concern for your customers here. How hard can this be?

July 4, 2010 - a weekend in journalism history

Perhaps this weekend will be one of the times journalism historians will write about when they look back at significant changes.

Paywalls went up at the Times of London (with the expected debate about whether they will work) and at three Gannett newspapers (as I've written, I think the significance of that has not gotten quite the press because if big-G shows success, others will surely follow).

And the Journal Register Co., as part of its Ben Franklin Project, published all editions throughout its chain using only open-source software. That may sound geek-like, but the significance could be much greater if it breaks the industry's almost manic bias against open-source.

OK, not in all cases, but in too many. Here's an example: In working with a major media company to rebuild a site that had crashed, we had to change content management systems from Drupal to Expression Engine, the one favored by that company's IT management. Now, EE can build robust sites. But you'd be hard-pressed to see it from our rebuilt site.

Most of what you now see on our site has been a hack through yeoman's work done by a programmer at this media company. Gone, however, are the community calendar, the polling, the aggregator of other feeds - all things integral to Drupal or easily obtained from its robust development community.

Those things may exist in EE, too. I haven't had the time to dig deeply into its modules. But here's the thing, it does have useful modules, but I'm told they have not been approved by this big company's IT procedure, which apparently makes government paperwork look tame.

It is one reason I have become convinced that when the history of this tectonic shift in journalism and media is written, someone needs to hold the proprietary publishing system companies to account. They can scream foul all they want, but I know from personal experience dealing with editors and others in many newsrooms as an AP editor that for many of those publishing systems, online - and the idea of easily integrating content across platforms - was a dream at best until the middle of this past decade. (Oh, the systems supposedly could do it, but ask anyone who had to work with one about the internal workarounds.) And the idea of integrating or even managing user-generated content definitely was not part of most systems until recently.

Yet, it's hard to get a publisher or vice president to give up a system in which the company has invested perhaps millions and which it had expected to depreciate over a certain number of years.

Is it any wonder the pure-play online sites, willing as many are to work with as much open-source software out there as possible, run rings around traditional media in flexibility?

More commentary on the Journal-Register project from Jeff Jarvis (who had a hand in it) and Terry Heaton.

Help through the tech thicket for journalists

The Hack/Hackers group, which is designed to help journalists connect with and understand the technology running their lives, has a very useful glossary of tech terms.

I suggest reading it - two or three times. You don't have to get all tech-talk about things, but these days you do have to understand what the tech talk is all about.

Another version of the glossary with a little more commentary is on Poynter.

Hack/Hackers was put together by three journalists: Rich Gordon of Northwestern, Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times and former AP correspondent Burt Herman.