Congrats to Elise Hu

Elise Hu, a former Upstate S.C. TV reporter who went to Austin and then to the well-regarded online startup Texas Tribune, is going to be digital director of NPR's "Impact of Government" initiative.

Congrats!

25 commandments for journos

This column by The Guardian's Tim Radford will become mandatory reading in my classes.

Among my favorites of his 25:

5. Here is a thing to carve in pokerwork and hang over your typewriter. "No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand."
6. And here is another thing to remember every time you sit down at the keyboard: a little sign that says "Nobody has to read this crap."
7. If in doubt, assume the reader knows nothing. However, never make the mistake of assuming that the reader is stupid. The classic error in journalism is to overestimate what the reader knows and underestimate the reader's intelligence. ...

10. So here is a rule. A story will only ever say one big thing. If (for example, and you are feeling very brave) you have to deal with four strands of a tale, make the intertwining of those four strands the one big thing you have to say. You may put twiddly bits into your story, but only if you can do so without departing from the one linear narrative you have chosen. ...

15. Words have meanings. Respect those meanings. Get radical and look them up in the dictionary, find out where they have been. Then use them properly. Don't flaunt authority by flouting your ignorance. Don't whatever you do go down a hard road to hoe, without asking yourself how you would hoe a road. Or for that matter, a roe. ...

24. There are things that good taste and the law will simply not let you say in print. My current favourites are "Murderer acquitted" and (in a report of an Easter religious play) "Paul Myers, who played Jesus Christ, emerged as the star of the show." Try and work out which one has the taste problem, and which one will cost you approximately half a million per word.

Internet stats resource?

Came across this set of Internet statistics from an outfit called Pingdom, a website monitoring service.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers

Take it FWIW, but at least this outfit does list its sources at the bottom, so A+ for transparency.

Pointer from Resource Shelf.

Reporting, editing resource: County boundaries atlas

The Newberry Library has online a digital atlas of county boundaries in every state from 1634 (if your state goes back that far) to 2000.

Thanks to Research Buzz for the pointer.

Correcting Twitter - to delete or not

An excellent conversation is going on at Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard blog given the erroneous information that went out this weekend on Twitter that the Arizona congresswoman had died.

Pick one:
- Do you delete ("scrub") the erroneous information as if it never happened?
- Do you scrub it but put out a correction?
- Do you scrub it but attach make a screenshot of the former tweet so that the erroneous one does not live on "in the wild" but the context is preserved as best you can (though you lose a lot of meta information)?
- Do you retweet the erroneous tweet with the correction appended?

Of course, saying to pick just one is simplistic. It's much more nuanced, taking into account how the speed of propagation has changed many of the old "rules" (which were never followed that well anyway when it comes to corrections).

It's worth reading.

Smart move by AP

AP's announcement that it's promoting Texas news editor Wendy Benjaminson to be assistant bureau chief in Washington coordinating coverage of state-federal relationships and overseeing the stable of regional reporters is a smart move.

First, moving the position up from that of a news editor to assistant chief gives it more heft. Second, and from the details in the announcement and follow-up by Poynter, it also seems the AP is moving a bit farther down the path I suggested the other day of integrating the state reports more into the national report.

The idea of creating more contextualized reporting is critical at this stage. Despite Mike Oresekes' comments that state news reports are the AP's "core franchise," there's the reality of comments I often hear from editors and publishers that were crystalized by Morris executive Steve Yelvington: The only place you see a significant member-generated component is the state wires. They're not available to commercial clients. They're also not generating high-readership content; anybody who's done any market research knows that state news is a dead zone.

(Yelvington was actually pointing out that AP critics who say the news service primarily just repurposes others' work are off the mark, that most of its material is original reporting.)

The "news graph" for many consumers has become dumbbell-shaped: Nodes at the international/ national and at the local/neighborhood levels, with little interest in the state level. At the same time, much of the action that actually affects them is happening at the Statehouse, partly the result of state budget crises but also of the now three-decade federal push to devolve power (and in some cases cost) back to the states.

So anything AP can do to integrate state issues into the national news context is a good thing.

Well said: David Sullivan on paying attention to it all

David Sullivan, whose day job is on the desk at Philadelphia Newspapers, has a nice post (When 10 is really 13) pointing out that while newsrooms shrink their editing but still promise to be thorough on the "big stuff," it's the small stuff that readers actually read - and that over time builds into a bigger problem.

I find it amusing when newspapers write about how they're going to make all these cutbacks but "the really big stories, the projects and major investigations, will still get multiple layers of editing." That's great, but that's not what readers read every day. It reflects the newspaper's sense of what it considers important, but doesn't speak to the reader's experience of the newspaper. A reader may not know firsthand anything that contradicts your six-months-in-the-making, four-part series. The reader knows that 10 best movies should have 10 items. And this has nothing to do with print -- stupidity on any platform is stupidity.

I see the same thing in my local paper, The State, almost every day. As Sullivan points out, however, you can't just blame this on copy editing cutbacks. It's as much about making arbitrary decisions without thinking them fully through, including how they might be perceived by readers.

One of my favorites is the arbitrariness by some papers of listing the man's name first in wedding and engagement announcement headlines or captions on the accompanying pictures, but the picture is almost always set up with the woman left and the man right. Sure, the reader will figure it out, but it takes that extra split-second and just a tad more work that makes us just that tad more unfriendly.

Or  the paper jumps a story to a separate physical section (yes, it still might be labeled "A," but the reader doesn't care about our arbitrary labels; if it comes out of the paper separately, it's a separate section).

Think of going to the bank and getting the wrong change from the teller or being told you can only get it back in quarters, not bills. You don't really care that the teller is having a bad day or about the bank's mechanical requirements. You want it the way you want it.

We are in a service economy, and journalism - and newspapers - have become a service, not a physical product. It's a lesson still being learned in many newsrooms.