Common Sense Journalism

Columbia police - really that clueless about FOIA?

2012-01-30T21:33:00.002-05:00

Some day, I pray, the Rent-a-Clue truck is going to pull in front of the Columbia (S.C.) police department and actually deliver a load of common sense.

Until then, apparently, we will have to continue to fight through the cluelessness that characterizes the department's handling of information, especially when it comes to the state's Freedom of Information Act. OK, in the 20 years I've been in town running news operations, the cops have improved from pre-Cambrian era public information operations to something resembling the Victorian era. But maybe we could nudge a little closer, eh?

Case in point - this weekend, police issued a news release (which, interestingly enough, is not on the police website as of when this is written at least 48 hours later) that there was a sexual assault allegation near the University of South Carolina campus. There were a few details, but not many, and the police would not say if the victim was a USC student.

Permit me a momentary digression, but what actually initially caught my eye in that story was the university police officer supposedly saying "state law prohibits the release of information regarding the victim in an alleged crime," which is patently false - it's only in sexual assaults. I suspected - hoped - that there had been a miscommunication between the reporter for the student paper and the USC police officer.

So I approached the reporter, a student in one of my classes. She was unclear from her notes as to whether wires might have gotten crossed with USCPD, but I advised her to ask for the police report, which brings us back to Columbia PD, the actual investigating agency.

She then sent me this lovely communication from Columbia PD's spokeswoman, Jennifer Timmons:

Due to the on-going investigation and sensitive nature of the allegation, it wouldn’t be appropriate to release the incident report at this time. This is a sexual assault allegation that the Columbia Police Department is investigating, and releasing specific information would be too premature.

Investigators are also still gathering additional information related to the case. Furthermore, state law prohibits the revealing or identifying any sexual assault victim or victim who reports such an allegation. I am relieved to know that you did receive my news release.

Please review Section 30-4-40 of South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act:

SECTION 30 4 40.Matters exempt from disclosure.

(a) A public body may but is not required to exempt from disclosure the following information: (1) Trade secrets, which are defined as unpatented, secret, commercially valuable plans, appliances, formulas, or processes, which are used for the making, preparing, compounding, treating, or processing of articles or materials which are trade commodities obtained from a person and which are generally recognized as confidential and work products, in whole or in part collected or produced for sale or resale, and paid subscriber information. Trade secrets also include, for those public bodies who market services or products in competition with others, feasibility, planning, and marketing studies, marine terminal service and nontariff agreements, and evaluations and other materials which contain references to potential customers, competitive information, or evaluation. (2) Information of a personal nature where the public disclosure thereof would constitute unreasonable invasion of personal privacy. Information of a personal nature shall include, but not be limited to, information as to gross receipts contained in applications for business licenses and information relating to public records which include the name, address, and telephone number or other such information of an individual or individuals who are handicapped or disabled when the information is requested for person to person commercial solicitation of handicapped persons solely by virtue of their handicap. This provision must not be interpreted to restrict access by the public and press to information contained in public records. (3) Records of law enforcement and public safety agencies not otherwise available by state and federal law that were compiled in the process of detecting and investigating crime if the disclosure of the information would harm the agency by: (A) disclosing identity of informants not otherwise known; (B) the premature release of information to be used in a prospective law enforcement action; (C) disclosing investigatory techniques not otherwise known outside the government; (D) by endangering the life, health, or property of any person; or (E) disclosing any contents of intercepted wire, oral, or electronic communications not otherwise disclosed during a trial. (4) Matters specifically exempted from disclosure by statute or law.

With warmest regards,

Jennifer Timmons

Well, gee, Jennifer, with warmest regards, get your head out of where the sun doesn't shine and review some relevant court cases and some other parts of the law, specifically 30-4-30:

(d) The following records of a public body must be made available for public inspection and copying during the hours of operations of the public body without the requestor being required to make a written request to inspect or copy the records when the requestor appears in person:

(1) minutes of the meetings of the public body for the preceding six months;

(2) all reports identified in Section 30-4-50(A)(8) for at least the fourteen-day period before the current day; and

(3) documents identifying persons confined in any jail, detention center, or prison for the preceding three months.

That cryptic reference in (2) there? That's to police incident reports. And the word used is "must," not "if you feel like it." In short, the Legislature went out of its way to specify that police incident reports are public records open to everyone.

And, looking at the section you cite, 30-4-40, try reading a little farther in:

(b) If any public record contains material which is not exempt under subsection (a) of this section, the public body shall separate the exempt and nonexempt material and make the nonexempt material available in accordance with the requirements of this chapter. (Thanks to Bill Rogers of the SC Press Association for the reminder)

Then let's hop over to the court files, where you'll find there isn't even really a conflict between this and the privacy provision because the S.C. Supreme and appeals courts routinely have held that police departments can't make up privacy exemptions. Further, the court has clearly held that nonprivate information in such reports must be segregated from disclosable information - in this case that would cover the name and other very specific related information, and that's about it. In fact, Jennifer, here's some specific language from one of the controlling cases, Burton v. York County Sheriff's Department:

In sum, we emphasize that law enforcement agencies do not have carte blanche to deny all FOIA requests for criminal investigative reports. The information contained in these reports can be withheld from disclosure only to the extent that it falls within one or more of the exemptions enumerated in section 30-4-40(a). The determination as to which portions of a report are exempt and which portions must be disclosed should be done on a case-by-case basis. (from an earlier case). ...

Unless and until the Supreme Court rules otherwise, we will follow its precedent and not expand the “right of privacy” under the Fourteenth Amendment beyond those situations which the Court has ruled bear on the most intimate decisions affecting personal autonomy—namely reproductive rights, familial and marital relations.

This has been backed up by an even more recent ruling at the Circuit Court level by a judge who permanently enjoined the state Department of Public Safety from citing an "ongoing investigation" as a reason to withhold records. (Updated 11:17 a.m. 1/31)

Notwithstanding, apparently the Columbia PD feels it has the authority to declare by fiat the ability to designate a much wider privacy exemption, unlike the S.C. attorney general's office, which seems to have a clear grasp of the law (PDF).

We'll assume for now that the spokeswoman is just passing on bad legal advice. So we'll let the lawyers jaw a bit - until the next time Columbia PD wants to make it up, and the next time, and the next time. ...

(South Carolina has a long history of various shenanigans to avoid the law - even when police are clearly told they can't do what they are telling officers to do.)

Columbia is part way into the first term of a new mayor, Steve Benjamin, and a new police chief. It will be interesting to see if this administration ever grows enough kahunas to demand that the city police stop making up the law and start following it.

With warmest regards.

Update: When I wrote this, I suspected, but could not confirm, that Jennifer Timmons is the same JT who used to be a journalist at a local TV station, WACH. One of my Facebook friends has now confirmed it - which makes me even more disappointed that she would mindlessly spew this kind of BS.

Update 3:45 p.m.: Timmons now claiming police need an FOI request letter even though the law clearly says the reports must be available for public inspection in person, no letter required. The cluelessness continues.

Update 4:30 p.m.: Reporter goes to cop shop (with copy of law) - asks to see report. Desk officer says only Timmons can provide (which is against the law as it is, since the reports are supposed to be out for public inspection). Calls Timmons' office. Timmons supposedly there and coming down. No one shows. Desk officer calls office again. Timmons has left. ~~Well, I think we've settled the question about whether Timmons is a professional.~~ Timmons emails back that she had not left but had gone to talk to assistant chief. That's not what the records officer told reporter.

Update 2/1: The police have now released the incident report (see below). It's what I expected - mostly blacked out - though there still are some nuggets to be gleaned - that the victim was probably from the nearby town of Lexington, that the person and the attacker were acquainted and that someone, probably the victim, told police both were using alcohol. None of this should be used without more reporting, of course, but good reporters use these no matter how redacted for clues to dig up more information. And for the campus paper, where the threshold question among readers is likely to be "do we have a rapist loose in the neighborhood," those can be valuable clues to pursue.

Still agonizing over letting readers in

2012-01-30T17:30:00.003-05:00

A blog post today by the editor of the Island Packet serving Hilton Head Island, S.C., and environs shows how journalists still agonize over letting their readers "in" to the newspaper pages (or, more really, the websites).

Editor Jeff Kidd has posted 12 questions to help us determine how much 'citizen journalism' you want at islandpacket.com, beaufortgazette.com.

Some are interesting, again illustrating the neurosis we have about this:

If clearly labeled user-submitted content was inaccurate, would it diminish your regard for staff-produced stories, photos and other content?
If clearly labeled user-submitted content was obscene or in poor taste, would it diminish your regard for staff-produced stories, photos and other content?

Kidd precedes the questions (most of the rest are about what things people read on the website and how they access it) with these observations, beginning with the thesis that the papers (the doublet includes the Beaufort Gazette) already are hyperlocal because of their focus on the local community and that they already allow "citizen journalism" through things like user photo galleries, community calendars and school lunch menus.

He goes on:

But there's no doubt the terms take on new meaning in an online age, particularly one coming to be marked by ability to both produce and consume news from smartphones and other mobile devices. This creates the possibility of unfiltered publications from the field, though most traditional-media outlets have not gone that far. We still submit to the model for in-print publication, where space is limited, one thing is published to the exclusion of something else, and thus choices are made about what goes in and what doesn't. Even the most gently edited submissions at the Packet and Gazette are reworked or reformatted so that it is distilled to its essence.

Website operations, on the other hand, largely remove the space constraint (though there is still much utility in winnowing away extraneous verbiage and information.) It also greatly reduces the turn-around time for publication. In fact, if we were so inclined, we could publish a a photo of little Jimmy's 11th birthday party as quickly as it takes little Jimmy's mommy to hit send on her smartphone's touch screen.

Of course, at this point we don't actually publish reader-submitted information instantaneously, either, and for good reason — newsworthiness and veracity are the coins of our realm. Allowing anyone to slap anything they want on our site with no approval — let alone verification — presents potential problems. After all, it takes little imagination to think of what could go wrong if a frat boy with an iPhone can immediately post a photo from impromptu wet T-shirt contest that erupted at the kegger. We want more community news, but we also want to remain a publication suitable for family reading.

Nonetheless, we doubtlessly will creep closer toward faster turnaround and yet more opportunities for folks like you to send in news of your everyday lives.

My problem: This doesn't sound to me like a publication that particularly wants "citizen journalism," but one that can get increasing amounts of content on the cheap -- just making it easier for your readers to shovel more content on your site because there may be ways to increasingly take the human factor out of screening it.

Here's the thing: Those readers are joyfully passing you by with their (humdrum) "everyday lives" and their mobile phones and tablets, passing you by to the point where you become less relative, not more.

If you really care about hyperlocal journalism, then you realize digital is about not only content but community. And online, community is far different from how journalists, even those at smaller operations like this, have tended to define it. It is not us handling "The News" and, oh, by the way, we'll let you have a little place at the side of the table.

True community would actually mean doing more "screening" -- in other words, getting more staff involved. Only it's not "screening," but curating and engaging -- inviting your readers in as co-contributors to the process, not just as some kind of cheap content creators.

When we see newsrooms get that, we'll know they're ready for the 21st century.

Editteach: Two good examples from NPR

2012-01-12T12:20:00.001-05:00

If you are teaching writing and editing, you could do worse than to have students listen to these two examples from NPR

(I like using audio to help teach because it shows the power of creating pictures in people's heads while also being a bit more dimensional than just print. It also shows the necessity for all writers to use their ears and eyes in ways to pick up details like nat sound that yo can then describe in text.)

Wade Goodwyn's moving and detailed story about troops returning home in December 2-11

Tracy Samilton's fun story today about how Craftsman decided to debut a riding lawnmower at the Detroit Auto Show (unfortunately, the transcript has taken some of the life and fun out of the story - make sure you listen).

Have you met his cousin, Zippity -doo-dah?

2012-01-09T20:23:00.002-05:00

Some headlines just write themselves ...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/beezow-doo-doo-zopittybop-bop-bop-busted-article-1.1003302
But imagine trying to do this in print with a one-coumn, tight count, like a 10 or 12.

(Thanks to Gary Karr for the pointer.)

Blackboard strikes again - RIP dropbox

2012-01-06T19:53:00.000-05:00

Ah yes, the Blackboard overlords have struck again adding yet another reason to my list of hating this course management system.

In v9.1, BB has eliminated the dropbox, helpfully suggesting that if you want to exchange files with students, use the "assignment manager."

Only, did anyone think that not every file exchange involves an assignment?

Dropbox, for instance, was perfect for sending a large audio editing review file privately to a student that was too large for email and then deleting it. Since the original story was not a traditional "assignment," it would be cumbersome at best to do it that way.

(For instance, the "assignment" here involves multiple versions of multiple items that are part of a story package - much better done through a server. The problem with returning the audio review file back through the server is the lack of FERPA privacy.)

And if a student needed to quick send me a large file back privately, it was easy enough to run it through Dropbox and then delete it.

(Yes, I can probably set up something through one of the online exchange services; it's just one more site and one more password and one more thing to complicate matters when this was a perfectly elegant solution, elegant being a word you don't hear associated much with BB.)

So instead of improving Dropbox with things like batch download and batch delete - after all, that would be soooooo 2005 - BB just does away with it.

Nice going. Let's see if we can find more to expand the list.

Editteach: Dissecting another fire story

2012-01-06T08:16:00.000-05:00

This one is online today from a TV station site.* (Seems I'm specializing in fire stories these days.) Updated to also correct street name.

Columbia, SC (WLTX)--An early morning fire is smoldering at The Salty Nut Cafe in Five Points.
Not a bad lede. If you are keeping score at home and use AP style, that should be S.C., but no one says the station has to do that. One might also ask why "SC" is needed on a story from a Columbia station, but this is the "world wide" Web, so such things are in flux.

Authorites say there was heavy black smoke when they arrived at 4:30 Friday morning.
Again, not bad (not counting the misspelling of "authorities," but lord knows how many times I've done that). However, this is a breaking story, so why say "Friday"? Still, we come back to the "world wide" thing - it's not Friday everywhere. So defensible.

The fire is now under control, but the 2000 block of Green* Street remains shutdown. Authorities say the cafe suffered heavy damage because they did not have a sprinkler system.
Now we run into some problems. The street is Greene, not Green. Shutdown, one word, is a noun. It should be "shut down" as a verb. And a bar is not a "they," but an "it." That's especially confusing here because the plural antecedent is "authorities" - did they not have sprinklers? (And why not just say sprinklers, instead of the more officious "sprinkler system"?) You could also question here why the phrase "suffered heavy damage because" is needed since the next sentence is more specific on the damage. I'd delete it, leaving just: "Authorities say the cafe did not have sprinklers."

Chief Audrey Jenkins says there was thousands of dollars worth of damage and the building is totally damaged on the inside. This was a very popular spot for people to congregate and it will be a while before they reopen.
Oops. The fire chief's name is "Aubrey." The verb links with "thousands," so "were" is preferred - but "are" would be even better to keep things current in a breaking story. Phrases using "worth" get an apostrophe (thousands of dollars' worth). Even better: Chief Aubrey Jenkins says there are thousands of dollars in damage ... or ... Chief Aubrey Jenkins says damage totals thousands of dollars.

I have no idea what "totally damaged on the inside" means. Totally damaged usually means destroyed, and inside is where buildings usually are damaged, so the whole phrase does no work. Cut it. Recast the second sentence to correct the pronoun and insert a comma (and you can probably drop "very," though I wouldn't get all hung up on that): This was a popular spot for people to congregate, and it will be a while before it reopens. (Let's save the debate about attribution on that for a different time, though I tend not to like naked assertions.)

An investigation is underway and no injuries have been reported.
Again, if you are scoring at home and using AP style, that's "under way," though I have been suggesting for years that AP drop that as increasingly anacrhonistic. A comma would be useful after "underway."

*The story is being updated, so some things have changed from the original here.

**In one of those wonderfully annoying things media companies like Gannett do online to rake in more cash, "Green" in the original story was a double-underlined ad link. Clicking on it did not take you to something useful like a map but to an ad for a Prius. Gotta love it. (The correct street name spelling might have prevented that.)

(With acknowledgement and apologies to Deborah Gump, one of the world's superior editing teachers and creator of the Editteach site, I have decided to use that as the standard header and tag for these kinds of dissections. It just so succinctly sums up what these posts are about. But do visit the site if you want a rich experience learning about editing.)

From the editing trenches: Dissecting a fire story

2011-12-30T18:34:00.001-05:00

There was a terribly tragic fire in Stamford, Conn., on Christmas. The day later, the following story appeared in my paper.

I can't tell whether it was an original AP dispatch or was reworked on the local desk. I've found similar, but not identical, versions online that take care of some of the problems noted below.

But the story provides a good case study of editing problems, especially with structure. So I present the original below annotated with my notes (I use these for my classes), and then a re-edited version. Feel free to comment:

    STAMFORD, Conn. — Fire tore through a house in a tony neighborhood along the Connecticut shoreline on Christmas morning, killing five people, including three children, but sparing two whom firefighters managed to rescue.
The typical wire-service lede that puts the actor before the result. And why is it that fires always "tore" or "ripped" or "swept"? Will people be talking about how "a fire tore through a house" or that five people, including three children, died in a fire on Christmas? And why use the general "tony neighborhood" description (is it even needed and is "tony" a common word) when Connecticut shoreline, combined with the home of an ad exec, probably signals all you need? And why make readers wait to find out who was rescued or whose house it was?

    Neighbors awakened to the sound of screaming and rushed outside to help, but they could only watch in horror as flames devoured the grand home in the pre-dawn darkness and the shocked, injured survivors were led away from the house.
Cut this at "pre-dawn darkness."

    The large Victorian home was purchased last year by 47-year-old Madonna Badger, an advertising executive in the fashion industry.
Really? This is the next most interesting thing in the story? How about what Badger was screaming? (If need be, we can add the purchase information after that and include the neighborhood.) And when we finally do use this, we can write it directly, not in passive form.

    Stamford Police Sgt. Paul Guzda said Badger's three daughters – a 10-year-old and 7-year-old twins – were killed. He said her parents, who were visiting for the holiday, also died. Police officers drove Badger's husband, Matthew Badger, from New York City to Stamford on Sunday morning.
The first two sentences are OK, though they can be tightened – and why back in with the attribution? The last sentence, however, raises lots of questions and distracts so early in the story. It would be better to explain who the other person was who was led from the house, then mention the husband.

    The fire was reported shortly before 5 a.m. Firefighters were able to rescue the two adults from the house in Shippan Point, a neighborhood that juts into Long Island Sound, Acting Fire Chief Antonio Conte said.
The best information here was that the fire was reported shortly before 5 a.m. The neighborhood information can be consolidated with the purchase information. And notice that the story still does not actually say Badger was one of those rescued. I'm not sure why the neighborhood information has to be attributed, since assessor's records are referenced later, but to be conservative, let's leave it.

    Neighbors describe Badger screaming repeatedly, “My whole life is in there.”
Move this up, and get the quote to the front. Also, the last "Badger" mentioned in this story is Matthew. That can cause a momentary hiccup in the reader's understanding. It's solved if we move this sentence before the appearance of the husband.

    Firefighters knew there were other people in the home but could not get to them because the heat was too intense, Conte said. “It’s never easy. That’s for sure,” he said. “I’ve been on this job 38 years … not an easy day.”
The first part of that quote does little work given the second part.

    Conte said fire officials don’t yet know the cause of the blaze and likely won’t get clues for a few days until fire marshals can enter the structure.
    By Sunday evening, the roof of the blackened house had largely collapsed.
Those two grafs are keepers but can be combined into one graf.

    A neighbor, Sam Cingari Jr., said he was awakened by the sound of screaming and saw that the house was engulfed by flames.
    “We heard this screaming at 5 in the morning,” he said. “The whole house was ablaze and I mean ablaze.”
Good material that can be moved up. But the quote essentially restates the graf before it. Fix this.

    Cingari said he did not know his neighbors, who he said bought the house last year and were renovating it.
Can be kept.

    The 3,349-square foot, five-bedroom home sold for $1.7 million in December 2010, according to the Stamford assessment office’s website.
Worth keeping, but relocate the information.

    Charles Mangano, who lives nearby, said his wife woke him up and alerted him to the fire. He ran outside to see if he could help.
    “I heard someone yell ‘Help, help, help me!’ and I started sprinting up my driveway,” Mangano told The Advocate of Stamford. There were already numerous firetrucks on the scene.
    “I just came out as a neighbor,” Mangano said. “There’s really nothing I could do.”
    He told the newspaper he saw a barefoot man wearing boxers and a woman being taken out of the house. “The woman said, ‘My whole life is in there,’” Mangano said.
Earlier, she was "screaming." Now she's just saying it? Eliminate the dissonance by eliminating this for now, but query the AP. The quote about not being able to do anything makes a much better ending to the story and, since it just reinforces what came before, it can be cut, if necessary.

    Badger, an ad executive in the fashion industry, is the founder of Badger & Winters Group. Badger was responsible for high-profile ad campaigns when she worked at Calvin Klein in the 1990s.
Keep, but reposition and tighten.

    Guzda said the male acquaintance was a contractor who was doing work on the home. A supervisor at Stamford Hospital said Badger was treated and discharged.
This info should be up much higher. And what was the man's condition? Also, use "released" instead of the terribly officious "discharged." And once we move up that the second person was a contractor, we can more seamlessly work in the idea that Badger bought the home last year

    “It is a terrible, terrible day,” Mayor Michael Pavia told reporters. “There probably has not been a worse Christmas day in the city of Stamford.”
Stamford is about 25 miles northeast of New York City.
Move this up higher (one might argue that the mayor's quote is somewhat obvious – there unlikely has been a worse Christmas – but it still resonates and adds to the fire chief's). And the location, which inelegantly hangs at the end, can be worked more seamlessly into the sentence about driving Matthew Badger from New York City to Stamford.

Here is my redone vrersion:

    STAMFORD, Conn. – Three children of a fashion-industry advertising executive and her parents died on Christmas morning when fire burned through the family's house on the Connecticut shoreline. The executive, Madonna Badger, and another person were rescued by firefighters.
    Neighbors awakened to the sound of screaming and rushed outside to help, but they could only watch in horror as flames devoured the grand home in the pre-dawn darkness.
    “My whole life is in there,” neighbors said Badger screamed repeatedly.
    Badger's three daughters – a 10-year-old and 7-year-old twins – were killed as were her parents, who were visiting for the holiday, Stamford Police Sgt. Paul Guzda said.
    The other person rescued was a contractor doing work on the home, Guzda said. A supervisor at Stamford Hospital said Badger, 47, was treated and released. [Need man's condition or sentence that it was not immediately available. Also should say his name was not available.]
    The fire was reported shortly before 5 a.m. A neighbor, Sam Cingari Jr., said he was awakened by screaming. “The whole house was ablaze and I mean ablaze,” he said.
    Cingari said he did not know his neighbors, who he said bought the house last year and were renovating it.
    Firefighters knew there were other people inside but could not get to them because the heat was too intense, Acting Fire Chief Antonio Conte said.
    “I’ve been on this job 38 years … not an easy day,” he said.
    Fire officials don’t yet know the fire's cause and are not likely to get clues for a few days until fire marshals can enter the structure, Conte said. By Sunday evening, the roof of the blackened house had largely collapsed.
    Mayor Michael Pavia called it “a terrible, terrible day.”
    “There probably has not been a worse Christmas day in the city of Stamford,” he said.
    Police officers drove Badger's husband, Matthew Badger, from New York City to Stamford, about 25 miles northeast, on Sunday morning.
    Madonna Badger founded Badger & Winters Group and was responsible for high-profile ad campaigns when she worked at Calvin Klein in the 1990s.
    She bought the 3,349-square foot, five-bedroom Victorian home for $1.7 million in December 2010, according to the Stamford assessment office’s website. It is in Shippan Point, a neighborhood that juts into Long Island Sound, Conte said.
    Charles Mangano, who lives nearby, said his wife woke him up and alerted him to the fire. He ran outside to see if he could help.
   “I heard someone yell ‘Help, help, help me!’ and I started sprinting up my driveway,” Mangano told The Advocate of Stamford. There were already numerous fire trucks on the scene.
    “I just came out as a neighbor,” Mangano said. “There’s really nothing I could do.”

Compilation of social media guidelines

2011-12-29T14:27:00.001-05:00

This compilation was put together by Europe's Chartered Instituted of Personnel and Development.

Worth perusing.

60 seconds in the digital age

2011-12-29T13:15:00.002-05:00

These two infographics about what happens online in 60 seconds are pretty interesting.

I always tend to take such things that average numbers with a little grain of salt, but even so, some of the numbers are impressive:

370,000 Skype voice calls
695,000 Facebook updates
600 YouTube videos
1,820 terabytes of data created

Missing in plain sight - unemployment story

2011-12-28T08:40:00.000-05:00

I have a class section and seminar (that I've done for the American Copy Editors Society) called "missing in plain sight."

I keep coming back to these because with the decimation of copy desks, I'm seeing more cases. So let's see how quickly you can pick out what's missing in this story - and figure out why a copy editor seemingly missed it:

South Carolina’s economy got an early Christmas present on Tuesday, as the unemployment rate dropped under 10 percent for the first time since April. The plunge came as retailers beefed up sales staff for an unexpectedly good holiday shopping season and others dropped out of the job search.

   More strikingly, the drop to 9.9 percent from October to November was the largest monthly drop in the 35 years that statistics have been kept in the state, according to a report from the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce released Tuesday. The national unemployment rate also saw a significant decrease, to 8.6 percent in November from 9 percent in October.

   “This is truly good news for South Carolina, and surprising,” said Doug Wood- ward, an economist with the University of South Carolina. “We’ll take it.”

   Overall, nonfarm employment grew by 15,000 jobs from October to November and is up nearly 31,000 from a year ago – the largest increase for the same time period since 2006.

   Folks found 7,100 jobs in retail and 6,600 in professional and business services. Manufacturing, which has been a bright spot for the state, continued its climb, adding 900 jobs between October and November.

   The retail spike was fueled in part by people believing that the economy both in South Carolina and nationally is on the mend.

   “As the economy begins to rebound, they are less worried about being laid off” and more willing to spend, said USC economist Joey Von Nessen.

   Deedra Senter, co-owner of the Learning Express toy stores in Lexington and Irmo, is seeing that trend first hand. After a flat November, December sales are up 20 percent over last December and she and co-owner Paige Watson had to order additional stock.

   “We’ve had an unexpectedly good holiday season,” Senter said. “There have been some scary times this year.”

   The owners wanted to beef up their staff of 13 but couldn’t find workers with the right experience. So they have their present staff working overtime.

   “Our staff has to be very customer-oriented and experts in toys,” Senter said. “We put ads on Craigslist but had people not show up. It worked out great for our girls because they are getting time and a half.”

   Woodward and Von Nessen earlier this month declared that the state’s economy for 2012 was “looking pretty good” and predicted substantial job growth in the coming year – most in the manufacturing sector. However, in their annual economic outlook, the Darla Moore School of Business economists predicted the unemployment would remain flat as more people entered the workforce and began looking for work in a brightening job market.

   So Tuesday’s report was a surprise.

   “The good news is the major reason (for the drop) has been due to actual employment gains rather than just drops in the labor force,” Von Nessen said.

   Although the labor force did drop by 4,750 from October to November to 2.17 million, meaning some have dropped out of the job search.

   Gov. Nikki Haley and workforce executive director Abraham Turner issued statements praising S.C. businesses for ramping up employment and predicted more gains to come.

   “When we took office, the unemployment rate was 10.5 percent,” Haley said in a release. “To see it drop to 9.9 percent is a good way to end the year. We continue to have challenges, but we are committed to doing all we can to put South Carolinians back to work.”

   Lexington County once again had the lowest unemployment rate in the state, dropping to 7 percent from 7.5 percent. Orangeburg County and Calhoun County were the only two counties in the state to have unemployment rise.

Graphic: UNEMPLOYMENT EASING
   The jobless rate improved dramatically in South Carolina in November, dropping by the largest amount since the state began tracking the rate in 1976, as more people landed jobs. Two counties in the state saw an increase in unemployment, but most improved in November from October:

   Lexington: 7% from 7.5%

   Richland: 8% from 8.8%

   Kershaw: 8.6% from 9.1%

   Newberry: 9.2% from 9.6%

   Fairfield: 10.8% from 11.4%

   Calhoun: 14.1% from 12%

   Orangeburg: 15.6% from 14.9%

   SOURCE: S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce

Did you ask yourself this: They're making such a big deal of this being the largest month-to-month drop, so what exactly was the unemployment rate last month? (It's not in the story or the graphic.) It was 10.5 percent.

Oops. Not sure why a desk missed that.

(The penultimate graf references that figure, but only from when the governor took office nine months earlier. The rate had actually gone higher than that in the interim - to 10.9 percent in September, for instance.)

LaRocque needs to be less rigid in usage

2011-12-27T08:30:00.000-05:00

I have long admired Paula LaRocque as a writing and language coach* and some of the excellent columns she has penned for SPJ's Quill magazine. But in the past couple of years, it seems to me her columns have taken on more of a rigid approach than a modern observer and user of language should be.

Several times, especially with some of her "brevity" examples, I've wanted to write a post saying wait a minute, things are more complicated than that (and some of my students and others who know me might find that interesting because I'm known for squeezing a sentence till it screams). But her latest column in the Quill dealing with a "potpourri of poor writing" sent me to the keyboard for pronouncements about "correct" usage when what is correct is changing ever more rapidly.

There are some excellent points in the article - you should read it - about misusing things such as "feel badly," "adieu" vs. "ado," "low (lo) and behold," etc. But she runs off the rails in her discussion of more important/importantly and gauntlet vs. gantlet.

More/most important(ly)
LaRocque writes emphatically: "Adjective/adverb errors are also perennials in the garden of bad grammar. “Most importantly” and “feel badly” have been in my end-of-year folder for years, and 2011 was no exception. “Most importantly” is an elliptical expression meaning “what is most important,” so careful writers and speakers lop off that “ly” and keep the adjective: most important."

Well, not exactly. A quick Google search will show you this is hardly settled territory. And, as a matter of fact, there are good arguments for the "ly" form.Mark Liberman at Language Log, for instance, has a good dissection of the topic. Among other things, he points out that Merriam-Webster's guide to English usage traces the angst about this back only rather recently, to the Times' Theodore Bernstein, who advocated for "more important" but then seemed to backtrack.

If you are in the camp of those who hate M-W as too liberal, however (and I tend to not make it my primary source for that reason), then Liberman supplies this usage note from the American Heritage Dictionary, the most middle-of-the-road of the big three: "But both forms are widely used by reputable writers, and there is no obvious reason for preferring one or the other."

Even the most conservative of the big three, Webster's New World 4th (the one used with the AP stylebook), uses "importantly" and not "important" in its example (page 717 of my well-worn edition, though it may vary in some newer printings).

Brian Garner, one of the most cited observers of modern English usage, argues that to insist on "more important" is "picayunish pedantry." He lays out three reasons:

If you can use "importantly" to begin a sentence, why not "more importantly"?
While the argument (as LaRocque makes it) is that "more important" is elliptic writing for "what is more important," the same form isn't used for "more notably," "more interestingly" or other analogous phrases.
If the phrase is moved to the interior of a sentence, the "ly" form is generally acceptable.

Gantlet vs. Gauntlet
LaRocque writes with unbridled conviction: "Mistakes with the word gauntlet, a glove, are common. The word is confused with gantlet, a double line or row that a subject travels between, often as a punishment or
hazing: “He says an extended run through the gauntlet may not be a bad thing for the Massachusetts senator.” This writer means gantlet."

And I'm ready to line up behind her, hoist the flag, throw down the gauntlet, run past the gantlet and charge into linguistic battle.

Except.

Two of the three major dictionaries - M-W and AHD - now list "gauntlet" as the preferred form. The M-W entry goes to far as to now label gantlet "a variant of gauntlet." Again, I take M-W with a grain of salt, but when AHD throws its gauntlet into the fray behind, well, gauntlet, I pay lots more attention. In fact, of at least a dozen modern dictionaries and online sites I have looked at, only WNW and the AP maintain the clear distinction.

I'm thinking it's time to move on. I maintain the distinction in my writing, but I no longer insist on it as a teacher (though I urge students to consider it). Again, a Google search will show that this is an area of changing usage. I like this from the Grammarist blog: "Writers have been mistakenly using gauntlet in place of gantlet for so long that most dictionaries have simply given up on trying to preserve the latter word. But careful English users still distinguish between the two." (See this fun example of when the word was used "correctly" and the reaction it brought.)

Pronouncements rarely work anymore
What I hope you take from this:

Language changes more rapidly than ever. You're probably writing and saying things now that a decade or two ago were frowned on or just plain prohibited (not that it stopped anyone).
Usage is not grammar, and most of these kinds of things are arguments about usage, which changes even more rapidly in the digital age. (Another reason I tend to object to "grammar" exams proposed to screen students for entry into college journalism programs - much of what my colleagues refer to as grammar is actually usage and style.)
Let's drop the "man the barriers against the language Huns" arguments (such as the inanity going over at an editor's forum on LinkedIn about "over" versus "more than" (it's not an issue anymore - use whichever one suits your purposes or whichever one your boss, client or style guide dictates; Garner, fr his part, calls the distinction "a baseless crotchet")). Journalists have never been guardians of the language and, if looked at in the "man the barriers" light, have done as much "damage" to it as anyone else.
Pronouncements like LaRocque's do damage in that they delay needed, prolonged and intelligent discussions about where language has been, where it is going and how to assess when it's time to change. Every semester, for instance, I find myself telling students that "rule" they learned a couple of semesters ago, well, it no longer applies as it once did or it is in flux. It drives them nuts, brought up as they have been in a world of right-and-wrong standardized test answers. But if we don't help them learn how to deal with ambiguity, we are not teaching them how the current world works.

LaRocque treads close to the edge on two other examples. She mandates "sank" instead of "sunk" in a sentence such as "There was silence as the foreign minister's words sunk in." I'm with her for now - but only for so long. Just as with pled for pleaded, snuck for sneaked and dove for dived, I think this one is on an unstoppable change trajectory.

She also decries the use of "one of the only" instead of "one of the few." I'm with her again, but this is a case of idiomatic usage overtaking strict meaning, much like "could care less," which some observers see taking on idiomatic acceptability.

This spring, a linguistics doctoral student is teaching a course at the University of South Carolina on how new media is more rapidly changing language than ever before. It's already filled - that ought to tell you something. I wish every journalism student had to take it.

So in the new year, let's try for fewer pronouncements and more reasoned discussions about language issues and a realization that very little of this "beautiful, bastard language" of ours, as John Bremner used to call it, is set in stone.

(*Her husband, Paul, also has written one of the best books on copy editing I've ever used and read, avoiding entanglements with most such usage things and emphasizing the big questions that editors must deal with before all others.)

Numeracy - a minuscule problem

2011-12-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

If you were reading along in The State this past week and came across this story,* you might have spotted a problem:

   If state lawmakers want to retire, they would have to give up their seat in the Legislature, according to a proposal moving through the state House of Representatives.

   The proposal would end the practice of lawmakers retiring but remaining in office and replacing their $10,400 annual salaries with much larger pension benefits - more than $30,000 a year, in some cases.

   State lawmakers are members of a separate - and much smaller - retirement system than state workers. Because of that, any changes to the General Assembly Retirement System would have little affect on the much larger state pension system’s debt of $13 billion.

   But lawmakers hope the change would send a message of shared sacrifice to the nearly 500,000 workers, retirees and other beneficiaries on the S.C. Retirement System. Come January, state workers in that system will be asked to pay more into the retirement accounts only to potentially receive lower benefits once they retire. ...

   State lawmakers still would benefit from a more generous pension formula.

   State workers calculate their annual pension benefits by multiplying their years of service times their average final salary times 0.0182 percent. State lawmakers multiply their salary and years of service times 0.0482 percent, giving them a higher benefit.

   Meanwhile, the proposal to change the retirement system for state employees calls for them to pay 1 percent more into the system - an increase of $408 a year for the average employee - while changing their pension formula, which could result in a lower benefit for some workers.

   The S.C. State Employees Association has agreed to endorse having state workers pay more into the retirement system, but only if lawmakers give state employees at least a 2 percent raise. Carlton Washington, the association’s executive director, called the current proposal, which lacks that guaranteed raise, “shortsighted.” But he said the offer from lawmakers to change their own retirement system could be a good sign to state employees.

   “If that is put on the table first, then that would send somewhat of a positive message to employees that (lawmakers) are at least interested in a comprehensive review,” Washington said. ...

It's a wonder S.C. state workers weren't already stocking up on canned pet food for their retirement. A pension based on "0.0182 percent" (or even the more generous "0.0482 percent" for legislators) would be very slim pickings indeed -- a factor of 0.000182 times the average of their last five years' earnings times the number of years worked. For someone making $50,000 who worked for 30 years, that would be a grand total of $273 a year. It's a case of mixing decimals and percents - the factor is 0.0182, or 1.82 percent - or $27,300 a year for our hypothetical worker.

It's what happens when a reporter tries to change the factor to a percent or vice versa** and forgets to move the decimal -- but a sharp-eyed copy editor should have caught it.

(For bonus points, you might also have caught the affect/effect error in the third paragraph, especially egregious from a copy-editng standpoint because it's used correctly in the headline.)

*The error has been corrected in the online story. Perhaps it was by an eagle-eyed copy editor when the story was posted. But since the affect/effect error is still there, my bet is on a correction made after the error was pointed out but never acknowledged online - a more common occurrence for this publication. The copy above is from the PDF replica edition.

** Don't ask me how I know this was it. Take this one on faith.

Kodak - a lesson and a reminder

2011-12-24T18:14:00.001-05:00

Eastman Kodak serves as a good case study and reminder for those of us in journalism:

You can't sit on your laurels
The innovation that could save your bacon might be right in your own shop - if you don't discount it
"We needed to understand that we were not a family; we were a team."

All three can be found in a look by Reuters today at Kodak and its spinoff, Eastman Chemical. The venerable film and camera maker is struggling, now seventh in digital cameras and struggling against HP and other established players in the printer market. Spinoff Eastman Chemical, on the other hand, is thriving.

As to point one above, Kodak clearly stayed at the dance with film too long. Think about the difficulties, some tradition and some financial (large debt and capital investments to be paid down; sucking at the teat of the cash cow, etc.), that traditional news organizations have gone through.

Point two follows from point one - as the article notes, Kodak invented the digital camera. But there was no urgency to develop it - after all, why cannibalize the cash cow that was film (and chemicals).

Point three is from a former CEO of Eastman Chemical, Brian Ferguson, who talks about the difficulties Eastman had in adjusting to faster, more flexible times (and the need to lay people off) because of the "paternalism" of Kodak. You can scoff at it if you want; you can decry how the orientation of capital and labor has changed - or regressed, depending on your view. But I throw it in because it captures nicely the orientation I hope graduating students have and understand. Too many in my generation wanted to work for a "family," and the PR spin in many corporations still emphasizes that. But when push comes to shove, it's best to remember Ferguson's words because in the cold light of business, they ring more true.

I've used Kodak before as a parable of our times. Kodak's story is worth reviewing periodically for any journalist.

As we approach another new year, I want to share with you that 6-year-old speech that's also linked to above. I think it still has some good points.

KeynoteAddress
Florida Press Club Annual Meeting
Oct. 15, 2005, Orlando, Fla.
Doug Fisher, author Common SenseJournalism
and instructor University of SouthCarolina

    It's been a tough year. Journalism has beeneconomically battered ... then legally battered in the Valerie Plamecase ... and finally – literally – physically battered by HurricanesKatrina and Rita.
   Yet you have persevered, practiced and honed yourcraft, true to the idea that people deserve to know what works – andwhat doesn't – in this world. It is not easy. It is not a job everyonecan, or will, do, despite what some people would tell us.
   But you did it. And you are being honored tonightfor excellence in that work, and you should all give yourselves a roundof applause.

    I'm a nomad. I started in radio some 30 years agowhen all-news was becoming hot and got a break working for one of theall-news pioneers – Westinghouse Broadcasting. I moved to a TVassignment and anchor desk for a while, and then got hired at the paperbecause an editor was willing to take a chance on me. It didn't hurtthat we kept beating them down at City Hall.
   I ended up spending 18 years at the AssociatedPress, the kind of journalism that is exhausting, maddening – andthoroughly exhilarating: From covering presidents and what were thenthe super-secret stealth fighters, to writing about the guy in westernOhio who had a Titanic museum in his basement and watching thousands ofelderly people jam the Rhode Island Statehouse because their money wasfrozen in decrepit credit unions.
   So I figured when you all invited me to speak, thepress club decided, given the times, it might be good to see that it'spossible to be a nomad journalist and still maintain a 300-pound,churlish figure.
   When I was leaving the AP bureau in Columbus, Ohio,to start my days as a correspondent, my boss put his arm around me andgave me my – as he put it – "AP management training."
   "Do good, don't do bad. And don't miss the big one."That was it – short and sweet. So we'll try to stick to a few shortobservations tonight about our current state of affairs in journalismand what we might do about it.

    My first piece of advice: Next time, instead of NewOrleans, send the hurricane entries to Boise.
    [Eds note: Thepress club lost about half of its entries, those that had been sent tothe Press Club of New Orleans for judging, as a result of Katrina.]

A "media" company threatened
    Let's start with the tale of a media company, onethat's been an integral part of our business.
   In recent years, this company saw technology change.High-tech competitors from industries it hadn't had to think aboutbefore invaded its turf.
   The company is trying to reinvent itself – to pullaway from the medium to which it is so closely tied. Its stock price isdown almost a third in the past year, and large layoffs threaten to cutto the core of its business.
   I'm not going to tell you quite yet which mediacompany I'm talking about, but all of us could probably find somethingin there that sounds a lot like where we work.

What is journalism worth?
   The one thing this company does know is what itsproduct is worth, even if that worth is diminishing.
   Sadly, I'd suggest that's not the case withjournalists. We know what our newspapers are worth, and our radio or TVstations. You can put a value on those presses and transmitters, onthose cameras and subscription lists.
    But what is thejournalism itself worth?
   If we look at it with the cold, hard eye we bring toour stories, we might have to admit our journalism is worth nothing, atleast when it comes to money, which is the way business keeps score.
    Our journalism has gotten its value from beinglumped together into a package that attracts eyeballs and thus attractsadvertisers. We're like some giant 800-number dating service, only witha purpose we keep telling ourselves is nobler.
    For a journalist, advertisers exist for one reason –to turn time into money.
Our readers and viewers pay us in time. But if we want to be inbusiness, we have to keep score with money. But if our only value comesfrom aggregation, that's a problem at a time when corporate behemothslike Viacom are splitting and when we see a rise in free papers and wecontinue to struggle with whether we can charge for news on the Web.
    After all, if the "package" your journalism comes inis free, what does that say about the value of the actual content?
   Without knowing what our journalism is worth, we endup valuing the package, not the content. And that makes us dependent onany change that suddenly makes that package less relevant.
   In short, it cheapens our journalism.
   Yet I rarely hear journalists ask this basicquestion. And there's hardly been a peep from the major journalismorganizations. (True, they've been a little tied up lately trying tokeep journalists out of jail and to preserve some semblance of freedomof information after September 11.)
   Some researchers – Stephen Lacy and Phillip Meyerare the most prominent – have been trying to figure out this question –can quality sell? So far, the answer is a tentative yes.
   But too much of today's journalism is just acommodity, one nugget not much different from the next. And as welearned in beginning economics, in a commodity business, you get largeand you get cheap.
If you think about it, that sounds a lot like modern media.
   If we're going to argue that somehow qualityjournalism is too important to die – and if we expect anyone to payattention to that argument – we need a crash program that gets to thatcore question: What is journalism worth?
   I challenge you tonight to leave here and startasking what your journalism really is worth.
   Because if we don't do that, if we let others do itfor us, then we might as well admit journalism is nothing more than asocial good to be supported by foundations, donations and governmentfunding. In short (and with apologies to anyone from public radio or TVin the audience), the way we pay for most social goods in this country– by begging.

Rapid Relevance
   Part of modern business is understanding that yourcustomers likely will be gone tomorrow if you don't meet their needs.There are simply too many alternatives.
   Who is that customer? As Pogo said: "We have met theenemy and it is us."
   That media company I talked about? The medium isfilm, the company is Kodak, and we, journalists, were among its largestcustomers. At every sporting event, newspaper and magazinephotographers went through yards and yards of film.
And then things changed. The digital camera became relativelyaffordable. We didn't want to wait. We wanted those images now. And wecould do away with all those messy chemicals and cost.
   One day, in the late 1990s, the AP decreed that ifyou were a newspaper and you wanted photos, you'd better get a digitalreceiver. That was enough to move even recalcitrant publishers. Some ofKodak's largest customers were history.
   OK, so you're Kodak. You still have that massivebase of retail customers who not only have film cameras but have to getthat film developed, something that also was a big part of Kodak'sbusiness.
   Only now Kodak had to deal with cameras that hadnames like Sony. Or Hewlett-Packard: A computer company? Sellingcameras? (Does that sound familiar – Yahoo hiring war correspondents?)And that developing went to one-hour labs. (How many of us still sendfilm for two-day processing – assuming we still own film camera?)
    So now one of Kodak's biggest competitors isn'tanother camera company but a retailer – the world's largest – Wal-Mart.And Wal-Mart often is using another company's equipment – Fuji's.
   But we – as journalists or as amateur photographers– didn't care about some venerable name, did we? We wanted rapidrelevance – when we wanted it, where we wanted it and how wewanted it.
   We're not the first. People are fond of saying therailroads suffered because they didn't realize they were in thetransportation business. But the smartest people in transportationrealized their business also was actually rapid relevance – getting itto the customer exactly when, where and how the customer wanted it.
   So if Kodak dies – and I really don't think it willbecause it is reinventing itself, but it's going to be gut-wrenchingfor many people – but if it does, we helped kill it. And if we don'tcare about a little $13 billion company, why should our readers careany more about a $3 billion Knight Ridder or New York Times or a $1billion McClatchy – or any other media company, if we don't give themwhat they want?
   Consider a few things about those customers wecovet, the 18- to 34-year-olds:

Jupiter Research recently reported a third of them increasinglyrely on their portable media players for TV and instant news andinformation – and that was before the video iPod.
M-metrics says full-time students with jobs are significantlymore likely to use mobile e-mail than anyone else.
Another recent survey found that 85 percent of college studentssurveyed had cell phones – and most of those could send and receivetext messages or play games.

   Consider the widely reported Washington Post focusgroups where people said they wanted the news – they just didn't wantthe newspaper. It was dirty, messy, a pain to deal with – in otherwords, just like all those photo chemicals we were so happy to banishfrom our newsrooms.
    And – even though Yahoo sponsored this study –consider a report from this week that should scare the heck out of youas a journalist: 81 percent of college students said search engineswere the "best" source of information. Friends and family came next at64 percent and then traditional media at 34 percent. (The numbers aremore than 100 because the study took the top two choices as "best.)
   In other words, if we continue to value ourjournalism by the package it comes in, we have no idea what the coreproduct – the thing our customers say they want – is worth, and we riskbecoming obsolete.

"Dead Money" and "Bad Competitors"
   If we just cut profits and put the money back intothe newsroom, all would be well. Right?
   It's become such a chorus that I'm reminded ofsomething Gen. George Patton once said: "If everyone is thinkingalike, then someone isn't thinking."
    Recently, some folks have pointed out it isn't thatsimple, not when most media companies now are creatures of the publicstock markets.
When you get stockholders used to a certain profit margin, you can'tjust wake up one morning and say, I think we'll cut the profits so wecan do better journalism – even if you wanted to.
    You'd be fired – the directors by law have toprotect shareholders' interests. And you'd probably be sued.
    So if you don't innovate and find new products – ornew ways of doing things – you basically must cut and cut to makemargin. Finally, the market decides you've cut too much and you're nolonger worth the price. It's called: "dead money."
    Eventually, your stock value falls enough that youcan afford to buy back the shares and go private, or you become cheapenough that a takeover company dismembers you.
   That does allow some new players – some who mightcare deeply about the journalism – into the game. But it's gutwrenching, and there's no guarantee you won't be bought up by afinancial blood-sucker. This is business survival of the fittest. Beready for it.
   We also face what business-strategy expert MichaelPorter calls the "bad competitor," one that doesn't play by "our"rules. It doesn't have to. Electronic news sites have much lower costsof entry. Even a new newspaper these days can buy press time or evennew presses more cheaply than those of the established media.
    "Citizen journalism" sites – one of which I'm in themiddle of trying to set up – are even doing it without "big-j"Journalists.

Bet on the jockey, not on the horse
    It sounds like a bleak picture. It doesn't need tobe.
   Yes, there are going to be rough times.
   But if we, as journalists, are to have a hope ofreclaiming the journalism we set out to do, we can't ignore – or worseyet, simply wring our hands and whine about – what's happening aroundus. We have to bet on the jockey, not the horse.
   Let me explain.
   I enjoy putting a few bucks down on the ponies. Butyou won't find me in most cases at thoroughbred tracks like Belmont orChurchill Downs. I'm more likely to be watching the harness races atYonkers or the old Louisville Downs – or maybe Pompano Park.
   I've learned that I'm lousy at betting on horses.They are like technology – big, sleek, powerful – and more likely tocome in out of the money. So while the payoff can be great, I'm notwilling to tie my paycheck to Big Elmer.
    But I have learned I can bet the jockey.
    The jockey straddling half a ton of horseflesh ispretty much along for the ride. But a harness jockey has more controlover that "technology," and you can find jockeys who tend to be moreconsistent winners. So I'm betting on the skill, the craft, not thetechnology.
   And that's what I'm hoping you'll do as journalists.
   You need to worry less about the technology and betmore on your craft. The medium does not matter as much as thejournalism.
If you're a good storyteller – and that you're here tonight shows youare, whether in words, pictures or graphics – you already are honingthe skills necessary in this multimedia, always-on world.
   A good storyteller already tries to create amultimedia event in the reader's mind. Sight, sound, smell – you'retrying to transmit all of them.
And the smart writer has always worked with photographers. That writerknew a so-so story could make 1-A with a great photo -- and thephotographer was another advocate for the story. And a goodphotographer always got a sense of the writer's story, knowing that ifthe pictures matched, they were likely to get the best play.
   That's what this multimedia world is all about –being aware of all the ways to tell a story and knowing enough to usethose other resources when needed – and when appropriate.
   If you're a writer who wants the reader to "hear" astory, why wouldn't you want to help those readers who come to thestory on the Web with a few short audio clips? If you want them to"see," why not video or a slide show?
   Fortunately, we rather quickly shrank from thisvision of the new-age multimedia reporter as "Edward Scissorhands" –outfitted with multiple tools, a veritable Swiss Army knife of ajournalist. Of course, as in the movie, things tended to turn out badlywhen it was tried, or even when we just thought about it much. We nowseem to realize this "one-person band" idea isn't the best and thisisn't going to be journalism on the cheap.
   But even if you're in a small newsroom without bigresources, you can still expand your storytelling. There are so manysimple, cheap tools out there that even if all you do is occasionallyadd sound to your print story shoveled onto the Web, you're givingpeople a reason to come to that Web site for your journalism.
   This isn't going to be painless. We're in the"Jell-O era" – the time when managers are tempted throw anything theycan against the wall to see what sticks. That's natural. It alsoproduces silly mandates, such as you have to get sound on every storyor every story has to have some other multimedia element.
   Of course, not every story lends itself to sound,and you certainly don't want to spook an interview by whipping out amicrophone at the wrong time. Just the same, I've seen too many "print"journalists and journalism students fall back on that excuse when itclearly wasn't likely. Do what we used to do in TV when we had to shootfilm – do the interview in pencil and paper first, and then pull outthe microphone and record. You'll probably get better, more thoughtfulanswers as a result.

Watch the people, not the rats
    Two final points: First, listen to the rat poisonexpert.
    On NPR the other day there was a fascinatinginterview with an author who recounted dinner with the rat poisonspecialist of Europe. Asked about his success, the poison specialistsaid: "I watch the people, not the rats."
   Rats eat the food people leave. So in France, hemixes in a little butterfat with the poison. In Germany, it's some porkfat. In Venice, I guess it's olive oil. As journalists, we also need towatch the people – not the rats.
   Part of the reason we're in this mess is because wehaven't paid attention to changing desires, lifestyles and needs.
   We wrote too much for those we were covering – therats. We expected people to read it the way we wanted them to. Weheard, but we didn't really pay attention, when someone questionedwhether we were really in "mass media" anymore.
    And too often we forgot that it doesn't hurt to mixa little butter – or some occasional sugar – into our stories.

In the 21st century, large is not incharge
    My final point comes from, Sumner Redstone, thepower behind Viacom. When Redstone said this year that he was splittingthe $23 billion colossus so that it could more nimbly respond tochanges in the media world, he said this: "In the 21st century, largeis no longer in charge."
    Those should be sweet words to journalists because,at its essence, journalism is small. We too often confuse journalismwith the practice of putting out a newspaper or putting on a newscast.Those are team efforts.
    But the process of gathering news, of discoveringand uncovering, of going places where the average person can't go –that, my friends, remains a one-on-one relationship between source andjournalist. And that's not likely to change anytime soon.
   Small means opportunity. Yes, it was sad when theBaltimore Sun said it was closing its London and Beijing bureaus. Butperhaps now jobs open for two, three or more freelancers.
    If we don't like the way things are going and thinkwe can do it better ourselves, there's no better time. The costs toentry are low – you can put up a community news Web site for a fewhundred dollars and a few hours' work. Remember, unlike at Kodak, we are the raw material.
   Will such "citizen journalism" make money? I don'tknow. That's what we're trying to find out in a South Carolina project.
   But don't make the same kind of arrogant mistakeswe've made before in dismissing things out of hand, like this kind ofthinking from a former SPJ president:
    "There is a difference between 'citizen journalism'and 'professional journalism,'" he wrote. "A professional journalist'sNo. 1 obligation is to be accurate. A citizen journalist's No. 1obligation is to be interesting."
   He missed the point. The challenge for both thesedays is to be accurate andinteresting.
   If we can do both – and be quick ... if we canfigure out what we do is worth ... if we can bet on the jockey and notthe horse ... and watch the people not the rats ... and if we rememberthat large is not in charge ... I believe we as journalists canreclaim journalism's soul, no matter what the medium.
   There is no better time than now. There is no oneelse but us!
   And if you don't believe me on that, well at leasttrust me on this: Next year the hurricane entries go to Boise.

Quicken: A case of software arrogance

2011-12-24T14:04:00.001-05:00

There are some parallels to be drawn between Intuit and its Quicken software and the media industry. Both have tended to do things because they can, not because they really understand the needs of their consumers.

Intuit's Quicken 2012 is a good example. One truly wonders how much usability testing it was put through before release.

If you've used Quicken for years, as I have, its combination of spreadsheet views,when necessary, and database aggregation made it a very powerful tool. But now the developers - or marketers - at Quicken apparently have decided they know best. What has resulted is a piece of bloatware (required 1GB of memory to run) loaded with non-optional graphical interfaces that sometimes are less easy to understand than a simple spreadsheet in colors and that severely restrict the options and functionality.

The best example is the "new" budget. It's a circus of colored bars arrows, drop-down boxes, etc., but with less functionality than the original spreadsheet version. For instance:

You can't do a specific budget out for more than 12 months from the current month. So if I want to sit down today and do all of a 2012 budget, guess what? I can't do December 2012. December is usually a month of some pretty big inflows and outflows, gifts and travel on one side, and things like capital gains on the other. Yet I have to wait until January to put those in the form? So you've just decreased my efficiency.
Once a month has passed, you are locked out from making any changes. So let's say I decided to make a big purchase at the end of a month and pay for it with a sizable withdrawal from savings. If I wait a day or two to enter it, the month's end might have passed, and I'm locked out.
Maybe I make an advance payment on a loan. I have to wait a week or two (even online) to get the statement showing the adjusted principle and interest. If I've passed month's end, I'm locked out.

And on and on. Even generating the budget favors more using averages than specifics.

What's it matter? After all, you still get a general sense of spending, right? Yes, but sometimes - fairly often judging by the complaints on Intuit's third-party complaint forum - a more detailed look is not only appreciated but needed. Being able to generate a year-to-date budget report that is as close to up-to-the-minute as possible can be quite important at times.

In trying to create "Quicken for Dummies," Intuit has severely limited its product - and the irony is that in in doing this, the bloatware is actually less useful than a slimmer, more elegant version.

That's a lot like the media business was, if you think about it: We'll tell you what features you'll get - and you'll like it. Customer feedback is kind of shunted off to the side.

When options became available, people quickly fled.

For now, there aren't that many options. Microsoft is not developing "Money " anymore, though there is a free, lite version. And Intuit owns "The Mint." But Intiut might take a lesson from the media. In this digital age, nothing is forever, especially when you try to force things down customers' throats.

Foxtrot comic illustrates the inanity of 'and/or'

2011-12-20T15:08:00.001-05:00

The inanity of using "and/or" is wonderfully illustrated by a weekend Foxtrot comic. Go to my Tumblr for the comic and discussion.

(Logically, "or" includes "and.")

Blondie makes a common holiday error

2011-12-20T14:54:00.000-05:00

What's wrong this panel from Sunday's "Blondie" cartoon ?

Find out.

We need your views: Is some research threatened?

2011-12-20T14:00:00.000-05:00

The December Convergence Newsletter is out with a couple of important articles looking at how news organizations' convergence practices have changed and challenging some of our assumptions about "digital natives."

But we also need your help beyond that. Here's an excerpt from the newsletter. Please weigh in:

Is some research threatened? We need to hear from you.
The article by Jake Batsell and Camille Kraeplin not only continues their significant research into the evolving nature of convergence, but also includes an observation that signals potential concern for researchers: "Our difficulty soliciting responses suggests that, in an age of information overload, email surveys are becoming a less effective mechanism for conducting newsroom research."
They found that many large and midsize TV stations and groups have adopted "no survey" policies. Others begged off, citing an increasingly burdensome workload.Such surveys have, in the past decade, become an important method of gathering significant information about changes in the field. Are you finding the same problems?
We'd like to hear from you, problems or no, about your views on this and whether you think it could be a significant problem for some research. Email us at convedit@mailbox.sc.edu, or comment on our Facebook or Google+ pages or on our blog. We'd like to compile your views in a future issue.

Tools: Free graphic design programs

2011-12-20T12:32:00.001-05:00

You know you need some free graphics programs. There's a really nice review and video here:
http://opengraphicdesign.blogspot.com/

(Thanks to Ed Henninger for the pointer.)

When a correction is not enough

2011-12-17T11:13:00.000-05:00

When a correction blows a hole in a previous story and actually raises more questions about what went on, is a small correction buried on page two enough?

Here's an example from The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C.

The original story:

What crosses the jump is this graf (Keel is Mark Keel, head of the State Law Enforcement Division):

Keel said the sanctions came because SLED’s prior administration outsourced most of the agency’s information technology work. That left the agency unable to monitor local law enforcement agencies as they used the federal system, leading to the sanctions. “I don’t know if the prior administration understood how important this particular part of the agency was."

Later, the story explained that as a result of outsourcing IT, SLED stopped doing required audits of the use of the national crime database.

The same information was picked up by AP from The State:
SLED is supposed to audit every local law enforcement agency to make sure it uses the federal crime database properly. Those audits stopped in 2007 under Keel's predecessor as the agency had most of its technology work done by outside companies. The FBI sanctioned SLED last week, but also commended the agency for taking steps to resume the audits.

OK, makes sense to me and provides a simple explanation, although one could certainly raise a bunch more questions about Keel's predecessor and the decisions to outsource IT. One might also ask why SLED wrote a contract, apparently, that did not give it an opportunity to audit, etc.

Then today comes this correction, buried at the bottom of page 2:

To my mind, that raises many more serious questions. If the IT was not outsourced, then the problems were even more clearly internal to SLED. Why did it stop monitoring? Why were no audits done? Is there a failure of leadership or a systemic failure?

This is when a typical correction does not cut it.

The paper's online story has this graf:

Keel said the sanctions came because SLED’s prior administration had planned to outsource most of the agency’s information technology work. The plans caused SLED to lost [sic] most of its IT staff, which left the agency unable to monitor local law enforcement agencies as they used the federal system. That lead [sic] to the sanctions from the FBI.

“I don’t know if the prior administration understood how important this particular part of the agency was.”

OK, perhaps not quite so nefarious (though it still raises many questions), but it reinforces my point. The buried correction was not enough. There is an important nuance here for the necessary understanding. At least the correction should have been more robust.

But this also raises some other questions. I can't tell, because I did not see the original online version, but it appears the story has been hastily changed (circumstantial evidence comes from the two language problems note with "sic"). If that's the case, I see no note on the story indicating the change was made. That would be a transparency problem, something else the paper might want to think about in being honest with its audience.

Ban headlines like this

2011-12-17T10:28:00.000-05:00

One inviolate rule of headline writing - it should reflect with fealty what the story actually says.

So let's look at this specimen from today's (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper.

Is there really a "ban"?

Let me help by starting with the last graf:

The provision that Upton got placed into the spending bill will cut off money the Department of Energy would have used to make sure that the regulations are followed. The lighting standards themselves remain.

Not definitive enough? OK, let's go up a few grafs to this:

In fact, the new standards don’t ban incandescent bulbs, but rather require that new ones use about 25 percent less electricity. The extra efficiency is provided by the use of halogen gas.

We report, you decide.

It's not as sexy, but something like House blocks money for light bulb rules would be a bunch more accurate.

Why Firefox is losing my loyalty

2011-12-15T18:09:00.002-05:00

The folks at Mozilla know Firefox has gone from being an upstart challenger industry to becoming firmly entrenched in some production processes. Knowing and understanding, however, are two different things.

Yet another update appeared this week on my various machines, and again, the pre-install message was the same: This or that plug-in is incompatible and so deactivate it.

Nope, screw the update (thankfully, only a minor one, 8.01, instead of the major version changes that have been flooding out in recent months). I need that plug-in, one that automatically refreshes websites, to work on the digital signs in the newsroom that display those sites.

And I don't need to get messages from the CMSes, digital signs and other back ends I work with telling me my browser is no longer compatible (I usually can ignore those, but the nag factor is a pain).

And then there's the added annoyance that on some Macs, FF8 won't properly integrate with the Quicktime 7 plug-in, prompting the "Quicktime needs another component" message (it doesn't) and won't play MP3 files inline. (No problem with FF3, which is why it stays on my machine.)

Firefox's great vitality is its stable of plug-ins. But that will also be its downfall, if it iwn't careful. You can't offer a buffet of useful plug-ins by third parties, encourage people to use them and integrate them into workflows, and then break them with numerous updates.

I can see the response now - these are important updates and if those third-party developers can't keep up, too bad. (I also largely agree that sites that sniff for specific browser versions, for instance, instead of core engines are bad and stupid.)

But that misses the point. That was OK when you were an upstart. When plug-ins were new toys and discoveries that had a large cool factor. But now they have a large embedded-in-workflows factor. Constant breakage is not just a trifling annoyance, it's a major pain in the arse.

I'm not particularly voting for Big Browser here. But it's time for Mozilla to get some of this crap out of the way, get more judicious about updates, and figure out a way to get major plug-ins and other sites in line before releasing all but the most serious security updates.

AP's new plug-in for MS Word - Styleguard

2011-12-15T17:04:00.002-05:00

Tired of having to reach over to lift up that heavy AP stylebook? Enter "Styleguard," AP's new plug-in for MS Word that checks as you type.

From the news release:

AP StyleGuard, powered by Equiom Linquistic Labs, is a powerful yet easysolution that integrates with Microsoft Word and provides automatic checking ofyour documents for AP style. Using defined structure and rules similar toWord's spelling and grammar checking, AP StyleGuard helps ensure theconsistency of your writing style. It saves the time of manually referringto the AP Stylebook and offers recommendations on items you might not haverealized are covered by AP style.

No matter what type of writing you do, you can rest assured that AP StyleGuardhelps you stay on top of all the current spelling, grammar, punctuation andusage guidelines from the journalist's bible.

Cost: $49.99For now, it's available only if you have a subscription to the online stylebook and, in keeping with AP's traditional operating system myopia - it appears to be Windows only.

On the other hand, anything that might short-circuit much of Word's absurd grammar recommendations with some common sense might be useful.

Good for newspapers, maybe, but for journalism?

2011-12-15T16:50:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Lou Phelps of the Savannah Daily News in a column this week for making brutally clear that newspapering is a business - a cutthroat one - that's not necessarily good for journalism.

Phelps, a media consultant whose company also publishes the Daily News, seeks to make the point that, when looked at from a cash-flow perspective, newspapering is still a pretty decent business and that "we are far from dead," especially smaller community papers:

For smaller publishers still operating their own presses who need to spend $150,000 for computer-to-plate equipment, or $250,000 on press improvements, these incentives will help them cut their payrolls and newsprint waste, helping to make their companies even stronger in future years.

I agree with Phelps, who also looks at Lee, McClatchy and Gannett and finds that they would be in decent shape if it weren't for their crushing debt and depreciation payments. Traditional media companies are going to have to move earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization (EBITDA) closer to bottom-line earnings.

This month's Common Sense Journalism column is going to use an example out of Iowa to argue that if trad media companies want to thrive among the nimblest of new-media companies, they are going to have to write down and throw off more of the real estate, "big iron" and "big silicon" they find themselves writing down and tied to. They have become storefronts on the information highway, and, frankly, they probably ought to be operating out of storefronts, or close to it.

Phelps, however, takes it a step further, nicely drawing the distinction between newspapering as a business and journalism:

Unlike many business sectors, our expenses are tied very tightly to revenue. And, our industry, generally, is not burdened with significant research and development costs or patent attorneys, such as those in the drug or manufacturing sectors.

Take a restaurant, for example. It has to have employees standing there to cook and serve, and has to purchase the food items listed on the menu whether customers come in the door on Friday night or not.

Not so with the newspaper business. If our ad revenues decline, we cut newsprint/ink usage, we buy fewer stories and photographs, and we don't pay sales commissions (particularly optimum if sales reps are on straight commission.) Well-run newspaper companies have controlled all of their overhead and operating expenses, and changed their staffing strategies to be able to adjust to these vagaries.

Granted, some companies were late to that party and paid dearly in 2008 and 2009 as they struggled to believe that advertising revenues would not rebound - and took too long to cut.

But by 2010, most newspaper companies came to grips with the future, and began to admit to each other ... "It's amazing how few people it actually takes to run a newspaper company, isn't it?" as one distinguished newspaper owner in Georgia said to me last year.

And, we all began to cut like crazy.

Exactly. Newspapering doesn't take (relatively) a lot of resources. Journalism does.

To keep things in perspective, The Savannah Daily News is not the traditionally dominant paper (the Savannah Morning News, daily circulation about 35,000, is). It's a free, low-staff operation (perhaps it's significant that the paper's "about us" page is blank, though this is on the subscription form: Welcome to readership of Savannah Daily News, locally owned and edited by professional journals. Be sure to sign up your family members...and we how you will consider recommending us to your friend and associates. ---Founded in 2004, Savannah Daily News is the region's FREE daily news source. SDN is locally owned, with news stories written daily by respected journalists who live in and love the Savannah, Coastal Georgia and the Lowcountry.)

I couldn't readily find any circulation figures, but it doesn't matter, because I think the sentiments Phelps expresses are shared by many others in the industry looking for low-cost, turn key solutions to what ails them (which Phelps will happily supply through her Community Daily News LLC).

As Phelps notes, newspaper companies are "not burdened with significant research and development costs." Which goes a long way to explaining why newspaper companies are finding it so hard to merge onto the new information - and journalism - highway.

News generated by computers

2011-12-08T10:32:00.001-05:00

A new blog is up, "Just to Clarify," by Kris Hammond - and I'd recommend you read it occasionally. Hammond is the chief technology officer of Narrative Science, which is focused on turning data into computer-generated narratives.

Much of its work is based on research coming out of Northwestern University.

His newest post has the provocative title: Why 90% of news will be computer generated in 15 years.

Hammond's thesis breaks down to four (he says three, but I broke out No. 3 here) points:

More and more data is being generated natively in all sorts of areas (business, government,sports, etc.) and it is becoming more accessible
New techniques are also allowing computers to take text that previously required human mediation and interpretation and turn it into data
Integrating the first two, with some human guidance, will produce richer and more relevant stories
As news organizations increasingly have to rely on aggregating revenue streams from numerous niches, instead of a mass audience, doing so without the aid of computers doing some of the writing would be economically infeasible.

As he puts it: "A computer can write highly localized crime reports, personalized stock portfolio reporting, high school and youth sports stories at scale to provide coverage that was previously impossible and could never be possible in a world of purely human generated content."

Not to mention the fifth point - publishers looking for ever-cheaper ways of doing things.

See also Hammond's earlier, thought-provoking post: "The end of destination sites." That ought to give you a snoot full to think about for the rest of the day.

AP Style: Holiday Guide

2011-12-06T12:05:00.001-05:00

AP has compiled a special guide to style for the holidays. It's below. While we're at it, let's repeat the usual suggestions to avoid trite phrases like "'tis the season," "it's beginning to look a lot like ..." and "the white stuff" for snow.

Advent
The four Sundays preceding Christmas.

"Auld Lang Syne"
Sung to greet the New Year, poem by Robert Burns set to Scottish music.
BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) --
Dateline for AP stories from the biblical site of Jesus' birth.
Bible
Capitalize in reference to the Scriptures; lowercase biblical in all uses.
Boxing Day
Post-Christmas holiday Dec. 26 In British Commonwealth countries.
Champagne
Capitalize sparkling wine from the French region uncorked to celebrate New Year's.
Christmas Eve, Christmas Day
Capitalize Dec. 24 and Dec. 25 Christian feast marking the birth of Jesus.
Christmastime
One word.
Christmas tree
Lowercase tree and other seasonal terms with Christmas: card, wreath, carol, etc. Exception: National Christmas Tree.
dreidel
Toy spinning top for Jewish celebrations.
hallelujah
Lowercase the biblical praise to God, but capitalize in composition titles: Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus.
Hanukkah
Eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights starting Dec. 20 this year.
Jesus, Jesus Christ
Pronouns referring to him are lowercase, as is savior.
happy holidays, merry Christmas, season's greetings
Such phrases are generally spelled lowercase, though Christmas is always capitalized.
Holy Land
Capitalize the biblical region.
Kriss Kringle
Not Kris. Derived from the German word, Christkindl, or baby Jesus.
Kwanzaa
African-American and Pan-African celebration of family, community and culture, Dec. 26-Jan. 1.
Magi
Three wise men who brought gifts to the infant Jesus at Epiphany, celebrated Jan. 6.
menorah
Candelabrum with nine branches used for Hanukkah.
Messiah
Capitalized in references to Jesus or to the promised deliverer in Judaism.
Nativity scene
Only the first word is capitalized.
New Year's Eve, New Year's Day
Capitalized for Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
North Pole
Mythical home of Santa Claus.
poinsettia
Decorative plant for Christmas; note the "ia."
regifting
Passing along an unwanted present to someone else.
Santa Claus
Brings toys to children in a sleigh pulled by reindeer on Christmas Eve.
"A Visit From St. Nicholas"
Beloved poem by Clement Clarke Moore that begins, " 'Twas the night before Christmas ..."
"The Twelve Days of Christmas"
Spell the numeral in the Christmas carol.
yule
Old English name for Christmas season; yuletide is also lowercase.
Xmas
Don't use this abbreviation for Christmas

Selective use of data

2011-12-01T22:44:00.001-05:00

Data is good in journalism. Selective use of data, not so much.

So let's look at the following story from The Nerve, a journalistic endeavor of the S.C. Policy Council. The council is a heavily conservative advocacy organization, but for those critics who would like to dismiss The Nerve's work out of hand as a result, stop.

The reporters, many of whom worked for "established" media, know their stuff and more often than not have uncovered those annoying little tidbits that send politicians into a tizzy. It also has become another media voice documenting and amplofying FOIA violations - can't be enough of those.

Yes, the stuff could use some solid editing from time to time. And it can be a bit shrill - one clearly knows the direction the writers are coming from ("Where Government Gets Exposed" is the site's tagline). But to dismiss it out of hand is ill-advised.

However, there are things like this that bother me because they show selective use of data to put a finger on the fairness scale, so to speak. And yes, I am a USC employee, and no, doesn't matter a twit to me what the subject is. We're talking basic journalism, editing and fairness in presenting data here. So consider the following. My comments and questions, had I edited this, are in brackets and italics:

As College Tuition Rises, So Does Administrators’ Pay

The body of the story bears that headline out at only one school.

By Amit Kumar

We’ve all heard it before: Tuition at South Carolina’s public universities and colleges is rising; state appropriations for higher education are falling; and it’s something that has been going on for years.

There is, however, at least one budgetary commitment that has remained constant or even increased at state institutions of higher education in recent years: total compensation paid to university presidents and vice presidents.

"Remained constant or 'even' increased" - so if it's remained constant, why is it worth mentioning?

The Nerve analyzed total compensation packages for the presidents and vice presidents at the University of South Carolina, Clemson University, and the College of Charleston, the largest undergraduate public universities in the state. The Nerve obtained compensation records by filing S.C. Freedom of Information requests with all three universities.

While tuition at all three public universities has nearly doubled in the past decade, university administrators have been receiving steady compensation packages worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the review found.

OK, so the news is what? If administrators' salaries had been going up, the news is clear. But if their compensation stayed "steady," then doesn't that bolster the idea that the extra money's been going for other purposes (like education and more faculty)?

The Nerve’s review also found that, while university administrators often point to decreases in state appropriations as justification for tuition increases, the amounts of federal stimulus dollars each of these three universities received in the past two fiscal years more than offset any cuts in state funding.

More on this in a minute, but hold this question - do stimulus dollars actually replace state appropriations?

For fiscal year 2011-2012, the total compensation package for USC President Harris Pastides is valued at $535,000; for the College of Charleston President George Benson, at $398,987; and for Clemson President James Barker, at $400,000.

Each of those packages is more than 12 times the per capita income in South Carolina, valued at $33,163 in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

OK, gives us a bit of context. But is 12 times excessive compared with similar officials in other states (which also have been cutting budgets) or with other S.C. officials? Has that ratio increased or decreased over time - that's a major weakness throughout the story; the real issue is whether there have been increases, and have those been excessive? I know it's hard to feel sympathy for someone making $300K or $400K a year, but as journalists, we're supposed to know when a snapshot can be more misleading than a time series. BTW, check the state salary database, and 17 state employees show up (most from the universities, including the Medical University of South Carolina, as making more than $300,000, none of them the university presidents because the presidents' actual salaries are much lower).

At USC, the total compensation paid to Pastides each year since fiscal year 2008-2009, his first in the post, has been constant at $535,000. That number includes both money from state government and supplemental private funds from University of South Carolina foundations.

What's the breakdown? Has the public portion of that changed? What relevance does the "private" part of that have to the argument at hand, which seems to be tuition rises but these folks keep dipping from the trough.

A report by The Chronicle On Higher Education, though, found that the median total compensation package for university presidents – including presidents of university systems with multiple campuses, like that of USC – at 185 of the top research institutions in the nation in 2009-2010 was $440,487 – $95,000 lower than Pastides’ package.

Useful to know.

Meanwhile, both in-state and out-of-state tuition for attending USC have more than doubled in the past 10 years, with in-state tuition rising from $5,024 in 2002-2003 to $10,168 in 2011-12. After adjusting for inflation, that figure represents a 61 percent increase in tuition and fees.

A common refrain from universities regarding their yearly tuition hikes is that the increases are necessary because the amount of money the state appropriates to higher education has decreased each year. And this is true: For instance, for the 10-year period from 2001-2002 to 2010-2011, annual state appropriations to USC-Columbia have declined by 45 percent, from $183.7 million to $101 million, according to the most recent report by the S.C. Commission on Higher Education.

However, for the past two completed fiscal years, state universities have received federal stimulus dollars as a response to the recession. While those stimulus funds, which are non-recurring, have more than offset year-to-year reductions in state appropriations, universities have still elected to raise tuition in those years.

OK, back to the original question - are stimulus funds the same as state funds? I don't know, but the journalist could have helped me out as a reader. Many federal funds come with restrictions, as opposed to the state's "general fund" dollars. If the fed money is not a perfect substitute, is the argument here that the fed money used for purpose "x," should have then freed up the same amount of state money for other uses, thus negating or lessening the need for a tuition increase? Would have been nice to explain.

For example, in fiscal year 2009-2010, state recurring appropriations to the entire USC system declined by $20.5 million; that same year USC received $29.2 million in federal stimulus dollars, more than offsetting the loss in state dollars. Still, USC increased tuition by 3.6 percent for in-state and out-of-state students in 2009-2010.

Similarly, at the College of Charleston, President George Benson’s compensation has not increased since he first took the top position in 2007-2008. However, the compensation packages for five of the college’s six vice presidents have increased since 2006-2007, including three packages that have increased by more than 14 percent each after adjusting for inflation.

OK, so the story vis a vis Benson is? The five VPs is interesting. But why does the story report only VP increases for College of Charleston? What about Clemson, USC, etc.? (Note: Clemson's data comes at end - would be useful if these were grouped if the point was that VPs overall were getting raises.)

For instance, the compensation package for George Watt, the college’s executive vice president of institutional advancement, has increased by $62,687, or 20.1 percent after adjusting for inflation, since 2008-2009 – right at the height of the recession.

Sounds not so good. But what does a VP of institutional advancement do? As a reader, helps me decide whether it's reasonable.

In the past 10 years, in-state tuition at the College of Charleston has increased from $4,858 in 2002-2003 to $9,616 in 2011-2012, or by 57 percent after adjusting for inflation. Out-of-state tuition has increased even more, by 76 percent after adjusting for inflation, or $13,356 more per year.

College of Charleston, like USC, repeatedly justifies tuition increases at least partially because of lowered state appropriations. But although the amount of general funds appropriated to public universities has decreased significantly in recent years, general funds make up only a small portion of a university’s overall budget.

For fiscal 2011-12, general funds made up only 9 percent of the College of Charleston’s overall budget. For USC, that number was 11 percent; for Clemson University, general funds were only 8 percent of its overall budget.

Perhaps it is too obvious to note that one of the reasons general funds make up "only" (a loaded word) a small part of the budgets is because the state appropriations have been cut so much? Again, trend data useful for me as a reader to determine context.

The bulk of these universities’ budgets actually comes from other funds, which are made up of tuition and fees. Of the College of Charleston’s $220 million budget, $183.5 million, or 83 percent of the overall budget, comes from other funds. At USC, $641.8 million out of its $907.2 million budget, or 71 percent, comes from other funds; at Clemson, other funds make up $650.6 million out its $805.4 million budget, or 81 percent.

And, again, that large proportion would be a direct result of state funding being cut, right?

Universities are crying out that they need to increase tuition because their state appropriations are dwindling; but those appropriations make up only about 10 percent of their overall budgets, and cuts to those funds have been offset by federal stimulus dollars in recent years.

So synthesizing my comments: This is a collection of random facts that when put in the same graf sounds sinister but fails to answer whether stimulus dollars can be directly substitutable for state appropriations and how much state money as a proportion of the schools' budget has changed. The implied argument seems to hinge on "only," but the "only" might well be the result of state cuts, especially if the federal money is not a one-for-one replacement - seems a bit tautological, eh?

All these same financial trends are visible at Clemson, where in-state tuition has increased by 67 percent and out-of-state tuition by 75 percent in the past 10 years after adjusting for inflation.

In that same time, Clemson President James Barker has seen his compensation package increase by $120,986, from $279,014 to $400,000 – a raise of 14 percent after adjusting for inflation.

OK, that's useful.

Some of Clemson’s vice presidents have received large compensation increases in the past decade as well, even when adjusting for inflation.

In the past 10 years, the compensation package for Doris Helms, Clemson’s vice president for academic affairs and provost, has increased by 28 percent, to $270,389 today. The package for John Kelly, vice president for agriculture, public service, and economic development, has increased by 19 percent after, to $242,732 today; and for Neill Cameron, vice president for advancement, by 15.5 percent, to $211,185 today.

OK, that's useful. So Clemson raises some flags. But when did those raises happen? Isn't it possible the bulk were before the 2008 recession? Help me out as a reader to evaluate the information. It's far more significant if they've continued getting raises even after the economy tanked.

And why don't we hear about the VPs at the other institutions - USC? So at two out of three schools, there were~~n't~~ significant VP raises? But not at the largest? And how do they relate? That's cherry-picking data.

Bottom line: Might be a story here. Take your pick based on your policy/political/fiscal orientation:

Tuition's gone up even though the schools' financial picture shouldn't have changed because federal stimulus dollars were exactly substitutable for the state money that was cut. (Nothing in the story says that about the fed dollars; we are left to artfully conclude it.) Ergo, any tuition increase somehow is tied to the pay, although how is that possible when the pay remained steady for the presidents of two schools and we have no data in the story showing significant increases for underlings at one of ~~those~~ the three schools ~~(besides Clemson)~~?
University officials' pay has continued to rise even while the economy has gone to crap. (Unfortunately, the data we have right now shows that's the case at "only" one of three, and even then it's not clear when the increases took place.)
State appropriations were cut and the stimulus dollars that came in could not directly replace them. So tuition was raised, in part to cover the salaries plus any increases in those salaries over the past decade. That was wrong, since the stimulus money could have freed up other funds that could have been transferred back to other lines to cover/offset the salaries. The implication is that those top officials should somehow have refunded parts of their salaries to cover that (unspecified) part of the tuition increase.

One of these might have been true. But this story, as a "random walk" through data, doesn't support any of them. If the stimulus was not a dollar-for-dollar replacement, you could also debate things like whether the money was effectively spent, whether the universities should have added positions at such a time, did the universities properly transfer money among lines to account for the stimulus, etc.? But that's a different story than what's here.

Bottom line - numbers don't make a story credible by themselves. Careful, clear numbers with accuracy, completeness and context - and the assumptions clearly spelled out - do.

A different way to look at new community newspapers study

2011-12-01T08:57:00.001-05:00

A new study from the Reynolds Institute and the National Newspaper Association is being framed as "readers in areas served by community newspapers continue to prefer the community newspaper as their sources of local news and advertising."

From the release:

The survey, in its sixth year, shows consistent trends.

Readers prefer the printed copy to the online version, with 48 percent saying they never read the local news online.

They prefer to receive advertising through the newspaper (51%) instead of on the Internet (11%). And only about a quarter of respondents said they had found local news through a mobile device in the past 30 days. Slightly more (38%) said they had received local shopping information by mobile device.

They also have a strong preference for government accountability through newspaper public notice, with 80 percent saying the government should be required to publish notices in the newspaper.

Let me suggest a slightly different interpretation. If a quarter of your market said it was using a device to access your product -- in this case mobile -- would that be an "only" to you or a cause for management to start thinking strategically in that area?

If more than a third said they received local shopping information on a platform -- mobile -- and the suggestion was that perhaps not all of them are going to your site, would that be a cause for concern? Or are you willing to write off more than a third of your audience - a segment likely to grow? (Unfortunately, the release talks about a "trend," but provides no trend data or a link to the time series raw data files. You should also read the footnote to the study carefully because the methodology has changed a bit.)

Yes, it's clear community papers continue to have an important place in the media mix of consumers, but I don't think it's all unicorns and rainbows as the release might suggest with this quote:

"The survey shows a majority of respondents believe that the newspaper does a better job of providing background and depth on stories essential to citizens,” Anfinson said. “Further, the newspaper is more useful to them personally than any other news source. It not only highlights the strong bond between local communities and their newspapers, but demonstrates that people do value good journalism."

If I'm running a business, I'm not willing to give up a quarter or a third of my market, yet I've sat in many a meeting in recent years where community publishers defiantly act as though digital is the enemy or, if they have digital assets, seem largely clueless about them. Bad move.

(Also published on the Community Journalism Interest Group blog.)

Best wishes for a current AP'er

2011-11-24T11:04:00.000-05:00

I didn't know Tim Huber at AP - he joined after I left. But reading his story today in the Charleston
Daily Mail - how he is recovering from a massive stroke - reminds me that once AP, always AP, and I can't help but wish him and his wife the best on this holiday,

It's an inspiring story - and not surprising for those of us who know the grit of AP'ers {grin}.

Best to all those journalists - at AP and elsewhere - who are on duty around the world today. Thanks for all you do.

On this Thanksgiving, a tale of journalistic sharing

2011-11-24T10:28:00.000-05:00

It comes from Nieman Lab, which recounts how a rural Kentucky paper reached out to the Huffington Post to reprint a HuffPo story on a coal miner fighting for safer working conditions.

Perhaps what's surprising about this is that it would be seen at all as unusual in 2011 and the age of distributed journalism.

Don't be a journalism turkey - have a happy Thanksgiving!

Style, yes, but common sense, too

2011-11-23T18:24:00.000-05:00

I admit. I like the idea of style, AP or otherwise. It adds a certain sense of order to things and lets me write instead of having to think about the minutiae.

And I enjoy the various style quizzes that pop up in newsletters and other publications I get. It's always fun to see how much I recall.

My concern, however, is that they can send the message that it's all about style and that style is a rigid thing, when all it should be is a guide. Common sense often must prevail, and sense - the sense of the writer and what he or she is trying to accomplish.

Here are two questions and answers from the quiz I linked to above:
Q1 Arizona officials said the two thousand bushels were sufficient for its November Harvest festival.

A1 Arizona officials said the 2,000 bushels was sufficient for their November Harvest Festival.

Our AP bible reminds writers that a plural noun could take a singular verb if the amount is used as a unit, rather than individually. In this case, was becomes the proper verb since the writer is not referring to individual bushels. For numbers, 2,000 is used. Words come into the picture when the figure is in the millions or higher. Festival is capitalized since it’s part of the formal title for this annual event.

Q4 K-Mart, Wal-Mart and JC Penny announced they will open at 12 midnight on Black Midnight.

A4 Kmart, Walmart and J.C. Penney announced they will open at midnight on “Black Midnight.”

All three company names can be checked in the stylebook. Newer versions will remind journalists that Walmart is the correct version when referring to its retail outlets. Midnight is sufficient without the 12, as is noon. Black Friday is not listed with AP, and many papers have treated it with and without quotes. Those using quote marks may be citing the punctuation guide in the back that states: “A word or words being introduced to readers may be placed in quotation marks on first reference.”

Forget for a moment the admonition that when you do one of these things you're probably going to get something wrong - in this case the use of "Black Midnight" for "Black Friday" (which was used in the answer). Let's look at how what seem like a couple of absolutist answers really should be a bit more flexible:

Arizona officials said the two thousand bushels were sufficient for its November Harvest festival.

A1 Arizona officials said the 2,000 bushels was sufficient for their November Harvest Festival.

Is the use of "its" in the original wrong? No. It's perfectly acceptable here if the writer's sense was "Arizona's ... Festival." So the editor should be checking with the writer for the sense.

K-Mart, Wal-Mart and JC Penny announced they will open at 12 midnight on Black Midnight.

A4 Kmart, Walmart and J.C. Penney announced they will open at midnight on “Black Midnight.”

Is "Walmart" always mandated here? No. If you are talking about your local Walmart store, then that's the correct style. But if the writer's sense is that the company says it will open at midnight, then Wal-Mart is correct.

I hate that part of the stylebook and have only reluctantly given in. It can produce stories where you have both spellings repeatedly interchanged, which is bonkers.

So the next time you see one of these, have fun with it but take some of this style stuff with a grain of salt. Always temper it with what the writer was trying to accomplish, and if you don't know that, then ask or leave it alone.

SC Primaries - split decision for the Republicans

2011-11-22T18:56:00.000-05:00

The S.C. Supreme Court has turned aside the challenge by several counties that said they should not be responsible for paying for the Jan. 21 presidential primary. The primary must be held and the counties and State Election Commission will do so, no questions asked, the court ruled today.

But there was also a slapshot at the GOP, which had intended to put these four "advisory" questions on the ballot:

1. In order to stop the uncontrolled growth of our national debt and prevent excessive borrowing by the Federal Government, which threatens our economy and national security, should the United States Constitution be amended to require a balanced federal budget without raising taxes?
Yes
No

2. In order to promote economic growth and to decrease America’s dependence on foreign energy sources that threaten our national security, should the United States energy policy include increased domestic energy production through access to more on-shore and off-shore oil and natural gas?
Yes
No

3. In order to protect South Carolina jobs and defend against federal government intrusions, should the United States Congress pass the Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act, which would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board from ordering any company to close, relocate, or transfer employees?
Yes
No

4. In order to address the matter of Corporate Personhood, the enfranchised People of the Sovereign State of South Carolina shall decree that:
Corporations are people
Only people are people

Not so fast, the justices said in their 3-2 decision:

Nothing in the statutes upon which this declaratory judgment is rendered and no provision of South Carolina law would allow the ballot for a publically funded Presidential Preference Primary to include anything other than the names of candidates for a qualifying political party's nominee for President of the United States. Accordingly, the State Election Commission and the County Election Commissions are hereby directed that they may not print such ballots or conduct such primaries for any matter other than the nomination of party candidates for President of the United States. No advisory questions may be included on any such primary ballots. Additionally, no other advisory elections, straw polls, or the like on any question may be conducted at the various Presidential Preference Primary polling places or within 200 feet of the entrance to such polling places.

So score one for a bit of sanity.

These questions were not much more than a publicity grab. Any results would have little validity as a barometer of anything.

Maybe the strong language will keep this silliness under control in the future. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Got those journalism blues

2011-11-22T17:23:00.002-05:00

Sure, things are tough in the business. Reporters are being given Sisyphean lists of things to do in this age of social media, bringing the predictable backlash.

But hey, what good is it if you can't sing about it? Awhile back, the "Copy Editor's Lament" went viral (well, OK, maybe it was just a slight sniffle, but still it was fun).

The latest entry, from the Texas Center for Community Journalism, is worthy of a watch/listen. If you've got those journalism blues, pour a glass of your favorite adult beverage, lean back, flip on the video and nod along. Time to get in a mellow mood before the holiday tryptophan kicks in.

That "journalism blues" link also helpfully has the words so you can sing along - or for that next karaoke night.

It seemed like a great headline - even if we made it up

2011-11-21T18:15:00.001-05:00

What do you do if you have a pretty good story about a man who fakes his own abduction and when he calls mom to get $100 in ransom, she talks him down to $60 - but you just don't have that great quote for the headline?

Well, you make it up, of course. At least that's what The (Columbia, S.C.) State appeared to do on Saturday. I dare you to find the quote from the hed in the body of the story:

So this would be another reason to be judicious on quote heds - if the good quote isn't in the story, probably not the time for a quote hed.

The State had an editor who just loved quote heds - for a while it seemed like there had to be one on the front or Metro front almost every day. The editor, unfortunately, had a habit of reaching down the bottom of the story to grab the writer's punch line. That was bad enough, for several reasons.'

But making them up out of thin air? That's a new one on me.

Ham-handed editing

2011-11-16T15:23:00.000-05:00

So here's the Oscars story as it appeared in The State's printed edition:

Can you find what's wrong?

LOS ANGELES — After a tumultuous week that saw the departure and replacement of the Oscar show’s host and producer, the film academy enjoyed a night of good vibes Saturday at its third annual Governors Awards. You might even say the force was with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Armed “Star Wars” storm troopers ensured guests were in their seats and paying attention as Darth Vader opened the evening. Under Vader’s helmet was academy president Tom Sherak, who welcomed the audience of industry insiders with, “How was your week?”

Over the past week, Oscar producer Brett Ratner and host Eddie Murphy resigned and were replaced with producer Brian Grazer and host Billy Crystal. Ratner departed the Oscar show amid criticism of his use of a pejorative term for gay men at a screening of the director’s action comedy “Tower Heist,” which stars Murphy.

Saturday’s untelevised Governors Awards couldn’t have been smoother.

Jones, who famously voiced Vader, accepted his award by video from London’s Wyndham Theater, where he is starring in “Driving Miss Daisy” with Vanessa Red-grave. Baldwin and Glenn Close feted the actor before Sir Ben Kingsley presented him with his Oscar onstage in London.

Close called Jones “a world treasure” and Kingsley said the 80-year-old actor is “always so damn good.”

Smith, the groundbreaking makeup artist who counts “The Exorcist” and “The Godfather” among his credits, was lauded for his long career and his generosity in sharing the secrets of his craft. Writer-directors J.J. Abrams, Peter Jack-son and Guillermo del Toro saluted the 89-year old.

Abrams, creator of TV’s “Lost” and “Fringe,” said Smith “was the Beatles to me” and told of how he wrote a fan letter to the makeup artist and received an “old but clean” tongue from “The Exorcist” in return.

Winfrey was introduced by Quincy Jones, Travolta, Maria Shriver, producer Larry Gordon and a student she’d never met but whose education she funded.

Travolta said “the academy got it right” when it chose the media mogul to receive its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, calling her “the most wonderful person in the world, the most magical person in the world and the most powerful person in the world.”

Yep, in a bunch of ham-handed editing, The State in its print editions managed to cut the first names of Jones (actor James Earl), Smith (makeup artist Dick) and Winfrey (Oprah - need we say more?) and the awards (lifetime achievement) that Jones and Smith received.

It also managed to leave out the first names of "Baldwin" (Alec) and "Travolta" (John).

It did manage to get it right in the online edition.

Smooth, very smooth.

Get your AP Stylebook T-shirts while they're hot

2011-11-16T10:57:00.000-05:00

AP Stylebook T-shirts (and you'd better get that right, not t-shirts or tee-shirts {grin}).

Definitely should be in the pile of holiday packages for every copy editor.

ACES should include one in the goodie bag for everyone that goes to its New Orleans meeting in April.

Love the slogan: "We wrote the book on style. Edited it, too."

Liquid Text, file this under WOW

2011-11-16T10:51:00.000-05:00

Pointer from Jack Lail to a project coming out of Georgia Tech called Liquid Text.

Can you imagine how this could change journalists' ability to extract and organize info?

Editing lesson - why Goog is not enough

2011-11-16T08:54:00.001-05:00

Here's a lesson for your editing classes - or for any journalist, for that matter - as to why relying on Google (or any other single source, especially in these days of ubiquitous data that also contains easily propagated errors).

I gave my editing class a simple car-train accident story the other day. It happened on Bonhomme Richard Drive in Lexington County. But many students went into a tizzy because it was listed differently on Google:

Now, those of us who've been around awhile probably have some sense that Goog was in error. If you have a sense of French, you know it's Bonhomme Richard, or maybe stuck back in the corners of the brain is the factoid that several U.S. warships have had that name.

But these days it is easy - and imperative - to check multiple sources. In the editing room, we have paper maps on the wall (I know, how quaint, except Google does not list county boundaries or subdivisions, both important for a local journalist.)

A quick run over to Mapquest shows this (which is also on that paper map):

And just running "Bonhomme Richard Lexington" through a Google and Bing search pulls up numerous real estate listings with the correct name.

Of course, preponderance of the evidence is not good enough in journalism, so my students should have checked with us, which some did. But the disappointment was that they were relying only on Google. What if I had put "Richard Bonhomme" in the copy? They most likely never would have asked.

Anyhow, victory is ours! OK, too much caffeine there so early in the morning. But Goog did confirm the error once I pointed it out.

I hope you'll find this useful as an example you can use in class and elsewhere.

At once perceptive and arrogant - Part 2

2011-11-15T10:53:00.003-05:00

So yesterday I riffed on the arrogance in an otherwise perceptive look inside Tribune by an an editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Then, this morning, I'm reading a fanciful post on Mel Taylor Media of what Steve Jobs would do if he were running a newspaper, and embedded in the middle is this YouTube video of a woman - journalist apparently - wishing ads on the Internet would just go away. We'd all go to a donation system, etc. etc. (I have no idea who this person is or where this was said; it's not labeled.)

I put this under perceptive and arrogant because, again, I think it shows the inability, even after several years of the writing on the wall, to fully connect with reality. It's perceptive, with a streak of arrogance.

Wow. Is this contagious? Is there a vaccine I can get out there? Sure, every journalist has had sweet dreams of oodles of time, buckets of money and the autonomy of presiding over a fief.

But let's take some reality pills here, OK? Content is great. Content is NOT king.

At once perceptive and arrogant

2011-11-14T14:08:00.002-05:00

That pretty much sums up my reading of Laurie Winer's part-memoir of her days at the L.A. Times and part-review of James O'Shea's book The Deal from Hell in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

True enough, Winer has me more often than not muttering and shaking my fist at her recounting of the cavalier and rapacious sacking that Sam Zell and his minions did to Tribune and the Times.

Hers and Dean Starkman's recent piece about the San Jose Mercury News should be must-reading, if for no other reason than to think with the wisdom of hindsight about what has happened.

But just as I am about to shake my fist in solidarity again, up pops that old journalistic arrogance in Winer's retelling:

All of FitzSimons’s ideas came from his knowledge of broadcast; he thought newspapers should focus on local news and that editors should rely on readership surveys to figure out what consumers want covered, and then cover those things. This is the antithesis of a good newsroom, where editors rely on reporters who are on the ground asking questions to help determine the importance and urgency of stories. Then, editors, most of whom are former reporters and have overarching expertise in their fields, confer over which stories should take precedence. The front-page editorial mix is based on their collective view of what a well-informed person needs to know about his neighborhood or country: not a distinction that the average citizen has the perspective to be able to make. When real journalism is being practiced, these decisions are not ever based on which stories will increase the stock portfolios of the editors or the newspaper.

Yes, basing your editorial decisions solely on readership surveys is the antithesis of good journalism. But actually paying attention and listening to your readers, and then using that to expand your frame of reference when making those vaulted journalistic decisions Winer praises? That's not the antithesis at all. It's using your head and putting the arrogance on a shelf.

"Real journalism" shouldn't be done for the aggrandizement of others, no. But it also needs to get real - if it doesn't generate the resources necessary to support it, it's dead. Winer seems to be living in that land of Oz that too many journalists have inhabited - where somehow the roads are paved with gold and we're all taken care of, and ignore that man behind the curtain who eventually has to be paid.

How condescending -- "not a decision that the average citizen has the perspective to be able to make." No, but the average Joe and Jane do have the perspective to make a decision and they're making it, and they're telling arrogant journalists "you're not that important anymore."

Maybe that's tough to handle, but a show of arrogance back doesn't do anyone any good. Yep, Zell was a schmuck when he told a photographer in Orlando that to survive, newsrooms have to figure out how to find enough resources to cover both "puppies and Iraq" and characteristically delivered the message with a "f*** y**" to the person who asked the question. It's unfortunate because it means Winer and others can easily dismiss it without getting off their pedestals.

Unfortunately, they're just as guilty of uttering the same epithet -- at their hoi polloi audience, which, newly empowered by technology, is giving them the finger back.

Les Anderson will be missed

2011-11-14T10:23:00.002-05:00

Less Anderson, a longtime journalism prof at Wichita State University has died.

He's one of the good ones and will be missed. Links and details on the COMJIG blog.

2 important reads into the state of things and how we got here

2011-11-12T19:03:00.002-05:00

Dean Starkman has two important pieces to read in the Columbia Journalism Review - important because the first one should get you thinking, at least, about the sometimes squishy base on which so many future of news predictions - including a few made here - are based and the second should get you thinking hard about whether newspapers (and to some extent mainstream news organizations, including broadcast) were ever structurally, organizationally and psychologically capable of avoiding what has befallen them.

In his first piece, "Confidence Game," Starkman takes aim at Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis - the thinkers and proouncers - and Journal-Register head John Paton, who is trying to translate many of those thoughts into practice.

Shirky, Rosen and Jarvis are (or, more correctly, at times can be) important voices in the discussion. My thinking has certainly been influenced by them (one of the most important being Shirky's observation that we may well be in an interregnum similar to that following the invention of the printing press where the only certainty is uncertainty until some new kind of form, process and equilibrium are found (and that probably should be forms and processes, since one size is rarely likely to fit all going forward).

But they tend to be, how to delicately put it, at times full of themselves. That's to be expected - one does not venture out on such limbs without a certain hubris and certainty of one's position. On the other hand, Starkman does put a pin to some of the over-inflation of the future-of-news (FON) crowd:

Jarvis and Shirky in particular have reveled in the role of intellectual undertakers/grief counselors to the newspaper industry, which, for all its many failings, has traditionally carried the public-service load (see Pulitzer.org for a laundry list of exposés—on tobacco-industry conspiracies; worker-safety atrocities; Lyndon Johnson’s wife’s dicey broadcasting empire; group-home abuses in New York; redlining in Atlanta; corruption in the St. Paul, Minnesota, fire department, the Rhode Island courts, the Chicago City Council, the University of Kentucky men’s basketball program, and on and on). But their vision for replacing it with a networked alternative, or something else, is hazy at best.

Meanwhile, FON’s practical prescriptions—what it calls engagement with readers—have in practice devolved into another excuse for news managers to ramp up productivity burdens, draining reporters of their most precious resource, the thing that makes them potent: time. ...

FON thinkers, who emerged only in the last few years, represent a new kind of public intellectual: journalism academics known for neither their journalism nor their scholarship. Yet, the fact is they are filling a void left by an intellectually exhausted journalism establishment, and filling it with crisp, readable—and voluminous—prose that offers to connect journalism to the technocratic vanguard.

Starkman spends many words decrying the idea that news is a commodity, if for no other reason than that much of it is local:

Framing the news as a commodity and ultra-abundant makes it easier to give away. It also suggests a lack of understanding of what it takes to produce great beat reporting, let alone accountability journalism. ...

Seeing news as a commodity, and a near valueless one (Paton above says its value is “about zero”), is a fundamental conceptual error, and a revealing one. A commodity is the same in Anniston, Alabama, as it is in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Whatever local news is, it’s not that.

But in doing so, Starkman falls into the same tar pit that traps many journalists - assuming - without testing - that geography remains a definer of value. There are beginning to be some signals that may not be the case. (Yes, especially as to the last, I know there are flaws in the methodology; that, to me, is not a reason to reject outright the possibility but to find ways to test it more effectively).

So he asserts value without really effectively answering the question: If it is not a commodity, then why are newspapers and broadcasters needed anyhow? If every story produced has intrinsic value that can be effectively captured, why do the journalists doing the work need or want a third party to intercede with the audience, and by implication siphon away some or all of the value, for them?

One can imagine Starkman answering that if the institutions did not exist, they would have to be invented to provide the aggregate fire power (journalistically, legally and financially) needed to stand up to the other "big three" - government, business and, until rather recently, labor. (As he writes: "I’ll go further and posit as axiomatic that journalism needs its own institutions for the simple reason that it reports on institutions much larger than itself.") While the Fourth Estate has been atomizing, government and business have been consolidating, centralizing and amassing more power and resources.

The FONers have never effectively answered that challenge, in my reading of them. But Starkman doesn't really, either.

Now that we’re done panicking, it’s time for journalism thinkers to turn to the real task: how to re-empower reporters, the backbone of journalism, whoever they are, wherever they may work, in whatever medium, within institutions that can move the needle. (That sound like the same kind of squishiness he accuses the FONers of.)

He talks about journalism that is "institution-centered, network-powered" using an example from The Guardian's coverage of the News Corp. scandal.

"In that case, traditional investigative reporting broke the story, while social media propelled it to the stratosphere—heights the paper never could have achieved on its own," he writes. (An idea, I would add, that is not new at all but is embodied in Paul Bradshaw's "news diamond" idea of 2007.)

All well and good, but Starkman does a bit of the same that he accuses the troika of - throwing out some idea with a certain hope but no real sense of how to get there.

Starkman, in a response to a comment from Paton, says: "And while I appreciate your credentials, candidly, I don't see how they are relevant here. My piece is about ideas. I expect people to feel free to disagree with mine without feeling the need to interview me."

Which is why, on that level, I recommend reading it. It is a piece about ideas and their clashing. These are important ideas, and sometimes it is important to consider them on a philosophical level divorced from practical reality. Starkman's piece, if you approach it that way, is a valuable stimulant.

His second work, on the rise and fall of the San Jose Mercury News, can be seen in a way to contradict at least some of the underpinning of his first. At least part of his take-away seems to be that while audiences for the Merc's online operations saw little value in the general local news report (how's that not make it a commodity?), they were more than willing to pay for, essentially, utility - access to the archives and to News Hound, an early aggregator of other sources as well:

The Merc dropped the fees in the hope of generating more traffic, and with it, more advertising, even though the revenues from those online ads were a seventh of their print counterparts. The decision not to charge for content reflected an electronic version of the business model built on amassing the largest possible audience, not on cultivating niches

And yet, the niches were there for all to see. By the late 1990s, Chris Jennewein told me, the Mercury News was finding audiences well beyond its circulation area—online readers as far away as India eager for the Merc’s tech news. And while Knight Ridder began trying to build audiences for its NASCAR coverage in Charlotte and the auto industry in Detroit, it was reluctant to dedicate the people necessary to create the content for those niche markets. “Our newspaper roots,” he wrote to me, “held us back.”

That last sentence is what makes this an important read. As much as anything, the Merc (and Knight Ridder in which it operated) is the embodiment of institutional news orgs', and especially newspapers', past 25 years. From mediocre to soaring on monopoly and booming-economy profits invested in the best way in make-a-difference, award-winning journalism to watching its economic core - classifieds - be eaten away in a decade, the Merc's story is that of Newspaper Agonistes writ larger.

Starkman ends with this observation:

Disruptive technology is only half the story of what happened to newspapers. There is also the response. The disruption opened the path to change, and not just for small companies unburdened by legacies of success. The change could also come for those older newspaper companies willing to accept that what was happening was not so much an existential crisis in journalism as it was a catastrophic assault on the most prosaic aspect of the newspaper business: the classifieds. Tough to do in any circumstances. Even tougher at a time when things feel as if they are going better than ever.

There was no better time to produce journalism and make a profit for newspapers than in the period journalists like to think of as the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, and which their colleagues on the business side might prefer thinking of as the Era of the One-Newspaper Town.

Mary Jean Connors of Knight Ridder, reflecting the sensibilities of so many people who insisted that, in the end, they were newspaper people, had told me, “You cannot change who you are.”

It is a noble sentiment, reflecting the diminished glory of a noble enterprise.

But it is not written.

I'd like to agree, but I can't. More like a flawed Shakespearean character, the newspaper industry was a prisoner of its own traditions, history, mindset and people, a potentially lethal psychological and economic cocktail. It continues today in many ways and in many newsrooms I visit or work with and among many journalists I talk with. Yet, given their sociology, I can't bring myself to lay all the blame on them.

The industry's one-time strength, it's localness, quirkiness and fierce independence (which too often operationalize as resistance to change or even to recognize it outside the organization), can be harnessed for good (cut across the bureaucratic crap) or deadly at a time of fast-moving external change. Starkman details the internal publisher-led struggles against Merc initiatives that K-R wanted to roll out chainwide and resistance of other papers to standardization online at a time when advertisers were scaling up to digital and increasingly saw audiences as national or at least regional (there's a reason all those big-box chains emerged at about the same time).

He also leaves behind a bit of a warning tale about "big iron" and "big vendor" (my terms), noting that in many ways K-R's Real Cities initiative was strangled partly by being ahead of the systems commonly used in newsrooms. Coding changes, things that in online publishing systems today can take just a few minutes, required extensive time, for instance. (On today's content management systems, for instance, some of that inter-paper quirkiness and power prerogative might have been accommodated with a few keystrokes while still being within an overall structure.)

And his portrayal of Tony Ridder, the man who sold Knight Ridder to McClatchy and who has been largely vilified, suggests that Jim Batten, Ridder's predecessor who was revered as the journalist's journalist might have gotten it a little less right and Ridder a little more so (what kept him awake at night? "Electronic classified.") than the popular meme would have us believe. (Follow that earlier link and you'll find Jon Fine making a similar point in 2006, though the vilification continued in the comments.)

This all makes this an important story, one that should be required reading in journalism schools and newsrooms. It is at once both a hopeful and cautionary tale. It makes us think about the role that both personal and institutional foibles play, what it might take to overcome them and whether they actually can be effectively overcome short of the major upheavals we have seen in this and other industries. Approached that way, without the usual finger-pointing, we may well learn something from it.

Crime copy worth killing

2011-11-12T17:06:00.000-05:00

Pointed out on the Boston Editors group on Facebook, a bit of crime writing from the Springfield (Mass.) Republican that only a mother could love - the mother of the writer - and then not even a sure thing at that.

Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett he ain't. Not even Mickey Spillaine.

A sample:

The city's mobile forensics investigation truck has been getting a workout this year

Early Sunday it was parked outside a North End home, where a man was found on the sidewalk around 2:15 a.m., shot in the head and bleeding. Police declared the victim dead at the scene, making him the city's 20th murder victim of 2011.

The extent of the man's head injury was bad, according to authorities, who later hosed down the blood-stained sidewalk in front of 564 Chestnut St. while most of the neighborhood was still asleep.

For homicide detectives and firefighters, it was just another day on the job. They chatted amiably as a fireman trained his hose on a puddle of blood. A murky, red stream inched its way toward the gutter, turning a tawny color as it pooled near the base of a driveway.

Once the sidewalk was clean, the firefighters said goodbye to a detective, just as the first spikes of morning sunlight began appearing on the dark, frost-covered block.

Yahoo's 'Down But Not Out' unemployment project

2011-11-07T18:08:00.000-05:00

File this under pretty compelling reading.

I had not heard of this till a pointer from Cyberjournalist today, but I'm really intrigued by Yahoo's "Down But Not Out" project to crowdsource the long-term unemployment morass many Americans have found themselves in.

The tricked-out Tumblr blog contains emails from those without jobs. It's pretty compelling -- and at times scary -- reading. The idea could - and probably should - be adapted by local newsrooms. You could build a pretty interesting picture of what is happening around you. (And did we mention the engagement - Yahoo says the average time on site was eight minutes.)

The Yahoo folks explained to the Online News Association what they did to put this together.

AP Style - Achilles - apostrophe or not

2011-11-06T08:44:00.002-05:00

A reminder from the AP style updates this week that it's Achilles' heel but Achilles tendon.

"homage" takes "an" because the "h" is silent.

Hodgkin lymphoma - no longer "Hodgkin's disease." Distinguished from Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The "industrial average" part of Dow Jones industrial average is lowercased. (Maybe someday there will be an entry on why AP and others continue to fixate on a price-weighted index of 30 stocks that is so unrepresentative of the market. Yeah, the answer usually comes back, but that's what the public knows. Yeah, is my reply, but someone has to take the first step ...)

twin towers - lowercase in reference to the two main World Trade Center buildings

Ramadan - don't call it a holiday. It's a holy month that ends with a holiday, but don't confuse the two.

From the "your results may differ department"

Keeping in mind the AP stylebook is the AP's stylebook and not the commandments, there are also these new entries that are likely to bring dissent:

Company names:
You must include the full company name somewhere in the story. This ensures that the story will be among the search results on Yahoo and other websites. Without the full company name, the story may get overlooked. Put me into the "this is often overkill" and "nice but not always necessary" department. I'm thinking that Wal-Mart is perfectly acceptable for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in most cases, for instance. It is wise to think about it, just as we need to think about using people's full names and not just their nicknames so that things are searchable. But if it gets in the way of the flow, ditch that advice.

illegal immigrant
Used to describe someone who has entered a country illegally or who resides in a country in criminal or civil violation of immigration law. Acceptable variations include living in the country without legal permission. Use of these terms, as with any terms implying illegalities, must be based on reliable information about a person's true status. Unless quoting someone, AP does not use the terms illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or the term undocumented.
There's been so much written on the dispute over this already, so file this under the "just be aware" it's now official header.

Beware "big vendor"?

2011-11-06T07:21:00.001-05:00

There was a fascinating column in Forbes by Adam Hartung this past week that got me thinking - again - about how "big vendor" (just like "big iron" in the IT business) has been a lot of the source of news organization sluggishness that too often has been blamed on newsrooms' reluctance to innovate.

I can't endorse the survey because I don't know enough about it (in fact, I'm always skeptical of these kinds of things just by their general nature), yet it does get my thinking juices flowing:

Recently, technology provider IFS Corporation did a survey on ERP users in manufacturing (Does ERP Mean Excel Runs Production?) Their surprising results showed that new employees (especially under age 40) were very unlikely to take a job with a company if they had to use a complex (usually vendor supplied) interface to a legacy application. In fact, 75% of today’s users are actively seeking – and using – cloud based apps or home grown spreadsheets to manage the business rather than the expensive applications the corporation supplied! Additionally, between 1/3 and 2/3 of employees (depending upon age) were actively seeking to quit and take another job simply because they found the technology of their company hard to use! (CIO Magazine: Employees Refusing to Use Clunky Enterprise Software.)

One of the reasons this also got my thinking juices flowing was that I am doing a social media roundtable this week for a press association, and one of the things we'll be discussing is "best practices," especially in light of the twittersphere flare-up over the AP's latest social media guidelines and the earlier one over ESPN's.

Just one other observation about "big vendor" -- I won't get into great detail or ID the operation, but I know of one news organization with a pay wall that has a big vendor online system and accompanying metrics. Log on to the metrics, however, and you'll see tracking for only a handful of accounts. Of thousands of subscribers only a dozen or so are using the pay wall?!

No, comes the explanation. The organization uses another application that apparently manages the pay wall log ons (I haven't gotten deeply into this yet, beyond WTF), and they don't talk to each other. The reaction from those who should have this info: Not much we can do about it.

When you are flying that blind, you are probably going to eventually fly into a mountain.

But what concerns me as a somewhat casual member of a news consulting group that specializes in community papers (so I get to listen in on the war stories) is that a lot of these news organizations are just being seen as "bug sucker" by "big vendor." The results are not likely to be good.

Dear Gannett, about the video resurrection ...

2011-11-04T10:53:00.001-04:00

Please read Wasim Ahmad's wonderfully reasoned post dissecting Gannett's sudden rediscovery of video.

"Newspaper video" remains an unsettled (at best, still controversial at worst) area of unclear ROI, debates about quality vs. run-and-gun, etc.

But the way NOT to do video is to try to force it on every person in the newsroom. Yes, every journalist should be aware of video and every one should be able to know when to take out a smartphone, hit the record button and take wide, medium and closeup shots.

But that's far different from what Gannett's usual pattern is.

Google removes plus operator from searches

2011-11-03T10:17:00.000-04:00

And the hoi polloi ain't happy about it.

Apparently Google+ has the great masses of unwashed misusing the "+" operator that allowed you to specify that a term had to appear in the search.

Now, Google says it has expanded the functionality of the quote marks so that if you put a single word in quotes, it will also require that word to appear in the search.

Wonder how the research librarian community feels about this.

Are those news sites or ad sites? It gets ugly.

2011-10-30T19:50:00.000-04:00

Over at the Monday Note (petty much required reading here at CSJ World every Sunday night) Frédéric Filloux has performed an interesting experiment in looking at news site Web design - mask all the ads and see how much of the site really is left devoted to news.

It's pretty eye-opening. For instance, here is the French site 20 Minutes as Filloux found it the other day.

He blocked out the ads with red.

Fascinating. There is some squishiness in this, because when I went to the site today, the big splash page and background he found were gone and there was a more subdued feel. Still, it shows how excesses have been known to pop up.

At the Swedish paper Aftonbladet, however, the ads still reign, just as he found them. Look at the mask:

U.S. sites seem a bit more restrained, but hardly without problems. Go to his post to look at the masked screenshots and judge for yourself. Consider this gauge he put together of where the typical page for various sites actually begins with news content:

So what does that say about concern for the reader given all that we have seen in eyetrack and similar studies about readers' reluctance to scroll more than about a screen and a half before they start losing interest?

Now, the scrolling dynamic is a bit different on mobile screens, where it tends to be built more into the psyche of the screens (plus it's easier to do with the flick of a finger). But as Filloux writes:

The weird thing is this: On the one hand, web designers seem to work on increasingly large monitors; on the other, the displays used by readers tend to shrink as more people browse the web on notebooks, tablets or smartphones.

The result is a appalling when you try to isolate content directly related to the news. (His emphasis.)

There are many forces pulling at online sites, not the least of which is the need to make money. But I find it fascinating how much of the real estate has been given over to ads. It seems to be the print mindset brought to the Web (you could often find, in the "good old days," inside pages with one or two short stories and a huge ad stack). But the online audience, as we know, is not "captive," and my experience anecdotally observing people's digital use is that they are not willing to be subject to the same kinds of thinking.

Mobile could change all this significantly, if it really does generate new design principles - and Filloux discusses some of the better iPad apps that have eschewed the "print" layout and "start from a blank slate in which a basic set of rules (typefaces, general structure of a page, color codes) are adapted to the digital format."

But we also know from experience that large swaths of the news industry will take the path of least resistance, which right now seems to be simply "scaling down" the cluttered website designed for the desktop and squeezing it into a smaller screen (perhaps not even with all the elements, but still with many of them including the ads).

I think his illustrations show why that won't work.

Holiday fruitcakes arrive early

2011-10-29T14:34:00.000-04:00

I normally don't point out or comment much on political stuff because, well, there's just not much percentage in it.

But this entry on the Open Secrets blog. which tracks money in politics, just begged to be pointed out. It's about the creation of one "American Phoenix Super Pac" by a nonprofit called Florida Deep Sea Burials Inc. There are a ton of questions surrounding all the paperwork's errors, stuff that is a big yawn for most folks except wonks like me that like to track money and influence.

Then there was this graf that caught my eye:

According to American Phoenix's website, the group wants to ban cremation and replace it with "carbon-neutral" deep sea burial; ban circumcision; ban absentee voting; end pensions for all public officials; eliminate red light cameras; "end corporate rule"; declare Islam a "hostile political party, not a religion"; classify the killing of Sikhs in Pakistan in 1947 as a genocide and overturn the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), among other goals.

Not even November, and already the holiday fruitcakes are arriving.

Given the paperwork mess, one wonders if someone isn't pulling a giant joke here. It would be funny were it not so potentially serious.

Google Maps to developers: Prepare to pay up

2011-10-27T13:34:00.000-04:00

Google is enforcing limits on maps called through its API -- 2,500 loads a day for a styled map (available sice May 2010) or 25,000 a day for regular maps.

It doesn't affect our little corner of the world at Dateline Carolina - we just link to a "mymap" and have low usage. But it does have the development community atwitter.

When taste - and common sense - took a vacation

2011-10-26T13:33:00.001-04:00

Yeah, call me a prude. But when I see a lede on a story like this, it makes me cringe, even if it is in the college paper:

South Carolina scores 2.21 GPA on annual Trojan report card

When it comes to safe sex, USC is not on top like it was two years ago.

(Not to mention that there apparently was an explosion in the brackets factory and they managed to embed themselves -- many improperly -- into all those quotes.)

And then, of course, there was this editorial headline:

I know. College is a fun, frivolous time. But if they're not using common sense here, will they suddenly be able to turn it on in the "real world"?

Should journalists ID themselves when covering public events?

2011-10-15T15:35:00.000-04:00

Journalist-turned-prof Kenna Griffin of Oklahoma City University has an interesting - and to me, disturbing - blog post recounting how another j-t-p recently said at a public event that journalists should identify themselves before live coverage of such events.

The other j-prof was none other than Jacqui Banaszynski of Missouri. The idea of tweeting, blogging or whatever else passes for live coverage of a public event these days made her "uncomfortable with this kind of stealth world."

Well, yes, it is uncomfortable. But when you appear at a public forum or other public event, c'est la guerre.

As one commenter pointed out he, as do I, usually takes some time to introduce himself to the key players in the room, if nothing else as a courtesy and as long as that's practical. And I generally don't file live - I like to digest things for a few minutes - because I have learned, sometimes painfully, during the years that it is best to engage my brain before my keyboard (and this from someone who started out doing live radio and TV reporting).

Banazynski may express those nagging misgivings that tug at many of us just from a purely human sense that it's probably not a good thing if the world becomes one big "Truman Show." But she also needs to get a dose of reality.

The world, not just journalists, is equipped with smartphones and wireless and the ability to go live from anywhere at about any time. Journalists have no more of an ethical responsibility in those situations to flag themselves than anyone else in the audience who is perfectly capable of performing an act of "journalism."

Perhaps that is the real source of her unease, that "public" events are now truly public.

Does the technology change things? In some cases, yes, but if you somehow felt more comfortable with the old paper-and-pen crowd covering things that your words and actions were not going to be taken out of context or misconstrued, think again.

As Griffin put it:

Any person can live report information from a public happening. This is a fundamental right as a citizen. Therefore, people should be careful not to say things in public that they don’t want mass disseminated, especially in today’s tech-savvy world.

Those are words of wisdom for everyone, not just those in the public eye, however fleeting.

Or, to borrow from the old carpenter's phrase: Think twice, speak once.

Why Estonia is important in the e-world

2011-10-15T14:13:00.001-04:00

Excellent piece this week by Phil Noble about Estonia, its president and its rising place in the e-world.

Go ahead and drool over the price of an unlimited data plan for a tablet. It's OK.

Jtools: Trunk.ly to save links

2011-10-10T17:22:00.001-04:00

I've been playing around today with trunk.ly, a new free site that will fetch your links from your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and save them for you.

I'm kind of liking it as a way to stay organized and find stuff I've forgotten about. You can import a bookmark file too.

Try it and let me know what you think of it.

RIP Gannett's 'Moms Like Me'

2011-10-09T14:52:00.002-04:00

At one time not too long ago, niche sites like Gannett's "Mom's Like Me" were being touted as one of the ways to pump needed life, and revenue, into traditional newsrooms' flagging online efforts.

Such sites, not branded to the paper or TV station, were a core part of the Newspaper Next initiative from the American Press Institute. Now, word that Moms Like Me is being shuttered shows the strong headwinds both inside the industry and outside that continue to make such initiatives difficult.

Steve Buttry, one of the people tasked by API with trying to spread the "N2" gospel (and one of those I respect for trying to effect real change), put it this way in a recent blog post:

As someone who spent most of two years trying spread the N2 message and issuing the N2 call for transformation, it pains me to look back five years later and say that we didn’t bring about any significant lasting change.

N2 was a worthy effort that delivered what the newspaper business needed. We presented tools and concepts for newspaper companies to focus more clearly on meeting the needs of their communities with multiple products doing valuable jobs for businesses and communities. We spurred development of some niche products, some of them still in operation. We guided some innovative projects. But the default settings of the newspaper industry were too strong for anyone to embrace the thorough organizational transformation that N2 championed.

It wasn't just the industry, of course. Social media, like Facebook, has moved in on at least part of the space these sites hoped to occupy.

It highlights, for me, trad news orgs' continuing struggle with the "community" part of the three-legged stool necessary for success online (content, utility and community) Many of these sites were put up more in an "if you build it, they will come" mode without significant input from the hosting newsrooms.

It's not all Facebook. It's also a lesson that it's tough to pick niches that can work on the scale that a lot of chains feel is needed to generate acceptable ROI. (And if you think about it, there's a bit of an oxymoron there - a "scalable niche"?)

High school sports appears to be viable, and for now at least Gannett is keeping its HighSchoolSports.net.

But is this best done on the national scale Gannett is trying? Or more on a local scale as the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News has done admirably with its Pigskin Review? We'll see ...

Newspapers: Some things never change

2011-10-09T01:41:00.000-04:00

From Sean Ireland's latest column in the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association bulletin:

A group of newspaper publishers came to some clear conclusions about their future as they gathered for an SNPA symposium.

They agreed that “newspapers of the coming age will be smaller, better-edited, higher-priced and able to hold their own against any kind of competition.”

The publishers predicted higher costs, decreasing revenue, rising taxes and a growing threat of punitive legislation. Perhaps most importantly, they closed with this: “Newspapers should give more thought to their public relations. We need friends.”

“The Newspaper of the Future” was the discussion topic at the SNPA meeting, and though it was held 70 years ago – in 1941 – the conclusions drawn then seem no less relevant for the newspaper industry now.

Sigh - some things never change.

Yelvington on tablets

2011-10-07T15:07:00.000-04:00

Steve Yelvington has a 10-point list of things worth remembering about tablets and mobile.

Worth reading.

My favorite:

It's not just another distribution channel. We should have learned this from the Web, but many of us didn't. A mobile device is an intelligent device with storage and sensors and the full power of the Internet at its beck and call. It can do amazing things. If you don't take advantage of those amazing capabilities, you will have a sad phone, and sad users.

Now we understand why the headline said 'Killer Cantaloupe'

2011-10-02T01:36:00.003-04:00

Sometimes we can use just a bit too much shorthand in trying to compress things. For instance, there was this lede on a story by the AP's Marilynn Marchionne that went out under the headline Killer cantaloupe, scary sprouts --- What to do?

MILWAUKEE -- Avoid foreign produce. Wash and peel your fruit. Keep it refrigerated. None of these common tips would have guaranteed your safety from the deadliest food outbreak in a decade, the one involving cantaloupes from Colorado.

Oh no! A "food outbreak." Quick, man the guard towers. Shoot the melons on sight. Make sure the asparagus doesn't slip through the bars. Anyone seen the cabbage?

Yeah, readers can probably get it, but as professionals our craft should be better than that. It's an outbreak of food-borne illness, which is what the lede should say. Another one, I fear, to chalk up to overworked editing hubs.

AP Style: Useful baseball playoff style guide

2011-09-29T10:53:00.000-04:00

AP has taken some time to put out a useful baseball style guide. The occasion is the beginning of the postseason, but it's helpful at any time.

BC-US--World Series Style Guide, Advisory
Editors:

To help with consistent phrasing in coverage of the Major League Baseball playoffs and the World Series, The Associated Press compiled a World Series Style Guide of key baseball terms and definitions. Also included are some hackneyed terms to avoid. Some of the words are taken from the AP Stylebook. Others are standard usage for baseball stories transmitted by AP Sports.
___
AL and NL championship series
Spell out "championship series" on first reference with the league abbreviations. It's AL or NL championship series initially, then ALCS and NLCS on subsequent uses. AL stands for American League, NL for National League.

A word for each
ballclub, ballgame, ballpark, ballplayer

Best-of-seven series and best of seven
Hyphenate when used as a modifier with the number spelled out: best-of-seven matchup. On its own, no hyphens in the term: The Red Sox and Phillies meet in a best of seven.

Cliches
Better to say a player hit a home run, rather than he "walloped'" or "'blasted'" or "cracked" it. Home runs are also homers, but avoid calling them "dingers," "'jacks," ''bombs," ''taters" and "four-baggers." Pitchers can pitch two-hitters, but avoid "twirling" or "chucking" or "fireballing." And teams try to reach the World Series instead of the "Fall Classic." In short, avoid hackneyed words and phrases.

Descriptions
Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter or Yankees' shortstop Derek Jeter? No apostrophe when describing his role: Jeter is a Yankees shortstop, Roy Halladay is a Phillies pitcher. But if club ownership is implied, use the hyphen for a possessive: the Yankees' Jeter, the Cardinals' Albert Pujols and the Braves' Chipper Jones.

No hyphens
Third base umpire, first base coach, left field line

Numbers
Sample uses: first inning, seventh-inning stretch, 10th inning; first base, second base, third base, first home run, 10th home run, first place, one RBI, 10 RBIs. The pitcher's record is now 6-5. The final score was 1-0.

Pitchers' duel
It takes two pitchers doing well for a duel, so it's pitchers' duel (possessive plural), rather than a pitcher's duel.

Postseason vs. playoffs
The terms aren't interchangeable. Postseason encompasses all the games after the regular season ends — the first round of the league playoffs, the AL and NL championship series and the World Series. It takes 11 wins for a team to go through the postseason and become champions. Playoffs refers only to the first two rounds that determine the World Series opponents.

RBI or RBIs?
For more than one run batted in, the abbreviation is RBIs: Granderson led the majors with 127 RBIs, Braun had five RBIs in the win. The seldom-used plural written out is runs batted in, but in AP Style the "s'' is placed at the end of the abbreviation: RBIs.

"Take Me Out to the Ball Game"
Traditionally sung during the seventh-inning stretch as the teams change sides on the field. Even though AP Style is ballgame (one word) on all other uses of the word, it's two words in the formal title of this baseball anthem.

World Series
Or the Series on second reference.

World Series champions.
Teams that win the championship are World Series champions, not world champions.

Will print be dead by 2020?

2011-09-22T09:55:00.000-04:00

Russell Viers contends much of print will be dead by 2020 - and he's making the argument aimed at community papers, not the big metros. Interesting debate at his blog with Kevin Slimp and others. Worth considering the graphs.

Hypercorrection with 'fewer'

2011-09-11T00:08:00.000-04:00

Saw this in a game story tonight and have seen it more often than not lately:

Lattimore finished with 27 carries for 176 yards and one touchdown, one fewer scores than defensive lineman Melvin Ingram.

Yes, the guide is that you use "fewer" when things can be counted, as touchdowns can. But these are guides for a reason - other considerations can come into play and modify the situation. In this case it is idiom - in American idiom we don't generally say "one fewer," we say "one less."

Why? That's why it's idiom, which is often the language equivalent of "just because" as etymological origins become hazy or disappear over generations. (In other cases, we can trace back when and why something became idiom, like "out of sorts," which actually refers to printers being angry because they were out of "sorts," the small pieces of cast type used for spacing.)

So here it would be "one less score than."

To do otherwise is hypercorrection.

Reporter resources - Cool site: StatSpotting

2011-09-06T13:35:00.001-04:00

Just came across StatSpotting, an intriguing site that scrapes the Web for some of the most intriguing statistics of the day.

Nothing I'd take to the bank, especially given the gauzy nature of who's behind it,* but certainly a place that seems useful to find out what kind of stats are bouncing around online for possible story ideas.

For instance, here's what's being featured today:

I've added the RSS feed to my reader.

----

*The site says it's run by "NP Labs," but that goes to a dead link. Its "whois" lists an outfit in Bangalore called Numbers Plus, but that site is just a GoDaddy container. So as with all things Web, caveat emptor, but then again you should just be using this for ideas anyhow, right?

6 reasons to hate Blackboard

2011-09-05T15:32:00.010-04:00

I've been meaning to write this post for several years, but just keep finding more "features" of Blackboard to hate. (I'm not alone. Type "Blackboard sucks" into Google for even more.)

The "resurrection" of some of these fine "features" in the latest iteration, however, has finally reminded me to memorialize some of these:

1) When you need a notice like this on your log-in screen, it's a hint something is badly amiss:

2) It's 2011, ever hear of "drag and drop"? The Blackboard interface is hugely clunky. Let's say you wanted to move an item from a folder to a subfolder. You have to click copy and then, if you've asked to remove it, you have to click the idiot warning about removing something. How about just being able to drag items from one place to another?

3) It's 2011, ever hear of batch delete? Not in most parts of BB. No, it's click on remove for each individual item, then answer the idiot question, then ... you get the idea. So say you have a class of 20 students and they are submitting labs twice a week to the drop box. Do the math, especially since it often takes at least 30 seconds for BB to execute. That's 20 minutes a week just deleting stuff.

4) Click, click, click - oops, you forgot a "switch" and so that feature won't operate. Some of the "tools" within BB require multiple "switches" to be thrown in multiple areas before they become available to students. Miss one and ... Compare that to more modern applications - say, about everything else online. If I can set up a blog online with a minimum of intuitive clicks (and those include setting templates, etc., which BB does not allow), why is it so hard for BB to do it?

5) BB quizzes get a special place in Hell. In addition to the drag and drop (not) above, the software has some special "features" that make it difficult if not useless for those of us teaching language-related courses.

- No way to designate capital letters. This is such 1990s technology. Every question should have the option to mark it wrong if the capitalization is not matched. This is a longstanding request that BB seems to be incapable of.

- No way to expand "fill in blank" boxes to accommodate longer answers, such as retyping short sentences to correct errors. So students are left seeing half (or less) of what they have typed. Not easy to proofread there, bucko.

- Conversion of apostrophes, quotes and ampersands to the "&amp" code. Put a question in with one of those and it will close correctly - the first time. But gawd help you if you reopen it to make any changes. The system automatically changes the symbols to the HTML code - and if you don't remember to re-edit it, your students will all be marked wrong. See this, for example ("World Series of Poker's" helpfully changed by BB):

Click to see detail

(The even cooler thing is that every time you open it, it adds another "&amp" code to the line, so after discovering the error and reopening it to edit, you have at least two to remove.)

6) No ability to prevent cutting and pasting of quiz questions (so, for instance, students can't easily pass them on to others). Yes, there is script available out there. And no, it's not perfect, but it helps. So why doesn't BB just license the script and make it an option check box for the quiz?

And three bonus reasons:
1) The rich text editor interface that is javascript based is abnormally clunky and fails to work across browsers. The RTEs in about any decent online service or content management system these days (say, like the one used to post this) are relatively sleek and easy to use with about any browser. Comparatively, Blackboard's is put together with baling wire and chewing gum.

2) Having a "grade center" that cannot be opened in its own browser tab without giving you errors is stupid. It's 2011, tabbed browsing is the norm, and not allowing that means yet more clicks back and forth to get to other things from the control panel.

3) Update: Why, I almost forgot my most recent vexation - copying a file to another directory and then being unable to set the order of items because the file you copied has become co-joined with some other item (see photo - notice the two 4's) and everything gets screwed up when you try to reorder one of them. (I finally figured a work-around (emphasis on more work) - copy the item a second time. Then delete the original one you copied. Everything snaps back into place.

I could probably find more, but this is a good start. It's 2011, but Blackboard is so 2001.

The folks at my school are exceedingly helpful. They raise these issues with BB and on user groups as far as I can tell, but the solutions are few and far between.

Logic problem: AP story on Confederate flag

2011-09-02T13:41:00.000-04:00

Maybe it's me, but do you see a problem in this story:

LEXINGTON, Va. — Officials in the rural Virginia city where Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson are buried voted late Thursday to prohibit the flying of the Confederate flag on city-owned poles.

After a lively 2 1/2-hour public hearing, the Lexington City Council voted 4-1 to allow only U.S., Virginia and city flags to be flown. Personal displays of the Confederate flag are not affected. The Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose members showed up in force after leading a rally that turned a downtown park into a sea of Confederate flags, vowed to challenge the ordinance in court.

Some speakers during the meeting said the ordinance was an affront to the men who fought in the Civil War in defense of the South. One speaker stayed silent during his allotted three minutes, in memory of the Civil War dead.

But many speakers complained that the flag was an offensive, divisive symbol of the South's history of slavery and shouldn't be endorsed by the city of 7,000 people.

"The Confederate flag is not something we want to see flying from our public property," said city resident Marquita Dunn, who is black. "The flag is offensive to us."

Most residents who spoke, both blacks and whites, opposed the ordinance. But H.K. Edgerton, the former president of the NAACP chapter in Asheville, N.C., said he supported flying the Confederate flag because he wanted to honor black Confederate soldiers. Edgerton, who is black, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with images of those black soldiers.

"What you're going to do in banning the Southern cross is wrong. May God bless Dixie," he said, amid some gasps from the audience.

Before the rally, ordinance opponents rallied in the city park, then marched to the hearing under a parade of Confederate flags.

Unless I'm mistaken, that should be:

Most residents who spoke, both blacks and whites, supported the ordinance. But H.K. Edgerton, the former president of the NAACP chapter in Asheville, N.C., said he supported flying the Confederate flag because he wanted to honor black Confederate soldiers. Edgerton, who is black, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with images of those black soldiers.

If not, then the "But," which shows contrast, should be dropped from the second sentence (in that case, Edgerton would be an illustration, not a counterpoint).

I'm also thinking that

Before the rally, ordinance opponents rallied in the city park, then marched to the hearing under a parade of Confederate flags.

Should be: Before the meeting, ordinance opponents rallied in the city park, then marched to the hearing under a parade of Confederate flags.

How TSA has bulked up its app with crowdsourcing

2011-09-02T12:50:00.000-04:00

The headline on this article from NextGov is Agency apps must be regularly updated or face obsolescence, but the really interesting thing to me is the detail on how the TSA has used crowdsourcing to bulk up its app:

The My TSA app pulls together Federal Aviation Administration data about flight delays and crowd sourced data about how long it's taking app users to get through security checkpoints at specific airports.

The app also includes a list of more than 3,000 items fliers can and cannot carry onto their flights or put in checked baggage. That list started at about 900 items but grew rapidly as travelers used a response feature on the app to ask TSA about unlisted items.

Similar direct user feedback and computer analysis of how travelers are using the app has helped TSA to home in on precisely what their app audience wants, Bonner said.

"At a minimum, you should provide some opportunity for users to provide feedback," he said. "Maybe there's a function you think will be a real knockout feature, but if you have a feedback mechanism, you may find out people don't understand it or aren't using it."

Worth considering for those in the newsbiz considering apps.

Turmoil at 'The State'?

2011-08-31T10:15:00.001-04:00

Two things you won't necessarily read in The State today (or tomorrow):

Buyouts are being offered to two more copy editors, pretty much decimating the desk. That leaves what, two or three? Makes me believe even more the preparations are to move the work to Charlotte's new hub.
One of the biggest advertisers, Jewelry Warehouse, has pulled its ads after "boycott" messages from fans upset over columnist Ron Morris flooded various Gamecock message boards. Mediation hasn't worked so far, and if this post at 9 a.m. on the Cocky Talk board is to believed as coming from JW President Scott Satterfield, it's not getting much better:

To all Gamecock fans,

You will see a half page ad for baseball posters that we sell which were produced by the state. WE DID NOT RUN THAT AD - The State did.

I am in the process of seeing when they scheduled this and if I find it was after my conversation with them about ad suspention, then we'll have a whole different conversation today.

I am very tired of the controversy and am hoping this was not a concious effort by them, because it messes with the appearance of my word I gave Gamecock fans.

We have worked on many projects together and the state has control of when they run - we just were an outlet

Please, let's get on with the football games - Scott Satterfield

One of the good guys, Tom Bardin, dies

2011-08-29T00:46:00.006-04:00

I got a call a few hours ago to tell me, and now it's been confirmed, that Tom Bardin Jr., head of the S.C. Legislative Audit Council, has died at age 54.

He died while running in Beaufort, which is his hometown. He was apparently in town to visit his mother and was found by his wife, Angie, after his daily run.

Tom was a friend and former neighbor for many years till he and his wife moved up to Hilton along Lake Murray.

More than that, Tom was a friend to everyone in South Carolina who cares about honest, efficient government. He was truly one of the good guys. (See Post & Courier editorial of Aug. 31.)

Tom worked for the LAC in various jobs while I was at AP. He then left for a stint at the Department of Social Services before returning to head the council - the state's watchdog agency - in 2009, after I had gone to the University of South Carolina.

Tom was as straight-up a guy as they come. He and I chatted less frequently in recent years - the last time was about a month ago to congratulate him on his daughter's marriage. But while we discussed family, friends, the university and all those things you catch up on, the talk always turned to our experiences with state government and its various political figures. We exchanged some good stories and shook our heads knowingly, sometimes out of exasperation. But Tom also clearly was dedicated to making government run right.

He wasn't one of those on a "waste and fraud" witch hunt. But several of those whose agencies underwent scrutiny under Tom's steady hand likened it to having a proctological exam and root canal while giving a deposition - if it was there, Tom and his examiners were going to find it. That didn't make a lot of people in state government overly happy.

Most S.C. residents, especially those always bleating about taxes and spending, probably don't know who Tom was, if they even have a vague notion of what the LAC is. But they should stop a moment and take note, because he was one of those sometimes vilified "state workers" who, no question, was doing his best to work for them.

Our (Karen's and mine) sympathies go out to Angie; their daughter, Jill; and son, Tripp.

They also go out to those in this state who care about how things run. They've lost a champion for good government.

The LAC has been a bright spot with Tom and his predecessor and mentor, George Schroeder (who also had a brief stint as the state's first inspector general and will now be back at the audit council as interim director). Let's hope any successor is as good.

Update: Tom's obituary.

What he said ... John McIntyre's first-day-of-class speech

2011-08-23T12:42:00.002-04:00

John McIntyre, whom I am proud to call a friend, has posted the first-day "welcome" he gives to editing students.

I suspect versions of this will be showing up in classrooms across the nation - maybe the world :)

This is not a gut course. Writing is difficult enough to do. It does not come to us as naturally as speech, and we have to spend years learning it. Editing is even harder. We can write intuitively, by ear, but we have to edit analytically.

Before we even get to the analytical aspect, we will have to do some work on grammar and usage, because if you are like most of the five hundred students who have preceded you here, you will be shaky on some of the fundamentals. You will have to learn some things that you ought to have been taught, and you will have to unlearn some things that you ought not to have been taught

I should also caution you from the outset that this course is appallingly dull. A student from last term complained in the course evaluation that “he just did the same thing over and over day after day.” So will you. Editing must be done word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and we will go over texts in class, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. No one will hear you if you scream.

I’m going to turn my back for a minute so that anyone who wants to bolt can.
Now, if you are willing to stay—and work—I can show you how it is done.

There's more good stuff, but you really can't get the full flavor until you know John's somewhat patrician speech pattern - so check this out first.

Bad vs. Badly

2011-08-21T23:05:00.000-04:00

This from an AP story on Social Security disability:

Patricia L. Foster said she was working as a nurse in a hospital in Columbia, S.C., in 2005 when she was attacked by a patient who was suffering from a mental illness. Foster, 64, said she injured her neck so bad she had a plate inserted. She said she also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Make that she injured it so badly. "Bad," the adjective, is perfectly fine if you say you are feeling bad. But you injure yourself badly.

The migration from adverb to adjective seems to be led by phrases such as "eat healthy." Let's see if we can slow it down a tad.

Buffalo Wild Wings adding Columbia location

2011-08-21T22:39:00.000-04:00

It looks as if Buffalo Wild Wings is adding a third Columbia, S.C., location - in the Harbison shopping area.

Haven't seen any publicity about it yet, but the permit hanging on the door of the old O'Charley's restaurant on Harbison Boulevard says it's for a BWW.

Looks like they're adding a deck on the left side of the building and cutting lots of holes for new doors.

And the real Shell gas price is ...

2011-08-21T19:15:00.002-04:00

I always love it when merchants run a little shell game on their customers.

Take the Corner Pantry Shell Station at South Lake and Platt Springs roads.

Last week (8/14), the sign said $3.25 a gallon. I drove in, stuck in the Shell credit card, filled 'er up and left - all for $3.259 a gallon.

This weekend - same sign, same price. But now there's a placard on the pump - the "credit" price is actually $3.31. Seems to me if you don't want to scam your customers, you'll tell them on the sign that the price is the cash price. (And doubly annoying is that I'm using a merchant card, not some bank-issued Visa or MasterCard.)

Maybe it's time for some truth-in-advertising legislation like in other states that require showing the different prices.

Thanks, Tucker Oil, which proudly proclaims on its website, "I take pride in treating my customers with fairness and respect." Just one of life's little annoyances. I suspect we'll be seeing more of this kind of stuff from a range of merchants desperate to keep their profit margins up.

I know newsrooms have largely done away with consumer units for fear of alienating local businesses, but this might be a topic to keep monitoring.

Bleacher Report U - a great resource

2011-08-20T15:06:00.000-04:00

Yep, it's brutal. It's pointed.

And Bleacher Report's new training site, Bleacher Report U, and its other editing resources really should be part of your tool box if you are teaching journalism in a digital age.

Bleacher Report U is designed to help train all those "content contributors" on which it relies for cheap/free labor. (There, I said it.)

The sports site makes no bones about it - it's out to get eyeballs and clicks. Which, of course, includes the inevitable clickwhore slide shows.

But if you aren't exposing your students to this brutal reality of 21st century journalism, you're shortchanging them. You have to sign up for the training, but just copying the module descriptions and goals into a Word doc and handing it out ought to be enough for a good conversation starter.

More valuable, however, are the other writing and editing resources available outside of the B/R-U structure. I'd encourage you to look at a few of these and check out the internal links that will open up even more (some have been around for a couple of years and I am just finding them):

The art of the headline - Ryan Alberti's plain-spoken guide.
If you find the copy-editing cheat sheet, you will also find an invaluable link to a Google doc that shows "before" and "after" versions of headlines. Lots of grist there.
There is a full editing case study centered on one article and its revisions. Lots of good stuff (a few minor things I don't agree with, but darn few).
The B/R blog entry on prose style with this good opening sentence: On the Internet, form IS content. HOW you write changes the very substance of WHAT you write, because it changes the way readers process and understand your work.

There are lots of sites out there with plenty of helpful tips on Internet writing, SEO, etc., but this is one of the best at integrating it all and not pulling punches.

One thing I especially like is how it reinforces the idea that copy has to be "centered" not only rhetorically but "spatially":

Rhetorical centeredness speaks for itself. A piece should have a coherent overall structure, with an attention-grabbing introduction and a point-making conclusion. Tangents are okay in small doses, but your job as an editor is to keep a piece progressing at a steady pace. This is delicate work, obviously. The only way to master the craft is to practice it.

As for “spatial” centeredness: It’s important to maintain visual and structural balance in the text. Most pointedly, this means (a) breaking long paragraphs into shorter ones and (b) creating single-sentence “anchor” paragraphs where appropriate.

Yeah, nothing really new here, but nicely put and emphasized. This is something that needs to be emphasized much more in print, too. I've always called it "visual grammar." It's one of the reasons that even when we went to computers, editors often printed off longer stories - they could "see" where there might be problems.

Newsrooms in general could learn a lot from this stuff. Read it closely, and, whether you agree, disagree or detest some of the dog-eat-dog tone, for me it highlights many of the reasons traditional newsrooms still struggle online. If they adopted some of these ideas for "print" as well, not only would those pages be friendlier, but shoveling the print version online might work better too.

I recall listening in on a state press association teleconference a while back as editors and publishers debated what training to offer. At one point, it was suggested I do a seminar on online writing.

Fine, I said. "How many of you are rewriting your copy for online?"

Dead silence.

OK, I said after about 10 seconds, "You don't need an online writing course."

----------
(Thanks to the Community Journalism Interest Group blog for the pointer.)

Citizen Journalism - what happened to YourHub

2011-08-19T00:16:00.000-04:00

A decent retrospective and analysis by Tom Grubisich in Street Fight Daily of what has happened to Denver's pioneering YourHub concept that once was spreading nationwide.

I'm beginning to seriously wonder whether any existing media company can truly pull off hyperlocal, even with things like TribLocal in Chicago.

Meanwhile, here in Columbia, The State is killing off its Neighbors section in print. Not clear yet if it will beef up its online efforts or if it's just throwing in the towel now that Patch is on the ground in some areas.

How newspapers resemble the auto industry

2011-08-16T10:02:00.002-04:00

In this month's Tennessee Press, the publication put out by the Tennessee Press Association, Jeff Fishman, publisher of the Tullahoma News, speaks truth to power in his withering comparison of the newspaper and auto industries.

Reprinted by permission:

Newspapers should learn from G.M.
Jeff Fishman

The U.S. auto industry could have saved itself earlier by paying attention to the way its business was eroding and listening to the people who were stealing its market share. U.S. auto executives came back from Japan and refused to transform their work environments from lumbering, stodgy bastions of tradition into places where workers
were encouraged to be creative and innovative.

The situation bears a strong resemblance to the newspaper industry. Let’s take a look at the places where the news industry and the auto industry screwed up:

In the ’80s and ’90s, sales declined as customers were turned off by shoddy quality.

Auto industry: anyone who drove a U.S.-made car in the ’80s knows what I’m talking about. Everything about the cars was sub-par. The seats were uncomfortable; the controls made little sense and were hard to deal with. These were minor issues, compared to the engines seizing and misfiring, the electrical system shorting out, the windows not rolling up (or down), the doors sagging on their hinges.

Newspaper industry: the buyouts and mergers started and with the accountants in charge instead of passionate content creators, many papers gutted staffs and started to run big colorful graphics and lots more wire copy, instead of local content for and about their neighbors. Most papers had a monopoly position in their markets and could pretty
much be assured of making a profit, no matter what they did. Meanwhile, the readers were starting to notice that their newspapers were lacking…how should I say this…news.

The workers felt ignored and belittled, so bad attitudes and fear took over.

Auto industry: the line workers had no power to offer suggestions and, indeed, were punished for speaking up. All that mattered to management was churning out enough cars to meet the quotas, no matter how bad the quality.

Newspaper industry: a culture of irrelevance took hold in newsrooms. The reporters knew the bean counters didn’t care about real news; the accountants just wanted something that would generate money and not get them sued. Many journeyman news professionals I met would, with little encouragement, go off about the corporate “suits” that were putting the vise on the newsrooms to “pop a number.” Reporters that dared to try to make suggestions about long-term changes (like less coverage of city/county government and more enterprising reporting like the underlying reasons for the continuing erosion of middle-class opportunities) were ignored or worse, discarded.

Temporary economic bubble created easy profits thus postponing needed change.

Auto industry: America’s “let’s consume as much oil as we can” faction pushed through tax relief in the early ’00s that meant people who leased a “light truck over 6,000 pounds” could take advantage of tax breaks. What this did was support the Big Three, despite their declining market share. The Big Three were making so much money from SUVs, because they were pretty cheap to make, and Detroit was able to charge about $10-$20,000 more for them than a typical sedan. And, of course, when the tax break ran out and gas prices skyrocketed, they were without a viable product to sell as consumers looked for more efficient cars.

Newspaper industry: the mortgage/real estate boom created a huge advertising windfall for newspapers. Many real estate sections were often larger than the rest of the paper. Thousands of pages of expensive classified ads, paid for by realtor estate agents who were so awash in cash that they didn’t care what the cost was generated huge profits. Of course, the rest of the classified business was under siege at that time. When the real estate market imploded, advertisers abandoned newspapers, looking for cheaper ways to sell their products. Thus newspapers were also left without a viable product to sell.

The industry blamed others rather than conducting an honest self-appraisal.

Auto industry: the Detroit execs blamed Consumer Reports for pointing out that the cars they were building were utterly without redeeming community value (remember the Chevette or the Chrysler Cordoba). They claimed the people rating cars were biased towards the Japanese and were unfairly criticizing patriotic Americans. The U.S. cars were better, if only people would realize that! The industry was in complete denial about how the auto-buying public had turned against it as a result of its collective apathy. Long gone was the nostalgia of people who fondly remembered their first car as independence. They were fed up with cars that broke down as a result of shoddy engineering and the industry’s appetite for greater profits.

Newspaper industry: many publishers viewed competition from radio, cable news, shoppers and yes, the Internet, as being anti-newspaper. The truth was, they had stopped listening to the market, which was craving instantaneous, colorful, creative solutions for news delivery. Not listening to the market was a complete departure from the reason they were successful in the first place. They were successful because they listened and then responded to what they learned.

Transportation, not cars; information, not newspapers

Let’s stop building SUVs and listen to our customers and respond with relevant, thoughtful, engaging, vibrant products that meet the needs of our readers. The public’s desire for credible information has not and will not change even though the delivery method might. Newspapers have been a part of American community life since 1690 and will continue in one form or another for a long time as long as we continue to invest in our core product, information.

The US auto industry finally realized they are in the transportation business, not the auto business. They created innovative, solution-oriented products designed to respond to market changes. The quicker newspapers embrace the fact they are information brokers, not in the traditional newspaper business, the better off the country will be. Our customers, both advertising and readers, are not hesitant about expressing their opinions, positive and negative, on how we are doing our job. News organizations just need to listen and react to their customers’ desires.

For more than 300 years, newspapers have endured the scrutiny of many and will continue to bring relevant news to the citizens of the communities they serve, in print, online with video and audio, or some yet-to-be-realized technology. Newspapers must continue to illustrate a commitment to our trusted customers by respecting tradition while embracing change.

LinkedIn Privacy Fail

2011-08-16T09:31:00.000-04:00

So LinkedIn recently opted everyone into its ad network, which includes sharing some of your info so you can be noted as recommending, sharing or following a brand.

Instructions on how to opt out.

Another case of read the graphic

2011-08-15T09:57:00.001-04:00

Can you spot the discrepancy on this Business Insider post (another case, BTW, of Business Insider's "clickwhore" mentality by putting the stuff in a slideshow)?

Yep, that's $30 to spend, not $20 (which would hardly have been much of a deal at all) - reinforced by not only the $30 in the graphic but the "50% savings." So yes, that "You Missed It!" really does kind of apply to the editing here, doesn't it?

The hyphen is not evil

2011-08-08T09:11:00.001-04:00

In both cases here, the headline writers needed a hyphen. And the first one compounds it with "small businessperson."

Commentary on my Tumbleblog.

Love these capthcas - grammar intensive

2011-08-08T08:57:00.001-04:00

From Happy Place - "Grammar Test Keeps Idiots Off The Internet"

I love it.

Twitter Board for Newsroom

2011-08-03T16:11:00.002-04:00

It was nice to see the Boston Globe follow our lead and get a Twitter Board for the newsroom.

OK, a bit tongue in cheek. But ours went up in the Carolina Reporter newsroom this summer.

A bit of the old and new - the new Twitter board and, on right, a sculpture from old type.

Closeup of the board using Tweetdeck and Twitterlists. We put it together using a salvaged Mac Mini and money from the lab fund to buy the 32-inch screen.

Also, while they've been up for over a year now, we haven't really shown off our digital signs. I worked on getting these specifically to show off the work on Dateline Carolina, the sign on the right. The left sign shows announcements in both graphical form and a ticker and has a video feed that we automatically switch among CNN, the Weather Channel, ESPN and the local news depending on the time of day. During the academic year, it also switches over from 4-4:30 p.m. to display the nightly newscast produced by Carolina News for local cable.

We have these in two places in the Coliseum (our offices and classrooms are in the windowless basement for now - new digs coming in two years, we hope). The signs taped on the bottom of each ask people not to poke - oh how I wish we had touchscreen technology on these. Displaying partial stories from the website isn't perfect, but it does give us visibility we didn't have.

Thank to the dean and director for the $$.

Now, what I want to do is set up a second one for Facebook and some important local websites. Firefox has a plug-in that allows you to cycle among tabs - but it doesn't refresh the tabs. Suggestions?

AP Style - Minthorn profile

2011-07-30T14:00:00.000-04:00

Nice profile by Paul Fahri in the Washington Post on AP Stylebook co-editor David Minthorn.

As usual, the standard crop of complaining comments over "email/e-mail," etc. Best response from commenter TBG: He can't be wrong if he sets the style. That's like saying you spell your last name wrong.

As said here before - the only style you have to follow is the one used by the person signing your paycheck.

Such arguments are nice dalliances over a cappuccino or latte, brandy, Scotch, or other libation of your choice. But once the drink's gone, move on and get a life.

Reporting Resource: Governors Journal

2011-07-27T13:25:00.000-04:00

Got the pointer from J-Lab ...

Governor's Journal is all about the nation's governors.

It's edited out of a PR agency in D.C., but from what I've seen, it's pretty straight-up stuff, and at least the transparency level of who's behind it is high. Worthy of adding to your feeds.

Dear AP: check those thermometers

2011-07-25T22:12:00.000-04:00

AP apparently has a little confusion going with Fahrenheit and Celsius - or a massive case of hyperbole:

Thanks for the tip from a former student who pointed to the original criticism on Newsbusters.

AP enlarges its linking credits

2011-07-21T12:23:00.000-04:00

The AP is further joining the link economy with the memo from senior managing editor Mike Oreskes that when one of the cooperative's stories is based substantially on an AP member's reporting, the AP will henceforth link directly to the story, not just to the other newsroom's home page. (Paid Content, Nieman Lab)

This is a good thing if it gets members also thinking about their need to do the same thing - link more to their sources of information.

I'm not holding my breath, however, as noted in several other posts on this topic (hit the "linking" label below).

And as Andrew Phelps at Neiman notes, several media sites don't appear to be able to handle the code (sigh), showing me once again that it's the technology and vendors that are holding the industry back as much as anything.

Oreskes' memo, however, also shows the difficulty of trying to be too specific in policies on these things instead of just going ahead and linking frequently, as the rest of the Web does. For instance, if the story is mostly from one member, link; do that even if you do more reporting. But if it's from two or more don't link or if you've done substantial additional reporting .... sheesh.

I have a better idea. If you base a story on someone else's reporting, even if it was just the kernel for the idea, link to it. If you are unsure, link to it. It solves so many issues.

Dear NYT: Details or links please

2011-07-19T01:42:00.000-04:00

The New York Times again shows, to my mind, that it's still struggling with the idea of what readers might want from a story and how to more deftly link to solve that.

Case in point is the NYT's story on Delta's plans to cut service to 24 rural airports.

Uh, what 24 might those be?

It mentions a few in the story, but it took a reader in the comments to provide a link to a list. (The NYT did link to the Delta news release, but then it took yet another click to get to the list itself. As a reader, my immediate question is what 24 - any cities I fly into? That question should be openly answered on the article page, not hinted at through a link to the release that then requires another hop.)

There's a graphic that accompanies the Times' story, but it's basically useless unless you can click to expand it substantially with the cities captioned. You can't. (Oh, you can click, but it doesn't get much bigger and no cities are captioned.)

Tales from the S.C. DMV - clueless in Blythewood

2011-07-19T01:07:00.001-04:00

The South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles, once thoroughly reviled as many such departments remain around the country, has made great strides in recent years. I've bought and sold a couple of cars over the past five years, and I can honestly say the DMV's telephone response service has been quick and thorough in answering any questions I had.

But invariably, one finds that the Rent-a-Clue truck routes reach only so far, and apparently they do not pass near at least one office in Blythewood, the exurb where DMV moved its headquarters several years ago, one assumes to escape the advancing mob with pitchforks and torches.

I gave one of our old vehicles - a 2000 model - to my son in another state after one of his two family cars died. On Monday, he went to yon DMV in that state to transfer the title.

And he was stopped dead in his tracks.

There is a duplicate title, he was told, as the clerk read what the computer had spit out.

Huh?

This was a one-owner car, never transferred out of our hands, lien settled, title duly stamped, squeaky clean paperwork. All he should have had to do was hand over the papers and walk out of the other state's DMV either with a new registration or knowing one would shortly be in the mail.

Instead, of course, he's panicked and pissed and on the phone to me.

OK. Let me call the SC DMV. "Agent 323" was earnest and somewhat helpful. Nope, no duplicate title, she said, once we got the VIN straightened out (the "D" and the "O" look very similar on those old titles, and I was afraid the other state had gotten it wrong). So call back to son - no problems here. Make sure they got this VIN right.

A few minutes later, son's back on the phone. Still showing a duplicate. Same title number, but issued in July 2002.

Huh?

OK, back to the SC DMV, this time "Agent 318." She seems to know exactly the problem. "When our old computer system switched in July 2002," she begins explaining.

Uh oh.

It seems the electronic switchover created these phantom duplicate titles, at least in some cases. Well, yes, DMV can help. She'll email the appropriate people and within 24 to 48 hours they will send a letter to me and my son (they'll also fax it to me) that should make things all nicey-nice with the other state.

Of course, until then, he has a car with a screwed-up title that technically isn't valid in that state except to get a new one, plus we're waiting for him to mail back the plates that we need by the end of the week when the temp tags on our new wheels run out.

All this, of course, raises some questions:

Surely we're not the first folks to try to transfer the title in another state on an S.C. title issued before July 2002.
If this is a known problem, why does the customer have to wait to find out at the other end, then come back requesting a letter?
It's nine flaming years after the switch. You mean to tell me this couldn't be fixed by now?

What, was DMV expecting every pre-2002 car bought in S.C. to be retitled in S.C. (where, of course, it wouldn't be a problem)?

One wonders how many people have been inconvenienced by this (and why some enterprising reporter hasn't followed up).

Hello? Anyone home out there in Blythewood?

USAGE: Am I wrong on this adverse vs. averse argument?

2011-07-16T01:25:00.002-04:00

OK, folks, step right up, pay your dollah, and smack ol Doug in the face with a cream pie - if I'm wrong in this usage argument.

From a Randy Hines column on language and style errors in this week's Southern Newspaper Publishers Association bulletin http://snpainfo.org/eBulletin/07.14.11.htm (scroll down, or, if you want just that column, the PDF is http://snpainfo.org/eBulletin/print/SNPA%20eBulletin%2007.14.11-Hines.pdf).

Q1 The sportswriter was averse to using imminent writing coach, Jim Stasiowski.

A1 The sports writer was adverse to using eminent writing coach Jim Stasiowski.
Despite dictionary spellings for sportswriter, our AP bible reminds us of this exception as two words. Averse means unfavorable; adverse means opposed. Despite Jim’s protests, he is somewhat famous or eminent in journalism circles. The informal title before the name does not need a comma.

To which I wrote that I disagreed that it should be "adverse" and that the original "averse" is correct. My argument:
- What is being expressed here is an attitude, and "averse to" is the common American English expression to show opposition as an attitude.
- The object of the aversion is the "using," not "Stasiowski," and "averse" is usually used to express opposition to concepts rather than people.

I think I'm backed up in this usage note from one of several references I consulted yet again to make sure what I thought I understood all these years was what I understood:

Adverse means 'hostile, unfavorable, opposed,' and is usually applied to situations, conditions, or events—not to people: : the dry weather has had an adverse effect on the garden. Averse is related in origin and also has the sense of 'opposed,' but is usually employed to describe a person’s attitude: I would not be averse to making the repairs myself.

(I suggested another test would be substituting "using" for "making" in that usage note - they line up nicely.)

(For now, please don't suggest "opposes" for "is averse/adverse to" - yep, probably better, clearer writing, but let's color within the lines of what the original question was trying to illustrate.)

I also noted this about the explanation put forth as to why there should be no comma:

The use of the comma (or proper nonuse of it in this case) does not have to do with whether it is a formal or informal title. It has to do with whether there is more than one eminent writing coach. Since there is more than one (though few of Jim's caliber), the phrase is restrictive and thus no comma.

So, do I have a clue here, or is it time to send Doug back to a usage re-education camp?

AP Style - "HuffPost"

2011-07-15T22:47:00.000-04:00

For those who like to keep track of esoterica on AP style, the shortened form of the Huffington Post shall henceforth officially be "HuffPost," according to the latest guidance issued today from the hermetically sealed room deep inside the AP pyramid on New York's middle West Side.

(It really is a unique room if you can ever get an invitation - the Elvis on velvet paintings are especially notable, and Darrell Christian in a shaman's outfit? Absolutely not to be missed.)

Gentle kidding asside, AP is following the masses here, 34 million hits for HuffPost on Google to 2 million for "HuffPo."

However, in keeping with the occasional tone we like here at CSJ Plaza, we will contine to use HuffPo. It seems to capture the essence better.

CSJ on Tumblr

2011-07-14T10:12:00.000-04:00

A new branch of the Common Sense Journalism megaplex has opened on Tumblr.

I'll probably be putting a lot of the more visual and quick-hit stuff up there and cross-referencing here.

First couple are a screw-up in a hed and an ad that needs to understand you don't need "$" if you say "dollars."

A look at the underbelly of TV journalism

2011-07-14T09:36:00.000-04:00

And this time, not from the U.S., but from Canada.

Oh, Canada! Could it be so bad as Kai Nagata (formerly of the CBC) laid out in his 3,000-word post on why he quit as CTV's Quebec City bureau chief?

The most quoted quote from Nagata, 24: So I didn’t quit my job because I felt frustrated or that my career was peaking. I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life. The ends no longer justified the means.

But here's also another:
I have serious problems with the direction taken by Canadian policy and politics in the last five years. But as a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out. Even then I’m not sure I was always successful, but I always knew at the CBC and subsequently at CTV that there were serious consequences for editorial. Within the terms of my employment at CTV, there was a clause in which the corporation (now Bellmedia) literally took ownership of my intellectual property output. If I invented a better mouse trap, they owned the patent. If I wrote a novel, they got a cut. Rhymes on the back of a napkin? Bellmedia is hip to the jive, yo. And if I ever said anything out of line with my position as an “objective” TV reporter, they had grounds to fire me. I had a sinking feeling when I first read that clause, but I signed because I was 23 and I wanted the job. Now I want my opinions back.

We can now cue the ongoing and seemingly never-ending debate about whether postmodern journalism can exist without an acknowledgment that objectivity is dead - long live transparency and knowing where the journalist is coming from.

In a nutshell, Nagata trots out many of the same criticisms we've often heard about shallowness, chasing the royals when there is "real news," ideology passing for news, etc. Read it and make your own decision. From my days in TV and my continuing association with those in that end of the business, it certainly rings true, but is it too strident, or perhaps not strident enough?

The CBC follows up with a chat with Nagata and a link to a slightly snarky response from a National Post reporter. (In essence: What? Nagata discovers journalism is a business that has some boundaries? Heavens me.)

Ledes: Why the extra words?

2011-07-08T01:02:00.000-04:00

There seems to be in vogue among reporters the need to throw a few chosen extra words in ledes to "liven them up" or make them seem chummy.

To often, however, they just get in the way and just fuel the idea that the reporter has an agenda. Like this:

State Democrats clamoring for the resignation of Lt. Gov. Ken Ard might get some help from an unlikely source: Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson.

Why is "an unlikely source" needed? Isn't that clear from specifying that Democrats might get help from a Republican? Actually, it would be more profitable if the writer had specified that Ard is a Republican, instead of making the reader connect the dots.

State Democrats clamoring for the resignation of Republican Lt. Gov. Ken Ard might get help from another Republican, Attorney General Alan Wilson.

I think readers probably are smart enough with that to figure out it's unusual, dontcha think?

Joe Wilson's finances - a case of shoddy journalism

2011-07-05T19:20:00.001-04:00

What would you think if you saw this headline?

Report finds congressman in debt

Does it sound to you like he is in over his head? I'm betting a fair number of people would, and that's just the beginning of the problems I see with a story today on Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.. - he of the "You lie" remark fame - and his finances. It was published in the Greenville News (pay wall) and reprinted in my local paper, The State (where I can't find it online except in the subscription required e-edition).

(In disclosure let me say I know Wilson in passing from Boy Scouts. I've never voted for the man and generally don't agree with his positions. But that doesn't mean he should be the target of slipshod journalism.)

Here are the relevant parts (the bulk of the story is reprinted here for educational uses since it cannot be easily linked to):

WASHINGTON — A state Republican congressman who has accused the Obama administration of being fiscally irresponsible owed between $165,000 and $325,000 in loans and credit-card debt last year.
    U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson of Spring-dale reported the debts on his recently released personal financial disclosure statements for 2010.
    Congressional lawmakers are required to file the statements each year. The statements report assets in broad ranges and are not required to include a lawmaker’s primary residence. Wilson’s statement shows he owed between $165,000 and $325,000 in six personal loans, one home-equity loan, and credit card debt.
    Wilson reported total liabilities between $765,000 and $1.57 million. That includes two mortgages — each worth between $250,000 and $500,000 – for properties in Washington and Sapphire, N.C., and a mortgage worth between $100,000 and $250,000 for property in Springdale.
    Wilson’s report shows “he is almost certainly under some (financial) pressure,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington.
    “This report raises more questions than it answers,” she said.
    Lawmakers are required to disclose personal debts of at least $10,000, Krumholz said.
    Wilson did not respond to requests for more details about his finances. …
    Like other House Republicans, Wilson has criticized the Obama administration for “job-killing” economic policies, and has urged spending cuts and fiscal restraint.
    On June 22, he delivered a floor speech accusing the administration of “spending and borrowing money at a reckless rate.”
    Wilson reported assets worth between $1.2 million and $2.68 million. Most of that is real estate and a timeshare on Hilton Head Island.
    The asset and liability ranges in his report show Wilson was worth approximately $386,000 to $796,000 last year, according to Jock Friedly, founder of LegiStorm, a website that posts financial disclosure records, congressional salary data and other fiscal information.
    That range does not include the value of Wilson’s primary residence.
    Analysts say it’s unusual for members of Congress to report significant debt. ...
    Wilson appears to rank “somewhere in the middle of the pack in Congress in terms of net asset levels,” Friedly wrote in an email. …
    Their annual salaries – $174,000 for non-leadership members of Congress like Wilson – are not included on the reports.
    Wilson reported extra income of nearly $39,000 last year in pension payments from the South Carolina state retirement system, the National Guard and the U.S. military, according to his records.
    Additionally, he earned between $5,000 and $15,000 in rent from his property in Springdale, his report shows.

The story invites one to read between the lines and come to a conclusion that isn't necessarily there - that somehow he's being a bit hypocritical by taking on six-figure short term debt and up to seven figures in overall debt.

The article spends the first 12 grafs suggesting how irresponsible Wilson might be without ever telling us about his assets or cash flow, let alone doing even a rudimentary analysis. That's left to the bottom of the article and mostly for the reader to suss out.

Whether he's accused the administration of being fiscally irresponsible or the best thing since sliced bread has little to do with outstanding short-term loans and credit card debt of between $165,000 and $325,000. It has everything to do with whether he can carry that debt.

One of the first suggestions it may not be a problems is that Wilson's disclosure (available at http://www.legistorm.com/) shows one personal loan as far back as 1999, three others in 2006 and one last year. The home equity was in December 2007. That doesn't suggest panic borrowing to cover other shortfalls (which might indicate irresponsibility), but a measured flow of financing. Two of the mortgages were in December 2004 and one in December 2007.

There is no indication any are in trouble.

It's not even unusual in some cases to have current liabilities exceed cash flow if you can convert some assets to tide you over. As a college instructor, my finances, from the outside, look like a disaster every May to August. Cash flow is far less than current liabilities. But during the "regular season" I squirrel away money in investments that then are slowly converted to cash during the summer.

I've even gone entire years in the "red" while doing house remodeling, but it was hardly irresponsible, as I knew the liquid assets and eventual cash flow were there.

So, yes, as Krumholz said, Wilson might be under some pressure. But is it unreasonable pressure? Is it irresponsible?

Friedly estimates Wilson's net worth at $386,000 to $796,000. (If you just do a raw assets-minus-liabilities analysis, Wilson could be $323,000 in the hole or $1.9 million in the black).
Using Friedly's numbers, even if Wilson had to pay off everything today, he'd still have assets left. If you looked at a business in that light, you might consider it a worthy investment.

With much of Wilson's wealth in real estate, there could be some liquidity problems, and the net at a forced sale could be less than what is listed. So maybe there is some pressure, but net worth is just one screen, and a bunt one.

Let's look at income and current liabilities.

The article lists his income at from $218,000 to $228,000 - his $174,000 congressional salary, his $39,000 in pension payments, and $5,001 to $15,000 in rental income. The writer does not explain why he lists that income but leaves out from $45,000 to $145,000 in "unearned" rental income listed from the "Moseley and Wilson" partnership that owns a number of properties.

But to be conservative, we'll take the $218,000 and then apply a 0.75 factor to allow for taxes, etc., leaving us with $163,500.

As to the debt, we can only estimate because of the ranges involved. Wilson and his spokesman did themselves no favors by not answering questions

Let's take the $325,000 as short term debt (personal loans and credit card along with the home equity loan, though that could as easily be long term). The credit card is included because we don't know if he's paying that off, so we'll assume the worst.

We'll go with the maximum $1.25 million for long term.

We have to guess on the rates and durations. For short term, let's start with a rate of 10% and an eight-year term. One loan already goes back to 1999, and several others are at the eight-year mark now. If you take the potentially onerous cost of credit card debt versus the lower cost of personal loans, a blended 10% seems reasonable.

For long term, we'll be really conservative and say 15 years at 6.5 percent.

What we get (all figures are for the year):
Short term (8 years, 10%), current portion due $59,184
Long term (15 years, 6.5%), current portion due $130,666
Total: $189,850, or a shortfall against income ($163,500) of $26,350.

That would indicate some pressure, but perhaps none at all if the partnership income were included and much less if we even took more than $5,000 of that rental income range that the article dos include.

(You can try these calculations yourself at http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/loan-calculator.aspx)

But there are wide variations with just some small adjustments in amount, term or rate. Leaving the short- and long-term maximums, but varying the interest and duration for the short term to eight years and 5% narrows the gap to $16,546. Some others:

10 years, 10% = $18,706 gap
10 years, 5% = $8,542 gap

Just to show how sensitive this is, however, let's take the mean short-term indebtedness of $245,000 (again, leaving the current portion of long-term debt at $130,666).

8 years, 10% = $11,782 gap
8 years, 5% = $4,390 gap
10 years, 10% = $6,022 gap
10 years, 5% = $1,646 to the good

None of these gaps is particularly onerous if the assets can be converted to cover. But if we then adjust the long-term debt by increasing the maturity to 20 years, that payment drops by more than $18,000 a year, and almost all the scenarios are in the black.(Make it a 30-year loan and the payment drops by almost $36,000 a year, moving about everything into the black.)

If we lower the long-term indebtedness to the $1.17 million mean of the range, the total per year for that portion drops to $122,292 at 15 years, $104,676 at 20 and $88,752 at 30.

The last problem in the article is any lack of a longitudinal perspective. In fact, Wilson's worst-case asset-liability gap has dropped from $978,000 in the 2008 report to $323,000 last year. His best case situation went from a $1.15 million surplus in 2008 to more than $1.9 million in the most recent report.

I don't expect a long analysis like this in the paper. But we are entitled to something more than trying to make false associations on limited data. The reporting could have been better, but the editing was far short of the mark, especially the headline (in The State).

Pay Walls: Times of London tops 100K subs

2011-07-01T14:11:00.001-04:00

So is the Times of London's much-derided pay wall strategy working?

If you look at the latest figures from Paid Content, the answer seems to be - maybe. The number of subscribers had topped 100,000, equating to about $1.4 million a month. Still a pittance when measured against the paper's larger circulation, but something to think about.

Hyperlocal: InJersey autopsy

2011-07-01T12:52:00.002-04:00

With Gannett closing its InJersey hyperlocal sites this week, there is a good autopsy in StreetFight that you should read.

Written by Ted Mann, Gannett's New Jersey digital development director, it's one of those rare assessments that is neither shrouded in black nor shaded by rose-colored glasses. It's pretty much just the cold, hard facts (OK, with a little hopefulness thrown in).

Some of the things I thought were interesting:

News maps are eye-candy, not much else. As Mann says, that might change as geolocative and mobile are more integrated, but for now, no one seems to be clicking on them. I still think such visual representations might be the best way to present some individual stories especially when location is a key (I still go back to my July Fourth map of parades, fireworks, etc., instead of a river of text), but this does add a dose of reality to the mix.
Aggregation and syndication are NOT the way to build viable hyperlocal sites. I and others have said it, but let's let Mann say it: It was almost immediately apparent that we’d ripped the soul out of the sites, and they quickly became ghost towns.
Flashy content management systems don't matter. You can build a good site on the cheap. But it has to have content and features people want. InJersey used WordPress and BuddyPress. (This is reinforced from my own experience with Hartsville Today. The CMS doesn't matter, but the features and ease of use do. When Media General ditched Drupal and moved the site to Expression Engine, but without using any of the EE plug-ins so that it became just a glorified message board without the ease of associating pictures with posts, an online calendar, a list of recent posts and comments, etc., the site lost users in droves, and they said that was exactly why. (To the credit of a developer at one of MG's papers, some of that functionality was restored, but too late and not the calendar, which effectively migrated to Facebook.).)
Modesty is the best quality when it comes to expectations of growing audience (which is why - my comment here - hyperlocal sites and large media chains simply may not mix). Mann says the 17 sites had 2,259 members and 90 regular contributors. One of the sites had 65,000 pageviews in a month (he doesn't break out others, though in a Poynter piece he says some others had only a few thousand). Those of us in the trenches might rejoice at some of those numbers, but they are not enough inside a big organization that is looking for profitability and cash flow and measures audience in numbers far larger.
Banner ads couldn't support the site. No surprise there, but the debate will continue. Mann references Howard Owens, a friend of mine, who does seem to have success with The Batavian.
If you build it, they won't come - at least if it means doing any work. We all know this, but Mann's postmortem reflects it. See the 90 regular contributors above out of 2,259 members, or 4%. And, yes, there was a self-serve ad platform, but as Mann notes: [T]here was definitely an appetite among local advertisers to support the kind of reporting and coverage we were providing. Still loved using Flyerboard, we just had to sell them, create the ads, and schedule it all ourselves.
People staffing the sites need to live in the communities. Many of the Gannett journalists did not.

There are some other good points, too. As I said, well worth reading. There are holes to be poked and points to be debated and, as they say, your results may differ, but overall it's a good assessment that should be useful going forward.

Resume visualation site

2011-06-30T16:18:00.002-04:00

I was intrigued when I first read about this site, Visualize.me, which is a startup that will take your LinkedIn data and turn it into a spiffy, visually oriented resume.

I have mixed thoughts: On one hand, I think it's a neat idea. On the other, anytime an app wants to muck around in my data on a social networking service, I give it serious thought, scrutiny and research.(Not to mention that if you use it, you're going to have to go into Linked-in and make sure your data is clean or that you clean it up and make sure it is exact on things like expertise, something that can be time consuming.)

So we'll see. For now, if you want to look at the promo stuff:
http://vizualize.me/bbm5x

That code on the end I think is supposed to track the number of people I refer. So if you don't want that, I perfectly understand, just use http://vizualize.me.

As someone noted in the comments on that post, this still probably isn't for the HR dept. that wants to scan in your resume for keywords, but it might impress the hiring manager if you can get past the HR gantlet.

Merriam-Webster App

2011-06-30T12:36:00.000-04:00

Merriam-Webster has a free Android app to access the dictionary and some other goodies like word of the day.

You will get ads, however, the price of free.

Social networking: Google Plus

2011-06-30T08:29:00.002-04:00

Or, more correctly, "Google +" - now released in beta.

It has some interesting features, and I predict we will see some people defect from Facebook and others add it as their truly private social network (I think many folks are going to keep FB for some time because it is, right now, the town square of the Web. PC World has a good rundown.

I definitely can see this catching on with my students.

However, the Financial Times does point out the "resharing" feature
could be a privacy hole (you can apparently turn that off, but not easily)

Computerworld suggests that with a little tweaking to work with Google Docs, this could be a solution for collaboration within organizations (certainly would have to be better than the ill-fated Google Wave).

So this will be one more thing newsrooms will have to think about - and it reinforces the management challenges. It's so much easier when you have a Facebook that gives you "one stop shopping" to reach an audience, but it's not going to be that way anymore. It's going to take serious thought about where your audience is and how to reach them - not just mindless, robotic distribution.

Twitter for Newsrooms - Part 2

2011-06-29T14:40:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I noted that Twitter has a new resource for journalists.

Now comes the fun in the form of AdAge's Matthew Creamer suggesting Twitter left out one key hashtag, #enrage, as he recaps some of the journalist-to-digirati and journalist-to-PR person shouting matches (Twitter style) of late in "Twitter's Real Lesson for Newsrooms."

Usage: Handing over the 'reigns'

2011-06-29T08:58:00.000-04:00

Stumbling over the "rein/reign" usage difference is common as in this sentence this morning from Mediabistro's All Twitter in a story about Twitter co-founder Biz Stone leaving the company:

Now, it seems, Stone is ready to hand over the reigns and begin working on other projects.

It should be hand over the reins, not reigns. It flows from the same idea as "free rein," and "rein in," not "reign."

Whenever you come across these, remember, they all come from the days when horses were common and reins were the leather straps you used to control them: You reined in the horse (or gave it free rein), handed over the reins, etc.

Nothing to do with royalty here, unless you tend to equate royalty with the working end of a horse ...

Quick read - culture change in newsrooms

2011-06-28T11:42:00.000-04:00

From the recommended reading list, a blog post by Earl Wilkinson, head of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association, about the need for culture change in news orgs.

Strip away the predictable anti-union, the CEO-as-hero stuff (Ex: Because as easy as it is to blame CEOs and shareholders for the mess our industry is in, the dirty truth is many of them are fighting daily for change — but their companies are populated by newsrooms, pressrooms, unions, and fiefdoms that are finding new and innovative ways to stop or slow the change), and Wilkinson makes some points worth heeding:

Our industry’s response has been to cut people and newsprint, often without regard for priorities or the customer.
The top publishers refuse to collaborate on anything meaningful such as industry innovation, incubation, or experimentation.
When the analyst community five years ago gave publicly traded newspapers a green light to lower profit margins to heavily invest in digital, sales, marketing and research, publishers dabbled but mostly passed.
The old beacons to whom we have turned in the past for inspiration and guidance — Editor & Publisher, Presstime, Deutsche Bank and other fantastic analysts who covered the industry — are all dead, dying, or irrelevant.

Wilkinson acknowledges the "crap deals that hamstrung their companies with debt" (help me out there; those were done by the CEOs, not the unions, etc., right, Earl?). And he lays out a good list of things that still need to be thought about more: figure out what differentiates you; invest in research; embrace the crowd; sell market solutions, not space; be willing to fail, but quickly; etc.

To Wilkinson's credit, he has been at the forefront of trying to bridge the research of academia and the needs of the industry. That's a herculean task on both sides of the aisle.

The INMA is no one's vision of a "liberal" trade group, so when it steps up and says it's time to pay attention - it's time to pay attention.