New math, WOLO style

So this story and headline are posted on the website of one of our local TVs - WOLO.

Gas Prices Doubling

COLUMBIA, SC (WOLO)-- Gas prices nearly doubled over the week, prompting concern from drivers.

Here in the midlands, ABC Columbia news found prices ranging from $3.29 a gallon to $3.45 a gallon.

That's nearly 30 cents higher than prices were two weeks ago, when midlands drivers were paying an average of $3.08 per gallon.

Experts say that prices could spike even more as we near August, then the Labor Day holiday.

Really?

A 30-cent increase on $3.08 is "doubling"? Apparently the slide rule needs to go back in the shop for a tuneup.

And the person whose byline is on this is the news director. 

(It's also "Midlands" -- capped  as a recognized region of the state. But that's a guppy compared to the whale of a mistake.)

Damage vs. Damages - let's get it right (especially TV anchors)

Dear WLTX, WIS and numerous other TV stations I've heard this on during my travels:

Damages is what you win in court. It is NOT what is done in a fire, flood, etc. (The company won $63,000 in damages in its lawsuit.)

Damage is what happens in those cases. (The fire caused an estimated $63,000 in damage.)

So unlike the WLTX anchor who just -- again -- said a fire caused so-and-so amount in "damages," let's try to get it right and not sound illiterate, OK?

(Don't believe me? Here's another source. You can find many out there of various repute.)

Win a VIP look at 'Meet the Press'

Mea culpa - I've been meaning to post this but have been swamped with teaching. So with just 15 hours left to enter, let me clue you in to kind of a neat promotion: Win a backstage pass to "Meet the Press" a week before the election.

Normally, I don't shill for these things, but this one's being put on by Omaze, a startup that's raising money for causes by offering "experiences" like this.

(Full disclosure: It was brought to my attention by Rachel Kraus, who's been kind enough to speak to my class on social media and nonprofits and I owe her one - but I wouldn't be mentioning this if it were not MTP and linked to a decent cause.)

The beneficiary of the "Meet the Press" gig is the Young Storytellers Foundation.


Here are the details from Kraus:

•  You and a friend get flown roundtrip to Washington D.C. and put up in a hotel.
•  VIP access for you and your friend to "Meet the Press."
•  Sit on stage in one of 10 seats usually reserved for friends and family.
•  Meet David Gregory.

Taping takes place Oct. 28, a week before the election.

It's $10 for one ticket and less per ticket if you buy more. I don't know what your odds are - obviously it varies by how many entries are in, but  the site doesn't say (note to Omaze - a meter showing at least how many entries or how much has been raised would be a good addition.)

As with all these things, caveat emptor. But I think it's at least worth checking out.

Another Dewey vs. Truman moment - Augusta, Ga.

This is the sort of thing guaranteed to ruin your day -- count the votes from only one county in a multicounty congressional race, as I'm told one Augusta, Ga., TV station did, and end up calling it for the wrong person:

WJBF later got it right on the Web.

Oops - Hand Perez Hilton the remote, please

The Perez Hilton blog has this breathless story:


Wow! The Good Wife is seriously gearing up for their fourth season with an INSANE amount of talent!
Maura Tierney and Kristin Chenoweth have already been confirmed to appear on the ABC drama when it returns in the fall, and now, it looks like producers are pulling in ANOTHER old Broadway favorite…Nathan Lane!
That's right, the Golden Globe and Tony Award-winning actor will reportedly be a recurring character, and knowing him - as well as the unique way in which this specific shows utilizes actors for unexpected roles - we can't wait to find out even more details!
What do U think?? Are U looking forward to the new season of The Good Wife??

Did you catch the error?

"The Good Wife" is on CBS. So maybe that's one of those details the blog shouldn't wait to find out more about.

The details, by the way, are at Zap2It. Maybe a little less breathless and a bit more fact-checking there, Perez?

(While you're at it, how about saying "The Good Wife" is gearing up for its fourth season?)

Editteach: Dissecting another fire story

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.)

We need your views: Is some research threatened?

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.

A look at the underbelly of TV journalism

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.)

Hilarious send-up of social media and journalism

From the Fox station in DFW:




Thanks to Chris Roberts for the outpoint.

Online Mugging

Over the years, I've been truly po'd at some bosses, enough so to get into shouting matches with them (not my proudest moments). And there are times I probably should be thankful the Internet and blogging and comments didn't exist, or I might have been one of those contributing to this online mugging of a departing ABC producer.

(Who knows, as a former boss I might have been the object of one of these, too.)

You always expect a few complaints, but were I a top exec at ABC, I'd be thinking long and hard about the string of vitriol here. I'm of the "if there's smoke, there's fire" school, and this seems like a conflagration that has been smoldering for years.

Tech Talk: New stuff from NAB - but not just for broadcasters

Chuck Fadley, proprietor extraordinaire of the newspaper video list, has a recap of what he just saw at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, and the crowd seems to be trending toward digital single-lens reflx (DSLR) cameras that can shoot video.

Lots of accessories, including compact high-quality lenses coming out for those rigs. Interestingly, he says, it was almost all Canon and accessory companies - Nikon had little presence.

There's also a nonlinear video editor for the iPhone,

Meanwhile, he says, you could pretty much hear the wind whistle at the some of the traditional TV camera suppliers' booths.

Fadley also is excited by the new "freedom chip" that he says didn't get much attention but that could turn the Internet into your new video provider, bypassing cable. The new initialism is "OTT" for "over the top" delivery of broadband to your TV.

His take on it all: "I left with the impression that the whole TV industry has its head in the sand."

The real history of the Internet

Al Tompkins gave some publicity to this last week, but you really should watch it.

It's video of former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt speaking at the Columbia Business School explaining all the government actions taken to favor the Internet, including the decision that it, not broadcasting, should become the nation's common medium:

• "Stole" revenue from the phone network by giving Internet users and service providers free access to it.
• Declared the Internet to be a local service, thus avoiding the 3-cent-per-minute tariff for traffic across state lines.
• Decided online purchases should be tax free.
• Delayed HDTV
• Decided broadcasting "had become a threat to democracy."
  

And he says the government is contracting broadcasting spectrum to favor broadband.

Hundt isn't hurling some conservative broadside at this. He's explaining how he was deep in the thicket of it.

If you're heading to BEA, NAB, RDTNA in Vegas - free access to NAB show

I got an e-mail in that seems to check out, so I'm onpassing. Comes from a Jason Rouse at Tuvel Communications, which is repping the NAB show next week, April 10-15 (a phone call to the number on the company's Web site confirms the e-mail).

Rouse is offering to CSJ readers "free access to the exhibit floor, opening keynote and state of the industry address, info sessions, content theater and destination broadband theater and exhibits. Please pass this along and visit http://ow.ly/13T8Q to redeem or register at http://nabshow.com/register with the code A913."

He lists this as a $150 value.

I've followed the links as far as I can without actually registering and, again, things seem legit, though always caveat emptor.

Boehne's take on paywalls

Rich Boehne, E.W. Scrripps' president and CE, has an interesting take on TV station Web sites and newspaper site pay walls in an interview with TVNewsCheck (italics mine):

There's a reasonable amount of potential and it's the same for the TV stations. TV stations have every bit the opportunity that the newspapers have and some would argue they have a better opportunity. Thus far, they have not taken advantage of that and in many markets they're well behind the newspapers. But they're catching up.

As strange as it sounds, we are focusing more and more on print and online as separate businesses and not the same. There's a place for print. Maybe it's not seven days a week, but there are a lot of people who want this information in a print format and we should serve that market and do an outstanding job. At the same time, we should build a separate online business. So the online piece is growing, but it's still nowhere near the size of the print piece.

On paywalls:

I don't think we've seen anything so far that works forlocal newspapers. Part of the issue is scale. You need quality content, but you also need enough scale to sell it to enough people to make a business. That's not easy to do in a small or midsize or even a decent-size newspaper market. The same is true for a TV station.

Newspapers terribly underestimate the ability of TV stations to produce content outside of their core audience. If newspapers attempt to take a lot of their local content and put it behind pay walls, I have no doubt that TV stations will rush in and fill the void. Now, I know we would certainly do that in all of our TV markets. So that just changed the equation a lot and the newspaper industry just for some reason overlooks the ability and determination that a lot of TV stations have.

Read the rest.

How the sausage is made

Watching how the journalistic sausage is made is never a pretty sight. Exhibit A: This tape of the bickering before football coach Lane Kiffin's news conference in which he explained why he was leaving Tennessee for Southern Cal.

No Casseroles for You!

There is a special place in copy-editing hell for the writers and producers of menus. Jay Leno, of course, gets great mileage out of them on his show.

Here's one I was looking at because one of my favorite TV personalities, Guy Fieri of "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" on the Food Network recently taped a segment at the place.

It's from the Farmer's Shed in Lexington, S.C.



I know what they're saying, but it's odd idiom and sounds more like: Hey, you want a casserole? You can't have no stinkin' casseroles.

Better put, "Not all casseroles available all the time."

Convergence Conference: All things Canadian

Catching up on some things from Thursday's sessions, who would have thought we'd have so much about Canada? Good stuff, and it points out how we need to broaden our research perspectives (yes, folks, consider that a pitch to contribute articles to The Convergence Newsletter).

In separate presentations Kim Kierans, King's College and Marc Edge, Sam Houston State took at look at the Canadian media landscape and concluded that the amount of consolidation there is becoming dangerous to democracy.

Edge went so far as to say that "If you want to see the future of media convergence, look north."

They painted a picture of three companies, CanWest, Quebecor and CTV, that have control of much of Canada's TV and newspapers, but that gained that control by going billions of dollars in debt. CanWest, of course, recently sought bankruptcy protection.

Kierens tended to have an eastern Caadian perspective, but as bad a picture as she painted, Edge, who still has his roots in Vancouver, said it gets worse the farther west you go.

The big battle now is over the companies' demand for a 50-cent-per-subscriber carriage fee from cable companies. The big three have closed some TV stations and have threatened to close others if they don't get the fee.

Meanwhile, Robert Bergland of Missouri Western State outlined what he and Kirby Strider have found in an analysis of how much multimedia Canadian outlets are using, and the bottom line is a lot less than in the U.S. or the U.K. For instance, about two-thirds of Canadian media outlets use some form of online video. In the U.S. it's three-quarters and the U.K., 85 percent. However, there is more audio (40 percent of Canadian sites, vs. 20 percent U.S. and 10 percent U.K.)

There also are relatively few outside blogs on Canada's bigger papers and similarly low use of audio slide shows.

Bottom line: Interactive multimedia is a lot less common in Canada. Possible reasons: Management less oriented toward it, less training and different relationships with print and broadcast – more cross-ownership. But the biggest reason, he said, may be lower rates of broadband penetration. Many areas in the northern and western provinces have relatively little broadband yet.

Newspaper video cuts

There is a lot of discussion about the state of "newspaper video" on the Yahoo newspaper video group after the decision by the Las Vegas Sun to pull the plug on the innovative 702.tv.

The general meme is that those long features and other innovative projects that draw critical acclaim, but not necessarily lots of viewers, are falling by the wayside and that the TV staples of breaking news - fires, accidents, news conferences and the like -- are becoming the standard fare.

This is not surprising, but misguided, though Chuck Fadley at the Miami Herald says hard news and sports drive the paper's video traffic.

But if you are doing that, all you are doing is competing with every other outlet in the market - in short, you are back to commodity news. And if you thought it was tough making a buck in the commodity news market when your tools are primarily paper and pen, it's a whole lot tougher in video where the equipment costs thousands of dollars.

One person writes that his newspaper, which went into video "with a vengeance," has cut back to one stringer and that if anything breaks, there is no money to replace it.

Dirck Halstead writes that video ad rates "MUST come up." Michael Rosenblum responds that the rates aren't coming up, that the problem is in the ad departments and that we have to radically reshape how we sell online ads.

They're both right. While earlier Pew data, for instance, still showed the heaviest use of online video to be at upper income levels, the latest shows no difference among income or education groups. But various types of video are likely to draw different audiences, some more valuable than others (think golf on TV), and there's no reason to think that, if sold correctly and with data to back it up, some video might not command a premium.

But that means knowing how to sell it and having the data and tools. And Rosenblum is definitely right that the problem is in the front office more than the newsroom. As I've worked with news organizations -- and I've said this before -- their ad and business sides are essentially moribund when compared with most newsrooms. Unlike a newsroom, they are even more intimately tied to a business model, and I'm not sure how you extract yourself from that, both psychologically and sociologically.

I don't think we can downplay the amount of managerial fortitude it takes to make this kind of change. You are screwing with people's livelihoods and, in many respects, asking them to jump into the pit with no guarantee where the bottom is. The money at this point, such as it is, is still to be made in selling ink on paper, not pixels on screen. Yes, it will change, but human reaction to such things tends to be a lagging, not a leading, economic indicator.

This pullback in video is not particularly surprising for two reasons:

• the general pattern of technology adoption
  
• the way too many newsrooms appear have managed it

In general, adoption of new technologies, especially information technologies, has been on a steadily upward curve, with the slope becoming even steeper with newer technologies such as the VCR, microwave, cell phone and Internet. (The telephone and airplane seem to have a dip or plateau in the graphs in that article, but that would seem to be more an effect of World War II.) But the technology adoption curve really isn't necessarily continuous bell curve, as Rogers posited. Some project a gap between the early adopters and the early majority. (See also part three of that series.)

The case of online video, especially news-related video, is further complicated because it is, for lack of a better term, a "secondary technology." It relies on still-developing underlying technology. It's only relatively recently that high-speed Internet has been available in most areas (and one can debate what we call high speed vs. the rest of the world), but the cost in rural areas is problematic.

There is continued debate over effective streaming technologies, especially in the era of high definition, and the devices on which to play such video remain limited. This is unlike the VCR, another secondary technology, which was a quick and relatively easy add-on (jokes about programming them not withstanding) to a stable underlying technology.

And even though the Pew data show widespread use of online video, that number is based on whether the person has ever watched a video sharing site. When you look at regular use, however, the numbers drop sharply (89 percent of those 18-29 say they watch videos, but just 36 percent on a typical day).

Truly widespread adoption, the kind that leads to the monetization and ROI needed for sustainability for organizations like newsrooms, is unlikely until online video is widely ported to existing TVs or to some kind of mobile device that improves on the current small-screen experience.

Having said that, I still see or hear of too many cases in newsrooms where things like video are embarked on without a rigorous thought and management process. (Newsrooms are not alone - a marketing director told me recently her organization had hired a social media firm. Why, I asked. Because everyone tells us we need to do it, she said.) As a result, as the one Newspaper Video list correspondent noted, they jump in with a vengeance, only to be disappointed. This digital age requires a more rigorous way of evaluating and managing. Four key points:

• At the outset you should ask "why?" Also "how" and "what": Why are we doing this. What do we hope to accomplish or learn? (In the case of online video, it might be to learn workflows, define audience, understand the technology). How will we define success and what will we do if we don't have success?
• Monitor: Who will monitor comments? Workflows? Cost vs. benefit? Content? The online production system is different from the old rigid get-it-to-press model (not to mention the added dimension of interacting with your audience). Effective monitoring is critical.
• Measurement: There's an old business saying - you can't manage what you can't measure. So how will you measure? What will you measure? (Are total views critical, for instance, or is it time on view? Demographics? Psychographics?)
• Manage: Did we reach our goals? If not, why not? What should we do about it - kill it or adjust it? Or redefine the goals?

None of this need involve ROI. In fact, smart organizations realize that to grow and expand, everything can't be about ROI (in pure dollars and cents, unless you want to get into gritty cost-benefit analysis).

We don't need to be quite so down in the dumps about "newspaper" video. But we do need to understand that many organizations jumped out without the rigor needed to evaluate it. As a result, the pullback also is likely to be overstated. But, then, that just seems to be the nature of the business right now.

Convergence Newsletter - HD streaming

Latest Convergence Newsletter: Edgar Huang details work in evaluating best HD streaming technology http://bit.ly/FQmbK (free)

Nice taxonomy of online video

As with many things digital, we continue struggling to define new terms and concepts that really encapsulate the full experience.

So it is with online video. For some time, we've uneasily brought over TV terminology, but that was really designed for a one-way, not-quite-so-intimate, limited options environment. Online gives us many more possibilities, so the conversation has been augmented by the "three tiers" suggested by Chet Rhodes of washingtonpost.com.

Now, Peg Achterman has given us another, and I think very good way, to frame the thinking. She compares it to being at a concert. Do you have a "balcony" view, one in the middle of the orchestra or something in-between?

I don't know that the terminology is going to catch on -- after all, VOSOT, SOT, and other conjugations of that strange tongue called "newsspeak" came about partly because of the need for economy of phrase. But Achterman has given us a strong mental framework in which to consider things.