A report you should read: Why newsrooms don't embrace digital tools

I've spent more than a little time working with smaller newsrooms, trying to show them easy, low cost or free ways to get into the digital age.

I've had my share of speaking gigs at press associations and other news groups doing the same thing.

And I usually come away with the feeling that while they are impressed and really, really want to do this, the reality is that mostly it will be the same old, same old, with the reality being to do more and more but not smarter and smarter.

Students who report back from their new jobs often tell me they aren't really being allowed to use the digital skills I've tried to teach them.

Now, a new report from Duke's newsroom project tends to confirm all this. It's got a catchy title, "The Goat Must Be Fed." And you should read it and take it to heart, especially if you manage a smaller newsroom.

Too many small newsrooms seem determined to follow Einstein's observation that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is insanity. Time to stop.

(Related: NY Times report raises alarms about newsroom's digital future.)

Google Maps Engine issue

If you use Google's new maps engine, you need to be aware of a problem in using the "share" button.

When you do, it produces a link like this:

https://mapsengine.google.com/map/viewer?mid=zPZH3TAj6XZQ.knDBdB (That's not a complete link because it goes to a student's work in progress.)

The problem is that "viewer" in the URL. If you click on it and are not signed into Google, you get nothing. Not very good for sharing stuff with the general public - or with your professor for grading (grin).

The solution is to substitute "embed" for "viewer."

You'll find more details here:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/maps-engine/issues-and-troubleshooting/8YU8YVj36yA

Let's hope Google recodes that button.

Audacity and OSX 10.8 - MP3 export problems

If you are using Audacity and OSX 10.8, you might find that Audacity won't pick up the right path to the Lame dynamic library file for exporting MP3s, even if you use the recommended Lame install package that puts it in the user library where Audacity wants to find it. The problem is that if you have multiple accounts on a machine, the /usr/library is helpfully hidden by Apple. We've found Audacity can find it if you are in the administrator's account, but if you are in another account, say "student," it won't find it.

The best solution for us has been to create a Lame folder inside the Audacity folder in the Applications folder, point the Lame installer there, and then point Audacity there once the Lame dylib is installed. But this is a pain to do individually if you have a set of lab computers, etc.

However, if you edit the audacity.cfg file and then do a mass copy to the machines, it should work. At the bottom of the .cfg file, after MP3LibPath put in the path to your lame dylib file that you now have in the applications folder (or wherever you have put it):

[Export]
Format=MP3
Path=/Users/faculty/Desktop
[MP3]
MP3LibPath=

Problem is, how do you find this folder because the Library directory is hidden (this is the usr/library, not the root library)? If you click on the Go dropdown menu and while holding it down hit the Option key, "Library" magically appears as one of the places you can go -- and you'll find the .cfg file there.

Hope that helps - Doug

(Here is some more on the topic, including another way to get to the applicable Library folder http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=68006)

Email with an attitude

Wow. Intersting post from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten at The Next Web about a new email management system he's developing, InBox Pro.


Call it email with an attitude:

You can help me test it however by sending an email to boris@inboxpro.com. Try it now and the following will happen:
Your email will land in my ‘Queue’ box and you will receive a reply via email with some information and options. The email states that my inbox currently contains 325 emails and that it takes an average of 3 days, 7 hours and 47 minutes for me to reply to emails.

I hope that message alone will make it clear to people that maybe they are sending me too many emails and to accept that they probably won’t get a reply within a few minutes. But it doesn’t stop there. I also invite the sender to optimize their email for me to ensure I get to it faster. They can do that by following a link and then changing their email to one of 4 formats:

1: Yes/No question:
2: FYI Message
3: Short Message
4: Long Message

Each format has a separate ‘Average Response Time’ and it is shown as you compose your message. Over time it will likely show that Yes/No questions and FYI Messages are answered faster than Long Questions.

In a few months I hope to have an iPhone and Android app that skips the whole email part of this setup and just allows you to pick an address and submit a message format.

There is one more feature that make Inbox Pro worthwhile for me personally and that is the ‘Expire’ function. I can set a time after which emails will expire. That means that if I haven’t been able to reply to your email within one week that simply means I’m too busy to answer it.

Of course, the equation here is how many people will you offend with those responses? But then again, wouldn't it be nice to add some of this kind of structure that would truly make email useful again as a multidimensional communication channel.

Awesome tool for Mac users

I've fallen in love with XtraFinder, an app for Macs that gives "finder" file windows the same tabbed windows feature available in browsers.

Now, instead of having multiple windows open, I can just have one split one (one of the features), for instance, as shown below. Or I can have numerous tabs open in just one window, taking up a lot less real estate and improving my workflow tremendously.

If you are a journalist using a Mac, this will definitely help you keep things organized and speed up your ability to flip among things.

Thank you Tran Ky Nam.

Here, by the way, is a pretty complete tutorial on how to speed up workflow using a lot of Finder options (as well as some alternatives to XtraFinder).

Google+ captions

Google+ has announced a new cool feature for hangouts - captions.

It's aimed at helping those who are hearing-impaired, but I can see reporting applications, too, for creating a transcript (with the caveat that all machine-generated transcripts need to be double-checked).

Thunderbird development stopping

I'm disappointed in the word that Mozilla is stopping development of the Thunderbird e-mail client except for security and stability updates (rough translation - probably not going to see much of that, either).

Yes, it's a Web and cloud-based world, but there's a place for a machine-based client.

The Web interface for my university's email, based as it is on Outlook, is much too clunky and slow. I use the IMAP interface through a client, which just allows me more flexibility in quickly managing my mail or, at times, in downloading things to my machine for when I know I won't have good online access or would have to pay through the nose (like in some airports).

Right now, I use T-bird as backstop. I recommend downloading the SeaMonkey browser package, also from Mozilla. It has integrated e-mail as well as an integrated Web authoring tool. It's the little cousin of Firefox, but I think it should get more attention (although I do wonder sometimes how long Mozilla will keep it going).

Beware of merchants using Squareup

Update June 2012: I have started getting Square receipts with the type of card and the last four digits. See, Square, wasn't that easy?
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I hate to post this because I think it is wonderful new technology for small merchants to be able to swipe credit cards and handle the transactions through their cellphones.

But if you are a business traveler, beware. As these little white square attachments start sprouting from cellphones, etc., you'd better check with your accounting department on whether it will accept the receipts you are emailed or texted.

Many remain skittish about email receipts (possibility they can be easily forged). But the one I got today from a merchant using Squareup is likely to pose a special problem. While it is a visual receipt, not just a text-only email, it merely lists "item" without any details, and it does not detail which credit card was used (only the generic Visa). This can be a special problem for travelers who might have multiple cards for various reasons.

Here, for instance, is what a typical receipt looks like.

If the merchant is using an iPad, there is the option to print a true receipt. But many, like cabs, use cellphones, and they don't invest in a printer (the point being to save money, right?). If not, email is all you get. So then you have to wait till it posts to your Visa account (assuming you have access to that account), print out the record, etc. If it's a corporate account, how willing do you think accounting is going to be to check dozens and maybe hundreds of these things (as they become more common) against the corporate account, especially since there are no account or reference numbers?

I also take a bit of exception to the preset "tip" percentages at the bottom of each screen with no way, that I saw, to enter your own (other than "no tip").

So caveat emptor.

(I've often wondered why companies like this don't have a feedback mechanism on their websites, since the customer, not the vendor, is the ultimate word-of-mouth promotion for something like this. As a result, I sent my feedback through the website's "press" email. I'd encourage others to do the same. press@squareup.com.)

Here's a review of the company (officially called "Square"). Generally good, but some problems.

Update 4/1: After some extensive back and forth with Square's help desk - and kudos to the desk for continuing to talk with me about the options and take suggestions - there may be a way to get a detailed image of your receipt. Unfortunately, it is not obvious, and it may be off-putting to some: Sign up for a Square account, even though it might seem those are only for merchants.

Almost Everything on Square's website  (except the Pay with Square link) as of this post is merchant-facing, so the fact that you as a consumer can do this is not overly obvious. If you sign up for an account, you will be asked seemingly merchant-type questions for security. This includes the last four digits of your Social Security number. Square apparently uses all this information to dig into databases (credit reports?) and identify you. It will come back with a screen with those details, you confirm them, etc. You will be asked to click to have a Square card reader sent to you. You can ignore that and, after all that, you will have an account. One of the links in that account is "Receipts." I haven't run into a Square-enabled merchant since doing this, so I can't tell you how well it works.

I've suggested that Square engineer a consumer-facing link that skips most of that stuff and allows people to clearly sign up for an account to access their receipts. In addition, if Square had a big "convert" button in that account, then once it had me as a consumer, if I decided to start a small business, etc., it might well have me as a merchant customer (remembering that the demographic likely to use this for receipts is also the one that has the resources in both time, money and education, to do just that).

Very very cool tech: Integrating Google Docs and WordPress

This post on 10,000 Words, complete with video, introduces some very cool technology being used by a newspaper in Maine to publish online and in print using just Google Docs, WordPress and InDesign.

http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/how-to-run-a-news-site-and-newspaper-using-wordpress-and-google-docs_b4781

Google announces chromebook

(In recovering some earlier posts that had not been published, this one inexplicably moved to the top. It is an older post of about a week ago.)
 
Google has just announced the chromebook - not so much a computer as a cloud portal in a laptop box running Chrome.

Its big selling points:

• Almost instant startup
• No real internal programs
• Everything on the cloud
• Automatic background updates

From Google's promo site: Thanks to the power of HTML5, many apps keep working even in those rare moments when you're not connected.

Color me cautious right now - if only because in a few weeks I am headed to a place - for more than a "rare moment" - where I will NOT have high speed access (yes, such places do still exist, even here in the good old U-S-of-A). It's another decade, I think, before we get affordable, ubiquitous high speed access.

Yet, I can definitely see a place for this on, say, a college campus, where usage and access are concentrated. Can we see a day where these become standard issue to students?

Put this in a tablet, and I might like it even better.

From the cool tech dept: Wolfram Alpha creates QR codes

Wolfram Alpha has announced it can create QR codes from information you input.

The resulting GIF image can be saved and embedded in your website or put into publications, etc.

Here's my personal info encoded.

Even though Google has indicated it is ending QR support in favor of NFC - near field communications - I think QRs will be around for a bit (at least longer than CueCat was).

AP Style - technology marches on - email, cellphone, smartphone

Last year at the American Copy Editors Society meeting, AP announced it was following the crowd, giving up its stubborn insistence on Web site and henceforth going with website.

Today, with ACES in session in Phoenix, AP announces it is going with the flow again and making cellphone and smartphone one word and dropping the hyphen from email.

AP also is adopting handheld, one word, for the noun (though I hope the use of that jargonish term will be rare) while hand-held, the preferred dictionary spelling, stays for the adjective.

Who knows? If this keeps up we might yet get "workforce" and "underway," as most of the rest of the universe now does it.

In another change not yet from AP, but I see posted on the ACES convention site, AP is adopting Kolkata, instead of Calcutta, for the Indian city.

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Update: The backlash, such as it is, already has begun on Twitter at #teamhyphen

A bit more from the meeting: Nick Jungman reports AP is abandoning its short-lived idea (from last year) to spell out state names in datelines.

Yahoo's cuts, Delicious, etc., and dealing with ambiguity

Lots has been posted around the Web on Yahoo's decision to cut some services, such as the Declicious social bookmarking service. There's also some word that Flickr could be in danger.


Yet, as at least one comment has noted, this is also the Web and in five or 10 years, we may well be mourning the loss of Twitter or Facebook or, who knows, Google

These two - Delicious and Flickr - are what I would call "core" services, used by so many people and so interlinked by other sites that their demise would cause some serious damage. So let me just toss in my two quick cents:

• This does highlight something we have yet to come to grips with: deciding if we should have a way to preserve such "core" services and, if so, how. It's easy to put a list out of alternatives to something like Delicious, but at some point a service has so many users and crosslinks that the reality of wholesale shifting is impractical.
• If there is to be some way to preserve and provide an orderly transition, how do we fund and accomplish this? Delicious, for instance, says it is considering ways to exit from Yahoo and not shut down, but the impression is that this is more of a fire drill than the result of careful planning (more here on the problems).
• This decade will gradually see the erosion of such "free" services. The Web is not free; there are server and bandwidth and other costs. And there probably will always be neat new useful services that will be free out of the starting gate. But at some point past the newness and the optimism and idealism, a business crossroads is reached - can an ad-based model or a freemium model actually support them? I think we will see more services closing or switching to some kind of subscription model. The challenge is how to keep the prices low enough that they are accessible. I'm thinking it has to be in the $5 to $10 a year - yes, a year - range.
• I'm worried that this will just reinforce the paranoia some media managers/companies have about "free" and open-source services. As a result, they cut themselves off from useful innovation. News organizations must be willing to use all forms of software and services that can advance their journalism. The successful manager will be one who can evaluate what services are critical and must be kept on more proprietary platforms the organization can control and what are more flexible and short term and can be experimented with on free and low-cost platforms provided by others. Part of that will be keeping up with alternatives and having plans and strategies for migrating as the Web changes.

If there one thing we should know by now, it's that the Web is a living, morphing thing and that if you cannot deal with its ambiguity, your chances of success are much slimmer.
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UPDATE: Read this post on ReadWriteWeb to get an idea how journalists can use sites such as Delicious to stay ahead of the competition.

Could OneTrueFan help news sites - and some R&D thoughts

Earlier this year, I did an extensive post on how Amy Webb was peering into the future of technology and how it might affect people's online interactions and journalism.

One of her trends was that aspects of gaming were being incorporated into more sites as a form of social media - think of Foursquare and its ability for users to collect location badges and become "mayor" of a location.

But how to do that on a news site? One answer might be OneTrueFan. Here is Tech Crunch's description:

OneTrueFan is a service for web publishers that allows visitors to earn badges for interacting and sharing content on the site. The startup revolves around a game-format for visitors that allows you to see who is reading content in the site, compete for the most engagement and encourages you to share content within the service and on social networks.

But - and here we go again - why haven't publishers gotten together and created something similar, especially something that can be customized locally? For years, publications have been running "Best of" lists and contests (nominate your favorite dry cleaner, restaurant, pet grooming service, etc.) - often with competing lists among publications in a market.

But isn't this really the foundation of social media in a crude, print-oriented way? In other words, the idea was there, but as we've too often seen, the digital execution eluded media managers.

Yes,  OneTrueFan is more about the entire Web, and I'm then projecting the idea onto the local market, ala Foursquare (or maybe OneTrueFan is projecting the Foursquare idea onto the entire Web - whatever). But that's actually my point - the underlying idea is the same, and media companies had the concept within reach and little to nothing to develop it.

We can all trot out the usual reasons - intransigence, lack of vision, print-centricity. And they all play a part. But I also think the fragmentation of publishing plays a role. It makes sustained innovation difficult. I still cling to the idea (however misguided) that publishing still needs a central, industry-funded R&D center, or at least a clearinghouse, that can develop white-label apps that would be easy to adapt, from the largest operation to the smallest.

Ideally, this center, or perhaps a more formalized but decentralized association of research centers, would also solicit ideas and challenges from inside publishing companies (how often have we heard the complaint that good ideas died inside recalcitrant newsrooms) and somehow publicize them to other developers. The ideal would be to avoid the potential stifling of innovation that can come from centralization, but yet:

• Give publishers (and, again, I use the term broadly, from the biggest media company to the smallest hyper-locala site) access to the best of emerging technology.
• Provide a sort of "Good Housekeeping" seal of approval that might overcome some of the skittishness I still find among many journalists and media managers about freeware, shareware, and shared services which is where much of the innovation is occuring.
• Keep it simple so that even the most time- and resource-pressed operation can reasonably hope to adopt useful innovations.
• Provide some focus, if nothing else, to enable decision-makers to have a more centralized and analytical place to understand what is happening specifically in the technology and how it may affect their operations. (Not discounting the efforts already  by Nieman's Media Lab, Media Shift,  Knight Digital Media Center and Media Info Center, among many others)

It would be refreshing to see one of the existing journalism organizations step up and take on this role in a way that embraces inclusion and openness.

Yes, I am being idealistic here. I could spend another 500 words just highlighting all the downsides and operational challenges (not the least of which is the industry's long line of failed cooperative ventures and almost pathological aversion to working together). But for now I just want to throw out the idea.

J-reality bites? (and a cool resource thrown in)

Going around the e-mail, Facebook and Twitter circuits is this Gawker post pointing to an online video, So you want to be a journalist?




It's a cynical dose of reality. I also have mixed emotions. I do get annoyed at those students who seem to think the end all and be all of "journalism" is writing for the N.Y. Times or the Wall Street Journal. That kind of elitism bothers me. Yet - and you can call it shamanism, if you want - there needs to be a certain amount of that idealism, and I don't want to crush it. Idealism is important in most professions - it is what pushes the envelope forward.

So as a colleague pointed out in an e-mail, if you show this to a class of j-students, you probably should also show "All The President's Men" as a reminder that journalism does have purposes other than making money and hanging out in all the cool spots.
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Tech Tool: The dialogue in the video is a bit robotic, but that's because it is created, essentially, by a robotic computer. Translated, actually, into a video from what you write. In watching this, I discovered the Xtranormal site on which it was created. Type in your dialogue, pick a set of characters, and create a video using the text-to-video converter. (And if you know where to look in the embed code, you can download the finished product as an MP4.) I could see using this to create some short visual presentations for class.

Useful Resource - technical glossary

Ever need to know what 1080p vs. 720p really meant? Or 3GPP or M4V? (Don't say no - as journalists these days, we are more likely than even to encounter these tech terms - or have to actually produce in some of them.)

In my wanderings I came across a useful resource, a tech glossary from afterdawn.com. There are some others out there, but this is one of the better ones. Most of the definitions are simplified enough that, even with a few tech-talk spots, you can work your way through them, and the site internally links to lots of other guides.

Tech Tip: Bitly click through stats

Hadn't realized this until I saw it in a comment, but adding a "+" to the end of a bit.ly link gives you the click-through stats on that link.

Check it:
http://bit.ly/hagapx+

Help through the tech thicket for journalists

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

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

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

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