Newspaper Web sites still dominant, but ...

The latest report from The Media Audit says local papers have the leading Web sites in 74 of 81 metro markets this company regularly surveys. And while the company makes much of saying "the picture has changed substantially," the numbers provided are a bit squishy.

The only ones the release provides say that in 2001, 30 dail papers and four TV stations attracted to their sites more than 20 percent of the adults in their immediate market. Today, that's 55 newspapers and seven TV stations, according to Bob Jordan, president of International Demographics Inc., the market research company behind The Media Audit. Do the math, though, and that's 88 percent in both cases for newspapers.

But what has changed, says Jack Sheridan, a spokesman for International Demographics, is "the audience size that television has attracted in addition to the newspapers."

"Television is just not the laggard it was," he said. The good news: So far it's not a zero-sum game. "Nobody has even exhausted potential growth," Sheridan said. "It's still a wide-open game."

The message for journalists to take away, I hope, is that when things are competitive and wide-open, there is a tremendous chance for good journalism to step up and show what is possible and to attract site traffic. This means going beyond shovelware.

To show just how tight it can get, look at my own market, Columbia. According to a report from last June/July, 28.6 of those who logged on visited the Web site of The State, the local paper. Close behind was WIS-TV at 24.6 percent. The latest report says that among adults, The State attracts 22 percent and WIS 21.2 percent.

This isn't surprising. Both sites are good, but neither is overly distinguished. Both are getting better, with more video and more interactive features (though the video quality on WIS, which is a World Now site, continually fails to impress).

Journalist need to take note. What have you done today to make your paper's Web site better and more competitive?

----

Later in the day, Borrell Associates released its latest Web revenue report.

The summary:

Newspaper sites brought in nearly $1.2 billion last year, a 47% increase over 2003. The average share of local online advertising for a newspaper Web site was 18.1%.

TV stations saw their online revenues grow 59%, to $119 million. The average per-station revenue equated to 44 cents per TV household, and the average share of online ad spening was 1.5%.

Radio stations zoomed forward in 2004, nearly doubling their online ad revenue, to $34 million. The average per-station revenue ranged from $8,232 to $73,765, depending on market size. The average per- station share of local online ad spending as less than 1%.

Dear Norm: Further suggestions for AP

Norm Goldstein
AP
New York

Dear Norm:

Congratulations on some sensible changes for the AP Stylebook. Now that AP is into its annual style spring cleaning in preparation for a new edition, I have some other suggestions:

-- Now that U.S. is acceptable as a noun, make clear that U.N. also is. I doubt it is so unknown to great masses of people that there would be any confusion.
-- Also, create an entry that outlines when it is and isn't OK to use a state abbreviation as an adjective. The AP traditionally has spelled out all states in text, except when paired with a town or city. But these days, when writers and editors are looking to scavenge any space they can, more are moving to state abbreviations as nouns and adjectives. One issue: standardizing what article to use with S.C., S.D., etc. where the abbrevation might be mentally read as two letters, the first beginning with a vowel sound. There's little consistency now.
-- Now that you've made fundraising and fundraiser one word, do the same for "under way," "good will," "work force" and others where the "style" increasingly is ignored. It's good you've put a hyphen in "best-seller," but why not just make it one word as in the dictionary? Let the dictionary pick up more of the heavy lifting. The AP could weigh in only when there is a clear dispute, as in mini/minuscule.
-- Give in to common practice and go with al Qaeda. You have great reasons for using al-Qaida, except much of the journalism establishment is ignoring you, including those in the AP, judging from a large chunk of stories coming down the wire.
-- Simplify, Simplify, Simplify, and get the Hydra-headed numerals style under control. That includes reconsidering the need to repeat "percent" after every numeral. Is there any murkiness if you say something will rise 5 to 6 percent as opposed to 5 percent to 6 percent?

Your job, keeping peace among thousands of picky journalists and journalism instructors like us is sometimes thankless. Thanks for the improvements, but let's take a vacuum to the book, not just a broom.

A troubling ruling

David G. Savage of the L.A. Times provides some depth in his report of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision not to review a Pennsylvania ruling that could have established a neutral reporting privilege. In the case, a Pennsylvania newspaper is being sued by a town's mayor and council president after another council member called them "liars," "queers" and "child molesters."

The initial reaction is concern that this is one more restriction on reporting. And what could be more germaine to the public interest than reporting on bizarre behavior by a public figure? But as is usually the case, and once you piece together the backstory from a couple of sources, there are some complications. First, while some comments were made in a meeting, Savage's piece indicates many of the more inflammatory ones were made in a separate interview.

In addition, a lawyer for those suing says there's more to it than just a neutral, faithful report:

Norton's lawyer, Geoffrey R. Johnson, said the paper failed to put Glenn's comments in the proper context.

"The reporter admitted he knew these statements were false. What was withheld from the story is significant information about what this reporter knew about the speaker and some of the speaker's behavior," Johnson said.

We're into some slippery territory here. If this sort of case contributes to the demise of the slap-dash "he said, she said" story that passes for news, good. But how much context is enough is an area that needs further exploration. And the law of least resistance tells us that journalists are less likely to put the extra effort into gathering and presenting proper context than they are to avoid treacherous shoals.

Pulling some disparate threads together -- this case, the Apple case against bloggers where access to information is being treated as a contract matter, previous court rulings distinguishing inactionable opinion from actionable reports of possible fact(see Milkovich v. Lorain Journal) -- it is not beyond the pale to suggest little surprise that media are moving toward punditry. After all, punditry, as long as you are careful to avoid anything that can be interepreted as fact, is theoretically less actionable. If you think about it, this is a lot like the pamphleteers who populated the landscape when the Founding Fathers were framing the First Amendment -- great for stirring a frenzy, but not necessarily so great for actually getting the news.

AP Style: Fundraiser -- ditch the hyphen; Best-seller, add it

Finally!

AP, bowing to what has become common usage, as of today changes its style.

fundraiser, fundraising: One word in all cases.

May the hyphenated form RIP.

(Now, will it address the usually ignored distinction it makes between "good will" and "goodwill"?)
---
Update

In a late-afternoon message, AP also has made best-seller hyphenated in all uses, including the noun. That construction always has seemed more natural to me, although I don't see why AP didn't just to all the way and use "bestseller," the first-listed spelling in Webster's.

Another AP style change - National Guard

Foreign forces now also get the capitalization:

National Guard: Capitalize when referring to U.S. or state-level forces, or foreign forces when that is the formal name: the National Guard, the Guard, the Iowa National Guard, Iowa's National Guard, National Guard troops, the Iraqi National Guard.

Ethics: What, me worry?

From the Alfred E. Newman School of Ethics, we offer this exhibit:

At the same time one of Florida's most visible television reporters brought the news to viewers across the state, he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars on the side from the government agencies he covered. Mike Vasilinda, a 30-year veteran of the Tallahassee press corps, does public relations work and provides film editing services to more than a dozen state agencies.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune tells this sordid tale. But, of course, the reaction from some quarters (think TV) is less than shocking. From Forrest Carr, news director at WFLA-TV, one of the Media General partners in TBO online:

Carr said Vasilinda's business is separate from his news reporting and does not represent a conflict of interest that concerns News Channel 8. The station does not plan to stop airing Vasilinda's stories, Carr said.

``We have discussed this. He assures me he has safeguards in place,'' Carr said. ``He would not allow himself to be in a position where he would allow his journalism to be compromised.''

Carr said most media companies have government contracts, but they are carried out by people who aren't involved in news coverage. Because Vasilinda runs a small business, he is unable to separate the business and news sides of his organization, Carr said.

(Note to self: Investigate the apparent segmentation of ethics by market and business size.)

At the Tampa Tribune, upstairs from WFLA, Executive Editor Janet Weaver's taken a little different stance by promising a full review of the paper's use of Vasilinda's work.

Look, it's impossible to totally separate both sides of your work. To do so would pretty well take cleaving your brain. Or, as the paper quoted Bob Steele, ethics professor at the Poynter Institute:

"Journalists should be guided by a principle of independence, and their primary loyalty should be to the public ....When journalists have loyalties to a government office or government agencies, those competing loyalties can undermine journalistic independence."

Vasilinda sells his stuff to stations throughout Florida (mostly to NBC stations) through the Capital News Service he founded, The Florida News Channel (the one that boosted the use of the "virtual" (read fake) set), and to CNN. As the blurb on Vasilinda's Web site says: Through the years, we've proven that we can meet any challenge, even under the most adverse conditions, and achieve our objectives.

Hmmmm. Just what are those objectives?

But what, me worry?

---

UPDATE:

Vasilinda has posted an extensive defense.

From Romemesko letters:

Forrest Carr of WFLA in several posts, defends Vasilinda (post 1, continued here, post 2)

Eric Deggans of the St. Pete Times says the problem here is transparency -- that "viewers should at least be told when he is reporting a news story associated with an office that also pays his company."

Another commenter, Steward Ugelow, calls the story "a journalistic sand-bagging." Chris Davis of Sarasota responds as does Matthew Doig.

It does occur to me after all this back and forth that newspapers have some vulnerability here -- unless they don't take government legal ads, that is. The argument will be made, as it is in those linked posts, that those ads are different, that they are sold by ad departments squirreled away and that never get involved with the newsroom (except, I know cases where ad staffs were told to let the newsroom know of any interesting legal ads that came in). In that light, Vasilinda's plaint that his ad and news operations are separate sounds just the same.

This Just In!: AP allows U.S. as noun

A spate of style changes from the AP today, the most important of which:

U.S.: The abbreviation is acceptable as a noun or adjective for United States.

That's bowing to increasingly popular usage. Now, I wonder whether it will start allowing state abbreviations to stand as nouns for the states. In these days of ever-compressed news, I'm seeing that more and more.

Some other changes and additions:

Fatah : A secular political party and former guerrilla movement founded by Yasser Arafat that has dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s.

Sears Holding Corp.: A 2005 merger of Kmart and Sears, Roebuck and Co. Based in Hoffman Estates, Ill. (This replaces the old Sears, Roebuck entry. The Kmart entry remains the same, except it now refers back to this.)

Piling on: Another prediction of the death of newspapers

The latest prepared obit comes from Michael S. Malone via the Silicon Insider column on ABCNews.com.

Malone looks at it from his perspective -- a journalist and person deeply infused with the newspaper reading habit who has chucked it.

Some excerpts:

For a long time I rationalized that somehow newspapers would survive, that they still retained some inherent advantage over other media formats — especially the Internet — that would enable them to survive. I used to think it was portability and ease of use — until lightweight laptops and Blackberries came along. Then I thought it was the quality of the images — until I started regularly downloading MPEGs … who needs blurry out-of-register still images bleeding on cheap newsprint when you can watch a Quick-time movie on a 20-inch display?

The last redoubt for the survival of newspaper was, in my mind, accessibility. Hopping from section to section, story lead to story jump, just seemed so much easier than crawling through a long story on a computer screen. Then I saw the first links embedded in blogs. There was simply nothing in the physical world that could ever hope to match the ability to leap through cyberspace from story to story, file to file, with almost infinite extension.

Looking back, it was then that I stopped reading print newspapers.

... [M]y sense is that few newspapers will be able to make the crossing. If they kill their print editions now, they won't have the revenues to make a smooth transition to cyberspace; but if they keep wearing their paper albatrosses, they'll have less of a chance of succeeding in the new world. Thus, if all of the old-fashioned newspapers are going to die, nearly all of the forward-looking ones will too. Before it is all over, the number of "newspapers" left in America will probably be less than 10 — and they might not be individual papers but rather new entities created out of the current large chains. They will become the primary sources of national and international news, delivered into multimedia form.

As for the local papers: they will be shut down, their presses depreciated and scrapped, their offices leased out and the newsroom reporters scattered to the four winds of blogdom and specialty Web sites … where they will provide local news, commentary, movie times and maybe even those long lost Little League box scores.

I'm not as ready to write the obit yet. But I do think it's interesting how, in less than a year, this possiblity has now burst upon the public consciousness. Certainly, we had all debated it for quite a while (it was January 2000, of course, when Daniel Okrent delivered his famous "The Death of Print?" lecture). I just find it fascinating how these things lurk and lurk and suddenly become the cause of the moment. Meanwhile, the industry keeps chugging along.

My question: If print is dead, why are people starting newspapers? Surely they're not all that stupid. I think critics like Malone have confused "the newspaper" with the tradition-bound "newsroom." The ways in which we have always done things are what is dying. The shortcuts newsrooms have relied on -- too few reporters still on the street, over-reliance on press releases, favoring the quick and dirty -- to pump it out and pump up profits are being smoked out. I'm not so sure newspapers are dying as much as are the routines that have infected so many newsrooms, print and broadcast, in the past two decades as a result of presssure from the boardrooms. If by "dying," we mean getting back to the root of what it means to be a journalist -- covering our communities, however defined, as fully and honestly as we can and through whatever medium is appropriate -- that's a good thing.

They're cute tykes, but not cheats, we hope

My local paper recently tried a nice twist of a hed on a story about a Pokemon card tournament:

Diminutive card sharps
battle to see who rules this
little corner of the universe

Oops!

Just managed to suggest those kids are cheaters.

"Cardsharps" -- and, yes, that's the correct form, not two words (although the OED would have us hyphenate it) -- isn't a term you see very often these days, and so its misuse can be understood. To a dictionary (Webster's, M-W, OED), cardsharp means one who cheats at cards.

What the headline writer wanted, I'll bet, was to say the kids are experts at their card game. Most of the dictionaries don't have that entry, but Webster's, the one that goes with the AP stylebook, clearly makes the distinction: Those who are experts at cards are card sharks.

And it fits, because from what the story says, these kids would eat your lunch in a second if you tried to take them on in a "friendly" game of Pokemon.

Planet Journalism

Bit behind on this ...

This month's CSJ column is up on the Web. In honor of the landing on Saturn's moon, Titan, it deals with "Planet Journalism" and the tendency on that planet toward lifeless prose.

And while you're at it, Carl Bialik, WSJ.com's "The Numbers Guy," puts some sanity into the numbers being used in the debate about drilling for oil in Alaska.

Keep the cards and letters coming ...

If you're a teacher, you love these kinds of notes.

It's from a former student who struggled through copy editing. He went on to law school.

Wrote me the other day. Said he had a writing class with a punctuation test. He aced it. As a result, he made law review.

Know what class he credits?

Ka-ching!

Copy edit for Yahoo

Showing again that if you are going to stay alive in this business, you've got to be flexible, Yahoo is now in the market specifically for copy editors. This through J-Jobs:

Job: Yahoo! Inc.

Copy Editor

Location: Sunnyvale or Santa Monica
State: CA
Application deadline: Thursday, March 31, 2005

This is a full-time position.

Yahoo! Inc. is seeking a web-savvy copy editor with at least five years’ experience in online editorial for a full-time position in Sunnyvale, California.


Primary Responsibilities:
Ensure accuracy and consistency of style and voice across the Yahoo! network. Work with a team of writers and editors to promote editorial quality across the network, and meet the needs of a wide range of internal customers. Collaborate with marketers and product managers to manage approval process for outgoing messages. Proofread and edit web pages, newsletters, emails, and other communications. Experience required:
-- Bachelor’s degree required, preferably in English, Communications, or related field
-- At least five years' experience copy editing and writing in the online world
-- Excellent communication skills, both written and oral
-- Able to proofread and edit with meticulous attention to detail as well as an eye for the bigger picture
-- Able to negotiate tactfully and diplomatically
-- Able to respond and edit quickly, efficiently, and accurately
-- Able to manage multiple projects and balance changing priorities to meet deadlines
-- Working knowledge of AP and Chicago style
-- Basic knowledge of HTML How to apply:
Please send resume to edit-openings@yahoo-inc.com

Email: edit-openings@yahoo-inc.com

Yahoo also is looking for a "news editor." One of the duties: Copyediting.

See, it isn't going away in the new world of news. It might have some different functions, but someone still has to make sense of all this stuff. (Now, about that comma after "network" and "emails" without a hyphen ...)

Infinity gets it working

Infinity finally has gotten the kinks out of its online ratio streams so that they work on both Mac and PC. Thanks for that. You still get the Monster ad before the stream.

And then there's this interesting news from WBZ's president, Ted Jordan, via the Boston Globe:

Soon, WBZ will use the technology to offer customized coverage. While the regular WBZ format calls for brief headline-only news, the web version will offer the opportunity to listen in-depth, Jordan says. ''Say you like hearing the piece of a press conference that we carry [on air]," he says. ''People who want to, can stay with the press conference" through a live link to the recording on the WBZ site. ''When we have a political figure on, you may be only be able to get 30 or 40 seconds [on air]. But [online] we can allow listeners to hear the entire interview."

Now, that's using their heads.

Ourmedia.com online, NowPublic - and other sites

After months of promising, the promise has it the Web. J.D. Lasica & Co. have officially turned the lights on at Ourmedia.com.

The stated goal is to provide a central free repository forever for anyone who wants to publish online, from audio and video to your own blog, etc. So far, it's going through the usual growing pains with a fair share of complaints about time-out errors, etc. But I was able to get on without any problems today.

A thought occurs though. While I find the site intriguing and enjoyed clicking around it, it still has a hodgepodge feel -- a music video here, an audio interview with blogger/journalist Ed Cone there, a few member blogs, etc. In other words, a big candy store in which so much can get lost. Or as one blogger plaintively asked: "i'm just curious: is anyone reading this?"

It convinces me even more that:
-- Sites like this have to market just like any brand. Publish it and they will come is nice. And word of mouth in these viral marketing days can do some good. But to realize the full potential, you need to push traffic there, both as consumers and contributors.
-- "The next big thing" is going to have to be software that provides some personal organization to all this to make those disparate connections that lead to the kind of serendipity you get by browsing the shelves at a library. Think Googlezon?

While I was browsing, some serendipity:
-- Undergroundmedia.org: a good site with lots of tutorials on "being" the media -- how to podcast, videocast, blog, etc. A deep site worth several trips.
-- indtv.tv: A San Francisco-based outfit for which Robin Sloan now works trying to bring the idea of citizen media/journalism to video on the net.
-- Access North Georgia: An interesting site run by a radio station operation north of Atlanta (Jacobs Media Corp. in Gainesville, Ga.). It's a pretty rich site and, unlike a lot of the dreck from trad media sites on the Web, seems to be much more than just shovel. You can tell there's some definite thought and care that goes into this. There are a lot of different bylines on here, so I can't imagine those are all station employees (I could be wrong, but given the reality of radio). SoYyou can't immediately tell whether it's "citizen journalism" because it isn't trumpted as such. But doing some quick research I see that in 2003, Jay Jacobs, president of Jacobs Media, said he wanted to concentrate on "publishign the online newspaper." Worth a look for what can be done by trad media to try to take advantage of the net. In future months, I may try to ge over there and talk with the folks at some length.
-- NowPublic.com: A site that tries to take citizen journalism a bit further by giving people not only a way to post, but also to propose "assignments": The site's maifesto:

Technology has broken the corporate news monopoly. Digital cameras, camera phones, blogs, and RSS put the tools of the news trade into the hands of the public, and now real news comes from real people everywhere. Now you can demand coverage of the stories you care about—all you need is nowPublic.

Here public demand launches investigations. Assignments come from people on the ground, insiders, community leaders. Footage comes from eye witnesses, citizen reporters, people close to the real story. It’s open source news, and even in its infancy it’s richer, faster, more powerful than the infotainment it replaces.

We invite you to join this revolution. Take control of the news. Make it deliver information about your community, your interests, your life. It’s time. The news is nowPublic.

This one is most intriguing, proposing, for instance, a place where someone who wants "more" on a story can propose an "assignment" that would go to citizen journalists who are plugged into what is happening and can supply more details, photos, etc. by posting. Likewise, these same CJs could offer up their work (with voting possible to request more). The site is in beta, and I find it a little clunky. So far, the postings are more like a moblog than a full news site that would give me a broad and deep reading on a story or topic. Interesting idea, but not sure about its legs beyond a sort of digital clique.

And that' s the thing that keeps popping into my head. As all these CJ sites come online, I wonder if we're going for a "citizen's journalism" bust -- think the dot-com scene in the late '90s. Don't get me wrong. All these sites are neat, wonderful, great. But are we marketing to ourselves, in many ways? Will "the public" really care? What if "the public," whatever that is, doesn't share the enthusiasm? I wonder if, in a couple of years, we'll be writing about a "shakeout" among all these ventures?

AFP v. Google

Google now reportedly is removing Agence France Presse stories from Google News after AFP sued to block the service from linking to AFP stories and displaying the headlines, leads and photos on the Google site. (Copy of lawsuit- PDF)

Rafat Ali at Paid Content asks: So does this mean AFP can also potentially sue bloggers for blogging an AFP story?


The other thought, of course, is that perhaps we're closer than we think to the prediction in Robin Sloan's Epic 2014 (now updated to 2015) that after Google and Amazon combine, the New York Times feebly tries to enforce copyright, loses and becomes a newsletter for elite readers "and senior citizens."

An old timey newspaper feud with a newfangled twist

Out in Missoula, Mont., the upstart on the block, an internet-based/citizen journalism operation New West Network, has picked a little feud with the local old-line paper, the Missoulian.

Seems the local paper didn't want to take the upstart's help-wanted ad -- nor that of at least one other alternative pub. And, well, things just kind of have degraded from there. Jonathan Weber, New West's co-founder and editor, takes a few hundred words to jab, jab, jab at the Lee paper. One of the best parts is the comment that follows from a reader recalling a decidedly less genteel spat between the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post.

The tabloids are coming, the tabloids - er, make that "compacts"

Knight Ridder Chairman Anthony Ridder tells Katherine Seelye of the New York Times today that two or three of the chain's papers will soon go tabloid. The original thought was to do it in a few small markets with less risk, he says, but now the feeling is that there will be more bang for the buck in large markets.

He won't say which ones, but I'm putting money on Miami as one of them. Can you think of a better tabloid market? And maybe the Detroit Free Press? (The Philly Daily News is already a tab, so KR has some experience.)

But don't call them tabloids anymore. As designer Mario Garcia told the Times:
"Tab smells of down-market, of blood, sex and guts. You want to go to a compact. That makes you think of a small Mercedes, a small Jaguar."

Next, it'll be high tea and port sessions on the copy desk.

(K-R apparently isn't too worried about that image. The Philly D-N front it displays on its corporate Web site is the infamous picture of terrorists in Iraq about to behead a hostage, with the single-word hed: BASTARDS.)

Let's get into a price war ...

I was going to refrain from commenting on the rather stupid idea up in Madison, Wis., where the paper of record is selling access to its editors for only $25,000 for those who become "charter" members of its new Capital Region Business Journal.

I wasn't going to comment because I'm just tired of the seemingly never-ending parade of harebrained schemes from those running media companies who just don't get it. (Their motto: "Ethics is a five-letter word.")

But then Forrest Brown of The (Charlotte) Observer writes this hugely funny letter to Romenesko saying he'll allow someone to experience the copy desk for only $49.95.

Among the day's highlights that Brown proposes for "Bob," his visitor:

* 4:15 p.m. - Bob watches me in silence try to find a shorter word for *Presbyterian* in a 42-point, one-column headline. Designer says headline will lose *pop* if we make it any smaller.
* 4:45 p.m. - Bob watches eight more stories come to rim. ("Why do they call it a rim?" Bob asks. "NOT NOW, Bob!")
* 5:15 p.m. - Bob has to pee. So do I. Bob goes to pee. I stay at my desk.

Well, in the spirit of capitalism, we can't let that go unchallenged. So for just $44.50 you can come watch me teach an 8 a.m. class that often is barely awake, deal with anguished students later in the day and solve a dozen computer problems before noon -- and I'll throw in the special treat of taking one of my copy-editing labs. Who says there are no bargains these days?

(Price does not include taxes and fees. Payment may be made in U.S. dollars, Euros or M&Ms no older than the food in the newspaper refrigerator. Void in Hawaii, Alaska, most of the lower 48 and where prohibited by law. Based on an average of 12 muttered epithets per hour for 48 months; terms may be higher based on credit qualification. All editing as is, where is. Past experience most definitely will not indicate future results.)

Smoking out a study's plusses and minuses

Carl Bialik, "The Numbers Guy" at WSJ.com, has a good column today that looks at all the ins and outs of how the American Legacy Foundation comes up with its number that it is responsible for 300,000 fewer youth smokers. The column is one that should go in reporters' and editors' files because it outlines the major questions that should be asked of a lot of such studies.

Bialik's conclusion: The research is pretty solid, but as with any such studies, there are always some gray areas.

Bialik also has some cautionary words on taking drug-bust figures from law enforcement, and he takes a jab at another of those silly "productivity lost" numbers, this time dealing with the NCAA tournament.

And now it's time for me to go back to watching the games on the office TV ...

How not to do Internet radio

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I welcomed CBS/Infinity's decision to put its all-news stations on the Internet.

Infinity, using Radiomat, has now proved it's got a ways to go to learn about doing Internet radio.

-- First, I could not get the service to work on a Mac, despite what Radiomat/Infinity says. I have the most advanced Windows Media player available for the Mac (9) on a well-equipped e-Mac with up-to-date OSx on a 100mb net. No way could I get it to come up in any browser: IE, Mozilla/Netscape or Safari. (In Netscape and Safari, I can get as far as the sonixtream screen, and then it gives you a 404 error. On the others, you just get a blank screen. I've disabled popup blockers, hit their "click here if you have a popup blocker" link, etc.) I did get it to work on a Wintel with Media Player 7, no less.

-- You get the pleasure of filling out a registration screen that requires e-mail address, etc., so that Monster.com can bug you unless you remember to NOT ONLY check the I don't want e-mail box but UNCHECK the I do want e-mail. (Ever heard of scripts that uncheck one when you check the other?) Of course, the I-want-spam box is helpfully checked originally. And the registration then apparently tracks you with a cookie, because you have to re-register every time you change machines or browsers. I suspect all that info's going into a database, so why not use it if you're going to require registration?

-- After forcing you to register, Infinity then forces you to listen to an ad. OK, guys, here's the skinny. Make it one or the other. For me, I'd prefer just listening to the ad.

-- And every so often, a Monster ad comes up, cutting off the underlying stream. Sometimes it's synched, but somteimes it steps on the station.

I didn't know Infinity had a "user unfriendly" department. But I am enjoying listening to WBBM and KYW.

'Fake' TV news

The use of video news releases (VNRs) has suddenly become horror du jour now that it's been discovered the Bush administration is sending out VNRs that are being used lock stock and barrel by the suckers - er, TV news departments.

The New York Times has now taken notice, prompting an ethics column from Poynter, etc.

Bravo! But wait a minute. Where have all these folks been? Sure, we get the occasional clucking here and there, but TV has been sucking off this teat for years. Hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are notorious for seeding harried local TV health reporters, who often slice up the video, add a local standup or voice-over or, if really industrious, even one of their own interviews, and then present it as a local package without ever identifying the source of the video.

Even the high-minded Consumer Reports does it. I'm not sure one if many of my local TV reporter's segments could survive without those VNRs.

Sure it's slimy. It should be smoked out and exposed.

And after we've done that, we can go after all the press releases barely rewritten and put in your local newspaper without any indication of that ...

Or how about all those "Ask the Expert" sites that papers and TVs have on their Web sites? "Ask the person who paid to be an expert" is more like it. (Check out the lower left on this page, for instance.)

In other words, if we're going to get outraged, let's do it at ALL the sleazy stuff that goes on in newsrooms and taints the really good stuff because there is no transparency. The public is not stupid. Eventually it comes back to bite us in terms of credibility.

AOL clarifies IM privacy policy

After the mini-explosion earlier this week about Instant Messaging privacy and terms of service, AOL has posted new language in its TOS that clarifies when it may use material and when it may not. It also has included a helpful plain-language note to explain what it means. As spokesman Andrew Weinstein said in an e-mail: "same policy, but hopefully much clearer."

A couple of thoughts:

• AOL did a good job in responding to this and in posting the clarifying note. Yes, as the company notes, the TOS was revised a year ago. and yes, this is the same policy. Still. that doesn't mean much these days when perceptions count -- and in this case it was when the perception was discovered (in other words, someone actually probably read the TOS) that counted.
• Read the dang TOS and EULAs when they pop up on your screen. Even better, do a CTRL-A and copy it to notepad and print it out, if there isn't a print button -- although I think every EULA and TOS should have a clearly-marked button PLEASE PRINT THIS. (Just one more user-friendly thing. If the users want to ignore it, so be it.)
• Strike this as another blow for clear wording -- and for editors whose jobs it is to ask the tough questions, think about the way things can be minsterpreted, and put it all in plain language. With the wider reach -- and potential misunderstanding -- of the Web, we clearly need more editors to do such things. AOL may have thought that was worded as clearly as a pane of glass (and maybe it was edited by other than the lawyers; I don't know). But another set of trained eyes often can see the opacity.
  

P Diddy is your competition

If you're in newspapers, your competiton is the reporter across town at the TV station or maybe at the alternative weekly, right. Or maybe the national reporter who parachutes into town on the big story? If you're in TV news, the same thing applies?

Nope. With the growing sophisitcation and power of mobile phones, your competition is P Diddy. Listen to this clip from a speech he gave (it's a little rough). Pay attention to how he talks about how he has "subscribers" for his music, his clothes, etc. (Text of speech, if you prefer.)

Then read this about a new mobile virtual network operator (MVNO as the digiterati like to throw around -- definition) that is going to set up its own mobile broadcast units to stream video direct to the mobile phones of -- you guessed it -- "active youth," the exact same demographic existing media covet.



Thanks to MoCo.news for the pointer.

Owens says let business be business

Howard Owens, whose day job is innovations chief (my shorthand because I like the title) at California's Ventura County Star, writes on his site that Apple should have the ability to find out who is leaking its secret information to the bloggers who are posting it. Nondisclosure agreements are contracts that should be enforced, he says.

There is a certain journalistic hubris that equates the need for open government with full disclosure by private enterprise. The two do not equate. We are the government, and the people have a right to know everything about its government. Businesses are sovereign, even publicly traded companies. They have a right to keep secrets, just as any private individual has a right to keep secrets.

This is where Owens and I part. We wouldn't if, indeed, business were truly sovereign in this county. Oh, for such a refreshing development! The problem is that business and government are inextricably intertwined in America -- and that's even before the move toward privatization afoot across the land. The more business gets into government's pocket and vice versa, the less this argument holds. Now, in Apple's specific case, the intertwining may well be minimal. But the problem is that the judicial system, once a precedent is set, tends to give stare decisis more weight than looking at each case individually. And that is why this concerns me -- the precedent that can be set here could have wide-ranging effects.

(And just a thought: What if that prison medical company that was trying to cover up deaths had a nondisclosure agreement? Would we logically argue the same thing? After all, it's a "sovereign" business.)

State of the News Media '05

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its second State of the Media report. At the equivalent of 600 pages (hey, is there an editor in the house!), I'm not going to try to summarize it here, although USAToday had a good advancer.

The report cites five broad trends:

• Faster, looser and cheaper are increasingly the models of journalism. The report calls this the "journalism of assertion" rather than the "journalism of verification." (Sure to become this year's catch phrase, so let's just put it on the cliche list now and move on.)
  
• People, by and large, have not become partisan in their news consumption.
• Transparency may be the word of the future -- reporters (and editors, I presume) making what they do and how they do it more public.
• Mainstream media are slow to invest in way to expand audience.
• Broadcast network news is at the edge of momentous change.

Here's last year's report, if you want to compare. (That address has now been corrected to an .asp page.)

Some other not-so-bon mots

A few other selected things that really should not have gotten past a desk:

• A paper told me it looked in-depth into legislators' campaign finances. While it may have taken an in-depth look, it looked in depth. The adjective and adverb forms are rarely both hyphenated.
• Later on it told me: Each of the groups donating wanted to get a lawmaker elected or had an agenda they hoped lawmakers would follow. The operative word is each, and it takes a singular pronoun. And why do we need "of the." Ditching that makes it abundantly clear: Each group donating wanted to get a lawmaker elected or had an agenda it hoped lawmakers would follow.
• From the Atlanta story: Sheriff Myron Freeman said he could not speak about the standard procedures for escorting prisoners in the courthouse and could not say what kind of holster had been issued to the deputy, etc. No reporter, or that reporter's editor, should let "could not" go unchallenged. Perhaps he "would not"; that gets to his own free-will decision. Saying he "could not" implies some outside factor or force keeping him from doing it. If so, readers have a right to know. If not, readers have a right to have the correct terms used.
  

On the other hand, while I am no fan of the word "located," often finding it superflously dropped into copy (located at the corner of ... when "at the corner of" would do just nicely, or located 50 miles from -- try simply "50 miles from"), I did come across one of those cases where it was used well:
The city of 50,000 located 60 miles southwest of Atlanta ...
In this case, it keeps those numbers from running into each other.

The and/or abomination

I must have been feeling persnickety today because I just kept finding things in the paper. One of my least favorite is the use of and/or, especially with potential court sentences. It's a bureaucratic abomination usually misused. (Yes, there can be a few uses for it, but they're as rare as a snowball on an August day in South Carolina.)

The paper this morning told us: Anyone else convicted in federal court of possessing the synthetic male hormone can receive up to one year in prison and/or a $1,000 fine.

And that: Illegally selling streoids carries a maximum penalty of five years and/or a $250,000 fine.

And: Prescribing steroids for that purpose is a felony punishable by up to five years and/or fines of $5,000 for the first offense.

Wrong on all counts, your honor. If a person can get a fine and jail, then that is the maximum, and and is the correct word to use. So it would be a maximum penalty of five years and a $250,000 fine for instance.

If you can get one or the other, then use or. ...a felony punishable by up to five years or fines of $5,000 for the first offense.

If you absolutely must specify that a person can get one or the other -- or both (and I'd be throwing the caution flag every time I saw that), then say it that way: a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, fines of $5,000, or both.

Is AOL out to grab your material?

AOL says no, but the discovery of some language in its Terms of Service that's been floating around for about a year has some corners of the blog world abuzz. The terms:

Content You Post

You may only post Content that you created or which the owner of the Content has given you. You may not post or distribute Content that is illegal or that violates these Terms of Service. By posting or submitting Content on any AIM Product, you represent and warrant that (i) you own all the rights to this Content or are authorized to use and distribute this Content on the AIM Product and (ii) this Content does not and will not infringe any copyright or any other third-party right nor violate any applicable law or regulation.

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion has a rebuttal from an AOL spokesman -- and rebuttals to the rebuttal from numerous others. Some of the debate seems to be whether using AIM is "posting" comment to AOL. Amy Gahran at Contentious is urging people to abandon AIM and has a lengthy look at other terms of service agreements as well.

I know one of my former employers uses AIM internally. Wonder how it would feel if it knew?

UPDATE: AOL clarifies its policy and its terms.

NY Times, meet Mr. Period

OK, it's the New York Times and all that, but the lede on this morning's Brian Nichols story out of Atlanta was atrocious. At 48 words, someone needed to introduce the writer and editor to a period. (Yeah, yeah, if the venerable Times wants to run it, fine. It's the Times. But no wire editor should let it into his or her paper that way; you're not the Times.)

To wit (I'm including the first two grafs for a reason):

Atlanta -- A killing spree that terrorized this city ended Saturday morning when a man accused of killing a judge and two other people during a courthouse rampage surrendered peacefully after a SWAT team cornered him in the apartment of a woman he had taken hostage as she arrived home.

As the suspect, Brian Nichols, was being driven from the scene by FBI agents in a black sport utility vehicle, Atlanta residents lined the roads to cheer and gawk.

OK, get your breath back now and try this:

Atlanta -- A killing spree that terrorized this city ended Saturday morning when a man accused of killing a judge and two other people during a courthouse rampage surrendered peacefully.

A SWAT team cornered Brian Nichols in the apartment of a woman he had taken hostage as she arrived home. As Nichols was being driven from the scene by FBI agents in a black sport utility vehicle, Atlanta residents lined the roads to cheer and gawk.

Now isn't that a bit easier?

Congrats to our winners

The nice thing about having a blog and students is that I get to congratulate them when they win contests. So, we break for a commercial announcement. Congratulations to these winners!

Hearst
Kent Babb, first place, sports
Kristin Chandler ninth place, feature

SPJ Mark of Excellence Region 3 (exact places not yet announced)
James Warden, General News Photo
Julia Knetzer, Photo Illustration
Carla Wynn, Online Feature and Online In-Depth
Keita Alston, Online Feature
Eva Pilgrim, TV Spot News (two awards)
Anna Lake, TV General News
Parul Joshi, TV In-Depth
Corey Fulks, TV General News

S.C. Press Association
Tricia Ridgway: first, specialty page layout and design; third, arts and entertainment story
Juia Knetzer: second, feature story
Carla Wynn: second, specialty page layout and design; third, informational graphic
James Warden: second, informational graphic; third, specialty page layout & design
Melissa Ridings: first, informational graphic

Another editing blog entry

Received this e-mail:

We announce with great pleasure the launch of Scriptae Viri Commenticii, a new blog on copyediting, writing, and other topics of a more general nature. Most posts will cover general issues of interest to copy editors and all who work with or simply appreciate language.
Your friendly blogger, Vir Commenticius, draws on his 10 years of experience as a professional editor (copy, production, and acquisition) to craft posts of wit and wisdom that will delight wordsmiths of all stripes.
Read what Vir Commenticius has to say at http://vircommenticius.blogspot.com. Enjoy, comment at will, and pass it on!

Checked it out, and I pass it on for the dissection of a lede on a Michael Jackson story. It's well done and tackles one of my pet peeves, the "then-" misuse.

Sadly, I have no idea who this person is, so I refrain from putting a link in my rail. I just have a problem with blogs that don't tell you who is writing them.



Update: I've received an e-mail identifying the person (a freelance editor) and am satisfied enough that this is now in my rail.

Bloggers: Don't get too big for your britches

The bloggerati have been high on the hog lately, what with the takedowns of Rather and Eason and Gannon -- and all the attention suddenly heaped on the very valid question: "Are bloggers journalists?" (You know my answer -- basically, yes.)

So to sober things up a bit, I point to the latest results from The Gallup Organization, "Blogs Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues":

Three-quarters of the U.S. public uses the Internet at work, school, or home, but only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs (the shortened form of the original "Web logs"). More than half, 56%, have no knowledge of them. Even among Internet users, only 32% are very or somewhat familiar with blogs.
More to the point, fewer than one in six Americans (15%) read blogs regularly (at least a few times a month). Just 12% of Americans read blogs dealing specifically with politics this often. Among Internet users, the numbers are similarly low: 19% and 15%, respectively. (My note: Margin of error +/- 3 percent)

And there is this pungent comment, noting that it was in May 2002 that Andrew Sullivan wrote that blogs would be the next big thing:

Well, it has been almost three years, and, while blogging is certainly wielding some influence in media and political circles, traditional news outlets are still the dominant sources of information for the American public. (Blogging is also so new that the 2003 edition of Microsoft Word thinks it's a typo at this writing.)

Hey, but at least the results are a little better than Pew's survey reported in January that said 62 percent of those questioned didn't know what a blog is, right? Right?

In other words, don't break out the champagne yet, folks. Which is a good thing, because it shows again that a) The public is not a bunch of cats to be herded into "the next big thing" and b) Success more often comes from long attention to craft and accuracy. So will it be, I think, with "blogs." Those that gain currency will be the best of breed as distinguished by their long attention to detail, accuracy and relevance.

One other thing of note about this: As with others, the Gallup survey shows that if you want to reach the coveted younger Internet user, blogs probably have to be in your mix. And as Kevin Drum notes, even if we take the numbers at face value, we're probably talking in the tens of millions of adult Americans who are reading blogs at least occasionally.

Apple ruling proves my prediction

It was barely a week ago that I wrote:

The Apple case is being portrayed as a free-speech case. But I suspect neither Apple nor the judge sees it that way. To them, it is a case of business law and contracts and the like. Business law and free speech (and by extension, journalism) are antithetical -- the former being built on the need for secrecy and control. If journalists stay on the sidelines, they are likely to end up with a series of rulings that mix the two to the detriment of journalism and journalists' future.

The California judge, in ordering today that the bloggers reveal their sources, now has proved my prediction. Quoting the AP story (via Yahoo news):

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg ruled that no one has the right to publish information that could have been provided only by someone breaking the law.
"The rumor and opinion mills may continue to run at full speed," Kleinberg wrote. "What underlies this decision is the publishing of information that at this early stage of the litigation fits squarely within the definition of trade secret.
"The right to keep and maintain proprietary information as such is a right which the California Legislature and courts have long affirmed and which is essential to the future of technology and innovation generally."

So let's see. If we extend that logic that no one has the right to publish information that could be provided only by someone breaking the law, that would put off limits the Pentagon papers, much of the Iran-Contras stuff, all the steroid info coming out of a California grand jury, and about anything having to do with business that is other than pablum, since most of business considers its affairs to be trade secrets (think MCI, Enron, Tyco) ... and on and on.

Journalists should be truly chilled by this. They may well find out they have much more in common with the "pajama brigade" than they think.

Next generation (TV) reporters?

We all saw the satellite phone images from Iraq. Jerky and expensive -- but we all were riveted.

Now, Norwegian state broadcaster NRK has upped the ante a bit for domestic transmissions -- last weekend it broadcast video reports of a ski race from a mobile phone.

The AP reports that NRK outfitted a reporter with a third-generation (3G) mobile phone "and sent him off with 15,000 skiers who started the race. He stopped six times to provide commentary and images from his perspective of the world's oldest, longest and biggest ski race."

But here's what reporters of all kinds (with the move toward convergence, not just TV) need to pay attention to:

NRK said images were as good as those transmitted by satellite telephone from conflict or catastrophe areas but that 3G was cheaper and easier to use.

The broadcaster said it will consider using the technology, especially for fast-breaking news and sports, when there is a reporter or witness at the scene but no camera crew.

The era of the "techno journalist," "backpack journalist," or whatever we want to call it may be growing closer more quickly than we think.
For more on the multiskilled journalist, see this from the Convergence Newsletter, this from OJR, and this counterpoint from OJR (written by Newsplex trainer Martha Stone). (Our point at Newsplex has always been that the concept of a backpack journalist as master of all trades is misguided, but that journalists will also have to be familiar with a much broader array of ways to do their jobs and present their material.)

(See this earlier about a local TV station advertising for a "backpack journalist.")

Begging the question

John Holbo suggests it's time we stop being so pedantic on the use of "begging the question" and give in to the misuse of it as a substitute for raises or poses the question.

His commenters largely disagree. As one notes, "Never surrender." I think this is one case where it's worth holding the line.

Blog analysis from Election '04

There is a research paper out (16 pages, pdf) that tries to analyze how political blogs of the right and left behaved during the presidential election, especially how they interlinked.

The paper is put together by Lada Adamic of HP Labs and Natalie Glance of Intelliseek Applied Research Center.

I haven't read it all, but a couple of things jumped out:

• Liberals were more prolific bloggers
• But conservatives were more likely to interlink among themselves
• Showing the dependence on "mainstream media" however, those interlinks wer far less than the number of links to MSM sites (after all, gotta have some fodder to start fulminating on, right?)

Here's Adamic and Glance's quick summary:
In our study we witnessed a divided blogosphere: liberals and conservatives linking primarily within their separate communities, with far fewer cross-links exchanged between them. This division ex-tended into their discussions, with liberal and conservative blogs focusing on different news articles, topics, and political figures. An interesting pattern that emerged was that conservative bloggers were more likely to link to other blogs: primarily other conservative blogs, but also some liberal ones. But while the conservative blogosphere was more densely linked, we did not detect a greater uniformity in the news and topics discussed by conservatives.

One of the things they say they want to do is further research into "independent" blogs -- few of them showed up in the lists Adamic and Glance used -- to see if they somehow bridge between the right and left.

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly had some further comments.

Media Center Webcast - MP3

The Media Center has posted an MP3 (52mb) of yesterday's The Vanishing Newspaper webcast. It's also posted all the running comments and questions, for what they're worth.

There also are some post-cast comments from Phil Meyer and Stefan Dill.

RSS Romenesko

Jim Romenesko, that mandatory daily stop of every media junkie, now has an RSS feed.

This hed's worth more than a dime

Having just gone on about problem heds, let me then share this gem of a hed from The (Columbia) State. What's even more delightful is that it was on a brief -- too often the graveyard of heds.

The story is how an 1894 dime sold for $1,322,500 at auction:

Old dime worth
13,225,000 new ones

The trouble with synesis

I've written before about synesis, that grammar principle that allows a seeming mismatch in things like subject-verb or noun-pronoun agreement when the strict rules of grammar conflict with the notion we are trying to get across.

But in my paper today is a good example of why we should go here cautiously. In the same story, within a few grafs:

Once Town Hall figured out that tank height was the source of the problem, they tried several fixes, all unsuccessful.

Four grafs later:

State aid is paying three-fourths of the bill, and Town Hall chipped in $50,000 from its annual $410,000 budget.

So is "Town Hall" an it or a they? Moral: Once you've chosen one form, you're stuck.

Better to use "the town" in one of the two sentences (so that we also avoid the overuse of metonymy):
Once the town figured out that tank height was the source of the problem, it tried several fixes, all unsuccessful.
Or
State aid is paying three-fourths of the bill, and the town chipped in $50,000 from its annual $410,000 budget.

Troublesome ledes

Here's another example of why today's pressed-for-time readers won't wade through the way we've always done things, such as this lede and second graf on an L.A. Times story (augmented slightly by the local paper here):

Greenville native Charles Townes, the co-inventor of the laser who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1964 and then startled the scientific world by suggesting religion and science were converging, was awarded the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for progress in spiritual knowledge Wednesday.
The prize -- the proceeds of which Townes plans to largely donate to religious and academic institutions, including his alma mater, Furman University -- recognized groundbreaking and controversial leadership in the mid-1960s in bridging science and religion.

That lede is a 44-word behemoth, followed by a 35-word second graf that makes us wend our way through clause and phrase before getting to the point. And do you say "the proceeds of which"?

Try pruning a bit:
Greenville native and Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes, who startled the scientific world by suggesting religion and science were converging, was awarded the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for progress in spiritual knowledge Wednesday. That gets us down to 33 words. Do we need the passive form "was awarded"? I left it to point out that it depends on your judgment: Using "won" might imply that he somehow competed. But we use "won" for the Nobel, so why not here? And is the day of the week really important here? It produces that awkward construction momentarly suggesting the spiritual knowledge was on Wednsday. So let's rework just a bit more, and work on the second graf at the same time. We also need a place for that information about the laser and physics, and the third graf provides it.

Greenville native and Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes, who startled the scientific world by suggesting religion and science were converging, has won the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for progress in spiritual knowledge.
The prize, awarded Wednesday, recognized groundbreaking and controversial leadership in the mid-1960s in bridging science and religion. Townes plans to donate most of the money to religious and academic institutions, including his alma mater, Furman University.
Townes, the co-inventor of the laser, shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1964. [After winning the Templeton Prize, he] said no greater question faced humankind than discovering the purpose and meaning of life -- and why there is something rather than nothing in the cosmos.

Now, before you jump on me for those square brackets -- and if you've read much here you know I hate them -- that's just a note to check when he said that. Otherwise, it might be confused that he said it back in the 1960s.

But now I think we have a much more accessible story, one that does not require the reader to pull on the waders first.

Writing Coach John Rains also has a good post about ledes on his blog.

Nouns v. Adjectives

Another example today of the poor use of nouns as descriptors when the adjective (or even possessive) form is better. A headline from my local paper:

China
textiles
flood
U.S.

Chinese would be the best word to use, but given the tight count, why not try China's. That's a 6 1/2. Textiles is 6 and about fills the line. But for the sake of better usage, I bet the paper could have squeezed a half space in.

Update: And, now, this afternoon, is this hed on that paper's Web site:
Spain Muslims issue fatwa against bin Laden

It's on the Web, so there's no tight-count argument here. It's Spanish Muslims.

Carroll: Heck yes, defend bloggers

Thank you Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle for putting it well and succinctly:

Bloggers are just columnists without newspapers. Some bloggers, like Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, are more like reporters with newspapers. The idea that there should be a different legal standard for them is ludicrous. This is all free speech, and this is all journalism. There are fewer newspapers, but there are more blogs. There is a net gain in information. This is a good thing.

Finally - OJR gives good print

Finally. I've carped here before about how Online Journalism Review, an otherwise excellent site, sullied its reputation by a) not having a decent RSS feed and b) not having a print-friendly version that gave you the link when you printed it. The RSS was solved recently, and now OJR finally has a decent printing setup.

I've got to think that Robert Niles' appointment as OJR's editor last summer has hastened the changes for the better. After all, he's long had one of the best, but too often little-noticed, journalism resource sites on the Web.

Let's hope this one stays in Las Vegas

From that "anything goes" capital of the world comes word that a local TV station has hired a sitting state legislator to be a consultant on legislative issues -- at $3,000 a month.

Of course, none of the TV types involved see anything the least bit wrong with that. But Poynter's Al Tompkins puts it nice and simply for them: "Generally it is the role of the media to cover legislators, not employ them," he said. "Obviously when you're covering somebody and you're employing them, that would be an issue."

Maybe that's still too complicated for them to understand?

What next? Cheney on retainer for Fox?

More on bloggers as journalists

Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor, has an interesting take on this -- the idea that a "functional test" might be used to determine when one functions as a journalist. Balkin also notes some of the hazards of this.

NY Times story from Sunday with a broad look at the issues.

AP close to launch

It was almost a year ago that I wrote that:

When the AP’s Tom Curley talks these days, it pays to listen, because if the AP can pull off what he hopes, it’s not going to be a question of if we do – or teach – multimedia journalism. It’s going to be how and when.

According to the latest dispatch from Curley's missionary work to press association meetings around the country, that time is almost here.

The Daily Press of Newport News, Va., reports on Curley's talk this past Friday to the Virginina Press Association. Curley told the group that this summer AP will be ready to launch a Web-based system of presenting stories and all their multimedia components -- much different than the line-by-line display of wire stories most editors now see on their computer screens.

Curley's calling it "newsbase." According to the Daily Press:

Instead of offering news in its traditional list format, he said, the nonprofit cooperative would start searchable Web-based databases that would tell subscribers whether stories are available, along with video, audio, graphics and photos.

The "newsbase" system is designed to make news easier to search, track and use in broadcast, print and online formats, Curley said. Icons will appear on Web pages showing what media forms are available for the AP's stories.

Curley notes the usual newsroom cultural problems, in this case that photo editors thought news editors would get too much control over the selection of photos.

A year ago, I wrote: The AP is the behind-the-scenes, 800-pound gorilla when it comes to forcing the news industry into change.

Here's Curley's take on it a year later via the Daily Press:

Newspapers will have to take advantage of it, Curley said.

"We will set these things up," he said. "And you brand it. You run with it."

'Nuff said?

Another language blog - closer to home

In the North Carolina Triad, Angie Burgin Kratzer has started her blog Word Sang about "language, its development, uses and misuses." She's a teacher, freelancer and owner of WordServices in Greensboro.

And to top it off

Video from "Comedy Central's sendup of the "new" journalism from Crooks and Liars.

Who is a journalist? - still more

As each day passes, it does appear the Internet is going to force us to finally confront that question: Who (or what) is a journalist?

Having just posted on the Apple v. bloggers case, I continued catching up on my reading and came across yet more evidence, this time from Cnet, in this story about the Federal Election Commission and blogging provocatively titled "The coming crackdown on blogging."

The distilled version: The McCain-Feingold Act cracks down on cases where a campaign coordinates advertising and other communications with a third party. It's effectively an unreported campaign contribution. But what to do about all these passionate folks online who favor one candidate or another? Or those who simply look from afar and comment on the entire state of politics from their blogs or Internet sites? The FEC, 4-2, had approved an "Internet exemption." But as such things go, the matter went to court and a federal judge told the FEC to scrap that and figure out a way to regulate the Internet.

In the interview with C-net's Declan McCullagh, Bradley Smith, one of the six FEC commissioners, has these observations:

What happens next?
It's going to be a battle, and if nobody in Congress is willing to stand up and say, "Keep your hands off of this, and we'll change the statute to make it clear," then I think grassroots Internet activity is in danger. The impact would affect e-mail lists, especially if there's any sense that they're done in coordination with the campaign. If I forward something from the campaign to my personal list of several hundred people, which is a great grassroots activity, that's what we're talking about having to look at.

Senators McCain and Feingold have argued that we have to regulate the Internet, that we have to regulate e-mail. They sued us in court over this and they won.

If Congress doesn't change the law, what kind of activities will the FEC have to target?
We're talking about any decision by an individual to put a link (to a political candidate) on their home page, set up a blog, send out mass e-mails, any kind of activity that can be done on the Internet.

Again, blogging could also get us into issues about online journals and non-online journals. Why should CNET get an exemption but not an informal blog? Why should Salon or Slate get an exemption? Should Nytimes.com and Opinionjournal.com get an exemption but not online sites, just because the newspapers have a print edition as well?

Why wouldn't the news exemption cover bloggers and online media?
Because the statute refers to periodicals or broadcast, and it's not clear the Internet is either of those. Second, because there's no standard for being a blogger, anyone can claim to be one, and we're back to the deregulated Internet that the judge objected to. Also I think some of my colleagues on the commission would be uncomfortable with that kind of blanket exemption.

So if you're using text that the campaign sends you, and you're reproducing it on your blog or forwarding it to a mailing list, you could be in trouble?
Yes. In fact, the regulations are very specific that reproducing a campaign's material is a reproduction for purpose of triggering the law. That'll count as an expenditure that counts against campaign finance law.

It's tempting to say that C-net has a dog in this hunt as an online-only publication, and maybe Smith's overstating. But come on, Smith is one of the six who will have to make this decision -- essentially who is a journalist -- and so we'd better listen.

How to avoid introducing errors

A good thread at Visual Editors.com discusses how to avoid introducing errors into the paper.

Thanks to A Capital Idea for the pointer.

The Facebook as reportorial tool

The Facebook was all the rage in journalism circles at the end of last year. In brief, it's a site, segregated by school, that lets you log on and network (if they also are members) with classmates, alumni, and (shudder) staff and faculty.

It's all the rage in the Carolina Reporter newsroom where I spend part of my days.

It's also, it turns out, a decent reporting tool. The other day, we had one of those names in a story that was made up of two "first" names, raising the question of whether we had it in the right order -- you know, the "Is it Patrick John or John Patrick?" (not the real name)

Of course, it wasn't in the university directory, as out of date as that can be sometimes. So one of our enterprising students logged on to her Facebook account and there our person was, picture, profile and all (we did get it right the first time, by the way).

The Facebook is supposed to segregate by college because the logon is based on a college e-mail address. But with so many people taking part-time classes and so many schools now having alumni e-mail, you might stand a chance of coming across someone at a school you need who would let you "borrow" a logon. But every newsroom probably ought to find the graduates on its staff from local schools and arrange to create logons. Especially in these days of federal education privacy laws, this might be the first way you get a lead on someone for a story.

The Washington Post reported in December that 1 million students in 300 schools use the Facebook.

Friendster - blogs

If there is any doubt about the ubiquity of blogging, Friendster says it will give all its members Typepad blogs.

Now comes the next business model -- a sanitation service to clean up all the blog detritus that's being created (grin).

Apple v. bloggers - Who is a journalist?

Took a day off to attend the South Carolina Press Association convention, and so come back to the news that Apple has won the first round in its attempt to force bloggers to disclose who is leaking material to them about the company. The California judge's ruling is only preliminary and says that bloggers should not have the same First Amendment protection as journalists -- which once again raises the question, "Who is a journalist?"

Forbes goes so far as to ask, "Is Apple the new Microsoft?"

And some bloggers are talking about a boycott of Apple.

Juris Pundit has a wider list of some of the stories and comments.

So much has been written, I won't attempt to duplicate it further. But two thoughts here:

• Some current journalists will take comfort in this, that the "pajama brigade" has been put in its place. They shouldn't. The structure of journalism is changing to the point where I now tell my students that they should expect to spend at least parts of their careers "independently employed" (a nice way of saying freelance). Media organizations are at heart businesses, and as they adopt the practices used in other industries, they are discovering there is no longer a moral or economic imperative to have large staffs. Certainly, large organizations have used freelancers for decades, but in all but the smallest shoestring operations, and especially in newspapers, there was a sense that for you to "own" the responsiblility of what was on your pages you needed to "own" your staff, or at least a significant portion of it. In recent conversations, however, I find more journalism exectives at least willing to explore the idea of hiring people only on a project basis, or using skeleton staff augmented with temps as newsflow dictates. Those freelancers might well find themselves caught in whatever is the final outcome of the Apple case -- if a blogger writing news about a company gathered from a confidential source does not have protection, does a freelancer doing the same thing have any? Ultimately, could a freelancer working for himself or herself between traditional employment be defined as not being a journalist?
  
• The Apple case is being portrayed as a free-speech case. But I suspect neither Apple nor the judge sees it that way. To them, it is a case of business law and contracts and the like. Business law and free speech (and by extension, journalism) are antithetical -- the former being built on the need for secrecy and control. If journalists stay on the sidelines, they are likely to end up with a series of rulings that mix the two to the detriment of journalism and journalists' future. It has happened before and rarely to the benefit of making information more widely available to the public. Business and government in America have always been inseparable, and restricting information on one will eventually, I predict, restrict information on the other.
  

FOI Tips

A newsletter in today from the Society of Professional Journalists has some interesting research information on freedom of information.

Based on research commissioned by Open The Government (of which SPJ is a partner), here are some of the findings, as quoted from the SPJ newsletter:

• Bashing President Bush doesn't work. Bashing faceless bureaucrats who hide information does.
• People said they are most afraid of terrorists. One-third of respondents said it doesn't matter what the government does or doesn't do because their religious faith would keep them safe.
• Respondents said the media are too liberal and out of step with mainstream views. They fault their local newspapers for not doing enough investigative reporting.
• Respondents said national security means their children are safe. They are more concerned about local threats than international ones.
• Respondents don't care about government information when it involves threats they can do nothing about. But they want the right to know if they can make a decision to control their surroundings.

This is useful stuff for journalists looking to make the case for more open government -- and needing to know how to make it.

You give us 22 minutes -- We'll give you the internet

OK, that's a play on the old Group W all-news radio slogan "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world."

But as an alumnus of Philadelphia's KYW, it gladdened my heart today to read that CBS, the eventual successor to the old Group W, is going to put streams from 11 of its all-news stations on the Net. Smart move, in my opinion -- and a challenge for newspaper sites. Now, if I want Philly news, why not just click up KYW -- instead of going to the Inquirer's Web site? (Or if I want to listen to my old friend Bob Roberts, just click up WBBM.)

Rebutting the use of 'refute'

Over at The Language Guy, Mike Geis has a nice post about using "refute" for "rebut."

(And he gets an extra tip o' the hat for his Ohio State connections, an institution that let its guard down once and granted me a master's.)

The (journalistic) power of the network

There is an interesting discussion on Poynter's Online News discussion list that is worth every journalist's time to think about.

In a nutshell: The power of the blogging world in journalism may well be that it can bring to bear on a topic far more resources, incrementally, than can any single news organization (see the reflections of Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell on this in regard to the Jeff Gannon story).

Stephen Downes of Canada's National Research Council argues that under current models, however, the blogging network is just as susceptible to abuse as, in many respects, are current media. Particularly, he rails against the long tail, the contention that value in the future will come not from the mass but from aggregating millions of niches created by the interlinking of the network -- a concept that has become the darling of the digitorati lately. Downes contends (and I clearly am simplifying here) the power curve that characterizes the long tail is susceptible because a disproportionate area under that curve still is occupied by a relatively few sources. They occupy that position, he says, because they were there first and are relatively easy to link to, following the dictum of the net that linking is all. (Downes' post on his Stephen's Web should be read several times -- then put down and picked up every six months and read again for the power of the concepts and arguments he attempts to corral.)

Downes advocates for development of tools to replace the current hierarchical network structure with one that enables us to find information (define that term as you like) based on context built from markers that signify the way that information has been used by others -- in other words a truly distributed network. The critical distinction: While the long tail model still has its roots in aggregators that can reach into that tail and effectively associate those microlinks, "distributed journalism" (as Dan Gillmor has coined the term) would not under Downes' model rely on aggregation to discover semantically related material.

But, says Beau Dure, in a world (of blogs) where "the signal-to-noise ratio ... is staggeringly low," it's even more important for traditional media to step up the gatekeeping role. (Read his earlier master's thesis here.) The organization that does so, and that learns to integrate citizen journalism into its offerings, will be ahead in credibility, he says.

As is often the case in such situations, all of these views has probably got part of it right. Dure's probably is a better model of the current world where technological limitations make it unlikely most people would spend the time and effort to review thousands of information sources multiple times a day. The "traditional media" have a role in this world to sort and filter and probably do some production of journalism as an enhancement.

"Traditional media" have always been aggregators, not just of eyeballs, but of news as well. PR releases, police scanner broadcasts, tips whispered in reporters' ears -- all went into the maw to be spit out in a "product." It seems likely that, if those outlets acknowledge aggregation as their business (with journalism as a nice little sideline of that), they will find ways to shift their business model to encompass bloggers or whatever else comes along, and probably co-opt their share of these "new" journalists in the process.

While some segments wring their hands at the dilution and I suspect in some cases, disappearance, of the traditional reporter-editor production model ( Jakob Nielsen, for instance, has suggested that in the new scheme, editors could become more paramount than reporters) , Dure's suggestion is probably closer to the short-range truth: more distributed reporting, aggregated presentation. How much of that becomes mechanical versus human controlled remains to be seen. (Moral: If I were a reporter, I'd be concerned about bloggers; if I were an editor, I'd be concerned about Google, RSS and their successors.) One of the key flash points here will be Downes' argument that things shift to "pay to produce" -- that with distributed production, the producers at the end of the long tail put more value on being linked to and noticed than on receiving recompense for their work. (Clay Shirky has looked at this "fame vs. fortune" argument in the context of micropayments.)

Ultimately, if Downes' vision is achieved, the need for the aggregator diminishes sharply. Theoretically, we would be able to build a semantic network of sources and stories that would not depend on aggregation or on a hierarchy of A-list blogs. The question: Would we do it? Would we want to invest the time to be our own aggregators? The answer again is probably yes, and no. There are days, for instance -- or even hours of the day -- that I want a "quick read." At those times, there is value in aggregation (and with it the commission of "traditional journalism" to help me as a consumer make sense out of it). But there will also be times, such as now, when it will be enticing to wander about and discover seemingly random threads that when woven make a coherent tapestry. Downes' vision would make that more achievable.

More Mean Streets

More mean streets for TV reporters.
Today's Morning Meeting column by Al Tompkins of Poynter has a list of some recent manhandling of TV reporters.

From Denver, controversial professor Ward Churchill gets angry at being questioned about a drawing. (Note to Channel 4 - get a better media viewer. That one has problems.)

From Louisville, a company exec get's po'd at a WAVE reporter (Note to WAVE: Why can't I find a video link?)

In Memphis, a state senator gets annoyed at being asked about ethics.

And not listed by Al, but one incident that got a lot of attention recently, was when Steve Wilson of WXYZ in Detroit got roughed up by one of the mayor's bodyguards. (Note to WXYZ: why no video on this link?)

But why are we surprised? In this case, the video camera is becoming more ubiquitous, but at the same time while we want it cheap and available, we somehow expect that it won't be shoved in our faces. Combine that with a culture more willing to see violence as an answer (see, e.g., Pacers/Detroit or South Carolina/Clemson), and we can expect more such cases. Besides, it makes good TV, right? Otherwise, why would these stations breathlessly flog it.

Looking at these also convinces me we have a long way to go in effectively using video on the Web. The Denver and Memphis video is poor and choppy (Denver's using an embedded player that doesn't even work right on Netscape, forcing me to use IE, and while Memphis uses Windows Media Player, it's not very good), and as noted for Louisville and Detroit, I can't easily find a video link.

Compare to Feedroom, for instance.

If 2005 is to be the year of video on the Web, as some have predicted, the quality of these local feeds (and I'm on the university's super-high-speed line) isn't very good.