...was gotten by at b2b reporter. This is really worth researching, as Obama had said his mobile-using supporters would get the news of his VP pick first via text message. The message did go out, and the method was widely heralded as "breakthrough," but the media had already go Biden's nom out.
Paul Conley posted his take, with relevant links.
Daniel Libit of Politico on the relationship between blogs, journalists and audience engagement.
"Behold the Commentocracy, where big ideas and rough remarks sit shoulder to shoulder, altogether transforming the nature of the Web and of journalism...Writers and editors have become obsessed with comment tallies (even if many don’t deign to read the comments themselves), which have become a favored, albeit unreliable, barometer for determining editorial success and tapping into the political zeitgeist."
Pardon me for barfing up a whole press release, but as this is a research blog (and not really a reporting site), you can live with it.
Poynter Receives Boost to Transform Journalism Education Through E-Learning
$1.4 million grant from Knight Foundation to NewsU e-learning program adds digital transformation modules and multiple languages
St. Petersburg, Fla. - July 8, 2008 - The Poynter Institute announced today that it will use a $1.4 million, five-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to help transform journalism education by expanding the world's most successful and innovative journalism e-learning site. Launched in 2005 with a prior Knight Foundation grant, NewsU provides interactive, inexpensive courses to journalists at all levels of experience and in all types of media.
The grant will help NewsU expand in four key areas:
. Enhance the skills and digital abilities of journalists,
. Find new ways to teach and inspire journalists as well as those without access to formal journalism training,
. Increase news literacy, and
. Use the Internet to deliver training in innovative and effective ways.
Specifically, NewsU plans to offer new courses to help journalists and others make the transition to a digital world, shift its current content management system to a Web 2.0 platform, deliver course content in multiple languages, and create e-learning modules on news literacy for the general public.
"More than 73,000 participants have enrolled in NewsU courses since its introduction, vastly exceeding initial expectations and making NewsU the top e-learning destination for journalists and others interested in journalism," said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at The Poynter Institute. "We are excited about taking NewsU to the next level and reaching journalists around the world."
"This second Knight grant is a major vote of confidence in the work of our faculty and staff, our partners and our diverse and expansive user base," said Karen Dunlap, president of The Poynter Institute.
"New technology is transforming journalism," said Gary Kebbel, Director of Journalism programs at Knight Foundation. "Journalism education cannot meet the training needs of today's journalist without using that same technology. We hope this grant helps anyone learn to use new platforms to pursue the fair, accurate, contextual search for truth." He added, "Every community in this democracy has a core need for information that creates shared experiences that unite us."
NewsU was launched in 2005 to help journalists understand and adapt to the digital revolution. Through partnerships with more than 25 journalism organizations, the online site has developed and introduced more than 65 interactive learning modules that can be taken anytime and anywhere.
About The Poynter Institute
Founded in 1975 in St. Petersburg, Fla., The Poynter Institute (www.poynter.org) is one of the nation's top schools for professional journalists and media leaders, future journalists and journalism educators. Poynter offers training throughout the year in online and multimedia; reporting, writing and editing; leadership and management; TV and radio; ethics and diversity; visual journalism; and journalism education. Poynter's News University (www.newsu.org) offers training to journalists, journalism students and others through interactive e-learning modules and links to other journalism education and training opportunities.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes journalism excellence worldwide and invests in the vitality of the U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950 the foundation has granted more than $300 million to advance journalism quality and freedom of expression. Knight Foundation focuses on ideas and projects that create transformational change. To learn more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.
Contacts:
News University/The Poynter Institute
Howard Finberg, Director, Interactive Learning
Phone: 1.727.553.4371
E-mail: hfinberg@poynter.org
Marc Fest, Vice President of Communications
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Phone: 1.305.908.2677
Email: fest@knightfoundation.org
Zainab Zakari has penned This article is 1,689 words long for the New York Review of Magazines, reporting on the various theories concerning how long articles should be online. Mentions various studies on attention spans and anecdotal evidence of why 1,000 words is an arbitrary and incorrect benchmark.
"Weisberg chose 1,000 words arbitrarily, but he and Nielsen are echoing the prevailing wisdom that, on the web, shorter is always better. If you don’t keep it short, you’ll lose the reader’s attention—and once a reader is bored, all it takes is one mouse click to kill an article.
Are these assumptions justified? Based on my personal experience, an informal survey of the literature in the field and conversations with various social psychologists and social scientists, I believe they are not."
The Torontoist outlines this story fairly well, with a little blogger editorializing thrown in to get the conversation rolling.
The gist:
-photographer finds man breaking into his house, burglar jumps from window, breaks leg
-photog takes pics of injured burglar below his window, posts them to Flickr
-CP24 covers incident, asks for photos, does not get permission, but runs them anyway without attribution after accessing them on Flickr
It's a fair use issue which is fleshed out nicely in the comments section of the original post.
It's been ages since I filed anything away here. My media research has slowed to a crawl thanks to busy days at work and a desire to NOT stare at computers when I get home.
Here's a great essay by John Hockenberry called You Don't Understand Our Audience: What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC.
Hockenberry is a former Dateline reporter and takes a strip out of television news with a well-written view of its audienceness.
A Simpsons episode comes to mind. Remember when Uncle Herb was complaining that his engineers were telling car buyers what they wanted instead of listening to them? Get the sense that this is what modern news reporting is doing? Instead of reporting, its tailoring information based on demographics.
From David Jones' PR Works blog, a note on a new bill that may get passed providing reporters and some bloggers with some protection from governments wanting access to confidential sources.
CNet has a story on the blogging half of the equation.
Filing this to read later (when I'm not at work).
A “Journey to the Heart of Internet censorship” on eve of party congress.
In partnership with Reporters Without Borders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Chinese Internet expert working in IT industry has produced an exclusive study on the key mechanism of the Chinese official system of online censorship, surveillance and propaganda. The author prefers to remain anonymous..
Found on BoingBoing:
Jasmina Tešanović shares with Boing Boing this essay about her friend Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist in Russia who was murdered last year. Photo of Ms. Politkovskaya courtesy Novaya Gazeta, via Wikipedia.
Who knows how this will be edited and changed over time. I'm posting the current version (August 23, 2007, 2:40 pm) here in this post. The words below are that of the original author, Jasmina Tešanović.
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08-23-2007 | Jasmina Tešanović
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Seventh of October 2006:
Accompanied by a nervous dog named Van Gogh, Anna Politkovskaya returns to her three room flat, on the seventh floor with a single bag of groceries (she will have to return downstairs for the second bag).
Inside the elevator, five gunshots. The killer drops his gun and walks out of the building. A 14 year old, Nina, is the first to see Anna dead on the elevator floor. Nina screams and runs up to the seventh floor on foot. An elderly woman from the eighth floor calls the elevator to her own floor, then calls the police. Then the old woman hurries off to buy her own groceries because all the shops will be closing at 4PM.
Anna Stepanovna Mazepa Politkovskaya ( her ex husbands name), mother of a 28 year old son and a 26 year old daughter... murdered in Moscow.
The long-expected news shocks no one, even as it hurries around the world. Repeated attempts had been made on her life, and success, was only a matter of time.
What did this tiny, unpretentious woman do to merit this? She was a journalist from LG, a magazine founded in 1993 by Mihail Gorbachev, as an attempt at Russian full democracy through truth and openness.
She was always close to death while wandering in the lethal war zones of Chechnia, alone, in the dark, to get the story from the other side...
Once she was kidnapped by the Russian military, who staged her fake execution, much as they had done to Dostoyevski some centuries earlier. The military commented after that they would have preferred an authentic execution...
Arrested, she was kept in a hole of solitary confinement for four days without food, water, light, even buttons, for fear that her buttons might be microphones.
During her attempt to reach Rostov and mediate in the Beslan school terrorist kidnappings, she was poisoned.
Anna wrote about the dirty wars in Chechnia, on terror attacks and the political instrumentalization of terror by the Russian government, of the aftermath of terror, on numerous abuses of civil human rights, of the double crimes inflicted on victims, the crimes of the terrorists and the crimes of the state.
It is incredible how the biggest opposer to Putin and his virile masculine Russian model (just as Yeltsin was before him) should be this minute fragile creature who did not smoke, drink, or enjoy any bursts of adrenalin. And yet only a hit-man could silence her.
She hated the misery and felony of Russian official power, but she despised the Chechnian militant heroism and its historical cult. While reporting on the impotent war-games convulsing the region, she tries to create a new line of understanding, a language for survivors and grieving mothers. The missing red thread of the missing peace. Her motto: I live my life and I write what I see.
She used to say in her low key, matter of fact voice:
Sometimes one has to pay with one's own life for one's own words. She found no swaggering male glamour in being a war correspondent: for her, war was about dirt, stench, confinement, thirst, hunger, hatred, grief.
My texts are written for the future. They bear witness to the new victims of the new Chechnia war.
That is why I write all the facts I can.
Maybe some day, there will be a war tribunal for the many criminal deeds in Chechnia , and Anna's life and death will be a part of that.
What are those tales and facts she is talking about in her work? The letters of a Chechnian father whose son was abducted and killed, to Putin and Kofi Anan. These are the questions of the father:
- who insulted, tortured my son and according to what law?
- what was he guilty of?
- why is there no enquiry about it and no criminal charges?
One mother of a dead Russian soldier refused to bury him (she kept it under her window sill for 15 days) while demanding an official report of his death. Thus the authorities were forced to do it, and other Russian mothers followed her example to find the truth. Breaking the general rule: You have your son's body, shut up, you should be grateful.
Instead of saying: thank you for my dead son, they asked: Why, for what noble cause?
The case of a young Chechnian woman who disappeared preemptively, accused by the Russian authorities as a potential kamikaze. And her mother asking both sides: why? Sometime I think that I am put here in the middle in order to see if I can survive all of them, says the mother, reflecting Anna's own standpoint as a reporter.
The episode at the gala dinner when Kadyrov (the pro-Russian Chechnian who suppressed the rebels) made Chechian girls, winners of a beauty contest, dance and collect money from the floor where the heroes threw it: Kadyrov the peacemaker.
Anna was lonely. Why write books that cannot be published in Russia and are not understood in the West?
Just before she died she said: My life is so hard, but most of time humiliating. At age of 47 I have a sign on my forehead that I am rejected by society, and I don’t have the strength to fight it any more. Not to mention the joys of my work - the poisoning, arrests, threats... phone calls to my editors because of the texts of the crazy woman from Moscow... living this way is terrible. I need more comprehension.. But the most important thing is to be allowed to do my work, to tell what I see...
Anna is not here to see and write anymore: but she belongs to a long history of women' activism, pacifism and the creation of an alternative, invisible history.
Her description of Malika -- the girl who took the lead against the Russian tanks which invaded a Chechen village, killed alone (2002) while nobody from her lot had the courage to follow her cry "You cowards"… a voice like Jean of Arc, like Antigone.
She discusses boldly of the instrumentalization of the female kamikaze bombers and their desperate ideology: take me with you, I too want to avenge myself... the new fake heroines are women manipulated, like a fashion-show with explosive waist-belts. At last, through getting killed 'for her people,' a woman in Chechnia can become a martyr saint -- escaping her historical role as traditional mother, cook, housewife, nurse.
Such true life stories against all constructed patriotism and patriarchal nationalism... that makes Anna an international pacifist thinker.
The whole world is afraid of nuclear proliferation while instead I am afraid of hate: nobody can predict the paths revenge will take. The children from our camps will never forgive the children who grew up in cosy homes. The refugees need understanding and solidarity, not gifts of cash or the hypocrisy of those who fast to "share the suffering" and yet secretly nibble cheese in the closet.
"I live my life and I write what I see:" anywhere on the planet, we can retrace Anna's steps, and we owe her that.
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Quick link: Online contest for improving online local journalism.
http://www.newschallenge.org/main_e.html
An interesting new endeavour that I can't quite get my head around. Webb Alert is a five-minute daily news roundup of Internet/digital matters. Its host, Morgan Webb, is a tech geek goddess worshipped by many for her hosting of X-Play.
I'm not sure how popular it is, but experience with it so far has left me scratching my head. The stories are about a minute long, if not shorter, and summarize stories that can otherwise be found on any tech blog or even in the mainstream media. It's basically a vocalization of links the creators find interesting. They even say so in some of their copy.
Moreover, the broadcast can be embedded on your website. I found it at ArsTechnica.com, where I just finished reading all the stories Webb Alert ran in its broadcast.
There was one "unpaid ad for a blog that I like," during the broadcast, but that was it. If you click on the Advertise With Us link, you get Morgan's bio, which says volumes about where the creators are putting their money in terms of attracting an audience.
What is suspiciously absent from the site is an About Us page. Who's running this operation? Are they billing themselves as a news organization, or an aggregator with a talking head?
I'm looking at this through my media criticism lens (which may be unfair, depending on their intentions), but I find the site wanting. There should be more transparency here, given the precedent set by other of online independent media.
An interesting post from a PR-guy's blog about Google's decision to allow news subjects to comment or respond to news stories about them.
Oh, the possibilities for burned PR folk. Oh the flak that will fly.
Here is Google News Blog's explanation.
Edit, August 8: Here is Ars Technica's post on the subject.
Nate Anderson has a story/post on a new bill that would protect journalists from revealing their sources in the U.S. It may apply to bloggers as well (provided they make money doing their reporting).
Linky to post at Ars Technica.
Utterly fascinating.
"More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989. Citizens who call the Internet their primary news source know slightly less than fans of TV and radio news. Hmmm... maybe a little less Perez Hilton and a little more Jim Lehrer."
The questions asked were:
Who is the vice-president?
Who is your state's governor?
Does the US have a trade deficit or surplus?
Which party controls the House of Representatives?
Is the chief justice of the Supreme Court a liberal, moderate, or conservative?
Click through for data charts... one of which is titled Daily Show viewers are more up on current events than Fox News fans.
BoingBoing amalgamates a bunch of links in this post about a scholarship for programmers who want to train as journalists. The goal, the post says, is to find ways to combine the two fields. Definitely worth following.
WarrenEllis.com pointed me to Universe by Jonathan Harris. It's supposedly a news viewer that navigates topics though a night sky-themed interface.
I tried to use it, but it took forever to load on the Mac at work. Sounds like an interesting idea though.
BostonNOW appears to be a print news product that sources blogs and "citizen journalists" for content.
BoingBoing commentary and reporting. Great quote to find again: "Print versions of blogs - their slogan should be 'Bringing you yesterday's news tomorrow.'"
UPDATE
Just a few notes now that I've had exactly 5 minutes to go back and look at this site.
-stories are not dated on the front page. Datelines are found at the bottom of each story
-there are a few older stories still being ranked as "front page" (French election, for example, under the World heading). This could just be because of the presentation scheme (stories perhaps ranked by readers? most recent comments? I'm not sure).
-I find the headlines and decks confusing and mostly useless (which could just mean I'm not Bostonian)
-There is precious little news evident under the World and Nation headings; in order to find news there, you have to navigate a "most popular tags" interface, so news is not presented, but rather placed so readers have to go looking for it
