Archive for the ‘Journalism’ Category
And sometimes you do a story just for the headline
An 18-year-old Florida woman was only slightly injured when she was shot by her friend’s oven, police said.
Yes. An oven. She was trying to cook waffles and didn’t know her friend was storing ammunition in the oven. So we got to write this totally straightforward headline:
Woman shot by oven while trying to cook waffles
Life on general assignment
In the new world at NBC News, I’m now doing general assignment after many years covering various beats. That yields a certain variety to one’s work week.
At 1 o’clock this morning, I was hunched over a spreadsheet calculating word-frequency counts for President Obama’s State of the Union address. Ten hours later, I was writing this:
One of the busiest interstates in the U.S. remained closed Wednesday, hours after a semi-trailer transporting French vanilla coffee creamer overturned in Phoenix, coating more than 150 feet of the highway with a white slick of delicious-smelling traffic hazard.
You never know what life on GA will bring next.
Grab your coffee mug: French vanilla creamer closes busy Arizona interstate (NBC News)
Sometimes, you do a story just for the picture
(Jody Taylor/Sixty5 Media via NBC San Diego)
Driver stuck in midair after car rams California clinic (NBC News)
Quotation of the year
“I refuse to let my professionalism and my femininity be defined by a piece of fabric.”
— Melissa Medley, Enterprise Florida
Florida answers critics of ‘sexist’ logo: ‘It’s just a cartoon’ (M. Alex Johnson/NBC News)
Shepard Smith apologizes for the wrong thing
Watch the full apology (YouTube via TPM)
After Fox News broadcast a man’s shooting himself in the head near Salome, Ariz., after a hundred-mile car chase Friday, anchor Shepard Smith abjectly apologized to his viewers:
“Sometimes, we see a lot of things that we don’t let get to you, because it’s not time appropriate, it’s insensitive, it’s just wrong. And that was wrong. And that won’t happen again on my watch. And I’m sorry.”
Hats off to Smith for the apology, which was richly merited — but not for the reason he gave.
What Fox viewers should have heard was an apology for the network’s having devoted any time at all to a local police chase involving some random guy whom nobody besides his friends and family have heard of.
#JournalismRules update: ‘exclusive’; ‘scoop’
I’ve updated The Reader’s Guide to Journalists with two new entries. Check it out and pass along your proposed rules.
Can you scientifically quantify social media opinion?
Over at NBCNews.com, we’ve started publishing daily charts tracking what people are saying about the presidential and vice presidential candidates on Twitter and Facebook. Here’s today’s for the weekend (click here for the full-size version):
In my analysis, I write:
In recent weeks, Obama has generally led Romney by two to seven percentage points in national polls, which carefully select their samples to reflect Americans most engaged in the election and registered to vote.
The picture is different among Americans who have gone online to talk about the election, however — NBCPolitics.com’s analysis indicates that that narrower but more diverse sample of the country prefers Romney by 36 percent to 32 percent overall and by 51 percent to 49 percent when they’re compared head to head:
Nope, I haven’t changed jobs, or: Welcome to NBCNews.com
But my employer changed names:
NBC News has acquired full control of msnbc.com and its digital network from Microsoft Corp. and is immediately rebranding the site as NBCNews.com.
Many details of the arrangement remain to be worked out, and financial terms weren’t disclosed.
But NBC News President Steve Capus said the site — one of the news industry’s earliest and most successful online operations — would become part of NBC News Digital, a new division led by Vivian Schiller, the former president and chief executive of National Public Radio. Schiller joined NBC News as chief digital officer last year.
Full story (M. Alex Johnson/NBCNews.com)
‘Alternative story telling’? No — just telling the story
Sometimes reporting, editing and producing a breaking news story can be frustrating, because two new developments land on your doorstep before the last one has made it through the production process.
That’s what happened when a gunman entered a real estate office in Valparaiso, Ind., today and took about 10 hostages. So in parallel with writing msnbc.com’s running main story, which you can read here, I also set up a Storify stream, immediately publishing news, images and local reaction as they came in. By the end of the day, it was a lively, largely unintermediated narrative of the entire drama as it unfolded:
