Posts Tagged ‘journalism’
Perfect
And I don’t mean this cover, from the weekly edition of The Telegraph, is a perfect front page. I mean it perfectly captures the struggle between the frivolous and the serious that we in the media still haven’t resolved.
Mobile journalism in the real world, or: How I work
My Livescribe notes from a recent (non-msnbc) food writing outing. If I tap anywhere in the notes, the pen begins playing the audio from that point.
Originally posted April 15, 2011, and revised Aug. 19, 2011, to reflect upgrades.
When I joined msnbc.com nearly 12 years ago, I made an abrupt transition at age 38 from a very traditional newspaper orientation.
When I worked at The Charlotte Observer, Congressional Quarterly, Knight-Ridder Washington and The Washington Post, I had been using the same tools for almost 20 years:
• The standard reporter’s notebook and pen.
• A landline telephone with an audio pickup to record interviews.
• A handheld audio recorder for field interviews.
• A “portable” (but actually fairly bulky) point-and-shoot camera. Later, that got traded in for an equally bulky portable camera that could shoot as much as 90 seconds of grainy video.
With standard variations for specific assignments (if you were ever a cops reporter, you’ll remember clipping a brick-size beeper to your belt), those were the tools print reporters used for decades.
I recently returned to work after having taken a couple of weeks off, during which I did nothing remotely job-related, and the tools I use now were scattered on my desk where I’d left them. I was struck by how remarkably different they are.
Grammar Day: ‘Correct’ and ‘proper’ aren’t the same thing
In honor of National Grammar Day, I’m republishing this post from 2011:
National Grammar Day (as proclaimed by the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar) started in March 2008, almost exactly two years after Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet on Twitter.
Putting those events in the same sentence isn’t a non sequitur. Grammar isn’t a simple system, but it’s easy to reduce beliefs about “correct” grammar to simple cris de coeur that fit snugly in Twitter’s 140-character limit. The #language hashtag is an active one, and much of the traffic blares its horns at a misspelling or a grammatical offense that has slipped through to publication. I’ve certainly sped along in its fast lane — #language is littered with my own objections and funny-to-me observations.
Debates over grammar are like debates over the existence of God or what region is home to the best barbecue*. We all have firmly held beliefs, and what makes the debates so fun is that all of us are right and all of us are wrong.
Why you should ignore crowd estimates
(Miguel Medina / AFP - Getty Images)
Cross-posted from World Blog. Read this post in context.
Update 1:10 p.m. ET: Al-Jazeera has now cut its estimate in half. Earlier: “up to two million.” Now: “more than a million.”
Wired, meanwhile, offers a way to guesstimate a big crowd.
_____
Estimating crowds is a notoriously inexact science, so much so that the National Park Service stopped doing it for protests in Washington many years ago. That leaves it up to news organizations to make their best guesses.
So it’s no surprise that estimates of the crowd that gathered today in Cairo’s Tahrir Square are very imprecise and wide-ranging:
• Washington Post: “Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands.”
The Twitter Snowball Effect, the Zodiac and NPR
(Commons.Wikimedia.org)
Update, Saturday, Jan. 15, 1:40 p.m. ET: At the bottom, I’ve appended a response from a Minnesota Planetarium Society board member.
Twitter has resounded with the news this week that there’s now a 13th sign of the Zodiac, called Ophiuchus. Regardless how you feel about astrology itself, it’s easy to demonstrate that the “news” is bunkum — a textbook product of what I call the Twitter Snowball Effect.
Tracing the story back, we find that the excitement was sparked Thursday by items in Time.com’s NewsFeed and the Huffington Post, which reported that “astronomers from the Minnesota Planetarium Society” had found that because of the moon’s gravitational pull on Earth, the alignment of the stars was pushed by about a month.
With the Minnesota Planetarium Society as the only attribution, the items printed the new Zodiac, which slotted Ophiuchus into late autumn between Scorpio and Sagittarius (and transformed me from a Cancer into a Gemini).
In fact, the Minnesota Planetarium Society said no such thing.
Cat scratch fever
Jim Davis wants you to know that he really, really — really — regrets yesterday’s “Garfield” strip, which some people thought might be offensive to veterans.
That’s “Garfield” — representative of all that’s safe and bland in the comics world — and “offensive to veterans” in the same sentence.
If that seems unlikely, there’s a reason. It turns out the strip offended nearly no one, veterans included. All it did was create a manufactured mini-controversy based on journalists’ assumptions that it would — substantiating my hypothesis that we’re frequently skipping basic reporting steps in our eagerness to stay up to Web speed.
Reporting: News organizations look at WikiLeaks material with different eyes
WikiLeaks.org tried to coordinate coverage of its highly anticipated release of secret U.S. documents from the war in Iraq by sharing the material with a select group of news organizations weeks in advance, but it couldn’t coordinate what they actually said.
In the end, the shadowy, decentralized organization couldn’t even coordinate the release of its own documents. Al-Jazeera, one of the news organizations that it had given the documents weeks ago, broke WikiLeaks’ embargo by publishing a six-minute video on its website late Friday afternoon. The New York Times, The Guardian of Britain and Le Monde, which also received the material under the embargo, followed swiftly with their extensive prepared reports.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
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The power of user-generated content
This is a good story:
For 20 minutes, Juan Diaz hung out the third-floor window of his burning Willimantic home, waiting to be rescued.
He was losing feeling in his fingers, but he relied on sheer will to stay alive.
Diaz lost everything in the Sunday afternoon fire. According to the American Red Cross, 26 people were displaced from the five-family home on Clark Street.
What makes it a great story is the accompanying user-generated photo submitted by viewer Nicole Cirifalco:
Full story (WVIT-TV of Hartford, Conn.)
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David Carr sure loves to eat
David Carr with a pork bun (Grubstreet Chicago)
If you do, you’ll also get classic example of a David Carr trope: the “Look at me, I’ve got an expense account and get to dine with famous people!” throwaway line.
It comes in the 12th graf today:
Mr. Sorkin acknowledged the odd couple nature of the pairing. “This is not intuitively the perfect marriage of director and material,” Mr. Sorkin said over a dinner at the Sunset Towers here.
That sort of construction pops up a lot in Mr. Carr’s work:
• Christopher Weekes, a writer-director who came all the way from Sydney to show “Bitter and Twisted,” a suburban seriocomedy that is one of the more talked-about features at the festival, said over a lunch of organic chicken and Kobe beef that New York had something all directors crave.
Journalists’ Quick Reference Guide
If you’ve just recently discovered this blog, you might be looking for the Journalists’ Quick Reference Guide. You can find it here.
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Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 