Journalism as a Conversation

thenewrepublic: Hipster Abe Lincoln When the New York Times...

Sat, 19 May 2012 12:10:15 -0700

Hipster Abe Lincoln

When the New York Times reported that a Mitt Romney-affiliated Super PAC was considering attacking President Obama for falsely crafting the persona of a “black, metrosexual Abe Lincoln,” the obvious way to respond was with revulsion. The other way, however, was with delight. Insidious purposes no doubt motivated its creation, but the phrase “metrosexual Abe Lincoln” offers an anachronistic juxtaposition that’s very much worth contemplating. (“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth skinny jeans…”) Indeed, with so many other presidents to choose from, why stop at Lincoln? “

Happy Saturday

Journalism magnet school ... for first-graders

Fri, 18 May 2012 10:27:00 -0700

I’m so in love with this concept I could die. Why shouldn’t we start teaching journalism in first grade? It’s the linchpin of our democracy.

Disco Queen Donna Summer, 63, dead from cancer

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:20:02 -0700

Disco Queen Donna Summer, 63, dead from cancer

“For All We Know” — Mom

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:19:58 -0700

“For All We Know” — Mom

Mom

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:19:45 -0700

Mom

Two 20-something journalists bring down corrupt sheriff—as...

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:22:32 -0700

Two 20-something journalists bring down corrupt sheriff—as it should be.

Part of my youth has died. RIP, Adam.

Fri, 04 May 2012 10:47:00 -0700

Part of my youth has died. RIP, Adam.

Dear "Media in the World" students ...

Tue, 01 May 2012 16:40:00 -0700

This email I just sent to students might be one for the record books:

***

Hello media critics: Attached is the order of presentations for your final projects. Feel free to swap with someone, but make sure you let me know.

On an unrelated note, in yesterday’s talk about “parental advisory” labels on CDs, I mentioned Tipper Gore lobbied Congress for such labels after she overheard her (11-year-old) daughter listening to “Me So Horny.” That’s incorrect. The song the girl was listening to was Prince’s “Darling Nikki.” 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty As They Want To Be” album, which included “Me So Horny,” was among the first CDs to receive the label, though.

Point of clarifaction. See you Wednesday.

Doreen.

Sherry Turkle: The Flight from Conversation

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:58:00 -0700

Sherry Turkle: The Flight from Conversation:

I first encountered Turkle’s research on mediated communication while developing a readings list for my doctoral dissertation on journalism as a conversation. I’ve had a mad crush on her ever since. She’s a rare qualitative scholar in an ocean of quantoids at MIT, a challenge in itself. She’s also one of the first scholars/psychologists to study the Internet’s impact on human relations — and it ain’t purty.

I think it’s fair to say she’s grown increasingly concerned about our use of social media and text-messaging as a substitute for real conversation. I’m with her on that. While I consider myself a champion of mediated communication, it’s hardly a substitute for the real thing. And yet as she eloquently explains in this NYT guest editorial, we are substituting at an accelerating rate, from boardrooms to classrooms, fooling ourselves all the while.

Partly in response, I put conversation and discussion at the heart of every course I teach, at least when my students and I are in the classroom. I also forbid the use of electronic devices during those discussions, unless otherwise instructed. I confide to them I’d be the first to pull out my phone to check for messages if I didn’t, and that’s no lie. Usually, but not always, I get faint smiles of understanding from them. And, for now, that’s good enough for me.

Charles Colson, Watergate Felon Turned Evangelist, Dies

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 19:57:13 -0700

Charles Colson, Watergate Felon Turned Evangelist, Dies:

Oh my god.

The Woman Who Brought Down Sandusky

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:55:45 -0700

The Woman Who Brought Down Sandusky :

I got so much love for this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, announced Monday. Not only did my peeps at The Seattle Times win for an investigation into abusive methadone prescriptions, but a young reporter who preceded my time at the paper years ago, Eli Sanders, picked up a prize for his harrowing account of a murder-rape published in Seattle’s alternative paper, The Stranger.

And then there’s 24-year-old Sara Ganim of the little known Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. This bulldog broke the Sandusky story at Penn State and then pounded at it relentlessly, all while the big boys at ESPN looked on. I like her style. She reportedly wakens at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. to get working and sleeps with a police scanner at her side. Cops reporters in newsrooms get no respect. And yet many of the biggest stories of our times originate on the cops beat, among them Watergate.

Hats off to those go-to, sleepless workhorses of newsrooms. I’ll take one of them over 10 traditional beat reporters any day.

saragregory: ProPublica T-shirts! (via SelflessTee -...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:12:30 -0700

saragregory:

ProPublica T-shirts! (via SelflessTee - ProPublica)

Bad ass …

The Delicate Art of Anonymity in the News

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:51:00 -0700

Quoting anonymous sources in the news these days is about as verboten as telling your waning audiences to bug off, as the student reporters at the college where I teach might attest. In some ways, they’re synonymous.

For decades, lazy journalists routinely attributed controversial material in stories to anonymous sources — until readers and media critics lashed out. By the time I got to college, the practice was so out of favor that I hardly imagined its use. My teachers preached the rigors of fact-based reportage and deep sourcing that comes from humping a beat. And if a source wouldn’t go on record with vital information, backdoor it with a comparable source or leave it alone — it’s not worth losing your credibility with audiences if the source turns out wrong.

Then I got in the news business, and shit got real. I began to understand the nuances of sourcing a story, including the crucial need for anonymous sources in key circumstances. The so-called “whistleblower,” for instance, potentially puts his or her job and/or life at risk by exposing corporate or governmental corruption and may deserve anonymity. We see examples in the movies all the time now, including “The Insider,” an account of Jeffrey Wigand’s heroic take-down of Big Tobacco as a named news source, no less.

In my own work as a crime reporter in Tacoma, the challenge often came with witnesses to unsolved killings. They’d tell me things I knew could put their lives at risk if the killer found them. Because these ordinary citizens weren’t exactly press savvy, they rarely thought to ask for anonymity. So I’d offer it. And if the source protested, I might still balk. Particularly as an editor years later, I learned how to balance the value of juicy information with ethics, keeping the journalistic principle of “minimize harm” in mind.

So when The Mooring Mast at Pacific Lutheran University where I teach found itself in a sourcing kerfuffle, I was intrigued. In a story about student theft from the cafeteria and adjacent market-kiosk, the paper quoted a student by name who admitted to theft, even after the paper reportedly offered her anonymity. The university initiated a misconduct investigation, and now the newspaper is pledging to pay any fines she might incur as a result.

A hard case for journalists, with no easy answers. With the benefit of nearly 20 years of experience and countless mistakes behind me, I might have insisted this woman deserved anonymity to protect her from punishment. Her reasons for sometimes taking food out of the cafeteria to consume later — she’s on a pre-paid meal plan and doesn’t always eat the allotted amount — may well resonate with readers. That perspective alone is important to the story, not necessarily who said it.

Regardless, the key is transparently explaining to readers in the story why you did or did not offer anonymity. I learned that in bundles at The Seattle Times, where the question of offering anonymity prompts the highest level of discussions before publication, from top management down. Given that such issues rarely are as black and white as they appear, transparency with audiences points a way. Indeed, transparency in the end may be your only salvation.

How to Promote Listening in Comment Streams

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 10:34:00 -0700

How to Promote Listening in Comment Streams:

fastcompany:

ibmsocialbiz:

Scientists in Seattle want to improve the listening skills of the Web. In terms of conversation, they say, the Web is fairly social (about the level of a 2-year-old, able to express simple thoughts). However —
Communication is about listening as much as speaking. Unfortunately, our web interfaces have thus far paid scant attention to supporting listening, creating a feedback gap and likely contributing to the scorched earth nature of our web dialogue.

By turning the traditional comment box into a listen box, the level of discourse might change. Read details of the proposed interface here.

Hear, hear!

Love the spirit behind this, even if it never takes off. Maybe instead of an interface that encourages listening by asking you to literally repeat what a commenter just said, you instead pose a question or two seeking clarification/understanding of a comment. Either way, hats off to researchers at my undergrad alma mater.

News with a View: The Eclipse of Objectivity

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 14:17:24 -0700

Objectivity is easily the most confused and problematic goal of modern American journalism. I spent part of last summer writing a chapter for a smart, new book of essays that explores the concept and, in many cases, rips it to shreds.

At last, the book is out: News with a View: The Eclipse of Objectivity in Modern Journalism. My chapter, as you might guess, focuses on conversational journalism in the digital age, and whether that squares with objectivity. As I explain in my introduction, it depends on how you define objectivity. Regardless, conversation is pretty damn revolutionary in my book. Here’s a snippet from the chapter:

“Conversation … is not a departure from facts-based reporting, though much confusion persists. Since completing my research, I have taken the data on the road, sharing it with academics and journalists alike, including the professional journalism school at The Poynter Institute, the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the annual South by Southwest arts and technology conference in Austin, Texas. Almost without fail, I get some variation of these two questions: How does conversation square with objective news? Is this the end of objectivity?

The short answer to both: It depends on what you mean by ‘objective.’ The long answer, as this chapter reveals, is that rethinking objectivity is in order, and that is a complicated finding. Despite the complexities of conversational news, though, one point is clear: It represents a departure from the paradigm of the journalist as elusive, all-knowing, data-distributing automaton in favor of the journalist as co-collaborator, partner, and ordinary human. And for many, that is revolutionary.”

Big props for these 10 principles of “open...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:42:00 -0700

Big props for these 10 principles of “open journalism,” from Alan Rusbridger, The (London) Guardian’s esteemed editor-in-chief. Given my research on journalism-as-a-conversation, I’m especially partial to his first principle:

“1. It [open journalism] encourages participation. It invites and/or allows a response.”

tiffehr: 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art, by...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 12:24:33 -0700

tiffehr:

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art, by Phillip Scott Johnson. (And the source list.)

Via my Uncle Lanny. I know my fair share of these paintings and artists and on occasion the subjects. What a treat to see the transitions and canonical characteristics settle between faces. (Bonus points for Modigliani though it should have kept rolling to Brancusi).

Love this. Miss you, Tiff.

newyorker: Good Things About Twitter One of the most...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:41:59 -0700

newyorker:

Good Things About Twitter

One of the most felicitous uses of Twitter is to promote long-form nonfiction by circulating a blurb leading to the full text. Since the practice started, people have shared current long magazine and newspaper pieces and dusted off archival ones. Now organizations like @longform and @longreads and @TheByliner work specifically to find and share excellent pieces that stretch up to three thousand words and beyond. Before Twitter, I was reading half as much extended nonfiction and fiction as I do now on the iPhone or iPad, using apps like Readability and Instapaper.

Two pernicious fallacies embedded in criticism of Twitter—and, by extension, blogs, tumblrs, and GIFs of catbots who kill with laser eyes—are that non-traditional forms of expression can wipe out existing ones, and that these forms are somehow impoverished. The variables unique to the Internet—hyperlinks, GIFs, chat, comments—have enabled new writing voices with their own distinct syntaxes. But we are not dealing with fungible goods—the new forms will never push out older ones because they’re insufficiently similar. You might overdose on unicorn GIFs and go to bed too tired to read “Freedom,” but unicorn GIFs will never replace “Freedom.”

- Sasha Frere-Jones on the good things about Twitter: http://nyr.kr/GG6KH6

Media scholars are partly to blame. Too often looking for bold, black-and-white statements to make their research stand out, they write hysterically about the danger of one new medium replacing another in consumer habits. The reality, as my buddy @grovesprof told me after completing a study of his own, is that many consumers use media in a complementary way, as described above. Complementarity theorists give us a more nuanced, realistic picture of people’s habits. Now if we could get them to spread the word.

"‘Curation’ is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which..."

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 14:21:00 -0700

““‘Curation’ is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which we’re all engaged when we’re tossing links around on the internet is simple ‘sharing.’ And some of us are very good at that! (At least if we accept ‘very good’ to mean ‘has a large audience.’)”

- Props to Matt Langer, on Internet attribution and the need to stop calling sharing/editing “curation”

With love from mom. Have a Mctastic St. Pat’s.

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:51:16 -0700

With love from mom. Have a Mctastic St. Pat’s.