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December 2005
A good place for Bad Subjects: Long-running web publication a home for progressive topics
2005-12-01By Briana Monahan: Non-profit and volunteer-run, the website Bad Subjects is an open forum and news source for left-leaning thought.
Bad Subjects urges its readers to see the politics in everyday situations through editorials, reviews, news and blogs.
The site presents arguments and conversation starters that are "too clear and polemical to pass muster in either the academic world or the mainstream progressive press," according to founding member Charlie Bertsch, an associate professor of English at The University of Arizona.
The idea to form Bad Subjects stemmed from a discussion group called "Politics Collective" at the University of California at Berkeley, Bertsch said.
Initially a small campus magazine, Bad Subjects went cyber on a gopher server at Berkeley before web servers even existed, according to co-editor Jonathan Sterne, an associate professor of art history and communication studies at McGill University.
Bad Subjects "predates all of the news/blog sites in existence" and is the second longest continuously running publication on the Internet, Sterne said. Bertsch added that Bad Subjects "was one of the only progressive publications listed in Yahoo's first indices of web content."
Even through the transition from print to online, Bad Subjects has always acted as a bridge between the academy and people "working nine-to-five jobs ... [who don't] have the time or inclination to read scholarly books or journals" but are having similar ideas regarding current politics, according to Bertsch.
The production team of Bad Subjects is collectively run by numerous editors in different locations, ranging from Berkeley to Arizona. The editors form groups to gather articles and topics for each issue, communicating mostly by e-mail. The staff ranges from graduate students to people with professorships.
Sterne described mainstream journalism as an arena where "expediency, chronic understaffing, dependency on PR hacks as 'official sources,' obsession with news cycles and concern with profit motive consistently undermine the real social purpose of news media, which is to foster critical thought and democratic debate."
"Journalism students should look to Bad Subjects ... as [a] serious alternative to the over-professionalized world of mainstream journalism," Sterne said.
According to the site, Bad Subjects gets about 1.4 million hits per month and has more than 120,000 readers worldwide, as the free print magazine and site are translated into English, Spanish and French.
More than a dog's life at DoggieNews.com
2005-12-02By Laura Ybarra: Every dog has his day at DoggieNews.com.
The blog, designed to appeal to dog owners, profiles dog news and the newest kanine-centric products, according to the site’s publisher, Steve Johnson.
"The average American dog owner is difficult to define. There is the animal rights activist and the animal welfare activist, and we’re kind of interested in them. But we’re more interested in the average American family with a dog," Johnson said.
"They want to know about the latest products or any new laws that might limit their ability to own a dog," he added.
Johnson posts short articles that inform readers of new dog products and dog news. The posts on DoggieNews.com range from information about pet snoring remedies to a pet detoxifiers.
To find stories that appeal to dog owners, Johnson said he monitors news organizations like the Associated Press and Reuters and keeps an eye out for press releases.
DoggieNews.com is just one of 15 websites and blogs Johnson operates through his business, Clear Digital Media.
"Our business publishes consumer-focused content on the Internet to attract a specific audience," said Johnson, who added that DoggieNews.com was spawned from his own interest in dogs and his ability to recognize a trend.
"A couple of years ago, we saw statistics that [showed that] dog ownership was increasing significantly. Added to that, I own a couple of dogs," he said.
Since DoggieNews.com launched in June 2004, Johnson said the site has seen significant growth: "If we continue to grow we will have to hire a staff," he noted.
Johnson said he hopes to expand his doggie site by making it more specific to particular dog breeds.
"The average dog owner is interested in specific breeds and what they need to know about raising specific breeds," he said.
The importance of blogging in journalism education
2005-12-02By Robert Niles: British journalist Bill Thompson blogged today on news.bbc.co.uk about the importance of blogging in journalism education. I couldn't agree more. I require all my students at USC Annenberg to blog, regardless of class topic, with the idea that blogging gets students in the habit of writing, and in a conversational style that effective journalism needs.
Thompson writes:
"The real point of getting a journalist blogging at this early stage in his or her career is that the bloggers, in all their variety, with all their different skills and abilities and interests and biases, are reshaping the world in which professional journalists operate just as much as the telephone shook up the profession in the first half of the 20th Century."
When I ask students how many have read the newspaper or watched TV news within the past day, few hands go up. But every students acknowledges having gone online within the day to read the news. Even if few have considered a job in online journalism, in my experience, today's students implictly understand that medium better than they do print and broadcast.
What we as journalism educators need to do is help these students understand how to connect old media commitment to sourcing and truth-telling with new media techniques for discovering and sharing information.
Thompson concludes:
"The growth of internet use and the emergence of easy-to-use publishing tools could well be the best thing that has happened to journalism since radio and then television offered new ways to reach people, but that requires a certain degree of modesty and a great willingness to learn on the part of a profession that is not noted for either attribute."
This was the final week of classes for the fall term here at Annenberg. And in the spirit of this post, I wanted to share with you a few of the final projects submitted by students in my undergraduate Introduction to Online Production/Editing class. Each year I teach this course, I grow more encouraged about students' potential to help make journalism better.
Soccer fever: A fan's life-long passion plays out on the Net
2005-12-05By Kelly Winslow: For fans across Britain, the name of the game is football, not soccer. To British citizens worldwide, it is what baseball is to America: a national pastime. And like baseball, for each fan there is a team that shines bright. For sports blogger Damian Dugdale, this is the Aston Villa Football Club.
Dugdale started his blog about the Aston Villa Football Club, a team located in Birmingham, England, in July of 2005. He decided to create the blog after he began getting more and more visitors to his personal website when he posted weekly articles about his favored team.
"I’ve supported Aston Villa all my life and have actively been involved in supporter groups," said Dugdale. "It felt natural to start writing about the club."
When he created the site however, he didn’t expect the huge response he would get. By August, the site had over 1,000,000 hits, and Dugdale says he expects 1,500,000 this month if the site keeps progressing as it has.
The site owes much of its popularity to dedication of the football fans, Dugdale said. It provides a forum for fans to submit and read news, personal opinions and speculation about the team.
"I'd like to think that when somebody reads something on the site that the opinion, thought or point of view is something they can relate to, as we are supporters," Dugdale said.
Besides being what Dugdale says is "accurate and to the point," the site is on top of the news. This summer, it was the first to break the news that an England international player was leaving Aston Villa -- a tidbit of information Dugdale contributes to the site's growing network of contacts.
"We're not writing about something that isn't really of interest to us; we're writing about something we're deeply passionate about," Dugdale said. "Because of this we probably know a little bit more about the subject than a reporter for a daily newspaper or general football website who has got another 10 articles to write about 10 different teams."
There are five active contributors to the site, including Dugdale. There is also a fan opinion category where readers can get their e-mails published. Dugdale said they "actively promote readers to send in their opinions" and provide access details on publishing articles for those interested in contributing on a more regular basis.
"The site is there for any Aston Villa fan to write about the team and express their opinion," Dugdale said. "It's an opportunity to write what they think about the football club we all love."
As for plans of the future, Dugdale said he would like to offer host blogs for supporters of other teams, which he says will "create a nice open feeling."
And with all the talk of football, is Dugdale a player himself?
"All Englishmen play football, and we all could have played for our team!" Dugdale said.
OJR blog cited among top news blogs
2005-12-05By Robert Niles: Congratulations to our Annenberg students who help write the OJR News Blog. The blog is listed in the upcoming book "Blogosphere: Best of Blogs," by Peter Kuhns and Adrienne Crew, as one of the Web's most "Influential Current Events Blogs."
(The book's official release date is January 13, 2006, but it's shown up at several L.A.-area Borders over the past week.)
As our students wrap up the fall semester here at USC, here's a reminder than all OJR readers are invited to submit entries to the News blog. (Our editors review each submission before posting.) It's a handy resource to let other OJR readers know about new websites, initiatives or interesting developments you've come across.
Better journalism through better math
2005-12-06By Robert Niles: Almost every reporter and editor I've met in my career believes in the principle that journalists ought to cover the news impartially. But a few issues do bring many of us off the sidelines and turn us into advocates: Issues such as freedom of speech, the promotion of literacy, open access to government and physical protection for working journalists.
Here are two more we ought to add: The defense of science and the proper teaching of math.
It's past time to lay aside the stereotype of journalists as mere literary wanna-bes, obsessed with language at the expense of arithmetic and the lab. The scientific method provides the foundation for human knowledge, and mathematics provides the universal language behind scientific method. As journalists, we're in the same business as scientists and mathematicians – to investigate the world and describe its truths. The biggest difference is that they've got a longer and stronger track record of success than we do.
But we have more readers. Which makes our role in defending a replicable pursuit of the truth so important. Too many people in the United States despise science. And thanks to the indifference of too many others among the press and public, they're getting away with dumbing down school curricula, sabotaging research and gutting public records. When we as journalists fail to do something so simple as check a source's arithmetic, we create an opportunity for more bad data to make its way into public consciousness. We owe our readers better than that. Our profession ought to know good science, and good math, from bad and pass that knowledge on to our readers.
That's one of the reasons why I've been trying for the past 10 years to teach journalists, as well as the public, better math skills. But an incident last week reminded me how far we have to go on even the simplest tasks.
My third-grade daughter brought home a math assignment involving percentages. The question offered a pie chart listing the percentage of energy provided by various sources in the U.S. and asked "How much more energy do we get from petroleum than from natural gas?"
My daughter took the easy route and tried subtraction: Petroleum's 40% minus natural gas' 23% equals 17%. But she looked at the pie chart, saw petroleum taking up over half again as much space, and said "That can't be right." She erased her figuring and wrote "About twice as much" for her answer.
My wife, taking this problem as too advanced for a third-grader, wrote a note to the teacher: "It's not 17% more. It's 17/23 [actually 74%] more. Not sure how to do this with 3rd grade math. She eyeballed it and said twice as much."
A few days later, we got the assignment back. The teacher had marked the answer wrong, underlined the question, wrote "this means subtract," noted where my daughter had erased her arithmetic, rewrote "40% - 23% = 17%" over it and added "She was right :-)"
Excuse me for a moment while I crawl under my desk and scream.
Great Blue North Draft Report: From statistician at a typewriter to online publisher
2005-12-07By Nicholas Kump: This April the Great Blue North Draft Report's Colin Lindsay will cover his ninth NFL Draft for his site. Over the past nine years, Lindsay said he has been able to predict the draft with more than 75 percent accuracy. Such high numbers are the result of many hours spent pouring over newspapers from all of the NFL’s cities, as well as listening to sports news and sources within the NFL.
And all this information is available to readers at the Great Blue North Draft Report, which offers a comprehensive review of NFL news and its annual draft. It also gives readers an accumulation of "many years of research about NFL Draft picks and their contribution to the NFL," Lindsay said.
"I'm pretty much the only one you can find for updated information about the draft years after it happens," Lindsay said.
The Great Blue North Draft Report boasts a unique grading system for every NFL team. Lindsay gives every team a grade depending on the potential contribution by the players selected, but unlike most other sports websites, Lindsay follows up on his picks for the next few years, updating his initial grades as each rookie draft pick either blossoms or busts as a pro.
Lindsay said that he "looks at tapes, listens to a variety of sources, and reads many sports publications" in order to find all the information he needs to give accurate grades.
The site has its roots back in the 1970s when Lindsay diligently recorded the statistics of the New York Giants using a typewriter. In the mid 1990s he posted his results on the Internet for friends, and soon he expanded to all 32 teams. All of this recording of statistics comes as second nature to Lindsay, who has worked for the National Statistics Agency in Canada for 30 years.
During the season Great Blue North Draft Report gets more than 4,000 hits each day, but when draft season comes around in March and April, the site receives more than 50,000 each day, according to Lindsay.
At the same time as many websites are commercializing, Lindsay said the services on his site will be free "as long as I am running gnbreport.com."
Pulitzer decision not enough for online journalists
2005-12-07By Robert Niles: Today's announcement from Pulitzer Prize Board that it will accept online material from newspaper entrants in all journalism categories raises a question: When will the profession get an awards competition that honors the best in journalism, regardless of medium?
Awards programs play an important role in promoting great work. But with the explosion in the number of information sources now available online, the newspaper industry would better serve its long-term interests by switching its focus from promoting print journalism to promoting great journalism overall. Today's decision takes a needed baby step in that direction. But the Pulitzers remain off-limits to online-only news organizations.
The market battle isn't between print and online. It's between journalism, across all media, and agenda-driven content, from astroturf propaganda to paid advertising masquerading as news. The profession as a whole would benefit from using its most prominent awards competition to support worthy efforts by those reporting news online.
The Pulitzer decision raises an additional challenge for the Online Journalism Awards, which are administered for the Online News Association by USC. The ONA originally split its awards between independent online news organizations and those affiliated with newspapers or broadcast outfits. In 2004, the ONA did away with that designation, in favor of splitting the awards by an entrant's number of unique visitors. (I supported the switch at the time, but have since written the ONA in support of eliminating category classifications altogether.)
Since that switch, the number of entries from independent news organizations have plummeted, and the awards have become dominated by affiliated sites. If the Pulitzers are now going to consider online work as part of its awards, will the OJAs become redundant?
[Editor's note: I won't be posting tomorrow, as I'll be going in for a little medical attention. And, depending upon the quality and effectiveness of the post-op medication I get, I might not be able to work a keyboard by Friday either. We'll see.]
Journalists from Southern African region unite online
2005-12-08By Haley Poland: By providing a virtual meeting place and a way to share information and resources, journalism.co.za aims to improve communication between journalists across the region of Southern Africa.
When asked in an e-mail interview if he felt there were needs specific to Southern Africa's journalists, site editor Franz Krüger noted that journalists in the region know far too little about each other. The site fosters association across national boundaries by discussing topics of common interest, as well as topics that might never be shared otherwise, he said.
"We would like journalists in this region to treat it as their home page," wrote Krüger, "where they will find the information and contacts and debates that they need in their professional lives."
He added that because South Africa is relatively new to democracy, and the process of democratization is happening in many African nations, the media are not strong enough to play their proper role.
"In our small way," he wrote, "we hope to build better journalism and thereby support the democratic project."
Journalism.co.za was started in 2003 by the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and is becoming a joint project between that program and the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism. Much of the material on the site is linked from other media sources, but Krüger wrote that he hopes to generate more original content. Journalism.co.za functions as a teaching tool for the Wits journalism program, and students contribute in various ways.
In addition to attempting to expand the site's interactive components, a discussion has begun regarding e-learning options, according to Krüger.
One challenge is that people in Southern Africa have slow Internet connections, he wrote, so the site must be kept simple to ensure the downloads don't take too long. Money is also an issue.
"We're still dependent on kind funders," wrote Krüger. "We would like to move to a new platform, we would like to commission more reporting -- but all of these take money, which has been tight."
Various features have been added along the way, including the Journ-AIDS and Journ-Ethics sections. The greatest change over the past two years, according to Krüger, is the concentration on news and almost daily updates.
"We have built a network of correspondents around the region which allows us to provide original coverage of news about journalism and media," he wrote.
The Journ-Jobs section, which provides information on available positions in the media industry, is taking off slowly. Site organizers are looking at options to promote the section in the hopes of generating more income, according to Krüger.
Site provides 'Spot-on' political commentary
2005-12-09
By Neha Kashyap:
Chris Nolan, a San Francisco-based veteran political journalist and the founder of Spot-on.com, began a political blog two years ago as a one-woman project.
"I just get tired of yelling at my TV set about the current state of politics," Nolan said. "So I started screwing around with commentary online."
After learning more about how inexpensive online blogging is in comparison with paper media, Nolan decided a year ago to invite other bloggers to create a political commentary website with a unique perspective.
"I realized that this doesn’t just have to be me," she said. "I looked for people who have something to say and who can express themselves well."
Thus, other writers were invited, and Spot-on.com was born.
The site includes blogs by Nolan; international journalist Deborah Klosky; Christopher Brauchli, a practicing lawyer from Boulder, Colorado; and Josh Trevino, a former speech writer for the Bush administration.
Nolan said she wants to provide alternating viewpoints, as reflected by her choice in writers and their respective topics and opinions.
After California's latest elections, for instance, both Trevino and Nolan wrote about the success of moderation over staunch conservatism. Trevino wrote in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Loss," that the election outcome was "the bitter fruit of the shunning of conservatives," while Nolan's post "Off Base" said the election was "fall-out from the general state of national affairs."
"Josh is a great writer, and I disagree with him violently on a lot of issues, but he brings a new point of view to discussions that have become one-sided," Nolan said. "I wanted Republican party politics and national issues from the insider's point of view."
The different takes on current politics have definitely paid off, and Spot-on is now Nolan’s full-time job. The site received around 90,000 hits in October.
Approximately 40 percent of the readers are women, the highest of any political blog, according to two surveys done by the site. Most readers are Democrats, while 20 percent are Republicans, and 10 to 15 percent consider themselves independent.
Spot-on grew through links from other blogs, Google AdSense and the audiences and connections of each of the writers.
The biggest obstacle to succeeding in online journalism, or "stand-alone journalism," as dubbed by Nolan, is the smaller daily tasks required to keep up a site and make sure readership continues to grow.
"You have to think, 'How do you generate traffic?', 'How do you get your name out there?' Other people want to emphasize not how to get to the reader, but that you get there. But we have writers with unusual perspectives, and there’s strength in that," Nolan said.
Future plans for Spot-on include finding more conservative writers and including international points of view, particularly voices from India or China.
"I don’t want to have a 'the Chinese are coming' mentality," Nolan said. "I want a writer who can explain China to America."
Blog, sponsored by local TV news station, becomes a central voice for Nashville-area bloggers
2005-12-12By Elizabeth Held: The blog-centric website Nashville is Talking aggregates Nashville area blogs, bringing together many voices into one repository of Music City news and information.
The aggregator runs alongside a blog written by site editor Brittney Gilbert, a Nashville native and long-time blogger herself. WKRN-TV recruited Gilbert in the spring of 2005 to start up this station-sponsored blog as a way to increase advertising revenue and establish a Web presence, according to Gilbert.
"Not a lot of young people watch the news, and the station wanted to establish itself online in order to expose a different demographic to Web news," Gilbert said. "This is a very different format from Web news you usually see."
Gilbert explained that most of the blogs that appear on Nashville Is Talking are volunteered by the bloggers themselves. With full editorial control of the site, Gilbert reads through all the local blogs as they are updated throughout the day and highlights entries or postings she finds particularly noteworthy.
There are, for the most part, no restrictions on the blogs; any blog in the middle-Tennessee viewing area is fair game for the website. Gilbert said she has only rejected one blog due to its outwardly prejudiced nature.
"Occasionally I’ll link to a photo, a comic ... something that doesn’t necessarily have to do with Nashville itself, but I try to keep the blog 90 percent generated by people in the community," Gilbert said.
Writing and editing the blog is Gilbert’s full-time job, and she couldn’t be happier. She said it’s rare for someone to be hired just to write a blog.
"Prior to working here at the station, I was a waitress. I was publishing narrative non-fiction, which is how I was recruited to the site," Gilbert explained. "I really enjoy [running this blog] and feel very lucky."
The blog has received positive responses from the community, according to Gilbert, and the readership is increasing. Nashville is Talking has also helped WKRN-TV in some unexpected ways.
"We’ve gotten a lot of story ideas that have been handed off to reporters that we may not have gotten otherwise," Gilbert said. "This is newsworthy stuff. It’s a great way to connect with the local audience."
Blogger takes online action to counteract pro-eating disorder websites
2005-12-13By Jamilla Jamison: British Colombian Lindsay Kante launched RecoveryMinded.com, a blog-driven website designed to counteract the detrimental effects of websites like Pro-Anorexia’s Journal and the BlueDragonfly, which give advice on how to hide anorexia and bulimia from others.
Through her site, Kante, who suffered from Compulsive Eating Disorder and bulimia nervosa, allows herself to serve as an example for readers by sharing the story of her recovery.
Kante said that she was first motivated to begin the site last April as a way to release her feelings about her own personal battles with eating disorders and also as a way to show the realities of eating disorders that many pro-bulimia and pro-anorexia sites are so good at hiding. [See "Anorexia Goes High Tech", published in July 2001 by Time.com, for details about pro-anorexia sites on the Internet.]
"I know the reality of it," Kante said. "I am able to see beyond the denial that [people who start pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia sites] are in."
Kante said she also wanted to start her site to challenge this denial.
"I get a lot of referrals from search engines and people looking for pro-bulimia and pro-anorexia sites," Kante said.
Kante's site previously displayed Yahoo! news feed, but she recently took the section down because she didn't feel that "it was adding any value to the site."
She stated that she had never put much effort into the news feed section of her Web site, but now she will most likely start adding links in her blogs to feature articles and Web sites that she finds interesting.
The Web site also has links to ads provided by Google AdSense. Kante stated that she often logs into her Google account and changes URLs that she finds questionable. When she does find questionable material, she immediately blocks the ads and notifies Google of illegal activity.
"Google is pretty good at keeping [pro-anorexia] and [pro-bulimia] sites from exploiting their ad services," Kante said. "I haven't seen anything too harsh show up in my ads so far."
RecoveryMinded.com now receives about 50-100 hits per day and is broken into sections based on what type of eating disorder a person might have, Kante said.
Some of the sections include: All About Recovery, Anorexia Nervosa, Personal Experience and Stories of Recovery. Each section offers insight into identifying eating disorders, alongside explanations from Kante about how she has stayed on the path to recovery for the past three years.
Save the date....
2005-12-13By Robert Niles: I am emerging from the post-op fog to let you know that I'll have a feature article up later today on automated Web traffic and the problems that creates for some webmasters.
Also, here's a reminder to save the date for Friday, March 3, 2006. That's when OJR will be hosting a one-day conference here at USC for journalists who publish independently online. More details will be coming, along with a formal announcement, later this month.
Student Web project becomes cultural campaign
2005-12-14By Kate Crisalli: A former USC student now living in Iran has turned a class project into a unique cultural effort: Inside Iran, a blog that offers a personal, small-scale look at Iranian life and society. Under the name of "Shiva the Spy" she promises to "be your eyes and ears in Iran. ... You'll have a window into the social, cultural, political and historical aspects of the country. I will bring you the stuff that American media can't ... or won't."
Shiva, who asked to be identified only by her first name, is an Iranian-American who was born and raised in California. She graduated from USC in May 2005 with a double major in international relations and communication and a minor in journalism. In her senior year, Shiva took a class in online journalism production with Online Journalism Review editor in chief and Annenberg School for Communication adjunct professor Robert Niles; it was in this class where Inside Iran began to take shape.
Post-graduation, Shiva planned to spend a year in Iran to learn Farsi on a professional level. Originally, she wrote in an e-mail interview, she began the blog as a way to keep in touch with her friends while she was out of the country. The project took a slightly different twist when she explained it to Niles, who encouraged her to push the concept further and turn it into her final project for the class.
Inside Iran developed into a forum for exploring the cultural differences and similarities between America and Iran and for stimulating debate about Iranian issues, because "there simply isn't enough of this out there," Shiva wrote.
The blog also works to dismantle cultural stereotypes: "Inside Iran’s purpose," she noted, "is to show a more everyday-life perspective of Iran that may serve to balance the constantly negative and extremely simplified images typically portrayed by the mass media."
The site is a collection of Shiva’s daily observations about Iranian living, ranging from pop culture (techno music and Iranian sitcoms) to politics (the problem of terrorism, and the country’s quest for nuclear energy) to religion (funeral ceremonies and the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.) She also maintains a photo gallery and a page of links to other interesting sites dealing with the topic of Iran. Interestingly, Shiva is not alone in her efforts: she reported that Iran ranks as the third country in the world in number of blogs, with about 70,000 sites in operation.
When asked about the readership of her site, Shiva wrote that the audience consists mostly of friends, professors and colleagues who want to keep in touch with her. However, she added, "a lot of new and veteran bloggers also visit the site, which came as a surprise to me. I guess word spreads fast in the blogosphere." Since the site’s debut two months ago, she has had visitors from such far-flung places as South Korea, Norway, Japan, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, India, Singapore, Sweden and Indonesia.
Shiva will leave Iran when her school year is finished and wrote that she does not plan to continue the blog after her departure: "After all, it’s called Inside Iran!" However, she noted that she has been "surprised and glad to learn that there are many people curious about Iranian life" and expressed the wish that others inside the country will be interested in furthering the site’s objectives once she returns to America.
The White House vs. 'Briefing': Same story, retold
2005-12-14By Robert Niles: Jay Rosen's PressThink offers a thorough look at the flap over Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing blog for WashingtonPost.com.
Allow me to add my $.02 to Rosen's excellent report, in an effort to provide some additional perspective to these sorts of things:
I spent about three years, early in career, working as an editorial writer for a GOP-leaning newspaper. In that job, as one might expect, I had regular contact with individuals and think tanks that help craft and disseminate conservative political opinion. (Less with sources on the left.) So I can say, from personal experience, that political conservatives in America years ago declared a private war on objective journalism. As part of that, the right has worked diligently to create an alternate media where information's value is judged internally by its political utility to the right, rather than by the quality of empirical evidence supporting it.
Yet mainstream journalists remain reticent to acknowledge that fact when reporting on conflicts between the conservatives and the press.
Which isn't surprising, I suppose. How does the press acknowledge this conflict without implicitly accepting it? And how can the press accept this conflict without abandoning its commitment to reporting on both sides of the ideological spectrum without favor? It's just a lot easier, intellectually, to pretend the conflict does not exist – to go on believing that the right subscribes to some unspoken covenant that respects the practice of objective journalism and to treat any complaint about a reporter or a story (or a blog) as substantive on the issue of journalistic process, rather than simply being an objection to that process's result.
But that's not accurate. Or honest. The political right does not want Americans getting their information from objective journalists, whether they be reporters or columnists. It wants Americans to get their news from agents of the political right. (The left might entertain similar fantasies, but, to date, it has made nowhere near the coordinated effort to make them happen that the right has.) This, among daily newspapers at least, is the great underreported media story of our generation. And the Dan Froomkin flap is merely the latest episode within it.
Virginia paper seeks new viewers with 'TimesCast'
2005-12-14By Robert Niles: The Roanoke Times has debuted a new website feature worthy of a look from other newspaper.com publishers. TimesCast (linked from the site's home page) is daily video report summarizing news, sports and entertainment stories of interest to younger readers, delivered by Times staffers.
"We don't wear makeup. We don't worry (too much) about wardrobe," Times editor Mike Riley wrote in an e-mail. "We're fancy ourselves the anti-TV. We want to connect. We want to engage. We want to be interactive. That said, we have brought in some TV folks to talk about their trade to help us get a baseline on the industry, and we have used an acting coach, mostly to help us get comfortable in front of a camera. (He's been terrific, by the way.) For most news folks, as you know, video is an unnatural act. We hope we can find a way to make online video sync with the paper's newsgathering, and there's no reason it shouldn't."
TimesCast plays weekdays at 3:30 p.m. (ET) and uses Macromedia Flash to allow viewers to click on the video itself to read stories, view additional images or leave comments. There's not much source video, instead, the focus remains on the newsreader. Which makes the broadcast feel a bit like a podcast, but one where you can see the speaker.
Riley wrote that cost shouldn't provide a barrier to other newsrooms looking to try something similar to reach broadband-enabled younger Web users.
"It actually doesn't cost much to get in the game as far as the digital equipment goes (we went fairly high end, though). The real cost is in staffers' time, and for us that translates largely into the multimedia editor, a script writer, a graphic artist, the news editors contributing items, and the TimesCasters. So those costs are well-dispersed, which makes it a more feasible project.
"So I don't think cost is the barrier. I think fear is, namely the fear of taking a risk, trying something new, venturing into a new medium, and facing the fact that the experiment could fail. But what we'll learn, even from failure, outweighs the costs."
It's not that you got it wrong; it's how often you blew it
2005-12-15By Robert Niles: Online encyclopedia Wikipedia's taken well-deserved hits recently for its bogus entry on a friend of the Kennedy family. But readers need proper context for such criticism. If a publication makes a mistake (which, eventually, we all do), how does its error rate compare with those of others?
The journal Nature this week provides a partial answer. In its investigation, Nature asked leading scientists to examine articles on Wikipedia and in Encyclopaedia Britannica on a variety of science topics. In the 42 articles examined, researchers found 162 errors, omissions or misleading statements in the Wikipedia entries, with 123 in Britannica. Yet the researchers categorized just eight errors as serious – and those were evenly split, with four in Wikipedia and four in Britannica.
The investigation demonstrates, once again, that Wikipedia is not a perfect source of 100-percent accurate information. But neither is Encyclopaedia Britannica. That Wikipedia was able to perform as well as Brittanica in avoid serious errors on difficult scientific content provides a strong endorsement for the concept of getting good information by letting readers collectively write and edit it.
Daytime Emmys open awards to vbloggers, others
2005-12-19By Robert Niles: The New York-based National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which presents the Daytime Emmy Awards, will accept entries in a new category for video content delivered via the Internet or cell phones.
Entertainment video distributed first online between January 1, 2005 and March 1, 2006 is eligible for the new Emmy Award for "Outstanding Achievement in Content for Non-Traditional Delivery Platforms." Entry applications are due March 1, and will be available for download from www.emmyonline.tv. The winner will be announced at the annual Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony, to be broadcast on ABC in April.
Unlike last month's decision from the Pulitzer board to open that awards competition to online-original material produced by newspapers, the television academy is not limiting its award just to broadcasters. From the Academy's press release:
Entries for this award must be original material made-for-broadband or made-for-mobile. These platforms include video blogs, website programs including journalistic reporting, event coverage or event analysis, mobisodes (short episodics created for mobile devices), video-on-demand and other video delivered over an IP network or platform such as wireless, broadband or VOD. Entries can not be material originally produced for television viewing and then repurposed for the new media. Entries will only be accepted on DVD and must not exceed 20 minutes in length.
Full-time blogging requires a huge commitment and financial backing
2005-12-20By Christopher Frankonis: This weekend's Sunday Oregonian published a package of three pieces intended to consider not the question of "blogs versus mainstream media" but "blogs as mainstream media."
As the one-time publisher of Portland Communique, I was asked to contribute my views based upon my personal experience.
But the full version addressed some questions more fully, including the financial realities of blogging full-time on the local level and that pesky matter of blogs as mainstream media.
The money quote on that latter question, to entice you to read the entire piece:
"What's considered 'mainstream' media is a function of what's available to people, not a function of how that media functions or what it covers. There is not much that is more mainstream than people seeking out information and opinion to help them make sense out of their lives. As more people turn to blogs for this, that may make them mainstream, but it doesn't have to mean the blog form somehow has 'sold out'."
Happy holidays from OJR
2005-12-20By Robert Niles: The students have left for the holidays here at USC (though many of them will be invading my hometown of Pasadena for the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl in a couple weeks). So that means we're wrapping things up for another semester break.
I leave you with what I hope will be a touch of holiday inspiration: 'Why do I love online publishing?', with responses from some of the year's top Web publishers and editor. Plus me. ;-)
So allow me to wish you happy holidays until OJR returns after the New Year.
(Or, to satisfy the fans of Bill O'Reilly among us who hate the phrase 'happy holidays,' here's a more detailed greeting from another, much more insightful, Fox personality:
"So, have a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a crazy Kwanzaa, a tip-top Tet and a solemn, dignified Ramadan. And now a word from MY God, our sponsors!"
Thank you for that, Krusty the Clown.)