Brian McDermott

These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.

Tool, or trouble? Facial recognition might be driving some sources away from the news

January 17, 2012
At first, Brittany Cantarella had no idea the man she accidentally swiped with her Chevrolet was named Lord Jesus Christ. But within two days, the minor traffic incident had gone viral. Reporters snatched the then 20-year-old's Facebook profile picture and left messages on her grandmother's answering machine. "It's the girl that hit Jesus!" a man in Stop & Shop yelled.

"I wanted to hide, I wanted to run, I wanted to go far away," Cantarella said.

Two months later, she was willing to talk to me about the accident at a coffee shop in western Massachusetts. She was resolute, though, that I not take her picture or shoot video. That's because Cantarella's experience with viral fame made her wary of having her image wedded to a traffic accident that would never go away online.

This small anecdote is part of a new media conundrum dogging the relationship between visual journalists and their subjects: most people happily publish their own picture online, but a growing number of them are becoming wary of having their image captured by visual journalists.

With facial recognition software becoming commercially available in the past few years, new technologies could further reshuffle the relationship between a subject and a visual journalist.

Ed Kashi is a renowned photojournalist who has spent the past 30 years shooting for National Geographic, the VII Photo Agency and dozens of other outlets. And, he told me in an email interview, he's noticed individuals and organizations becoming more reluctant to allow visual access.

"There is more wariness and a desire to have more control over access and what you are allowed to show," he said. "In some cases and with certain subjects, this new paradigm presents a dilemma and can halt worthy work." More...

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An ad buyer's SEO advice for online news publishers

March 24, 2011
"The best S.E.O. strategy," I told a group of UMass journalism and marketing students, fidgety at the smell of the free pizza cooling in the next room, "is to produce strong, original work."

I'm paraphrasing, because that line wasn't in my notes. But I liked the sound of it. It's a comforting thought for a journalism professor that good journalism will find a large audience. Yes, it's vital to understand the basic principles of writing pithy <title> tags, wise linking practices, and analyzing audience behavior. Those are parts of the "Plain English Optimization" the Online Journalism Review rightly promotes, and I teach those skills in several of my classes.

But isn't strong, original journalism paramount? Or was I being naive during my S.E.O. talk, wiping pizza sauce off my chin in my ivory tower as working journalists were getting crushed by the weight of Charlie Sheen keyword trends? I decided to ask a person who would be clear-eyed about how journalists can best approach S.E.O.: an ad buyer.

Chris Lorenzoni has been planning, designing, and buying ad campaigns for various New York City ad agencies since 1998. He has bought ad space in the New York Times, Yahoo News, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and he's spent his career on technology's leading edge, most recently working with mobile and tablet advertising.

"Mass marketing as we grew up learning it is pretty dead," Lorenzoni said. "Even if it's for the same car, you can't run the same ad for a 35-year-old guy and a 21-year-old girl. You have to carve out and look for different audiences."

The need to identify those audiences analytically was a profound cultural change for the ad industry.

"Nowadays when you look at people that do the initial research about sites, it looks like they're stock traders. People are logging in and matching audiences against another third-party verification. There's a lot more science and math in media buying." More...

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What the 'Ground Zero mosque' flap says about the state of journalism

August 24, 2010
The Ground Zero mosque does not exist.

There is, of course, the planned Park51 Muslim community center and mosque, which local authorities approved for construction on Park Place in lower Manhattan about two blocks, or about 600 feet, from Ground Zero.

And there is also, of course, a myth - the latest outrage brand- of a "Ground Zero mosque." Headlines from dozens of outlets have trumpeted that three-word shorthand, tempered at best by the flimsy embrace of quotation marks. Yet the phrase "Ground Zero mosque" violates the most basic tenets of journalism: be truthful and be accurate.

So what's false? Simple: the mosque in question will not be built at Ground Zero. To conflate the lingering psychological toll of the destroyed World Trade Center with a building 600 feet away is as absurd as calling the Lace Gentlemen's Club on 7^th Avenue in Manhattan the "Fox News Strip Club" by virtue of its two-block proximity to Fox's headquarters.

Speaking to Michael Calderone at Yahoo News, AP New York assistant chief Chad Roedemeier said that the slug on the story has always been "Ground Zero mosque," and that phrase has often appeared in headlines. But he said the wire service has always said the mosque was "near" ground zero in stories. (I used to work as a freelance photographer with the AP in New York City.)

That distinction isn't good enough in an age of six-word iPhone headlines, warp speed online skimming, and well-financed PR and political hucksters trying to smoke-bomb plain languge. Whether it's birthers, Breitbart, or BP, there will always be cynical and reductive operators trying to exploit the uninformed in the age of too much information. The question is why responsible media doesn't fight as aggressively to reframe stories with the facts. More...

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Can Bottled Water Save Journalism Online?

November 17, 2009
The October 20 survey was depressing and unsurprising news. Approximately 1,820 Brits out of 2,000- that’s 91 percent- told Lightspeed Research that they would never pay for news online.

“Online it should be free,” said 19-year-old Shauna O’Brien, an economics major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In the fatalistic gloom of the news industry, Shauna’s words and the British survey reinforce what a long string of failures, from Times Select to Salon Premium, have shown anecdotally: people just won’t pay for web news. Paired with stubbornly low online ad revenues and a high demand for news online, many news organizations find themselves cornered into a budgetary free-fall. The conventional wisdom is that changing this equation is impossible.

Perhaps. But could there be a lesson from something Shauna O’Brien does pay for?

Shauna buys a five-dollar pack of bottled water every few weeks. “My family has been buying water forever,” she said. In that the O’Briens have a lot of company: bottled water is a 12 billion dollar per year industry in 2009, double its size in 2000. Tap water, of course, is free, and available almost universally in the U.S. In taste tests, people often can't tell the bottled brand from the tap.

So how are these companies making so much money? Does the bottled water industry have any lessons for online journalism? More...

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Brian McDermott

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Tool, or trouble? Facial recognition might be driving some sources away from the news

An ad buyer's SEO advice for online news publishers

What the 'Ground Zero mosque' flap says about the state of journalism

Can Bottled Water Save Journalism Online?

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