OJR front page archive for August 2009
Where are the tribunes of the people in the health-care debate?
August 28, 2009
Every day, the debate over health-care reform grows hotter – but newspapers and their websites are doing little to shape the outcome. This is not just journalistic failure, but also abdication of public responsibility. For all their cost cutting, newspapers still have the editorial resources to take ownership of how big local issues are covered – and health care is, above all, local. As four doctors who are health-care-reform advocates wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Aug. 13:“...all medicine is local. And until a community confronts what goes on in its own population — to the point of actually seeking the data and engaging those who can solve the problem — nothing will change.”
The doctors examined 306 “Hospital Referral Regions” – which cluster hospitals used by most residents in their metro areas – and found that 74 of them met the doctors’ criteria for “more effective, lower-cost care.” Rich documentation about wide disparities in costs in hospital referral regions can be easily accessed at the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Thedata can be repurposed into charts and other easy-to-grasp visuals that pinpoint high costs at one or more hospitals and lower costs at other hospitals within the same metro area. This should be the starting point for newspaper coverage helping people to locate one of the crucial drivers of runaway costs: the availability of doctor-owned care-referral centers.
But go to newspaper websites today, and you won’t find them helping their communities understand this economic calculus of health care. I recently browsed five sites in metro areas that have the highest cost care, and only one site – the Miami Herald -- was even taking a stab at owning coverage of the issue.
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The University of Montana's online Rural News Network sustains community ties as newspapers close
August 25, 2009
DUTTON, MT – When Courtney Lowery flew to Seattle for surgery shortly after her college graduation, her hometown newspaper published a notice so community members knew where to drop off gifts. She awoke following that January 2003 surgery to find a suitcase full of teddy bears, candy and flowers from neighbors in the small farming community at her hospital bedside. Her thank-you note to the town also ran in the Dutton Dispatch – on the front page, alongside the news of the day.Lowery, a journalist and currently editor of the Missoula-based NewWest.net, made a complete recovery. However, that thank-you-note issue of the Dispatch was one of the newspaper's last before the paper was permanently shuttered.
"These small-town papers – their value is huge," Lowery said, "They bring the community together [with] a sense of pride and identity. They're a tiny mark of ‘we were here' for prom, Arbor Day, Veteran's Day... You lose your paper; you lose your history."
It was partly from that sense of loss and a belief in the value of community journalism that Lowery and University of Montana photojournalism professor Keith Graham created the Rural News Network. For the RNR class at the University of Montana, journalism students travel to small towns that have lost their local paper or never had one, and involve residents in starting up local news websites with the goal of handing the sites' operation and upkeep to those community members at the projects' close.
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LA Times redesign doesn’t quite click
August 21, 2009
The LA Times website used to remind me of an old-fashioned hardware store – things were plopped wherever there seemed to be space. That changed when Meredith Artley took over as editor of the site in early 2007. Under Artley, latimes.com quickly became a leader in design and featuring content that celebrates the special qualities of its metro area. So why is the site’s new design, despite some welcome improvements, specked with so many mistakes?The gray (screened) type is gone, thank goodness, but it has been replaced by type that, because of the limited way it’s used, produces an even grayer look that extends to the entire layout:
The new typeface is Georgia, a serif version of Verdana, which Microsoft commissioned early on for its online readability. Georgia, which was inspired by Times Roman, is fine, but not when, everywhere, it is uniformly presented in regular font.
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Inspiring journalism students to believe... they 'can do anything!'
August 18, 2009
Last week I experienced one of my proudest moments in the classroom. It was the last day of the summer session, and students in my Web design course were busily working in the computer lab on final multimedia projects. The room was filled with the sound of keyboards clacking and a hum of conversation. I was moving around the lab helping students troubleshoot the missing quotation mark in HTML or errant action on a Flash scene.Suddenly, and without warning, one student, who had been working quietly, excitedly exclaimed, "I feel like I can do anything!" She was sitting in front of a computer screen, editing video in iMovie. Obviously proud of her creation, she was moved to this empowering declaration. Here she was, a female undergraduate student, getting excited about something she created on a computer and associating that with a general sense of agency and confidence. It warmed my heart to the core.
We have a unique opportunity in media education to train our students in advanced technology skills and concepts, particularly due to the high concentration of women in our discipline. I have discussed this opportunity before and continue to believe it is not only our responsibility but should be our discipline's mission to effectively impart communication technology skills to our students in a way that instills an innovative spirit and a sense of agency for influencing the direction of the profession.
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An assignment for journalists and students: Talk with an entrepreneur
August 14, 2009
Last spring, OJR helped present a boot camp for entrepreneurial journalists at the University of Southern California. We selected and brought about a dozen journalists to USC's Marshall School of Business, where they spent five days learning some of the skills - and the mindset - necessary to start and sustain their own online publishing businesses.But we put those campers, and a second group of finalists, to work before they came to Los Angeles. Today, I'd like to tell you a bit about the first assignment we gave them, because I think it could help any journalist, or journalism student, who is anxious about their place in journalism's future.
It's a modified version of the assignment that Tom O'Malia, Director of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies in the Marshall School of Business, for years has been giving his beginning MBA students.
From the assignment:
Entrepreneurship is network dependent. Just like a journalist without sources, an entrepreneur without a strong network could not function. So how do you build a network? How do you attract a mentor? How do you get first-hand information about how someone successfully built an online journalism business?Well, the same way you've gotten any information as a reporter. You ask. You will interview a successful news entrepreneur and, through the interview, learn about his or her journey to success. This exercise allows you to use your existing journalism experience and expertise to take the first step toward building your entrepreneurial network.
I believe that all journalists, and journalism students, would benefit from sitting down and talking with someone who's started their own business - ideally, someone who's started a business involving intellectual content, such as a fellow journalist, or an author, artist or publisher.
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The Nine-Percenters: A Moroccan micro-blogging mutiny
August 11, 2009
Last Tuesday, after reading an Al Jazeera article on the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, a Moroccan expat named Hisham Twittered the following:
It's true; things haven't gone too swimmingly for Moroccan journalists of late. Criticizing Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, they've learned, will cost you 3 million dirhams (about $370,000); discussing off-color Islamic humor will get you suspended from journalism. And on August 1, the Ministry of Communication seized 100,000 copies of the provocative French-language magazine TelQuel and its Arabic sister-pub Nichane because they contained a poll on King Mohammed VI's popularity. Conducted on the tenth anniversary of the king's ascension, the survey, it has since been revealed, showed a 91% approval rating for the king (known as le Roi Cool, or simply M6, by the more affectionate of his subjects.)
Hisham's hashtag, "#9pcMaroc," refers to the remaining 9%.
Iran taught the world that suppression on any scale breeds a Twitterstorm, and the mini-drama that's played out on newsstands and monitors over the past week and a half highlights three central paradoxes in the debate over Morocco's future.
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Lessons from the revolution, for the revolution
August 6, 2009
My travels this summer have brought me to Washington, D.C. and Williamsburg, Va., where I've shown my California-dwelling kids some of the scenes of their nation's birth. But while they've been seeing the sights from their U.S. history classes for the first time, I've also enjoyed revisiting some of the scenes of the American Revolution, for the perspective they've given me on the business and information revolution that's now roiling the journalism industry.My kids are big fans of the "National Treasure" films, so, like thousands of other visitors, we had to stop at the National Archives in Washington. While my kids rushed to see the Declaration of Independence (once we slogged through a 90-minute wait), I slid over toward the more legally profound Constitution, then spent the bulk of my time with the Bill of Rights.
As a journalist, I find it thrilling to look upon the original First Amendment (actually, "Article the third" on the document). Straining to see those famous words, now faded almost to obscurity on the page, I was reminded that their power draws not from their presence on that piece of paper, but from the affect that they had upon a new nation, and have to continued to have since.
Words fade from paper. Websites fall offline. Books are sometimes lost to the ages. But those works' influence endures in the people that they affected - people who copy and reference and change their lives as result of the words that they read or heard.
That was the first lesson I took from my recent trip: That the power of journalism lies not in its presence on a printed page or on a website, but in the influence that it has upon the audience who reads it. We protect journalism not by restricting access to it, but by extending its influence by spreading its reach.
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Newspaper websites offer no cure on health-care reform
August 5, 2009
Helpless to stop their print world from being pulped, newspapers are blowing a golden opportunity to use the Web to recapture relevance and audience. The occasion is a story that impacts every man, woman and child in America – health care and how to universalize quality without busting the entire U.S. economy.News about health-care reform is, obviously, all over the media, including newspaper websites, 24/7, but too much of it has a Washington dateline when, in fact, the issue is basically local. People seek care where they live, not on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue NW or on K Street NW in Washington. Newspapers and their websites, with their still formidable local resources, should own this story as the locus shifts to their backyards.
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