Posts tagged Journalism
Gender Balance in News
Open Gender Tracking Project is a software program that collects digital content from news sources and analyzes gender balance within news organizations. The project was created by Irene Ros and Adam Hyland of Bocoup and Nathan Matias of the MIT Center for Civic Media.
The program collects data on who is writing the articles and who the articles are written about. It also measures audience response data directly associated with specific articles (like how many times a post is shared in social media). The goal of the program is to make news sources aware of content diversity (or lack thereof) so organizations can work toward maintaining a balanced set of voices.
For the most part, women are currently being underrepresented in digital media.
Via Guardian:
In the UK, newspaper front pages rarely include women, and women write a minority of articles. Women are prominent at the Daily Mail, where they write most of the celebrity news, fewer news articles, and almost no sport. Even when publications do include women, they’re often at the mercy of their audiences. 20% of Telegraph opinion articles are written by women, but women’s opinion articles attract only 14% of the Telegraph’s shares and likes on social media.
And according to studies done by the Women’s Media Center, in both legacy and newer news sites, women are too often relegated to writing about “pink topics” like fashion, relationships, and food, rather than urgent and/or international issues.
On a positive note, Global Voices, an international citizen media news site, is one of the only news organizations currently known to have equal gender participation. According to The Guardian, 764 women wrote 51% of all articles from 2005-2012.
Related: Gender balance is the new rage. I just wish somebody had spread the word to the Wikiverse: Wikipedia Bumps Women From ‘American Novelists’ Category. — Krissy
Image: Screenshot of graph from Open Gender Tracker
Groundhog's Day: DOJ Tracks Fox Reporter's Phone Records
Last week’s news was that the Justice Department seized two months of Associated Press phone records.
This week’s begins with a report that the DOJ surveilled Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, tracking his visits to the State Department in an apparent attempt to link a 2009 leak of classified information about North Korea to government adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim
Via the Washington Post:
When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.
They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.
The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press…
…Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.
Washington Post, A rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe.
Intern with The FJP this summer: Apps due Friday!
It’s Spring. Which means it’s time to start thinking about summer. And working with the FJP is assured to be a summer well spent.
NYC applicants, see details here.
If you’re not in NYC, send us a note anyway.
The She Works: Note to Self Tumblr is an NPR creation that’s part of The Changing Lives of Women series. Advice that’s helped you at work, to women, from women.
You can create your own note card and print it out, if you like. Pictured above is a quote a lovely working lady once shared with me. Wise words, especially for entrepreneurial women. Lady journos, get on this. —Jihii
The News Machine
Remember Operator, the game where you whisper a message to someone, they whisper the same to another who does the same to another until finally the message comes back to you full of distortions and embellishments? So too COLORS Magazine’s News Machine.
Created for last month’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, The News Machine is a commentary on how information systems work, and how discrete items within it get lost in translation — so to speak — as they pass from one medium to another.
Via COLORS:
Designed in collaboration with interactive designer Jonathan Chomko, the COLORS News Machine turns your tweets into headlines, but only after they’ve been passed through all the media filters and technological platforms that disseminate and distort the news today.
Twitter is the largest and least verifiable wire agency in the world. Tweet your story to @colorsmachine and watch the message change as it echoes through different media and into print.
A megaphone will read your tweet out loud. Its tape recorder listens, converting what it hears into text so that the television can show it onscreen. A camera watching the television converts what it sees into a signal to the radio antenna, which broadcasts the tweet. And the waiting microphone interprets this radio address as text again for printing.
Pick up your receipt. Compare the original tweet with the final report. Accuracy of reproduction varies according to the clarity of your writing and to chance.
As Fast Company’s Mark Wilson points out, The News Machine’s “tacit thesis is very difficult to reconcile: Even by stating the truth, you could be helping to spread misinformation.”
Intern with The FJP this Summer!
Reminder: deadline is May 10. Apply!
A newspaper published a story about the Surgeon General’s office that contained information about the size and location of the Army of the Potomac. A furious Hooker complained to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton that the chief of the Secret Service “would have willingly paid $1,000 for such information” about Confederate forces.
Ford Risely, The New York Times, Birth of the Byline.
Risley, a professor of communications and head of Penn State’s journalism department takes us through Civil War era journalism and how the byline came to be.
Indeed, during the first two years of the war, an increasingly aggressive and competitive press had published stories that infuriated military leaders on both sides. The Civil War was the first war widely covered by American newspapers. And in their zeal to report the greatest event of their lives, newsmen produced a decidedly mixed bag of stories.
On one hand, many reporters honestly and faithfully chronicled the fighting. Tireless correspondents went to extraordinary lengths to report stories, often on tight deadlines. However, other newsmen mistakenly, and in some cases recklessly, reported the conflict. Correspondents less concerned with the facts and more interested in rushing stories into print wrote damaging stories that hurt their side.
Following the journalistic practice of the day, correspondents wrote anonymously during the war, most using a pen name or no name at all. Newsmen liked the custom, believing the secrecy allowed them do their work better. As one reporter wrote, “The anonymous greatly favors freedom and boldness in newspaper correspondence … . Besides the responsibility it fastens on a correspondent, the signature inevitably detracts from the powerful impersonality of a journal.”
However, commanders did not like the practice because newsmen often could not be held accountable for what they wrote. McClellan had complained to Stanton of reporters repeatedly “giving important information” about the Army in their stories. “As it is impossible for me to ascertain with certainty who these anonymous writers are,” he wrote, “I beg to suggest that another order be published holding the editors responsible for its infraction.”
After the news leak, General Order No. 48 was issued, which required that all reporters with the Army of the Potomac—of which Hooker (mentioned above) was commander—“publish their communications over their own signatures.”
And the byline was born.
Related: A few more thoughts on journalism history from our archives.
We get stories much faster than we can make sense of them, informed by cellphone pictures and eyewitnesses found on social networks and dubious official sources like police scanner streams. Real life moves much slower than these technologies. There’s a gap between facts and comprehension, between finding some pictures online and making sense of how they fit into a story. What ends up filling that gap is speculation. On both Twitter and cable, people are mostly just collecting little factoids and thinking aloud about various possibilities. They’re just shooting the shit, and the excrement ends up flying everywhere and hitting innocent targets.
Farhad Manjoo, Slate. Breaking News Is Broken.
FJP: Two things here — Adopt a slow news diet or pay very close attention to how you follow breaking news. Else, as Farhad suggests, take a long walk.
Something weird has happened to The Most Trusted Name in News.
Has something weird happened? Has the race to break news scraped the bottom of the barrel yet (of course not, there’s a long way to go).
In my inconsequential opinion, CNN has been one of the newsroom to most embrace technology and social media in recent years and as a result it is also the one suffering most from the process of pulling hard fact from rumour and hearsay as the time to do this work diminishes in the newsroom.
The Stressful Careers of Photojournalists and Newspaper Reporters
Using metrics such as career opportunity, compensation, deadlines, working in the public eye, and danger among others to generate an overall “stress score”, CareerCast has a top ten list of the most stressful jobs of 2013.
Congratulations, photojournalists and newspaper reporters, you’ve cracked the list.
Reiterating what we already know, CareerCast reports:
Two careers in the media industry score highly on the stress scale: photojournalist and newspaper reporter. Professionals from each field can be thrown into the epicenter of dangerous situations, such as war, natural disasters and police chases. Both careers also have declining job opportunities as the 21st century media landscape evolves. Newspaper reporters in particular face a shrinking job market; the BLS estimates a 6% job decline in the industry by 2020.
The growth of online media has transformed the newspaper reporter’s job immensely. The immediacy internet outlets provide can be a useful tool, but it can also be a huge trap. Striving for the fastest reports can lead to inaccuracy and heightened stress. Watchful public eyes are trained on reporters at all times, so an incorrect report can compromise a reporter’s reputation as quickly as they can send a tweet.
The least stressful job for 2013? University professor.
Image: Stressful Careers. Select to embiggen.
Happy Birthday, Joseph Pulitzer!
Today in 1847, the legendary Joseph P. was born. He’s also the namesake of Columbia J-school and we’re getting cupcakes on his behalf today, so here’s a nod, a smile, and a question in his direction.—Jihii
Q: How does the half-Jewish, half-Roman Catholic man from Hungary behind yellow journalism get to be remembered as the father of great American journalism and a great American journalism school?
A: His contributions outweigh his slip-ups, he was incredibly enterprising, and he got a lot of things done.
For starters, he wanted to be in army but was rejected on account of his sickliness till he met a bounty recruiter for the US Union Army, enlisted in the Lincoln Cavalry for a year, then worked his way to St. Louis as a muleteer, baggage handler, and waiter. His journalism career began with a job at a German language daily, and some significant hops, skips and jumps later (including ownership of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), he bought the The New York World, which was in dire financial states. The yellow journalism period came into full play during a four month long circulation battle with William Randolph Hearst’s Journal.
In the view of historians, Pulitzer’s lapse into “yellow journalism” was outweighed by his public service achievements. He waged courageous and often successful crusades against corrupt practices in government and business. He was responsible to a large extent for passage of antitrust legislation and regulation of the insurance industry.
Notable accomplishments include tremendous improvements in circulation of both the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York World, innovations such as the first extensive use of illustrations in the paper, exposing tremendous corruption, crazy news stunts (such as the time he raised public subscriptions for the building of a pedestal at the entrance to the New York Harbor for the Statue of Liberty to be emplaced), and of course, Columbia J-school and the Pulitzer Prizes.
Read his full bio here.
Image: via Kenmore Stamp Company.
Intern with The FJP this Summer!
It’s Spring. Which means it’s time to start thinking about summer. And working with the FJP is assured to be a summer well spent.
What We Do
We write, report and make videos about journalism, education, media and technology. This you probably already know by way of our Tumblr, Twitter or theFJP.org. We also experiment with and collaborate on some interesting future-of-journalism projects. Read more about us here.
How the Internship Works:
- You spend 8-12 weeks with us.
- 80% of the time you work on one of our ongoing projects, (i.e.: research, interviewing, writing, post-production on our growing video interview collection).
- 20% of the time you carry out an independent research project on the business, technology or social impact of a particular aspect of the media ecosystem. Your goal is to publish your findings in the long form (be it writing or multimedia) on the FJP.
- You work remotely (15-20 hours a week) on your assigned projects and come in for weekly team meetings and weekly chats with industry experts.
Requirements:
- You’re a college student, a master’s student or a recent graduate.
- You’re in NYC and able to meet for 1 full weekday per week.
- You’ve got a demonstrated ability to work efficiently and independently.
- You’re smart, a bit of a media geek, and have strong reporting, writing and thinking skills.
- You’re comfortable across the social web and networks.
- Bonus: You’re experienced with audio/video production, design, code, or a combination of them.
To Apply
Send an email to hello@theFJP.org. In it, include a cover letter (no attachments) that includes links to your online persona (e.g., blog(s), clips, Tumblr(s), Dribbble, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), why you want to work with the FJP, and what you’d like to actually accomplish during your Internship.
Need help with a cover letter? Here’s our advice on writing one.
Application Deadline: May 10, 2013.
If you’re in school and your school supports it, FJP internships have been used for college/graduate credits. A monthly food and travel stipend is included.
Outside New York City
Successful internships require a level of interaction that only occurs when we’re in the same room together. That said, we recognize that many of the best and brightest are a long ways away from where we are. If you’d like to get involved with the FJP in a collaborative role, send us a note at hello@theFJP.org. Follow the same instructions as above and we’ll get back to you if we think it’s possible to work together.
Media people who feel smug because they have a Twitter handle, an about.me page, and 500 friends on Facebook often seem to think there is something magical about their ability to navigate social media. There’s not. Social media is easy to use, the barrier to entry is almost zero, and it’s not at all impressive in the larger realm of what constitutes “new journalism,” or whatever it is we’re supposed to call journalism that involves the use of Big Data and interactive infographics.
Journalism skills, however – those antiquated intangibles that fusty old out-of-touch Columbia tries to teach – are non-trivial. Journalists have to be able to not only write, but to also process and synthesize complicated ideas in a short time, structure narratives, master the art of interviewing, take notes really fast, self edit, research in places where others don’t think to look, speak truth to power, ask ballsy questions that might otherwise get their teeth smacked in, construct arguments, dismantle other arguments, see through bullshit, and think on their feet. You can learn those things by yourself through hard work and experience, but it’ll take more than 40 seconds.
Hamish McKenzie, PandoDaily, So Columbia Journalism School’s new dean doesn’t Tweet. So what?
FJP: We’d argue that Twitter and this overall social media thing takes more than 40 seconds to learn but Hamish’s argument against Michael Wolff’s criticism of the Columbia J-School — and its appointment of Steve Coll as its dean — is well worth the read.
Bonus: Jihii Jolly’s Why I’m Paying for J-School.
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