Posts tagged newsroom
Facebook’s New… Newsrooms?
On Sunday, Facebook quietly registered a series of “Facebook Newsroom” domains—a move that seems to signal that Facebook’s entering the media content game in a new way. Three domains were registered, according to Fusible, facebook-newsroom.com, facebook-newsroom.org, and facebook-newsroom.net. Facebook is listed on Whois.com as the registrant, administrative contact, and technical contact for all three.
The Facebook Newsroom project looks like it could be similar to another Facebook project:Facebook Studio (facebook-studio.com) is a community for advertisers and marketers that already has more than 400,000 participants and observers.
continue reading at Fast Company
Heron: “I think my job will probably not exist in five years.”
Why the social media editor job may be a transitional one. -by Megan Garber via Nieman Lab
The bigger issue is that journalists are completely innumerate. I can count on one hand the number of journalists who have any understanding of mathematics.
Not to totally excuse David Brooks here, but his editors share the blame here. A good editor is a reader advocate, and should be adding up and questioning these figures during the editing process.
This is a particular problem with opinion pieces; we’ve all read columns that are chock full of outrageous, untrue bullshit. Editors who let this stuff through typically do it with the excuse that “this is an opinion piece.” True, but facts aren’t a matter of opinion, and a publication has abdicated its role if it allows its opinion writers to publish things that are simply wrong.
(via markcoatney)
[Phone sex] is not so unlike being a reporter. A central challenge of success at both is keeping random strangers—horny guys, hostile hedge-fund managers—on the phone, talking to you, confessing to you, growing fond of you, resolving to talk to you again. And at all times, phone-sex operators, like reporters, are expected to remain detached, wise to “The Game,” objective—but in a way, that’s crap. It’s not easy to become beloved by strangers if not a single part of you truly yearns for that love.
Let me tell you a thing or two about editors. Most that I’ve known have mistakenly thought they, and not the writers, deserved the credit for all the good pieces that run in their publication and none of the blame for the bad ones. (I think this held true for me, too, when I was an editor!) Try complimenting an editor sometime about a good piece in his publication, and you’re certain to get this eye-rolling response: “You shoulda seen it when it came in!” For this reason alone, editors should be sentenced to perpetual anonymity…
…Not to go all Ed Anger on you, but editor credits make my bowels seize the same way the “letters from the editor” in some magazines do. Graydon Carter! Shut up and let me read my Vanity Fair in peace! I don’t want to know more about the writer of the story, how the story came together, and how wonderful it is. Just let me intuit all of that from reading the story itself.
60 plays
On Monday’s edition of NPR’s All Things Considered, host Robert Siegal interviewed Andy Carvin, NPR’s Senior Strategist for Social Media.
Carvin has virtually become a one man news wire with his Twitter curation of MENA protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya among other hotspots. In this brief interview, Carvin explains his processes, how he tries to verify trusted sources and a little bit about what the medium and platform is doing for journalism.
Typically what happens is I start in a country and just think about who are the people that I already know. So, for example, during the Egyptian and the Tunisian uprisings, I had a lot of contacts in each country, at least half a dozen or so that I felt comfortable re-tweeting. And then as time goes by, you get a sense of who they trust as well. Who are they talking to? Who are they re-tweeting?
Libya has been a lot more complex because there aren’t many people there who are on Twitter, rumors of it being shut down altogether. And so, it’s been tough. I had to essentially start from scratch in order to find some sources there. But fortunately, there do seem to be some, including one young man who’s been sending out a live video stream. He’s reporting what he’s hearing from friends around the country. And it’s been absolutely riveting.
Run Time: 4:43. Transcript.
Lessons in Narrative Journalism
With bells, whistles and technologies oh, my, we sometimes miss the forest for the trees, forgetting that good journalism is good facts wrapped with good storytelling.
Steve Buttry, Director of Community Engagement at TBD, walks us through one of his favorite reported pieces and gives the following tips on creating engaging narrative journalism:
- Write as you report
- Get tapes where you can
- Get records where you can
- Identify story elements
- Use dialogue instead of quotes
- Keep you lead brief and enticing
- Identify your key moments
- Keep your beginning in mind when you write the ending
- Read your story aloud
For details on each of these bullets, visit Steve’s blog.
ReportingOn: A Post Mortem
In 2008, Ryan Sholin won a Knight News Challenge grant to create ReportingOn, a Web-based application to connect reporters working on similar stories so that they could share information.
Earlier this week, he mothballed the project and wrote a few words about the experience.
And a few recommendations for developers of software “for journalists:”
- Reporters don’t want to talk about unpublished stories in public.
- Unless they’re looking for sources.
- There are some great places on the Internet to find sources.
- When they do talk about unpublished stories among themselves, they do it in familiar, well-lit places, like e-mail or the telephone. Not in your application.
- Actually, keep this in mind: Unless what you’re building meets a very journalism-specific need, you’re probably grinding your gears to build something “for journalists” when they just need a great communication tool, independent of any particular niche or category of users.
From: Sammon, Bill
To: 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 036 -FOX.WHU; 054 -FNSunday; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers; 069 -Politics; 005 -Washington
Cc: Clemente, Michael; Stack, John; Wallace, Jay; Smith, Sean
Sent: Tue Dec 08 12:49:51 2009
Subject: Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data……we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.
How Should We Update Our News Apps?
Colombia’s El Tiempo updates its iPad app with two “editions” each day, one morning, one night.
Writes Mario Gargia:
Indeed, a much debated topic in news app development is the frequency with which they must be updated. I have stated my position on the topic earlier: the app is a medium for relaxation and not for constant beeps and updates. However, I understand this is an issue that has two strong sides for debate.
In the case of El Tiempo, and as I was involved with the early stages of creation for the app, I proposed the idea of editioning, nothing new if you are a journalist of a certain age and remember when US newspapers had morning and evening editions, and sometimes even three a day.
What do you think? Should the app edition update continuously, RSS style, or as a delivered bundle of new stories?
The Guardian Explains its Javascript Interactive
Time once was that interactives were created in Flash. Now, not so much. Javascript frameworks allow quick, rich, interactive deployment of data sets with all the whizz bang animation and movement users could want as they explore content.
The Guardian notes this, and gives a nod to Apple’s well-known refusal to support Flash on its mobile devices, as they explain how they put together their interactive on how British soldiers have died in Afghanistan.
The original Flash version fetched data from an XML document. The updating process was fairly long-winded, requiring a developer to update the XML then upload it along with new images. Now, journalists can update a public Google Spreadsheet and use existing editor tools to upload appropriate images. They then publish the spreadsheet and the application fetches a JSON object from the spreadsheet’s Atom feed on page load, resulting in live updates with no involvement from anyone on the development team…
…The JavaScript used is fairly straightforward; get data from the Atom feed and parse it to create the markup. We have a JavaScript carousel object which controls the pagination and use lazy loading to display the full size image of the soldiers to try and cut down on the number of initial HTTP requests.
Nice work.
People from the digital world are always saying we don’t need journalists at all because information is everywhere and there in no barrier to entry. But these documents provide a good answer to that question. Even though journalists didn’t dig them out, there is a great deal of value in their efforts to explain and examine them. Who else would have had the energy or resources to do what these news organization have done?
…I’m afraid we can no longer afford someone of your caliber…
From: Sammon, Bill
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:23 AM
To: 054 -FNSunday; 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 069 -Politics; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 036 -FOX.WHU; 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers
Subject: friendly reminder: let’s not slip back into calling it the “public option”1) Please use the term “government-run health insurance” or, when brevity is a concern, “government option,” whenever possible.
2) When it is necessary to use the term “public option” (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation’s lexicon), use the qualifier “so-called,” as in “the so-called public option.”
3) Here’s another way to phrase it: “The public option, which is the government-run plan.”
4) When newsmakers and sources use the term “public option” in our stories, there’s not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.
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