The poetry of the newsroom

Found this via a nice Huff-po piece on poetry and journalism.

Self-Portrait

Born in a safe family
But a dangerous area, Iraq,
I heard guns at a young age, so young
They made a decision to raise us safe
So packed our things
And went far away.

Now, in the city of rain,
I try to forget my past,
But memories never fade.

This is my life,
It happened for a reason,
I happened for a reason.

From American Life in Poetry


Jane Dwyre Garton quotes from a Columbia University symposium:

"Increasingly, poets are writing documentary poems that 'report' on an event. Many journalists also turn to poetic prose in order to convey a perspective that cannot otherwise be presented."

Logic unbundled: not better but more

News is part of the atmosphere now, as pervasive—and in some ways as invasive—as advertising. It finds us in airport lounges and taxicabs, on our smart phones and PDAs, through e-mail providers and Internet search engines. Much of the time, it arrives unpackaged: headlines, updates, and articles are snatched from their original sources—often as soon as they’re published—and excerpted or aggregated on blogs, portals, social-networking sites, rss readers, and customizable homepages like My MSN, My Yahoo, myAOL, and iGoogle. These days, news comes at us in a flood of unrelated snippets. As Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, explains, “The economic logic of the age is unbundling.” But information without context is meaningless. It is incapable of informing and can make consumers feel lost. As the AP noted in its research report, “The irony in news fatigue is that these consumers felt helpless to change their news consumption at a time when they have more control and choice than ever before. When the news wore them down, participants in the study showed a tendency to passively receive versus actively seek news.”

From "Overload" - a long article in last month's Columbia Journalism Review by Bree Nordenson.

Early Oscar Contender in the Death of Newspapers category

It's a short short-list. '08 Remembered.

News Update: the cartoon business model

From Geek and Poke


More here.

How Many Levels of 'Unknowns' does it take to make History?

Great blog on one of those Front Page of History Scenes that probably didn't happen...

Henry Morton Stanley pretended to have written something in his diary on November 23rd, 1871. Perhaps he did, though the pages in his diary are torn out, so we can’t know for sure. The event he claimed to have recorded — but probably didn’t — also probably didn’t happen, or at least not the way it’s usually “remembered.” He most likely didn’t say “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” on meeting the older doctor (Tim Jeal says so in his new biography), and he didn’t even meet him in the jungle at all. He met him in a town...

From the Edge of the American West blog.


And here is an interesting take on the above from the Nieman Journalism blog.

The value of unmediated information, direct from the source closest to the scene, versus the value of an older tradition that filters that information through the methods and mores of a profession? Substitute “those bloggers” for Stanley and “the mainstream media” for the Royal Geographic Society....

Is it just speed we're talking about...?

The End of Me Journalism starts by pointing at good examples of "Them"

Online, there's another alternative, which newspapers seem to have problems figuring out: Beef up coverage by aggregating links from other news sites. I'm always flabbergasted to hear editors complain about sites that link to them (somehow, in this view, the linkers are stealing content), when in fact that traffic is almost always additive- and newspapers should be doing the same thing themselves. Newspaper sites should be the central source of links to anything they cover, and they should use those links to supplement coverage they can't do themselves.

Mark Potts on the future of the "wires".


The next level of this analysis is how to be the "central source". That seems to involve legacy. Should YouTube become a news aggregator?

Mumbai: making judgments

It is not that the information sea has failed in its coverage of the Mumbai tragedy, but making judgments of trust about the veracity of the reporting is especially difficult.

Anger at the media for their coverage of the terror attacks in Mumbai is apparent on the blogosphere. For one, the mainstream media appears to have taken the approach of “shock and shake”, as opposed to verifying rumors before reporting them. But the nation appears glued to their television sets, as it is probably the most “live” source of information at this point in time.

Read some of the comments here: this is the democratisation of doubt. Increasingly the fissure between what is happening, and how it is being reported locally, regionally, nationally, globally (and commented upon by experts, locals, and all of us) becomes part of the story.


Not that in war truth is the first casualty, but that in live events such as now, broadcast and posted globally, the foundations of authenticity are visibly shaky. How do we trust in this environment?






Pictures via The Guardian.

Top 12 Media Gardening Tips November '08

1. Dig over any new beds before the winter frosts.

2. Trim back ivy after flowering and fruiting.

3. Reduce ventilation in the greenhouse.

4. Young fruit trees don’t like weeds or grass growing around their stems, so remove them now. Mulching with garden compost or well-rotted manure will keep them protected, as well as feeding the soil around the roots.

5. Once the ground begins to freeze and you have consistent temperatures in the low 20s F, it's time to protect modern hybrid roses from winter's wind and cold.

6. Add to the compost heap but don't disturb if you want to keep your amphibians warm through the winter.

7. Make sure evergreens have a good deep watering before the ground freezes because they continue to transpire, albeit slowly, during the winter.

8. Make preparations for next year by ordering new seeds, repairing and cleaning out sheds and greenhouses.

9. As ground becomes vacant it should be dug over and manure incorporated. Manure incorporated now should be broken down by planting time next spring.

10. Before lighting your bonfire, remember the hedgehog who thinks that the pile of brushwood is his ideal hibernation spot.

11. Check that young trees are well supported with stakes and ties.

12. Clean and put away tools and machinery.

Hither with crystal phials, lovers, come,
And take my tears, which are love's wine,
And try your mistress' tears at home,
For all are false, that taste not just like mine.
Alas ! hearts do not in eyes shine,
Nor can you more judge women's thoughts by tears,
Than by her shadow what she wears.
O perverse sex, where none is true but she,
Who's therefore true, because her truth kills me.

Twickenham Garden
John Donne

Promiscuity is the New Social Networking

And the old suck it and see.

Back in the earliest days of planning The Washington Post's online strategy, 15-plus years ago, we talked a lot about our intentions to "be promiscuous"–placing as many bets as possible on as many different technologies and strategies as we could.

That philosophy kind of went by the wayside over the years at The Post and other publishers as they put almost all of their chips on building up their Web sites. But as it turned out, the audience was promiscuous, adopting all sorts of online media and devices that publishers never fully appreciated.

Sometimes the old ones are the best. From Recovering Journalist.

Bill Hurt and Holly Hunter were the Orwell of the 80s

Discuss.

Asked if he has become a journalistic cynic, he responded, “That, my friend, is the understatement of the year.” He then quoted a line from the 1987 film “Broadcast News”: “You’re lucky if you can get out while you could still cry.“

“The IFC Media Project” gives Mr. Yago a chance to critique what he sees as misleading media practices. Much of the territory it covers is well worn in print and on the Internet, although not addressed as often on television.

NYT on a user's guide to making television news.

A new kind of "news" memory palace: maps

Bored of the front page or the home page? Then use the map.

a new mashed-up map of its news stories uses Google Gears Geolocation API to determine the user’s location and provide them with geographically relevant news.

ITN now using google APIs to target news to place.


From Journalism.co.uk

The Un-missing Link

If news orgs like the NYT, Washington Post, and hundreds of newspaper sites start linking to news and other content around the web in a big way, on their front pages (as the NYT plans) and across their sites, it will have a HUGE impact on the web’s link economy.

From Publishing 2.0

Ho! Mobility

Camden High Street
London, October
Robin Hunt


“Give it five years time, and I think people will choose to surf news on the mobile, because the mobile will have functionality [e.g GPS] that the internet doesn’t,” Fredrik Oscarson told Journalism.co.uk.


Five years?

Discuss

Britain's journalists, unlike America's, were never as pompous and po-faced as their US counterparts.

Roy Greenslade in the Guardian.

Programmer Journalism, joining Google?

Holovaty gained fame for linking up Google Maps with local crime statistics to create chicagocrime.org, one of the first mapping mashups. And he gained cred in the journalism world by melding programming and reportage at the Washington Post.

Adrian Holovaty helped to create ChicagoCrime.org. Now he has a local news start-up, Everyblock. Here is Chicago.


And this is the FAQ

EveryBlock is a new experiment in journalism, offering a Web "newspaper" for every city block in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC — with more cities to come. Enter any address, neighborhood or ZIP code in those cities, and the site shows you recent public records, news articles and other Web content that’s geographically relevant to you. To our knowledge, it’s the most granular approach to local news ever attempted.

So will Mr. Holovaty join Google? Valleywag thinks so:

If Holovaty does land at Google, expect him to transform Google News into a site that's more of a database of information than a news archive. He's long been critical of the newspaper industry's focus on stories, rather than information. A police-blotter news report, for example, is not as useful as a website which displays crimes on a map by type and date. If Holovaty's going to save journalism, he may have to do it at a search engine that many believe is killing the newspaper business. They can't say he didn't warn them.

Valleywag.

Post Jobs "heart attack" speaking the obvious becomes the norm

“Citizens” — people who are not professional journalists — can use a platform like iReport to legitimately report news. Remember those eyewitness reports from the Minnesota bridge collapse?

The problem is — and this is something that advocates of citizen journalism typically overlook — that if a platform is open, and anyone can participate, that means not only can well-intentioned citizens participate but so can bad actors, spammers, liars, cheats, and thieves.

That’s the double-edged swords of open systems — you have to take the bad with the good. In fact, you have to EXPECT the bad with the good. The ideology of open participation has revolutionized media, but that same ideology is often quite naive.

Publishing 2.0...


Or ZD Net:

I can’t say that this investigation is unexpected. I came across the story very early on in the day on Friday (via Digg) and after about 10 minutes worth of digging around was certain that it was false...

It is strange that it seems to take shorting on a falling Apple share, huge stock market losses, or a bank being wiped out before issues of trust and authenticity go centre stage?


Here's one good question today though:

"Your company is now bankrupt, our economy is now in a state of crisis, but you get to keep $480 million. I have a very basic question for you. Is this fair?"

Henry Waxman, chairman of the House of Representatives oversight committee, questioning Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld over the bank's collapse last month.

BBC Open City

Without the BBC, universality of news service might dry up, investment in UK programmes and journalism would be substantially damaged and we might find ourselves with total market failure. It would resolve the tensions between preserving an innovative and varied ecology in media and needing a public service champion, but a global representative is going to take some bold and creative thinking.

The Guardian's Emily Bell on the BBC.
The Guardian's Jemima Kiss on the BBC.

The director general Mark Thompson has directed the corporation to think beyond proprietary rights management to a new era of interoperability that offers consumers wider choice, control and benefits from "network effects" - the virality and interconnectedness of the web.

And more...

In regional news, the BBC could make all its video reports, audio, text and comments available to commercial rivals and trigger a renaissance in local journalism. And it could allow people to remix BBC news footage for themselves, perhaps for a "day you were born" birthday present or a significant football match.

The Return of News?

Denton tells us Snyder may be taking Gawker in a more newsy direction (Gawker's biggest traffic spikes in the last twelve months have been the result of breaking news stories i.e., The Montauk Monster, the Sarah Palin emails, and the Tom Cruise Scientology video. Says Denton: "In another era, Snyder would have been one of those beloved tyrants who roamed the newsroom." To that end, Gawker has also announced they will be hiring two new reporters.

From Mediabistro.

Kool aid

Put the words Obama and cool into Google, and it will spit out an astonishing 21 million hits. He is black, he is hip, he listens to Jay-Z on his iPod (and Yo-Yo Ma). He plays basketball. He fist-bumps. He is cool, a word that transcends age, race and gender.

Ben Macintyre in the Times.

News Innovation

I've challenged the team to look at improving "conversations around news" - to use digital community-building tools to enhance people's connections to their local communities and to news and information about those communities. If the class is successful, the students will develop new ideas for building these community connections - and a new Web site or service that brings those ideas to life.

Here are the high-level goals for the class:

To understand the ways that journalism has historically helped enable civic engagement and provided a forum for conversations around news.

To understand the nature of people's interactions online and to apply that understanding to local communities and the role of media in a democracy.

To develop recommendations on how to approach news, online conversations and civic engagement.

To develop software prototypes for enhancing online conversations and engagement.

From the MediaShift Idea Lab