May 2012
2 posts
11 tags
April 2012
1 post
11 tags
Does the AP Stylebook perpetuate stigma over...
The Associated Press just released an update to the AP Stylebook, which includes a note on privacy and sexual assault.
privacy Do not identify juveniles (under 18) who are accused of crimes, even if other news media do so or police release names. Also, do not transmit images that would reveal their identity. Do not identify, in text or through images, juveniles (under 18) who are witnesses...
March 2012
1 post
6 tags
Cleaning The Developing World With Unused Hotel... →
In 2009, Clean the World was born. It collects soaps and bottled goods from hotels (and charges them around 65 cents per month per room to participate) and reprocesses the soaps to be sent around the world. So far, more than 10 million bars of soap have been distributed to 48 countries, says Gomez. “That’s also 1.4 million pounds of hotel waste diverted from landfills,” he adds.
I’ve...
January 2012
3 posts
CBS reports Joe Paterno's death too soon, throws...
5 tags
The Online Public Records Accessibility standard
I don’t see why—in 2012—you still have to ask for public records to gain access to them.
It made sense in the old days, when you simply couldn’t access documents without asking first. They were stored in filing cabinets, and some poor clerk had to get up and retrieve them for you before you could read them.
You’d think those days would be long gone, two decades after the...
My landlady and the one percent
“The one percent,” she told me while fighting back tears, “they make all the rules.”
There’s a story behind every housing ad on craigslist. I saw one by a 42 year-old man who had a room to rent. “Just me and my 9 year-old girl,” it said. “Available immediately.” Or the one by the single 39 year-old woman whose ad included the question...
December 2011
2 posts
November 2011
1 post
No, I will not send you a list of my interview...
Cross-posted from my Public Relations class.
Hi, my name is Daniel and I am a tired, under-trained, over-worked reporter who is prone to making mistakes.
At least, that’s how Greg Miller of Marketcon PR describes my noble profession in a blog post on Ragan.com.
Journalism is hard work, Miller says, and reporters sometimes make mistakes when dealing with PR reps. He mentions one example:
...
October 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Can journalists put a "Donate" button in a story?
Yesterday a professor asked me if we could add a “Donate” button at the bottom of an upcoming article on LUTE Times, a classroom blog.
The article is about an organization, and the button would presumably take you to a page where you could fill in your credit card information and give them money.
“No way,” I said. “That would be advocacy.”
My professor...
PR lessons from Steve
Cross-posted from my ‘PR Principles and Practices’ class.
You couldn’t shake a stick at the Internet yesterday without learning that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had passed away. Along with the iPhone and the iPad, Jobs leaves behind important lessons for PR professionals. In his blog entry on Ragan’s PR Daily, Geoff Livingston notes:
The one thing to add beyond...
September 2011
1 post
“In this tragic moment, when words seem so inadequate to express the shock people...”
– Jean-Marie Colombani, Le Monde, Sept. 12, 2001
August 2011
2 posts
NYTimes Op-Ed page hacked! srsly! →
WHAT’S up, Times readers? Normally right now you’d be nodding off over a very thoughtful prescription for offering Qaddafi an honorable exile at a plastic surgery teaching hospital. But not today, people! Because I deleted that snoozer when I hacked my way in here.
Steve Bodow (Daily Show) and the New York Times poke fun at Anonymous and LulzSec. This is a must-read.
July 2011
3 posts
Attack on Norway: We face evil with compassion... →
Since I came to PLU, many have asked me to describe what Norwegians are like. Today, I am proud to give you my answer. When news came in about the bombing and massacre in Norway on July 22, it looked for a while as if things just kept getting worse. First came the report that at least 80* youths had been shot dead on the island of Utøya. Then came the heart-wrenching TV pictures and the ...
Reporters called victims' cellphones while they...
While victims tried to quietly hide from a gunman during last Friday’s massacre in Norway, their cellphones started going off. Reporters were looking for a quote.
Tore Christensen, 25, told Nettavisen.no he could hear the gunman shoot someone only 2-4 yards away from his hiding-place inside a café building. Shortly thereafter, a news reporter called his cellphone.
Luckily, the phone was...
"Script Kiddies" Hack Fox News Account, Tweet... →
Early this morning, six tweets went out over one of the Twitter accounts managed by Fox News, @foxnewspolitics, which described in graphic and convincing detail how the president had been shot and killed while campaigning in Iowa. […]
It wasn’t until around noon — ten hours after the messages had been posted — that someone with access to the Twitter account, which has ...
May 2011
2 posts
Making An Example Of Someone: Norwegian paper...
When I see newspapers latch onto a person at the beginning of a story, and drag them through paragraphs and paragraphs of social commentary as a plot device, I start to get uncomfortable.
I remember hearing about it on the news: Ali Farah had been assaulted in Oslo’s Sofienberg Park, but two paramedics refused to give him a ride to the hospital. As the ambulance drove away, the man was...
A college newspaper goes online ...again.
About a week ago, I was hired as Web Editor by our college newspaper. I kind of see myself as FEMA, coming into town after a particularly bad hurricane, to rebuild.
The Mooring Mast has been trying to “go online” ever since I came to PLU, and it has been an absolute disaster. I’ve learned two things from this whole process:
Surprisingly enough, college students are not...
April 2011
1 post
Finding crime hotspots through crowdsourcing
The Norwegian newspaper VG Nett recently posted an article asking readers to point out streets where they didn’t feel safe. Today they published the results.
The original article gave readers an interactive Google Map where they got to click up to five streets where they don’t feel safe. According to the results, 16,000 readers responded.
I actually talked to VG Nett’s...
March 2011
0 posts
February 2011
3 posts
Some Analysts Say... (Google News) →
Here’s what you do. Go to Google News, type in “some analysts say” in the search bar, and watch journalism spiral into a crash.
Thanks to CNET’s Buzz Out Loud for this link… last year.
January 2011
5 posts
Facebook is NOT Shutting Down March 15 →
[UPDATE] We have official confirmation from Facebook Director of Corporate Communications Larry Yu that the rumor is false. We asked him via e-mail if Facebook was shutting down on March 15, to which he responded, “The answer is no, so please help us put an end to this silliness.” He added, “We didn’t get the memo about shutting down and there’s lots to do, so we’ll just keep cranking away...
“I am fascinated by the seemingly involuntary “liberals vs....”
"Prison Valley" - A Captivating Interactive...
Last night I participated in the Society of Professional Journalists’ monthly Twitter chat, this one being about online storytelling. Featured guests were Mark Briggs, Mandy Jenkins and Mark S. Luckie. Check out the highlights here.
When guests were asked to name some of their favorite online storytelling examples, Luckie nominated the interactive web documentary Prison Valley. I wanted to...
“media platform - Often mistaken for the singular “medium.” Refers to...”
– @FakeAPStylebook
Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting... →
It looks like the “programmer journalist” might be here to stay.
ProPublica has written a series of blog posts with a practical guide to data scraping. This is a technique for automagically lifting content off of web pages, PDFs, images, etc. and organizing it into easily searchable databases. This can be handy if you’re trying to find financial ties between drug companies and...
December 2010
7 posts
My favorite term from 2010: The Teaspoon Effect →
I’m surrounded every day by ambitious people who are passionate about a new idea and want to make it a reality. They’ll pull up a chair and go on at length about this cool new project of theirs, and you can practically see fire in their eyes.
I have been - and continue to be - one of those people.
The thing is, the key to a really good idea isn’t whether you yourself would use...
BREAKING NEWS: Blogging Is Not Dead...
…or: The Social Media Press Is Out Of Touch With Real People
A tweet from Stefan Konrath today announced that blogs aren’t really dead, no matter what you may have heard.
Funny, I hadn’t heard…
It included a link to this post debunking a recent claim by Mashable that blogging is on the decline.
I can’t help but feel that the social media “scene” has...
So You Want A Reality Check
This month, two animated videos were released upon the interwebs, poking fun at naive college students and cynical journalism veterans.
If you’ve ever worked in the industry, you’ll probably find both of them pretty funny. If you’re a college student planning to work in the industry, you should probably find them both funny and terrifying.
This Christmas, why not...
MediaShift Idea Lab . Introducing Sourcerer: A... →
Seems like context is the new big thing in online journalism.
The idea used to be “let the reader sift through millions of RSS feeds and create their own newspaper.”
Now it’s more about helping readers understand the context of what they’re reading. We saw this when news sites started introducing “Topic pages,” but this prototype called Sourcerer goes even...
Why WordPress isn't ready for college yet
Bryan Murley made this comment during a recent CoPress discussion.
Can i just say that this seems to be the one major issue that many people have with WordPress in general in college media - the numerous updates and plug-in f***-ups. I’ve been through too many damned .x.x updates to listen to anyone saying get off my lawn. I really love the platform, but the constant updates can be...
“When I talk about Twitter, I’m often asked; What can you say in 140...”
– Alfred Hermida (@Hermida)
November 2010
1 post
Is SeattlePI.com blurring the line between news...
If you write a news story in the style of a classified ad, are you blurring the line between editorial content and advertising?
This one comes from Dean Owen at World Vision, who visited our class two weeks ago. While discussing the blurring line between editorial content and advertising in news media, the spotlight fell on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Here is the example we looked at:
...
October 2010
2 posts
September 2010
2 posts
Is this what journalism job ads will look like? →
Everybody and their dog has been talking about “the future of journalism” lately, but this piece on Mashable is well researched and has a rich amount of information in it.
The differences between reporting and...
I spent this week working my first story for PLU’s college paper The Mooring Mast. I’ve discovered that I relish the reporting process, but hate the writing process.
When I’m out there interviewing people, anything I do results in me getting more information. Pieces start to fall into place. Not all of them are equally significant, but they all form a picture.
Then I sat down...
August 2010
1 post
“Money pays the bills but it’s a thin source of meaning. We feel better...”
– Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project (“Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation”)
Amen to that.
(Redacted. New post to follow.)
July 2010
3 posts
First version of WordPress-based Assignment Desk...
Update: Daniel Bachhuber has informed me that this isn’t actually an official release, and they are working on a full rewrite of the software.
Ever since I heard Jay Rosen say that NYU’s journalism and computer science programs were teaming up to build an open source assignment desk using the WordPress blogging framework, I’ve been eager to get my hands on it. Well it’s...
Why do people read news?
Ever since I can remember, I’ve heard about how it’s our “civic duty” to read the news and stay informed about the “pressing issues of the day.” (I like to imagine it in the voice of Brian Williams.)
I don’t think anyone really reads news because they should. I think we do so because we want to; because it adds something of value to our lives.
I came...
June 2010
2 posts
QuiBids ad poses as news-organization
Have you ever heard of The Consumer Tips Digest? It’s not a news-site or product review blog; it’s one of the most creatively unethical ads I’ve seen in a long time.
Go there and you’ll be greeted by an article written by “Julie,” your friendly Consumer Tips Investigator. The article is an overly positive review of QuiBids, a penny-auction site, complete with a...
Possible new security-flaw in College Publisher →
Justin Taylor writes:
Our new site is set to launch tomorrow so here I am messing about the administrator controls and organizing and creating all my pages and content, when I came across a huge security issue. For some reason, using College Publisher’s Polopoly CMS, I’m able to post articles to any website in mtv’s “College Media Network.”
Read more
November 2009
1 post
DanielDrake.Net →