Guess the year II

" ‘The best thing going for the Republicans in this election,’ he wrote, ‘is the weakness of the Democrats. There has never been such a motley collection,’ he said, ‘of what former Ambassador William Bullitt used to call "first-rate second-rate men." ‘

"But it does not matter. George Herbert Walker Bush [okay, the name gives this one away] will not be with us much longer. By next Halloween, he will be living somewhere in New Jersey not far from the Nixon homestead."

(Hunter S. Thompson, October 5, 1987. From Generation of Swine – Gonzo Papers Vol.2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80’s)

Investigative Reporting — the new tools

Just got this e-mail from Investigative Reporters and Editors, an organization I joined about a month ago, for the outrageous sum of $25 for a year’s membership.

I say "outrageous" with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek; $25 is a paltry sum for access to IRE’s services and educational opportunities, although the cost to attend a seminar is out of my league. If I wished to go to Miami for a mid-December hiatus from Boston’s chill, for example, it would set me back $500.

But it’s worth it to me to pay $25, even just to be exposed to what IRE offers — a cheap way to learn about the tools available to an investigative journalist in the age of computer-assisted reporting. The NICAR (National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting) database library, for example, is an IRE program. The db library contains links to dozens of governmental databases, listed by category: Federal Spending, Environment, Public Safety, Election Campaigns, Transportation (four sub-categories), and more.

Here’s NICAR’s explanation about itself:

NICAR is a non-profit, journalism service organization. Our policy prohibits us from selling data to nonjournalists. Data is sold at or below costs to journalism organizations or individuals for legitimate journalism uses only.

And here’s the e-mail:

IRE’s CAR Boot Camps just around the corner!

5-day, CAR Boot Camp – Dec. 11-15

Please join IRE, NICAR and Florida International University on Dec. 11-15 for this unique computer-assisted reporting seminar that will show you how to acquire electronic information, use spreadsheets and databases to analyze the information and translate that information into high-impact stories. You can’t go wrong with Miami in December! To register or for more information, see: http://www.ire.org/training/NorthMiami06.html

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6-day, CAR Boot Camp – Jan. 7-12

Start the New Year right by attending IRE and NICAR’s CAR Boot Camp on Jan.

7-12 in Columbia, Mo. Register today and kick-start the use of computer-assisted reporting in your investigations. These unique, intensive seminars train journalists to acquire electronic information, use spreadsheets and databases to analyze the information and translate that information into high-impact stories. In addition, the institute provides follow-up help when participants return to their news organizations. To register for the January camp, see:

http://www.ire.org/training/bootcamps/jan2007.html

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Mapping Data for News Stories Boot Camp – Jan. 12-14 This New Year, resolve to expand your CAR skills with a mapping seminar on Jan. 12-14 in Columbia, Mo. In this intensive Boot Camp, reporters will learn how to uncover interesting news stories by mapping with geographical information system (GIS) software. Participants are encouraged to bring their own data to work on during lab time. They also qualify for reduced-price purchases of popular Mapping Software. To register or for more information, see: http://www.ire.org/training/mapJan2007.html

a random entry for a change…

Tell the FCC what you think!

Just received this e-mail from the Bay Area media watchdog group Media Alliance. If I weren’t 3,000 miles away, I’d be there! But at least we can all listen to what should be a very interesting       discussion live on KPFA 94.1FM

Tonight is your chance, please join us for this rare opportunity to tell key Washington policymakers how the media are serving our Bay Area communities…and how we’d like the FCC to support efforts for a more just media system! Your input is especially important at this time, as the FCC is currently re-considering rules to allow a handful of mega-media corporations to control even more of what we listen to, read, and watch… FCC Public Hearing on the Future of Media 5:00 pm – Opening remarks 6:30 pm – Public comment begins, 2 minutes each, no one turned away Downtown Oakland Marriott, 1001 Broadway, near 12th Street BART For more event details and background info, please visit our website. If you cannot attend, be sure to listen live on KPFA 94.1 FM and file your comments to the FCC online. Tonight I hope you’ll join Media Alliance, the Youth Media Council, the NAACP, Free Press, and many more, as we together raise our voices for media justice. Please encourage friends to attend and listen live, and stay tuned for next steps, Jeff Perlstein Media Alliance p.s. There will also be a terrific panel discussion on how media concentration affects local news, information and culture. Panel participants include: Al Hammond, director, Broadband Institute of California, Santa Clara University School of Law; John McManus, director, Grade the News; Karen Slade, general manager, KJLH-FM; Micheline Wilcoxen, executive director, Community Technology Organizing Consortium of Southern California; Paul Porter, co-founder, Industry Ears; and Tram Nguyen, executive editor, ColorLines.

The Sir Edmund Hillary of bloggers?

Blogging makes it into the pages of The Atlantic!

In the Cover to Cover section of the November issue, in a blurb-style review of a new book by Andrew Sullivan called The Conservative Soul, one of the two Benjamins (Healy and Schwarz — the reviewers) describes Sullivan thus: "a New Republic senior editor and prominent blogger."

This is the first reference I have yet noticed in The Atlantic to "blogger" as a means of identifying and establishing the credibility of a journalist or author. When I read that description, it shouted to me that a magazine that likes to regard itself, and be regarded, as one of the highest mountain peaks of top-notch journalism has accepted that certain forms of blogging (i.e. "serious," "journalistic" blogging) must be acknowledged as journalism.

citizen journalism: 1997-style; 2004 re-boot

Nine years ago, Jay Rosen, of PressThink fame, had this to say about bringing citizens into the ongoing discussion that civic, democratic journalism can be:

Using their capacity to publicly include, journalists should try to give citizens a larger place in the public world, in their capacity as citizens.

To include citizens in their capacity as citizens is to ask them to deliberate with others, in addition to expressing their own opinions. It is to see things from their perspective, in addition to taking their photos. It is to treat them as actors, participants, as well as consumers or clients. It is to hold them to a certain standard of citizenship — which includes civility, mutual respect, informed participation, a willingness to listen and respond — rather than condescendingly treasuring everything they have to say because it comes from an ordinary person.

To see people as citizens is to elevate them to a role they may not always do justice to, which is another way of saying that democracy is frequently disappointing. So, for that matter, is journalism.

Seeing people as citizens is the art of finding that equal station to which all are entitled in a democracy, and reserving a place in the news for people when they occupy that station.

What I mean by "finding that equal station to which all are entitled" is locating the points where  citizens are good judges, where they are competent to advance the discussion.

(From "Public Journalism – Theory and Practice, Lessons from Experience" – Kettering Foundation 1997)

It seems to me that, now, nine years later, this is what newspapers (and other media) are fumbling to do with blogs that elicit reader comments, reader submitted-articles and the like.

It seems to me, also, that such "baby steps" are simply wasting time.

I think what Rosen had in mind was something more along the lines of the leap that Mary Lou Fulton, vice president of audience development at The Bakersfield Californian, took in May, 2004, when she launched The Northwest Voice — one of the first citizen journalism publications to be started in the newspaper industry.

Note that: citizen journalism publication.

Here’s The Northwest Voice in its own words:

The Northwest Voice is a free newspaper that is home-delivered to over 30,000 Northwest homes every other Wednesday. Our Web site is updated daily and includes even more news and pictures.

The Northwest Voice is all about down-home news, told from your perspective. Most of the information and pictures in The Voice are submitted by readers, community organizations, churches and schools. We hope you’ll participate!

Our policy is to publish all contributions on our Web site and include as many as possible in the print edition. To learn how to contribute, click on the graphic at the top of this page.

In addition to reader contributions, The Northwest Voice features articles written by our editor, Maria Machuca, and information about land development, home sale prices and other issues of interest to the community.

We look forward to your participation and feedback as we build The Northwest Voice together!

The publication’s site also includes a "Talk to your neighbors" section with discussion threads, a "Meet your neigbors" section where users of the site post profiles and can read about their neighbors, a "neighborhood blogs" section with links to readers’ blogs and previews of recent posts, and a section where readers can search for others with interests similar to their own, such as photography, music, walking, dogs, linux.

However, even this audacious (at the time of its launch) project still seems to fall a little short of the mark. Rather than being invited to participate in discussions of matters that directly affect their lives and their futures — discussions that are the essence of democracy — readers’ submissions are more of the "down-home" variety.

In a search of the Northwest Voice’s web site just now, using "election" as my search term, I found no hard-hitting discussions — moderated by a staff reporter but with substantial citizen input — about candidates or issues. The only article related to the upcoming elections (~2 weeks away) was about candidates for the local school district board. Important, definitely, but limited in scope and impact.

the questions journos should be asking

The Nieman Watchdog Web site has launched a new blog especially for journalists, Editor & Publisher reported Oct. 12.

In Nieman Watchdog Project editor Barry Sussman’s words, with the blog, "We’d love nothing more than to host a rich, continuing discussion of how to do better reporting and editing — and, in the end, possibly, to help bring about some excellent journalism."

The Nieman Watchdog site, which is affiliated with Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, was created in spring 2004 to "encourage watchdog reporting by drawing on authorities in various fields to suggest questions for the press to ask."

The Weblog is an extension of this mission — 14 (more will likely be added as the blog evolves) of the 130+ Watchdog contributors regularly or sporadically post commentary that invites discussion and reader feedback.

One of my favorites of the 10 or so blog entries so far is Gilbert Cranberg’s from Oct. 19.

In a post titled "Timidity at Work," Cranberg (professor of journalism emeritus at the University of Iowa and 33-year veteran of The Des Moines Register and Tribune) asks why none of the big professional journalism societies — e.g. American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), Society of Professional Journalists, AP Managing Editors — so much as squeaked when the LA Times publisher, Jeffrey Johnson, recently "resigned" after balking at corporate-ordered cuts that he believed would harm the paper.

Cranberg writes:

When Jay Harris quit in 2001 as publisher of the San Jose Mercury News rather than make cuts he believed would harm the paper, he was invited to speak to the annual meeting of ASNE, where he received an enthusiastic standing ovation.

When the LA Times publisher recently balked at cuts for the same reason, ASNE was silent.

Evidently, Tribune company [the LA Times' corporate owner] executives and other like-minded corporate cost-cutters can proceed without fretting about reaction from the organized journalism community.

Why the timidity?

AJAX — and it’s not a cleaning product

This blog is hosted by Typepad, a blog hosting service that was recommended to me around three years ago by a journalism professor back in northern California. It’s a pay-service, but he recommended it because of the greater range (at the time) of "professional" options it offered than other, free, services such as Blogger.

I haven’t explored any of those free hosting services recently, but what I do know is that when I log into Typepad one of the first things I see is a range of links to "industry" news items — often on various aspects of the "Web 2.0" phenomenon. (Not quite sure what to call it, but phenomenon will do, for now.)

A few days ago, I logged in, and this is what I saw:

One of the great things about all this Web 2.0 stuff you keep hearing about is just how easy it can be to create compelling user experiences by gluing different services together. Our friends over at Google demonstrated that recently by putting together ajaxsearch.typepad.com, a demo site of some of the great things you can do with the Google AJAX Search API and a TypePad blog.

Google’s Mark Lucovsky built demos on his TypePad blog of integrated web search, blog search, video search and even mapping. We love seeing creative uses of our Advanced Template Set functionality, and Mark lays out on his blog how you can implement the solutions he built."

I followed the link to Mark’s blog, and this is what he had to say:

Inspired by a blogger named Marjolein Hoekstra, this morning I signed up for a TypePad account so that I could demonstrate how to add Google AJAX Search to a TypePad blog. I got a little carried away and ended up building out a complete TypePad solution. Something that should be pretty easy to migrate into your own TypePad blog. Just follow these instructions:"

And, of course, he gives instructions. They assume a certain amount of basic knowledge regarding Typepad template editing, and, as far as I’ve been able to determine, doing this at all would require a Typepad "Pro" account, but the results are undeniably cool.

Down the right-hand side of Mark’s blog are customized search panes, in order: Google search; Google video search, with four panels of video stills below the search box, name links to videos that other people have uploaded, and a link to "upload your own videos"; Google map search with a picture of the map, which on Mark’s blog is centered on Santa Barbara and has links below it to "A few great places" — namely "Sushi, Lucky’s, BikeShop, TheBiltmore, Jeannine’s, Cava, SanYsidroRanch, Sunstone, Melville, PhysicalFocus." Mark’s tour of the best parts of SB, no doubt.

What’s the potential of this for journalism? For journalism in the world of Web 2.0, for "old-school" journalism, for the wild and crazy (I’ve been reading Hunter Thompson; excuse the hyperbole) frontier between the two?

I’m not sure, but I know that before too long someone like Adrian Holovaty (who created and maintains Chicagocrime.org from data extracted from the Chicago Police Dept.’s Citizen ICAM Web site melded with Google mapping software) will create a new, web-based form of journalism that breaches boundaries.

A postscript to Mark’s entry, that encapsulates the exclusivity-destroying nature of the Web-based world into which we’re inexorably journeying:

"p.s. – If you are a Blogger user, check out http://ajaxsearch.blogspot.com"

Ethics in the wild & crazy new frontier

A friend listening to NPR’s Morning Edition radio show this morning told me about this latest development in the Mark Foley-congressional pages saga:

(From the Drudge Report):

ABC ONLINE GLITCH LEADS TO IDENTITY OF FOLEY ACCUSER

FAMOUS IM EXCHANGE WAS WITH 18 YEAR OLD

**UPDATE Thu Oct 05 2006 11:54:13 ET

A posting on ABCNEWS.COM of an unredacted instant message sessions between Rep. Mark Foley and a former congressional page has exposed the identity of the now 21 year-old accuser.

The website PASSIONATE AMERICA detailed the startling exposure late Wednesday.

…

ABC explains in a statement: "On Friday, ABC News published instant messages between a former page and Congressman Foley with the IM screen name of the teenage victim redacted. Immediately, we discovered that in one instance, the screen name of the teen on one IM exchange had not been properly redacted. ABC News immediately took down the posting [version 1], redacted the screen name and re-published the posting [version 2]. We certainly believed that we had taken care of the issue quickly. Last evening, after an inquiry from Matt Drudge, it came to our attention that a blogger was able to access our deleted file [version 1] by typing in a slightly modified web address. To be clear, no one visiting our website would have simply stumbled on the old version."

Apparently, by announcing the congressional page’s screen name in its report, ABC revealed enough information for a blogger to track down the page’s real name and identity.

As I say in my post above this one: "the exclusivity-destroying nature of the Web-based world into which we’re inexorably journeying."

I haven’t had much time to consider all of the ramifications of this, but one of the first that springs to mind is this:

The immediate nature of hyper-text based journalism necessitates hyper-vigilance on the part of journalists to ensure accuracy — and to prevent ethical violations with the potential to radically alter the lives of the people we report upon.

Journalism of the Web — real life

On Friday I had five "Briefs" to write for the New England Press Association Bulletin. After seven hours in front of my computer they were done (part of that seven hours was spent on the phone, requesting photos/pdf images to go with the briefs, and doing some reporting for which talking to a person was necessary) — but they wouldn’t have been had I not been able to look up innumerable documents and other information (company names, locations, phone numbers, "about" sections; people’s titles, roles, contact info.) online.

Somewhere around hour five on Friday, I had a flash of horror as I thought what I just wrote above. There’s no way what I did that day would have been possible without the Internet. I lived on Google that afternoon/evening, and usually had six or seven browser windows open at once (this is why I have a firewall and a virus scanner…), between which and my Word document I was shuttling with the keyboard shortcut "alt+tab" — back-and-forth incessantly as I slowly built my Briefs.

Around my computer on the desk were strewn paper "clips" from other publications — these were the triggers for the Briefs and contained a fair amount of information, but not enough for my task. And how had I received these paper clips? Via e-mail, from which I printed them out.

And where will my Briefs, once revised, be published? In the NEPA Bulletin — mailed to all the newspapers of New England, and on the Internet. In a pdf version of the Bulletin on the NEPA Web site. Where the information contained in them will be available to all with an Internet connection via a search engine such as Google.

And the circle grows ever wider.