JPROF

Intercollegiate Online News Network conference set for January

2010-10-15T05:18:00.003-04:00

The Intercollegiate Online News Network (ICONN) will hold its third annual conference on Jan. 13-14, 2011, in Athens, Ga.

Mark Johnson, journalism professor at the University of Georgia and faculty adviser to the GradyJournal, is the conference chair.

ICONN is an association of campus news websites that was formed at the University of Tennessee in 2008. Academic programs, campus news websites, professional organizations and individuals are welcome to join ICONN at no cost. If you are wanting to start a news website for your course or program, ICONN can help you do that with its JeffersonNet content management system.

More information can be found at the ICONN website.

Seven steps to the audio slideshow

2010-08-10T10:28:00.004-04:00

Getting prepared for the upcoming semester, I took a shot at codifying the procedures for creating an audio slideshow. If any journalism instructors out there want to use this, they're welcome to it (credit JPROF.com).

Seven steps to the audio slideshow

JEM 200 and 230 students (and beyond)

An audio slideshow is a journalistic form that combines sound and still pictures to tell a story.

1. FORM THE IDEA

-- what’s the slideshow about; what story is being told

2. DRAFT THE SCRIPT

two to three minutes (or as long as necessary)
time the script (remember: 10-15 pictures per minute

3. SHOOT THE PHOTOS

Rule No. 1: Take lots of pictures
Long-range, midrange, close-ups
Control the background, fill the frame, wait for moments
Rule of thirds
Last rule: Take lots of pictures

4. REVISE AND EDIT THE SCRIPT

(and shoot more photos)

5. Record and edit the audio (Audacity)

narrator
interviews
ambient sound
music and sound effects

6. SELECT, EDIT AND SEQUENCE THE PICTURES

software: Picasa, iMovie, Soundslides, Animoto
create title, credit and date slides

7. COMBINE SOUND AND PICTURES

convert to video file
upload (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)
breathe a sigh of relief
tell your friends

Photo story day - JEM 200's in-class lecture assignment

2010-03-29T11:02:00.001-04:00

Lecture assignment, March 25, 2010

Students in the JEM 200 course at the University of Tennessee were assigned to do a photo story of the lecture itself last week. Here's a short video of how the class went. Below are some of the instructions students received about the assignment.

Students,

You will be asked to begin an in-class photo assignment in lecture this week. To prepare, do the following.

Acquire a camera and get familiar with the kind of pictures it can take -- particularly pictures indoors with reasonably good light.

Establish an account with some picture hosting service. Recommended is Picasaweb, Google's service.

Upload some pictures to your account so that you can get familiar with the process.

Review JPROF's series on photojournalism, especially the part about writing cutlines.

You will be asked to take enough pictures to select 10 to 15 good ones (which means you should be taking 50 to 100 pictures, at least) and load them into an album on your hosting service. (Picasaweb is good for this because it lets you create new albums at will. Then, it can automatically make an embeddable slide show from that album.)

You will need to write cutlines for all of the pictures that go into your album, so part of your assignment will be getting cutline information. We'll talk more about that during lecture.

Your photos should include examples of long range, medium range and close-up pictures. You should have more close-up pictures than anything else.

This is a graded assignment, so do some thinking about it before you come to class. Some of the best advice you can follow are these guidelines for the student photojournalist.

Crowdsourcing the Civil War

2010-03-24T06:27:00.003-04:00

In the video below, George Rable, University of Alabama history professor, discusses the sources of information that newspaper editors during the Civil War used for their reports about battles and the war in general.

One important source was letters from soldiers -- a form of what we could call today crowdsourcing. This means using the accounts of participants at an event to construct an account of that event.

Crowdsourcing the Civil War from Jim Stovall on Vimeo.

Kiffen pre-presser video - last century's journalism

2010-01-19T10:16:00.006-05:00

The YouTube video above shows the eight minutes of controversy surrounding Bud Ford, the news reporters, and Lane Kiffen's lack of cooperation with reporters in dispensing information about his resignation as Tennessee's football coach last week.

The video has been racing around the web (more than 175,000 views as of this morning), and lots of folks are getting exorcised about it. The comments I've seen about it tend toward the anti-Kiffen flavor (he's some kind of coward not the face the media); and some are anti-reporters (they should have stood behind Bill Shorey's insistence that Kiffen go on camera).

By my general impression is this:

It was all absolutely unnecessary.

It is, at best, a demonstration of last century's journalistic process.

The first question that springs to mind is: Why were the reporters there at all?

If Kiffen didn't want to talk on camera and if he wasn't going to answer questions, why waste time showing up? If all Kiffen was going to do is make a statement, he could have done that in front of a camera and put it on YouTube. Then everybody could have viewed it, the message would have gotten out, the reporters could have noted it and gotten on with the business of reporting the story.

Instead, they all gathered in a room and waited -- WAITED -- for Lane Kiffen to show up, knowing he wouldn't be answering questions.

Why did they do that?

Because they've always done it that way.

JPROF.com celebrates 5th anniversary

2009-12-31T07:28:00.005-05:00

JPROF celebrates its fifth anniversary today.

In the past five years the site has grown in size (more than 400), expanded in purpose and reached around the globe to people I never would have touched or heard from.

JPROF was originally conceived (in my small study in Emory, VA, where we were living at the time) as a large, personal filing cabinet for material that I had accumulated during more than 25 years of teaching journalism. The amount of material on the web was expanding exponentially (as it still is), and I also wanted a place to store the things I had found that I might be able to use.

And, because I had several textbooks in print at the time, I wanted a web site that would give users more expanded and up-to-date material.

Since that time, JPROF has also become a forum (particularly through the companion blog http://jprof.blogspot.com for my impressions of what is happpening in the world of journalism and a site for all of the courses that I teach.

Because of JPROF, I have taken on some interesting and exciting projects, particularly this year for Edgenics.com -- something you will hear a great deal about during 2010.

Much has changed in my life during the last five years. I am now on the faculty of the University of Tennesse, having moved from Emory and Henry College in 2006. I am the faculty adviser for the Tennessee Journalist, the students news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media, and through it, we have been able to launch a national organization of campus news web sites, the Intercollegiate Online News Network (ICONN). At UT, we have been able to change our curriculum in an interesting and innovative way, and I have the privilege of being in the midst of those changes.

The field of journalism offers many excellent opportunities for our students, and I am happy to still be a part of it.

Personally, 2009 brought Sally and me a move to the farm where she grew up and a new daughter-in-law. Our video review of the year is now on YouTube.

As ever, I am profoundly grateful for the friends I have made through JPROF and for all of the people who have contacted me over the years because what they have found here.

Now, as is my usual custom on this date and because it is New Year's Eve, I bid you: Party on!

Have a great New Year.

(In case you're interested, you can read what we said about JPROF on each of the previous anniversaries on JPROF's About page.)

A new edition of Fowler

2009-12-12T08:00:00.003-05:00

Early in my academic writing career, I met Fowler.

I was putting together the first edition of Writing for the Mass Media and was looking for some basic writing references and somehow -- I don't remember how -- came upon Fowler. It was, the parlance of that day, the real thing.

Fowler is an "it," as well as a "he."

He is Henry Fowler. It is A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, or as Jim Holt notes in his essay in the New York Times, "among its devotees it is known, reverentially, as 'Fowler.' ”

Holt tells the interesting story of how Fowler became "Fowler." Henry Fowler was a former school teacher and amateur wordsmith who lived on the island of Guernsey with his younger brother Frank. In the first decade of the 20th century, Henry and Frank published a book titled The King's English, which, despite their amateur status, was a great success. They took on the editing of The Concise Oxford Dictionary and then planned a larger book on the language, but World War I occurred. Frank died of tuberculosis, and Henry barely survived a bout of illness, But when he did, he took up the project that he and his brother had envisioned.

As Holt relates in his essay:

The book was published in 1926, to immediate acclaim and brisk sales. Although language, as the truism goes, is an ever changing Heraclitean river, Fowler was not revised until 1965, when Sir Ernest Gowers gave it a light going-over, preserving both the spirit and the substance of the original. (The same cannot be said of the 1996 third edition, heavily reworked by R. W. Burchfield.) Now Oxford University Press has reissued the classic first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ($29.95), with an acute new introduction by the linguist David Crystal. It is a volume that everyone who aspires to a better command of English should possess and consult — sparingly. (emphasis mine)

Sparingly, as Holt points out in the rest of his essay, is the key.

You can't take Fowler too seriously because, for one, Fowler doesn't take himself too seriously. The language should be whatever is useful and not laden with a lot of half-wit rules (such as never splitting an infinitive).

The dictionary isn't a dictionary of definitions but rather a collection of short essays on the language. Most of them are short, thought-provoking, delightful and informative.

Fowler/'Fowler' has been a good friend for a quarter of a century, and it's good to know that there is another edition for the next generation.

An almost new way of organizing news

2009-12-08T17:41:00.006-05:00

The way a news organization arranges its content -- news, business, sports, editorial, etc. -- has been a standardized and unquestioned mantra of journalism for many decades.

The front page, or in the digital age the "home page," had a mix of stories and subjects, but each section such as sports had stories that could specifically classified as belonging to that section.

But is this how the readers really want their news?

What if there's a topic you're especially interested in and you want everything a news organization has on that topic in one place? And, if it's breaking news, you want those stories updated the moment new information comes in. And you don't want to wade through a lot of other stuff.

That kind of organization -- one by news topic rather than section heading -- may be on the way. GoogleLabs has teamed up with the Washington Post and New York Times to experiment with something they call Living Story Pages. These pages take a topic and group everything the news organization has about that topic together.

You can see the results of the experiment at this GoogleLabs page.

The Post has three pages, one each on health-care reform, D.C. schools and the Washington Redskins. The Times has five: Afghanistan, executive compensation, global warming, swine flu and health care. These are topics the news organizations are paying a lot of attention to and to which they are continually generating new information.

This is a departure from the standardized news site organization, but it isn't totally new. Newspapers did this years ago when they would group all of their stories about a big news event together on a page or in a special section.

The news here, however, isn't the idea so much as that fact that the news organizations are working with Google -- not going to war with the search engine behemoth as Rupert Murdoch apparently is determined to do.

And there is yet another departure from the traditional thinking: the Living Story Page mixes news and opinion together. That's a bigger break from the past than most people realize.

Bad news

2009-12-04T09:24:00.003-05:00

I am currently working with Edgenics.com to develop a new course curriculum for high school journalism. You will be hearing more about this project as we go along.

Here's a short audio slideshow on the fact that journalists have to tell their audiences "bad news":

Journalists have to tell their audiences bad news. It's not fun or pleasant to do this, but you're going to be a journalist, that's what you have to do.

Niles: Murdoch thinks he can screw Google. Think again.

2009-11-25T13:04:00.004-05:00

Bob Niles is taking Microsoft and News Corp. to task for trying to restrict access to content. Their agreement, he says, is oh so 20th century -- when you could get away with creating content and then parceling it out.

Not any more:

But, today, it (the deal) illustrates just the latest example of backward-thinking by legacy media executives who've been left lost and clueless by the Internet revolution.

Niles is more than a little gleeful about this wrong-headed move because he detests "the Fox News' cynical Republican-propaganda-masquerading-as-news" stuff that News Corp. produces.

But he also makes the point:

The Internet is killing one legacy media business model, however, and that's the supply-side model based on creating value by restricting access to content. That's the model upon which the News Corp.-Microsoft deal is based. While it might have worked in a pre-Web, channel-driven world, the public simply has spun too many ways around content-control deals to make this one worth Microsoft's time or investment.

Can't say as I disagree with much that Niles had to say.

Stepping on the Big Feet of Washington journalism

2009-11-23T08:50:00.002-05:00

David Sirota, writing for Salon.com, steps on a couple of the Big Feet of Washington journalism for supporting the Idiocracy:

First came a now-famous column about Afghanistan by the Washington Post's David Broder. The "dean" of the press corps attacked President Obama not for choosing any particular policy, but for simply taking time to meticulously consider his options in the Central Asian quagmire. "The urgent necessity," Broder asserted, "is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right."

This was followed by Jackson Diehl, the Post's foreign policy "expert." He wrote that the White House’s assiduous Afghanistan deliberations are not a sign of reassuring prudence after the bring-it-on Bush years, but instead a "compelling cause for unease about this president." Diehl's rationale for such an incendiary statement? He alleged (without proof, of course) that "there is unanimity in the Pentagon and considerable agreement in Congress and among the NATO allies" that a military escalation has to happen -- and therefore Obama "knows (the pro-escalation) course he must take" but "can't bring himself to embrace it."

Good points. Worth reading the whole thing.

University of Tennessee proposes new curriculum for journalism students

2009-11-20T09:14:00.008-05:00

UPDATE: The college faculty just voted to approve, with minor changes, the proposed changes in the journalism curriculum and requirements. (Nov. 20, 2009, 10 a.m.)

The faculty of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennnesse has proposed a number of changes to our curriculum. These changes are based on the following goals:

To create an innovative curriculum designed to address the changes occurring in all media.
To create a more flexible curriculum in the wake of economic realities at UT and in media industries.
To prepare graduates who are capable of working in all media.
To eliminate current bottlenecks in the curriculum preventing some students from graduating in 4 years.
To simplify the curriculum by eliminating tracks and by reducing the total number of courses.
To create a curriculum we can deliver with 17 faculty members, some lecturers, and GTAs.
To integrate new media in as many courses as possible.

The proposed curriculum includes a core and upper division electives. The proposed core is designed to ensure that all students should have the following knowledge and skills:

An understanding of the principles and history of all media.
An understanding of media law, diversity, and ethics.
The ability to write, report, and present news and other content in all platforms.
An understanding of the business of journalism and media and the issues affecting the business.
Professional experience

CHANGES TO COURSES OF INSTRUCTION

The new curriculum eliminates the "tracks" (magazine, sports, broadcasting, etc.) Instead, all journalism students will be required to complete the following core (22 hours).

JEM 200—Media Writing (3)
JEM 250—Visual Communication (3)
JEM 275—Principles and History of Journalism and Media (3)
JEM 300—Media Reporting (3)
JEM 400--Mass Communication Law and Ethics (3)
JEM 465—Media, Diversity, and Society (3)
JEM 492—Practicum 1-2
JEM 499—The Media Business and Future of Journalism (3)

This is a huge and important change. The faculty of the entire College of Communication and Information is set to vote on this change this morning.

The entire proposal can be found in this Word document (auto download).

The demise of newspapers - revisited

2009-10-15T08:18:00.003-04:00

A few months ago, I wrote a piece about the demise of newspapers being a good thing for the future of journalism.

Today, I am using those ideas -- and a new more -- as a basis for a speech I am giving to the Knoxville Torch Club.

Here is the basic text of the talk:

A couple of weeks ago, my son got married in Washington, D.C., at the Willard Hotel . . . [STORY] (audio to come)

What’s this got to do with newspapers? Nothing. And that’s the point.

What’s this got to do with journalism? A lot, I think.

Our world of communication – and our way of delivering the news – has shifted dramatically over the last ten years, even over the last five years. Print is no long a viable option of telling ourselves about ourselves on a timely basis, which is what journalism is. Print is slow, cumbersome, limited and expensive.

The web, on the other hand, is fast, flexible, inexpensive and seems to offer the future of journalism a cafeteria of possibilities that make the future both bright and interesting.

That’s why I believe the quicker we can get over our adherence to print in journalism, the better journalism will be.

Now, notice the wording of this talk. I said the demise of newspapers, not the death of newspapers. I do not wish death upon newspapers.

I grew up, so to speak, with newspapers. Reading them and later working for them. I have worked for six different newspapers as a reporter and editor, and since I have been in academia I have consulted with many more. I have many friends and former students who are fulltime newspaper people. I do not wish them ill.

And, in fact, I do not believe that newspapers in general are going to die. Some have, and some will, certainly. But when you look at the newspaper industry as a whole, particularly smaller newspapers, you see an industry that is in pretty good shape.

Smaller newspapers are better able to weather the rough economic climate that we are experiencing today. And, I think, they have more time to figure out the new media environment that we are in. Plus, their structure makes them more flexible and adaptable, and I think there is a great chance that they will come through all of this – though I believe their days of monopolistic practices and fat profits are over.

So, if a journalism student still wants a career in newspapers, I think it’s still a viable option.

But if a student is interest in doing journalism, I no longer think that newspapers are the best option. In fact, I’m not convinced that they are a very good option – for the reasons I mentioned earlier. They are slow, cumbersome, and expensive.

And they are limited.

Newspapers, by their very nature, can give you the news in only one way – print. The web can use a variety of forms and formats – text, pictures, audio, video and combinations of these platforms. Newspapers are geared to production deadlines. The web has significantly less production time involved in the process, and that production is significantly cheaper.

The quicker that newspapers transform themselves into news organizations – ones where print is only a small portion of what they do – the better off they will be. And the better off we, as news consumers, will be. To do that, newspapers will not only have to change what they do but also the way they think.

And here, I think, the evidence is discouraging.

Newspapers should be hiring reporters and editors rather than firing them.

Newspapers should be investing in journalism and in innovative ways to inform their readers rather than cutting back on page numbers and page sizes.

Newspapers should be looking for new ways to serve their readers. They should be trying to find new services based on the fact that they are the chief information gatherers in their communities.

Newspapers should be more attuned to what their audiences want and need. And they should be more responsive.

Several months ago, I was trying to sell a house. I visited the web site of the local newspaper to find out information about buying a classified ad. That began a rather torturous journey that wasted an hour of my time . . .[STORY](audio to come)

If newspapers are going to have paid subscribers – and I think that is a BIG IF – they should stop whining about the Internet and charge those subscribers something much closer to the cost of production than what they do now.

Finally, newspapers have to accept two irrefutable facts:

• Their economic environment has changed. They are no longer the monopolies that can command 20, 30, or even 40 percent profit margins.

• News and information is no longer what they thought it was.

In the good old days – about 10 years ago – news was a product. Newspapers produced it and sold it.

But the world is shifting so that news is now conversation. Economically, how does that work? The answer is we don’t know. But there it is.

Let me give you a non-newspaper example of this:

I coordinate all of the sections of our beginning news writing course. We offer about 11 sections, and once a week, all of those sections come together for a lecture that I give. There are between 150 and 200 students there. Most of you have probably heard of Twitter. [EXPLAIN] Well, Twitter is not all that popular with students . . .[STORY] (audio to come)

Unfortunately, I do not see a lot of evidence that newspaper are accepting their new environment or changing their thinking. There is very little innovation going on with newspapers now. It’s most retrenchment and hoping that all of this will go away.

The innovation is being done by Google and Yahoo and the small entrepreneurs who will shape the new media world. They are the ones that are creating a very bright future for today’s journalism students.

And that is why I believe that the demise of newspapers, ultimately, will be a good thing for journalism.

The Intersection of Journalism and Fiction

2009-10-12T06:31:00.006-04:00

The Ossoli Circle -- one of the oldest women's clubs in the South -- has asked me to speak today.

The invitation came because of the mystery novel, Kill the Quarterback, which was published last year. The following is a text of some of what I plan to say:

When people ask what Kill the Quarterback is about, I have a ready answer. “It’s not about football.”

The story is about a police reporter in Nashville who covers the investigation into the murder of a star quarterback. The reporter, Mitch Sawyer, finds out things about the murder that the police do not know. Mitch has friends on the police force, but he also has enemies. One of those enemies is the guy who heads the muder investigation.

So, Mitch – an independent cus – doesn’t tell what he knows.

Besides, Mitch thinks the police should do their own investigating. He doesn’t feel the need to help them out.

Mitch gets more deeply involved in all this, and he finds a far more complicated story than what he had imagined. And he finds this story hitting close to home.

Eventually, Mitch becomes a target of the murderer. And thereby hangs the tale.

I have taught journalism and writing for more than 30 years. I am fortunate enough to have a textbook on writing that has been in print for 25 years and is now in its seventh edition. I am former newspaper reporter and magazine staff member.

So why write fiction?

First, I think stories are important. Whether they are fiction or journalism, the stories that we tell each other have a great deal to do with who we are, what kind of a society we have and what kind of a life we lead.

Our religious beliefs are based on stories.

Our history – and our ideas about how we got to this point – are based stories.

Our view of the world around is based on narratives – the narrative of Barack Obama, the narrative of September 11, the narrative of Tennessee football. Our thinking about all of these things is conditioned by the stories that we hear about them.

All this is journalism.

But our fiction is also an important factor in the way we view the world. We may look at fiction as just entertainment, but I think it is far more than that – that it has a much higher purpose.

Fiction is a powerful part of the culture, and our ideas about who we are and what the world is like come through our fiction.

That’s why I have turned to fiction, at least briefly. I want to use whatever modest gifts I have for writing to tell stories.

Besides, there are many similarities between journalism and fiction. I know a statement like that invites many acerbic and waggish comments about too much journalism really is fiction.

But, of course, I’m talking about something that goes beyond the daily news reports and how accurate we think they are.

One of the things I teach students is that all good media writing exhibits four characteristics:
-- accuracy
-- clarity
-- precision
-- efficiency
(explain)

In journalism, we try to descibe the world we see as accurately as possible. Journalists take great pains to make sure their facts are right. They quote people correctly. They check and re-check their information. While they do not always succeed in this difficult task, they try as part of their professional responsibilities.

I would suggest to you that fiction writers do the same thing. They try to describe the world as accurately as possible. Only, the world they are describing is one of their own making – or one of the readers’ expectations. Fiction writers have to be true to this world just as journalists have to be true to the world they are in.

Yes, you might say, but a fiction writer can just make things up.

That is true to some limited extent. Let me give you a somewhat silly example of what I am saying:

Let’s say you’re writing a Superman story. Part of the story has a busload of kindergarten children careening off a cliff. Well, this is a Superman story, so what has to happen?

That’s right. Superman has to save the children. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be Superman, and this wouldn’t be a Superman story. The writer who didn’t let this happen wouldn’t be true to the world in which Superman operates.

Likewise, the mystery writer – something I aspired to be in writing Kill the Quarterback – has to live up to readers’ expectations about the genre.

• The mystery has to be solved.

• The major dilemmas have to be resolved.

• Clues about the killer should be left out in the open.

• Good has to triumph – to some extent – over evil.

And this has to be done through the natural order of things in the world that the writer has made. The writer can use coincidence to get his characters into trouble, but he or she cannot use coincidence to resolve the big dilemmas or the story itself.

These are some of the rules. Some are based on the common practices of mystery writers. Some are the expectations of the readers.

Plotting a good mystery novel – and staying true to the world of the genre – is a challenge. It’s fun, but it is definitely a challenge.

Personally, I find plotting far harder than the writing itself. Tracing the arc of the story so that the protagonist gets from the beginning to the end is something I struggle with. It would be much easier if I didn’t have to follow the rules – if I didn’t have to be true to the world in which the story is set. If, in other words, I could just make it up.

Any writer asks two things of a reader:

• the reader’s time and attention

• a suspension of disbelief – that is, acceptance on the part of the reader that the place where you are going is a world created by the writer.

The reader must be willing to make this investment.

The writer, on the other hand, must understand that this investment on the part of the reader is limited.

The writer’s first job is to be true and faithful:

• true to the world the writer has created

• faithful to the generally accepted rules of that world

But the writer must then open up that world to the reader in a way that is entertaining, enlightening and informative.

The central responsibility of the writer, I think, is to give the reader an accurate portrayal of the world that he or she is describing. That is the service the writer performs.

And that responsibility does not change whether one is writing fiction or journalism.

TNJN Nutshell - a new form for getting information on the web site quickly

2009-10-08T11:03:00.007-04:00

One of my big concerns is that our journalism students (at the University of Tennessee and elsewhere) do not understand the immediate nature of the web. As a news medium, the web has more immediacy than even broadcasting.

But the students don't seem to get that.

And, of course, that means we're not doing a good job of teaching it.

Too much of what is on the Tennessee Journalist, the student-operated news web site at UT, is old news -- sometimes several days old. And the students seem fine with that. They give themselves several days to write a story after an event has occurred when they shouldn't be giving themselves more than several minutes.

Consequently, I am planning on introducing a new form for the Tennessee Journalist tonight at the TNJN staff meeting. Below is the handout that I will be giving the staff and talking to them about.

TNJN Nutshell
Jim Stovall
October 8, 2009

The TNJN Nutshell is the standardized form for getting news and information on the site quickly. It consists of the following:

headline
summary
lead paragraph – who, what, when, where and the most important piece of information
three bullet points about the story – preferably in complete sentences (Check out CNN news story pages for examples.)
explanatory paragraph after the bullet points (optional)

Concepts governing TNJN Nutshell:

Gather accurate information. Accuracy is always the first priority.

Work BEFORE the story occurs by

-- setting up the page
-- writing the headline (you can/should/will change it later)
-- writing the summary (you can change that, too)
-- finding and putting in the links you want to use
-- finding the pictures/audio/video and any other sidebar material that’s relevant

Prepare to take pictures of the event

How do you quickly download, edit and upload your pictures. Figure that out before you cover the event.

Write as the event occurs.

Post as the event occurs, if possible.

Find ways to post your information in places other than TNJN.

-- post the bullet points on Twitter with the hashtag #TNJN
-- post the bullet points to Facebook (better: set your system up so that your tweets automatically show up on Facebook)
-- find other web venues to put your information. Many site accept reports from unpaid reporters. Begin with CNN’s iReport. But that’s just the beginning . . .

Return later to write a full story.

I invite any and all comments.

Writing for the web: making a (bulleted) list

2009-10-06T20:45:00.005-04:00

The list is one of the most important aspects of writing for the web that the writer must master. A well-formed list not only adds visual variety to the writing but aids in comprehension. The list invited the reader to scan the text, but it can offer the visual cues to arrest the eye.

Lists do not form themselves. The writer must make them happen. Here are some considerations and guidelines:

Appropriateness and significance. Lists are fairly easy to form, but they must be appropriate to the subject matter and significant to the subject. They must help introduce new information and concepts to the reader that are due some consideration on the part of the reader.
Number of items. A list must contain at least two items. In web journalism, the best lists are three to five items, but there is no hard rule about the number of items in a list.
Use of boldface. A list is best used when one or two of the most important words can be boldfaced. Doing this aids the reader in finding the words with the most informational value in the list. But boldfacing should be used sparingly. If you boldface an entire item in a list, you dilute the effect of the bold type.
Numbered and unnumbered lists. Two of the most common types of lists in HTML are the numbered and the unnumbered list. The numbered list uses numbers to introduce each item in the list. Use the numbered list when the numbers are important either for sequence or importance. When numbers are not important to the list, use the bulleted, or unnumbered, list. Numbers can be distracting if they do not carry any informational weight.
Parallelism. Ideally, lists should be constructed so that they are parallel. That has two meanings. One, grammar constructions of all items of the list should be the same. If one is a complete sentence, all of them should be. If one is a fragment beginning with a participle, all should be.

The second meaning of parallelism is that the items in a list should be of the same type or alike in a discernible way. Another way of saying this that no one item in a list should seem out of place with the other items

(Parallelism is an important tool of the writer -- one that should be understood thoroughly so it can be put to good use. The concept goes beyond the explanation presented here. To learn more about parallelism, start here at the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University.)

What good is all this?

Jakob Nielsen's research group has confirmed that readers of text on a web page are likely to do so in an F-shaped pattern. The research produced the "heatmaps" shown here that indicated the hot spots on a page of text where the eye of the reader tends to stop.

Nielsen says this about the implications of this pattern:

The F pattern's implications for Web design are clear and show the importance of following the guidelines for writing for the Web instead of repurposing print content:
Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't.
The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

A well-structured list thus plays into the tendencies of the reader and gives the producer of the web page a great chance to satisfy the reader.

Writing for the web: guidelines for an introductory writing class

2009-10-06T06:00:00.003-04:00

The following are some notes I have made for a discussion I am having with the JEM 200 writing instructors about what we are teaching concerning writing for the web. I invite your comments.

As we move from writing in print mode to writing for the web, here are some general principles that we should keep in mind:

The writing should be tighter – more concise.
Writers should use words and phrases that are information rich.
Writing should be shorter but with no loss of information.
Writers must learn to write quickly and with confidence.

We need to explore in some depth what each of these principles mean with our students. I admit that we haven’t gotten them all figured out yet, but all of us have ideas about them that we should share.

For instance, what are words and phrases that are information rich? Well, I know one that isn’t: “There is.” We should avoid those kinds of constructions. Maybe you know of others.

Possibly one way to think of information rich is to think of the Ws: who, what, when and where. If the words we use don’t convey something about those, we probably shouldn’t be using them.

But I digress.

Here are some specific guidelines that I want us to discuss at our meeting on Friday:

-- No story should be more than 200 words unless there is a compelling reason for it.

-- Summaries should be a maximum of 35 words.

-- Headlines should be a maximum of eight words. They should be abstracted sentences. That is, they must contain a subject and a verb and be as specific as possible. No puns, no play-on-words. Use alliteration only when it makes sense. In the words of Jakob Nielsen, they should be “pearls of clarity.”

-- Use lists when appropriate. Teach your students how to create lists. Check out what I say about lists in the third lecture on writing for the web.

-- Paragraphs should be a maximum of two sentences and 50 words.

-- Only one direct quotation per story. Direct quotations generally do not pull their informational weight. They add a bit of color and character to the story, but that’s about it.

-- Every story should contain at least one in-line link to additional information. The link should be constructed in a way so that the reader will have a good idea as to where the link goes. Check out this article on linking on JPROF. Teach your students how to set up a link in HTML.

-- Teach the concept of key words. Students should identify key words and put the tag around them.

The goals of our writing should be to deliver as much information to the readers as quickly as possible. Send the readers on their way satisfied, and they will return.

Audio journalism III: Teaching j-students about recording, editing and distribution

2009-03-08T05:59:00.008-04:00

Beginning journalism students, in their first news writing classes, should be taught the basics of audio journalism and should put those basics into practice.

The concept of audio journalism takes us beyond the medium of radio and requires that we think about sound itself as an increasingly available and important tool of the journalist (as we argued in the first two essays in this series -- see Audio journalism I and Audio journalism II).

How then do we as journalism educators train our students to use this tool?

At the University of Tennessee, we are trying to turn our curriculum more toward the web and away from the traditional media forms of print and broadcasting. This is a systemic change that will not be accomplished by simply adding one or two courses on web journalism to the curriculum or even by creating a sequence of courses. Instead, it involves changing our approach in our most basic courses.

One of those basic courses is JEM 200 Introduction to news writing. This course is required of all journalism majors as the gateway course to the journalism curriculum, and it has traditionally introduced students to the concepts of good writing, AP style, attribution, the inverted pyramid and other skills necessary for a start in journalism. We are now putting more emphasis on developing skills for writing for the web -- conciseness, headlines, summaries, lists, linking, etc. -- and in the section that was once "writing for broadcast," we are now teaching the concepts of audio journalism.

Here's what we are including:

Audio journalism
The importance of sound. Sound can be an excellent way to go beyond the pictures and text a reporter produces in covering a story. Sound gives voice to sources in a way that text cannot.
Formats. We reviewed some of the formats available to audio journalists in the second post of this series. Sound can be a complement to the other reporting or it can be the dominent form of the report. The web is allowing us to develop new formats, such as the audio slide show.
Writing for audio
Traditional radio formats. These forms of presentation of news and information including the drama unity broadcast story structure are still important for students to learn and use.
New forms of writing for audio that web journalism offers. We have already referred to audio slide shows, but we also must give some attention to writing introductions that alert readers as to what they are about to hear and to describe links included with the sound stories.
Writing scripts, questions and outlines. Most of what is broadcast in traditional media begins with and follows a script. Good scripts promote the efficient presentation of news and information, and they are likely to continue to be necessary on the web.
Speaking clearly
Enunciation and beyond. In previous times, training in this area could generally be ignored by most journalists, particularly those going into print. No longer. Journalists now need to use their own voices. Their accent, grammar and pronunciation skills must be developed beyond the normal level of speaking. Their speaking habits must exclude the use of the word "like" after every third word, and they must speak with the confidence that allows them to drop the hesitant pauses, the "uhs" and the "you knows."
Developing habits and practices that enhance the clarity of sound and the quality of reporting. We might jokingly call this our "radio voice," but it is no longer a joke. Journalists -- all journalists -- must be heard and understood.
Acquiring the skill of the short, concise question. Asking well-formed, concise questions -- and then shutting up -- is a rare skill, but it is one that should be developed by all of our students.
Recording
Tools and equipment. Basic recording equipment is inexpensive and simple to use. Every journalism student must have some kind of ditigal recorder and must be aware of its capacity.
The importance of sound quality. Sound quality does not have to be an obsession because of the good equipment that is available. Still, journalism students must learn to make their equipment produce clear, understandable sound on all occasions.
Ambient sound and music. The qualities of ambient sound and music can enhance the reporting. They are special products of audio journalism that cannot be duplicated by any other medium.
Editing
Putting audio files together for presentation. Editing audio can be as simple or as complex as the reporter and editor choose to make it. Some audio reporters, such as NPR's science reporter Robert Krulwich, develop their stories through complex and highly sophisticated editing techniques (see Darwin's Very Bad Day, for example). Our goals for beginning journalism students are more modest. Simply producing a clear, coherent recording would be enough.
Multiple tracks. Student should have some basic understanding of mixing sound tracks.
Importance of beginning and ending. Writing good introductions and planning the sound story from beginning to end is basic to good audio journalism.
Standard constructions and techniques. Students should learn the standard techniques of audio editing as the well as the terms, such as fades, cross-fading, establish music, segue, transition, voice out, music up, and voice wrap.

Covering these areas in just a few weeks of a writing course is ambitious. Not all of these subject will be areas in which the students can acquire any mastery, but their introduction and practice can show students their importance.

Note: I post the lecture notes for the lecture section of JEM 200, and at this writing I have posted the notes for the first of three lectures based on these essays about audio journalism. Two more sets of lecture notes are planned.

Audacity

The one piece of software that students should learn for audio journalism is Audacity.

While editing sound has a wide array of possibilities, it has been rendered simple and easy by Audacity, a free and downloadable piece of software from SourceForge.net. Audacity comes with a set of tutorials, the basics of Audacity can be grasped in just a few minutes by those who simply use the software. Audacity allows users to add and delete portions of a soundtrack and to place new soundtracks into a file. Its visual dashboard (below) includes all of the tools for basic sound editing, and it is likely that student will be able to learn the program to create audio files very quickly.

Podcasting

Podcasting is a term sometimes used for the general idea of audio journalism, but in reality it has a much more specific meaning. Podcasting is a means of distributing audio files through RSS (really simple syndication) feeds. Students should be taught the basics of using this system for distributing the audio files they produce, but we will refrain from going into details about it until a later post.

Read the two previous essays in this series on audio journalism:

Audio journalism I: Defining the field - the power and importance of sound

A clarion call for journalism instructors to think beyond the strictures of radio and to teach audio journalism -- using sound as a reporting tool -- to all of their students.

Audio journalism II: Forms and formats

Creative journalists can use the tool of sound as an effective in their reporting. They can start with traditional formats, but the web will allow them to develop their own.

Audio journalism II: Forms and formats

2009-03-06T09:20:00.010-05:00

Creative journalists can use the tool of sound as an effective in their reporting. They can start with traditional formats, but the web will allow them to develop their own.

Reporters and journalism students must stop thinking about sound as an exclusively radio format -- an argument made in the first of these three posts -- and adopt it as a reporting tool that can be learned and used to effectively deliver information to readers or listeners.

In this post, we will explore some of the forms and formats that are available in this new era of audio journalism.

(A third post in this series looks at how journalism students should be trained to be audio journalists.)

We begin with two principles:

Every journalism student should know the basics of recording and editing.
Sound can be the dominant form in a story package, or it more likely will supplement other parts of the web package.

With that, we should examine the formats that are available to online journalists who want to use sound as a part of their reporting.

Sound supplement formats

The audio clip is the first and easiest for the students to master. This is simply a short piece of sound, maybe as short as 15 seconds or as long as two minutes, that accomplishes a single purpose. It allows the audience to hear the voice of a source answering a question or making a salient point about the subject of the story. It is easy to produce and requires little or no editing.

(A good example of the use of an audio clip is in this profile story on a University of Tennessee soccer player.)

Given the ease with which audio clips can be produced, it is surprising that their use is not more widespread. Their absence shows that reporters are simply do not think about using audio, not that the hardware or software is difficult.

Another format is the reporter interview. Here, someone on the news staff other than the reporter interviews the person who covered the story. These interviews vary greatly in length, but they rarely run past five or six minutes. The New York Times (image at right) uses them on a regular basis to give background information on the story. With a minimum of scripting and editing, these reporter interviews can also be easy to produce and effective in enriching the story.

A variation on the reporter interview is the reporter round-table. Here several reporters who have interest and information on the same topic can tell what they know, ask each other questions and exchange views. Length on these pieces may vary, and they should be long enough to give a full airing to the information and views of the reporters. On the other hand, as with everything else on the web, generally shorter is better.

Yet another format is the reporter round-up. This format allows the reporter to tell the story in a one- to two-minute sound clip, much like a radio version of the story. The story is told as completely as possible and is read from a script written by the reporter.

These formats have many variations that will depend on the story that is being covered and the
inclinations of the reporter. At this stage in the development of audio journalism, reporters and editors should be encourage to experiment with these formats and even try to create new ones that may aid in the storytelling.

Sound dominant formats

Sound dominant formats take the audio tool from being simply a supplement to the text or pictures of a presentation to being the major way in which the story is presented. Such formats include:

radio stories, which derive from the longstanding conventions and customs of radio. These stories are a mix of reporting, interviews with sources and ambient sound, and the best of them come from news organizations such as National Public Radio and Voice of America. At their best, these stories require high-quality sound and professional word and sound editing skills.
audio slide shows, a web-originated format that is growing in popularity. Audio slide shows mix still pictures with sound, often but not always the photographer's description of the pictures that he or she has taken. Audio slide shows require photography, writing, speaking and editing skills, but they can be highly effective and entertaining in their presentation of information. (Read more about audio slideshows on JPROF.com)
long-form sound stories, those where time and brevity are not major considerations. These long forms allow reporters, producers and editors all the time they need to tell their stories. They can include all of the sound elements previously mentioned. One of the most creative of these long-form formats is This American Life, an hour-long public radio that deals with only one topic during the hour. This American Life gives ample time for sources to tell their stories, but its editing and production are intelligent and clever so that listeners can easily get caught up int he story.
talk-show and call-in formats, where audiences are invited to participate. The talk-show format is a highly popular one for traditional radio, and it is growing in popularity on the web with the advent of sites such as TalkShoe.com. Journalists can create their own call-in shows, advertise them and increase their audiences. Some news web sites, such as the Tennessee Journalist, are experimenting with this format to see what it will add to the richness of the site.

The list of formats here is not meant to be inclusive or prescriptive. It simply shows some of the possibilities of the use of sound as a reporting device. Imaginative and creative reporters will undoubtedly develop other formats and standards as online journalism itself develops.

Read the other two posts in the series:

Audio journalism I: Defining the field - the power and importance of sound

A clarion call for journalism instructors to think beyond the strictures of radio and to teach audio journalism -- using sound as a reporting tool -- to all of their students.

Audio journalism III: Teaching j-students about recording, editing and distribution

Beginning journalism students, in their first news writing classes, should be taught the basics of audio journalism and should put those basics into practice.

Audio journalism I: Defining the field - the power and importance of sound

2009-03-05T14:50:00.011-05:00

A clarion call for journalism instructors to think beyond the strictures of radio and to teach audio journalism -- using sound as a reporting tool -- to all of their students.

Now that the web has freed sound from the confines of radio, audio journalism needs to be a part of the skill set of every reporter. This series of articles sets out the parameters of audio journalism and outlines some of the things that we journalism educators need to be teaching our students.

Audio journalism is reporting news and information with sound. Doing this was once the exclusive domain of radio, and truthfully, it wasn't much of a kingdom. Except for National Public Radio and the efforts of a few isolated individuals and organizations, radio journalism has been a vast and neglected wasteland. Even where radio journalism was good -- and on NPR it could be very good -- it was still confined to the medium and restricted by time, programming constraints and geography.

The emergence of the web as a dominant news medium has freed radio journalism -- what we can more properly call audio journalism -- from those restraints.

The advantages of learning and using audio as a reporting tool are legion:

It is easy to produce. The equipment necessary for recording can fit into your shirt pocket. The software (Audacity is among the best) is simple and can be mastered quickly.
Sound can take a story beyond text (just as pictures can). Sound gives readers/listeners to a story an added dimension that nothing else can duplicate.
Audio literally gives sources a "voice." By using sound rather than text, their words, tones and inflections can be heard, not just described. Ambient sound can give these voices added context that increases the richness of the reporting.
Sound allows listeners to "see" with the best lens of all, the mind.
A personal example: For years, I have shocked people by telling them that as a baseball fan, I would much rather listen to a radio broadcast of a game with a good announcer (great ones include Jack Buck [deceased], Vince Scully, and Ernie Harwell) than watch the game on television. The reason: Video cameras are too confining; they do not give me a picture of the whole field or even a significant portion of it. If I am listening to it, however, I can "see" everything, and the experience is much more enjoyable and fulfilling.
The idea of audio journalism at this point is largely unexplored. That means that the people who get into it now have an opportunity to define the form. They can experiment and be creative without having the burdens of "tradition" or the concept of "best practices."
Audio is a presentation form that allows the audience to multitask. Reading text and watching video demand the full attention of the visitor. Audio lets the audience do something else in addition to taking in the information. As the demand for consumer time increases, this will continue to be an important consideration for the web journalist.

Finally, audio journalism is important because it is the dominant form of information distribution on The Next Big Thing in Journalism: mobile journalism. Despite all the current attention to texting, web site scaling and video on cellphones and hand-held devices, people generally use these devices to talk and to receive sound, either from other talkers or from audio producers.

All of these are compelling reasons why we journalism educators need to pay serious attention to the concept and forms of audio journalism. We need to teach our students how to use sound effectively in their report, both as a main form of storytelling and to supplement text, pictures and other formats at our disposal.

Two subsequent posts will outline how we can begin this process:

Audio journalism II: What journalism students should know - uses, forms and formats

Audio journalism III: Training journalism students - recording, editing and distribution

(Updated March 7, 2009, to include link to Audio journalism II.)

New York Times coverage of Obama's speech - a different reporting form

2009-03-02T10:51:00.004-05:00

The New York Times used the tools of the web to bring the story of Barack Obama's speech to Congress last week in a different and innovative way.

The web offers journalists many opportunities to report on events in ways that we never could have done with another medium. Witness the New York Times coverage of President Barack Obama's speech to Congress last week.

The Times had a straight news story on it, certainly, with all of the accompanying reactions and standard forms that print news stories are supposed to take.

But reporters and editors put together information about the speech in an innovative way that shows what can be done when a bit of creativity and imaginable are combined with the tools that the web gives to good editors and reporters. The screen shot to the right shows how the Times combined:

a video of the speech;
a marked timeline of the video so users could select a particular part of the speech if they wanted to;
a transcript of the speech so readers could follow along the video or simply read it without the video;
commentary and information from the reporters and editors about each part of the speech.

This package undoubtedly took some fancy coding to set it up correctly and some testing to make sure that it worked. No news organization could invest this kind of time and effort in anything less than a major story.

But here is an alternative to the straight narrative, and it is impressive.

A superior user experience

2009-02-22T07:00:00.004-05:00

Those of us who struggle every day trying to figure out this new media thing and worrying about economic models for journalism get distracted by many ideas and lamentations.

Thanks, then, to Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president for product management at Google, for this long, thought-provoking, and perceptive piece that helps to refocus on what we should be about: a superior user experience.

. . . As written communication has evolved from long letter to short text message, news has largely shifted from thoughtful to spontaneous. The old-fashioned static news article is now just a starting point, inciting back-and-forth debate that often results in a more balanced and detailed assessment. And the old-fashioned business model of bundled news, where the classifieds basically subsidized a lot of the high-quality reporting on the front page, has been thoroughly disrupted.

This is a problem, but since online journalism is still in its relative infancy it's one that can be solved (we're technology optimists, remember?). The experience of consuming news on the web today fails to take full advantage of the power of technology. It doesn't understand what users want in order to give them what they need. When I go to a site like the New York Times or the San Jose Mercury, it should know what I am interested in and what has changed since my last visit. If I read the story on the US stimulus package only six hours ago, then just show me the updates the reporter has filed since then (and the most interesting responses from readers, bloggers, or other sources). If Thomas Friedman has filed a column since I last checked, tell me that on the front page. Beyond that, present to me a front page rich with interesting content selected by smart editors, customized based on my reading habits (tracked with my permission). Browsing a newspaper is rewarding and serendipitous, and doing it online should be even better. This will not by itself solve the newspapers' business problems, but our heritage suggests that creating a superior user experience is the best place to start.

What do readers want? My guess is that it's three things:

news and information
conversation
opportunity

Opportunity for what?

We'll try to explore that in future blogs.
_________

And thanks to Jack Shafer, writing another excellent piece in Slate on business models for journalism (Not all information wants to be free), for pointing to the Rosenberg article.

Reforming the J-curriculum: beginning at the beginning

2009-02-18T10:13:00.007-05:00

To really reform a journalism curriculum, you have to begin at the beginning.

The faculty of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee decided at its first faculty meeting of the semester in January to make some definite moves toward revising our curriculum to recognize the realities of the changing media environment and to prepare our students for those realities.

During the past few years, the UT faculty had done what other faculties have done -- lay on a couple of extra courses about web journalism. Some faculty members had made some moves within existing courses (including changing the names of the courses) to include more about the web.

We had even taken a step beyond that in starting a student-operated news web site, the Tennessee Journalist (tnjn.com), that is a central part of the curriculum. The site operates independently from any single course and thus is open to being used by all courses.

All of these were steps in the right direction, but they have not achieved the fundamental changes within the curriculum that we have sought. At our January meeting, we resolved to take a big step (bigger, I think, than even most of our faculty realized) and change JEM 200, the introductory news writing course that is required of all majors and taken by many other students as well.

Because I am the coordinator of all JEM 200 sections, the task of rethinking and re-envisioning the course has fallen to me. We offer 11 sections of the course and enroll about 200 students each semester. The sections are taught by lecturers and graduate teaching assistant and occasionally (though not this semester) by full time professors.

In our new plan for the course, the beginning six weeks of the course have not changed substantially. During those weeks we introduce students to the following topics. (The links here take you to the weekly lecture notes for each of these topics that are posted on JPROF.com.)

What came next in the old syllabus was two weeks of writing for the web. That has been expanded to four weeks. My draft proposal for how these four weeks will go follows:

Week 7, Feb. 16-20
Writing sections: continue writing in the inverted pyramid form; emphasize efficiency and conciseness. Have the students learn HTML tags with this tutorial and this exercise.
Lecture: Writing for the web I Introduction to the web | The web as a word medium | How readers use the web | Important concepts | Headlines and summaries.

Week 8: Feb. 22-26
Writing sections: Write short (no more than 200 words) but information-packed stories; introduce and practice with writing headlines and summaries using the tutorials and exercises. Assign the preview story reporting/writing assignment that will be due for next week.
Lecture: Writing for the Web II The Tennessee Journalist | Important concepts (continued) | Technology | Writing for the web - the basics | Headlines.

Week 9: March 2-6
Writing sections: Reporting assignment (preview story) due on the first section meeting; upload that assignment to the TNJN server. Practice uploading pictures and writing cutlines as well as sidebar material if possible. Look for live stories on the Tennessee Journalist to show as examples for sidebar material. Pay particular attention to the "related links" function of TNJN and have students find appropriate links for their stories.
Lecture: Writing for the Web III Inverted pyramid | Visual variety | Lists | Summaries | Microcontent | Links

Week 10: March 9-13
Writing sections: Writing assignments should include writing headlines and summaries, creating links and lists, and taking pictures and writing cutlines. A second reporting assignment -- another preview story if you don't think they're ready to do anything else -- would be good.
Lecture: Writing for the Web IV Twitter | Photojournalism | Audio | What you need to do to get ready to work in the web environment.

That will take us up to spring break. During the week after spring break, you should continue doing whatever your lab needs. One idea is to assign them to do a photo story over spring break.

After spring break, we will devote three weeks to "writing for broadcast," but that will change from the broadcast writing section that we once had.

This draft plan has been written for the lecturers and lab instructors of JEM 200, but I am posting it here on the JPROF blog so that anyone who reads it can weigh in and help us with our deliberations. I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who can suggest additional resources -- readings, tutorials, exercises, examples, etc.

Resources:

Writing headlines for the web

Basic HTML tags

Finding links

The art of linking

Writing summaries

Guidelines for the student photojournalist

Audio slide shows

What's right with J-education at Tennessee

2009-02-16T20:30:00.003-05:00

The call has gone out from Innovation in College Media for journalism profs to come together on Sunday for a chat on journalism education. It begins with a blog post, and one of the suggested topics is "What's going right at your school."

Here's what's going right at Tennessee:

The Tennessee Journalist (TNJN.com)

TNJN.com is the student-operated news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at UT. It is operated by a student staff and is independent of any particular course. It is part of the curriculum of the School, and there are too many good things about it to list in the short amount of time I have to post this blog entry.

But here's one: We have a weekly staff meeting, and every week -- EVERY week -- at least 35 to 45 students show up. Their enthusiasm is palpable.

Check out the site. I am privileged to be the faculty adviser.

Intercollegiate Online News Network (ICONN)

We have formed an organization of campus news web sites, journalism students and educators, and professional affiliates. Any individual, program or professional organization can join. Our first meeting was in Knoxville in January, and there will be more soon.

The web site is http://intercollegiatenews.com.

And join the Facebook group.

I am looking forward to the chat.

The demise of newspapers means better journalism

2009-02-08T06:15:00.009-05:00

We who contemplate the importance of journalism look at the future with trepidation.

What happens to journalism, we ask, when newspapers continue on their inevitable decline? The question assumes that journalism itself will be diminished.

I am coming to a different conclusion:

Journalism will improve once newspapers die or decline to a minor medium.

Note that I said news-PAPER, not news organization. I have worked for newspapers in five cities (technically six because Bristol, Virginia, and Bristol, Tennessee, are two different cities). I loved the work and made my living at it for a while. I have many friends and former students who are newspaper people. They are facing difficult and uncertain times right now, and I wish them stability and good fortune.

But the medium they work so hard to produce -- the paper -- is holding back journalism from doing the best job that it can for society. The sooner the paper is gone, the better.

I have been thinking a lot about a piece that Steve Outing wrote for Editor and Publisher a couple of weeks ago. In it he envisioned the all-digital newsroom, and I teased out of that his list of qualifications that people who got jobs in that newsroom would have. Those qualifications are just the ones we need for journalism to thrive in this new technological age.

In addition, I was privileged to be in Nashville last week and hear Janet Coats describe how the Tampa Tribune (via TBO.com) is shifting its focus and operation from print to digital. (A short video of some of what she had to say is here on Jack Lail's Random Mumblings.) Her talk was fascinating -- a blend of practical and inspirational words that this beleaguered profession needs.

So, I began to think ahead to the day when won't be chained to the printing press. And my conclusion was that journalism will be better. Here's why:

More reporting. I don't necessarily buy the argument that there will be fewer journalists in the new age of digital journalism. The numbers will drop if the current news organization managers (editors and publishers) are in charge. Fortunately, they won't be. Instead, we're likely to have managers who recognize that good reporting -- and lots of it -- is an asset to the organization, not a cost to be cut.
More reporters. Students in my experience are wildly excited about this new age of journalism. I am honored to be the faculty adviser to the Tennessee Journalist , the student operated news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee. More than 35 people regularly show up at our weekly staff meeting (only the editors are required to come) and the numbers are growing. The number of our majors has grown from 350 to 450 in just one year.
More, different and better ways of telling a story. Newspapers and the people who run them have stifled the development of digital journalism. Slavery to print -- as well as simple laziness and stump stupidity -- have sucked the energy out of efforts to creatively use this new medium.
Recognition that journalism occurs outside the traditional news organization. Digital newsrooms will form in places that never thought of themselves as news organizations. All web sites that attract an audience are news web sites. Visitors demand new information. That why people return to a site. Journalism would do well to embrace this concept.
More respect for the audience. The accusations of arrogance leveled against traditional journalism are unfortunately correct. The web -- with its interactivity and with the ability of the audience to leave in an instant -- does not tolerate the arrogance of the journalistic priesthood.
Better writing. As Jakob Neilsen, usability guru, says, readers are "selfish, lazy and ruthless." They will not put up with the flabby, self-indulgent prose we produce.
Better reporting. With the audience involved in the process, we will have more sources and more points of view. We won't be gatekeepers. On our best days, we'll be conversation starters and guides. But we won't be in control. And that is a good thing.

Despite the current financial woes of news organizations and the generally hard economic times, the future of journalism looks bright and exciting.

And it will improve when we are done with print. I say, speed the day.

Qualities of the digital journalist

2009-02-06T22:29:00.005-05:00

Steve Outing, a well-known thinker and writer about online journalism, has envisioned the not-so-distant future digital newsroom in his January 28 column for Editor and Publisher. (The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future)

The whole thing is well worth reading and, journalism profs, recommending to your students.

Of particular interest is what Outing says will be the qualities of those who land jobs in this new space. They will be:

people with understanding of and enthusiasm for new forms of media and storytelling
multifunctional journalists who can use all the tools available, particularly audio and video recorders
social networks users and people who know how to gather an audience
people who can engage with audiences and are comfortable sharing personal information

Underlying all of these qualities is an affinity for practicing good journalism.

Someone asked me today what I thought the Knoxville News Sentinel (the local paper) would be in 10 years. I said I thought there would be a 24/7 web operation with a weekend print edition. That's based on what has happened in the last few weeks.

But who knows what innovations await us? We can only say with certainty that paper will no longer be surpreme.

Editing for the web: discussion notes for journalism instructors

2009-02-03T10:45:00.011-05:00

These notes are designed for editing instructors who want to conduct a section on editing for the web or online journalism instructors who want to teach their students about the special considerations for editing for a news web site.

An example of taking a "for print" story and making it into a "for the web" can be found here at JPROF.

Begin with the basics

Any discussion of journalistic editing should begin with reminding students of the basics of copy editing that do not change no matter what the medium:

Grammar, spelling, punctuation -- These are always considerations for the editor. It is just as important to be technically perfect in use of the language on the web as it is in any other medium. Two common mistakes in punctuation: direct quotations and forming possessives.

AP style -- Style rules are not optional in any journalistic setting.
Syntax, sense, repetition and redundancy -- All of these are problems that need to be dealt with in any writing, web included.
Accuracy -- Always, accuracy. (See JPROF's notes on Achieving Accuracy.)
Structure and emphasis -- The basic form for news on the web is still the inverted pyramid news story. (Checklist for inverted pyramid news stories.) Readers of the web want their information immediately; writers and editors need to give it to them.
The five Ws and H. Editors should make sure that there is a clear statement of who, what, when, why and how in the story. (Where and when, too, certainly.) These things tend to get lost in all the verbiage that we are likely to produce.

So, what's different about the web? Well, here are a few things:

Conciseness

Wordiness is one of the chief editing problems that a web editor must attack. (See discussion notes for Attacking Wordiness.) The web demands -- and readers demand -- that information come packaged in the fewest words possible. They want detail, they want color, but they also want efficiency. Read the before and after stories in the editing for the web example (referred to above) and see how the editor has attacked the verbiage of the writer. Has anything been lost or left out? Was it that important to understanding the story?

(You may want to talk to your students about a broadcast writing approach if you have not done so already: simple words, simple sentences, telling the story quickly, getting out. We don't really have to go that far on the web, but we do need to emphasize conciseness.)

Visual aspects

On the web, one of the most important aspects of writing is how it looks. Computer screens are sometimes difficult to view, and text on a computer screen takes some extra effort. In addition, many readers are in the habit of "scanning" rather than "reading." As editors, we need to offer them visual cues that interrupt their scanning to concentrate on the words that are on the screen. An editor needs to ensure that the presentation of the words is as legible and easy to understand as possible. Here are some ways to do that:

Paragraph separation -- A pretty standard presentation on the web is to have a line of white space between the paragraphs. Some programs do this automatically, but if they do not, the editor should see that this is one, as long as it is consistent with the visual style of the web site. Here is a good time to bring up the value of WHITE SPACE in design; white space is what allows us to see items on a page or on a computer screen. The web has unlimited space, so creating the appropriate amount of white space should not be a problem.
Lists -- Creating lists, where they are appropriate, is one of the most valuable things a writer or editor can do for a web audience. Lists are easy to read because they are short and the white space is built in. But a good list should also be informative and should add value for the reader.

Block quotes and indentations -- Block quotes, as long as they are not too extensive, are another device that makes reading easier. Like lists, they have white space built in.

Pull quotes -- The pull quote is a graphic device used for many decades in print to create white space on a gray page. A pull quote can also be used to emphasize certain information. This is an important editorial decision that the editor should take seriously and give a good deal of thought to. A pull quote does not have to be an direct quotation, although that is often the way it is used. A pull quote can be anything that editor deems relevant and worth emphasis.

Story box -- A story box is like a pull quote in a graphic sense: an insertion of larger type into the body of a story. The box doesn't pretend to be a quotation, however. It is an explanatory paragraph of list that adds something that is not in the story itself. It introduces both graphic variety and new information to the reader. An editor who creates a story box must spend some time and effort on it.

Subheads -- Subheads serve the same purpose on the web that they do in print: to break long stretches of copy. Subheads should be consistent and logical in their placement, and they should be accurate in their description of the text below them. They should be general enough to cover what the text says in the next few paragraphs.

Links

Links represent one of the special powers of the web as a news medium -- the ability to put the reader in touch with additional information about a top. For more on linking, see The Art of Linking article on JPROF.

For the editor, two major questions about links arise:

Where can I insert inline links into the text? And from this question comes those of where will be link take the reader? And will the purpose of the link (that is, where it will take the reader) be apparent? The editor needs to construct inline links so that they fit into the copy flow but that they are also obvious about what the reader will get if he or she clicks on that link.

What links do I list separately (related links)? Why are they there? Sometimes the reason for their presence will be obvious. At other times, the editor will need to describe them succinctly but in a way that will inform the reader.

Chunking

Chunking is an inelegant term for breaking up information and presenting it to the reader. In print, we think in terms of a single "story" and possibly a few exras: pictures, graphs, sidebars, etc. On a web site, we should think in terms of a subject/event and the different pieces of information we have about it.

At this stage of the web's development, we still think of the central piece of information as a "story," albeit a shorter narrative that we might have in print. In the near future, we may see a reduction in the use of the "story" as the organizing center of a web package. It may instead be the video or the photo gallery.

Chunking means that we need to consider the pieces of our package. Many of these pieces may be put together in some kind of text/narrative, such as an inverted pyramid news story. Other pieces, however, may not fit into that genre, and as editors we should be intellectually nimble enough to handle them.

Jim Stovall (Originally posted on JPROF Feb. 7, 2007; updated Feb. 3, 2009)

It's coming - Mobile as the seventh mass media

2009-01-25T07:51:00.009-05:00

A healthy portion of ink, airtime and web electrons were expended by the news media during the last week on the subject of Barack Obama's Blackberry.

Would he be able to keep it? He certainly wanted to and said so publicly. The Secret Service, it was reported, worried about security (as it should) and made no bones about the fact that he would have to give it up. Finally, negotiations produced an agreement that allowed him to hang on to it.

Most of the news coverage treated the whole as interesting but somewhat trivial.

Obama Digs In for His BlackBerry , The New York Times, January 7, 2009
Obama Keeps His Blackberry in a Hard-Fought E-Victory The New York Times, January 25, 2009

One story in the Times referred to Obama's Blackberry "addiction," but the use of that word -- even playful as it was -- betrays an attitude about mobile communication that demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding.

Mobile communication is an important, fast-growing phenomenon. It most definitely is NOT trivial.

My friend Chuck Warnock (Confessions of a Small Church Pastor and pictured at right) has been after me for several weeks to pay attention to the mobile phenomenon. Chuck pastors a church in central Virginia and is carving out a niche for himself as a guru of the future of small churches. He made his points convincingly this weekend when he came to visit and we had a couple of long conversations about it. (Chuck is also the lead partner with me in SmallChurchPROF.)

Mobile communications, he says, is the next big thing. We don't recognize that in America because our devices are so far behind those of most of the rest of the world.

Chuck directed me toward Tomi Ahonen, one of the chief writers and thinkers about mobile technology, its use and implications. Ahonen, a marketing consultant, has written several books, one of which is titled Mobile as the 7th Mass Media. (You can read or download an excerpt of the book at this site.) The first six are

print
sound recording
cinema
radio
television
internet

While the internet has had a huge impact on our lives during the past 15 years of its existence, Ahonen argues that mobile will have much more impact and it will be much fast. He marshals some impressive statistics to back up his argument.

As of October 2007, there were 6.6 billion people in the world and 3.3 billion cell phones.
90 percent of those who own a cell phone keep it at arm's length, and more than 60 percent of owners take it to bed with them. For many, it is the last thing they look at before falling asleep and it acts as an alarm clock to wake them up -- and it is the first thing they look at when they do.
Until only recently, Americans has not understood the cell phone phenomenon because our technology has been so far behind much of the rest of the world. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 changed that and showed us the possibilities.

Ahonen believes the introduction of the iPhone will be a key date in the history of technology because it will be the time when American creativity was awakened to the possibilities of the cell phone as an all-purpose communication and community-building device.

This is fascinating stuff -- and a little scary.

Personally, I'm a Luddite when it comes to cell phones. I can barely remember to take my cell phone with me when I go out of the house, and as I write this, it's downstairs and I'm upstairs (not in arm's length). I do not have a Blackberry but suspect that an iPhone will be in my future before too very long. It isn't in my hands yet, however.

Still, every high school and college student has a cell and is an expert in sending and receiving text messages. Like many other adults, I have denigrated this behavior as a waste of time and technology (which, undoubtedly, much of it is). But then, lots of people (including me) have denigrated Facebook and Twitter (follow me here), both of which I am sold on.

What are the implications for journalism and journalism technology of the coming Age of Mobile?

Plenty. I just don't know what they are yet, but Chuck has convinced me to get my head out of my MacBook computer screen and start looking around. There will surely be lots to see.

I'm glad our president is keeping his Blackberry. He'll need it.

So, apparently, will we.

Congratulations, President Barack Obama

2009-01-20T05:56:00.002-05:00

A remarkable feat by a remarkable man who will take the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009.

An author and college professor, he is now at the pinnacle of political power.

We join with the world in wishing him well.

And congratulations to the United States of America.

ICONN: First take on the final day

2009-01-17T09:18:00.010-05:00

The prevailing feeling I absorbed from the second day of the founders conference of the Intercollegiate Online News Network (ICONN) was this:

A good time was had by all.

We see a bright, innovative, exciting time for us (educators, professionals, students) and for our avocation (journalism). We look forward to an age of creativity and innovation. We see golden opportunities for our students to do good work, write and tell good stories, and make a difference for their readers and our society.

We are energized by meeting like-minded people who offer thoughts, ideas and plans on the things we are interested in.

During every session and every break, walk and van ride, there were dozens of lively conversations and exchanges. The tweets and blog posts flowed like a rushing stream (many of which you can find with an #ICONN search of Twitter or in some of the links below).

What a contrast from the dreary and dreaded staff conferences and faculty meetings where people struggle to defend their turf and fear the future. Economic realities and the threats of change are real, but the ICONN group in Knoxville (and many of their like-minded colleagues following the goings-on from afar) know that the future will be unlike much of what we have seen in the past.

And we're ready to take it on.

Below are some links where you can pick up a sense of what the conference was about.

During the weekend, I will be going through the audio that I recorded from various sessions and posting some clips from it. Participants should email me any reactions they have posted that I may have missed, and you are, of course, welcome to comment on any of this.

Links

ICONN and the future
UMass Journalism Professors Blog: Steve Fox: "It’s the second conference I’ve been to during the winter break — the other was at Western New England College where I was also asked to speak about the future of journalism. The mood at the two conferences could not be more different."

Live Blogging: Journalism conference as a participant observer
My Tennessee Home: Lisa Gary: "Collaborative connectivity was the theme behind the scenes, too. As panels discussed and students listened and took notes, participants from many universities used wireless connections to report from the scene."

Journalism Education Finds Its Iconn
instrumentlanding.com: Jay Baird: "The newsroom is broken. People on ferries taking pictures of airplanes in rivers are the new gatekeepers. How do we teach journalism students to collate, disseminate and guide media consumers through all of this? I think that the new model will be found on Rocky Top."

Photos

Photos by Ben Moser, TNJN.com. More of these at Flickr. From the top:

Photo 1: Jason Georges and Jeff Long (KPCC - Southern California) and the joys of the iPhone.

Photo 2: Tammi Marcoullier of Publish2 makes a point.

Photo 3: George Daniels of Alabama does the Twitter thing.

Photo 4: Bob Benz (Radiant Markets), Steve Klein (George Mason U.), and Steve Fox (UMass - Amherst) exchange some ideas.

ICONN conference, Day 2 - pictures of session 3

2009-01-16T10:07:00.004-05:00

The first session of the morning of the second day of the Intercollegiate Online News Network is underway. Above are some pictures.

The people on the panel are

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.
Professional affiliates

Tammi Marcoullier, Publish2
Bob Benz, Radiant Markets
Michael Marshall, UPI
Jay Baird, Mochi Media
Peter Gross, director, School of Journalism and Electronic Media, presiding

ICONN conference, Day 1 - pictures and links

2009-01-16T04:31:00.005-05:00

Listen to an audio file of the first session. (Unedited, 57:30)

The first day of the Intercollegiate Online News Network founders conference at the University of Tennessee saw a journalism academics, students and professionals come together to discuss ways to better integrate online journalism into journalism curricula.

Above are pictures from the first day's sessions.

Some people are twittering about the conference with the hashtag #ICONN.

And here are some blog posts about the conference.

Jim Miller's Menial Musings: Thoughts from the Intercollegiate Online News conference
BamaProducer (George Daniels): More pictures from Day 1
BamaProducer (George Daniels): UPI reinvents itself with new generation of students online
BamaProducer (George Daniels): UT Knoxville students turn out for ICONN
BamaProducer (George Daniels): ICONN begins with faculty-student exchanges
BamaProducer (George Daniels): A three-day trip to the Volunteer State begins
JEM222 blog: ICONN conference discussions how journalism classes relate to work field

Clear and cold -- 10 degrees -- in Knoxville early this morning.

More on the conference later.

Writing for Twitter - good journalism in 140 characters

2009-01-10T21:59:00.010-05:00

When a dam that held millions of cubic yards of toxic coalash near Harriman, Tenn., broke a few days before Christmas 2008, no one paid much attention other than those immediately affected by it and the local media. The disaster was epic -- compared to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989.

But it was Christmas and the country was in the throes of an economic crisis and the transition of a new president. And no one was killed.

But a few people were paying attention, and that made a difference. Amy Gahran, an independent media consultant in Boulder, Colo., and editor of the group blog E-Media Tidbits for Poynter.org, wondered what was going on. She's also a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Two days after the disaster, she wrote this for Poynter:

When I first learned of this disaster from SEJ colleagues by e-mail this morning (, I immediately launched the Twitter hashtag #coalash. Off and on today I've been posting links to news, context, background, opinion, resources, maps, and multimedia related to this unfolding story. Even EPA's Web manager, Jeffrey Levine, was tweeting relevant EPA maps and facility info.

Other Twitter users, including several Tenn.-area news orgs, adopted the hashtag. This made it easier for people to find and follow their coverage. Using a hashtag provides a broader view that includes local news coverage and extends beyond it. At the same time, a hashtag can amplify the reach of local stories. Online, this reach becomes especially crucial in the absence of delayed or absent mainstream national news coverage.

Once the buzz started on Twitter -- and came together through Gahran's hashtag -- news media from outside the East Tennessee area began paying attention and the story began to garner the international attention it deserved.

This story, and many others like it, amply demonstrate the power of Twitter as a journalistic device.

Once thought to be nothing more than an interpersonal communications trivial pursuit, Twitter has become an important information tool that can help journalists gather information and can also provide a means of distributing journalism to an interested audience.

What is Twitter

Twitter is a way an individual can connect with people who share the same interests and inclinations. An individual registers for an account on Twitter.com and selects a username. The individual can provide other information for a profile, but this is optional. The key thing is that the individual begins to contribute what, in Twitterland, are called "tweets."

In addition to the tweets, the individual can also begin to "follow" other users of Twitter; that is, the person finds other persons and begins to get a list of their tweets on his or her Twitter page.

As an individual contributes more tweets, he or she will attract "followers." These can start with friends and family, but if the tweets are at all interesting, follwers will show up whom the individual does not know.

This is just the beginning. There are many other aspects to Twitter, many of them outlined in this excellent article by Ellyn Angelotti.

But the big factor in Twitter is brevity. You have only 140 characters (letters, punctuation and spaces) to say what you have to say. That's usually between 10 and 15 words.

Writing a Tweet

Once you are on Twitter and are following a few people, read a page or two of tweets. You will get a sense of what is there and how people use it. You will be attracted, repelled, fascinated, confused -- and possibly even appalled. Remember that when you write a tweet, the people following you may have those same reactions, so begin deciding right away what kind of personality you want to form.

As a journalist writing for Twitter, you are trying to inform the people who are following you. But, remember too that as one of twitters, you are part of an ongoing conversation, and you should feel free to react to what others have said as well as introducing original information into the conversation.

Here are some things to think about and some guidelines:

What's the point? Why are you posting? Have a goal in mind. Understand how you want people to feel when they have read you post.
Information is more important, and interesting, than opinion.
One or two points (of information, opinion, whatever) max. Not three. You'll quickly use up your space.
Think: subjects and verbs. Complete sentences are not always necessary, but complete thoughts are.
Emphasize verbs. Active, descriptive verbs. It's one of the basic truths of good writing.
As in headline writing, "to be" verbs can be understood rather than written.
Drop articles (a, an and the) unless they are necessary for clarity.
Punctuate for clarity, not necessarily just to follow the rules.
Same thing goes for AP style. Often AP style rules will help with brevity, but sometimes they don't.
Use abbreviations only if you are sure your audience will immediately understand them. Don't use them just to show that you're hip to techno lingo.
Don't be afraid to direct your tweets to individual users. Done correctly, this can help build your audience.
Maintain a sense of professionalism. Using profanity and scatological language may give you a sense of coolness about yourself, but it's also likely to lose you followers. (On the day I wrote this, I stopped following an acquaintance for just this reason.)
Ask and ye shall receive. One of the great things about Twitter (and the web in general) is that there are people ready to respond, particularly if what you want is reasonable and interesting. A well-formed question will attract responses and followers.
Respect. Respect the language, your audience and yourself. Honesty, courtesy, modesty and civility are values in the Twitter society. Strive for them.

These are guidelines, not rules. They are mean to help you get started, not to lock you into a certain style or convention. Once you are on Twitter and a participant in the conversation, you can decide who you want to be and how you can use Twitter to be effective.

Continue reading:

Amy Gahran: Twitter Basics for Journalists & Recovering Journos
Step-by-step -- getting onto Twitter and making the most of it, from a major league Twitterer.

Terrance Ward: Using Hashtags for Organization in Twitter: Options for Making Microblogging Posts Ready for Viral Retweeting | January 5, 2009 | A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by the pound sign (#). Twitter, the pioneer microblogging service, saw its visitors quintuple in 2008. With so many more posts (or “tweets,” as they’re called on the site) being made, users are developing ways to organize and track the information meaningfully.

Craig Stoltz: How Twitter Finally Taught Me to be an Editor | Web2.0h...Really? | May 27, 2008 Fact is, it’s tough to convey any substance in 140 characters. You have to carefully weigh every word, letter and space. Even punctuation.

Margarent Mason: Writing My Twitter Etiquette Article: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely | The Morning News | August 15, 2008 Some good thoughts about how to use Twitter appropriately by Margaret Mason.

Ellyn Angelotti: JournoTweeting | Poynter Institute | This excellent article by Ellyn Angelotti takes you through Twitter step by step and then tells you how a journalist should be using it. Lots of links and good advice

JPROF celebrates fourth anniversary

2008-12-31T05:01:00.009-05:00

The last day of the year holds a special place on the JPROF.com calendar. It's the day in 2004 that the site went live. Thus, we celebrate our fourth anniversary today.

The site has come a long way from that small study and cold winter in Emory, Virginia, where it was first conceived and built.

I had finished that fall writing the manuscript for Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How, an introductory journalism text, and had been working on the web site for the book that the publishers, Allyn and Bacon, wanted. The idea came to me that the book's web site could be broadened into something even larger (since the book was 26 chapters, the site for it was pretty big) and more comprehensive. I had a couple of other texts on the market at the time, so the idea of a site that concentrated on teaching journalism grew like a weed in well-tilled soil.

Then there was the name.

I played around with a couple of things and can't remember how the idea of "jprof" struck. I know I was after something short. When those five letters came together in my head, I checked on the URL availability and, to my utter amazement, found that combination available.

It was a sign. The site had to be built.

Four years later, the site finds itself at the top of the hit list when you do a Google search for "teaching journalism."

I have heard from people all over the world who have found the site and used its contents. I am grateful to all of them and to all those who recommend the site. I plan for it to keep growing. This year, 2008, was certainly one of growth -- some in ways that I never could have imagined when the site was first built.

First, we saw the publication of two new books plus the seventh edition of the venerable Writing for the Mass Media. The new books are:

The Writing Wright, a book of essays, quotations and ponderings about journalism, writing and the writing life, and
Kill the Quarterback, a mystery novel published by Bushido Press/Greyhound Books.

Both of these books have separate URLs, but the web sites are housed under the JPROF rubric. JPROF has also become the home for the Writing for the Mass Media web site in light of the publisher's decision to stop hosting web sites for their books (a decision I find odd and puzzling).

Bigger changes are afoot.

During the last couple of weeks, I have been developing a new model for a news web site based on the concept of link journalism. This concept posits that there is much good information on the web and part of the responsibility of a journalist is to bring that to readers through the power of links. An outfit in Reston, Virginia -- Publish2 -- has developed software that makes it easy to gather links, organize them and publish them on a web site.

So, what we are doing is taking the Publish2 software and feeding it into some specialty sites:

BeePROF.com, all things bees
BooksPROF.com, all about books
SmallChurchPROF.com, everything about small churches (with my old friend Chuck Warnock)

The next possibility is GrowPROF.com, which will deal with everything from gardening to agriculture. Other ideas are in the wings.

These sites are within the JPROF site but have their own URLs to make them easier to find. In the year 2009, we hope folks will show up. We'll be posting more about this idea and these sites in the coming days.

And there's more to talk about, but as usual, I ramble on too much already. So, it being New Year's Eve, party on!

Journalism 5W - the Chinese edition

2008-12-24T08:50:00.003-05:00

It was quite a surprise that awaited me the other day at the door of the farm house -- a box full of the Chinese edition of Journalism: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. (Here's the book's Allyn and Bacon web site.)

My publisher, Allyn and Bacon, had told me nothing about this.

But there it was, five copies of the book with a completely different cover containing Chinese lettering and the first pages inside also contained Chinese letters. After that, the thing is in English.

The cover of the book says it is published by Peking University Press.

The publisher's letter that accompanied these books said it had been produced by Pearson's (Allyn and Bacon's parent company) Asia division.

Beyond that, I know nothing -- except that there are lots of people in China. I hope they're interested in journalism, American style.

Re-thinking the old media forms

2008-12-12T06:17:00.000-05:00

Yes, you can do the old forms on the web. But should you?

This "old media" type says we should re-think the forms of our content. This New York Times article by Virginia Heffernan is bit depressing but very perceptive.

She writes:

. . .they should think about what content suits these new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types, mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret we have been missing.

Stories behind the Frost/Nixon movie, confrontation

2008-12-11T18:13:00.000-05:00

The stories behind the 1977 verbal confrontation between Richard Nixon and David Frost continue to fascinate. The release of the Ron Howard movie Frost/Nixon has given us some great stories from that era. We looked at the transformation of David Frost from satirist to journalist a bit in an earlier post.

National Public Radio's Fresh Air program yesterday had James Reston Jr. as a guest. Reston was one of the researchers that helped David Frost prepare for the interviews, and he told some throat-grabbing stories about the information that he was able to come up with when he interviewed presidential aide Charles Colson.

Reston was one of the people who believed Nixon had committed crimes and that this set of interviews was going to be the only trial he would ever get. He was satisfied with the outcome, and he later wrote about it in The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews . A play was based on the book, and the current movie is based on the play.

The interview is online. It's only 18 minutes long (for those of us old enough -- remember the 18-minute gap?) and well worth listening to.

Pulitzers to include online news organizations

2008-12-09T10:01:00.002-05:00

This pretty much speaks for itself and can be filed under the "it's about time" category:

Prizes broadened to include online-only publications primarily devoted to original news reporting

The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism have been expanded to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet.

The Pulitzer Board also has decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories.

Update: Seth Goden has a good take on this. Essentially, there's not much of a change going on.

Inside David Frost's transformation from satirist to journalist

2008-12-07T16:45:00.002-05:00

With the release of the movie Frost/Nixon, Clive Irving (books on Amazon) describes the transformation of David Frost from satirist to journalist. Irving was on the inside of this story, and the view is fascinating.

In the summer of 1966, Irving was one of two people hired by David Frost as "creative consultants" for The Frost Programme. The other was Tony Jay:

Tony’s idea was that TV could and should be opened up as a forum for the people to engage with power, and it was Tony who insisted on doing something that nobody had risked before, having a live studio audience with a microphone swinging precariously on a boom above them so that David could pull people into the discourse when they were provoked. Thus a lot of politicians found themselves suddenly not only being cross-examined by Frost but by aggrieved members of the public. Amazing to think now how novel and dangerous that was then, in 1966, when it began.

Frost landed his biggest interview nine years later with Richard Nixon, who three years before had resigned as president of the United States. Both Frost and Nixon had a purpose for coming together, and thereby hangs the tale.

Here is a part of that interview. The video is provided by the Daily Beast (:33):

The photo above shows Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost and is from the Frost/Nixon web site.

Rules for the student photojournalist

2008-12-06T04:53:00.002-05:00

Every journalism student should learn the fundamentals of photojournalism. They should learn how to take pictures, and they should be given specific photo assignments.

Several years ago, I put together the following "rules" for training student photojournalists. If anyone has any comments, I would like to hear them.

RULE NO. 1: TAKE LOTS OF PICTURES.

You should assign a minimum number of pictures that the student should take, and that number should be high. For instance, if the photo is for a profile story where you anticipate using only one shot, the photographer should come back with at least 10 to 15 shots. In fact, 10 to 15 shots for any assignment would be a good minimum.

Young photographers tend to shoot too few pictures. They get one shot and one angle, and they don’t think about doing anything else. Assigning a high minimum number of pictures makes the students think about shooting different shots at different angles.

Young photographers should be told: keep shooting until someone needs medical attention or until you’re about to get hit by a truck.

RULE NO. 2: A PEN AND NOTEBOOK ARE AS IMPORTANT AS A CAMERA.

Photographers have to write down what and whom they are shooting. They will have to identify people for cutline information. They cannot trust their memories for any of this. They must have a pen and notebook with them at all times, and they must use it. They must also be accurate in getting their information, especially in spelling names correctly.

RULE NO. 3: PLAN.

As an instructor, you should talk with you students about their photo assignments. Help them plan what they will shoot. Some pictures happen spontaneously; most don’t. They are shot because the photographer planned to be there to shoot them.

One thing you might do is diagram the scene of a photo assignment with the student. Help the student figure out where the action is and where he or she should be to take a good shot. Most events -- speeches, parades, sports events -- lend themselves to this kind of planning.

RULE NO. 4: GET CLOSE.

Anybody can take wide-angle, establishing shots (top photo). Real photographers get as close to the action and the people as they can (bottom photo). They get expressions, hand movements, interactions, etc. They literally get in people’s faces.

Students should be told: if you show up at an event with a camera, people expect you to take pictures. You try not to be intrusive, but sometimes you have to be, and people will understand this.

RULE NO. 5: SHOOT IN THE BEST LIGHT POSSIBLE.

If you can shoot outside, do so. Shoot near a window if possible (but be careful). If you have to use a flash, do it. Light is what makes pictures possible, and nothing makes up for an absence of light.

Pay attention to the light. Many students don't and return with rotten pictures.

RULE NO. 6: EQUIPMENT DOESN’T MATTER.

Well, it does to some degree. But, students should never be allowed to use equipment as an excuse for not taking good pictures (unless the camera simply doesn’t work, of course). A good photographer adjusts to the limitations of the camera. A good photographer learns how to use the equipment he or she has to take the best pictures possible. You might tell students that one of the laws of photojournalism (and of life) is this: Equipment will never be quite good enough.

Students don’t have to know the innards of a camera to take good pictures either. They should know how to think about taking pictures. They should know what good composition is. They should know how to plan their shots. None of this has anything to do with whether or not a camera is digital or single-lens reflex or box Brownie.

RULE NO. 7: BE CREATIVE.

Require your students to return from an assignment with shots from more than one angle. Tell them to get high, get low, move around the room. Some situations -- like sporting events -- dictate where you can be. In most other cases, they should always think about their physical proximity to the subject. A shot from a high or low angle can make a fairly standard shot much more interesting. And, you never know which perspective is best until you have tried them all. Always move around--this will show you the options you have for each situation.

More on photojournalism:

A good take on being a reporter

2008-11-22T05:49:00.001-05:00

Reporting is where journalism begins.

Without reporting -- gather facts, information, and views and putting all those together -- journalism doesn't exist. So we owe a deep debt to those who spend their lives doing the tough job of reporting.

Deborah Howell, ombudsman for the Washington Post, has a good take on what it takes to be a reporter in her current column.

What makes a good reporter? Endless curiosity and a deep need to know what is happening. Then, the ability to hear a small clue and follow it. When Post reporter Dana Priest first heard "a tiny, tiny piece" of what turned out to be the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal, she couldn't ignore it.

She also quotes former Post editor Ben Bradlee, not a bad reporter himself:

They've got to love what they're doing; they've got to be serious about turning over rocks, opening doors. The story drives you. It's part of your soul.

Read the whole thing.

Non-profit news: the new journalism

2008-11-18T07:33:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has an article this morning on non-profit journalism -- an idea that has been around for a while. In fact, the Christian Science Monitor had a similar article, spotlighting the VoiceofSanDiego as the Times article did, back in February.

There are also articles in the Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, and elsewhere.

The basic idea is that a foundation or wealthy, public spirited individual puts up the money to fund journalistic efforts of one type or another. Sometimes, as the Times article points out, these efforts are locally based as in San Diego, Minnesota, Chicago and St. Louis.

Sometimes they are national, such as ProPublica or the Center for Investigative Reporting.

These organizations are most likely to use the web for the publishing and distribution of their products.

There are legitimate independence issues that can be raised about these efforts. What are the motivations of those who put up the money? Do they try to influence the journalism that is being produced?

But the fact that these questions can be raised do not make these efforts or organizations unworthy. Far from it. They can offer a valuable service to the public in an age when traditional media are abandoning their journalistic roles. They can offer outlets and employment, even if it is only temporary, to budding young journalists who understand the web and social networking far more intuitively some older folk.

In fact, ultimately the strength and staying power of these non-profit organizations will be in the people they hire rather than the journalism they produce. That's an idea that I want to develop in a later post.

Barack Obama: America's 'Professor in Chief'

2008-11-17T15:20:00.000-05:00

Richard Monastersky, a senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, has an article in a recent edition of the publication pointing out a number of things about the election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden with regard to higher education.

Obama is a former professor. He taught at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years.
Michelle Obama worked in the administration of the University of Chicago.
Joe Biden has been an adjunct professor at the Widener University School of Law for 17 years.
Jill Biden is an English instructor at Delaware Technical and Community College's Stanton-Wilmington campus.

The article then quotes a number of academicians about Obama's professorial and deliberative style. One drew the comparison between him and Bill Clinton, another ex-law prof:

But Mr. Obama must avoid the temptation to overdose on deliberation, says Ms. Hoff. (Joan Hoff, a research professor of history at Montana State University at Bozeman.) The nation witnessed the hazards of that tendency during the presidency of Bill Clinton, another former law professor. "Clinton would talk everything to death and not come to a decision," she says, particularly with regard to delayed decisions about Kosovo, Bosnia, and Rwanda.

And then there was the ultimate academician, Woodrow Wilson.

The article is titled "America Elects a Professor in Chief."

How open will the Obama administration be?

2008-11-17T13:27:00.001-05:00

National Public Radio had a story this morning speculating on how open the new Barack Obama administration will be. The story quotes former University of Alabama student (and friend) Christi Parsons, who covered the state legislature in Springfield for the Chicago Tribune when Obama was a state senator.

The gist of the story is that when he was in Springfield, Obama understood the press and conducted himself in an open manner.

But will that translate into an open presidency? Probably not, although we may finally see a president with the self-confidence of a John Kennedy in dealing with the press.

Link journalism - the shape of news to come?

2008-10-13T08:37:00.002-04:00

Two web sites came onto my radar this weekend that set me to thinking about the shape of journalism on the web.

A friend recommended Publishing 2.0, an excellent and provocative gathering of articles about journalism put together by Scott Karp and Robert Young. The article from this site that got my attention showed up in my email this morning. It is by Josh Korr, titled Nervous About Link Journalism? Ignore Web’s ‘Cesspool’ And Tap Its ‘Natural Spring’. Korr makes a short, strong case for journalists making good use of the good resources of the web.

Then I came across Mahalo, which bills itself as the human-powered search engine (hat-tip to Jack Lail for this). Mahalo is a bit of a cross between Google News and Wikipedia. Wiki-like pages are build for news events -- even breaking news. Much of the information that is on the page comes from links. Mahalo has its own editors, but it is also crowd-sourced, so anyone can sign up and build or edit a page.

(The folks at Mahalo make that pretty easy, so I -- always in blatant self promotion mode -- built a page for The Writing Wright, figuring I would continue until someone called a halt to my nefarious efforts. So far, the anti-self promotion police have not arrived to haul me away.)

But take a look at some of the news event pages of Mahalo -- these, for instance:
The Knoxville Church Shooting
Napa Valley Wildfire

The way these pages are structure is what has me interested. There is a paragraph summary and then a set of Fast Facts. Then there is room for more explanations and information in whatever way the editor/journalist wants to divide it. There is also ample room for links.

So, I am thinking: Is this the mode in which we should be reporting our stories? It tosses the inverted pyramid and other narrative forms aside.

I am putting this question to my Journalism and Electronic Media 560 Advanced Web Publishing class on Wednesday evening. It will be interesting to hear their take on this.

The Writing Wright: now available on Amazon

2008-09-27T05:35:00.000-04:00

Tom Clancy, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and Satchel Paige -- they were all writers (of sorts). And they have all made it into this first volume of The Writing Wright.

The Writing Wright is now available on Amazon.

If you are fascinated by writers and writing, The Writing Wright offers a box of chocolates you can’t refuse. The book sprinkled quotations and stories from many writers along with my own insight, instruction and commentary. Here you’ll find:

• Mark Twain’s critique of the writing for James Fenimore Cooper

• Ernest Hemingway’s attitude toward punctuation

• How expensive a misspelling can be

• Down-to-earth instruction on the glue of writing

• When Tom Clancy learned about submarines

• What Satchel Paige said about braggin’

• What H.L. Mencken thought about being a reporter

And much more.

The book contains many of my own illustrations. My hope for The Writing Wright is that it will draw you in and teach you something about writing – lessons you can learn over and over.

The price is $10.

The Writing Wright's fan page on Facebook

2008-09-25T08:09:00.000-04:00

Just created a fan page for The Writing Wright on Facebook.

The Writing Wright is a book of essays, quotations and snippets about writing, the language, journalism and the writing life. The book is illustrated with the author's pen and ink drawings.

Doing the fan page once wasn't too hard. I'm sure when I do it again, it will be even simpler.

I loaded a few of the drawings that are in the book into the first photo album, and I'm going to take some screen shots of a few of the pages and put them in another album. I also wrote on the Wall and started a discussion thread.

Before long, I'll figure out how to invite folks to become a fan. Probably won't do that until ordering info comes through from Amazon.

Meanwhile, you can head over that way and see what's up.

Where's Sarah? Wall Street elbows her out

2008-09-24T08:19:00.002-04:00

• Sarah Palin is no longer the focus of the rabid attention of the news media herd. Why is that?

Interesting that only a couple of weeks ago, the news media were 24/7 about Sarah Palin, the fighting hockey mom who could stare down the Ruskies.

But the last few days all we have heard from her is about her emails being hacked and a little dust-up with reporters when she went to talk nice to foreign leaders at the UN.

Has anyone asked her for an opinion about the economy or the Wall Street meltdown? Does anyone (even Republicans whose retirement plans are in jeopardy) really want to know?

What's happening these days is serious business.

Sarah Palin seems to be suddenly irrelevant.

Blogging the course - what's fair?

2008-09-22T10:10:00.000-04:00

This one hits disturbingly close to home.

A New York University student has written a scathing report about her current course "Reporting Gen Y" and has included criticisms of the professor. The student said the prof was not up to speed on social media and podcasting and taught the course with an outdated mindset.

It didn't take long for the student's report to make its way out into the web.

Ouch!

Mark Glaser at MediaShift has an account of the controversy with some follow-up with the director of the school.

Is it fair for a student to write about a class and its prof and fellow students? Should the writer let everybody know that he or she is doing it or should it be done undercover?

All editors want the same things -- and they're not getting them

2008-09-16T09:11:00.002-04:00

Lynn Worsham writes a brief, excellent article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education on the main complaints scholarly journal editors have about working with authors. Worsham is editor of JAC, a quarterly journal of rhetoric, writing, culture and politics.

Many of the complaints she describes are echoed by editors in other realms:

Inappropriate submissions because writers are not familiar with the journal, its purpose and its audience.
Sloppy manuscripts. Grammar and spelling errors.
Failure to follow the journal's submission guidelines.
Bad attitudes about editing and revision -- and, most of all, about rejections.

Editors everywhere -- inside and outside academe -- would agree.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

A seventh edition

2008-05-20T09:31:00.000-04:00

A textbook that goes into multiple editions can be like a child who grows up but doesn't leave home.

Textbooks can be funny things. If you write a textbook, you want it to be widely adopted so that about four years later the publisher will ask for a second edition (because, while your royalties don't amount to much at that point, the publisher is making a ton of money).

Only a few textbooks, maybe 15 percent, make it into a second edition. (I don't have a reference or stats to back that figure up.)

But then, the text may begin to gather new adopters and hang onto a few of the original ones. If that happens, about four years later, the publisher will ask for a third edition. And so it goes.

Sometimes a textbook can be like a child who grows into adulthood but never leaves home.

Those are a few of the thoughts I'm having this morning (May 20) as I am procrastinating doing work on the seventh edition of Writing for the Mass Media. The publisher is Allyn and Bacon, and the good folks there want the revised edition from me by June 1. That's why the posts on this blog and others I maintain have been a little thin in the last few days.

During its quarter century of existence, Writing for the Mass Media has been adopted as a textbook at nearly 500 colleges and universities (mostly in America but also in places across the globe). The sixth edition was used at 240 different schools, and many of those places are multi-year adopters.

So, this job is well woth doing (and has even become financially justifiable). But it's hard -- and a little boring and tedious. Fortunately, it's almost done.

And to make sure it's done, by June 1, I had better get back to it.

You can find out more about Writing for the Mass Media at these spots:

The Newseum opens in Washington

2008-04-13T06:55:00.001-04:00

Gannett's splashy new monument to journalism, the Newseum, opened in Washington yesterday. For the most part, I think, the reviews are good. (Check out this interactive guide at USA Today. And here's the review.)

(My old friend from Navy days, Thomas A.K. Kai, was there and sent me a link to the pictures he took, one of which is above. Tom has about 40 good photos of the place both inside and out.)

The place, visually, can't be missed, and its size and location will make it a tourist magnet. I certainly plan to try to get there the next time I am in D.C.

The hope is that people who know little and care little about the profession of journalism will show up and, after the visit, know more and care more. The memorial to journalists who have been killed doing their jobs is particularly appropriate and should not be missed by anyone.

Good journalism disturbs, unsettles and threatens people in authority. It frightens people who hold on to easy assumptions about the world in which we live and the people who inhabit it along with us. Whatever the technological and format changes that await us in the near future, I hope that there will be people who take on this calling in this very dangerous world.

So, good luck to the Newseum and to those who visit the place.

One note: The giant marble slab that contains the words of the First Amendment on the outside of the building comes from just down the road from where I live in Blount County, Tennessee.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

TNJN wins regional SPJ awards

2008-04-01T12:57:00.000-04:00

The Tennessee Journalist <TNJN.com>, the news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at UT, has been named as the best independent news web site for Region 12 of the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence awards. A number of the staffers have received individual awards. I am the faculty adviser for this site and proud as punch. Read more at the Tennessee Journalist and the SPJ site.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Public Conversation on Web Journalism conference at UT

2008-04-01T12:48:00.000-04:00

The University of Tennessee School of Journalism and Electronic Media is hosting a two-day conference titled "A Public Conversation on Web Journalism" on April 3-4. The conference is being funded by a grant from the Scripps Foundation. It will feature Rob Curley, vice president of WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive, as the dinner speaker on Thursday evening. Among the mix of academics and professionals at the conference are Steve Klein of George Mason University, Chip Scanlan of Poynter, Kenneth Knight of the Tampa Tribune, and Channing Dawson of Scripps Television. Find out more about the conference at the Tennessee Journalist.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

The Tennessee Journalist

2008-01-28T11:42:00.000-05:00

The Tennessee Journalist is the news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee.

TNJN.com was created in the fall of 2006, soon after I joined the faculty at UT. This news site is part of the curriculum of the School and is operated by a student staff. They make the editorial decisions about what is posted on the site every day. You can find out a little more about the origins of TNJN.com at its About page. And if you want to be entertained, watch a promotional video about TNJN that was produced by one of our students.

The purpose of this news web site is to help the School teach a variety of aspects of web journalism and to give students the opportunity to practice and develop their skills and understanding of this new form of journalism.

TNJN.com, I think, serves as an excellent model for what a journalism/mass communication program can do to get itself into the convergence world. The site cost very little to establish and does not require much out-of-pocket cash for the School to maintain it. The students have taken to it with energy and enthusiasm.

Here are a few facts:

The site was established in October 2006.
The site is a part of the curriculum of the School.
The site is run by a staff of students, and editorial decisions rest with that staff of editors. The staff operates independently from any class or course, and anyone may join the staff.
The site is operated with a content management system developed specifically for TNJN.com. This system (which the students have named “Ochs”) is built on the Django open-source framework. It was developed by Johnny Dobbins and Staci Wolfe and is owned and can be licensed by the University of Tennessee.
Students doing work in any of our courses can contribute their work to the site. Some courses give students the option of completing some course requirements by working with the site.
Advertising space can be sold on the site. (We have not done this yet, but we are planning to begin this semester.)
The site is equipped to handle almost anything our students produce: news and feature stories, pictures, audio, video, audio slide shows, etc.
The site is updated on a daily basis and can be updated immediately when breaking news occurs.
A unique and important aspect of the site is that every student who contributes to the site automatically gets a profile page. This page can contain a short biography and picture of the student. It also contains links to all of their work on the site. A good example of a student's profile page is this one.

The student staff holds a weekly staff meeting on Thursday evenings, and about 30 students regularly attend these meeting. Probably twice that number (or more) make regular contributions to the site.

TNJN.com is gathering an audience. Through the fall semester, the site attracted about 2,500 unique visitors every day. Since the beginning of the spring semester, the number of unique visitors has averaged more than 3,200 each day.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

JPROF's third anniversary

2007-12-31T13:27:00.000-05:00

JPROF observes its third anniversary today. Three years ago, after a couple of months of preparation, I launched JPROF from my small study in the house we were renting from Emory and Henry College in Emory, Va. The site was a personal endeavor, designed to help me keep up with the field of journalism so that I could stay current for my students and so I would have material at hand to updatte the textbooks I had written. I had no ambitions for the site other than those. If the material that I put on JPROF could help other instructors and students of journalism, that would be great, but that was not my first priority.

That's the way it's worked out, however. JPROF ended last year with about 1,400 unique visitors a day (see below). This year the audience grew enormously, and I am not certain why. In November, JPROF averaged more than 8,000 visitors a day, and there were three days that month with the visitor count topped 10,000. That figure has dropped back for December to nearly 5,000 visitors a day. (You can check out the stats for JPROF if you are interested.) The image to the right shows the monthly totals, and you can get a larger view of it here. JPROF comes up near the top when a Google search of "teaching journalism" is done.

I sincerely appreciate the time that people spend with JPROF, and I hope there is material here that they find interesting and useful. I also enjoy hearing from folks and certainly don't mind when people point out errors of fact or grammar.

A couple of other items of note before we close out 2007:

I am in the process of changing JPROF from an HTML tables code to a cascading style sheets (CSS) code. I am testing the frontiers of my technical knowledge by doing this, but so far, there have been been few problems. I hope this will make the site more stable, and it will load faster for users. It will also simplfy the layout somewhat. The big differents users may notice is that more pages will have search functions. I hope that helps.

The publishers of Writing for the Mass Media has asked for a seventh edition of the book, and I will be working on that full bore this spring. The sixth edition was used as a text in about 240 colleges and universities, and I am greatly humbled by that fact. Thanks to all.

By far the biggest web thing that has happened to me this year is the phenomenal growth of the Tennessee Journalist, the news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee where I teach. I got TNJN.com rolling in October 2006 with a lot of help from some very good friends. I was blessed with a set of students who quickly took ownership of the site and are making it into something to be proud of. Their hard work and enthusiasm leaves me awestruck, and there were will many good things to come of that in 2008.

With that, I'll stop and bid you my usual New Year's greeting: Party on!

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Audio slide shows

2007-03-01T09:34:00.000-05:00

Web journalism students should learn how to produce an audio slide show.

These things are not easy to do in that they require students to select pictures for a slide sequence and write a script that will be recorded for that sequence. But they are certainly well within a student's grasp.

This article on JPROF lays out some of the principles to following in producing an audio slide show.

There is also a practice assignment that students can use to learn how to select and sequence photos and how to write a script. The assignment includes pictures and information for a script.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Launching Politico

2007-01-09T09:37:00.000-05:00

The coming launch of the political news web site Politico has drawn much attention from those who wonder about its longevity (see the latest New York Times article about it; and an earlier one). I have no idea about how long it will last -- though, being a political news junkie, I hope it will be for a long time -- but I am fascinated by the ideas that its founders have about how it should be structured and how it should operate.
More

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Tributes to a coach

2007-01-02T08:23:00.000-05:00

Not a football coach, though it is that time of year. A writing coach.

Don Murray, a man whose work and ideas influenced many of us in the business of writing and teaching writing, passed away Dec. 30. Writing gurus Roy Peter Clark and Chip Scanlon at the Poynter Institute have written fitting tributes to the man they knew personally and the one who talked and taught writing for all of his professional life. (There is a lot more about Murray on the Poynter website.)

Murray won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in the 1950s -- the youngest ever to do so -- but he didn't let that stop him from a long and prolific career as a magazine journalist, newspaper columnist, fiction writer, and university professor. His idea about the five steps of the writing process have been referenced by JPROF here.

The world could do with a few more like him.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

2007 -- year of the First Amendment?

2007-01-01T08:10:00.000-05:00

Well, it isn't likely, but I always begin a year with that great hope -- and very little else.

There is no reason to be confident. Our leaders want to diminish the rights of the Constitution because it will make them more comfortable and more secure in their power. The people seem to buy these outrages in the name of solving "problems." The problems are rarely solved, but the politicians get more comfortable.

This past year we saw the Federal Elections Commission "reprimand" a NASCAR driver because he had a "Bush-Cheney" sticker on his car during a race. We can only hope that the FEC continues to make such ridiculous decisions so that people will wake up to how dangerous that agency has become.

Meanwhile, we can hope (but, as I said, without a lot of confidence) that high school principals will leave the student press alone, that prosecutors will find other ways to pursue their cases besides jailing journalists, and that FEC bureaucrats will get stuck in traffic on their way to work.

And to give you a taste of what is going on with the First Amendment and the Constitution, I recommend the following as a starter:

George Will, "A Retreat on Rationing Free Speech" (Washington Post)
Dahlia Lithwick, "The Bill of Wrongs" (Slate)
Bradley Smith, "New Rules Might Silence Democracy" (Ft. Worth Star Telegram)

Looking after the First Amendment is never easy, but it's always worth doing.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Second anniversary

2006-12-31T10:15:00.000-05:00

JPROF celebrates its second birthday today. This is one of those things that "the world will little note nor long remember" (Abraham Lincoln, a big supporter of JPROF). Still, we pause for a moment. I've had a lot of fun putting this thing together and then adding to it over the last couple of years. The best part is the many folks who have said they looked at the site and liked what they said. Some have even recommended to others, and a few cruel folks (including me)have made their students spend a few moments here. Some kind of audience for this site exists out in the world. I'm not sure who they are or why they come, but they seem to be showing up regularly and growing. The number of daily visits -- whatever that means and for whatever that's worth -- grew seven fold this year. At least, that's what my stats say:

I have other counters assigned to the site, but I'm not sure what those numbers mean either. I like these because they are the biggest ones, and they make me feel better on days when the ego is shrunk.

Besides, as Casey Stengel, the old perfersser, says, "You can look it up."

So, in addition to celebrating the New Year, take a moment to celebrate with me. 2006 was a good year in lots of ways. One of the big things for me was taking a position at the University of Tennessee where I have had the chance to get a new news web site started for the School of Journalism and Electronic Media there. The site is called the TennesseeJournalist.com (TNJN.com), and I'll be writing more about that shortly.

I'll stop now. Party on.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Photos you can use

2006-12-25T19:48:00.000-05:00

One of the first topics that JPROF.com tackled (which is coming up on its second birthday in less than a week) was that of how a news web site that didn't have access to syndicated photos could stay visually current. There are a few sites that provide free photos, such as DefenseLink, that we pointed to at the time that could help in this regard.

Today, two years later, the situation is much different. Photo editors can use this simple formula to help illustrate their site with news photos:

Flickr + Creative Commons = Photos you can use

Flickr is the photo web site owned by Yahoo.com. Anyone can get space on Flickr, and uploading photos -- lots and lots of photos -- is relatively easy. Many people have taken advantage of Flickr to store their photos and share them with friends.

And a lot of those people have placed their photos under a Creative Commons agreement. Creative Commons is the idea that the creator or originator of a copyrightable work can automatically license that work for non-commercial use. (JPROF has a short piece about Creative Commons here.)

How can you find these photos on Flickr that have been licensed under a Creative Commons agreement? That is the easy part. You simply go to the advanced search function of Flickr and along with your search terms, click on the box next to Creative Commons. Some topics may not yield much, but if you are creative and expansive, chances are you will find something that you can use.

For instance, on the day that I am writing this (Christmas Day, 2006), the big news story is that James Brown, one of the greats of rock 'n roll music, has died. As an individual running a news web site -- or as a student running a news web site -- I probably would not have any pictures of James Brown that I could use if I wanted to post something about him.

When I searched through Flickr for "James Brown" and used the Creative Commons filter, I came up with more than 1,000 that people had decided to share. Not all of those photos were good, or even usable. But my search turned up an excellent set of photos by someone who identifies himself as ShanghaiStreets, who took photos of a concert that Brown gave in Shanghai in February. The content of these photos was excellent, and the photographer has posted technically high quality images, so getting the photo itself and working with it was easy enough.

It's not a bad idea to get in touch with the photographer to let him or her know that you are using the photograph and to ask how that person wants to be credited (as I have done in this case).

Mark Glaser, once a regular contributor to the Online Journalism Review and who now runs the web log MediaShift, has an excellent article about using Flickr for this purpose. Anyone who wants to use this method and understand the ideas behind it should take a close look at this article.

I plan to require this article for my JEM 422 (Managing News Web Sites) class in the spring, and we will be spending some time on the proper way to extract and use photographs obtained by this method. If you think photos are important to the presentation of news and information (and you're right -- they are), this is an excellent resource that, if used carefully, can add immeasurably to your site.

Remember the word "carefully."

Not everything that everyone puts on Flickr is on the up and up. Photos can be stolen or faked, and a photo editor who is not cautious can be easily fooled. Here are some precautionary steps:

Get in touch with the photographer. If there is any doubt,ask about the photograph, where and when it was taken and under what circumstances. People who post photos on Flickr often do not include a lot of information.
Look at other work the photographer has put on Flickr.
Sometimes photos will contain restricted material. In that case, don't use them. In looking for the James Brown photo, I found that someone had posted a photograph of James Brown on a television set. That one -- besides the fact that it was a bad image -- was off limits.
And when in doubt, don't use it. Better to forego the photo than to get into trouble or violate someone else's right to control their work.

Check out Amy Gahran's post on Poynter's E-Media Tidbits about protecting yourself when using photos from Flickr. This will also be required reading for my students.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

A personal note

2006-11-19T06:32:00.000-05:00

It has been several weeks since any new entry appeared on this site. That's certainly not due to a lack of issues and events to write about. It's more a case of my inefficiency -- and the fact that we have been busy at the University of Tennessee launching a news web site for the School, the TennesseeJournalist. It's live, and I invite you to take a look.

But for now, we'll take a break from things journalistic, and you can, in your mind's eye (and with the aid of YouTube, iPhoto, and various other devises), travel down to Blount County, Tennessee, to see what a beautiful late fall day we had on Saturday.

Enjoy.

The Iraq war is like . . . a comma

2006-10-05T09:10:00.000-04:00

Once again, commas are in the news.

Well, make that once in a blue moon.

In a speech the other day, George W. Bush said that eventually the war in Iraq would be seen as "just a comma" in the history books. He didn't offer any explanation for what he meant, and his detractors have pounced, claiming that he is trivializing a war that he began and that has cost the lives of more than 2,500 soldiers. (Here is the Washington Post story on all of this.)

I'm not sure what he meant either, but as a card-carrying grammarian, I'm pretty sure that commas are important -- probably more important than Bush or his detractors seem to think.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Redundancies in the air

2006-10-03T11:45:00.000-04:00

If you're a collector in the word game (as I am), keeping your redundancy box full is a fairly easy matter. All you have to do is pay attention occasionally.

That's what I was doing when I was driving along yesterday, listening to story on National Public Radio. The story was on the opening of the new Supreme Court term.

The anchor was interviewing a law professor about the various cases the court would be hearing this year.

At one point in the interview, the anchor -- in response to something the prof had said -- cut in with "Well, that's the key central point, isn't it?"

The law professor, who may find redundancies the elixir of life, repeated the interviewer's words.

"Yes, that's the key central point," she said and continued with her comment.

I hope that both of these intelligent people have some regrets. Meanwhile, I have a new redundancy for my collection.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Editing for the web

2006-09-14T10:33:00.000-04:00

The web is a different medium.

Then why do we keep seeing so much shovelware -- articles that were written for print -- on news web sites.

One reason, of course, is that news organizations (particularly newspapers) do not invest in enough people who can change print stories into web-friendly packages.

Another is that editors do not understand the needs or possibilities of the web. To get my students shifted from print to the web, I have developed this example of how a print story can be turned into a web story.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Another Football Saturday . . .

2006-09-09T16:47:00.000-04:00

And another offering from

First Inning Artworks

Check out the offering on EBay.

Today's Word on Journalism

2006-09-07T08:44:00.000-04:00

"In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, French commentator on the American experiment, 1835

That quotation comes from Ted Pease's Today's Word on Journalism, a daily email that contains a quotation about some aspect of journalism. Ted is a professor at Utah State and has a world-class sense of humor, particularly when he directs it at himself. His email is always a delight to read. You can subscribe by sending a "subscribe" message to Ted at tpease@cc.usu.edu. (The drawing to the right is de Tocqueville, not Ted.) More quotations about journalism -- many of them coming from Ted -- can be found at this page on JPROF.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Couric takes over

2006-09-06T09:11:00.000-04:00

In the long history of the CBS Evening News, there had been only three permanent anchors: Douglas Edwards, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. Now there is a fourth. Katie Couric CBS biography) debuted as the newscast's latest anchor last night. Couric is a legitimate journalist who was part of NBC's news team covering the Pentagon and the Gulf War in 1991. For the last 15 years she has been the host of NBC's Today Show, and her work has not been considered to be on the front lines of reporting. Her main job at CBS is not to deliver the news but to deliver an audience (preferably one that is a little younger than the one CBS has). Here are a few stories and reviews of her first night: New York Times, Washington Post, NPR.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

The iconic image

2006-08-22T07:59:00.000-04:00

Few of us get to leave the impression that Joe Rosenthal did.

Rosenthal was the 33-year-old Associated Press photographer who took the picture of Marines raising the flag during the fierce battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific in 1945.

That image struck an instant chord with viewers, and it has been stuck in our consciousness ever since. It has been reproduced millions of times in many forums and is the basis for the giant Marine memorial that overlooks the nation's capital.

Rosenthal was an excellent photographer during his entire career -- not just a guy with a camera at the right place and time. He died on Sunday at the age of 94.

(Check out what the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper where he worked for many years, had to say about him; also take a look at the retrospective at Poynter.)

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

News orgs discover web's immediacy

2006-08-17T13:42:00.000-04:00

A couple of stories from Romenesko’s blog on today show that big time news organizations are discovering the immediacy of the web.

One comes from Westworld, which reports that when the Denver Post stumbled onto a scoop last month about beer magnate Peter Coors being arrested for drunk driving, the Post nailed the story and then put it on the organization’s web site – despite some grousing from the traditionalists. These folks thought a story like that should be saved for print first, which was several hours away. The paper’s managing editor said the web would be “our breaking news platform.”

Then there is the story about CBS streaming its nightly news program simultaneously with its over-the-air broadcast. This, apparently, has come about only after painstaking negotiations with affiliates.

One is tempted to ask: “Where have these folks been for the last 10 years or so?”

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Seeing and believing

2006-08-11T14:23:00.000-04:00

This week's incidents of photo-doctoring of pictures from Lebanon that have been published by some news organizations have provoked a good deal of outrage and hand-wringing.

So they should.

Changing a photograph in a way that alters its meaning -- even if only incidentally -- is not a good thing for journalists or journalism. We have been reading about this sort of thing far too much these days, and unfortunately, we will probably continue to hear about such behavior.

But in an article in Slate ("Don't Believe What You See in the Papers"), Jim Lewis has some valuable perspective on how we view photography. A photograph has power because we believe it; we think that if we had been standing beside the photographer when it was taken, we would have seen the same thing. That's not true, and Lewis does a good job of reminding us of that fact.

Lewis also links to a "rogue's gallery" of digital manipulation put together by Dartmouth's Haney Farid that reminds us that this sort of thing happens on a regular basis.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

An expensive comma

2006-08-10T14:24:00.000-04:00

Sometimes punctuation can be expensive.

That was certainly the case for Rogers Communications of Canada, which recently found that its misreading of a contract -- not recognizing the meaning of the placement of a comma in a particular sentence of a contract -- will cost the company a couple of million dollars. All this is according an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Rogers had a contract to put cable lines across thousands of untility polls in the Maritimes. Rogers thought the agreement was good for at least five years because of the sentence that the agreement "shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successfive year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."

The contract was with Aliant, Inc. More than a year ago, Aliant informed Rogers that it was giving notice that it was scrapping the contract based on that sentence. Rogers argued that its understanding was that the contract, which was still in its first five-year period, could not be disgarded so easily.

But the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission disagreed.

The comma, the commission said, gave Aliant the right to cancel the contract during the first five years with only a year's notice. Alient will do so, and renotiating the contract will cost Rogers about $2 million.

A high price to pay for overlooking a comma.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Plagiarism: Unconscious and unintentional?

2006-05-03T14:22:00.000-04:00

Writing is one of the most conscious and intentional acts a human can undertake. Constructing a phrase or sentence is a high-level mental activity (akin, I tell my students, to doing a complex math problem).

That's why Kaavya Viswanathan's excuse – or, at least, explanation – for the plagiarism in her novel How Opal Mehta Go Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life sounds so odd.

She admitted the plagiarism but said, in typical 21st century fashion, it was "unconscious and unintentional," according to a New York Times report. It's as if she wants us to believe that she was writing in her sleep.

This piece is not meant to beat up on Ms. Viswanathan. She is only 19 years old and what she has been through during the past two weeks has undoubtedly destroyed a major part of her life's plan. She had gotten a novel published early in life and had a contract for another. Now, all that is gone.

While the plagiarism is maddening, one can feel sorry for her personally. Plagiarism is theft, and she did it and got caught – in a very public way. Her career as a writer is likely over. Little, Brown, her publisher, has announced that it will not be publishing the second novel.

It will take time and effort for her to move away from all of this.

She could start by giving up the "unconscious and unintentional" excuse. She may not have understood the seriousness of what she was doing when she did it, but the fact remains that she did it. Her acts were both conscious and intentional.

Writing is like that.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

The writing life, Gay Talese style

2006-04-23T11:42:00.000-04:00

For more than 40 years, there has been intense interest in the writing style exemplified by Gay Talese – and in Gay Talese (web site) himself.

But that emphasis, particularly in Talese himself, may have been misplaced. Talese is certainly a writer of utmost grace. He works at his profession with an intensity that is rare.-

But what distinguishes him is not his writing but his reporting.
Talese has produced a number of important and interesting magazine articles and books, most famously “Frank Sinatra has a cold” (Esquire, April 1966), The Kingdom and the Power, Honor Thy Father, and Thy Neighbor’s Wife, among many others. In some of these, he has been a minor or major character.

Now he is about to publish a memoir, A Writer’s Life, which talks about his methods of reporting and writing. The book and Talese were profiled in the New York Times last week (“Gay Talese’s New Memoir Emerges After 14 Tortured Years”) by Charles McGrath.

. . . In the late 60's, when he was working on "Honor Thy Father," his book about the Bonanno crime family, he moved in for a while with Bill Bonanno and his bodyguards, and in the early 80's, while working on "Unto the Sons," he suddenly decamped for Calabria. Most famously, in the early 70's, while working on "Thy Neighbor's Wife," a book about sexual liberation in America, he went native for an extended period — far longer, his critics claimed, than his research strictly required — managing massage parlors in New York and living for a while at Sandstone, a nudist swingers' colony in California.

Talese is a graduate of the University of Alabama, where I taught for 25 years. Several years ago, he returned to campus to receive a writing award that my college gave him, and two of my faculty colleagues and I had dinner with him one evening.

I told him the story of when I was an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee in 1970 and had just finished The Kingdom and the Power. The book had been written like a novel, and I wondered how he could have gotten inside the minds of all of the people he described in the book. He had to have speculated or made good guesses, I thought.

No, he said, there was nothing in the book that he had made up or speculated on; everything was the result of interviews (sometimes many interviews) and observation.

Talese went on in that conversation to describe his work methods, which include intensive concentration on his subjects and hours of taking and transcribing notes. He is meticulous in the construction of his sentences and paragraphs, revising and constantly questioning his prose. His standards are high, exacting and tortuous.

But Talese doesn’t make it up. He is not a novelist, although as a pioneer of the New Journalism writing style, he uses some of the techniques of fiction. He is a journalist, and as he said recently, “Nonfiction takes no liberty with the facts.”

Above all, Talese is a reporter.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

The death of the clever headline?

2006-04-14T07:41:00.000-04:00

Headline writing is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism and certainly one of the most difficult things to teach for the journalism professor. Now -- as if accuracy, clarity and a bit of wite weren't enough -- there is a new challenge: search engines. Steve Lohr writes this week in the New York Times about how news organizations are tweaking headlines in an effort to get their links picked by Google and its kin and thus drawing readers to the site. If the Google consideration becomes a major one, we could see yet another shift in the practice of journalism.

More

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

The Newspaper Problem, in a nutshell

2006-04-09T09:39:00.000-04:00

The sports editor of my local newspaper wrote a column this weekend that, inadvertently, summed up much of what is wrong with American newspapers. (He and the newspaper will remain un-named and un-linked.)

The column must have been in reaction to some criticism the sports department had received from high school sports partisans. The newspaper had apparently not given enough attention to the schools of these partisans, and they were accusing the sports department of bias.

The sports editor had grown a bit testy with these folks.

In an area that includes over 40 high schools, seven colleges and numerous other sports activities, it’s impossible for a seven-person staff to be everywhere everyday.

Just do the math. We haven’t learned the trick of making five loaves of bread and two fish feed 5,000. Sorry.

Until we learn how to do that, we depend on the coaches throughout the area. Without their diligence to call in results from games that we’re unable to cover, readers and supporters of those schools would not see the results in the next day’s paper.

Despite his testiness, one can sympathize with the editor. Seven people on the sports staff? He could probably use three times that many.

But the significant fact here, I think, is that people were complaining. They thought that the newspaper wasn’t serving them, and they cared enough to take the time and effort to say so.

And what was the newspaper’s response to this concern?

Do the math.

The math, of course, does not concern simply asking an underpaid seven-person staff to do an impossible job. Rather, and more significantly, it has to do with the fact that newspapers like this one operate at 15 to 20 percent profit margins (far higher than most other businesses), and they do so because they are a monopoly – the only game in town. The math also concerns the failure of newspapers to invest in improving the quality of their product by hiring more staff and paying them a decent wage. Instead, they have done exactly the opposite – cutting back on staff and staff development and keeping salaries and benefits for editorial and news people as low as possible.

Today the newspaper industry is aflutter with concerns about losing readers and tanking advertising revenue. “What shall we do?” the publishers wail. In the face of this, a newspaper should look at readers who complain about lack of coverage as a blessing. It means that, maybe, there is an audience out there that still cares.

But what has been the newspaper's response? A seven-person sports staff.
And what will be the readers' reaction? Will they say, as the sports editor seems to want them to say, "Oh, ok, we understand. Hey, those profit margins have to be maintained. Thanks for trying."

Or will they say to the newspaper just what the sports editor has said to them:

Do the math.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

60 Minutes and Tiger Woods

2006-04-04T20:27:00.000-04:00

CBS's "60 Minutes" is being roundly criticized for a segment that aired a couple of weeks ago on golfing phenom Tiger Woods. The piece asked no tough or searching questions of Woods, who rarely gives interviews and has carefully honed his image throughout his career. Defending the show's approach to Woods, producer Jeff Fagin asked, "Should everybody who goes on '60 Minutes' get slammed? Is that how you see our job? Or is it OK to profile a superstar athlete even if we didn't uncover any dirt?" Fagin and his associates didn't have to dig up any dirt. They simply could have asked Woods about the predatory and anti-First Amendment lawsuit he visited sports artist Rick Rush a few years ago.

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Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

The New York Times redesigns its site

2006-04-03T11:23:00.000-04:00

The New York Times has redesigned its web site, a move that is likely to draw plenty of attention and comment. There seems to be little new or innovative about the design. It gives the site a cleaner look because of its increased use of white space. What is most disappointing, however, is that the Times has clung to the old-school thinking of maintaining a "multimedia" section. The Times does excellent graphics, videos, slideshows and audio slideshows. Those items should be integrated with the other reporting that the Times does -- if for no other reason than to make things convenient for the reader. Whatever multimedia means to the reader -- and it's not at all clear -- these reporting methods should not be something separate, and it's time for journalists to shed that kind of thinking.

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Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Writing summaries

2006-03-31T20:07:00.000-05:00

One of the forms of writing that has emerged with the development of the web as a news medium is the summary. A summary is not a lead paragraph (although some news organizations use the lead as the summary). It tries to do more than the lead. It tries to give the reader an abbreviated but more complete idea of an article than the lead paragraph, which simply emphasizes the most important information. Good summaries help the reader decide whether or not to delve into an article. This short article (expanded from a previous version) on JPRORF.com explains more about summaries and gives some examples.

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Barry Bonds: hoisted on his own Louisville slugger

2006-03-26T18:32:00.000-05:00

Call me crazy, but if I were Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, I wouldn’t be all that anxious to get a judge to dismiss the suit that Barry Bonds had filed trying stop the collection of profits for the book Game of Shadows (web site).

A judge in San Francisco almost did that this week.

The book details the steroid use of the San Francisco Giants superstar. It tells how Bonds began using steroids after the 1998 seasons to pump himself up and to start – at the twilight of what was probably a Hall of Fame career – putting up monster numbers, especially in the home run category.

The book was painstakingly research by Fainaru-Wada and Williams, two reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle. They conducted dozens of interviews, heard audio tapes, and read hundreds of documents. Some of those documents were grand jury testimony that was supposed to remain secret.

Bonds has not denied the allegations specifically. Instead, he has refused to talk about it. Now he has had his lawyers file suit to stop the authors and publishers from collecting any profits on the book. Why? It’s a novel legal argument that the profits are illegal because some of the documents used in the book were obtained illegally (a somewhat questionable assertion in itself).

That argument has the strength of a piece of cellophane in a hurricane.

This week a judge in San Francisco recognized it as such as refused to grant an injunction against the defendants based on it. He even said the suit had little chance of success. But he didn’t dismiss it.

And that may be a victory for the authors.

If they are forced to defend themselves against the suit, they would probably be able to depose Bonds himself. That would be a reporter’s dream – a major source have to answer questions UNDER OATH.

Man, don’t you know they have a question or two for the slugger.

But, unfortunately, it probably won’t happen. Some judge will do the right thing and throw the suit out as a waste of everybody’s time.

That’s too bad. The thought of Barry Bonds having to tell the truth in the presence of a couple of top-ranked reporters comforts the mind as we head toward Opening Day – when all things become new.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Driving the message home

2006-03-19T06:23:00.000-05:00

A Federal court has ruled that Tennessee (my home state and where I will soon be a resident again) can issue a license tag that contains the words “Choose Life.” A legal fight about the state legislature’s power to do this has been going on since 2002, and in the news story about the ruling, both sides have claimed the First Amendment supports their point of view and what the other side is doing violates the First Amendment.

The controversy got me – as one who is fond of the First Amendment – to thinking . . .

As an advocate of expanding the rights the First Amendment protects, I think the court’s decision was generally correct. If the state legislature wants to issue state license tags that say “Choose Life,” I think it should be able to do so. I also think that a state legislature should be able to issue tags that say “Withdraw from Iraq” or “Eat More Chicken” or “Impeach Bush” or “I’m a Religious Wingnut” or just about anything else it wants to say. As a college professor, of course, I draw the line at “Abolish Tenure,” which is about as perverse, sadistic and anti-social as you can get. (You have to draw a line somewhere.)

It now takes an act of the legislature to get a message on a license tag. It should be much easier than that. A citizen should simply be able to order up whatever message he or she wants without the approval of the clowns who usually inhabit state Capitol buildings. That would make driving up and down the interstate far more interesting and fun.

People can buy the all-about-me vanity plates, I know, but these are not very interesting. Besides, I like my words spelled out.

The newspaper where I read about the court’s ruling (yes, a real newspaper, printed on newsprint) carried an artist’s rendering of what the “Choose Life” tag might look like. It had the face of a fat, laughing baby behind the words. A quarter of a century ago, our only child – a son – was as cute a baby as had ever graced a maternity ward, particularly with his head of bright red hair. He could have been pictured on that license plate – except for the fact that he was colic and spent the first three months of his life screaming at the top of his lungs. (He’s fine now; his parents never recovered, however.)

So, instead of my son’s picture at that stage of life, I thought I might want another picture to go with my “Choose Life” tag – say, a picture of Tennessee’s electric chair. Now there is a “Choose Life” tag I would be proud to have on the back of my truck. I know the “Choose Life” thing is supposed to be about abortion, but I should be able to interpret it any way I want.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about the state of Tennessee, which won its case but had to endure a few condescending slings and arrows from both the majority opinion of the judges who ruled in its favor. Those judges wrote that although “this exercise of government one-sidedness with respect to a very contentious political issue may be ill-advised,” they couldn’t find anything to prevent it.

How silly. Legislatures all over the place take up contentious issues all the time. They sometimes even pass laws about these issues. What the judges should have said was that this issue didn’t merit all the time and effort it took to get it to court but that it was the state’s First Amendment right to waste everybody’s time if it wanted to.

The lone dissenting judge came closer to getting at the real issue when he wrote:

“If the KKK and Nazi Party are able to pull together 1,000 proud, dues-pay members who wish to display such license plats on their cars . . . they are entitled to do so the same as the Son of Confederate Veterans, Penn State Alumni, antique aficionados and member of pro-life and pro-choice organizations.”

Hear, hear.

I’m for a license tag that says “Support the First Amendment.” And the picture of the happy baby to go along with it wouldn’t hurt either.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Getting a job in web journalism

2006-03-17T09:26:00.000-05:00

Anthony Moor, associate managing editor/online at the Orlando Sentinel and editor of OrlandoSentinel.com, has written an interesting and encouraging piece about getting a job in web journalism. The article appears on the Online Journalism Review web site and emphasizes that web journalists need to develop the basic skills of the journalist – particularly editing and copyediting.

Next, are you Internet literate? . . . While we don't need code monkeys, we do need people who understand the unique attributes of the Web as it pertains to journalism.

So, have you built a Web page as part of a student project or on your own? Do you know basic HTML? Do you work on the student newspaper website? Do you frequent Internet news sites? Do you use an RSS reader? Do you podcast? Did you ask to shadow the Web producers for a few days at your last internship? An affinity for our medium is essential.

Good questions all. Moor says there is a bright future awaiting web journalists, but as with any other profession, they need to get prepared.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Web writing example

2006-03-16T12:05:00.000-05:00

David Broder, long time and deeply respected political columnist for the Washington Post, included the paragraph below in his column this morning (March 16, 2006). He is quoting from a speech given by Gen. Anthony Zinni in 2002 about the possibility of war with Iraq.

This paragraph is a good example of why writing for the web – using some of the techniques developed by those interested in the topic – could and should be better.

This is not latter-day wisdom from the general. In the summer of 2002, seven months before the war began, he told an audience in Florida what would be required raq, if you're willing to do it," he said. "If our economy is so great that you're willing to put billions of dollars into reforming Iraq. If you want to put soldiers that are already stretched so thin all around the world and add them into a security force there forever, like we see in places like the Sinai. If you want to fight with other countries in the region to try to keep Iraq together, as Kurds and Shiites try and split off, you're going to have to make a good case for that."

The column that includes this paragraph was written for the print edition of the Post and shoveled onto the web site without much thought or editing. It is difficult to read because Broder is quoting words from a speech that uses sentence fragments, and he had to do it in a solid paragraph form.

But what if Broder or his editors had used the simple web technique of a bulleted list? With a bit of rewording, here’s how the paragif the United States invaded Iraq. "You could inherit the country of Iraph might have looked:

This is not latter-day wisdom from the general. In the summer of 2002, seven months before the war began, he told an audience in Florida what would be required if the United States invaded Iraq. Zinni said, "You could inherit the country of Iraq, if you're willing to do it:

• "If our economy is so great that you're willing to put billions of dollars into reforming Iraq.

• “If you want to put soldiers that are already stretched so thin all around the world and add them into a security force there forever, like we see in places like the Sinai.

• “If you want to fight with other countries in the region to try to keep Iraq together, as Kurds and Shiites try and split off, you're going to have to make a good case for that."

The web, because space is not a consideration, can take a mass of words and make them easily digestable. This is a good example of where it can work.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Gordon Parks, photojournalist

2006-03-10T09:34:00.000-05:00

Gordon Parks, one of the pioneers of what we today call photojournalism died this week. He was 93 years old. Parks is widely known as one of the first major African-American movie directors. But long before Parks got into movies, he was taking pictures for the Farm Security Administration and Life magazine. His photographs and photo essays were not only technically good but also displayed a dignity, social conscience and anger that made him unique. Parks was also a writer, composer and founder of Essence magazine. Few creative people ranged as widely as he did, and few were as good at so many things as Gordon Parks. Read his New York Times obituary. See also Magazines and Photojournalism's Gold Age, a short essay on JPROF.com.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

An honest mistake -- or something else?

2006-02-27T08:05:00.000-05:00

When the CBS News show "48 Hours" aired a segment a couple of weeks ago about a murder in Columbia, Mo., it altered a picture of the front page of the Columbia Daily Tribune the show used as a graphic. CBS has acknowledged the mistake, although it has not explained very well how it happened. But there is evidence CBS still doesn't understand the seriousness of its action -- particularly given the conclusion the show drew about the case.

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The art of linking

2006-02-23T09:03:00.000-05:00

Linking is one of the most powerful tools the web offers to journalists. With relatively little effort, journalists can use links to expand their stories and enhance the experience of the readers. Yet very few journalists or news web sites take advantage of this opportunity. Here are a few thoughts about this tool and how to use it.

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Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

War News Radio

2006-02-20T06:33:00.000-05:00

Students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania have created an Internet radio station devoted to covering the war in Iraq. But their station, called War News Radio, is different. Instead of gathering Associated Press and other news service reports and repackaging them, they are creating their own reports using sources that are not often heard from and technology that is not often used by news organizations. The students troll the web for sources of information about Iraq – many of them in Iraq itself. Then they use an Internet telephone service called Skype to call these folks up, interview them and put together their stories. The result is something you would not hear on most radio news broadcasts, even National Public Radio, which, by the way, did a story about War News Radio in January and interviewed two of its producers. Another story about War News Radio has just appeared in the Los Angeles Times. War News Radio is the product of some innovative thinking and initiative, and it could happen anywhere.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

A wide range of knowledge

2006-02-15T10:49:00.000-05:00

Among the many qualities that modern journalism demands of its frontline footsoldiers -- reporters -- is a wide range of knowledge. Simply put, reporters should know a lot of stuff about a lot of things. Terry Mattingly, who runs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, made the point eloquently in his weekly column about religion a couple of weeks ago. He tells the story of a reporter who seemed surprised and thought it was "interesting" that the new Pope also has the title of "Bishop of Rome."

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Grading writing assignments

2006-02-15T10:48:00.000-05:00

For quite a number of years I taught the introductory writing course at the University of Alabama, the infamous Mass Communication 102. I worked with seven or eight graduate teaching assistants each semester, and in our weekly meetings we talked a lot about grading. This memo to them grew out of those discussions several years ago. It outlines some of the considerations writing teachers should give when awarding grades.

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Generous words for JPROF.com

2006-02-08T10:55:00.000-05:00

Chip Scanlan is one of the Poynter Institue's writing gurus and a writer whose advice on the craft is widely read and respected. In addition to his articles on Poynter's website, he has begun a weblog called The Mechanic and the Muse: An Owner's Manual for Writers. Scanlan recently stumbled onto this web site and had some kind and generous things to say about it on his weblog, concluding with "If you want to learn about journalism and its current state of practice, pitfalls and power, J-Prof is one of the first sites I'd send you to."

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

JPROF's exercise room

2006-01-22T06:18:00.000-05:00

JPROF's exercise room, hosted by Annie the Grammar Queen (right), is open 24 hours a day. You and your students will find a variety of exercises of sharpening their writing skills. Help your students learn the rules for using commas (exercises are keyed to JPROF's Rules for Using Commas page), the terms of grammar, subject-verb agreement and more.

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Learning HTML

2006-01-17T16:35:00.000-05:00

Instructors of web journalism classes face a dilemma in how much HTML they should teach or require that their students should know, especially since many of us use web editors (Dreamweaver, GoLive, etc.) or content management systems to produce web sites. There are occasions, of course, when some use of HTML is required even when you are using these tools. My approach is that students should be comfortable with the basics of HTML so they can begin to figure out the tags if it is necessary. To that end, I have developed a couple of exercises (exercise 1, exercise 2) designed to help student get inside HTML and understand what is going on with tags. Anyone teaching web journalism is welcome to use them. Let me know how they work.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

GoogleMaps mania

2006-01-14T09:24:00.000-05:00

The ability of web site developers to put a customized GoogleMap on their web sites is creating quiet a stir these days, including a story this week on National Public Radio that includes an interview with Mike Pegg, creator of a GoogleMapsMania, weblog that tracks the use of GoogleMaps. The implications and possibilities of using GoogleMaps for web journalism are enormous. (Check out a GoogleMap of all the murders in Rochester, N.Y., in 2005 that was built by the folks at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.) Still, at present, GoogleMaps is intimidating because a knowledge of javascript is require. A beacon of hope has begun to shine, however. Mapbuilder.net, developed by Andriy Bidochko, gives us javascript-challenged users an easier way to get our custom-built maps onto our web sites.

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Academics, start your engines

2006-01-12T05:23:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again when we in academia have to gear up for the coming semester. If you're one of those, maybe JPROF.com can help.

The syllabus for the course I am teaching in web journalism this semester at Emory & Henry College is located on this site. Anyone who is interested can take a look. A few supplemental materials are there now, and I will be developing some other materials -- tutorials, handouts and the like -- as the course continues, and I will be putting those on this site as well. (If you have any suggestions or materials that you would like to share, please let me know.).

In addition, if you are looking for ideas for lectures or discussions with your classes, JPROF has plenty. For introductory classes in mass media or journalism, go to the syllabus for this course and you will find links to lecture notes on the following topics: news, newspapers, books, magazines, radio and television.

There are also discussion starters and notes for some of your other journalism classes, including
• Simple words
• Wordiness
• Clichés
• Verbs of attribution
• Accuracy

There is also the ever-popular Rules for Using Commas in both HTML and PDF form. If you can't find what you want, use the search function, or drop us an email and tell us what you need.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

Inside a cartoonist's mind

2006-01-10T10:16:00.000-05:00

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jim Borgman is giving us a fascinating peek inside the mind of the editorial cartoonist with his new weblog, BorgBlog. Borgman is posting not just some of his cartoons but some of his sketches and his thoughts about how particular cartoons develop. The site currently has three versions of the cartoon he drew about the West Virginia coal mining tragedy, showing how he decided on where to place the miner's wife. In addition, Borgman includes a variety of sketches, some of which turn into cartoons and some of which remain as half-formed ideas. This is a wonderful site for those of us who envy the skill and the power of the editorial cartoonist.

(Thanks to Jonathan Dube at Cyberjournalist.net for pointing usin the the direction of Borgman's weblog.)

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Another aspect of immediacy

2006-01-09T09:42:00.000-05:00

One of the five characteristics of the web -- identified and explained in Web Journalism -- is immediacy, the ability to post information quickly. With the growth of the blogosphere, this charactertistic has taken on another aspect: the ability of people to pass information around quickly, even if it isn't true and doesn't make sense. Frank Ahrens, in his Washington Post Web Watch column, has a good example. He cites the case of what happened to Wal-Mart last week.

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The First Amendment -- it protects lobbyists, too

2006-01-06T13:55:00.000-05:00

With the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal story dominating Washington, one of the cable news shows earlier this asked its viewers to go online and vote on the question of whether or not "all lobbying should be banned." The question was both silly and stupid -- and maybe even a little dangerous. Nobody likes "lobbyists" or the amounts of money that go along with their modern activities, but lobbying is what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote a protection in the First Amendment for the right to "petition the government for redress of grievances." This right of petition is one five the First Amendment gives us (religion, speech, assembly, and press are the others), and it's a pretty important one because it is a right extended to everyone, not just lobbyists. We should remember that before we go tossing it away.

Update. Washington lawyer Jan Baran has an excellent piece about this topic in today's Washington Post. The article has a bit about this history of lobbying in Washington. (Posted Jan. 8. 2006)

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.

The center of gravity has shifted

2006-01-03T20:04:00.000-05:00

The web has pretty much rendered obsolete the adage that says you should never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel and newsprint by the ton. Today there is less fear and frustration with the news media on the part of those outside the profession, and there is more willingness to take issue with the decisions of reporters and editors. The web has given those who believe they have been mistreated a forum and a voice -- and it is forcing the redefiniton of the relationship between reporter and source. Katharine Seelye has an excellent article about that this week in the New York Times.

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Want it to last? Draw, don't write

2005-12-21T16:12:00.000-05:00

A review of Clifford Connor’s A People History of Science in the New York Times this past weekend has this observation:

A great moment in the history of science was the publication of Andreas Vesalius's anatomy book, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, in 1543. What made the book a triumph wasn't the Latin text Vesalius wrote but the 420 illustrations. He never took the trouble to name the artists he'd hired to draw them. Nobody has ever translated the whole of Vesalius's text into a modern Western language; the illustrations have stayed in print from that year to this.

The review was written by Jonathan Weiner.

Illustrators, even anonymous ones, can have a great impact on their audience – and this is a prime example of just that.

Read more about journalism and issues facing the profession at JPROF.com.