Second anniversary

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

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

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

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

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

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 . . .

And another offering from

First Inning Artworks

Check out the offering on EBay.

Today's Word on Journalism

"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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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.

More

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

The New York Times redesigns its site

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

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

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

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

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

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.


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Gordon Parks, photojournalist

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.



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An honest mistake -- or something else?

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

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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War News Radio

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.



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A wide range of knowledge

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

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

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

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

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.



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GoogleMaps mania

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

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.



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Inside a cartoonist's mind

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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