JPROF's third anniversary

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

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

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

Tributes to a coach

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?

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

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.