Saturday, February 3, 2007

Online journalism tools and things to make you go 'Hoooo-Baby!!!'
We've looked at http://chicagocrime.org in most of my classes, but some university news sites are already doing more than looking...

The Independent Florida Alligator mapped churches that were vandalized in its area and did a map of a murder case.  The latter was done with Google maps; the churches were mapped with a service called Atlas, which I mentioned a while ago concerning Baristanet's maps of "teardowns" of neighborhood buildings. Innovation in College Media (which has also given Atlas a try) points to another local crime map in Muncie, Ind., created by the Ball State Daily News.

In other online new news... Several citizen journalism or "placeblogging" sites that I've mentioned here use the Drupal content management system, including http://knoxviews.com, http://h2otown.info and http://placeblogger.org

Here's another: Mark Hamilton reports on a local Drupal site covering a serial-homicide case, considerably more "hard news" than you might expect on a community site.

Right here in Knoxville, the multi-blogger KnoxViews coverage of the County Commission is impressive, too... enough to prompt one local professional journalist to comment "Hoooo-Baby!!!"

Back to classroom (or student weblog) discussion topics:
  • The Apple vs. online reporters court case settlement may be $700,000 worth of good news for independent online journalists.
  • Here's another set of guidelines for my online journalism students to discuss in their weblogs: The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles
  • And here's a North Carolina newspaper editor's reaction to a journalism-education discussion on several blogs, which he links to: What a journalist needs to know
  • OK, so that's a sneaky way to get students to go back and look at things I've linked to before. Anyone in need of more links to keep themselves inside on a nice day should see my recent bookmarks for "online journalism": http://del.icio.us/bstepno/onlinejournalism
  • For a bit of historical perspective, students should know what that last link has in common with Vannevar Bush's "memex" idea from 62 years ago.

5:12:19 PM    
 Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Not-a-Robot Brit Reads Newspaper for You
She reads the world's news with a British accent, and although she sounded a bit robotic at first, I'm going to give her a try a little longer. No, I'm not talking about Joanne Colan; Rocketboom.com isn't the only online news source to pick up a British accent recently.

The International Herald Tribune now offers free audio versions and customized podcasts of its news stories... read by a synthesized female voice at http://audio.iht.com

The new service is "powered by ReadSpeaker," a voice-synthesis company in Sweden whose products "speak" the contents of Web pages.  The articles aren't exactly read by a robot. According to the company, "Articles are read by the latest text-to-speech technologies using professional readers whose recordings are converted into language dictionaries." Improvements in the voice quality are promised; the company is beta testing the service. (Perhaps the "free" aspect will change eventually, too.)
 
ReadSpeaker says the IHT service is the first customizable news podcast of its kind. Maybe it's just the daily newscast Dave Winer has been asking for.

Of course there are other daily news podcasts, including local ones at WUOT and KnoxNews. In fact, KnoxNews is even podcasting all of the News Sentinel Editorial Board's interviews with more than 30 candidates in  upcoming August and November elections!

Back to Paris... from the IHT press release:

Visitors to IHT.com can now go to audionews.iht.com and select stories they would like to hear on the spot, or download articles to create a personalized audio feed that can be easily imported into iTunes or other podcasting software.

IHT.com is the first English language Web site to launch a service of this kind -- audio for the articles are dynamically generated using voices from professional readers.

Since the IHT was once the Paris Herald Tribune, I wonder if they could manage English with a French accent? A friend who spends the summers in Paris (poor guy) might suggest that the robot have one of the more snobbish New York accents -- he's convinced the paper isn't as good since it became a wholly-owned New York Times Co. publication.

(History: When the New York Herald Tribune closed, the Washington Post and the Times joined forces to keep the international paper going. But the Times ended that collaboration a few years ago.)

Speaking of history, I wonder if another old familiar voice could be enlisted in a podcast news service?

11:37:27 AM    
 Friday, July 14, 2006

Do newspapers really want you to read them?
Maybe not, according to Tom Stites, a former editor at The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune and more, who delivered a wake-up call at the Media Giraffe conference last week. "Is media performance democracy's critical issue?" was his title, and now a summary, a full text with pictures and a video of the talk are online.

His examples were taken from a single day's Boston Globe... He showed slides of some of that day's stories after asking the audience to do some role-playing:

"Imagine with me that you're a 39-year-old single mother of three daughters. You live in East Boston and ride the Blue Line to work long and unpredictable hours in a retail job near Downtown Crossing. One daughter is grown and married, one is living at home and working part time while attending a community college, and the third is still in high school. Your family has no health insurance. You shop, sparingly and carefully, at Wal-Mart. Now and then, when you can afford it, you go bowling..."

His question -- were the clippings (online at the end of his speech text) samples from "a newspaper that understands you (that single Mom) and presents news in a way that[base ']s relevant to your life"? Or were they pages from a product aimed only at the lobster-dinner and Boston Symphony Orchestra set -- because that's who the paper's advertisers cater to?

(I'm not sure what the Knoxville counterpart would be, but I'll try to keep that lady in mind...)

"Is there any wonder," Stites asked, "that less affluent Americans have abandoned newspapers and are angry at the press? They've abandoned newspapers -- the primary source of serious reporting -- because the newspapers have abandoned them."

Stites' recommendation is for journalists to look back at Joseph Pulitzer's statement of purpose, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Platform, which pledged to...

...always fight for progress and reform,
never tolerate injustice or corruption,
always fight demagogues of all parties,
never belong to any party,
always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers,
never lack sympathy with the poor,
always remain devoted to the public welfare,
never be satisfied with merely printing news,
always be drastically independent,
never be afraid to attack wrong,
whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

Stites had a lot more to say (10 pages in my fine-print print-out), and a healthy discussion is underway in the comments on the Citmedia.org copy of his text, and on blogs linked to it -- including a discussion of whether blogs, Christian radio or FoxNews are any better ways to reach that mother-of-three between trips to Wal-Mart. Take a look, and join the conversation over there.
More blogger comments from the conference at and 

2:06:59 AM    
 Thursday, July 6, 2006

A little bit of Rocky Top on Mass. Ave
So here I am lecturing at Harvard...

Well, not exactly. But I am (back) in Cambridge preparing to steal a few smartaleck cliche-busting remarks from an East Tennessee friend and attempt to impress the Berkman Center weblog group with the RockyTopBrigade's general wit, wisdom and diversity... from R.Neal, KnoxViews in general, SayUncle, No Silence Here... and other non-law-professor bloggers... some of them more progressive than others... Consider it an unstallanche!

After-the-fact addition:
  • Here's a direct route to the RTB East Tennessee aggregator I talked about, one of the cool RSS things webmaster Johnny Dobbins cooked up for the group.
  • I showed the News Sentinel's KnoxNews site, talked about things I like and don't like about it, and fumbled around trying to find its video blogs. Here they are: Random This. The site search engine didn't help much, even with the vlog page's name, but I later found it listed under "Entertainment" and "multimedia" on the site map.

7:10:21 PM    
 Sunday, May 28, 2006

Tips for a new generation of wired workers
My online journalism class wrapped up the semester with a three-week group project to put together a collection of stories on a single theme. The group, mostly seniors doing their first HTML project, chose a pragmatic topic: What comes after graduation. They called their publication Beyond the Torch,  a reference to the Tennessee Torchbearer statue that stands in front of the  School of Journalism & Electronic Media.

If I'd been able to get them to hang around a couple of more weeks, they could have linked some of their stories to these end-of-semester offerings elsewhere:
  • The News Sentinel just finished a week-long series on the "millenial generation," including a piece on the work expectations of recent graduates...

  • And The New York Times offered new grads -- and their prospective employers -- a cautionary tale about adapting to workplace culture: Interns? No Bloggers Need Apply. ("Interns: No Blogging About Work" is more the point of the story. ") Excerpt:

    "Most experienced employees know: Thou Shalt Not Blab About the Company's Internal Business. But the line between what is public and what is private is increasingly fuzzy for young people comfortable with broadcasting nearly every aspect of their lives on the Web, posting pictures of their grandmother at graduation next to one of them eating whipped cream off a woman's belly. For them, shifting from a like-minded audience of peers to an intergenerational, hierarchical workplace can be jarring."

Here's wishing them all the best...

2:58:08 AM    
 Monday, May 8, 2006

Tennessee journalism research conspiracy?
The home page of Newspaper Research Journal, a "refereed" academic quarterly, is now linked to our home page for the Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication.

The journal is co-published by the University of Memphis journalism department and that very AEJMC newspaper division... whose website editor is here at a UT Knoxville keyboard. Sure, Tennessee is a wide state, and we're at opposite ends, but I don't know why we didn't get around to linking the two sites together... Now we have, thanks to a note from Elinor Kelley Grusin, NRJ co-editor.

The NRJ site includes everything a journalism researcher ("chi square" or "green eyeshade" variety) needs to know about manuscript preparation, submission and review. Among other things, NRJ is one of few academic publications that refer authors to the AP Stylebook, rather than the APA Style book favored by many social science journals and dissertation writers.

"Because the purpose of NRJ is to provide a bridge between educators and professionals," the site says, "the writing style should be clear, lucid and direct. Short sentences and paragraphs enhance the quality of NRJ. Traditional Associated Press style is used for text." (The Chicago Manual of Style is the journal's recommendation for academic details like endnotes.)

Along with the link to the NRJ page, I've added one to FindArticles.com, a site that makes it possible to search past issues. University researchers can get at the electronic editions of journals through their libraries, but the general public -- from "big media" companies to bloggers planning a media revolution -- may prefer to check out the FindArticles search. (The free site does have some advertising, unlike most library search systems.)

For example, a quick search for "Smart Mobs" retrieves my review of Howard Rheingold's book by that name from a couple of years ago. (Coincidentally, so does searching for "Smart Bob," but that also produces a mostly illegible, cartoon of a flasher... no connection or relation.)

7:58:04 PM    
 Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Scooped Again! Those Pesky Citizen Journalists
Despite a downpour outside, the UT School of Journalism & Electronic Media's JEM Week "online journalism" panel discussion had a standing-room, sitting-on-the-floor-room audience today, including plenty of journalism faculty and students. Read all about it here.

(I was even asked for autographs... but quickly realized the students needed someone's signature to prove they'd been at the panel discussion. Amazing what the words "extra credit..." do for attendance at special events a couple of weeks before finals.)

My only complaint is that, as a panelist, I was sitting out of the line of sight for the room's projection screen during a couple of presentations, including Jack Lail's review of readership statistics for KnoxNews.com.

Luckily, RNeal, publisher of KnoxViews.com, was there with a notebook. Alas, he couldn't stick around for lunch, but he promptly posted a full story about our little event, linked above... more than 1,750 words! Now I'm afraid some students will be using his notes instead of their own.

I did get out of my chair and slip through the crowd to see Katie Allison Granju's demo of the online editing system for http://wbir.com and for a peek into the station's amazing online 50-year archive of Knoxville news video.

Things I meant to mention or ask about, but didn't have time:

7:44:23 PM    

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