Journalism Workshops

Ink and pixels

christineseiber:

National Newspaper Week ends today. I have (and always will) have a soft spot for print media. But no matter what your medium, print or electronic, just stay informed.

Every day’s a new opportunity for some journalistic inspiration…

sarasteffan:

Today, in my media entrepreneurship grad class, my professor Tim McGuire told us a story worth sharing about the man, Walter Cronkite.

Back when the school named after him was under construction, the building in which has nearly become my second home now, Cronkite paid it a visit to see how the progress was going - one of the last visits he could make due to his many health issues. Construction workers on the fourth floor (the roof at the time, considering the top two stories weren’t built yet) saw Cronkite walking around below.

The workers shouted down to him, “We’re doing our best for you, Walter!”

Walter Cronkite was a true example of the widespread influence one journalist can have, and is one of the reasons why I will always be proud of my chosen field. Despite the lack of credibility of the few media personalities these days, we’ll always have Walter.

Journalism and a world in transition

marcoleitaosilva:

Voice of San Diego New Reporter Guidelines

stevesaldivar:

We only do something if we can do it better than anyone or if no one else is doing it.

We must add value. We must be unique.

Three things to remember for each story:
Context
Authority
Not just what is happening, but what it means.

There is no such thing as objectivity.
There is such thing as fairness.
But everyone sees everything through their own filter. Acknowledge that, let it liberate you. Let it regulate you.
We are not guided by political identification, by ideology or dogma. But every decision we make, from what to cover to how to cover it, is made through our own subjective judgments.
We are guided by an ability to be transparent and independent, to clearly assess what’s going on in our community and have the courage to plainly state the truth.


Our bent: Reform. Things can always be better.

We don’t have a dogmatic or ideological bent. But we do believe San Diego can and will do better.
We can have better infrastructure, a healthier environment, a better education system, a responsive, efficient and transparent government, a better understanding of our neighborhoods’ challenges, a thriving economy and an ever-improving quality of life. If anything, this is our bias.

Be the expert.
Write with authority. You earn the right to write with authority by reporting and working hard.
No “he said, she said.”
The day we write a headline that says: “Proposal has pros, cons” is the day we start dying.
There is no such thing as 50/50 balance. There is a truth and we work our damndest to get there.
Sometimes two viewpoints don’t deserve 50/50 treatment.
Most of the time there aren’t two sides to something, anyways. There are 17. Who’s not being represented? If they’re not speaking up, how can you represent them?
We don’t just “put things out there.” We’re not “only asking the question.”
We don’t ask questions with our stories. We answer them.
We don’t write question headlines, unless they’re so damn good that we can’t resist:
We don’t do this: “Did City Official Take Bribe?”
Or, to cite a recent example: “Did Wikileaks Hack Servers?”
We’d maybe do this: “How Did a City Official Ended Up With Millions in Donations?”
We’re not someone’s goddamn transcription service.
They can relay their own news. In a world where leaders are able to communicate directly with their constituents very easily, we have to a.) make sense of what they say and b) find out the things they don’t want to say. It’s the only way to effectively use our limited resources.

Tell the truth.

This means not being mealy mouthed and not being bias-bullied.
Stand up to bias bullies. Tell them why you did something. Let them challenge you on it.
If someone calls you biased, don’t be scared. Don’t dismiss it either. Reflect on it and answer with conviction.
Don’t go quote-hunting for something you know to be true and can say yourself. Don’t hide your opinion in the last quote of a story.
Take a stand when you know something to be true or wrong.

Care about your beat more than anyone else.
It is your way to make San Diego a better place to live.
Focus on big problems

David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has a quote that can be paraphrased this way: Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems.
It’s easy as a journalist to take a stand against a six-figure salary. It’s easy to take a stand against an expensive meal on an expense report.
Why do we take stands on those things and why are we afraid to take stands on bigger issues?


If you can’t find a good answer any of these three questions, drop the story:

Why did I choose this story?
Why will people care? (Not why should they care, but why will they care.)
Why will people remember this story?


Avoid ‘churnalism’
It’s not your job to have everything on your beat. It’s your job to have the best things.
Don’t worry about getting scooped. Worry about not consistently making an impact.
Love the title of this Columbia Journalism Review story: “The Hamster Wheel: Why running as fast as we can is getting us nowhere.”
A quote: “The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no.”
Another: “You say, ‘Why not have it?’ I say, ‘Because it isn’t free.’ The most underused words in the news business today: let’s pass on that.”
We are a small group with limited resource. Everything we do must [pay off for the users.]
We can learn a lot from sports journalism. (That’s for a different day.) But here’s one great quote to always keep in mind from sportsjournalism.org: “Nobody cares who’s first with the commodity news, but being first with what the news means still has value – in fact, it has more value than it ever has, given today’s torrent of information. Readers will gravitate to such stories, share them and remember them.”


Avoid the news voice whenever possible.

Sometimes it’s necessary.
But you should never write a story [the way] you think journalists are supposed to write it. Write like you would if you were trying to get your friends interested in an email. Lighten up. Be creative. Have fun. Be conversational.


Bring us in the implications, not the event.

So it’s not “Booze Ban Voted Through Council Committee.”
It’s “Booze Ban Has One Final Hurdle Left.”

Don’t be boring. People don’t spend their free time on boring things. That’s it.

Don’t tell me stories about “critics” or “some”

I don’t have a clue who “critics” or “some” are. But they managed to be the most quoted people on the planet.
I need to know who they are for that viewpoint to carry any validity.
And I need to know what, if any, financial stake they have in the issue. Honestly. (Just a sample of headlines in the news in a five-minute search this fall: “Some say Escondido police union’s flier crosses the line…” “Some say new constitution would solve state’s woes…” “Critics say Washing Oily Birds Is Wasteful…” “Observers Say Time Right for Santander IPO…”
I’ve read stories that use blanket “critics” in different spots to describe people on the opposite ends of the arguments. It was so confusing.

Have fun! Be creative! Push the envelope!
You don’t do this for the money. So let’s have some fun.
Try something that’s never been tried before. Or try something that someone else did somewhere else. Don’t do a story just to do it. Or because it’s an interesting exercise.
Think about what will impact people or policy makers. What will they want to read or what will force them to make a change?
Be a student of today’s great journalistic innovations.
Be a leader of today’s great journalistic innovations.


It’s ambitious, sharp and honest. It’s also long overdue. How do your news organization’s reporter guidelines match up with Voice of San Diego’s?

Building the new BostonGlobe.com

beta-boston:

As we began to design and architect the new BostonGlobe.com site in fall of last year, we knew that we had a unique challenge and opportunity – to design and build a news site from scratch in 2011 with all the technologies available today.

We set out to understand what readers wanted most from a new experience, with a process based on research, focus groups and user testing.

What they told us has guided us to create what we believe is a highly usable, readable and journalistically-focused experience.

I had recently arrived in August from a year-long assignment in the New York Times Company as SVP for product management at About.com, a site with almost a billion page views a month, largely driven by searches on Google. It was our job to optimize the product for each and every visitor coming over from Google.

As a user of multiple devices – laptops, iphone, iPad and any others I could get my hands on – I became obsessed with the idea of automatically delivering the perfect layout for each user based on the device they were using at the time.

As I arrived at The Boston Globe in August, we all became intrigued by really pushing the envelope with this concept.

Then we met Todd Parker and Patty Toland at The Filament Group in Boston, whose team had popularized the concept of Progressive Enhancement (and written the book on it). They also worked closely with Ethan Marcotte, who had written a ground-breaking article in May 2010 that pushed thinking forward around the idea of Responsive Design. (And later wrote the book on that.)

They also had Scott Jehl on their team, who worked extensively on the jQuery and jQuery mobile frameworks used across the Web.

The concept of Responsive Design spoke to us and our strategy of building a newspaper of the future that was truly built for our belief in a mobile future, where more people would be accessing us from a mobile or tablet device than from a traditional desktop.

We also have always found mobile sites, which group devices together and display a “mobile” version of the site, to be inferior and hard-to-manage. Sometimes they look good on your device, sometimes barely passable.

We wanted “one codebase to rule them all”: to allow our editors and producers to build the site once and have the site adapt itself based on what device you had at that moment. We knew that more and more devices would come on the market, and we wanted a site that would take that into account without our having to design for specific brands.

We found an all-star team of designers at Upstatement, who had already been converts to responsive design philosophies and were the perfect partner to execute the design concept and make the Boston Globe.com work visually on all screen sizes. They did the detailed and deep thinking in order to design for 6 different resolutions:

• 1200 px wide - For example, high res desktop browser
• 960 px wide - For example, regular res desktop browser
• 768 px wide - For example, horizontal iPad layout
• 600 px wide - For example, vertical iPad layout
• 480 px wide - For example, horizontal iPhone layout
• 320 px wide - For example, vertical iPhone layout

Through javascript and other methods, the site detects your screen size and the features that you have available, such as a touchscreen and local storage capabilities.

The site then delivers the most appropriate layout and fetches images at a resolution that makes sense. If you’re on a phone, only a small image file is loaded; page components like the section header and navigation morph to leave more room for content; and clickable areas get larger given that you are using your finger instead of a mouse.

We believe that the options this will give us in the future will be limitless – knowing you are on a small screen, perhaps there are different types of content that we should highlight at the top of the page? As mobile advertising continues to grow up, different ads can be targeted to different screen sizes, placed in the optimal position for readability and response rate.

With this smart design, we realized that we were taking full advantage of the most popular app on any device – the Web browser.

So we also built offline reading capabilities into our My Saved feature, which allows users to tag stories to be saved for later reading or just to be able to have for quick access. I like to think of My Saved as a sort of playlist for my content, allowing me to queue it up for reading later, in a quick stream.

Our development team also built My Saved to work across devices, so that you can save stories on a desktop and then open the My Saved app on a phone or tablet. The stories in your queue automatically synchronize to that device, downloading to local storage for offline reading.Our engineering team decided to leverage the high-performance programming language of Erlang and an Mnesia database to handle the volume of calls. Erlang has seen a resurgence since Facebook used it to help power its high-volume chat feature.

With all these capabilities, we saw that we were building a Web app and saw opportunities for building a set of native applications as a lower priority. We still intend to launch native apps and are thinking through the capabilities that a native app would provide that would allow us to create something very targeted at the needs of an app user that does something very different.

We consider this just the beginning of the life of BostonGlobe.com and are already planning to add features over the coming months that will continue to build on our goals of creating a site that does the tremendous journalism of The Boston Globe real justice.

Jeff Moriarty
VP, Digital Products
The Boston Globe
@jeffmoriarty
about.me/jeffmoriarty