So Long. Farewell

This is my final blog post for CNJ 442. The course has provided explanations for many of the things I do during my day job.

The system we work in, I now know is a content management system not just "assembler." We don't edit story comments because it leaves us liable. We constantly promote our selves to get ads.

I'll see ya online.

value added service

Have you ever glanced at the very bottom of news Web site? I mean the way bottom.

There's usually a list of other sites to click of other services, kind of like classified ads. Want to find an job? Click on careerbuilder.com. Lease up and need to find a new apartment? Head to apartment.com.

Newspapers sell their services to these ads sites to promote their services. There actually might be some database maintenance and building, information sharing and lots of other stuff involved in the name of paying for the news.

What's interesting is that the even in Web advertising for the news people are getting more for less.

Blackbeard and Wifi

A local politician used a wifi to let friends know about pirate attack, yes I said pirates.

Aventura Vice Mayor Billy Joel was halfway around the world when modern-day pirates tried to hijack the cruise ship off the coast of Somalia.

Talk about the Internet making the world a little smaller and neighbors a lot closer. From e-mail to Web sites. Both the local sites are buzzing about it.

Educating journalists

Journalist.org is asking how do you bring a not-so-Web-savvy newsroom up to speed?

Well, I know how UM plans to help: By educating students with a vast array of multimedia skills through a new master's program.

Professor Rich Beckman told his class last week that the program should be up and running by the fall. It'll be three semesters and a required summer abroad.

This is the type of program meant to turn out NYTimes/WashingtonPost quality work.

90-9-1 Theory. Who knew!

Have any of you ever heard of the 90-9-1 theory?

Apparently, it states that in any community 90 percent of the users, nine percent are contributors and only one percent participate "very often."

It's being used to explain the Web participation in Wiki world and other online user generated sites with more than one contributor.

The world of cyber news has gotten so big that it's now got it's only theory, well rule really. Theories are very scientific.

Thanks to my friend and former colleague Angela Connor's blog for educating me.

Notorious

This probably falls into the mindless information category, but it's related to online journalism. I promise.

According to Roland Martin's Twitter feed, Angela Bassett is will play Biggie's mother in Notorious, the movie named after his legendary song. (This the online journalism part)

Will Bassett, who lifted weights like crazy to play Tina Turner, spend time in the Islands to get the Biggie's mother's accent down? Talk about taxing part preparation.

What would you do?

Here's an interesting cyberchat started by another UM student, Greg Linch. His digital foot print is huge, but in a good way.

He wondered: If you had a million dollars to save journalism, what would you do?

Some of the responses include putting the money into a trust so students can spend their summers and semesters doing unpaid internshihps.

Wire service from a TV station

CNN, you know the international television station, started a news wire service. Talk about convergence.

For years, the Associated Press has provided news for newspaper, radio, television and Web sites. And newspapers have traditionally provided information for morning newscasts, but now that news flow is looking to reverse.

I can't help to wonder about competitive factors. CNN competes with MSNBC and FOX News. Guess this would just be for newspapers.

Award-winning sites

It's been eight years since the National Press Foundation started handing out awards for online journalism.

This year's winner is politifact.com, a project by the St. Pete Times and Congressional Quarterly that rates the accuracy of political statements by candidates and advocates.

The site is akin to factfinder.org, so I can't help but wonder is this where journalism is headed? These special projects are highly interactive and take lots of time to create, but they're not you're traditional sites.

I guess would really be considered new media.

Miami Herald being sold?

Don't know if one has to do with the other (see previous post), but the word in cyberspace is that McClatchy wants to sell the Miami Herald.

Online only?

Fitch Ratings predicts The McClatchy Co. and Tribune Co.—the two companies that own South Florida’s hometown papers—are looking bankruptcy by next year.

The empty bank accounts could mean “more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010,” the report says according to Editor & Publisher.

So, if the print product goes, will the cyber product go with? Or, (silver lining) will they go online only like the Christian Science Monitor recently did?

Charging for access

There are few, if any, news Web sites that charge users subscription fees to click their way through the morning, afternoon and evening news. There’s blog chatter that some news sites might charge users who don’t subscribe to the print edition, but such chatter is few and far between.

And if you listen to media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, the guy who owns the Wall Street Journal, newspapers make more money through advertising than subscription fees because the site is open to more traffic.

So, are there sites that still charge to log-on for the morning traffic report?

Speaking of Ads

According to CNN.com, Web ads are doing a heck of a lot better in this economy than traditional marketing means.

The article said the Web ads are a cheaper, more accountable way to reach the masses, which makes sense considering traditional ads cost more and consumers are more likely to log-on to the Web for quote “free” news.

Predicting that there could be a permanent shift to online ads when the world’s financial mess passes, the article online ads provide a targeted way for companies to track the return on their investment. Think: page view tracking software.

Speechwriter caught groping

Professors and professionals always say be cafeful of your digital footprint. Set your Facebook page to private, so now drunken pictures of you pop-up if a potential employer Google's you.

But what about your friend's Facebook pages? Well, if you're President-Elect Obama's cheif speechwriter it means you get caught groping a cardboard cutout of the now Secretary of State. Here's what the Washington Post had to say about it.

Paying for the Web

Just about everyone types w-w-w-dot (insert favorite organization) to get news these days. But, no one wants to pay for it.

Papers a have to pay reporters, producers, videographers, photographers, etc. Where does the money to do that come from? Ads. Ads. Ads.

Yes, those annoying pop-ups, scroll-downs and side bars that show up whenever a user logs-on.

Technically there are two other ways to pay for Web site usage—subscription fees and value added service—but the most common way are ads, so don’t get too annoyed the next time you type in w-w-w-dot and get a pop-up.

Are you reading this?

According to Web site gurus, users don't read stories online. They scan them.

Stories written specifically for news sites tend to be shorter, and not just the story length. The sentneces are shorter. The words have fewer characters. This is most noticable when there's breaking news.

I'd write more, but you're probably getting to the scan max--about four paragraphs. That's the length of most online breaking news stories.

Blogs revisited

Then again, there are blog posts like this ode to puppy cam that a Sentinel page designer made for the paper's viral video blog. It's gotten close to 40,000 page views.

Bloggers

Do news blogs really work? Most sites have them for politics, education, crime, columnists, lifestyle reviews, etc.

These electronic diaries are sort of like the new media version of what used to be called the reporter’s notebook, where papers would print sidebars of the interesting information that didn’t fit into the main story.

Using them as reporters’ notebooks, helps to belie ethical fears that reporters will logon and bash coworkers and sources. And while newsblogs can be written with a little more attitude and voice, they still must confirm to the standards of journalistic writing, meaning attribution and fact-checking.

But with the Web’s endless users, do the 500 page views the SunSentinel’s youtube, politics page received really constitute a success? Is it worth the reporter’s time?

Linking Law

While copy stuff without permission from news sites is illegal, linking to that stuff is more than allowed. In fact, it’s encouraged. “You do not need permission to link to our Web site,” the SS.com says.

The MiamiHerald.com let’s user link without permission too, but only allows users to reprint one copy of posted content “but only for your personal use.”

This makes sense considering that most Web traffic comes from a third-party site (er, I think that’s what its called).

The World Wide Web was created to share information, and there’s really no way to control who links to what. And why would you, considering third-party linking helps drive readership on your site.

Copyright

Web sites are made for information sharing not info stealing. All of the content—stories, pictures, graphics, illustrations—are copy written.

In fact, the SunSentinel asks users to fill out a form to reproduce any of its stories. Not sure how many people actually do that, though, as you must click through several layers of stuff to get to the “request permission to reprint” form.

In this copy-and-paste World, it would be a lot easier to highlight the story and just copy it into whatever Web site you want. Then download the picture.

Most of this stuff is not in the public domain, so it’s kind of like ripping music from Web site. That’s stealing, just like the PSA’s by Brittany Spears and other artists say.

Decency

Newspapers sites like to post thought-provoking images of interest to users on their homepages.
They also like to post thumbnail pictures that show some skin—photo galleries of hot lifeguards Miss World 2008 bathing-suit contest, and the Sptizer “girl” partying topless. Who wouldn’t click on like those or the graphic-content galleries of flood-ravaged Haiti or terrorist-ravaged Mumbai?

But if you think these images are indecent for a homepage, think again.

Web sites are held to many of the same ethical standards of newspapers where indecency and obscenity are concerned, meaning they can’t post obscene content—something “designed to cause arousal and lacks artistic, literary or scientific value.”

So bring on the bikini-clad ladies and bare-chested men.

Comments, schmoments

Now I know why newspapers don’t edit the comment sections of stories—they can get sued. Apparently, they’ve only get three options, each have all or nothing consequences:

1. Screen and edit all content in the comments
2. Edit nothing
3. No discussion boards at all.

If you’ve read to the bottom of a SunSentinel story, you know it opts for No. two. The discussion boards are a free-for-all. Take the story about a baby killed in a house fire that her mother and older brother survived. Apparently, the family’s power was turned off and mom was using candles for light when the fire started.

Firefighters say the woman ran for frantically for help. The mother was called a negligent, irresponsible woman who didn’t care about her kids by commenters who wondered incredulously “if she was such an active ‘church member’ how come the church is not providing the funds?”

I can’t help but ask how does this help the public discourse?

Interactivity Production

Creating the interactive pieces of a multimedia story takes time and skill. Look at credits on most of the videos attached with stories and the bylines don’t match. One person writes the story, another take the pictures and often shoots the video.

In rare instances, a reporter writes the story and shoots the video.

But in a deadline driven industry that’s cutting back on staff while increasing emphasis on its Web product, I must ask: Just who is supposed to produce the content for these sites? And, let’s not even mention the programming and design aspects of creating a news sites—Flash, Java, advanced HTML, file compression, etc.

It’s just too much for a few people.

Interactivity analysis. Part Deux

OK, to spare viewers the pain of reading one uber blog post, I split the visual critique into two.

You’re welcome.

Photographs: Local news Web sites homepages use a dominate image…small thumbnail pictures of newspaper bloggers are used on the homepage of the Miami herald. But photos of SunSentinel bloggers are only seen after a viewer clicks on the link.

Video: Both sites use video prominently displayed on their homepages. But viewers will watch each video differently because of the various site designs.

The Miami Herald has a flash based video player prominently displayed on the homepage that highlights all the sites videos. This makes it easy for viewers to find their video and makes sure each doesn’t become buried in the site. The SunSentinel on the other hand embeds their videos in each story. There is a video player mezzanine on the Sentinel’s but no real indication that the thumbnail images are video links.

What happens if someone’s been living in a hole for several years and doesn’t know that a red, right arrow means play?

Interactivity analysis

Now, let’s examine and critique the various visual aspects of both local newspaper Web sites.

Graphics: The only graphic visible on either of their homepages is an image of the NASDAQ stocks, courtesy of BigCharts.com.

Illustrations: SunSentinel.com has a blog called News Illustrated that highlights the work of the newspaper’s graphic designers and cross promote a weekly print feature by the same name. Sometimes it features online only illustrations, such as this. But PDF versions of the weekly News Illustrated feature are available too.

Each print version of the story has a refer to the blog.
It’s supposed to turn readers into viewers. When the refers are on every story, much like taglines (e-mail addresses and phone numbers) it works. When they’re not, they don’t.

Interactivity

Interactivity, in an online-Web-way, means being able to seamlessly combine multiple media elements. So a quick glance at the homepage of SunSentinel.com is a textbook example of interactivity. There’s text, video, links and photos.

Most news sites, save radio stations such as NPR.org, seem not to have audio files by themselves online, but the Miami Herald has an audio/podcast tab in it’s multimedia section on the homepage.

Wonder why more sites don’t do this? Maybe it has to do with how accustomed viewers have become to looking at things. For many, listening to the radio—which is akin to standalone audio files—has become something done on the commute to and from work. And news radio, as we learned during our visit to the Miami Herald at the beginning of the semester, is targeted toward a very specific audience.

Who’s producing the site?

Neither newspaper Web site farms out production to a third-party company. This helps brand the site with the paper and provides style and content consistency.

For example, the same bylines appear on stories in print and online, helping readers and viewers know who’s going to provide them with crime, education or political news.

The downside of this dual platform is that Web site standards tend to be more lack than those for print. Photo galleries of such things as cheerleaders, lifeguards and “porn stars in the mainstream” are common on the homepage of SunSentinel.com, meaning reporters names become branded with this too.

Each site also has a slot for user-generated content, where unique viewers can post their own photos, videos and in some cases stories. Where does that fall under the production question?

What is the content?

The last of our evaluating questions is pretty easy to answer: News.

But to peal back a layer of the onion, so to speak, a large segment of the content tend to be shovel ware—stories shoveled from the newspaper to the news site.

This has changed some with both papers writing for online first. But a viewer who clicks on either site first thing in the morning is liable to see the same story they just read over coffee and cereal.

True if that same viewer were to click on MiamiHerald.com at 8:30 a.m. the site should be updated. Also, if that viewer logged on right before rushing out the door, he or she is liable to see a traffic watch, something not done for print. It would be outdated.

But if he or she took the time to the read the stories, particularly the meaty, enterprise stories, they’d be much the same.

Is the info accurate?

Both SunSentinel.com and MiamiHerald.com are trusted sources of information in South Florida.

In the spirit of online writing, it would help if both papers put the attribution at the beginning of summary sentences on the homepage. While this is not typically done in print, online it helps boost reader confidence in the information.

Although to be fair, SunSentinel.com has far fewer summary sentences on the homepage, so it might help to work the attribution in to the headline.

It did with this one, BSO: Man hit teen with cinderblock after Halloween prank. Since homepages aren’t good for SEO, would it really hurt all that much?

What does the site look like?

Much like MiamiHerald.com did recently, SunSentinel.com has opted for a more horizontal than vertical layout.

This allows unique viewers to scan (sorry, that’s what the do) more of the page without scrolling for more news. The PC way of saying, I think, is that viewers can now spend more time on or with the page.

Not sure how many viewers want to spend time looking at that blue background on SunSentinel.com. It creates a distracting sense of negative space, which is supposed to help direct the eye to important elements on the page. The blue makes the page feel claustrophobic and kitschy. Sorry.

MiamiHerald.com, in contrast, has a more appropriate use of negative space on the page in nice neutral colors—white in a light gray boarder. The headlines pop and the layout just seems more sophisticated.

Sorry. SS this assignment requires evaluation and criticism. On a positive note, the site seems to be updated more.

How often is the info updated?

As part of a class assignment, the next five posts are dedicated soley to evaluating two online news sites: SunSentinel.com and MiamiHerald.com. Enjoy.

SunSentinel.com lets viewers know right off the bat the freshness of the site. Right, now, for example, there’s a big red “Last Updated: 9:21 p.m.” just above the main story.

Problem is, viewers won’t know what was updated. Was it a photo gallery, a story, a story gallery, a video? And if so, which photo gallery, story or video?

The only real way to know which stories were updated and when is by looking for the little, red time-stamp underneath headlines, which seven out of ten times are the same on the homepage and story.

One frustrating thing is that the “main story” mentioned three graphs up is not a story at all but a multimedia candidate comparison based on the unique’s address. While this will be extremely helpful at the poll, it could be a bit annoying to a viewer who thought he or she was getting an actual story that didn’t require action on their part.

Sigh. I guess what they say is true: You can’t please everybody.

Web Traffic Zooming

OK. We know newspaper circulation is down and Web traffic is booming. But seeing the numbers in black-and-white makes the whole situation just seem all the more real.

For example, Sunday circulation of the New York Times dropped 188,514 readers according to Editor & Publisher (see previous post). The paper’s Web Site, saw 20,068, 000 unique page views in September, E&P said.

Most news Web sites have ginormous numbers of unique page views. Just look at the top five newspaper sites for September:

NYTimes.com -- 20,068,000
washingtonpost.com -- 12,956,000
USATODAY.com -- 11,439,000
LA Times -- 10,022,000
Wall Street Journal Online -- 9,047,000

Something Rick Hirsch said during our class trip to the Miami Herald just jumped off my computer screen and hit me in the face: (And, I’m paraphrasing here.)

We have more people than ever using our product, but they don’t want to pay for it.

Newspapers combine. Well, sort of.

There might be a need to add yet another tag onto the Sun-Herald-Post now that the Miami Herald and St. Pete Times will combine their Tallahassee bureau.

South Florida’s three dailies have joined online operations—sort of. Each can pull stories from the others’ Web sites then publish them in the paper.

Now this.

Newpaper Circulation: 25 years later; 200,000 readers lighter.

A quick comparison of the nation’s top 25 newspapers in 1998 and 2008 tells of an industry trying to right itself in the midst of a down turn. The top four papers are the same, but each has lost about 200,000 readers.

In fact, just about all of the papers have lost thousands of readers. Some of lost a bit of their cachet thanks to layoffs and buyouts that gutted mastheads.

If you keep up with industry news, the D.C. bureau of a top-tiered paper is getting decimated. Translation: About eight staffers will be laid-off.

Sigh.

Presidential Campaign Contributions

As we round third and enter the home stretch of the presidential election, one can’t help but ask: should media CEOs contribute to political campaigns?

Giving money to one candidate or another is a big journalist no-no for reporters and editors. What about the men who own the companies? And yes, I said men because, well, the CEOs are mostly male.

Editor & Publisher said Sam Zell, the man at the helm of the Tribune Co., gave at least $40,000 to Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

The money didn’t seem to influence presidential endorsements by Tribune newspapers, including The LA Times and Chicago Tribune. Both endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Zell wasn’t alone in his campaign generosity. Rupert Murdoch, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, gave $2,300 to McCain, according to E & P.

Still, it makes you wonder just how far up the media, food chain do those pesky journalistic standards stretch. Apparently, not to the man signing the checks.

Mobile News Update

I tried getting my news, well would be if I lived in Atlanta, texted to my cell phone from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. To say it failed would be putting it lightly. I haven't received one text from the AJC.

Not One.

Maybe it was the 305 area code that threw off their bots. Maybe there just hasn't been any breaking news in all of metropolitan Atlanta. Or maybe no news worthy of a text message. IDK.

What ever the reason the outcome is clear: No news texts for me. And, it's been eight days since I signed up.

Endorsement changes

Speaking of how the Internet is changing the industry…

Here are some interesting excerpts from a live chat with the Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor at the Washington Post. The chat centers on the Post’s endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama for president.

Online journalism students might find it particularly interesting because Hiatt discusses how because of readers changing habits the paper to altered its endorsement release. He also talks about readership numbers.
Find the whole thing here or just read the excerpts below.

Washington: Doesn't the Post usually do Presidential endorsements on Sunday? Why today instead?

Fred Hiatt: We've always done it Sunday. But our Web readership--you all--is much larger on weekdays than Sundays, so we decided to experiment this year.

Springfield, Va.: The Post's circulation has dropped by about 200,000 copies in the past decade. How much of this loss do you attribute to curltural and generational changes (i.e. generation X prefers to get their news online) and how much is because subscribers are choosing to get news from another source that matches their liberal or conservative bias?

Fred Hiatt: Another excellent question. I think the two probably feed into each other. Our readership is actually way up, when you add washingtonpost.com readers to subscribers. But as you say, younger people (though not only) are used to getting their news on line, not in print--and this may tap into a tendency to want to go to websites where people know the views they read will be congenial to them.

On the other hand, I can tell from the comments that we and our columnists get that plenty of people who don't agree still want to read diverging view points

ProPublica.com

This, in many ways, is what journalism has come to: Top-notch, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalists leaving traditional news organizations to work for a Web site—ProPublica.com.

Don’t misunderstand; the site’s mission—“to focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with ‘moral force’”—is exactly why most journalists enter the business. It most certainly isn’t the pay or the hours or the notoriety.

What is sad are the reasons (more than likely) that caused some of the best investigative reporters in the business to jump ship. And we’re not talking about shabby shops either. These folks were at The LA Times, Wall Street Journal and Oregonian, to name a few.

The industry is changing. As newspapers and television stations struggle to find their footing in the digital age, it seems like some core journalistic tenants values have fallen by the wayside.

Context is sacrificed for content more times than should be. For that reason alone, I hope ProPublica not only survives but also thrives.

Mobile News

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has this nifty little option directly under the main bar that allows viewers to have news updates sent to their cell phones.

Yes, lots of newspapers provide this option for their online readers. But seeing it right there while I scanned the homepage made me think: What about all those folks with cruddy cell phones that making logging on the Internet a chore?

Not everyone has a crackberry or iPhone, you know.

So, I signed up for mobile access to the AJC. I’ll let you know how, and if, the whole thing works out.

NPR.org

So NPR (National Public Radio, for those that don't know) has jumped on the multimedia bandwagon like just about every other news organization on the planet.

Click through the Website and it's apparent that the public radio world is struggling with this question much like newspapers and televisions: How do you use photo, text, audio, video and graphics in a complementary not redundant way?

The written stories are actually just transcripts of the broadcasts, which is a bit of a missed opportunity. Reporters typically come back to the newsroom with more stuff than can fit into their story.

The flip-side to this being: Who has time to, in essence, create two different stories-one for the radio, one written for the Web?

Still, I love the fact that the photo galleries allow you to see what you've heard. It's like the icing on a yummy chocolate cake. They just makes things seem complete.

Anchoring part deux

Apparently I misunderstood the concept of anchoring and chunking Website design principals. Opps. Hey, mistakes are the best way to learn right?

In an effort to redeem myself, I scoured the Internet looking for subheads that would take me to another place on the Web page not another site (anchoring). I also clicked my way through about half a dozen sites looking for examples of chunking-when a story is split between several Web pages. It's like of like each paragraph gets its own page.

After an exhaustive search of more than half a dozen sites, I was unsuccessful.

Sigh.

Apparently, my regular sites do it right, so to speak. So cyberspace: Do you all know where someone can click to actually see these concepts.

Breadth over depth

Short and sweet articles apparently better than long and deep. Not sure how I feel about that. Runs counter to why I got in the business.

Christian Journalists

Reporters check political ideology at the newsroom door. But what about religious belief, esp. with faith and politics inextricably linked?

Blogging for bucks

I can hear journalists’ collective sigh of relief if Jim Hopkins learns how to turn online journalism into a moneymaker.

Poked

Best new blog—Poked: Social Networking Etiquette for the Working World. Wish I thought of it. I can relate to the "friending" dilemma.

Anchor's away

Per the request of our fearless leader (translation: the professor), my online journalism class has scoured the Internet for examples of chunking, layering and anchoring links. Sounds like a nifty haircut, doesn't it?

Not really. They are the various ways that news Web sites structure stories and compile information for readers/viewers/unique visitors, i.e. all of you who type w-w-w-dot then click on a story link.

An example of anchoring, if I have my definitions correct, is the LA Times Web site. I love The Times, even worked there for a while as a reporting fellow, but they tend to anchor photo, video and story galleries about three graphs into the article.

The page layout takes a little getting used to. As one classmate said last week, she tends to think the story is finished when she comes across this design.

But if the content is compelling enough--like the discovery of multimillionaire, adventurer Steve Fossett's plane--you'll keep reading. You might even go back and click on a link or two. I did.

Internet How-to

Saw this and had to ask: Is this an instance of gadget giddiness? You know, one of those moments of bells and whistles added to a story just because we have them to add.

This "info" graphic ran after a Sun Sentinel, 3B story about a Pompano Beach man who pretended to be dead after being shot. I'd link the story, but it's been killed from the Web site. (Pun intended.)

The graphic, however was not.

It was an online only and answered a burning question: Just how does one convincingly play dead? Apparently, by holding your breath, mussing your hair and positioning your limbs in unnatural positions.

Anyway, I don’t want to ruin it. See for your self.

Funeral Twittering?

Call me Johnny-come-lately, but Twittering a funeral? Really?!

Before I launch into a diatribe about how good journalistic judgment, training and ethics are needed more than ever in these techy-times of instant publishing, the back-story:

A reporter at the Rocky Mountain News "twittered" the Sept. 10 funeral of a 3-year-old who was killed in an ice cream store. For those that don't know, Twitter is a live blog format where people provide super-short snippets--140 characters or less--about what they're doing.

So while some college kids might tweet: "Sitting in class listening to boring lecture by..." The Rocky Mountain News reporter tweeted: "People again are sobbing. Coffin lowered into ground. Family members shovel earth into grave."

John Temple, editor of the RMN, said readers would be curious about "what was happening during the funeral. Who was there. How many people. Anything special about the way the service was handled. Etc."

He continued by saying that most folks couldn't attend the high-profile funeral but empathized with the family, who lost their son in a car accident after an illegal immigrant with a shoddy driving record smashed into another car, sending both vehicles into an ice cream store.

Twittering the funeral, he said, was a way to allow the community to take part in the mourning. Yes, most people have voyeuristic tendencies. Think: Reality TV.

But several journalistic mantras besides "seek the truth and report it" were drummed into reporters' heads by professors and editors. Among them" Minimize harm."

Eight bullets rest under that headline on the Society of Professional Journalits Web site. Two that seem especially poignant: "Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity."

Almost as if responding to that thread, Temple's column continued: "Think of such live reporting as someone whispering into a phone directly to a global audience. There is no room for editors. What the reporter writes is what you read almost instantly. That requires special skill. It takes practice."

Journalist must-haves

Intern wanted. Skills required: audio, video and photo content gathering and editing skills; Final Cut/Soundtrack Pro; and just about all of Adobe Creative Suite 4.

It doesn’t matter if you post this list your bedroom wall, bathroom mirror or the car visor. The important thing is to learn each skill set.

Oh, and don’t forget to figure out how to write clean and engaging copy too.

If newspapers and wire services expect interns to step into the building with this knowledge, what does that mean for working journalists? What are the chances for moving to a bigger paper, better beat or management position?

Great if you get your floaties out and learn to swim, so to speak. Which is why, after seven years in a newsroom, I’m back in the classroom.

This, my reporting brethren, is journalism.

Muffled Message?

My how things change yet stay the same.

A decade ago, major media outlets worried about being drowned out in the growing cacophony of clicks from dot-com news organizations, called by some a " product unencumbered by editors or journalistic ethics."

Today, the media elite seem to have acquiesced to being one of many voices shouting information at the public. They just want to be the one’s shouting accurate, in-depth, thought-provoking news.

"We—The Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the news outlets that aim to be aggressive, serious and impartial—don’t dominate the conversation the way we once did, and that’s fine, except it means some excellent hard work gets a little muffled," Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times said in an e-mail to The New York Observer.

Question: Just how hushed that work amid millions of page clicks?

More than three million unique visitors, for example, take a stroll through Politico.com each month—more than all but a dozen U.S. newspaper Web sites, according to The Times.

That’s not a muffled message. Sounds almost like screaming. The problem: Hundreds of other sites happen to be standing in the room shouting too.

Assignment update

Now there's video of the prosecutors, defense attorneys and defendants on the stand.
updated at 1:00 PM EDT, September 19, 2008

Class Assignment Postscript

Thought you all might like to know the SunSentinel updated the online version of the homeless beating story at 6:15 p.m. Court reporter Tonya Alanez wrote through the article, adding reaction from the victims' families and details about the defendants' upcoming sentencing.

As a student of online journalism, I must question why it took five hours between updates.

But as someone who knows the struggles of a daily deadline --trying to make phone calls to a gazillion sources, updating an online version while writing a print version with a very different tone and feel, as well as a possible sidebars --I totally understand. For the sake of disclosure, I happen to be a newspaperwoman.

Sigh. There goes that struggle again between theory and practice.

Class Assignment Finale

So, there were no updates after the last post.

Here are the times I checked and my notes:
2:12 p.m. no new updates
3:04 p.m. no new updates
5:41 p.m. Story still on homepage but no date or time stamps.

As for re-writing the top based on the online writing techniques we learned in class, here goes:

A Broward County jury convicted two men of second-degree murder for fatally beating a homeless man with a baseball bat and injuring two others.

Thomas Daugherty, 19, and Brian Hooks, 21, both of Plantation, also were found guilty of two counts of attempted second-degree murder in the Jan. 12, 2006 attacks on homeless men in Fort Lauderdale.Daugherty and Hooks will be sentenced on Oct. 22-23 and face life in prison.

Prosecutors sought first-degree murder convictions for both defendants, but the jury found them guilty of the lesser charge of second-degree murder.

Class Assignment

This is a class exercise about online writting. For the next several hours, I'll be posting the top of this story. To see how it changes, and when it updates.

Enjoy.

Plantation men found guilty in Lauderdale homeless beating case
By Tonya Alanez Sun-Sentinel.com
12:11 PM EDT, September 19, 2008

Two Plantation men accused of fatally beating a homeless man with a baseball bat and injuring two others were found guilty this morning of second-degree murder.

Thomas Daugherty, 19, and Brian Hooks, 21, were also convicted of two counts of attempted second-degree murder in the Jan. 12, 2006, spate of attacks on homeless men in Fort Lauderdale.The men face possible life prison terms when they're sentenced Oct. 22-23.

Prosecutors had sought first-degree murder convictions for both defendants.

After the verdicts were read, Daughterty started crying while Hooks kept a blank look on his face. Daugherty later shook prosecutors' hands.

Jurors reached their verdict after deliberating about a couple of hours this morning.

Jurors spent seven hours deliberating Thursday before Broward Circuit Judge Cynthia Imperato sent them home.

And the award goes to…

In this world of online journalism, a relatively new crop of awards was added to the standards—Pulitzer and Emmy—to honor those who those who comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The name? Well, quite naturally, the Online Journalism Awards.

Online heavy weights, such as the WashingtonPost.com and CNN.com, are among the 2008 winners. There is also new area of distinction, if you will. For the first time, the organization has acknowledged the work of non-English language sites.

The Online News Association was founded in 1999. A year later, the organization launched its awards program to “honor excellence in Internet journalism,” their Web site said. The awards are “open to Web sites around the world,” it continued.

But it took eight years for the worldwide organization to honor Web sites not in English. This, despite the Internet’s ability to make someplace across the globe seem like across the street.

The reason, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, could be that “the online world mirrors the offline world.

“People bring to the Internet the activities, interests, and behaviors that preoccupied them before the Web existed,” the organization said.

Still, typing w-w-w-dot into the browser can take people to places they’ve only dreamed of visiting. So let’s click on ELPAIS.com and Soitu.es—this year’s inaugural award winners—and jet to Spain.

Better late than never, right?

As promised, here’s the rest of the skinny on The Miami Herald class tour, which wasn’t so much a tour but more a walk around the newsroom that ended in a construction area that soon will become a television set.

Yes, it’s a week late, which would be strictly forbidden in the 21-hour world that is the Herald’s continuous news desk. At least I absorbed the concept of optimal timing for blog posts—8 a.m.—to capture as much of the “cubicle audience ” as possible.

According to Rick Hirsch, managing editor of multimedia and news projects, Web traffic peaks on Mondays between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.

This is when workers slog into the office, plop down in front of their computers, still trying to knock the weekend cobwebs from their heads. And, what better way to do that than by surfing the Web, Hirsch said.

When the cubicle crew goes home about 5 p.m., site traffic drops about 25 percent.

But don’t think the site sits stagnant. It is updated constantly, hence the 21-hour news cycle. Although, the staffing level does thin out and the updates slow down after 5ish.

Still, updates are audience specific. Viewers, for example, will find more sports on the homepage in the afternoon. And, it’s high school sports mania from Wednesday to Friday, the days leading up to the games.

This attention to the habits of its audience, Hirsch said, helped the number of visitors to newspaper’s Web site jump by more than a million visitors—from 2.8 to 3.9 million between Aug. 2007 and Aug. 2008.

Not too shabby.

Cautionary Cyber Tale

There is a lesson to learn in the Miami Herald/ Miami-Dade County School Board scandal that has news blogs buzzing. It is about more than the journalistic tenets of fair and objective reporting or walking the reporter-tightrope of maintaining professional yet somewhat casual relationships with sources.

This is a cautionary cyber tale.

The plotline: an alleged romantic relationship between a former education reporter and school superintendent. E-mails from the protagonists helped write part of this story.

The characters could be innocent in the end because nothing has been proven true. Because the so-called evidence is electronic, this tale deviates from the traditional theme of reporter-beware-not-to-get-too-close-to-sources. The message, instead, is more the millennial: Delete-doesn’t-mean-deleted.

PDF versions of racy e-mails exchanged are bouncing from satellites to computer screens across the globe thanks to the Internet. At first, the superintendent said the wording in the e-mails was doctored. The reporter won’t comment.

Whatever the truth, this incident will dog both of their careers in this w-w-w-dot world. It has become part of their permanent cyber-foot-print. Google both their names and articles about “an improper relationship” pop up.

So, the warning for online journalism students: Be careful what you put in writing, be it published in a newspaper, hand-written in a letter, text-messaged or e-mailed. You never know what stayed in the bowels of a Web server.

Online Oops.

Thanks to an outdated news story that made an online comeback, got picked up by a wire service and caused United Airlines stock to temporarily plummet, the public now knows a little more about how the Web connects gazillions of news pages.

But first, the backstory: A 6-year-old newspaper story about United's bankruptcy on an achieved page on the Sun Sentinel’s Web site ended up posted to Bloomberg News as if it were current. The chain of events between the archived story and current post apparently are still under debate.

As a student of online news, what’s interesting in all this are phrases such as “news crawler,” “Googlebot,” “news scrapper” and "Web spider."

The terms are pretty self-explanatory. Virtual researchers troll cyber space for news then add them to news indexes, which is probably an oversimplified explanation of how articles from around the globe make it on to Google News.

Who knew!

My Multimedia Prowess

Since this is an online class and we will be shooting video, audio and creating three-dimensional stories, if you will. I figured I’d show off what I’ve done until this point.

At the end of the semester, we’ll compare. Hopefully, the stuff at the end will be better than the stuff at the beginning.

Granny Rapper

No, seriously.

She’s dark-shade wearing, iced-out, 79-year-old grandmother who raps about kicking “fannies” and downloading music. Angela Pusateri, of Hallandale Beach, even has MySpace and Facebook pages. Talk about generational convergence.

Only 35 percent of Internet users are over 65, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project. That age group tends to be newspapers’ core readership not their Web sites core viewership.

The difference can be seen in the SunSentinel print versus online stories about Granny Rapper. The main distinction: Granny Rapper rapping. In print, we can only read her lyrics. Online, we get to watch her spit fire, well, as much fire as a septuagenarian can spit.

Look.

Answers from the top

Rick Hirsch, managing editor of multimedia and news projects for The Miami Herald, discussed different news standards for print and online during a class trip to the paper Tuesday night. He addressed why an edited version of a heart-wrenching picture ran in the paper but the unedited version ran online.

“Here’s something you can’t see on the front page of the newspaper, you can’t have a note that says: Warning. Graphic content when you turn they page,” he explained.

Such a warning exists on the [Hurricane] Ike Strikes Cabaret, Haiti photo gallery. Folks who click on the link despite the heads-up make a conscious decision to view the photos.

People walking by newspapers in the corner boxes or newsstands see the image whether they want to or not, he said. They don’t get a choice in the matter.

More on the trip to come.

When do pictures go from emotive to exploitive?

The Miami Herald ran a front-page picture today of a grieving father clutching his daughter’s lifeless body with a story about hurricane-ravaged Haiti. A tiny pair of legs belonging to a different child—dead and naked—was deleted from the bottom, left corner. The unedited photo is online with several other pictures of a naked 7-year-old boy pushing a broken stroller through squalor.

The New York Times has a photo of an African king—man worth about $200 million—dressed in his beaded, tribal garb. The story is about corruption, private planes, entourages and luxury cars. The traditional dress was for a special ceremony.

Thanks to the power of the Internet what’s cropped out of a newspaper photo is only a click a way to millions of viewers worldwide, as is the case like the first example given. On any given day, 50 million Americans click on Web sites to get their news online, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And those figures come from a two-years-old report.

What’s interesting is the alleged conversation that took place inside the Herald highlights the different journalistic standards applied to newspapers and their Web sites.

What’s good for the Web is definitely not good for the paper, which tends handle information more conservatively than their cyber counterpart. Most online message boards are evidence of that, spiraling into virtual markets of hateful language that rarely—if ever—would be printed in a newspaper. Click on just about any SunSentinel story then read the comments if you don’t believe me.

The beginning chapter of our class textbook stresses journalists who publish in cyberspace must subscribe to the same tenets as those whose words and images appear in newsprint or television screens.

“Although there are many kinds of journalism, practiced by many different kids of people in many different places and for many types of media, some common thread connect-or at least should connect-all journalists,” James C. Foust wrote in "Online Journalism: Principles and Practices of News for the Web."

So, why the breakdown between principle and practice?

New media, multimedia and chickens. Yes, chickens.

We could chat about the difference between new media and multimedia, which I learned this morning in class. One (multimedia) is static with few updates; the other (now obvious by default) is a living entity that’s constantly updated.

Examples of both could be provided with analysis of what works and what fails. To give you a taste, this Detroit Free Press site—looks like the mayor text-messaged his way to jail— is alive with changing stories, videos, and photos. A fixed site, but by no means less powerful, would be this one from the LA Times on Hip Hop High.

But why discuss either when we can watch the Chicken Busters. Who ya gonna call?!

Gatekeepers in the digital age

While strolling today’s headlines online (um, I guess technically the stroll happened yesterday), I came across this little ditty on washingtonpost.com.

Using Monday’s news that Internet rumors forced the could-be vice-president to admit her 17-year-old, unmarried daughter is preggers as the news peg, the article says bloggers are now helping traditional media guard the gate, so to speak. And, the blogosphere sometimes does a better job at the post, according to the article.

Is the power of the pen being usurped by the credence of the keystrokes? Maybe not completely, but there sure seems to be a lot of sharing going on.

Second week, first online class.

No, the class, CNJ 442, wasn't taken online. It was about journalism in cyberspace. We sat in real chairs in front of an actual teacher who will teach from a paper-made book.

Sounds like something doesn't fit, right? How are we learning about a medium based almost entirely on monitors, CPUs and loads of other digital stuff but using the ancient tools of paper and pens?

Simple. Core journalistic tenants haven't changed just the package in which news is now delivered to readers, viewers, listeners and/or users. News judgment. Speed. Accuracy. Fairness. They all still matter, probably even more so now.

But as journalists in the 21st century we need to add html, content management systems and just about digital everything--photos, video and sound--to our arsenal. At least, that's what Prof. Levinson, our textbook and about a gazillion other media watchers say.

So, for the next four months, I'll be one of those media watchers. Well, an online media watcher at least. That is, after all, why I made a campus comeback and returned to college.