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.