abrahamhyatt.com » Journalism Posts

The Carnival of Journalism: The Future of News Video Looks Like Crap

Abraham — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:12:16 +0000

This month’s Carnival of Journalism host is Andrew Pergam, who asks “What is the role of online video in the newsroom of the future?”

The future of online news video hit me for the first time in mid 2009 when I was talking to the editor of a small daily in Northern California. He was telling me how the paper had bought high-end video cameras, trained photographers to use editing software and put together beautiful video packages.

But that’s not what visitors seemed to care about. What did they click on the most? The raw, unedited footage from car accidents and local events that reporters shot and uploaded to the Web while in the field.

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Not much has changed since then for a lot of small and mid-size newspapers. The future of online news video looks like it was shot on a camera phone.

That’s obviously not true for the big guys, The New York Times, et al. And if you don’t have NYT-style resources there are apps and tools that make creating OK-looking video easy and cheap. And I should add that low-quality production doesn’t mean the content is without value.

But the drift towards low-quality video is an inarguable and inescapable trend, one that stems from the basic principle of supply and demand.

In an old post on (the sadly defunct) Rebuilding Media, Vin Crosbie writes that an overabundance of news sources leads to competition that actually lowers the bar on the definition of “quality” video.

When there were few suppliers, they used higher quality content (i.e., ‘high production values’) as a competitive weapon against each other. But now that there is an overabundance of suppliers, their competition levers towards being the first to produce content that is at least of acceptable quality. Millions of videos are viewed billions of times each month on sites such as YouTube.com (+3 billion per month) not because of high production values, but because the videos are at least ‘good enough’ to watch.

So What Role Does Video Play? Advertorials, Really?

From a financial perspective, cost-intensive video production faces a big hurdle. The rate that advertisers will pay for video views is relatively low. Let’s look a non-news-media example: Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Earlier this month paidContent reported that Marthastewart.com’s July traffic was up 7% to 2.6 million uniques but video views dropped 14% to 382,000. Like the rest of the media world, MSLO’s advertisers aren’t paying much for those views. So Martha ditched the editorially driven video strategy and teamed up with Frigidiare for some good old advertorial content.

Halfway through the paidContent story is a pretty depressing sentence:

As media companies look to refine their video strategies, it might make more sense to go with the custom video as MSLO is doing and wait until CPMs, along with marketer and viewer interest in supporting original, non-advertorial content emerges.

What this really means for small print news orgs is that there is no immediate future in investing in quality news video. That includes small online-only news orgs like the one I work for. If editorially independent news video can’t support itself, either through advertising or other revenue models, then it can’t be done.

There’s hope on the horizon. According to eMarketer, by 2015 US online video advertising will double in size to $2.16 billion.

Get ready for four more years of camera phone video clips.

Flickr CC-licensed photo by JcOlivera.com

Top 8 Journalism Apps of 2010 (That You’ll Use All Next Year)

Abraham — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:00:25 +0000

TweetThis year news apps were either horrible villains or lifesaving heroes depending on your perspective. But what about apps for journalists — for reporters who need information and tools on the go? I’m not talking about podcasting or video editing apps. I’m talking about mobile and cloud-based tools that the average journalist will use on a regular or even day-to-day basis. Here are my top eight choices that either launched or received significant upgrades in 2010.

1: Rapportive

Mac, PC, Firefox, Safari, Mailplane, Fluid and Chrome; free

This is my favorite tool of 2010. As my co-worker Marshall wrote last March: “Stop what you are doing and install this plugin.” He wasn’t kidding. Rapportive replaces the ads in your Gmail account with publicly available information about the person who sent you the email: links to their social networking accounts, their photo and biographical info, even a live feed of their tweets. Not only that, if you mouse over other email addresses included in the email, those people’s info shows up, too. At right is what the right half of an email from my boss looks like.

Suddenly, the sources you exchange email with have a face, and even better, their background info is at your fingertips.

It’s not omniscient. Rapportive displays data based on the specific email address that the sender is using. If they use a different email to log in to social networks, then those accounts won’t show up. One fun bonus is that it finds some hilariously old accounts. You’ll be surprised how many people have long-forgotten Friendster profiles.

2: Simplenote

Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android, Web; free/paid (no ads)

This is my second most-used tool of 2010. By itself, Simplenote, is, well, pretty simple. It’s a note-taking app that syncs what you write — whether you’re using a mobile device or a computer — live to the Web. It’s been around for two years but got a very significant update (tags, versioning, word count, sharing) in August. Its real power lies in its ability to work with a host of other desktop and mobile apps and browser extensions. Once you link to one of those tools, you no longer have to pay attention to Simplenote. It stays in the background, instantly syncing what you write to the cloud.

For instance, I use an app called Notational Velocity for pretty much everything I write. I like it because it stores what I write within the app; I don’t have any folders full of old documents. When I started using Notational Velocity I linked it to Simplenote and then forgot about Simplenote completely. But no matter where I go, no matter what computer or smartphone I use, I have access to everything I am working on or have written in the past.

True, there are plenty of other cloud-connected note-taking apps out there (Notespark, Evernote, etc.), but none have the simplicity and versatility of Simplenote.

3: Photoshop mobile app

iPhone, iPad, Android; free

Like note-taking apps, there are tons of image-editing tools out there. The Photoshop mobile app is a simple powerhouse that outperforms everything else. It meets my criteria for an on-the-go reporting tool: it’s stable, powerful and easy to use.

If you want hip filters and splashy effects, this isn’t for you. But if you need to quickly and easily color correct or make cropping/rotating changes to an image before you send it back to your newsroom or post it on your blog, this is your best bet. Over the course of 2010 it got several updates: new tools, Facebook and Flickr connection, and more.

4: Police and fire radio scanners

iPhone: 5-0 Radio; free/paid (extra feeds). Android: Scanner Radio; free/paid (no adds, more controls)

Even thought I work for a tech news site and don’t need an app like this, I love it. I wish I had something like it back when I was a daily reporter.

Scanner Radio for Android launched this year with more than 2,300 live police and fire scanners and weather radios from around the world. One interesting feature is that it will let you know when a specific feed has a lot of listeners. According to the developer, “You could have the app alert you when any scanner in the directory has more than 500 listeners, or, you could have it alert you when scanners you choose (such as those in your area) have more than, say, 50 listeners.”

I use 5-0 Radio, which launched in 2009. It claims to have “the largest collection of live police, firefighters, aircraft, railroad, marine, emergency, and ham radio” feeds.

5: USA.gov mobile app

iPhone, mobile Web; free

This may seem a little elementary, but the USA.gov app is unmatched as a portal for searching all federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal government websites, including in some cases vital birth, marriage and death records. It also does image searches and government recall searches.

Out in the field covering a fire and need some background? Punch your city name and “fire code” into the app. What about reporting about an accident at a job site? Searching for your city name plus “OSHA fatality” will bring up the agency’s website that lists accident reports.

6: Mobile document scanners

iPhone: JotNot Pro; $0.99. ScannerPro ($6.99), Document Scanner ($4.99), Scanner & Fax ($7.99)

These kinds of apps sometimes get mixed reviews (and I’m kind of cheating since some of then came out before 2010). They’re essentially camera apps that are really good at enhancing text in the images they take. Can you do the same thing by taking a photo and messing with the contrast and sharpness? Yes, in some cases. But often you can’t: the paper is wrinkled; the paper isn’t on a flat surface; you have multiple pages that need to be a single document; you need the resulting image to be a PDF.

I use JotNot Pro (right) mainly because it’s cheap. If I forked out $4.99 for something like Document Scanner I would also be able to do things like OCR (a process where images of words are turned into actual text). Each of the apps I listed have varying features that may or may not fit what you need from a tool like this.

7: DocumentCloud

Private beta

DocumentCloud made big headlines when it launched earlier this year. If you don’t remember, it’s “an index of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web.” Since then, dozens of small and large news orgs have used it to annotate and augment public documents that they’ve published. As of August, there were close to 500 users and 100 newsrooms participating in the beta trial.

I don’t know when the service will go public (the development team has been rolling out updates for beta testers throughout the year), but when it does, it’s going to be an invaluable tool for newsrooms, regardless of their size.

8: The Onion mobile app

iPhone, Android; free

The Android app came out this year (the iPhone version launched in 2009), and it is, as The Onion says, the “last bastion of unbiased, reliable, and definitive news in a world dominated by superficiality, mediocrity, and non-Onion news outlets.” You need it.

Did I miss any of your favorites? What will you be using in 2011? Let me know about it in the comments.

Build a Robot Journalist Assistant in 3 Easy Steps

Abraham — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 20:52:26 +0000

Overview

Too much information, too little time to sift through it — who has time to find the few relevant stories that dozens or hundreds of beat-related blogs and company and government sites produce every day?

How about a digital assistant? There’s a way to automate that filtering process in just a few steps using Yahoo Pipes. One of the best parts about Pipes is that you don’t need to do any heavy lifting on your own to create powerful tools. You are free to copy publicly available Pipes and alter them however you need.

That’s what we’ll do to a “robot assistant” that I built. I use it to take more than 80 RSS feeds from a wide spectrum of political sites, bloggers, analysts, lobbyists and pollsters who I think are interesting and filter the hundreds-plus posts they generate each day with just a few specific keywords. The result? I end up with 10-15 posts every day that I know are likely to interest me. It’s completely automatic; I never have to think about it.

Here’s how to take that Pipe and make it your own.

The Easiest Step

1: The easiest step: Copy the Pipe I’ve already built

First off, you’ll need a Yahoo account. Once you’ve set that up and have logged in to Yahoo, visit this Pipe: Robot and click on “View source.”

Here’s how Yahoo Pipes works. The blue bubbles on the left column are commands. You drag them to the canvas, input the needed information, and then connect them together using “pipes” that you drag between the modules . It’s visual programing.

But you don’t need to worry about any of that.

Notice up in the right hand corner where it says “Save a copy”? Click on that. The screen will grey out for a minute, and then – outside of the words “Copy of” in front of the Pipe title, the whole thing will look like it did before. But now it’s your own. Click on “Back to My Pipes” at the top of the page and you’ll see where your Pipe is listed. We’ll come back to this page later on.

You’ll need to do the same copying process for this Pipe called subRobot as well. These two pipes need each other to run. But aside from copying subRobot, we won’t have to do anything to it. When you’re done, close that browser window.

Google Doc

2: Create a spreadsheet in Google Docs

This spreadsheet will contain the online sources you want to feed into your assistant. You can title the document whatever you want, but it needs to have two specific characteristics:

1) The first line of the first column must be called “feeds” (lowercase). 2) That first column is where all of your feed URLs should go, one on each line. Website URLs won’t work; they need to be RSS feed URLs.

Here’s what my spreadsheet looks like.

Think of your spreadsheet as a working document. Even after the Pipe is set up you can always add more feeds or remove feeds. The more the better — up to several hundred.

Now that you’ve entered all your feeds into the spreadsheet, look up in the right hand corner to where there’s a drop-down button next to the word “Share”. Click on that and select “Publish as a web page”.

A small window will open. Change “All sheets” to “Sheet1″. Click the “Start publishing” button. When you do that, the options on the bottom half of the window will now be accessible. Change the drop-down menu that says “Web page” to “CSV (comma-separated values)”. Then select and copy the link in the box below. Your window should look something like this, although with a different link. What’s most important is that your link ends in “output=csv”.

Copy, Paste, Keywords

3: Copy and paste the Docs link, add your keywords, and you’re done

Now it’s time to make this Pipe your own. Go to pipes.yahoo.com and click on My Pipes. Mouseover the Robot copy pipe and click “Edit source”. The very top module is called “Fetch CSV”. Paste that URL you copied from the spreadsheet into the top field in that box. Very important: If your link starts with “https” change it to “http”.

The Pipe is now pulling in all of the posts from all of your RSS feeds. That was easy!

Now let’s do some customization. Scroll down to the box called “Filter”. It’s pretty self explanatory: As the information “flows” down through the pipes to this step, we’re going to use the “Permit” option to allow only some of it to get through. If you want to keep things easy, just change those keywords to whatever you want. If you want to get a little more detailed in your filtering, I have instructions at the bottom of this page.

One final thing. It’s a quick drag-and-drop change and then we’re done. In the module called “Loop” there’s a smaller module inside of it called “[open] subRobot”. In that smaller module, click the red box in the right corner. Poof — it disappeared.

Now go to the left hand column on your screen. Scroll down and click on “My pipes”. There will be two bubbles there — drag the one called “subRobot copy” into the hole left by the module that you deleted. Once it’s there, look for where it says “Change this >” and use that menu to select “item.feeds”.

Hit the save button and you’re done! When it’s finished saving, click on the “Run Pipe” link at the very top of the page.

More filtering info

The field called “item.description” means “everything in the RSS entry (i.e. the full or partial blog post or news story available in the RSS feed)”. In my example, I’m letting every entry that contain the words “facebook” “social media” or “twitter” get through. If I switched “Contains” to “Does not contain” I would get the opposite result. Change those keywords to whatever you want. Use the “+” button to add more fields if you need them.

If you’re interested, you have a few more options you can mix in. Click on “item.description”. In the drop-down menu, “item.Pubdate” and “item.title” are both useful. For example, use item.title to limit the flow of information to only blog posts with a certain keyword in the title. Use item.Pubdate to limit to a day or a date range.

Results

The results

Once you’ve clicked on “Run Pipe”, it will take you to the results page. Depending on the type of information you’re getting, to see your results you may need to click on the “List” tab instead of the “Image” tab (which is just slideshow of all the various images in your results).

There are two ways to get back to this page. You can bookmark it, or you can go to your “My Pipes” page via pipes.yahoo.com. When you’re there, you’ll see both of your Pipes. Mouseover the Robot copy pipe and click “View results”.

The third and best option is to just grab the RSS feed that’s available right above the results.

Feel free to change the name from Robot to something else. But do not change the name of the sub pipe.

One last thing to note: Pipes is not real time. There can sometimes be an hour or more delay between when a site posts something and when it shows up in a Pipe. If you’re getting your Pipe results via RSS, that delay can be even longer.

If you have any questions or run into any problems, please feel free to email me: abraham@abrahamhyatt.com.

The pipes in this post are based on a method developed by the awesome Pipes guru, hapdaniel. If you start to build pipes on your own, he’s an invaluable resource in the forums. Robot photo by Fred Seibert

Troubleshooting

If you’re not seeing results, double check that you haven’t accidentally made your filters too restrictive. At the bottom of the Robot pipe, click on “Pipe Output”. Use your mouse to pull up the frame at the bottom of you screen with the debugger results in it. (It will only list a few results, even though your actual output may be much larger.) Don’t like the headlines you see? Play with the keywords in the filter, and use the “Refresh” link in the debugger pane to see what your changes result in. You may have to hit refresh several times, especially if you’re dealing with a large amount of info.

If you’re still having problems, the issue maybe that you’re trying to push too much information through the Pipe. The problem isn’t in how many RSS feeds you have — that should be ok up to several hundred. But if your keywords aren’t specific enough and there are hundreds or thousands of results, the Pipe will likely break.

From RWW: White House to Federal Agencies: Beware Social Media Ratings and Polls

Abraham — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:47:18 +0000

I normally don’t cross post what I (occasionally) write at ReadWriteWeb, but I think that the White House’s concern about polls and ranking mirrors what a lot of newsrooms are wondering as well: Just because a lot of unknown people like a story idea, should we take it seriously too?

“In a memo released yesterday, the White House made it significantly easier for federal agencies to use everything from social networks to online forums. But with the newfound freedom comes a surprising caveat: User ratings and rankings on those services, the new guidelines warn, “should not be used as the basis for policy or planning.”

In other words, a million Americans can Digg or retweet an important blog post, but government officials shouldn’t use that popularity as an indicator of the post’s value.

That’s not always a bad thing considering that a dedicated group of like-minded people can game a casual voting system. But the voice of a social network corresponds to real people in the real world. A recent study, for instance, found that Twitter chatter accurately forecasts box-office revenues.

As a whole, the new guidelines [PDF] were sorely needed. Social media and other online activities fell under a law that arduously dictates how agencies handle written materials. Under the new guidelines, online activities are now considered a “public meeting,” which gives agencies much more freedom to blog, hold virtual meetings or even run contests.

That freedom comes with a stipulation. The memo was written by the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs administrator, Cass Sunstein. In it he explains that agencies should “exercise good judgment and caution when using rankings, ratings, or tagging” because they aren’t “statistically generalizable.”

That’s true, but it doesn’t mean they’re worthless. John Zogby, founder of polling firm Zogby International, told us last year that…”

Read the rest of the post here.

Photo by libraryman.

A Simple Tool For Finding Journalism Sources on Delicious

Abraham — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:19:44 +0000

A coworker of mine, Marshal Kirpatrick, once wrote, “People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to “join the conversation” – because they aren’t sure where to find the conversation.”

That’s doubly true for journalists. We need to mine the Web for stories and sources but where do we start? The social bookmarking site Delicious is a good example. It’s filled with millions of potentially noteworthy links, but how do you filter it to find what’s valuable? To answer that question I built a simple tool for identifying Delicious users who are really interested in the same topics I am.

Last month I spoke at a conference for university admin types. The session was about the loss of higher ed reporters, and ways that a university can become their own media organization. That doesn’t just mean disseminating information, but collecting it as well. I wanted to give people at the session a simple way to get their toes wet. So I turned to Yahoo Pipes and came up with Delicious User Finder. (You can find a primer on Delicious here.)

What it does

You enter keywords. The Pipe spits out a list of Delicious users who have tagged bookmarks with your keywords — and the number of times they used those tags.

That number is the key part of this tool. Those users with high tag counts think just like you do; they see the news through the same lens you do. And now that you’ve found them, they’re your personal information mine. You can use them to find new blogs, news sources and online services. You can use them as your own news aggregator. You can use them to discover where the conversation is.

They’re not a “source” in the traditional, real-life sense; the majority of the time who they are is irrelevant. Click on their name on the Delicious User Finder search screen. That will take you to their collection of bookmarks on Delicious. You can either bookmark that page or grab the RSS feed on the bottom of that page.

What it won’t do

Some users are goldmines, but plenty of others are crap. Also, it’s a limited pool. The search will only analyze the most recent 100 bookmarks with your tags. For some searches that may go back two years, for others, two months.

Advanced

The quote from Marshall comes from a piece he did for ReadWriteWeb called “How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet.” It’s a little dated, but if you’re interested in getting even deeper into finding out where the conversation is, then I highly recommend it.

We Made The Media: What went right — and wrong

Abraham — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:29:32 +0000

We Make The Media was an intense day. As one of the sub organizers who spent the last few months helping Ron Buel and a core group of people create the event, it was both thrilling and heartbreaking to see how it played out.

Over the course of the day about 50 percent of attendees left and didn’t come back. Many that I talked to said they didn’t see value in simply discussing the problems of the industry. Several people told me they felt like the day was an attempt by OPB, which was a sponsor, to “steal” innovative ideas that were generated by the journalism community. (I think that’s completely unfounded.) By the end of the day, I didn’t feel inspired, I felt exhausted.

Two days later my mood has improved. When I spoke to the audience as part of the opening panel, I said I was amazed by how the journalism community in Portland has come together over this last year. Yes, it’s very “Portland-y.” But the ways we’ve been exploring ideas and learning from each other is fundamentally important to the future of journalism in Oregon. And we clearly saw that happening on Saturday. Because of that, I feel like the day was an overall success.

But I’m going to leave why and how it was successful to other attendees to write about. Here are two things I believe the conference failed at on Saturday.

Diversity
Uncomfortable: That’s the only way to describe the atmosphere in the conference room when the lack of racial diversity was brought up. When the organizers were planning the event, we contacted media outlets we were familiar with. We failed to reach out to community media, and to media that reflected the racial diversity of Portland. This was a mistake, one that I take partial responsibility for.

We were lucky to have KBOO come on as a sponsor a few days before the conference. But what if that had happened a few weeks before? Who else could we have invited? And how would that dialogue have shaped the planning of the event? If we’re going to create a media organization that breaks out of the old news models, we need to be including people from outside traditional media outlets.

Technology
From the beginning of the day, the smartphone- and laptop-using crowd congregated in a back corner of the conference room. True, that’s where the power outlets were. But like minds found like minds — and they were in the minority. I’m not inferring that the rest of the attendees were Luddites. That clearly was not the case.

But the attitude of some of the core organizers was that technology, like the printing press, is simply a method to deliver the news. Wrong. Technology is journalism — from the code that creates new projects, to the tools we use to report and communicate, to ideas we are only now discovering. The cavernous gap between those two mindsets created an us-vs.-them mentality that drove some of the Twitter crowd into a frenzy. I’m not being critical of it; the heavy flow of snark on Twitter was hilarious and absolutely spot on.

But remember how I talked about a journalism community that’s coalescing? “The corner” wasn’t feeling it. And the project they gravitated to — an incubator for journalism startups — had little or no outreach or communication with any of the other final projects.

It’s two days later and I’m asking myself, “Now what the hell am I supposed to do?” I know I’m not the only one asking that. Over the next few days I’ll gather together answers from some other participants — and try and come up with one of my own.

Binary image by Carsten Mueller; wrench photo by Davide Guglielmo.

Hey media startups: J school students need your help (and you need theirs)

Abraham — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:37:58 +0000

I spent the better part of last weekend at the University of Oregon’s journalism school. On Saturday I was a panelist at the Building a Better Journalist conference, and on Sunday I took part in the Redefining J School barcamp. I don’t have a journalism degree. In fact, I don’t have a college degree at all. But this weekend I learned this: Professional journalists and their news organizations need to start thinking about how we can help students get the training they need.

It was a weekend of contrasts. I came away amazed by some sessions and depressed by others. The conversation during the barcamp was so fast and sharp at times it was almost impossible to take notes; the new media sessions at the conference had a great range in topics as well. Of course, there were also a few tedious veterans yabbering about “change.” I get cynical and bored with people who wave the word “digital” around like it’s some kind of healing wand without ever examining what has actually changed in our industry. Journalism students need answers, not aphorisms.

If there was one thing I took away from those two days it was this:

There are j school students out there who want more than what their universities are providing. And we may be loosing some damn good journalists because of it.

That’s not a crack at the U of O. In fact, they’re probably the most proactive university I know of. They recently changed their curriculum so that students get more hands-on training earlier in their studies. Several professors and instructors — including Ed Madison, Michael Werner and Suzi Steffen — were an integral part of the barcamp. Additionally, the university’s journalism department has been a strong supporter of community events like the Digital Journalism Camp and We Make the Media conferences. (Disclaimer: I am involved with organizing both events.)

But the reality is that as easy-to-use blogging, video, audio, programing and other digital tools increases, the number of students entering college with some type of skill is increasing as well. That doesn’t mean that a university can teach all incoming students at a higher level. It means the university has to serve a broader spectrum of students. With, of course, limited resources. Some students, like entrepreneur Daniel Bachhuber for instance, aren’t being challenged enough and they’re dropping out. That’s a tragedy not just for the school, but for the j school students who could be learning from their advanced-level peers.

One solution is to improve existing internship programs. Challenging, real-world work experience isn’t guaranteed to keep students in school, but it’s a significant start. Students at the barcamp had plenty of suggestions: Give us opportunities to add things to our portfolios, training that reflects what’s actually happening in journalism, and work that respects our time. But new journalism startups also need to start creating internship programs. J school interns are not just a source of cheap labor — they’re the talent pool you’re going to be drawing from as you grow.

Out-of-work journalists are fleeing the industry for stable work elsewhere. We can’t afford to loose talented students to other fields as well. Over the next decade we’re going to need them as much as they need us.

130 years of must-read stories for digital journalists: Five lessons from 1851-1981

Abraham — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:48:56 +0000

• Members of the White House News Photographers' Association, circa 1922-1926 •

As journalists, the future looms so large that it feels like we’re constantly on new ground. But we’re not. Whether we tell stories with words, audio, video or a combination of all three, there are a surprising number of lessons to be found in the past. A 115-year-old slice-of-life story about a sick man falling down on a city street has the same emotional power we’re looking for in our own stories. A 28-year-old story about engineers designing a computer has a staying power we’re hoping for in our own tech reporting.

There’s another lesson that’s buried in these stories from the last two centuries. It may be the most important. If you want to create quality journalism, the most important thing is to stand up from the keyboard, walk outside with whatever tools you like best, and start reporting.

1: You can report on technology in a way that it remains compelling — and relevant — for decades afterward.
“The Soul of a New Machine,” Tracy Kidder, 1981 [Excerpt]

In the late 1970s, Kidder followed a team of engineers at a company called Data General Corporation as they frantically tried to design a new computer model. It’s a topic that could easily be confusing and dry. And 30 years later it seems like ancient history. But it’s not. The story is still a great read. Kidder took great pains to keep the technology understandable. And while the equipment is now quaintly archaic, the story around it — a crushing race to build a product that appears doomed to fail — is fascinating. “Soul” went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.

2: Don’t be afraid to get close to the action, whether you’re recording with a notepad, recorder or camera.
“When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,” Stephen Crane, 1894 [PDF]
“Can’t Get Their Minds Ashore,” Abraham Cahan, circa 1898 [Google Books]

“When Man Falls” is slice-of-life reporting, not hard news. A man walking on the street falls over in what looks like an epileptic fit; a leering crowd gathers and waits for police and an ambulance. “Ashore” has a similar feel. Cahan is the invisible scribe as he follows a series of conversations at a receiving station for new immigrants in Manhattan. We’re no strangers to up-close journalism these days, whether on a battlefield or a crime scene. But Crane and Cahan are two great examples of reporting that gets close enough to see the smallest details, but not so close as to overshadow the story as it unfolds.

3: If you play with language, with storytelling, never forget the journalism at the core of the story.
The Pig, Ben Hecht, 1921 [Google Books]

“The Pig” is a brilliant example of voice done right. In the last forty years, there have been a few dozen print journalists who fall into that same category of “voice done right”: Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Susan Orlean. The examples of voice done poorly feel countless. If you allow a strong voice in your work, remember this: Journalists have been trying and failing miserably at it for more than 100 years. Do your homework. Learn how the masters got it right.

4: Sometimes you’re part of the story. Your honesty, not your ego, is what’s most important.
“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” Lillian Ross, 1950 [New Yorker archive]
“Travels in Georgia,” John McPhee, 1973 [New Yorker archive]

The “I”, the first person, is a firmly entrenched element of modern journalism. The “I” can add a crucial character to a story, one that guides readers with an invisible hand. Done poorly it’s an exercise in vanity. Ross’ profile of Ernest Hemingway is a great example of the “fly on the wall” reporting style that made her famous. In “Travels,” McPhee hangs out with biologists as they do field work and occasionally eat roadkill. The “I” in each of their stories is a remarkably unobtrusive but essential voice.

5: Profiling everyday people will always be powerful.
“Court Buff,” Mark Singer, 1980 [Google Books]
“Watercress Girl,” Henry Mayhew, 1851 [Link]
“The Rivermen,” Joseph Mitchell, 1959 [Google Books]

Singer wrote about courtroom spectators. Mayhew wrote about a child living and working in incredible poverty. Mitchell (and his contemporary A.J. Liebling) spent his entire career writing about supposedly unremarkable people. “I actually believe deeply in the dignity of ordinariness,” Susan Orlean once said. Orlean wrote what I think is one of the best profiles ever crafted, a study of a 10-year-old boy (“The American Man at Age Ten“).

“An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain,” she wrote in 2001. “I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it. The challenge was to write these stories in a way that got other people as interested in them as I was.”

Alive In Baghdad: Help independent Iraq journalists

Abraham — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:38:51 +0000

Alive In Baghdad is a collaborative effort between journalists in Iraq and the U.S. For the past four years they’ve been producing video stories about what it’s like to live in Baghdad. They cover a lot of the war- and security-related issues you’d expect. But they also cover a side of Baghdad you’ve never seen: the lives of gays and Christians, the state of women’s rights, teenage soldiers, youth soccer, illegal pharmacies, what college students do to relax.

Right now Alive From Baghdad is hurting for money; they can’t afford to hire translators for their stories. This is a short video on just a few of the stories that Alive In Baghdad has done over the years. Even if you can’t support them financially, go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast, or go aliveinbaghdad.org and watch some of the stories in the archives. It will change the way you think about the war, about independent journalism and about the Iraqi people.

Visit aliveinbaghdad.org to buy a t-shirt, make a voluntary subscription pledge of $5, $10 or $25, or to make a one-time donation.