Thursday 19 April 2012

Winning the Pulitzer - lessons for our media

This year, the Pulitzer Prize for Feature story writing went to this story. It is a riveting account of an attack on a lesbian couple in Seattle. The story is powerfully written. A situation that might have been exploited for its sensationalist potential is treated with sensitivity, even though the account is vivid and heart-wrenching. The story is even more ground-breaking in our Caribbean context in that it focuses on a lesbian relationship, not as an oddity, but as a simple human story of love and caring that ends in tragedy. As such, it presents many lessons in good reporting that our own press would do well to emulate.

 http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-bravest-woman-in-seattle/Content?oid=8640991

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Responding to the Andre Bagoo issue

Amid all the sound and fury surrounding the Andre Bagoo issue, Sunity Maharaj's response is one of few that manages to shed more light than heat:

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/commentaries/Noise-as-strategy-outrage-as-defence-139352248.html

Tuesday 17 January 2012

NewsU Syllabus Exchange

via NewsU


The Syllabus Exchange, in partnership with the Broadcast Education Association, gives educators a way to enhance their curriculum by sharing ideas and teaching materials. Our goal is to provide a database of course syllabi, assignments, exercises and other teaching materials that can be shared. Our focus is in the area of journalism, electronic media and communication studies. We welcome not only editorial-sequence syllabi but also those from related fields, such as advertising and public relations. We also welcome high school and other teachers.

While we review each upload for appropriate content, we don't edit or warrant the material.

Here's how it works. When you share a syllabus, assignment or other teaching material, you'll receive 100 Poynter NewsU Training Points. To download a training resource, you will need 50 points [for each resource]. To get everyone started, we are giving every registered user at Poynter's NewsU 100 points. That means you can download two resources before you start sharing.

Visit NewsU to get started!

Thursday 12 January 2012

“Words We Don’t Say,” An Update

In last week’s news meeting question, inspired by a list of forbidden words from Kurt Andersen’s days as editor of The New York Times Magazine New York, we asked you to help us make our own list of stale and lazy phrases that you’re tired of seeing and hearing from news outlets. Looking at the comment section, we’ve got a pretty good collection going; here’s what you’ve sent in so far:

Transparency
Strongman
Cutting edge
World Wide Web
Game changer
Robust
Love child
Illegitimate
“Adult conversation”
Iconic
Paradigm
Canoodling
Traffic metaphors (crossroads, juncture, intersection, turning point)
“-gate”
Brutal murder
Savage beating
Vicious attack
Deadly tornado
Destructive tornado
Bete noire
At the end of the day
Street smarts
Endeavor
Persevere
Regime
Going forward
Substantive (rather than Substantial)
The other side of the aisle / Both sides of the aisle
To be honest
Quite frankly
Mom (rather than Mother), and “Mom jeans”
Lawmaker
Tipping Point
Going Forward
Bloviate
Underwater
Impact (when used as a verb)
Walking something back
Throw under a bus
(Feel free to keep adding to the list, here.)

Correction: This article originally stated that the "words we don't say" list dated back to Kurt Andersen's days as editor of The New York Times Magazine. Andersen never edited that magazine. We meant to say that it dated back to his days as editor of New York. The relevant sentence has been fixed. CJR regrets the error.

Tuesday 3 January 2012

Collaborative Reporting

via Strange Attractor

I read Highs and Lows of “Post Mortem” Collaboration Between Frontline, ProPublica, NPR, by Carrie Lozano over on Mediashift with interest, not least because collaboration has been a specialty of mine for many years now. Ever since I first started working with social media over seven years ago I have focused on collaboration, so a project that marries collaboration and journalism is of course going to pique my interest.

This piece, first in a series by Lozano, sets the scene, but doesn’t go into any detail about how journalists from Frontline, ProPublica and NPR actually got down to the day-to-day nitty gritty. That’s what I’m really interested in, because the collaboration tools available today make working together really easy, if – and only if – people are willing to learn and adjust the way that they communicate.
There are basically two types of collaboration.

Asynchronous collaboration:
  • The actions of the collaborators are spread out over time 
  • Materials are gathered or created and made available to the other team members who access them whenever they wish to
  • Collaborators can be spread out over different time zones
  • Conversations can occur slowly as there can be a delay before each participant is able to reply
  • Tools include: wikis, blogs, microconversation tools (i.e. Twitter-like tools), Google Documents, file sharing services like Dropbox
Synchronous (or nearly synchronous) collaboration:
  • The actions of the collaborators are taken in concert
  • Materials are created together, in real time, either by simultaneous editing or by taking turns in a timely fashion
  • Collaborators are usually in overlapping timezones, even if they are not physically in the same location 
  • Conversations happen smoothly as collaborators can response almost instantly
  • Tools include: instant messenger, chat, Google Documents, microconversation tools

The trick is in knowing what kind of collaboration you need and how to swap seamlessly between modes as required. A lot of people who don’t understand collaboration wind up using email as their primary tool, despite email being very badly suited for the work. If you’re going to collaborate with other reporters, you must set up your collaboration systems and ensure that everyone is familiar about what to use, when and how, before your project truly kicks off.