Faith, sports, and journalistic inquiry

The Wall Street Journal today had a thought-provoking piece by Christianity Today online editor Sarah Pulliam (@spulliam on Twitter) about journalism’s handling of faith and sports. The piece has a great news peg attached to it after all the controversy surrounding the Super Bowl ad from an anti-abortion group starring Florida Gators star and soon-to-be NFL draft pick Tim Tebow and his mother.

The column dissects some of the troubles journalists face when covering athletes who profess faith. Journalism is a profession based on inquiry and skepticism, and so when covering athletes who talk about religion this can get complicated. Pulliam neatly summarized some of this clash:

• Journalists see a lot of sides of athletes, including their bad sides. How do they match words with deeds, and are they qualified to judge hypocrisy or a person’s devotion to their faith?
• Journalism is empirical, a discipline that requires observation and the testing of facts. How does one materially test something such as faith?
• How do you honestly tell an athlete’s story without talking about the faith that motivates them? Out of that, how can you determine that the motivation is real?

Obviously an athlete’s faith becomes part of the news at times. Pulliam cites Cassius Clay’s transformation into Muhammad Ali as an example of something that is news itself and impossible to ignore. Read more

J198: The game is slowing down

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

Since it’s Super Bowl week, we’ll kick off with a football analogy. Old timer quarterbacks often compare the process of maturing as a player as being somewhat correlated with the speed of the game. Consider NFL great Warren Moon:

“You’ve seen pretty much everything. I think the big thing for older guys, at least for myself, is the game really slows down for you. It really is a slower game. And even though you might be slower because you’re getting older and you’re not as quick as you used to be, because the game has slowed down to you mentally and the way that you view it, you’re still at the same speed of the game.”

Experience, the “I’ve seen that before” kind of recognition, allows you to focus on the game and not technique. NFL rookie QBs get overwhelmed by how fast defenses are, but in time they adjust as they learn to read blitzes, recognize defenses, and so forth. What they’ve had to learn on the fly soon becomes instinct. The game slows down.

The game is slowing down for the students in J198 as well. The focus is shifting from the entry level work with technology and back to the familiar stuff: storytelling. Read more

Games made for social media

Forgot to post this last week when I tripped across it, but I was tooling around the NBC site for the winter Olympics and noticed a cool section called Olympic Pulse.

The page, linked off the main home page, is essentially an aggregation for Twitter feeds featuring athletes and NBC broadcast personalities. You can sort between these groups or have a combined feed. Off to the right are links to other social media outlets where folks can find Games content, such as via Facebook.

Blogging was the big new media thing at the Beijing Games in 2008. Missouri sent several students to China to work one media coverage as part of an internship-type thing, and in fact one of my students was blogging daily from the Games. And boy did blogging take off across all types of media, which is interesting because really it’d been a growing phenomenon for about four years before that point. Read more

iHaven’tseenityet, but iWantone

My dad has this habit of printing out e-mail. Occasionally he’ll get something that captures his interest or makes him think or makes him laugh, but his first reaction sometimes centers on this urge to print the thing out and pass it around. When I go home to visit my parents these days, it’s almost a guarantee that at some point dad’s going to break out the paper e-mail to share a joke or something that he read about.

Needless to say, I think this is weird. It’s not how I use e-mail and feels like one of those Stuff Old People Do kinds of things. If I wanted to share it, that’s what the “forward” button is for. But even as I shake my head at the notion of my dad clear-cutting whole forests to share that latest e-mail joke going around the Intertubes, I realize that there is something there. We live in a networked world, and we like to share our media. It’s just that he likes to physically hand his e-mail to me.

And I do my fair share of, well, sharing. One of the things my wife and I have had to work out as fairly newish married folk is the use of laptops in the living room. We both have work to do at nights at times but it seems nicer if we’re at least spending time together in the same room, even if we have our heads down and are staring at our laptop screens. And while we might be exchanging information back-and-forth in that Only In The 2000s kind of way, there can be some sense of human disconnection even as we collaborate.

Even tougher, sharing something on my screen is more difficult if all I’m doing is playing. You can’t just pass a laptop to someone so they can quickly read an email, see a photo, or watch a video, and so I’m stuck with either e-mailing it to her or sitting next to her and trying to orient the crazy thing so she can watch it while still being able to access the controls. The former is just another impersonal manifestation of our highly wired society, whereas the latter is just clunky.

And this is why I want an iPad. I haven’t even held one in my hands and am stuck with presentations and commercials, but I want one.

This is a post about the iPad, but not from an insider who was lucky enough to touch one yesterday. This is about me, the consumer looking at all of this stuff and deciding whether it’s worth being an early adopter. For the first time in a while, this is an Apple product I’m actually excited enough about to think about getting at initial release. Read more

J198: First week recap

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

So we all survived the first week, and by that I mean all of us. This week was all about basics of working the camera, simple work with video files, and getting them uploaded to YouTube.

The lab assignment was pretty simple: interview another person in class with the camera by asking three questions, download the file to the computer, create a movie with the clip using the video-editing software, then upload to YouTube. The second half of the assignment was to edit that longer clip so there is only one question, create a movie out of that, and upload it. The goal was to just give them a feel for how to work the camera and work the software, plus a very basic editing technique involving simple video cuts.

The sense I got from the students is that they were surprised by how easy it was. The Kodak Zi8 cameras we’re using were chosen just for for that reason, that it’s literally a push-button form of video shooting that is accessible to newbies. There were some questions about the video editing and pressing the wrong buttons there, of course, but overall it was pretty smooth. Read more

J198: Equipment and software choices

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

I already wrote that we’d chosen to use Kodak Zi8 cameras for our class, but I wanted to complete that thought with a word about how we’re working video. As we planned the course last fall, my department chair and I talked about different ways we could do things. The easiest thing to do would have been to buy a bunch of iMacs with iMovie and put Final Cut on there and use that. But because we haven’t done this here before, it was a question of need. If these are baby steps in multimedia, does it make sense to roll out all of the nicest tools until we see how much we actually will use them? In addition, the entire production process for other classes and the student newspaper was already PC-based, so did it make sense to go out and by a bunch of iMacs just for video editing?

For us, video will consist of cutting, splicing, titling, and some work with sound. We could do more (a LOT more) but we are focusing on the basics for this first foray.

So we both agreed that sticking with the new Dell PCs that we have was just fine and that buying a lab full of Macs didn’t make sense. I did check into Sony Vegas as a Final Cut type of program, and because it’s priced at different levels it actually isn’t cost prohibitive to use it. We decided, though, to stick with Windows Movie Maker, which comes free with Windows and has all of the basic features we need for this course. Read more

Foursquare, journalism, and a sense of place

I have a confession to make. I live a secret life. By day you know me as the mild-mannered professor of journalism, helping guide young ones in the formation of their journalistic skills. But I have an alter ego.

You see, I am the mayor of Coppee Hall.

For the uninitiated, I’m talking about Foursquare, a mobile Web application that uses location-based systems to let you “check in” where you are using an application on your iPhone or similar smartphone device. If I had to compare it to something you already might know and use, it’s similar to Twitter except that rather than tweeting about what’s in your mind or what you are doing, it’s simply a status message about where you are.

My goal for this post is to sketch out some ideas in hopes that you’ll add yours at the end of it. I’ve been fooling around with Foursquare the past couple weeks after Mashable recently noted it was the social media offering worth watching in 2010. After using it for a while, I am seeing some of the huge potential it offers both fans of social media and journalists. And I see a lot of potential for it in terms of journalism education, as it offers a new way to tell stories and add to the record.

Read more

J198: Start your engines

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

New semester starts tomorrow here at Lehigh. Courses for this semester are COMM 100 Media & Society, the second semester in a row for this course, and JOUR 198 Multimedia Reporting.

It’s the latter course that has me excited as well as a little nervous. I’ve been planning and thinking through this course for a few months, but as I’ve been tweaking the syllabus the past few weeks I’ve had to come to grips with what I don’t know. Specifically, the baseline skill levels of the students entering the course, because it really affects what direction all of this takes.

I go back and forth on on whether I’m being too ambitious or not pushing them enough. In the end, I just don’t know. I have to get my hands in the dirt with this group and figure it out, and that work starts tomorrow. I know they can tell stories because they’ve been doing that. But there are always differing levels of ease in understanding the common threads in telling stories in narrative writing versus multimedia platforms. There’s always that light bulb moment in their head. The central question as it relates to any new platform we’ll be learning (audio, video, photo) is how fast we can turn that bulb on. And, of course, most of them have never held a video camera in their hand.

This will be a real learning semester for me. I’ve taught something like this course before, so I know it’s doable, but what I need to learn is where Lehigh students are and listen to them. One thing I do know is they’re good students and fast learners. I continue to be impressed with the high achievement level I observe in Lehigh students.

My syllabus has a built in note that the class is subject to revision. I have had classes like that due to their experimental nature, and I hate that. I’m a planner. As a student I needed to build my schedule and tasks around what was expected of me. So I’m sensitive that too much in-semester change would be a big problem; some revisions I might wait to make until J198 2.0, some I might adopt in term.

And then there are the millions of brainstorms that always seem to hit right as we’re entering the fray, such as a great conversation I had with fellow new mediaphiles Bob Britten and Jen Reeves on Facebook about journalistic uses of Foursquare, which I’ve been messing around with the past couple weeks. Together we did a mini-crowdsource discussion of ways to use Foursquare in the classroom, which is a blog post in itself that I’ll get to this week.

In truth it’s probably too much to squeeze stuff like Foursquare journalism into this term, if for no other reason than I don’t even know how many of my students have a smartphone. But the problem is that once I get these ideas churning in my brain I can’t help but wonder if I’m not giving the students my best if I don’t at least make it an option to tap into the scary world that is my brain on new media.

But, anyhow, we set sail tomorrow. I’ll be blogging it out and posting links to things as we go so people can follow the progress on Twitter and such.

Rethinking online networks and engagement

The situation in Haiti has my mind churning this week. The images and stories coming out of this tragedy after the earthquake have been heartbreaking, but I have been mindful of how mediated the whole thing is for me even as I blog about it. I’ve never been to Haiti, unlike a few friends of mine. My whole conception of what Haiti is and what its struggles are (and were, long before this quake) are coming to me via media. As I get ready for another semester of Media & Society, that perspective is still as fresh to me as ever.

There’s another aspect of this though that has me intrigued, and that is the use of social networks to raise donations for the victims in Haiti. I touched on it a bit the other day when I wrote about the SMS campaign being used to raise aid dollars, but it’s much wider than that. As I’ve been sitting here this week editing down my 200-page dissertation to a 2500-word abstract for a professional organization competition, I realize that much of what I’m seeing as it relates to Haiti and social media reflect what I found in that research.

First, a story, then some theory, then some explanation. Read more

Ubiquity and accountability

It doesn’t shock me at all that the early stages of the Haiti coverage were built on social media rather than professional media. We’ve seen this before when big news events happen and traditional lines of transmission inhibit the ability of news organizations to get the message out.

In the case of Haiti, the 7.0 earthquake damaged so much communication infrastructure that communicating the stories and images out of Port Au Prince was thrust upon the locals still shellshocked from the devastation. That my first thought after the disaster was to wonder how the citizen journalists on the ground would tell this story shows how far we’ve come. As a scholar I’m no longer fascinated and in awe of the notion of the citizen reporter. In my case, I found myself wondering last night what they’d do with it this time, how it would be different and more meaningful than past events.

Within hours, the New York Times was curating a social media roundup on its blog, soliciting voices from the region. The Los Angeles Times was aggregating tweets and attempting to verify whether the voices were hoaxes or actually coming out of Haiti, just one interesting professional media use of social media that looked like a next step highlighted today by the Sydney Morning Herald.

But that’s all stuff we’ve seen before, and as Mark McGwire would say, I’m not here to talk about the past. Read more

Dell catches the Cluetrain

Mashable posted an interesting interview with Richard Binhammer about how Dell has turned its Twitter presence into something that will make it money. You can read the full piece, but basically the words of advice are as follows:

1. Be on Twitter to build better relationships with customers, not make wads of cash.
2. Have a diverse approach. Don’t confine yourself to one account, but maybe have several accounts with your company’s brand that serve several purposes (i.e. one for news, one for customer service, etc.)
3. Don’t just be a spammer. Ask questions of your audience. Listen to them. Show it in your tweets.

My favorite Binhammer quote from the article:

“Dell first heard about Twitter at SXSW a few years back and got excited about the listening aspect of Twitter.”

All of this made me think about The Cluetrain Manifesto, a wonderful book I’ve been rereading this month in preparation for two independent study efforts I’m doing with grad students this semester. Cluetrain celebrated its 10th anniversary last year but remains as fresh and relevant now as it was in the late ’90s. The book is packed with ideas, but what sticks out to me is this: As media move toward more interactive and socially connected operations, businesses that survive and thrive in this new world will be ones that use social media to reconnect with their customers at a human level. Read more

Forsaking the mission in search of the almighty hit

I have a beef with our local newspaper, The Morning Call.

As a new resident I understand that it takes a while to get to know the area and the way news is done in a particular locale, but the past couple weeks of watching the MCall on the Web has disappointed me. I see them making and remaking some of the huge mistakes that got journalism into its current bit of trouble.

It started a couple weeks ago when, via the @mcall Twitter account, someone noted that a Tiger story was its most popular of the moment. First, great that you’re on Twitter and using it. But for this story? It was a story sourced entirely by TMZ, fit more for a gossip rag than a newspaper that claims to represent serious community conversation. And again … TMZ! Even my non-journalism students here at Lehigh know they’re sketchy.

I’ll get back to this one in a second, but for the sake of narrative just know that I registered my own reply via Twitter and let it go.

And then came today’s bit of stupid. Read more

Wednesday is for links (12/9)

So you don’t have to surf the Web …

1. Your weekly “get off my lawn” rant about participatory media this week comes from The Digital Journalist via the provocatively titled “Let’s Abolish ‘Citizen Journalists’.” I kid, of course, because I have more respect for journalists who come out and just say what they think rather than pick at the edges. To wit:

There are citizens and there are journalists. Everybody can be one of the former, but to be called a journalist means that you are a professional. Either you have been schooled in journalism, or you have “paid your dues,” rising slowly through the ranks.

I disagree, of course, and I don’t think the pros help their cause a bit by arguing on the basis of elitism. For an interesting follow-up, check out Jay Rosen’s virtual interview with Dirck Halstead, editor and publisher of The Digital Journalist.

2. Via Mashable, Twitter is about to open up the “firehose” to API developers by making all data for all tweets available. This will put developers on more even footing, but more important, it will really spur more creative Twitter applications. Between that and the launch of Google Real-Time, which will be indexing social media content continuously, it looks like 2010 will be a big year for the growth of the conversation Web.

3. What makes an academic tick? A great post by my colleague Hans Meyer at Ohio U unpacks it a bit. It starts with an exploration of how the iTunes shuffle feature is so-not-random but uses that to demonstrate the change that happens in the process of becoming a scholar. Rather than ask how or why things work (or in this case don’t work), you set about trying to determine it for yourself. It’s intellectual self-reliance. Good stuff:

So what does this post have to do with the media? Nothing really, but I wrote it so I can refer back to it on days when I don’t feel as smart as the other bloggers and researchers I read. Maybe I’m not as smart as they are, but at least I’m working on it, at least I’ve come to the point where I don’t just ask questions, I actually try to find the answers through rigorous application of scientific methods. Even if I don’t have all the answers, I have something valuable to add to the discussion. I have my perspective which I can defend because I’ve objectively looked at the evidence, as stupid as it may be.

4. President Obama visited the Lehigh Valley last week to talk job creation, and Twitter was abuzz. Citizen journalists (sorry, I won’t abolish the term) took photos, and folks from all walks shared details and info using the #obamalv hashtag. It was interesting to read through the feed in real-time and see people of different views converging together in a shared space of discussion.

5. Via The Oatmeal, you don’t have to be a Web designer to have experienced this type of misery before, but you might laugh with a bit more understanding.

6. David Cohn of the most excellent Spot.Us wrote an interesting piece for PBS’ Idea Lab walking us through the cool bit of innovation that happened this fall between his site, McSweeney’s, and the SF Public Press. The collaboration helped create a dynamic story, “The Bay Bridge Explained,” that got wider exposure via partners in the process. I’m pretty upfront in my love for Spot, and they remind me every day that there’s a difference between trying something (anything!) and trying something good. Cohn may not have hit on the future here, but this is going to be a part of it.

7. Good post by Dan Gillmor today attacked ghostwritten editorials used by the mainstream professional press, in this case inspired by a piece “written” by Sarah Palin. I agree with Gillmor insofar as we’re talking about transparency; while these editorials are really advertorials for a candidate, source of the writing aside they can help drive public discussion and so I have no problem with using these pieces per se. What’s dishonest, as Gillmor notes, is printing bylines when nobody really believes the candidate actually wrote it. Even a one-sentence agate line at the end saying the column used a ghostwriter would be a welcome change. If we don’t do this kind of thing, it really keeps us from doing what we should be doing as media, which is deconstructing the myth of image-candidates.

J198: Multimedia reporting books

I finally selected my books to adopt for Multimedia Reporting (J198). I have known from the start that I didn’t want to have a textbook or a book heavy on online philosophy or culture, as I figure they’ve gotten some of that in their other courses. God knows the poor saps in my Media & Society course have been inundated with it.

Online culture: it’s what I do.

So, rather than turn next term into a giant World of Warcraft game, I wanted to make sure that book adoptions were based around a text that is practical. My ideal vision has been to pick a book that they would not want to sell back, something that would serve as a practical field manual for doing media across multiple platforms. Read more

Graduate readings list

Next term I have a grad student sitting in on my Media & Society course and doing parallel readings. We don’t have a grad program in our department here at Lehigh, but because of the liberal arts setup we have here in the College of Arts & Sciences that has given me contact with all kinds of grad students. The student I’m working with next term is interested in Web 2.0, social networks, a little bit of marketing, etc.

The setup we devised was that the student would sit in on the class and do the readings from the textbook and Dan Gillmor’s We The Media just like the undergrads. But they’ll also do some primary source readings over the course of the term and we’ll meet every couple weeks to discuss them over coffee, with the end result being a term paper. This will offer a much deeper layer of the course; we talk about thinkers such Lippmann and Milton in COMM 100, but the grad student will actually be reading them.

The course deals with media’s role and impact on society, so lots of media and culture readings are a must. Here’s the list I came up with: Read more

A fish out of water is a good thing

I taught my last Media & Society (COMM 100) course of the fall semester today. I can’t believe how fast my first semester here at Lehigh flew by, and it feels like I’ve been running from Day 1 here as I adjust to a new job and a new life. Still, it has gone more smoothly than I could have hoped. I love my department and think the world of the active minds I see in my classroom.

This was a semester of agility in M&S. The course deals with the intersection of media and culture, but really has a focus on making students aware of the media environment in which they literally live. It’s a really broad subject, and as I planned the course this past summer it felt like I was wrestling with too much.

My vision for the course changed over the term somewhat. The initial plan was to talk about media platforms, then apply that to media theories and areas of ethics/law, then finish with Dan Gillmor’s We The Media and talk about the converage of media into a diverse ecosystem.

The plan stayed intact, partly out of necessity. But something really cool happened along the way. Read more

Wednesday is for links (12/2)

So you don’t have to surf the Web …

1. Big changes are coming to Facebook (cue scary music and get yer “1 MILLION STRONG TO GIVE US THE OLD FACEBOOK BACK!!!1!” group ready). Founder Mark Zuckerberg explains that they’re going to disband the network-style mode of grouping people, and this is important because privacy settings are often determined by the network you’re in. It looks like network-based privacy settings will go away in favor of the ability to clump custom settings and apply them to groups of people. Not sure how this will play out until we see the changes, but it looks like they’re going to incorporate more intuitive privacy options.

2. Rupert Murdoch, among others, have been making noise about putting online news behind a paywall. Steve Yelvingon explains why this would be an incredibly bad idea. This is one of the best reads of the week for me. The hard data seem pretty clear that an all-or-nothing approach isn’t wise, nor is a blanket view of your audience. The suggestion at the end as a potential way to shape new models to the data is interesting.

3. Another point, while I’m here with Murdoch and pay walls. The 2006 version of Murdoch sounds a lot more like a guy who understands what’s going on with the Web than the 2009 version. And for what it’s worth, Twitter founder Biz stone thinks Murdoch is off his rocker too. Still, the Fox News critic in me is almost dying for Murdoch to try this.

4. Something for the kids: Colin Horgan at True/Slant has an interesting take on why Radiohead’s Idioteque (from the genius Kid A in 2000) defines the 2000s. Read this as literary criticism, not ironclad truth, and you’re fine. You have to think that Radiohead was eerily prescient about how technology would evolve during the decade to buy into all his assertions. Like I said, read it like art and not reporting. By the way, can we just declare Kid A the best album of the decade by unanimous consent?

5. A haunting and fascinating piece of work by Wikileaks, as they published more than 570,000 messages sent on 9/11 in a type of chronological order. It’s a living history of how 9/11 unfolded through the eyes of those using text messaging.

LARRY, CALL BRIAN. WANT TO KNOW IF OUR MEN ARE OKAY, SAW A PLANE HIT BLDG

The project is really interesting, like reading a historical novel or watching a historical movie where you know something bad is going to happen. It starts with mundane calm-before-storm types of texts and slowly shows it all unfolding. There’s a lot there, but it’s a sobering read.

6. Clay Shirky warns us that things are going to get worse for journalism and community before it gets better. His argument, among other things, is that we’re going to have to go through a journalism period of community decline in the absence of news before we can recreate this thing. His thoughts are part of Yale’s “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?” which features some big names in journalism scholarship. It’s a link I’ll be using as they release more.

7. We’ve been saying for a while that Google Wave is going to change our relationship with media. The first really good example I’ve seen came in the past couple days related to the Lakewood shootings of four police officers. The Seattle Times created a public wave that allowed citizens to share information and edit one another, a crowdsourced type of citizen journalism that improved the Times’ coverage [search "with:public seattle times" in Google Wave to check it out]. Others were using G-wave to help in the manhunt after the trail went cold, and people shared sightings and information. Pretty cool stuff. This is just the beginning, folks.

Fore! News media off target on Tigergate

I tried to stay away from a full-blown rant on the Tiger Woods coverage. I really did, I promise.

But Stacey Woelfel, the current RTDNA chair and the news director for KOMU at the Missouri School of Journalism (yes, I am berating posts from my own; it’s what I do), pushed me over the edge with a snarky response to Woods’ silence. It captured a lot of what I don’t like about where news has drifted on the definition of “newsworthy.”

The argument, essentially, is that Woods has no right to privacy in the aftermath of the awful-terrible-no-good car crash because he is a celebrity, and the money he makes off of that fame gives him no ground when he wants to retreat.

You are who you are thanks as much to media interest as to your own golf ability, and we, the media, won’t settle for this approach you’re taking. … You have chosen to live your life publicly by cultivating your superstar sports status.  Had you chosen a private life without the attention on your golf—not to mention the multimillion-dollar endorsement deals — that would be different.

Well when you falsely frame it like that, who can argue? Read more

Microblogging toward productivity (Or: Why I play on Twitter a lot)

I’ve been thinking lately about how ideas and information make their way from my head to my blog. People who write for a living think about this kind of thing all the time, even if they don’t know they do. We try to find the best strategy, the best mindset, the best-decorated workspace, etc., that will get those creative juices flowing.

The worst, of course, is when this is all a writer thinks about. That would be what we call “writer’s block.”

I’ve been blogging going on six years now, across several different blogs. Some have been discontinued, modified, deleted, or outright killed. It’s part of my creative process. Some like to preserve things because their writing is like some sort of scrapbooking project. For me, my ideas need to be born and then (at times) die a horrible death. Or evolve. Something besides just sit out there in cyberspace. Read more

Wednesday is for links (11/25)

So you don’t have to surf the Web …

1. I blogged about Google Wave earlier in the week, but I really want you to check out Mashable’s piece on how it is going to transform media. The idea of a “public wave” is intriguing to people like me who think about journalism’s role in public discourse.

2. Best thing I’ve read this week: Clay Shirky’s piece about authority and credibility in the digital age. He’s using the term “algorithmic authority” to describe a process by which people put levels of trust in aggregators and filters on the Web simply due to things like hits and popularity. The piece is mind-bending and I’m still digesting it, but it has me thinking a lot this week about how the wisdom of the crowds works to create new authorities on matters even as we dismantle old ones. It has implications for how we think about people cutting through media noise in the era of overload. If you read anything this week, read this.

3. Twitter’s basic question “What are you doing?” has been changed to “What’s happening?” This may not seem like a huge deal, but it’s a new paradigm. It is a signal that Twitter recognizes a shift from the service being a me-centered medium to one that is we-centered. And, it seems, that the audience has evolved past Twitter’s original intentions for what it would be.

4. Media coverage falsely framing ACORN by falling into the he-said-she-said trap rather than providing some context via, you know, reporting? Shocking! Editor & Publisher lays out the case.

5. Blog of the week: Take a look at Jonathan Groves’ corner of the Web. Jonathan’s a buddy from the doc program at Mizzou, now setting the world on fire at Drury University. Best post of the past week is his piece about the 10-year anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

6. Frontline did an episode recently on the now-famous “Neda” video out of Iran that went viral this past summer. There is some excellent reporting here, and they broaden the argument on why citizen journalism matters by giving us the context. My first thought is that I still wince every time I see the Neda video. My second thought is that it’s terribly important that we keep showing it, if only to reinforce the idea that good media use means we encounter abuses of authority structure that make us angry. We aren’t outraged enough.

7. Just for fun, what if Star Wars characters were socially connected on Facebook? Good times, that’s what.

8. If you read ESPN, you probably know of Bill Simmons (a.k.a. The Sports Guy). Well, he’s been told by ESPN to cool it on the Twitter thing for a couple weeks. His crime? Insulting a radio station that is a partner with ESPN. Just in case our students think the corporate conglomerate media structure that sacrifices competition for the sake of efficiency isn’t such a bad deal ….

9. From the invalidate-my-own-argument department, Jackson Sun columnist Tom Bohs makes the very scary argument that citizens can’t fact check well enough to produce consistent journalism like the pros can. So we should trust the pros. Such as the kind of pro who’d misspell “Berkeley” or the last name of Dan Gillmor (not to mention get his current locale wrong). And I’m pretty skeptical Bohs actually has read We The Media. It’s all sorta funny/ironic considering Gillmor was the prime target of this fine piece of opinion journalism. If only citizens could crowdsource the editing on this piece like a real professional journalist! Oh wait, they already are doing it.

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