SXSW panels on the brain

South By Southwest’s panel picker opened today, so I officially have SXSW on the brain until next March. I wanted to talk a little about a panel I proposed and also plug a few others that I have voted for.

A shameless plug for our panel: If you like what you hear, please vote for us using the link a couple grafs below this one. It requires a short registration but you aren’t obligated to attend the event in Austin. Ours is the only panel tagged “journalism education” and so I think we bring a lot to the table here. Read more

Parting words for my J198 Multimedia Reporting students

This semester we took something of a leap when we introduced J198 here at Lehigh. As students in our department you’ve always had the journalism focus as part of your studies. The only thing that was narrow was the platforms you learned about: writing, photography, maybe some online work here and there.

This semester we learned (in the words of Cassie) everything. Yeah, we learned video. And photos. And Twitter. And blogging. And Web building. And maps. And a little Gowalla. And SEO. And podcasting. But there’s a common thread there. We used it to build something greater than the whole, and that something was the story. If there’s one lesson I want you all to take away from this course it’s something Steph said during her group’s presentation: When we learn the technology to the point where operating the equipment is second-hand, you realize something: It’s always about the story. Always.

You learned a lot about technology and networks this semester, and that kind of information will be vital. But now that you’re at the end of the term, zoom out and see the big picture. See how this all works together. For example, we didn’t use Twitter because it is all-important. We used it to build up networks and relationships with people, to listen to them in shaping stories and work with them to promote the work you did. We used it to get information and push information.

And it works. For example, Google south+bethlehem+arts and what do you get at the top of your search hits? Why, the very site put together by Andrew, Lauren, and Ope. Why is this? Because it was set for SEO, it had a clear title that was reflected in the URL, and it was sold in social media by both you and your followers. In other words, “everything.” All of it was pointed toward benefiting from Google’s system of rewarding clicks over big media brands. Read more

Initial iPad thoughts

I am writing this whole post from my new 3G+WiFi iPad using the WordPress app. Who says you can’t create content with these things?

The app is pretty good, though it could use a WYSIWYG interface. Formatting links and text is sort of a pain, but then again I was surprised WP even had an iPad app so quickly, so maybe the limitations are due to them just getting something out.

I played with the WiFi version at the Apple Store, but I spent about 6 hours with this thing tonight. Immediate things that jump out with the luxury of time:

E-mail is real nice on this thing, much better than the iPhone. I like the flat design, where you can see your inbox and the called up message in one pane.

The A/V is sweet. Great screen quality and robust speakers. Resolution on pictures and video is eye-popping, far better than a computer. I streamed a couple ballgames using the excellent MLB app (more on this in a second) and got uninterrupted viewing at HD quality. Amazing.

Any app that uses Web browsing within its interface (i.e. not using Safari) better put out an iPad app quickly or they are toast. If there is no iPad version it loads at iPhone size and you can blow it up, but it usually pixelates. That works ok at times for the app itself, but it kills Web pages and often makes them hard to view.

Students love it. I have let about 15 students tool around on the thing for a while. Some were skeptical of it before using, but I have yet to find a user who doesn’t love it after trying it. Better, they generally see a use for it that either is unique or inadequately filled by a device they already have. I think this thing is going to be a hit for students once the textbook market revs up in the iBook store.

My own media habits are changing. Pre-iPad, I often had my laptop out in the living room with me for media browsing (quick email checks, news, looking up things on IMDB). Now I barely pull it out, and I don’t miss it. If I need more computing power or things for work, I use the laptop. But that’s what it’s for. Regular surfing for info or quick looks is easily filled by the iPad. The laptop was always clunky for around-the-house stuff, and the iPad has simplified my life a lot. Not once have I found myself wishing i could plug in a USB drive.

Favorite app: MLB At Bat, and it’s not even close. Especially with MLB.tv streaming games. A really nice way to watch a game. Pitch speeds and types, player stats, live video, and all kinds of info at your fingertips.

Unexpectedly cool app: Star Walk, which uses GPS and the compass functions to locate constellations and planets in the sky. Really cool for star gazers or space lovers like myself. Awesome app.

Other apps: I’m looking forward to checking out the magazines on this such as Vanity Fair (not a magazine I normally read; I feel I should point this out). Twitteriffic is probably my favorite Twitter client on there, but Tweetdeck is nice too.

Overall my sense of this device is unchanged: If you understand what it is and is not, you’ll love it. Most of the critiques I read are from programming and architecture enthusiasts. Their criticisms are valid and usually true, but it’s a mistake to think these views match the general perspective. So I think public perception of the iPad depends largely on how Apple sells this thing. It can’t market it as a computer, but if it sells the value of a niche device then it has a hit on its hands. The experience is that good.

Steps forward in multimedia reporting

This semester we took our first leap into multimedia reporting here at Lehigh University. I had an amazing class of 11 students who really embraced the material with a vigor and made this a successful semester. I am having them all blog about the course and evaluate where they are with these skills, and I told them I’d do the same for myself. Again, it’s hard to teach this unless you model it.

So this is a retrospective post on the semester, but before getting to that I wanted to plug their converged semester project sites for the non-J198 class crowd:

• Bethlehem Beyond Steel: A look at how the city is continuing its economic development in the wake of Bethlehem Steel’s collapse while also preserving the history that is so closely tied to life here in the Lehigh Valley.
• Housing Market: Bethlehem’s South Side: A look at the state of the housing market in south Bethlehem both from a residential and commercial view. And gumption, with a video look at a foreclosed home.
• South Bethlehem Arts Revival: The growth of the arts culture in South Bethlehem, complete with a Gowalla walking tour!
• Lehigh Valley Homeless: A great project with some outstanding video stories that talks about how we help an invisible population here as well as available resources.

Take a chance on these sites and look around. This is the first attempt at some of this from students who have never produced stories in this type of platform. Overall I am pretty impressed. If you are interested, check out some of the students’ evaluations as they roll in from their blogs. The themes that are emerging are pretty telling. Read more

With the iPad, you’ve gotta think about it

I’ve had a number of conversations in the past few days with people who don’t seem to know what to do with the iPad. Buy? Don’t buy? Is this going to change my life? Is it going to be a waste of money?

If you’re still confused, Guy Kawasaki posted a pretty good decision-point flowchart that might help you out. It’s pretty funny and even this Apple fanboy can admit it’s pretty right on.

I posted the other day that the iPad is a complementary device for almost everyone. You aren’t going to ditch your desktop and likely won’t ditch your laptop for it, although you might get rid of the latter if you don’t use your laptop for much more than news browsing, video/photos, and e-mail. No, the iPad is a device for consuming media while comfortable.

My wife’s latest issue of Newsweek seems to confirm this idea (pictured). The back page of the mag has an iPad ad featuring a person writing a fairly mundane e-mail. Interesting, but the feature isn’t the thing. Notice the positioning. It’s on the user’s lap, feet propped up and crossed.

Apple has a little more of a sell job on its hands than it had with the iPod and iPhone. The iPod was a breath of fresh air after a few years where tons of complicated MP3 players had flooded the market. It simplified the mobile music experience and solved all kinds of problems related to music purchase thanks to the iTunes store. The iPhone filled a similar void. A lot of smartphones were of the BlackBerry variety, with reputations more rooted in business use than personal use. The smartphone market wasn’t going to grow past the business base unless a smartphone came along that was fun and easy to use.

The iPad is different. Consumers have to think a little harder about whether this device makes sense for them. Unlike the iPad and iPhone, most people don’t have a tablet computer and haven’t thought about one. So people have to sit down and think about how they browse and use media before taking the plunge.

That’s why I think Apple has created ads such as the above. It’s selling features in a sense, but Apple also is tying it to a type of experience. In this case, comfortable media browsing. We’re going to see more of this, not less. Obviously Apple has to sell what the iPad can do, but it also has to help people imagine what it can be or what spaces in our lives it might occupy if this is going to go mass market.

The press elites failed us on health reform

NYU professor Jay Rosen likes to talk about the “church of savvy” in political journalism. Diane Winston has a pretty good breakdown of the term, but essentially it describes how the journalism elite shape the news in cooperation with sources. The result is a contextless news presentation, with focus on horse race, tactics, gamesmanship, and “how will this play politically?” rather than verification and hard questions, rigorous reporting, and a focus on getting it right.

This is necessary in elite political journalism, of course. It shies away from tough questions because tough questions mean no guests for Sunday morning talk shows. Wash, rinse, repeat, frustrate your audience.

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos.com likes to describe the outcome a different way, such as how he did during his SXSW panel when he argued that journalists have become “stenographers for those in power” rather than people who fact-check.

I was thinking about this as I followed the Twitter stream last night during the health care vote. The endless coverage on the cable nets had to fill airtime somehow, and so we got a fair amount of the usual stenographer action. Republicans say X, while Democrats say Y, meanwhile there’s an actual bill online against which we can check such claims. The result is repeating two contradicting statements, at least one of which by definition is actually false, rather than verifying both claims and reporting only the correct one.

In other words, the press didn’t really learn from the Joseph McCarthy problem. Read more

Transmedia stories and the future of context in news at SXSW

I have to be honest: I was pretty disappointed by most of the journalism-specific panels I attended at SXSWi. It’s not that the info wasn’t good or vital, it’s that I expected a lot more forward-looking or cutting-edge stuff. I blogged about a particularly disappointing one (not so much the panel’s fault, I think, as much as it was the tone set by the questions), but that was fairly typical. The best sessions that I could use were in non-journalism arenas such as gaming and marketing.

One panel I have been looking forward to actually exceeded my high expectations. “Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online” with Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, and Tristan Harris was everything I was looking for here at SXSWi: important questions, big ideas, and a focus on discussion and solutions. No teeth-gnashing over stale questions like “Will bloggers replace journalists?” and other such important chatter from 2005.

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel and recap this thing. Elise Hu at the Texas Tribune did an excellent liveblog summary of the panel and discussion, and if you want to hack the raw tweetstream check out what the audience was doing with the #futureofcontext hashtag. What I want to do here is briefly sketch out the argument and where my mind has been going with this since the panel spoke.

Rosen had the best visual description of the context problem facing our journalism today. Imagine, he said, downloading a software update to your computer for a program that isn’t installed on your machine. The absurdity of such a situation should be self-evident. The update does the user no good because it’s an add-on to a program that doesn’t exist on the machine. It’s a waste of the user’s time, it’s a waste of resources, and it doesn’t accomplish the mission set out for the software patch. Read more

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

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

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

Google wave, “Flash waves” and Journalism 2.0

So I’ve been messing around with Google Wave for a few weeks now, thanks to generous invites from former Mizzou PhD colleagues Mark Poepsel and Heath Hooper. I’ve been hearing about it since late last year and it has gotten considerable hype among new mediaheads.

My initial reaction after using it a bit is that the hype is well deserved. I’m going to scribble my thoughts below and probably add some more down the road.

We went over the Cluetrain Manifesto this past week in Media & Society and G-wave reminds me of one of those wonderfully simple-yet-powerful phrases contained in their 95 theses: “Markets are conversations.” The idea being that as communication technology evolves it has become more social (in the example Cluetrain was highlighting, tech’s impact on markets). We are deemphasizing mere publication in favor of conversation, hierarchy in favor of hyperlinks.

How do you describe G-wave to people who don’t have it yet? Turns out, it’s really difficult. Read more

Twitter, Darfur, and Lehigh

The Brown & White student newspaper did an article today about a project I’ve been working on a little bit during my first semester here at Lehigh. For about a month now a group of students have been using Twitter to raise awareness both about the conflict in Darfur and the United Nations’ role in helping us find a way through it.

The article’s great and really shows the thought and preparation (not to mention the current hard work) put into this project. It’s off to a nice start, with students tweeting a few times a day, building an audience, and also following others for the purpose of retweeting (follow them at @DarfurConflict).

I won’t overstate my role in this, as really I’ve just been the Twitter adviser here to help shape students’ understanding of what this thing is and offer advice on how to make it work. They’ve done a great job both creating content and listening to their audiences. Twitter is one of those forms of media you have to use a little before you really have a handle on what it is. I’ve noticed a marked growth in the quality in the short time the students have had to get more comfortable.

This project is what I loved about Lehigh as I was getting to know the place while on the job market. Opportunity abounds here. The project started because someone at the U.N. contacted Bill Hunter here at Lehigh (we are a U.N. partner campus). Something that simple is the catalyst for something interesting.

Of course we are having to look hard at how to define success. Followers were scant early on, but they’ve picked up steam as we’ve gotten more of an audience. This is in part due to retweeting, I’d bet, but also because the students have shown interest in others by following like-minded folks on Twitter simply by searching the live feed for “Darfur” posts. I’ve been tracking followers by the day and it has been an interesting case study in building a social media brand from the ground up.

What’s most interesting to me is that these aren’t trained journalists. Most of them aren’t even studying journalism or communication here. It is a powerful reminder to me of what I already know, that the heart of what we do in media is still about telling stories and that is something people can identify with both as consumers and producers on the Web. Most of us are storytellers at heart in our own little way, and different media platforms are merely channels for our stories be it a blog, Twitter, or Facebook. Stories are the building blocks of social change and action, though, and so this is a field experiment at work.

I gave them a little bit of guidance by telling them to “find your voice” on Twitter, be it straight reporting, opinion, analysis, or a mixture. We aren’t editing or approving anything they write, and so I’ve really been testing out this notion of a light hand of direction that we learned with MyMissourian. We aren’t editing for style or grammar. It runs back to the basic questions: Is it true? Is it fair?

J198: So we took the plunge

We ordered more Zi8 cameras for J198. Each of the four groups is going to have at least one of these things for use in the field, but we’re also getting a few for the Brown & White for next semester. We’re also going to give each group a kit that includes a mini-tripod. We’re still testing it against others, but we need to know whether adopting this thing widely works for us.

I really think these cameras are going to be a hit. I showed the Kodak to another student who has signed up for the course and she showed some excitement about the camera just upon seeing it. Buzz is a good thing. I can’t teach buzz.

Also on order is one of the Flip Ultra models, which will give us a good comparison point for cameras in this range. So while I’m still pushing the Zi8 to see how far it can take us, I’d like to see what other possibilities are out there.

This is going to be an interesting test of Web video vs. TV video. We’ll learn ‘em a little bit of TV-style storytelling, but it’s going to be just another tool in the toolkit along other forms of video work.

J198: Kodak Zi8: A good tool for the backpack

One of the cool parts of my job here at Lehigh is I get to play with toys. It’s a guy/eternal kid thing. If I had room for a couch in my office, you damn well better believe there’d be a fort made out of cushions. Throw in a dash of academia nerdiness and you can imagine how much fun it can be for me to do what I do.

The latest toy-playing has been trying out equipment for J198 Multimedia Reporting (I’m blogging my journey as I build this course, which you can access as a tag because that’s how I roll). Right now we’re playing with digital cameras in an attempt to choose the core devices for the course.

The class will have four groups of three people, and so we’re thinking of giving each group one or two finalist devices and using the course to assess the equipment. There’s a good reason for this, as what we end up using long-term will also potentially be adopted by The Brown & White student newspaper for general use (with perhaps a couple nicer devices as well).

My department chair Wally Trimble has been working with me to think through this after I have been passing on recommendations from my own research. There were a few things we felt like we had to have in a video device. The main one is we wanted something that would be a paradigm-shifter. We haven’t had multimedia here at Lehigh as part of coursework, so there is a potential problem with handing students a device that looks like something they’ve seen. Giving them something that looks like a digital camera would make them think still images. Handing them something that looks like a TV camera might make them think television news. We want them to think Web, and so it was important for us to have a device that looked like a Web tool first. Read more

Blogging out J198

Next semester will be my first foray into teaching multimedia journalism here at Lehigh. Planning for this course has been hard and exhilarating at the same time, because while I’ve enjoyed all the freedom I’ve had to plan this course it also is unnerving for a new PhD to know you’re doing something within a program that hasn’t yet been tried.

Thus, as with any venture like this, there are moments where I worry this airplane isn’t gonna fly. But that’s why I came to Lehigh. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I do really well when I’m handed challenges and given the freedom to come up with a solution. I’m OK even if I don’t have freedom or support (I did work at the Daily News, after all), but I find the result more gratifying when I feel like I’m given the tools to make it great.

The good news is that Lehigh has blown away even my high expectations. The students here are sharp and the faculty are top notch in terms of scholarship, interest, and support for new folks. Not a day goes by where I don’t feel blessed to have landed here.

Anyhow, back to J198 “Multimedia Reporting,” which we’ll offer next spring. It’s got two main components: weekly work and a semester-long team reporting project. Read more

The Texas Tribune gets it

The New York Times had an interesting piece about the Texas Tribune, a not-for-profit news organization that launched last week to quite a bit of buzz in new media circles. The Trib’s buzz has come from its unique business model: a mix of entrepreneurship, donations, premium content, and other revenue sources to create a product that is targeted to and paid for by a select audience.

It reminds me a bit of what they’re trying to do with Minnesota Public Radio, and indeed a colleague in my department said that the Trib’s model reminds him of a radio model that has worked internationally for years.

The Trib’s model interests me as a scholar and a journalist. The welcome change of the past few years is that we’ve stopped trying to save newspapers, which may not have ever been possible anyhow, and instead focused on figuring out how to try and save journalism. Newspapers can come and go, but American democracy is built on the notion that citizens need information to be self-governing. The re-emerging partisan press, while not mutually exclusive to a robust public debate, has weaknesses that are best addressed by a strong independent press. Read more

The “I told you so” bandwagon

Major media have been heaping on the past couple days about some of the misinformation about the swine flu outbreak being posted to Twitter.

NPR, for example, bemoaned how tweets about swine flu inject “noise” into the process of informing people. CNN piled on with similar thoughts and also tied it to the loss of centralized media operations.

Some of this is a basic misunderstanding of what Twitter is, but it should be noted that the #swineflu trending topic has been going for about five days solid on Twitter, and that’s substantial. But Twitter has been a source of breaking news as well. I found out from Twitter today, for example, that Missouri had its first case of swine flu and have been getting periodic official updates from @CDCemergency. Read more

Streams of discussion and journalistic ethics

I posted a link to Martin Langeveld’s piece on the content cascade the other day and have been thinking a lot about the notion of discussion streams of late as I’m preparing to teach Online Journalism to the online master’s students this summer.

An illustration came to mind today as I was lecturing in Principles on media ethics. The case study we were walking through sketched a conflict involving a newspaper that had an ad submitted for publication from a local tanning salon. The ad made misleading claims that led the reader to believe that tanning beds are safer than laying out in the sun, whereas an advocacy group of dermatologists were upset that the ad was running because research shows the beds to be dangerous.

The reason discussion streams came to mind is that one of the proposed solutions was that instead of choosing to run or not run the ad, the newspaper could write a story about tanning bed safety and run it against the ad. Putting aside the problems that come with writing a hit piece against an advertiser right next to their ad, one thing that came to mind was the problem of time. Read more

From my reading radar: April 21, 2009

Stuff I’m reading and thinking about …

Mark Briggs has a good post about applying the reputation economy to comments on news sites. In terms of discussion online, when I talk to folks running news sites the issue of civility is usually atop the list of concerns.

Vin Crosbie has some good thoughts about where we are in the media reorganization, calling us in the “middlegame.”

I spent some time with working professionals last summer when I taught Online Journalism here at MU through our online master’s program. I wish I’d had this piece by Martin Langeveld from the Nieman Journalism Lab when we talked about journalism and the stream of discussion.

Mashable has some good thoughts about passing the social recruitment test for prospective employers.

Lastly, congrats to my former LA Daily News colleague Matt Hufman, who was part of the team that produced a series that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service. Matt reported and wrote a series of editorials that went with the packages that were considered for the award. He’s a top-notch journalist and a great guy.

Taking the easy way out

Barack Obama’s decision to release Bush administration memos that argue for the justification of torture techniques has been all over the news. Something else has raised a bit of ruckus in journalism academia circles, and that is Mike Allen’s account for Politico on how the decision was made.

Allen wrote a fairly short piece that led with the news that Obama consulted a wide range of sources before making his decision. In the fifth paragraph of this eight-paragraph story, Allen chose to “balance” the piece with anonymous quotes from a former Bush staffer who railed against the decision. The staffer accused the administration of putting America in danger, a fairly weighty claim. Read more

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