Month: June 2011

Global Imperialism

Saw this while in Eugene yesterday and thought it was clever.

Notes for #J508

I drove down to Eugene today to chat with Suzi Steffen’s J508 – Reporting and Information Strategies class. It’s always a lot of fun talking with Suzi’s classes and I think it’s awesome that she brings in people to talk with her students. Something I wish had happened more often in my college education.

I promised the class notes from what I talked about so here goes.

Byproduct knowledge

One of the things I spent a while talking about was the idea that you can take all the byproducts from working on a story and turn them into something valuable. This not only provides an outlet for interesting information that doesn’t fit in your main day-to-day production, but also lets others learn from what you’ve already come across.

A tremendous recent example is the way Will Davis has chronicled the Bangor Daily News’ move to having an entirely WordPress-powered site. He’s created a development blog where’s he’s posting tons of helpful back story about the switch. Not only is a cool way of publishing all that extra knowledge but it also got Will, and the BDN some great press.

37signals also does a terrific job of this with their Signal vs. Noise blog. It’s full of great things they’ve run across and lessons they’ve learned while building great products.

Using multiple formats

Something else I touched on was making use of many different formats to tell your stories. Sometimes a story is just an image, other times a 3,000 written piece fits better. The great thing about the web is that your story can take whatever form is most appropriate.

Jeff Jarvis defines this when he writes about what it means to be a digital first news organization. He writes:

Digital first, aggressively implemented, means that digital drives all decisions: how news is covered, in what form, by whom, and when. It dictates that as soon as a journalist knows something, she is prepared to share it with her public. It means that she may share what she knows before she knows everything.

Handily there are tons of ways you can do this with very little cost. WordPress.com has many themes that support various post formats. Tumblr is another option. Twitter, in a way, is even another format you can use to tell stories.

Other tips

Something I forgot to mention when talking about Twitter is an insightful example that Marshall Kirkpatrick gives about how he tracks the future of the music industry on Twitter. If you’re stuck on figuring out how Twitter can help you as a journalist go read that post.

Marshall’s also talked about other ways he finds information at a couple of conferences at the U of O. Daniel Bachhuber posted some notes from one back in 2009. If you ever get the chance to hear Marshall speak about this stuff take it. I guarantee you’ll learn a ton.

Tools, tricks, and hacks

Something I totally neglected to cover was that for all your WordPress.com questions we have a really solid support site. If you’re stuck on how to do something or just want to see how you can make better use of the platform you’ll likely find the answer in there. If you don’t feel free to get in touch.

Instapaper was the first tool I mentioned. Like I said, it’s fundamentally changed my life and how I consume information. I really can’t recommend it enough. Use it.

Evernote and Simplenote were the next two I mentioned. These are like digital reporter’s notebooks and are really great buckets for putting information in to. I use Simplenote, which also syncs seamlessly with Notational Velocity on my Mac. While it’s limited to text the advantage is that all the files are stored as plain text files and can be accessed with any text editor. For future proofing your data there’s not a whole lot better than plain text.

I also recommend taking the 10 minutes necessary to get Google Reader up and running with subscriptions to your favorite sites. They even have a handy video that explains everything. Having automated content subscriptions that you check regularly can really help you stay on top of things.

Anyway, that’s it. I’ve likely left things out so feel free to ask me about them.

New reading for the week

Picked up The Information by James Gleick this weekend at Powell’s. I’m already 3 chapters in and it’s solid; a really great read.

The Cable Internet Racket. Or, how not to provide customer service and why monopolies are bad.

Elowah, Horsetail, and Oneonta Falls

Took some time-off with a friend in town to hike a few short loops in the Columbia Gorge. 3 waterfalls in just 6 miles is a pretty sweet deal. Pretty overcast day but hiking on a Friday meant that trails weren’t too crowded.

The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers

But not knowing what plagiarism is isn’t really the problem. It’s unfortunate that right now the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism. And the reason the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism is because their product is less and less valuable these days. When students plagiarize, there’s an implicit recognition that “I’m just doing this for the grade.” That’s why they do it. And that’s the way that the majority of students look at the university, and have been for some time now. At my college, the frats had rooms full of file cabinets full of plagiarized papers. Plagiarism is old news. It’s really not just that plagiarism is getting easier to do, with the Internet. The problem is now that the grade doesn’t even get you the job.

The New Inquiry – The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers. (via Robin Sloan)

What Can You Do With $20,000?. There’s a lot you can do with $20,000 a year. Instead of a traditional college tuition payment you could travel, cover living expenses for 6 months, seed a couple small businesses, and much more. Bonus is that you can end your 4 years with an investment fund of $40,000, no debt required.

Sum Up: NY Times’ Bill Keller is an Expert on Twitter, Doesn’t Use It

I’ve heard this kind of thing a lot from traditional journalists. The idea of sharing online is truly foreign to them. Anything they say in public could be heard by the competitors! It’s at once egotistical “everything I think is so valuable I have to hoard it” and dismissive of everyone else “therefore all those people on the net sharing their thoughts must be worthless”.

The inability to see social media as anything other than a place to mine for traffic is at the core of why the traditional media doesn’t get the net, and why the net is going to replace them.

Derek Powazek – Sum Up: NY Times’ Bill Keller is an Expert on Twitter, Doesn’t Use It.

The right way to ask users for help

I haven’t ever used MLKSHK but their appeal for people to help fund product development makes me want to contribute.

For $24 a year you get a site and service run by people who care about their community. We’re people who care about delivering a good product and who are committed to building out the site for as long as there’s a community that cares about MLKSHK. We have an amazing list of places we want to take the site but we won’t be able to do it if we can’t devote all our time to it. And to be clear, we’re not against getting money or funding from the right people; we just want to be able to do MLKSHK the right way.

Just a bit of time spent poking around the product shows that they really get it. The founders have put a lot of time, creativity, and personality into things and it shows.

There’s nothing wrong with asking your community to help support you and they’ve done it in a wonderfully thoughtful way. Great stuff.

(via Gruber)

No journalism on Facebook

The only thing to add is that it is not possible to do journalism in an environment where your writing can be taken down if the company hosting it deems it offensive.

Dave Winer – No journalism on Facebook.