As some of you may know, my reporting beat at Medill right now is medical research. One of my recent struggles has been fulfilling my class’ requirements for taking pictures, which is tough to do when dealing with large Chicago hospitals. Perseverance can get you to speak to the chief of surgery, but it’s very hard to get in the door to take a photo. As I commented to one of my professors that I meant to do a diagram to make up for this, but instead had merely found a picture of an x-ray that showed the device I was writing about, the professor told me, “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, Michelle.”
Good point. It doesn’t make me want to do less with diagrams, but if another piece of media can do a better job than original content could, why push it? I thought this reflects nicely on the fact that while user-generated content can bring interesting perspectives to the news, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some things still best left to journalists operating in the traditional way.
Twitter can be great for getting the pulse of what people think about the issue, but that’s in the Twitterverse (I need a better word than that). Journalists don’t have to reinvent stopping people on the street asking for their thoughts.
It’s a calming, but scary, thought. Take it too far, and there will be no reinvention of journalism, and obviously the status quo is not without fault.
But for someone who errs on the side of a hyperactive overzealous obsession for journalism (it’s a good thing, really!), maybe once in a while it’s time to relax and use what is already out there.
Oh, and my solution to the picture issue – find medical research at smaller labs. It’s working out well so far, but I’ll keep you posted.
What I’m about to say may mystify you, as I virtually throw myself over the bridge, in front of the bus, whatever metaphor you choose.
Whatever happened to accountability for fact errors in journalism? Yes, as a practicing journalist I realize just how easy it is to make a fact error accidentally. And every time a journalist writes anything, her byline and reputation is on the line. In the Internet age, that’s scary. Every word I’m writing right now is posted under a domain bearing my first and last name, it’s more than a little frightening.
But that’s no excuse for what I see from too many news organizations, which is corrections being issued by simply correcting the text in the article, and making a minimal mention of the fact that there is a correction, if it is mentioned at all.
Back in the old days of journalism, and by old, I mean mere years ago, a page was devoted to setting the record straight. The way things are now may be easier for journalists, but they are not serving the readers and viewers, who deserve the truth, as well as they could be served.
I believe corrections should be made in as public a way as the original content, making a maximum effort to make sure that all who received the misinformation, receive the correction to that information.
Not all publications have this problem, thank you Slate and it’s been getting better in the past year, but it’s still something I would like to see worked on as a community. Of course, a bigger and better change might be figuring out how to make a profit off Internet content. We can’t do that because users — myself included — like the comfort of not paying for things. Likewise, I as a journalist like having more obscured corrections pages. But that doesn’t make it right, for either issue.
So I threw myself under the bus, I can’t help it. I take ethics VERY seriously, perhaps sometimes too seriously, even when it causes me inconvenience.
The Climax of New Media and Obamamania
Many have argued that Obama’s candidacy would have been less successful if it had not been for the support of candidates who were mobilized and brought together by digital and social media technologies. Then, it makes sense that a lot of buzz surrounded the role of new and social media when covering President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Some posts I recommend that I found online looking at the issue:
But one of the best features I saw, which in the interest of full disclosure I should say I found via MediaShift, was this interactive map from the Washington Post:.
A Detailed Analysis
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| What I liked about this site |
The map solidly integrates video, photos and articles, giving the user a lot of freedom in choosing how to interact with the site.
- A sliding timeline allows the user to look at what was going on at a specific point during the day. A line graph shows which of these time segments has the most content.
- Content is broken down by subject (“president”) or type (“video”), again giving the user a great amount of control
- User sees aesthetically pleasing animation as various items pop in and out of the screen as the user changes the timeline. It’s pretty, but not too distracting.
- Special features allow user to track the presidential parade route. This allows the user to feel as if they are right there, and put context to places they might have seen in video.
- Perhaps most valuable as a way to use traditional content in a non-traditional way, the geographic location of stories done by the Post are marked when and where they happen with a Post logo. When clicked on once, there is a summary on the story. Click on that, and the user gets to an actual article that opens in a new window or tab, so as not to disrupt the map experience.
|
| What this site could have done better |
- I would have liked to see user photos and videos integrated into the page. If the web producer was afraid of info overload, there could have been a filter to just display Post content, and user content could be filtered by where people are from, or other categories.
- Search bar, share and full screen buttons are difficult to see. They could have been made larger, or contrast between their color and the map could have been increased.
- It would be better to limit time the user is look at to less than four hours. True, there aren’t many between 1 and 5 a.m., but around noon the content gets almost overwhelming.
- Summaries that come up when the user clicks on a Post icon are just half of the lede. It would be better if reporters or web producers had come up with solid one-sentence blurbs or summaries.
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| Other ways the inauguration could have been covered |
- 360 degree panorama views of certain intersections that were around the inauguration. Again, this is to give the sense of the news consumer being there. I remember these panorama shots from the late ’90s, I’m often surpirsed we don’t see them much anymore.
- I would have liked to see more video and audio of the man on the street interviews where attendees express why they came out, why it’s important to them to be there
- Updates to this map would be helpful, where does the President sign legislation? What does that area look like? Political stories could continue to be linked to this map, but it’s static, the same as it was at the end of Inauguration Day. In contrast, twitter.com’s “coverage,” or topic stream was updated 5 times in 10 minutes during a randomly sampled time between 9:00 and 9:10 p.m. on Sun, Jan. 25.
- One interactive way to cover the inauguration that I didn’t see would be a broader map showing what people were doing to celebrate outside of D.C. I thought one of the most interesting stories I saw was a short TV news spot on the inauguration celebration on Kenya. They don’t all have to be that far afield, but the way it was celebrated in Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, and smaller towns and villages in America would have been interesting.
|
A Comparison with Other Media
| Washington Post |
twitter.com |
Chicago Tribune |
| content from professional organization, but user has great deal of flexibility interacting with it |
runs solely on user contribution |
content only from professionals, not a lot of flexibility in interactivity |
| uses photo, audio, video and minimal text |
only text, with external links to a variety of multimedia |
mostly text, some photo galleries, types of content not well integrated |
| uses map to place user in DC |
no map here |
no map here |
| updates have stopped |
still being updated |
no more updates |
*This is doubling as a post and an assignment for my Interactive Storytelling class at Medill.
It’s interesting to see the quirks of WordPress working with HTML. Note to self: style for the background in the template overrides background color designated on an individual page. Is there any way to override the template? Also, ordered lists were converted into un-ordered lists inside the table. Hmmmmmm, all part of the learning process.
As the inauguration approaches, I would love to be in D.C. Chicago’s been THE place to be for long enough though, so I’m happy staying here. I anticipate lots of crowds, and not lots of access to the interesting sights, parties and get-togethers.
But I would like to see video, lots of video, to make me feel as if I am there. The Internet has enough space to host whatever people throw at it. Even though I’ll be here, focusing on research and innovations in hospitals, I’ll virtually be able to take part.
Thinking about this reminded me of a video someone showed in my new media class this past week. A news organization had gone a bit overboard in posting two minutes of shaky video without explaining the story. That’s an example of people doing video just to do video, and not thinking about how it tells a story.
Of course, most people are familiar with the fact that the inauguration is occuring. Still, I’m hoping independent participants recording the history for their kids, as well as large media organizations bring the story to the world, remember to write some clarifying paragraphs, or use voiceovers, to remind us what we are looking at.
There’s a nice example here of bringing viewers behind the scenes and getting them excited about the upcoming gigantic news event, and maybe thinking of a certain news organization as a place to turn for actual coverage.
And I’m starting to think about how I can use these same techniques to bring new treatments in hospitals to life for Chicago viewers. I think there are some ways video has been used really well, and sometimes (like I mentioned above) when it just gets thrown up on the page.
This should be a very exciting news week ahead, and I, for one, can’t wait.
I have a problem. I’m interested in too much. After the first week of my second quarter at Medill, I have eight story ideas I’m working on. To give you some perspective, we are supposed to have 15 done by the end of the quarter. There are 11 weeks in a quarter. 8 times 11 = 88. 88 does not equal 15. This is a better problem than the opposite I suppose, which would be needing 88 stories and having 15.
And before I get going, make no mistake. I love Medill. I learn more there in a day than in any day of the rest of my life. I work harder in a day there than any other time in my life. And I love it more than I previously loved any day in my life. I tell my journalism friends that they must go, receive intimate critiques of their work, ask all the questions in the world, meet fellow journalists searching for a place in this so-called “dying industry.”
But no institution is perfect, and any institution that takes risks is going to make mistakes. Here’s Number 47:
After spending much of the weekend perusing my reporting syllabus, one requirement perplexes me. We are assigned to do an “alternative storytelling” piece. The example is a “Q&A”, AKA a question and answer piece.
I take issue with this because this means “Don’t use any writing style, just write down your questions, and their answers. Now sigh happily, and revel in the joy of finishing an article.” If you ever find me writing a Q&A, pinch me. If you ever find me writing a Q&A and calling it an alternative format, claiming that it’s innovative, drag me away from the keyboard, and do something worse than pinching me. Don’t kill me though, because then I’d be dead, and that sounds a lot less fun than living. But no Q&As. Ever.
If a journalist wants to show interviews to the reader, great! Use audio and video to do it! Let them see whichever parts they want of the interview, and use as many senses as possible. I advocate this — journalists are the eyes of the public. Let others see what we see!
However, this stance means I need to think about what I view as alternative storytelling. To have an alternative, you need something common. In Web 2.0, if something is common, it’s gone the way of the typewriter. Originality is the name of the game, and that’s the new common form. So what’s the alternative to originality? Reverting to copying others? Not for this reporter.
Which brings me back to my original problem. I’m not a reader, so I don’t know what’s interesting to the reader. But by the end of the quarter, I’m going to think of a new way to convey a story. A story about medical research, because that’s my beat. In the mean time, I’m leaving the alternative storytelling box on my syllabus unchecked. I’ll start with the slide show requirement, because I get slide shows. Arty, informative, visually appealling — that’s much more my thing. Maybe the answer will come to me in a dream.
In the meantime, any ideas on how you wish journalists would tell stories?
Note: This post is actually the worst form of storytelling, a long dry boring post on the web. Can I make it up by pointing you to a riveting NOVA documentary on a trial dealing with the teaching of intelligent design in schools? I think they are much closer to alternative storytelling than this entry is. I expect more of myself by the end of March.
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