Look who's talking... anonymously

Just a day after my introductory news writing class started asking questions about "anonymous sources," Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has a column titled "The casual, corrupting use of anonymity for political officials."

Greenwald includes links to official policies at The New York Times and Washington Post that set reporters' ground rules for granting anonymity to news sources -- and points out widespread violation of those rules by the Washington press corps, under both the Bush and Obama administrations. He gives examples of columnists quoting "people at the White House" on issues of policy and intention, but without naming anyone who might be held accountable for those statements in the future. Says Greenwald:

This practice was so widely abused during the Bush presidency that journalists and their news organizations engaged in all kinds of tortured public discussions -- and even promulgated guidelines for the proper use of anonymity -- all of which, since then, have been almost entirely ignored.

There are, of course, narrow circumstances in which anonymity is not only justifiable but crucial -- namely, when whistle-blowing government officials risk their jobs or even careers to divulge damaging information that the Government wants to hide -- but that obviously isn't how anonymity is being used in the vast majority of cases by Beltway journalists, such as those documented here.

Instead, anonymity is now eagerly granted to any government official the minute they ask for it -- even when they are doing nothing but spouting the official, pro-administration line -- by journalists eager to be chosen as the White House's anointed message-carrier and who are therefore willing to agree to any conditions imposed by the White House in exchange for that "honor."

I encourage students to read the whole column -- and follow the links to the newspapers' policy statements, the I.F. Stone archives and the Nieman Watchdog site.

Times Policy | Post Policy | Roanoke Times Policy

Official University Twitterers Lead Students?

Both the Radford University and Virginia Tech public relations folks are already using Twitter.com, but the majority of my RU students hadn't heard of this rapidly growing social network site before I mentioned it in class.

Is this the first time college PR departments have been ahead of the students at adapting a new technology? Maybe its too similar to the status-update feature on Facebook, which most students seem to be familiar with. Well, if they want to see what the college publicity folks are saying, here are the local feeds:

http://twitter.com/vtnews
http://twitter.com/radfordu

Forget http://twitter.com/runews ? Someone in the .ru domain apparently grabbed it -- all tweets are in Russian

A sports stats outfit is also using college names and logos on its tweets, such as http://twitter.com/RadfordStats

In addition, there is a twitter account for http://twitter.com/RUHighlanders, but nothing had been posted when I looked.

I wonder whether the VT and RU public information offices' interest has something to do with the presence of Roanoke Times (roanoke.com) refugees on the staff at both universities. The newspaper's blogs and editorial pages have had twitter feeds for almost a year. http://twitter.com/roanoketimes

In fact, media organizations and college journalism faculty members were the first people I saw using Twitter, after the Web technology insiders like Dave Winer (http://twitter.com/davewiner), who is "following" 879 feeds on Twitter, has 19,068 "followers" and has posted 12,750 updates to his Twitter feed as of a few minutes ago.

The TV Watch - Media’s Big Names Can’t Resist Twitter - NYTimes.com:

"The Internet has revolutionized society by giving anyone an instant and unfiltered outlet for self-expression. But it has also turned journalism into a year-round, ever-updated “Dear Friends and Family” Christmas newsletter."

Speaking of media and twitter, I noticed the other day that the Charlie Rose Show has had a twitter feed -- but that that it missed posting the news that Charlie was interviewing twitter's Evan Williams. Weird.

Meanwhile in London, The Independent says "February 2009 might well go down as the month when Twitter replaced Facebook as the hottest and coolest company in Silicon Valley."

Unless you read it there (or somewhere else), you read it here first.

"Reboot .Gov" campaign for Internet public info

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.org has been making imaginative contributions to the Internet since before the Web began, especially by campaigning to get more and more technical and government documents online.

(He also started the first Internet radio station in 1993 for his "Geek of the Week" interviews.)

Now he is asking President Obama to consider him for the position of "Public Printer." See his platform at Yes We Scan!

Check out his site, or watch his speech at Google about some of the things Washington could be doing to make government more open online.

Case in point, here's a recent New York Times story about his efforts to get more court records online in a free and easy to use system.

So who and what is Twitter good for?

A tech-savvy guest coming to one of my classes assumed college juniors would know all about Twitter. Either my media studies crowd is being shy or Radford students are out of the loop.

I asked who used Twitter in one class of 24; I don't remember anyone raising a hand. Maybe there were a couple of nods, but definitely no enthusiasm. I'll ask my other classes today. (I did -- and found a half-dozen Twitter users in the crowd.)

Perhaps that (media history) class's advertising, broadcast production and journalism majors just aren't interested in something the campus PR folks and student entrepreneurs started using before them? I think they -- the journalism students, at least -- should be more curious.

Anyhow, I've been looking for a good, recent, novice-friendly introduction to Twitter, and Andrew Ratner at the Baltimore Sun has one here: Twists on Twitter, by the people who use it:

"About a year ago, the free micro-blogging service got about 100 mentions in all media in a given week. Maybe a dozen or so of those were in major newspapers and magazines. Last week, by comparison, Twitter was mentioned more than 1,000 times in all media, and more than 200 times in major publications.
Twitter users are overwhelmingly young, but unlike most of the other social networks, Twitter is not dominated by the youngest of young adults, according to a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project."

If the old (Dylan, wasn't it?) line about not trusting anyone over 30 holds for this campus generation, maybe that explains it. That Pew survey Ratner mentioned gives 31 as the median age for Twitter users, compared to 26 for Facebook.

I'll admit to using LinkedIn.com, median age: 40.7, but I'm trying to keep up with all the others, too. Hence this blog and my token twitting @bobstep.

Here's a slightly older post on Five ways smart people use twitter, including both news and marketing folks. And another, coincidentally picking the same number: five ways to use twitter for good. Or does twitter have some connection to the number five?

Drive-by shooting at edge of campus

Radford University has been the victim of a drive-by -- of a non-violent kind -- by whoever shoots street-level photos for Google Maps.

The pictures are a shot of reality when compared with Google's local map, which leads visitors into a couple of dead-ends. If you browse around the university with maps.google.com, you get a map that ignores several years of campus construction and omits the campus entrance at Jefferson and Fairfax streets.

Ask for the School of Communication offices at 702-704 Fairfax St., and instead of a straight route down Jefferson, you get wild goose chase directions down the wrong ends of former cross-streets Adams or Fairfax, which have been campus cul de sacs since before I got here.

With the addition of street-level photos, Google's Rt. 177 (Tyler Avenue) map shows an Oscar-like golden figure you drag to the roadway for a street-view color photo. The photo above clearly shows the campus gates where Tyler meets Jefferson -- an intersection the map version underneath insists does not exist, the gray swath in front of the forlorn golden guy.

In another Radford reality check, at the foot of Tyler Avenue you can enlarge the T-intersection's photo just enough to see a street sign saying "East Main" while the map insists you are turning onto "Norwood Street." (Maybe that was its name once?)

I hadn't noticed the local street-level pictures until a student pointed them out in class last week. I'm not sure how long they have been online, but I estimate they were taken last summer, since they still show the much-missed Joe's Diner, whose site has been a vacant lot for six months.

Google's photos show only Tyler and part of East Main; the drive-by shooters apparently crossed the New River and never came back, but you can trail them into Pulaski. The City of Radford, meanwhile, has an online Geographic Information System that provides up-to-date maps. No street-level pictures, but it has more detailed aerial photos than Google. See City of Radford GIS or www.radford.va.us/BasicGIS/

Footnote: Yes, I'll mention my headline when we have class discussions of yellow journalism.

New Ways to Read the Times

NYTimes.com has an experimental new interface intended to simulate Sunday Times tabletop browsing.

Says the FirstLook blog:

"Here at The Times, we often hear a common story of usage from our customers: Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch. For many of our customers, this ritual is fundamental to their enjoyment of the weekend, and its absence would be jolting.

"With this in mind, we present an as-yet-unnamed article skimmer. Think of it as an attempt to provide the Sunday Times experience anytime. Of course, there are parts we can’t replicate: the satisfying crinkle of the paper; the circular stain of your coffee; the smell of newsprint."

The prototype ArticleSkimmer gives you 17 "section" pages, each a 5x4 display of story summaries in 19 boxes -- one double-size at the top. You browse from section to section with the space bar and can choose stories with the mouse or a keyboard shortcut.

Hold down the letter "a" for "article," and numbers appear in all the story boxes. Type the number to load a story. (I learned about the shortcuts by clicking a question mark at the top of the page.)

It's fast. It's easy. It's free, and no ads jump out at you until you go to a story page. Presumably "monetizing" this interface somehow will come along if the word "prototype" drops out of the address.

If the traditional newspaper section names (World, U.S., Politics, Technology, Sports etc.) aren't your style, try Dave Winer's "river of news" approach, the time-stamped latest items from Times RSS feeds, at nytimesriver.com

(Dave's blog, Scripting News, is where I heard about the Times article skimmer item.)

Related -- the Times also has expanded the ways that Web developers can make use of Times material. For an only slightly technical discussion, see this Poynter.com column on what the developers call the Times Article Search API.

New media tools Sprouting on Web

Thanks to a Facebook post by Paul Jones at UNC, I'm taking a first look at Sprout Builder, a Web2.0 tool for sharing multimedia content.

Paul pointed to some Sprouts by Howard Rheingold, whom I expect to be ahead of the curve and teaching about it. I also see that Sproutbuilder is already in use by Gannett newspapers, so here's my first attempt at embedding a Sprout in Blogger: