Distracted by a Web site covering Dixie like...

Searching for a D-Day story about a World War II foreign correspondent for a history article, I stumbled on something new instead: Like the Dew, a Journal of Southern Culture & Politics launched in March and aiming to live up to the old Atlanta Journal motto, "We cover Dixie like the Dew."

According to the site's "about" page, Like the Dew plans to draw on free-lance contributors to report on news and life in 16 states from Florida to Maryland and Texas to West Virginia. More than 50 contributors are already listed, but the mainstays are founder Keith Graham of Atlanta, who spent more than 25 years at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and site designer Lee Leslie, whose background is advertising, marketing and blogging. Between them, they've contributed more than 80 articles. Other contributors include Mike Williams, a former Cox Newspapers foreign correspondent, and Eleanor Ringel Cater, long-time movie critic for the Journal and Constitution.

(While the Dew falls heaviest in Georgia, the site isn't exclusively Atlanta -- I see a story about a Appalachian trail maintenance here in Southwest Virginia, others from Florida and Alabama, one about a Texas graduation, and there are a couple of my former colleagues at the University of Tennessee on the contributor list.)

So what does any of this have to do with my original search for that D-Day reporter? Not much; just some Web serendipity. The hits at LikeTheDew.com weren't the right ones, but they did include two stories that kept me reading, a D-Day landing account in a 1944 letter from Graham's uncle, and "'Evil Reporter Chick' Moni Basu is OK," University of Georgia journalism student Anna Dolianitis's profile of another Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, a former war correspondent, but from the wrong war for my search.

Basu was one of 73 of the AJC's staff who took a buyout this year, after working as a foreign correspondent in Iraq, among other things. So far, she isn't on the Like the Dew contributor list, but Basu is still in journalism -- and still in Atlanta -- at CNN Wire.

Journalism as a pro-am lifestyle... sometimes with music

A UK university offers an MA in Social Media, asking & answering: "Is the MA in Social Media for me? If you are a media or cultural studies graduate, have experience in the web, PR, or marketing industries, and want an opportunity to explore the emerging area of social media through scholarly research or practice, then: yes."

Picking up threads from my recent Twitter obsession... Coincidentally, blogger MarketingProfs offers: "Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School" http://bit.ly/2lEzsm

And NYTimes.com blogs out its requests for local neighborhood citizen reporters to go to meetings: http://bit.ly/dxrW8

... with a Twitter boost from blogger & J-school prof Jeff Jarvis:
"NYT to public: 'Be the journalists.' The Local assigns the locals. http://bit.ly/11GNEB "

Maybe J-schools need a new slogan: "It's not a career; it's a lifestyle"?

And one you can combine with your other talents -- in this case, not the usual underground press, but something I considered when I lived in Boston.

At the time, I even had a line or two from this song in mind... "newspapermen meet the most interesting people..." along with this picture from one of my favorite LP jackets.

New slogan for banjo heads -- or laptop lids? -- "This machine surrounds unemployment and forces it to surrender."

unTimely product launch?

As a long-time Palm Pilot, Palm Treo and Palm TX user who has resisted getting an iPhone, I think the new Time magazine cover was a very rude thing to do the week of Palm's "Pre" launch.

Something ought to be done...

(OK, so I don't know what PreTwitter will look like.)

Confession: Apple products outnumber Palm products in my house two-to-one. But if a Sprint/Pre will work in Floyd, Va., where my AT&T phone doesn't, I might just switch.

The article, meanwhile, by Steven Berlin Johnson, is worth a read... Says he, "I called my Dad to tell him about it this morning, and his -- typically droll -- response was, 'Well, that's a pretty roundabout way to get your face on the cover of Time.'"

Learning Secrecy 101 on college campuses

An investigative report in the The Columbus Dispatch, "Secrecy 101", has gone beyond Ohio's borders to uncover colleges' public records policies concerning college sports. From Alabama to Oregon, the Dispatch reporters found examples of schools censoring player information, often citing a 35-year-old student privacy law whose author says it was intended to protect student grades, not athletic records.

From the Knoxville News Sentinel to the Wall Street Journal, other media are picking up on the story. "Unfortunately, that's the way secrecy laws work," News Sentinel editor Jack McElroy said. "Governments find it convenient to err on the side of confidentiality. So one result is that the $5 billion college sports establishment operates with little public scrutiny."

So far I haven't seen any follow-up in Virginia papers, although the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech are both mentioned in the Columbus, Ohio, paper.

"Across the country, many major-college athletic departments keep their NCAA troubles secret behind a thick veil of black ink or Wite-Out," the Dispatch reporters said. For example, under its interpretation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, one university wanted $35,330 to provide documents that were free of charge at more than half the 69 schools who responded to the reporters' record requests.

The Dispatch asked 119 schools for reports of NCAA violations, football players' summer-employment, players' "comp" ticket guests, and flight manifests for team air travel. Fifty schools, including the University of Virginia, either didn't provide information or wanted too much money to comply with the request, the paper said. Virginia Tech received good marks on some, but not all, of the record requests..

Stories:

• The Columbus Dispatch, Secrecy 101 (national schools) and Violations Across the Country, plus a sidebar.
  
• Knoxville News Sentinel: "UT not only school hiding behind FERPA"
  
• Wall Street Journal: FERPA: A Law Grows in Columbus . . . And at a College Town Near You.
  
• AP at First Amendment Center: Report: College sports programs withhold info
• Overview of Freedom of Information on Campus
  

Where do you say the free speech stops?

Newspaper executives, journalists, bloggers and victims of "vitriolic and hateful comments" on newspaper Web sites got together in Knoxville recently for a face-to-face discussion of community voices, public discussions and the pros and cons of anonymity.

The News Sentinel's Jack Lail has a summary, video clips, and more. See:

Getting the mean out of comments: knoxnews.com

In a column about the event, the News Sentinel's editor, Jack McElroy, said the paper's Web site draws 50,000 comments a month: "Some of the comments are intelligent. Many are inane. A few are downright cruel."

The Associated Press Managing Editors and the News Sentinel put together the "Online Credibility Roundtable," supported in part by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Connecticut news outsourced to Indian staff

Hartford Advocate: News - Outsource This!:
"We hired Indian freelance journalists to write the paper this week...

"Vanishing revenues have put the newspaper industry in a death spiral and many papers long ago outsourced other functions (like IT support centers and telemarketing) to India. We devised this issue as an experiment on what outsourced news might look like."

Back when I worked for The Hartford Courant, I remember delivering a bundle of copies of the first issue of The Hartford Advocate to the University of Connecticut for my next-door neighbor, one of the four people who started the paper.

As I recall, Ed, Linda and another couple launched the whole Advocate chain after Ed and the other guy got fed up with "part-time" copydesk jobs at the the now-fading but then-independent Hartford Courant... which eventually was gobbled up by a chain, which was gobbled up by another chain, which then bought the Advocate alt-weeklies.

So much for "alt." But it's good to see someone still has a sense of humor.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports on the same "outsourcing" stunt, but closes with a nice shout-out to former Advocate staffer Paul Bass's New Haven Independent, a Web-only newspaper that has concentrated on what you might call "in-sourcing" his city.

"Mr. Bass said he liked the outsourced issue, but it reminded him, alas, that so much of American journalism these days actually can be done from a desk in Mumbai, and that the threat facing most American newspapers isn’t necessarily outsourcing or even the new frontier of the Internet. It’s dull, stodgy products that have been downsized and bled dry by corporate owners. If what you do can be done, however imperfectly, from Mumbai, he said, then maybe you need to go back to Square One."

To see what I mean by "in-sourcing," which involves having your feet, head and heart in a local community, see this story and this story, including their background links. Nothing there looks "phoned in" -- not from Mumbai; not even from some office across town.

Opening tunnels for data mining

A couple of mines down the road from me in Pulaski County produce iron oxide pigments, not just the sand and gravel that are more common in local "mining" operations.

OK, that's not what the title means by "data mining," but it's something I didn't know before today, and it was easy info to dig up, thanks to a new project called data.gov -- an initiative to make more government databases easily accessible to the public. (In my case, browsing data.gov links led to a database of active mines at USGS. More interested in coal mines? That took following a few more links.)

In an interesting twist on this project, see Apps for America a contest encouraging data-miners and hackers to build applications that USE such public data.

I'll count the first entry as a "proof of concept," even if it's not particularly useful. It turns FBI most-wanted list photographs into a matching game: FBI Fugitive Concentration

Meanwhile, without entering the contest, SunlightLabs has scraped together Unofficial Data.gov RSS feed that it found missing from the data.gov site itself. It also provides the source code of the Python script that creates the feed, and an analysis of the current contents of data.gov.

Transparency in government, participation and opportunities for collaboration are all topics of discussion at the Open Government Dialogue site from the National Academy of Public Administration.

Here's a New York Times blog entry on data.gov:
Throwing Open Uncle Sam’s Data Mine - The Caucus Blog:

"Back on Jan. 21, on President Obama’s first full day in office, he put down a marker on new standards for openness and transparency in government.
His administration has already done a few things, but on Thursday, it took a big step toward its goal and started opening up vast reservoirs of federal data to the online public at a Web site called data.gov.
So far, there are 47 government data bases available there that you can rummage through, with many more to come over the next months and years. The administration hopes the public will use this information to suggest ways to make the government more efficient, responsive and innovative."

It's a beginning. Those aren't the 47 most fascinating collections of government info, unless you're heavily into geology. But it's a start. On the other hand, at least one database-oriented journalist-blogger sums it up as "lame so far."

I'm still browsing both the Open Government Dialogue and data.gov sites. So far the open-the-books attitude reminds me a lot of Carl Malamud's "Reboot .gov" project at YesWeScan.org, and his creations at Public.Resource.org -- as I keep browsing, I'll be watching for connections.