Journalism needs pros, amateurs, devout agnostics

Ellen Hume, one of my favorite authors and thinkers on media-future issues for almost 15 years, is leaving the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT.

Coincidentally, there's a conference this week at MIT on "The future of news and civic media," and Hume's parting message is full of food for thought: The future of news?. A veteran of both the Wall Street Journal and PBS, Hume says major news organizations are still needed, even while many of today's fine journalists have never set foot inside any mainstream media organization.

Snippets:

• "Joshua Micah Marshall is I.F. Stone2.0 (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com)"
  
  
• "Twitter is dazzling, as a headline service and a conversation. But I need more than Twitter, YouTube and my Facebook social network to understand this complicated world."


• "My bottom line has always been: how can people understand their real choices for shaping their own lives and communities? How can the flow of news actually promote personal and community agency? This is why the future of journalism and civic media are important to me."
  


• "If the best and brightest young folks don’t value agnostic, professional journalism, even a dozen new business models won’t work for long."


• "I am waiting for a public relations campaign to argue the virtues of Kovach and Rosenstiel-style journalism (http://www.journalism.org/node/71), combined with a comprehensive news literacy curriculum at all levels, in all countries, that invites people to produce, consume and pay for public service news."


• "Fair, important, earth-shaking journalism is actually hard to do. It’s harder than simply repeating what anyone tells you, or selecting the facts that support your own biases. That is what all the fuss is about as newspapers around the country collapse and die."

Read the whole thing.

More about Ellen Hume.

More about the Future of news & civic media conference at MIT.

Summer fun for journalism students and grads

Mark Luckie has an inspiring list of 30 Things You Should Do This Summer for journalism school grads, most of which involve getting practice with new online journalism tools... and they are perfectly good ideas for students a year or three away from graduation.

Meanwhile, the Society of Professional Journalists has a "Journalist's Toolbox Update," with more than 30 resources for reporters, editors and teachers -- from online social network tools to background articles on swine flu and government contractors in Iraq. Exploring any of those would be a good idea, too...

As Luckie puts it, "You could spend this summer working on your killer tan... or you could use the downtime to get heads up on the thousands of other grads competing for journalism jobs."

I added a footnote to his post, suggesting that many journalism grads would also profit from the less technological activity of reading some really good journalism -- both to experience the writing and to think about how the reporting was done. I'm working on Max Frankel's autobiography, "The Times of My Life, and My Life with The Times," myself. Gay Talese's "The Kingdom and the Power" and David Halberstam's "The Powers that Be" are old favorites for J-school grads who haven't read them yet.

Here are some source lists:

• Mitchell Stephens' list of 100 top works of journalism


• Pulitzer-winning booklength works of general non-fiction and biography


• Pulitzer-winning feature stories, investigative reporting, and more.
  

Those last Pulitzer examples include stories you can read online. The book-length suggestions, on the other hand, are easier to take to the beach.

Searching & graphing public data using Google

A new data-visualization feature was added to Google search a couple of months ago, while I wasn't paying attention to anything but end-of-semester work. The system uses the latest official statistics available from government agencies, and Google is soliciting more data.

Luckily my Twitter feed brought a couple of tips about it today. Very cool. Try typing "unemployment rate" or "population" in a Google search window, followed by the name of your city or county. This would be very useful for journalism students, once it works as advertised. (See note below.)


Related posts:

• Official Google Blog: Adding search power to public data
• Google+Data.gov+Gapminder

Problem:The click-through enlarged graphs shown in the video work for "population radford va" but when I search for "unemployment rate radford va" the enlarged graph page comes up blank. The same happens with the two searches demonstrated by Google. I posted a note in a Google forum asking whether the unemployment data search is broken... and will update this when I get more info. (Or just follow that link to the forum to see if there's any discussion.)

On the population data search, a left column allows you to add other counties or states to the expanded graph, as shown in the video. Using the same technique with unemployment data would be even more interesting, so I hope they get it working.

Footnote: The search should be "population placename, st" or "unemployment data placename, st" -- if you leave out the word "data" in the unemployment search, or include it in the population search, you don't get the data graph. The comma appears to be optional. Also, in some localities, such as Radford, independent city names work with or without the word "city." County searches also work with or without the word "county." (New York City, however, is not the same kind of thing. Apparently "New York County" is only part one of five in the city -- 1.6 million of its 8.2 million people. See U.S. Census QuickFacts. )

Browsing ideas for Boston's news future

In August the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication will make Boston the scene of its annual convention.

Newcomers might want to start browsing through these two serious discussions of possible futures for The Boston Globe. Both authors suggest paying more attention to the company's Boston.com Web site.

(If you haven't been following the drama, the Globe is currently owned by The New York Times, which has put it up for sale after rough negotiations with the paper's unions.)

• Next steps for the shrinking Globe -- Dan Kennedy
• Metamorphosis for the Globe? -- Martin Langeveld

The newspaper's section of the Globe Web site is technically boston.com/bostonglobe.

For more browsing: The Globe's main competition is The Boston Herald. One or both of those articles mention a third daily, a free paper aimed mostly at subway-riders, the Metro.

The city's old-established "alternative" weekly is The Phoenix. When I lived there 10 years ago an alternative-alternative was just getting started, the Weekly Dig, probably a reference to the city's "Big Dig" monumental tunnel-building that was going on at the time.

A risible or banal glut of shibboleths for the feckless?

If you have accidentally double-clicked on any word in an online New York Times story recently, you've seen a question-mark icon indicating that one more click will get you a definition of the word. That's a huge improvement over the previous version of the "feature," which went straight to the dictionary after that second click, interrupting anyone with a twitchy mouse finger, including a journalism professor trying to highlight a well-turned phrase or tightly-edited lead for class discussion.

But here's another bonus: Now that a good many of those mistaken clicks have been eliminated, the Times is able to compile a list of the words people look up... including some word choices that aren't in the news writing textbooks.

• See this fascinating report and discussion of the words that generate the most clicks, thanks to Zachary M. Seward at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab.

• My favorite copy editor, Pam Robinson, at Words at Work, found most of these links, including a "Wordle" map of the terms and a list of reasonably correct definitions, rescued from the depths of Metafilter's discussion thread.

• Also see this funny list of bad guesses at what the words mean.

• Finally, don't miss the lively discussion at Metafilter, or its great headline: "All the news that's fit to cromulate." (cromulate?)

No word on when the Times might add the click-for-definition feature to the print edition.

Finding time for life and "Life Inc."

Summer reading: I think it was the Frontline documentary "Merchants of Cool" that first put Douglass Rushkoff's reporting and analysis on my radar. I hope I can make time this summer for his new book, Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back. The book is a call for small-scale activism, for local community, for "reconnecting with real people, places, and value."

(Will people will only see the first two words of the title and assume it's about a photo magazine, a breakfast cereal, or a board game?)

Here's a "Merchants of Cool" crossover observation from one of the Life Inc. online chapter excerpts:

"With no other choice available, we grow up partnering with corporations for our very identities. A kid's selection of sneaker brand says more about him than his creative- writing assignments do, and is approached with greater care."

Along with the sample chapters, this is the first book I've noticed using online video previews... (The first one starts with a 15-second burst of tuning-across-the-dial static, which almost convinced me the clip or my Web connection was faulty, but the noise goes away.)

Episodic videos on Vimeo:

Life Inc. Dispatch 01: Crisis as Opportunity from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

More at http://lifeincorporated.net

A blurb from another of my favorite authors:

“Read this book if you want to understand how the current economic meltdown started 400 years ago, how so much of what you consider to be a natural evolution of daily life was carefully designed to profit a few, and how corporatism has so colonized every part of life that most of us don’t even recognize how our lives and fortunes are channeled and manipulated by it. Rushkoff is going to be attacked as a communist, but that gets his point wrong. Look at his references — he has meticulously documented his argument. I love that Rushkoff isn’t afraid to think big — very big. He took on the media more than a decade ago. Then he took on Judaism. But now he’s chosen a larger target — the corporation.” -- Howard Rheingold - author, Smart Mobs

So, is Rushkoff out to start a movement? I'd say yes, but he says no -- at least from the excerpts I've skimmed -- that the whole point is to work close to home, "reinvesting in local reality"...

"We’d each like to launch a national movement, create the website that teaches the world how to build community from the bottom up, develop the curriculum that saves public schools, or devise the clever antimarketing media campaign that breaks the spell of advertising once and for all... The temptation to save the whole world—and get the credit—comes at the expense of steps we might better take to make our immediate world a more fruitful, engaging, sustainable, and satisfying place."

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.