Twittering the News

I mentioned Twitter in one of my classes and was surprised that only one out of 34 students had heard of it.

I thought young folks were supposed to be ahead of gray-bearded old guys on this stuff... For any who are still in the dark, here's a nice explanation of Twitter as a resource for journalists -- from another guy about my age...

yelvington.com | Steve Yelvington's media weblog:
"Why do people use Twitter in the first place? That's simple: Humans are genetically programmed to thrive on conversation."

Coincidentally, I've just posted a bunch of links to Steve in my other blog, on the topic of news Web site management systems.

Historic magazine archive via Google

Just when my Media History students might need one more source for their final semester projects...

Wonder what the latest technology was in 1905? Go read Popular Mechanics for that year, back when "wireless telegraphy" was the hottest thing since the "horseless carriage." (I guess "...less" was "more" back then.)

This blast-from-the-past search is thanks to a new archive of old magazine articles at http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

(For more about Google linking to historic newspaper archives, see my blog item from a few months ago.)

For background see this BusinessWeek article: Google updates search index with old magazines:

"Google has added a magazine rack to its Internet search engine. As part of its quest to corral more content published on paper, Google Inc. has made digital copies of more than 1 million articles from magazines that hit the newsstands decades ago."

(Many thanks to Gerald Grow, a magazine-publishing expert and one of the most "sharing" professors on the Web, for an e-mail alert about this new Google search development.)

I haven't explored enough to see what publications are included... but Popular Mechanics and Popular Science are part of the collection, which will be useful for the "Media History" course when we talk about communication technology...

And I noticed New York magazine turning up in a quick search, which will be a resource for research into more recent journalism history -- and for news writing courses. Originally the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper, New York published a lot of great "new journalism" in the 1970s, including Tom Wolfe's article "The Birth of 'The New Journalism,'" which I was just talking about in class today, and one of my all-time favorite cover stories on investigative reporters. Amazing.

Here's a surprise: I did a quick search for the words "journalism" and "politics." The top two hits were not the first magazines I expected to see. They were Jet and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is archived back to 1945. Jet -- a great resource for studying African-American culture, apparently had regular columns headed "politics" and "journalism." (Ebony and Black World are also part of the collection.) As for the Bulletin, I guess the topics just came up regularly. This quote jumped out at me from a 1985 article, titled "The Media: Playing the Government's Game":

Before the atomic bomb, journalism never hesitated to march off to war, but the news media usually were eager to demobilize once victory seemed at hand ...

I haven't stumbled on a list of which magazines are in the collection, but I've noticed quite an assortment: Ebony, Mother Jones, Black Belt, Cincinnati Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, Log Home Living, Bicycling, Backpacker, Vegetarian Times, Prevention, Runner's World, Baseball Digest, CIO... The themes suggest that publishers like Johnson, Emmis and Rodale have contributed groups of titles.

Finally, although you can search for any words in any magazine, the results delivered are full-page images. That means you get to see full-spread advertising layouts, which will be appreciated by students and professors interested in advertising and design.

Practicing 'theft superior'

I've alerted the keeper of the W.T. Stead Resource Site, a collection of writings by an influential 19th century U.K. newspaper editor, to what I take to be a wonderful typographical (or digital scanning) error that stumbles into a larger truth.

The essay in question is
W.T. Stead, "The Future of Journalism" (The Contemporary Review, 1886). The passage that caught my eye is this one, with a great opening (emphasis added):

"A man without a newspaper is half-clad, and imperfectly furnished for the battle of life. From being persecuted and then contemptuously tolerated, it has become the rival of organized governments. Will it become theft superior? The future of journalism depends entirely upon the journalist."

True either way, especially that last sentence, but I think "theft superior" is a bad scan of the word "their."

The ironic question today is whether corporate publishers with their eye on profit margins and stock quotes have been distracted by such "theft superior" and have led to the demise of the vigorous public-service newspaper journalism that might fulfill its promise as a democratic force.

(Stead wrote about that, too. See his "Government by Journalism.")

This week's end-of-semester question: Can some new online media financial model, community-funded (spot.us) or non-profit journalistic enterprises and bloggers fill the blank if newspapers are knocked out of Stead's opening line?

"A man without [a blog | Google | numerous RSS feeds | Facebook | Fox News | MSNBC] is half-clad, and imperfectly furnished for the battle of life."

40 years ago this week... the future as demo

I first read about Doug Engelbart's innovations in collaborative computer technology in mid-1980s books by Ted Nelson and Howard Rheingold, more than 15 years after Engelbart entranced an audience of engineers with a demonstration -- in 1968 -- of devices and ideas that most of the world wouldn't see for decades... the first mouse, hypertext linkages, expanding on-screen outlines, and a bigger idea behind them: That creative use of connected computers could augment human intelligence.

Luckily, that 1968 glimpse of the future was preserved on film and has been available in various Web incarnations. Now, for its 40th anniversary, you can read, watch and listen to more here:

The Innovation Journalism Blog: Come Celebrate the 40th anniversary of Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos":

"On December 9 1968, Doug Engelbart and his team from SRI International Augmentation Research Center performed 'the mother of all demos' in front of a gaping audience of one thousand computer engineers. The demo let the cat out of the bag in a monumental way; Doug's big idea that the big thing about computers was not automation, but augmenting human intelligence was demonstrated in real life... The audience could do nothing but cheer."

Telling a friend's story

Jeanna Duerscherl of The Roanoke Times steps out from behind her cameras to talk about covering the very personal story of a friend's battle with a rare, incurable cancer. See her blog at Backstory: Photographing my friend:

"Typically, journalists tend to avoid telling stories about people they know on a personal level. It's complicated: Our job is to tell people's stories - not become part of the story. And when we have closer, personal relationships with the people whose stories we're telling, sometimes our stories intertwine. And sometimes it becomes impossible not to become part of their story. That's why we explain our relationships to our readers."

The photojournalist shot video interviews with her roller-derby friend, Brooke Smith, as well as a slideshow of stills that accompany the story. In her blog essay, she discusses the thought process behind doing the story at all:

"I needed to make sure I would be doing it because I believe this story has the power to make people stop for a moment and reflect on their own lives."

To see how well she succeeded, here's the full story, Brooke Smith: Letting go, letting God. The text is by reporter Rob Johnson, who also interviewed Brooke's doctors and friends.

(The designer of the white-text-on-black Web page isn't credited. Personally, I think that layout makes the story hard to read, but the "print this" button switches it to black-on-white.)

Narrative non-fiction textbook online

Gay Talese has come up in classroom conversations more than once this month, but it's just a coincidence that I stumbled on this link to one of his most famous articles, and more.

Best Esquire Magazine Stories - Top Articles in History of Journalism - Esquire: "Five years ago, we named 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,' by Gay Talese, the greatest story Esquire ever published. Here, as we close out our 75th anniversary celebration, are the top seven, with several republished online in their entirety for the first time ever."

Also included, for Media History students writing about Vietnam, John Sack's article "M," and for popular culture fans, Tom Wolfe's profile of stock car racer Junior Johnson. The others are great, too, even if the "Top articles in history of journalism" needs an "in Esquire" modifier.

However, I'm also intrigued by Esquire's 70 greatest sentences, starting with this one:

"Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well."
--Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," 1936

Your Newspaper on YouTube

My old neighbor Jack Lail from KnoxNews.com just pointed to this story...

To YouTube or Not To YouTube?, posted at the Newspaper Association of America, whose motto is "Advancing Newspaper Media for the 21st Century."

... He's even quoted in the story, which talks about newspaper Web sites managing this whole "multimedia" business with YouTube's help. Jack also points out this map of YouTube using newspapers.

Also quoted, Chet Rhodes, assistant managing editor, news video for washingtonpost.com, calling YouTube "both a curse and a blessing" for newspapers, cursed for competing with newspapers' own video efforts. "But the good side of it is that they've made video workable on the Web," he said.