Newspaper's story of coal country health care project wins video journalism award

A Washington Post report about Southwest Virginia has won an international video journalism award. Titled "The Healing Fields," the story by Alexandra Garcia took first place in the Concentra Award competition, which concluded last week at the DNA2009 conference in Brussels.

Garcia told the story of the Remote Area Medical volunteer corps, which brings more than 800 doctors, dentists, nurses and other health-care workers to Wise County Fairgrounds in July to offer free treatment to those who cannot afford it -- treating more than 2,600 patients in three days.

The two-part video originally accompanied Hidden Hurt, a Washington Post Magazine story by Mary Otto, subtitled "Desperate for medical care, the uninsured flock by the hundreds to a remote corner of Virginia for the chance to see a doctor."

The Concentra Award is sponsored by Avid and Panasonic. Its stated goal is to promote healthy competition in television news, and "to stimulate journalists to film and edit their own pieces, so they master the entire production process themselves." The Concentra Web site includes videos of winners and nominees for this year and the three preceding years.

In addition to Garcia's winning entry, two more of this year's eight finalists were from the Post, the work of Emmy award-winning video journalist Travis Fox. The competition is international, with entries from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and producers in Canada, Belgium, Germany, Norway and more -- all provided in English or with subtitles.

Radford University makes the Times, the Post & more

The folks in the RU public relations office have two reasons to celebrate -- not only did the school's basketball team score its way into the NCAA tournament, the university's RU Facts Web page scored a link at nytimes.com... Well, a nytimes.com sports blog, at least:

Little Ol’ Radford’s Big Man - The Quad Blog - NYTimes.com:

"Radford students skipped spring break to hang around campus for the weekend. With good reason. The Highlanders clinched an N.C.A.A. tournament bid on Saturday by wiping out a 13-0 deficit and coming back to defeat Virginia Military Institute, 108-94, for the Big South Conference title."

RU's President Penelope Kyle didn't make the New York Times, but she was the lead of Aaron McFarling's story in the Roanoke Times: What a reward for those who stuck around. Let's Dance!

RADFORD--The university president held out her right arm and swept her hand across the front of her body -- past the student revelers on the court, past the team in its championship T-shirts and hats, past the second-year coach engulfed by well-wishers, past the fans still in the stands applauding and reluctant to go.
"Look at those students," Radford University President Penelope Kyle said. "They did not go on spring break. Some of these students have been out of class since Thursday. We asked them to stay and support the team.
"And look at them. They did."

Senior guard Kenny Thomas won the most-quotable lottery, though, with everyone using his line, "Finally, Radford isn't little ol' Radford for once."

There's nothing like March Madness to shine a spotlight on a college. USA Today used the AP wire right after the game, but came back on March 12 with a comprehensive story of its own, headlined Season of wonder at Radford, along with two good photos and an info box about the school. ("Radford is the first men's or women's team in Big South history to improve from seventh place one year to regular-season champ the next.")

In case any of my news writing students missed the stories (Hah!), I'll save them a few links here. Among other things, they'll see how the AP story was used:

• The Tartan
• WSLS: '98 run helped enrollment
  
• Richmond Times-Dispatch
• The News & Advance
  
• Roanoke Times #2
• Roanoke Times #3
• The Sports Network
• ESPN
• Bloomberg
  
• Sports Illustrated/CNN (AP)
  
• USA Today (AP)
  
• Fox Sports (AP)
• Washington Post (AP)

Coincidentally, the game wasn't the only thing that put Radford in the Washington Post over the weekend. Sunday's paper carried a column headed "Second Class Citizens in Virginia," which had nothing to do with the game -- it was a wrapup on the legislature's decision not to solve the confusion over student voting rights, with Radford as a key example.

Business journalism and lines it sometimes blurs

Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review provides a Jon Stewart clip with his column, The Daily Show Eviscerates Santelli and CNBC:

"But what makes this so interesting is what Stewart does to pierce the CNBC bubble on several different things that make the network so disliked by business journalists generally:
"Its lack of a line between opinion and reporting (and lack of disclosure about who’s a reporter and who’s not). Its Siamese-twin closeness to Wall Street. Its rah-rah rooting for the stock markets. Its inanity in interviews that too often veers into sycophancy.
"On the other hand, if there is a discomfort among the business reporters with CNBC, it might be because the network’s bad practices are only extreme manifestations of wider cultural problems in their profession.

USA Today's report on the same Stewart episode has drawn more than 80 comments already.

New York Times business columist Joe Nocera, who was also on the show, posted a clip of his own interview, but the discussion thread includes both segments.

"You should be a financial columnist. You've got the whole thing figured out," Nocera says to Stewart... then catches himself using Stewart's analytical language, referring to the financial industry's "crappy loans." He also joked that Stewart's analysis of the financial industry would give him his Saturday column.

So here's Nocera's Saturday column, actually not based on the Stewart interview, but focused on G.E., which (coincidentally?) owns CNBC. I'll recommend it to my students when we talk about thorough business journalism, versus the kind that blurs those lines between billionaire-celebrity-chat, opinion pieces and real "You're mother says she loves you, but check it out" reporting.

(Students also might be interested in discussing the interplay between Nocera's blog at nytimes.com and his column in The New York Times.)

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?