Paul's Web Space 2.1

Press Intimidation at the National Political Conventions

There were disturbing examples of police trampling on press freedom at both the Demcratic and Republican national conventions in recent weeks.

First, at the DNC08 convention in Denver, an ABC News producer was arrested outside the hotel where a private breakfast was being held for Democratic party leadership and VIP donors to the party. Nightline was in the midst of a series called "Money Talks," reporting the continued influence of big money donors on the political process, and ABC News correspondent Brian Ross opined "We're getting under their skin, I think."



Then the following week brought many incidents of harassment of independent journalists covering the RNC08 convention in St. Paul. In perhaps the most infamous, Amy Goodman or Democracy Now!, along with two of her producers, were arrested while trying to cover the police response to a demonstration, even though their press credentials were plainly visible. As Goodman recounts the arrests were somewhat violent — her producers were stomped and bloodied and Goodman's press pass ripped from her neck when she protested that they were credentialed journalists.

What possible reason exists for these arrests other than to intimidate journalists interested in covering the dissent – and not just the spectacle – surrounding the conventions. It's a chilly day when freedom of speech is infringed and diverse voices are deliberately silenced and marginalized in conjunction with these highly visible manifestations of our democratic process. And for the most part, mainstream media stood silently by as these events transpired, and for the most part concentrated their coverage on the packaged spectacle.

Labels: DNC08, freedomofspeeech, journalism, politics, RNC08

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My ONA08 Day One - Like Minds, Jeff Jarvis

As I walked up to the registration desk at the Online News Association Annual Conference (ONA08) at the Capital Hilton in DC, I received a warm greeting from conference co-chair Amy Webb (I helped out a little on the social media subcommittee).

I then walked into the Like Minds workshop, where Neil Budde of DailyMe.com was discussing the issues and ideas involved with editing a stand-alone news site (rather than one connected to an existing newspaper or broadcast media outlet). In reality a lot of the issues are the same, just dealing with different audiences (or entrenched editorial staff). He pointed out that our site, edweek.org, doesn't have to deal with the same sort of noise and invective as many media sites, partly due to the civility of our audience; this is starting to change, however, as we wade into the world of politics (but our readers are still more well behaved than many).

It can be difficult to impart ethical or journalistic standards to people in the technology world rather than journalists. It can help if you ask them to look at readers as users — strive to provide a satisfying user experience, and you will be doing good journalism. This actually sounds similar to my prior blogging that good SEO can lead to good usability.

He discussed the utility of measurement, page clicks vs. time on site/length of impression. It can be tough to convince advertisers that a lasting impression might be better than a fleeting click, but one way is to demonstrate the difference visually. Metrics can also help determine most valuable content/tasks based upon traffic/audience response; through a show of hands, we saw that some in attendance actually follow and react to metrics in real time.

Finally, it is the job of the editor to ensure that technologists help productivity, not make production/reporting staff jump through hoops to fit some software/technology imperative. At edweek.org, we operate much like this, with many of our projects aimed at labor saving and automating repetitive tasks.

Then Dale Steinke of KING5.com discussed the challenges facing ediotors of broadcast sites. In the area of video, he stated that raw video most popular, showing a funny clip they posted featuring ping-pong car crashes after an ice storm in Portland OR that was subsequently shared on YouTube many thousand times. Compelling produced video samples included a documentary of suffering in Africa, and a very funny video mash-up of the movie Election with Hillary Clinton produced by Andy Bowers & Bill Smee, guys I knew from Yale who are now with SlateV.

Hillary's Inner Tracy Flick


He then launched into a discussion of newsroom integration, for which I had submitted some comments that I was asked to relate. Here are some of the notes that I had sent in:

Newsroom integration – we have some successful strategies, mostly by involving editors and reporters in as much of our web operations as possible. Specifically, we introduced staff-written blogs a couple years ago, and over the past year, increased the pace of introductions, so that now a significant number of reporters and editors actually write (or lightly edit) blogs. Likewise, with our online chats, we have involved the newsroom in scheduling and moderating them, and our e-newsletters are edited by newsroom desk editors. Also, over the past year, we have assigned a rotating reporter to sit with the web editorial/production team for three months at a time, learning all the tools, and participating in production to the extent that is practical for such a temporary “producer.” Lastly, we sent two reporters to each political convention over the past two weeks, and they were equipped with laptops, smart phones, and flip video cameras, and trained in video shooting and in using our Twitter account. They were blogging, twittering, shooting video to post in their blogs, and even writing an occasional news article. Mojos if only just for special events (so far).

Going viral – we were plugged in to the C-SPAN convention coverage, our blogs were included, we used the hashtags so our tweets were included, but really, the biggest rush of traffic comes from our own e-newsletters. We also use Facebook, MySpace, Social Tagging, YouTube, etc, but with little payoff yet.

I also attended the J-School Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, and heard various people connected with schools of journalism discuss projects they have undertaken that involve more creative use of the web, which is a tremendous development. The dinner keynote speaker at this event was Jeff Jarvis, Directory of the Interactive Journalism Program at CUNY and author of the blog BuzzMachine. Jeff described his Entrepreneurial Journalism program, starting with why that is not an oxymoron. He rather believes that business thinking is becoming more and more important in the world of networked journalism, and the only way to create a "sustainable journalistic enterprise." He described an evolution of journalism that is necessary in today's business environment, including these steps and more:

1. Survival
2. Stewardship
3. Innovation
4. Good Management
5. Opportunity

Jeff described how the curriculum covers many business topics that are increasingly important for journalists to understand, from elevator pitches, to advertising models, to subscriber acquisition and churn, and the way that these projects eventually were pitched to real angel investors, and the winning ideas will eventually be tried as real businesses. He also briefly described some of the ideas, imploring us not to shear these ideas in our own blogs invoking the novel (to me) concept of "FrienDA" – a play in NDA, or non-disclosure agreement among friends – a seemingly risky concept in other contexts, but probalby low-risk in the world of journalists familiar with news embargoes.

Labels: education, internet, journalism, ona08

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference/archives/001203.php#thursday

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Online News Association Conference: 9/11-13 in DC

Tomorrow the Online News Association 2008 Annual Conference kicks of in Washington DC with a series of workshops and a reception at the Newseum. It promises to be a fabulous conference, featuring keynote speeches by Tina Brown, Robert Scoble and Devin Wenig, more panels than ever before, and the Annual Banquet featuring the Online Journalism Awards Banquet.

I'm looking forward to sessions about everything from audience measurement, video and multimedia, and social media in the newsroom. There will be a town hall style panel covering online ethics, which has created an online ethics wiki to get the conversation started ahead of time. Then on Saturday afternoon, the conference closes with a Super Panel as usual, but this time addressing how to save a struggling media company. Read the case study (pdf) and join the conversation on the conference discussion forum; super-panelists will incorporate some of the ideas posted in this forum.

I'm on the conference organizing committee, participating primarily social media subcommittee headed by Chrys Wu. It's been an amazing group, and we've come up with some really cool (if not absolutely bleeding edge) social media tools to assist those at the conference as well as those who cannot make it:

• A pre-conference podcast series featuring interviews with conference speakers, organizers, and student journalists. This series is available as an RSS feed and an through iTunes. There are now six interviews available;
• - A Twitter feed that's the "control tower" for all things ONA08 online; if you're twittering, please be sure to use the hash tag #ONA08;
• A Tweet widget that collects all Twitter messages tagged @ONA08 and #ONA08 provided by at Widgetbox (see below);
• A public bulletin board for discussing panels and workshops, making last-minute announcements, and arranging meetups;
• A Flickr pool where you can upload conference photos; join and tag your photos with ONA08;
• Last but not least, the ONA08 Facebook Group, where we've been discussing the conference for a while.
  

Several people have asked who's coming to the conference. Post a message in the "Hang Out in the Lounge" forum to find out and meet in person.

We still need bag stuffers. If you know of people in who will be in Washington on Wednesday, let them know we'd like their help. Have them email Tiffany.Shackelford@gmail.com to volunteer.

ONA08 as much about community as it is about industry. And this year promises to offer more information and ideas than ever before from all sorts of people interested in the future of online news. I hope you’ll join the conference online and in person.

Labels: conference, journalism, ONA, ona08

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference

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DNC Convention 2008 Excitement

The DNC Convention has certainly been an interesting event, made even more so by the role I've played in exposing edweek.org's expanded coverage, and by my friend who spoke there.

First, I was Twittering about Edweek's coverage and Campaign K-12 blog using the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags. Leslie Bradshaw sent me a Tweet in response describing the coverage that she was setting up for C-SPAN. Her social media agencies New Media Strategies and JESS3 created this site, picked the blogs, and made C-SPAN video embeddable by bloggers for the first time.

On the bottom of this page, there are local and national blogs, including ours; there is also a page compiling all #RNC08 and #DNC08 tweets, including many from Education Week. Not only are we using blogs and tweets more actively than ever before, but we managed to have our coverage picked up by C-SPAN and Frank Rich in the New York Times.


Then on opening night, my friend Margie Perez spoke at the convention. Margie was great — she talked about the impact of Katrina on her and on New Orleans, the lame response by the Bush Administration, and the help she got from Habitat for Humanity, and her smile was a mile across. She then introduced a video narrated by Jimmy Carter with more about the project. Her blog posts describing the experience are priceless (part 1) (part 2). Another friend, Armand Lione, posted the YouTube video you see above.

An electrifying week, and it's not over yet!

Labels: DNC08, edweek, politics, socialmedia, twitter

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