Fishnette

A rare occasion of manual labor. This perhaps marks the 30th...

Fri, 24 May 2013 19:57:30 -0400

A rare occasion of manual labor.

This perhaps marks the 30th anniversary of my using a lawnmower. Then, I took my sailboat to Lakeview, Iowa, to a lot owned by the Comitos. After parking the boat, Bilbo the patriarch said, “here, now mow this lot.” I had no idea how to even turn the mower on. (I had no idea how to boil eggs or cook spaghetti when i became a cook at a fancy restaurant, either.) He showed me. I mowed the lot.

This is probably the second time I’ve used a lawnmower since. But it needed to be done! It’s probably not to company specifications, but it’s done!

Content and presentation are companions.

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:06:00 -0400

There’s this whole kerfuffle today about the New York Times’ Snowfall, the dramatic story of a deadly avalanche that’s not only a good (Pulitzer Prize winning) read, but an elegant presentation of audio, video, graphics, photos. Snowfall has it all.

Scroll Kit founder Cody Brown claimed:

“It took The New York Times hundreds of hours to hand code “Snow Fall.” …we made a replica in an hour.”

Wait, what? Wow, you reported, wrote, edited, photographed, filmed, created graphics, and coded it all up in an hour?!

Thinking not.

Cody Brown misses the point - digital storytelling isn’t just about the bells and whistles, the presentation. It’s about the content too.

And at its best - with Snowfall, for instance - content and presentation go hand-in-hand from the beginning.

By chance today, i encountered a link to this piece on A List Apart by Karen McGrane. Here’s what she says:

“Arguing for ‘separation of content from presentation’ implies a neat division between the two. The reality, of course, is that content and form, structure and style, can never be fully separated.”

Meanwhile, Michelle Minkoff wisely tweets:

“If you want to do ‘wow journalism’, a magic tool isn’t going to fix it. Strong ideas and elements will build to it. Or, put another way, we have limitless story options these days. I say there is no magic form. Just good matching of content to form.”

Cody Brown says Scroll Kit is “looking for publishers with big stories to tell.”

But presenting big stories elegantly, appropriately and creatively means being there from the beginning, when an idea is being conceived and pursued.

It doesn’t mean coming in at the end with a shiny new tool to tart something up with a Snowfall cookie cutter.

wnyc: WNYC filed an open records request to get New Jersey...

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:37:09 -0400

wnyc:

WNYC filed an open records request to get New Jersey Transit’s new hurricane emergency preparedness plan. This is what they got back. Read more about how NJ struggled to prepare for Sandy, and the future of transportation infrastructure, from Transportation Nation. And listen to reporters Andrea Bernstein and Kate Hinds discussing their investigation on the Brian Lehrer Show.

-Jody, BL Show-

love this… annfriedman: In my ongoing quest for the...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:25:59 -0400

love this…

annfriedman:

In my ongoing quest for the perfect framework for understanding haters, I created The Disapproval Matrix**. (With a deep bow to its inspiration.) This is one way to separate haterade from productive feedback. Here’s how the quadrants break down:

Critics: These are smart people who know something about your field. They are taking a hard look at your work and are not loving it. You’ll probably want to listen to what they have to say, and make some adjustments to your work based on their thoughtful comments.

Lovers: These people are invested in you and are also giving you negative but rational feedback because they want you to improve. Listen to them, too.

Frenemies: Ooooh, this quadrant is tricky. These people really know how to hurt you, because they know you personally or know your work pretty well. But at the end of the day, their criticism is not actually about your work—it’s about you personally. And they aren’t actually interested in a productive conversation that will result in you becoming better at what you do. They just wanna undermine you. Dishonorable mention goes to The Hater Within, aka the irrational voice inside you that says you suck, which usually falls into this quadrant. Tell all of these fools to sit down and shut up.

Haters: This is your garden-variety, often anonymous troll who wants to tear down everything about you for no rational reason. Folks in this quadrant are easy to write off because they’re counterproductive and you don’t even know them. Ignore! Engaging won’t make you any better at what you do. And then rest easy, because having haters is proof your work is finding a wide audience and is sparking conversation. Own it.

The general rule of thumb? When you receive negative feedback that falls into one of the top two quadrants—from experts or people who care about you who are engaging with and rationally critiquing your work—you should probably take their comments to heart. When you receive negative feedback that falls into the bottom two quadrants, you should just let it roll off your back and just keep doin’ you. If you need to amp yourself up about it, may I suggest this #BYEHATER playlist on Spotify? You’re welcome.

** I presented The Disapproval Matrix to the fine folks at MoxieCon in Chicago yesterday, and they seemed to find it useful, so I figured I’d share with the class. It was originally inspired by a question my friend Channing Kennedy submitted to my #Realtalk column at the Columbia Journalism Review.

SUBMISHUN: It's local election night

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:43:53 -0500

newscatgif:

love it! the pizza!

About that fake girlfriend...

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:03:13 -0500

A student asks:

What are your thoughts on how the media covered the Te’o story? What should they have done differently?

The catchup: Yesterday, Deadspin published a piece revealing that a Notre Dame football player’s girlfriend, whose death from cancer motivated him during the season, well, she never really existed.

My student notes an ESPN reporter’s response that there wasn’t much he could do when he couldn’t locate documentation about the girlfriend. (Apparently he’s forgotten that old adage “When your mother says she loves you, check it out.”)

One of the Deadspin writers attributed the problem to a lack of investigative reporting emphasis in an interview with Poynter.

But in my experience, many sports desks - especially local news outlets - don’t want to delve deeply into their local sports heroes’ potential peccadilloes. While at the Florida Times-Union in 1988, i was one of two primary reporters on a seven-day series on the NCAA’s enforcement policies. Analytical skills and a knowledge of sports landed this then-biz reporter on the story. The other reporter was from the metro desk. A sports reporter wrote one story, an interview with a key coach that neither of us could get. But editors appeared to differentiate between news and sports reporters on this project.

In other instances, i’ve argued with sports reporters over whether heavy drinking in public by a college athletic director should be a story - and i’d contend it should have been. And let me acknowledge it would have been a story at some of the newspapers where i’ve worked, probably including the T-U.

In the end, i personally don’t give much of a damn about the fake girlfriend. It turns out that it literally isn’t a life-or-death matter. It calls into question either honesty or intellect of a football player. Really, who cares?

But the media hullabaloo around it is disappointing, when i consider another story about a young girl, now dead, and Notre Dame football.

My friend Melinda Henneberger is one of the few journalists who’ve written extensively about the suicide of Lizzy Seeberg, whose allegations of rape against a Notre Dame player went virtually ignored.

Lizzy Seeberg’s rape and her subsequent death are real - yet they received not a fraction of the attention from the media or from the Notre Dame athletic department that the girlfriend hoax has.

And that is truly sad.

P.S. Let me note that when my students offer up the “my (insert grandmother, grandfather, family friend here) died” excuse to get out of a test, i do insist on seeing an obituary or some other proof of death. And guess what? Several of those students decide they don’t really need to be there for the “funeral.”

Foxy! http://gifshop.tv/m/RKDHLRZRG7/

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:34:49 -0500

Foxy! http://gifshop.tv/m/RKDHLRZRG7/

: Journalism Is Personal

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:03:07 -0500

: Journalism Is Personal:

annfriedman:

You probably read this post at Gawker, in which Hamilton Nolan aims to put the fear of Cronkite into the aspiring Thought Catalog contributors of America. You probably also read that Andrew Sullivan is striking out on his own, hoping his readers will pony up enough money to cover the…

Annie the cat http://gifshop.tv/m/NQ7ZJRZRG7/

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:25:03 -0500

Annie the cat http://gifshop.tv/m/NQ7ZJRZRG7/

My first attempt at gifshop app on my phone. Oliver is not quite...

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:04:00 -0500

My first attempt at gifshop app on my phone. Oliver is not quite this crazy chasing reflections - but close!

Colorado politics: When small money beats big bucks

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:55:41 -0500

Super PACs and nonprofits funded by the Koch brothers and Karl Rove, along with their barrage of TV ads, got plenty of media attention in the 2012 presidential election.

But Democrats used similar techniques - often on a smaller scale, with different methods and, in the most prominent instance of the presidential election, more successful results.

Fair Share Action is one example.

The Super PAC created in early August wasn’t a big-bucks operation. The group raised a little more than $5.5 million and spent about $3.7 million, according to the FEC report filed Dec. 6. Hey, the group even ended up with $1.8 million in the bank.

It may not sound like much, but it may have had a significant impact in President Barack Obama’s win over Republican Mitt Romney in the swing state of Colorado.

That’s because Fair Share Action spent at least $1.8 million in the state, much of that working to get out the vote for Obama in Colorado.

The group did spend $497,000 for an ad buy in the closing days of the campaign, according to its independent expenditure reports with the FEC. (You can sort through those records here.) Those ads were purchased in concert with Priorities USA Action, the Super PAC supporting the Obama campaign.

But the bulk of the Fair Share Action’s Colorado cash went to feet on the ground - the group was still running ads for organizers in Boulder’s Daily Camera on election day. And most of that action was in Colorado, though the group also supported candidates in other states, including Florida, Arizona and North Dakota. Here’s what they say about the 2012 campaign on their web page:

“We didn’t win relying on big corporate money. Door to door and vote by vote, Fair Share Action organizers are building a democracy and an economy that works for ALL of us. Fair Share Action weighed in on key electoral battles in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Wisconsin.”

So if it wasn’t big corporate money, where did the money come from?

From Denver philanthropist and gay activist Tim Gill, for one. Gill kicked in $250,000 to the group and his Gill Action Fund gave $218,000 in September. AFSCME, the public employees union, kicked in $100,000 around the same time. Merle Chambers, who turned to philanthropy after selling her oil and gas company in 1997, gave $200,000 in October.

And like Rove’s various American Crossroads mingled groups, Fair Share Action is part of a larger web of interwoven groups. Fair Share Alliance is a related 501c(4) group that kicked in $500,000 in cash, plus in-kind staff time to the Super PAC. Since such nonprofits don’t have to reveal their donations to the FEC, it’s unclear where the cash came from.

Meanwhile, Environment America gave $550,000 in September. The related Environment America Action Fund gave $1.8 million in November and Environment Colorado gave $250,000 at the end of October.

It’s worth pointing out that Environment America and Fair Share Alliance list the same Washington, D.C., street address. And Environment America is apparently different from, but sharing the same Boston headquarters address, as Environmental Action, which donated $200,000 to Fair Share Action.

That address on the fourth floor of 44 Winter St. is the same address used by Brad Martin, the treasurer for the Fair Share Action Super PAC. Martin is listed as the executive director of Fair Share Action and a senior adviser of Fair Share Alliance.

It’s also worth a mention that the treasurer of Fair Share Alliance’s board of directors is Pete Maysmith, also executive director of Colorado Conservation Voters and former executive director of Colorado Common Cause.

The thing is, one of the main goals for Fair Share Alliance is, as their website says, “Fighting big money in politics.”

Working with Colorado Fair Share and Common Cause, the alliance helped fuel a successful Colorado initiative encouraging the state’s congressional delegation to vote to overturn the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that enabled Super PACS like Fair Share Action. Fair Share Alliance donated $175,000, Colorado Fair Share gave $295,000 and Common Cause gave $51,250 to the groups supporting Amendment 65. The Alliance also contributed $403,900 worth of in-kind support, while Common Cause gave $52,983 in in-kind help.

Earlier this year, Fair Share Alliance told a reporter they’d been transparent in their support of Amendment 65, even though they keep the names of donors to the nonprofit private, even when the money is being used for a political campaign.

This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that Democratic interests combine their financial and strategic resources to achieve common goals.

Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer did a great job writing about this in their 2010 book “The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care.”

Obama defeated Mitt Romney by 137,948 votes in Colorado. It sure wasn’t the kind of money Karl Rove and the Koch brothers tossed around in the 2012 campaign. But it’s possible Fair Share Action’s door-to-door canvassing, mailings and phone calls had something to do with that.

mattwaite: Drones, soldering irons, micro controllers,...

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 13:51:07 -0500

mattwaite:

Drones, soldering irons, micro controllers, multimeters, code … I reject your notions of what a journalism education must be. How journalists gather information, how it is collected, how it is stored, how it is processed, how it is analyzed are all open for wild experimentation. And there has never been a better time.

When are you going to put more pictures up?

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:15:13 -0500

when did you even ask this?!? why am i just seeing this? yikes!

Derek Willis: How I Got Here

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 20:51:46 -0500

Derek Willis: How I Got Here:

dwillis:

I meant to finish this by Thanksgiving, as a way of acknowledging the key role that female mentors have played in my career. Better late than never.

A resume is a fairly terrible way of summing up professional experience, particularly since it attempts to impose a uniform structure over stories…

Get ready for the Amendment 64 civic lesson!

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:57:37 -0500

It will take place on three levels: Federal, state and local.

It will involve the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government.

Amendment 64 is now part of Colorado’s state Constitution - it’s provisions would be difficult to repeal unless a court overturns them.

There are many questions to resolve:

Will the Justice Department look the other way at marijuana use in Colorado and Washington? Will Congress pass legislation allowing state laws to take precedent when it comes to pot? Will these laws be taken to federal court?
What regulations/laws will the Colorado General Assembly put into place? Will there be a statewide referendum to apply an excise tax to marijuana sales on the November 2013 ballot? How will the executive branch proceed with the legislature’s directives? And how involved will the state courts get in figuring out how Amendment 64 will be implemented?
Which local governments will ban marijuana-related businesses? Which will allow - and hope to profit from - them? How will local law enforcement respond to the new laws? (Already some are dropping minor possession cases, but others aren’t.)

Watching implementation of Amendment 64 will be a government-watching geek’s dream (and perhaps the government’s nightmare).

source2012: Avalanche of misinformation Colorado’s airwaves...

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 10:55:24 -0400

source2012:

Avalanche of misinformation

Colorado’s airwaves have been awash in misleading ads, according to a new report by the nonprofit FreePress.net.

In August and September, six of the biggest nonprofits and super PACs spent more than $6.5 million to air nearly 5,000 ads on Denver’s four major-network affiliates, the group found.

But even when local reporters called these ads’ claims “debatable,” “misleading” or “playing fast and loose with the facts,” that didn’t keep the TV stations from pulling the ads — or from doing business with the offending groups.

That troubles Timothy Karr, senior director of strategy at Free Press.

“Lying is a liability not only for super PACs and other groups that produce dishonest ads, but also for the stations that air them,” he said in a press release.

Strikingly, Free Press found that the big four Denver TV stations devoted only 10 minutes and 45 seconds to local reporting on ads from these six groups, while at the same time airing 29 hours of ads.

That’s a ratio of one minute of news to every 162 minutes of ads by the six groups studied: American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS, Restore Our Future, Americans for Prosperity, Priorities USA Action and House Majority PAC.

i finally made a GIF

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 18:57:06 -0400

Because, really, this is what happens at Boulder City Council meetings. Except he’s moving away ‘cause they’re so mean.

GIFSoup

Waldo Canyon Fire map

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 16:39:21 -0400

Here’s a google map my students in the CU Journalism News Service put together of properties destroyed in the Waldo Canyon Fire.

Colorado wildfires chart

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 10:53:02 -0400

Here’s a chart a couple of my grad students are updating two or three times a day with details about the state’s wildfires. It’s available for media outlets to embed or to use numbers from for publication with credit to the CU Journalism News Service

dailycamera: The CU Independent snagged a great photo of the...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:00:02 -0400

dailycamera:

The CU Independent snagged a great photo of the bear falling out of the tree today, but it seemed like it was… missing something.