Catherine’s 4 Hour Failure

For this assignment, I wanted to cover a hackathon at the White House that I participated in last Friday. It was an all-day event but Ethan and Matt said it would be ok to bend the rules a little bit since I wasn’t actually writing during the event.

But I had several problems actually completing the assignment in four hours:

  1. I got extremely emotionally invested in the post. I wanted it to do a lot of things – report on the day, congratulate the White House for having a Hackathon, explore further ways they could expand the platform, showcase all the different projects from the participants, and make a case for why death stars are important to petitions.
  2. Although I like writing, it is something that requires deep focus and is more difficult for me than creating things with images, media and code.
  3. I like to get feedback and ideas from advisors and friends before making anything public.
  4. The way my life is structured I rarely have four hours of uninterrupted time.
  5. I always want to add images and media to my blog posts which subsequently take me forever to format.

So, here is my resulting post on the Civic Media blog. I’m happy with it but I estimate it took about 10-12 hours of my time if you include thinking, writing, talking and formatting (not including the event itself which was nine hours). And that time was definitely not consecutive – mostly I did it in blocks of 30 minutes to one hour.

My takeaway: I’m not cut out for journalism if the deadlines are like this :).

Journalism “Hackerspace” Model?

Speaking of new interesting models for journalism…..I saw this today:

(from the site) “ Newsdesk.org is a platform only. It has no editor, no publisher, no copy desk, and no IT, development and marketing staff; participants must address their own needs for these services, and are encouraged to do so collaboratively as well.

In the hackerspace spirit, there are no leaders. Project governance is by consensus, within a practical framework of independence, mutuality and excellence in one’s work and peer relations.

Also, in that spirit, everything on this site should be considered a work in progress, fully open to comment, critique and meaningful editing by engaged peers.

Participants have access to a fully operational, hosted, nonprofit news platform, with an associated suite of communications and publishing resources, and a record of publishing quality public-interest journalism from 2000 to 2010.

Newsdesk.org comes with beneficial professional relationships that require care and attention. The site is a member of the Investigative News Network, won an SPJ Sigma Delta Chi award, and has been previously funded by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the Harnisch Foundation.”

 

Ink, uploaded

Ink (Video in Youtube)

Hi. As you know…. “A radio anchor (Paula Molina) and two journalists (Ludovic Blecher and Borja Echevarría) that some years ago decided to move from the print world to the online spend a night with Bobby, the president of The Harvard Crimson, and with Brian and George, the two employees that run the only printing press that belongs to a newspaper’s college in the US. The Harvard Crimson is the oldest newspaper in US colleges, founded in 1873. The three of them know this world is getting to an end, but they still love their job..”

4 Hour Challenge: Timeline of Saturday’s gunman hoax incident, from report to all-clear

I worked on a story for The Tech over the weekend and on Monday. In the first four hours, I pieced together the timeline below. The full story that I wrote for the Tech can be found at http://tech.mit.edu/V133/N7/hoax.html.

7:28 a.m. Cambridge Police receive report of male with a “large firearm and wearing body armor.” MIT Police is notified.
7:30 a.m. Cambridge and MIT Police respond to 77 Massachusetts Avenue.
7:35 a.m. Cambridge Police tweet “Report of possible person with gun on Mass Ave in #CambMA”
7:35 a.m. State police begin shutting off traffic on Mass Ave between Vassar Street and Memorial Drive.
7:43 a.m. Police have locked down the area around MIT’s Main Group Buildings (although there were still reports of students and staff in the buildings later).
8:37 a.m. Someone at the MIT Police’s control center asked whether he should contact the Security and Emergency Management Office (SEMO) to send out an alert asking people to stay out of the Main Group (MIT’s central buildings).
8:47 a.m. MIT’s emergency information website, emergency.mit.net, is updated. “This morning information was received from Cambridge Police that there was a person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT. Multiple law enforcement agencies have responded, please stay clear of the area until the authorities can confirm that it is safe to enter. More to follow.”
8:51 a.m. MIT’s emergency alert sends a text message. “Multiple law enforcement agencies on campus in response to a report of a person with a gun on campus, further info on the Emergency Web Page.”
9:10 a.m. A second text message is sent out. “Multiple law enforcement agencies on campus in response to a report of a person with a gun on campus. Stay indoors and shelter in place and report suspicious activity to the campus police dispatch dial 100.”
9:22 a.m. MIT Alert sends out an email to all-campus@mit.edu saying “This morning information was received by Cambridge Police that there was a person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT. Multiple law enforcement agencies have responded, stay indoors and shelter in place and report suspicious activity to the campus police dispatch dial 100. More updates to follow on emergency.mit.net.
9:30 a.m. A third text message says “Continue to shelter in place, report suspicious activity by cell phone to MIT Police.”
Around 10:00 a.m. Cambridge Police start to clear the scene.
10:19 a.m. Cambridge Police tweet “Scene is clear. Call unfounded. No threat to public safety in #CambMA #MIT”
10:46 a.m. MIT alert sends a text message saying “Cambridge Police have issued all-clear. MIT returning to normal operation. MIT PD will monitor campus.”

 

The Direction of News

In seventh grade, distraught from my recent findings on MSNBC that lip gloss may cause cancer, I began my search for a new news source. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular–most of my life questions were fielded by Seventeen and Teen Vogue–but I was hoping for something that could convey huge amounts of information to someone with an impossibly short attention span.

Seventh grade was 2005 trickling into 2006. It wasn’t until 2007 when election coverage became serious and I finally found the only articles on the election that I could begin to understand–The New York Times graphs and multimedia articles. In 2008, when this interview with Steve Duenes, Graphics Director of the NYTimes came out, I first saw the future of news.

It was this email that Steve Duenes quoted in his interview that made this change so apparent to me:

From: Nicholas Kristof Subject: the power of art

in september i traveled with bill gates to africa to look at his work fighting aids there. while setting the trip up, it emerged that his initial interest in giving pots of money to fight disease had arisen after he and melinda read a two-part series of articles i did on third world disease in January 1997. until then, their plan had been to give money mainly to get countries wired and full of computers.

bill and melinda recently reread those pieces, and said that it was the second piece in the series, about bad water and diarrhea killing millions of kids a year, that really got them thinking of public health. Great! I was really proud of this impact that my worldwide reporting and 3,500-word article had had. But then bill confessed that actually it wasn’t the article itself that had grabbed him so much — it was the graphic. It was just a two column, inside graphic, very simple, listing third world health problems and how many people they kill. but he remembered it after all those years and said that it was the single thing that got him redirected toward public health.

No graphic in human history has saved so many lives in africa and asia. 

I’m sending you a copy of the story and graphic by interoffice mail. whoever did the graphic should take a bow.

nick kristof

The Elements of Journalism ends with a discussion on the purpose of journalism as a whole–something to be defined by its new constituents who are redefining news gathering and sharing. I don’t disagree with this conclusion. I also see the level of involvement of bloggers, tweeters and social media activists only growing in the upcoming decades, but I think the way in which we encapsulate our information is already rapidly changing. Visual communication skills should slowly be integrated into the current curriculum. Our 3,500 word articles will become a combination of a short video or handful of pictures taken with our phones, supplemented by clean visual representations that hopefully every grade school student can create just as easily as the heralded 5 paragraph essay.

Journalism is becoming more loosely defined with the rise of new outlets to share stories (and what is a “story”, exactly?), but I think the key will be in the ways in which we communicate. I don’t see news turning into a pure feed of microblogs and mobile uploads. I think it has a lot more to do with the tools and skills we are given that enable us to communicate more effectively with visual representations of our stories.

 

Ink all over the place

A radio anchor (Paula Molina) and two journalists (Ludovic Blecher and Borja Echevarría) that some years ago decided to move from the print world to the online spend a night with Bobby, the president of The Harvard Crimson, and with Brian and George, the two employees that run the only printing press that belongs to a newspaper’s college in the US. The Harvard Crimson is the oldest newspaper in US colleges, founded in 1873. The three of them know this world is getting to an end, but they still love their job

(At this point, I’m waiting the video to get uploaded. Grrrrrrrr)

It’s All Gouda! A Visit To The Formaggio Kitchen Cheese Cave

The first 23 seconds of this video took us four hours. As for the whole thing? Well, we won’t get into that.

Starring: Mimolette Cheese

Co-Starring: The guy in the hat from the cheese shop whose name we deleted when we accidentally erased our most important interview. Or maybe it never recorded that interview. We’re not really sure. But regardless, we don’t know his name.

With Special Guest: The nice lady at the cheese counter who suggested we buy some cheese.

Executive Producer: Brett Anderson

Deputy Assistant Key Grip: Jane Spencer

 

What does a news phoenix look like?

“What do you want news to do?”

When we were asked this question two weeks ago, I had many vehement opinions about the future of news. I had been thinking about almost nothing else since hired at the Globe. Like many millennials, I was accustomed to the free access of information. When I began my job, and the reality of the journalism crisis suddenly woke me from my naiveté, my mind dashed off daydreaming about that “ah-ha” moment when journalists exalted their newfound path into the digital age. But as I continue to learn more, it seems as though there may not be an “ah-ha” moment, and that the entire enterprise of news is poised to crumble. And unlike other industries, there is yet to be a comparable, financially viable replacement to this establishment.

As I ruminated on and researched the possibilities for journalism, it became clear that–regardless of the current state of news–journalism is a highly skilled and necessary craft essential to progress as a modern society. Without it, we would be lost in something similar to the Dark Ages, subject to a sort of tyranny that naturally evolves from ignorance. In my mind, the question “What do you want news to do?” permutated into, “What are the pieces of modern news that must be preserved?”

First and foremost, the kernel of news is its ability to keep society informed and its leaders accountable. Regardless of where our new news comes from, it should continue to hold this value if we hope to preserve democracy.

New independent journalism seems to be moving back to a partisan viewpoint, which is refreshing and honest. I’m personally more trusting sources that admit their bias, than those that insist on their neutrality only to be engaging in clandestine partnerships. However, it’s important to remind the public that there are many opinions in the world, and we are each entitled to our own. The internet age has consequentially brought a din of information that individuals are left to sift through and make sense of. We have access to more kinds of media and knowledge than ever before, and it’s only natural to seek out the types of information we’re most interested in. But with partisan journalism, there needs to be a way to serve content from both sides of the playing field.

A journalist is a curator of cultural knowledge. News is like a museum of the present. A museum’s mission is to preserve the important aspects of art and culture through carefully curated sets of artifacts. News serves much the same role, but in real-time. Like curators, journalists train to dedicate their lives to the preservation of moments of reality in an insightful and engaging way. They encapsulate culture and share insight. Without curators, we are doomed to walk digital flea markets, hoping to stumble upon an important event that is crucial to our understanding of current affairs. But like most flea markets, all we’re likely to find is a collection of old recipe books from someone’s great aunt.

For journalism to continue someone must care about the preservation and curation of democracy. In a capitalist society, that someone also has to make a living from it. As is evident in software (specifically mobile) free is passable, but most paid services have a more polished product. The code is cleaner; the bugs are fewer. Obviously there are outliers on either end, but realistically this is the exception, not the rule. So as we move forward the question of “how?” remains unanswered. How does journalism remind us that we are lost without it, before we are actually lost and without?