Megan Taylor

Clearly I graduated too early. I can't apply for this class, but maybe you or someone you know can.

Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), in partnership with Education Writers Association and the Student Press Law Center, is launching a program to share investigative reporting skills with college and university students that they can apply to covering campus issues.

Seventy-five students from around the country will be selected to receive full scholarships to participate in the Campus Coverage Project.

You'll learn how to:

• Use the Internet as an investigative reporting tool.
• Read budget documents and find the stories that matter.
• Prepare for tough interviews and come away with the information you need.
• Analyze your school’s performance to see how it measures up.
• Examine athletic programs—and their funding.
• Use legal tools to pry open foundations, auxiliaries and other secretive campus institutions.
• Examine issues on your campus in the context of national debates on higher education.

Qualified students are those with experience reporting for campus-related news outlets who have at least one year of coursework remaining.

Apply by Oct. 12, 2009 for a full scholarship to attend a three-day Campus Investigative Reporting Workshop and participate in a year-long program that offers ongoing training and opportunities to learn from top reporters from throughout the country. Space is limited.

For more details and an online application, go to www.ire.org/campus.

I live in the West Bronx area of New York City. The neighborhoods in this area are diverse, the history is complicated, and the stigma of the Bronx is strong.

There is no metro paper that covers these neighborhoods. The New York Times, Daily News, New York Post and Gothamist occasionally cover political and crime issues in the area, but no major paper is giving this group of communities a voice.

Instead, residents are given a voice in the small local papers that are part of the Bronx News Network. Rather than focusing on breaking news items and fighting over scoops, these papers work together. The Bronx News Network is a nonprofit organization founded by Mosholu Preservation Corporation and the Norwood News.

The Bronx News Network includes the Tremont Tribune, the Norwood News (for which I freelance), the Mott Haven Herald, the Mount Hope Monitor, the Hunts Point Express and the Highbridge Horizon.

None of these papers are dailies. They publish anywhere from every two weeks to once a month. But they still provide an important source of news and opinion to an under-served community. They have unimpressive websites and tiny offices. And they are surviving in a time when the news industry is in trouble. They will continue to survive, and not just because they are the only ones providing this service to this area.

Small community newspapers will be able to provide targeted advertising, the bane of the major metro.

They can react quickly to the changes in technology and society.

They live in the areas they write about.

I don't want to say that tiny papers are the future of journalism, because the future for journalism will not be any one thing. The future will depend on each community, and how the community interacts with the producers of journalism.

I am saying that this model seems to be working really well for this particular community. And it's important to look at what is working where, and see what can be applied in other areas.

First up is the "Us Now" documentary about online collaboration, and the kinds of things the Internet makes possible.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo. Buy the DVD here and for more information, extra clips and reviews please go to usnowfilm.com.

The raw footage of the interviews has also been released, which you can see on the Us Now site, including transcripts. Notable among the interviewees is Clay Shirky, who wrote about newspapers in March, talking about Ebbsfleet United, leadership and revolutions.

Secondly, Cory Doctorow, advocate of the free, open Internet, had an interview on the Search Engine podcast for TVOntario. Everything Doctorow says is smart, so have a listen.

The Washington Post launched a new blog yesterday, written by Ezra Klein.

That's how the e-mail I got introduced it too. "a blog by Ezra Klein." Pardon me, but who the @#$% is Ezra Klein?

Klein comes to The Post from The American Prospect, where he quickly built a dedicated following and became a widely recognized voice.

OK, nice credentials, but I still have no idea who this guy is.

Apparently he is going to write pretty extensively on "legislative issues at the top of the Obama administration’s agenda, including economic recovery, reviving the banking system, cap and trade, and health-care reform."

Important stuff. Why didn't you lead with that, instead of expecting me to recognize a by-line?

The blog itself is off to a pretty good start, even if Washington Post PR isn't.

• A section called "Think Tank" will be updated with articles, studies, and policy briefs.
• Ezra Klein is on Twitter.
• His blogroll links outside of Washington Post blogs.

No word on how much he'll interact with his readers, so I'll withhold judgment on that point.

Oops, Ezra didn't write his own About page:

Beatblogging.org has what Ezra needs to know to make his blog rock: Creating the perfect beatblog.

More about Ezra Klein:

Related articles by Zemanta

Political Blogger Ezra Klein Joins The Washington Post (readwriteweb.com)

Ezra Klein to WaPo (outsidethebeltway.com)

Article Skimmer

A while ago I wrote about the Article Skimmer interface that the New York Times had developed.

Times Wire

Those people just don't quit - the Times Wire was recently launched to provide a constantly updating "river of news," including pictures.

This comes in the wake of a few other news visualization updates:

Google News Timeline

Google's News Timeline searches multiple data sources and places the results in chronological order, allowing the user to scroll, drag or click through the evolution of a topic.

Google News

Google News has also been redesigned, with more videos and photos on section pages and some clutter clean-up.

Old Newsmap

The Newsmap, by Marcos Weskamp, also received an update recently.

New in Newsmap, from the blog:

• rectangularized treemap layout: To accommodate text properly, cells are as rectangular as possible, this there's more room for headlines without chopping them off in several lines.
• search as you type: try the new search on the top right, see how newsmap updates.
• deep linking: you can now deep link to any state of the app. just try updating your view, and notice how the url changes. You can grab and share that url with anyone.

New Newsmap

I really like these different ways of seeing news. They are each targeted toward a purpose: seeing the most recent news, seeing news from different sources or seeing news over time.

What other news visualizations are out there? Which do you prefer? Or, do you prefer to browse through news Web sites instead?

Thinking more about programming in journalism (not computer programming, the one we associate more with radio and television) I realized there are a few things news organizations are doing that are really similar to the concept of packaging news with an identity: blogs.

At most organizations, news blogs aren't structured around an identity. Instead they are topical. Which could be better, in some ways, what I really hate about TV news is all the self-promoting, self-congratulatory anchors and show hosts. Sometimes, identity is a bad thing.

So I was poking around several news Web sites looking for good blogs, when I stumbled upon USA Today's "communities." The Community Center blog (keeping you apprised of conversations and opportunities on the site where readers are getting involved with USATODAY's daily journalism) is a hub for the other blogs on the site, which look suspiciously like beatblogs to me.

Each blog has a designated author (or small group of authors) and appear to be updated several times a day.

But something bothers me. Which of these things is at all like the other?

I really like the Interactivity blog - just wish it looked as nice as some of the others.

A few days ago Mindy McAdams wrote a post about how she uses her iPhone and what that could mean for journalism.

Her questions for journalism:

• If someone has all the videos and quality radio news she could ever find time to listen to (or watch) right in her pocket, how can anything even remotely like the newspaper compete with that? The newspaper as it was, in the heyday of the 30 percent profit margins, had something for everyone. Now the Internet-enabled phone provides that.
• Will the traditional print news organization come up with programming, instead of random and disconnected stories? I don’t mean it has to be audio and video, but it would be something with an identity, like a show or a series. The closest thing I can think of that’s not radio is David Pogue — a brand unto himself.
• Breaking news is a commodity — you’ll never pay the bills with that. Hard news is not always breaking news, but how should it be packaged or bundled — to adapt to the phone?

I'm not sure mobile phones have quite reached the level of "world in my pocket," (speed, coverage, screen/keyboard sizes are still issues) but that's not the point. If we [media organizations] sat around until the right phones were created, we'd be in even deeper poo than we already are. Realize right now that everyone will soon have an Internet-enabled phone (or similar pocket device) and the technology will keep pace with the demand.

Will the traditional print news organization come up with programming...?

Do traditional print news orgs still exist? Don't they all have Web sites now? Aren't they all scrabbling to save themselves online?

We're not at the beginning of the news revolution anymore. We're in the middle, and the organizations that have made it this far are very different from what they were 10 years ago. The ones that make it through will be the ones who drop this "traditional print news organization" concept and think about what people are reading, watching, hearing, buying, doing, playing...

Hard news is not always breaking news, but how should it be packaged or bundled — to adapt to the phone?

Mindy suggests that a packaged identities can be a part of this and I agree. After all, isn't that what we're doing by building personal brands and using social media? Isn't that why you follow someone on Twitter or Facebook? Why you subscribe to a blogger's RSS feed?

I hadn't thought of this before, because I've been thinking more technically about how information can be packaged for multiple mediums.

But what if we break the media company identity down into a series of smaller, bite-sized packages?

Company branding is already being broken down to the individual level. Personal branding is all the rage. Will news packages be branded to the individual? Or be yet another subset of the company branding? Or will the individual brand dominate the other two?

I had a meeting recently with a PR company that I do occasional Web work for. They asked me to remove some content from their site, because they were approached by a lawyer representing several newspapers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post were named).

Apparently, these papers want PR companies to remove media placements from their Web sites in cases where the company had simply uploaded a PDF of the print product.

OK, yea, that's totally not fair use. But why do you think they started doing that in the first place, rather than simply link to articles?

Oh yea...those damned paywalls.

PR companies have been doing this for years. Why do newspapers suddenly care?

Is it that more PR companies are getting their sites optimized for search engines?

Is it the $0.10 in ad revenue that the papers might be losing because someone looks at a PDF instead of going to the newspaper's Web site?

©

On Wednesday evening I spoke to a group of five students who are taking part in the Bronx Youth Journalism Initiative.

I've mentioned BYJI here before, mostly begging for help with my public speaking anxiety.

To my surprise, the whole thing went pretty well. The kids were Web-savvy enough to have uploaded a few videos to YouTube, and knew of Twitter, though none are using it yet.

I talked about the "newspaper crisis" caused by lack of innovation, an old business model and the problems with advertising and paywalls. (The kids' immediate reaction to paywalls: "That won't work." Out of the mouths...) I went over the basics of online journalism: blogs, social networks, multimedia. I also talked about citizen journalism a little bit, in terms of how everyone can have a voice in their communities, which is a big problem in the Bronx. They really liked the concepts of "Not Just a Number," which I showed them, along with the Las Vegas Sun Web site.

One student asked me how he could learn to code, and I directed him to the W3Schools site. Another asked about the future of news on e-readers like the Kindle. And of course the final question was "Where are we going?"

Thanks to Mindy McAdams, Craig Lee, and Tracy Boyer for their advice and inspiration. I've uploaded a powerpoint presentation to Slideshare which I used as a guide for my presentation, although it was really more a conversation than a speech.

Next week I will be speaking to the students of the West Bronx Youth Journalism Initiative about online journalism and the future of news.

The West Bronx Youth Journalism Initiative is a weekly program offered to sophomores, juniors or seniors from Bronx high schools.

Students will learn the fundamentals of writing, reporting, and photojournalism through classroom instruction but, more importantly, through hands-on reporting in their own neighborhoods. We will take them on field trips - including the newsroom of a daily newspaper. They will learn about community activism and civic responsibility, how their neighborhoods work (or don't), who has power, who doesn't and why.

I'm nervous, because I'm really horrible at public speaking. But also because I have no idea what these kids know.

What's the level of computer/Internet proficiency? Do they have access to computers at home? Do they read news online, have blogs, read blogs?

James Fergusson, the program coordinator and Editor of the Mount Hope Monitor, has told me that they have not discussed online journalism in class.

I got some great advice from Mindy McAdams, who told me not to assume that the kids are technologically ignorant. Even if they don't have computers at home, the public libraries offer free access.

She also suggested that I show "Not Just a Number" and "The Mac" as examples of stories told by people about their own communities.

I can probably spend a few minutes at first figuring out what they know without looking like a total hack. The problem is how to adjust what I want to say to their level. After beating college reporters over the head with the "good news" for two semesters, I'm not sure how to condense the message to half an hour.

Any advice? What should these high-schoolers know about online journalism? What do I tell them about the future of news?

The MediaShift Innovation Spotlight looks in-depth at one great mash-up, database, mapping project or multimedia story that combines technology and journalism in useful ways. These projects can be at major newspaper or broadcast sites, or independent news sites or blogs.

This week, I covered New York Time's Represent.

Represent is a look at the future of online journalism -- focused, local and geographically relevant. It's a different way to group and browse information based on an individual's political districts.

Some have compared Represent to EveryBlock. It does fill a hole in EveryBlock's coverage, taking the concept of block-by-block news and expanding it to fit the political realm of information. In fact, EveryBlock recently hooked up with The New York Times to display political news items for each block.

Check out Represent Helps New Yorkers Track Their Politicos to learn about how Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis did it.

So I made some resolutions in January, and two months into the new year I guess it's about time to see how I've been doing.

One of the things I wanted to work on was posting to my blog more often. I did well in January, with 24 posts. But not so much this month, with one week left and only seven posts. Clearly, I'm going to have to work on plan to find, think or do more interesting things to write about.

As for learning Javascript...I've written a few simple scripts for pop-up windows and the like at work, but I haven't been making progress with my Lynda.com videos. I'm thinking about finding a text resource; the Lynda.com videos go really slowly for me.

I have been making some progress on PHP, mostly through more advanced manipulations of WordPress. Haven't started any formal learning though. Should wait until I'm done with Javascript.

Although I have not been writing for BrightHub once a week, and I've been neglecting NewsVideographer as well, I have been writing a whole lot for my Innovation Spotlight series at MediaShift. I had so many projects for January and February that I wrote mini-spotlights on the off-weeks. I'm looking for new projects now though...

I said in my resolutions post that I would produce one multimedia or web development project each month. I haven't really kept up with that, mostly because every time I turn around, I get in my own way. Right now I'm dealing with some PostgreSQL issues on my Mac. However, I did edit this video for Quinn and Co., Public Relations.

My last resolution was about getting involved in my community. I got in touch with the West Bronx Youth Journalism Initiative a few weeks ago and I will be helping them out with a new Web site and hopefully a guest lecture.

The MediaShift Innovation Spotlight looks in-depth at one great mash-up, database, mapping project or multimedia story that combines technology and journalism in useful ways. These projects can be at major newspaper or broadcast sites, or independent news sites or blogs. The main spotlights will run every other week, with mini-spotlights running on the off-weeks.

Another mini-Spotlight this week, featuring the Washington Post's TimeSpace framework for media browsing.

TimeSpace, a Washington Post project, is a coverage mapping framework that displays content from multiple sources in space (via a map) and time (via a timeline). A display map, covering anything from a single city block to the world, is tagged to show viewers where news is being covered. Viewers can also view the news map as it appeared at different points over the preceding hours or days, giving them a picture of how the news events unfolded over time.

Check out Washington Post's 'Web Ninjas' Build Map-Timeline Combo for how they did it and screenshots of the development.

Please let me know of any innovative projects you are working on or have seen lately. It doesn't have to be from a major newspaper, it just has to be an innovative blend of journalism and technology. Please e-mail me at mtaylor[at]megantaylor[dot]org to submit a Spotlight recommendation.

Over the weekend I discovered The New York Times "First Look" blog.

I'd never seen this before, although the blog has been around since 2006, when the Times was experimenting with "My Times."

How did I find it now?

Because the Times is testing a browsing prototype, "the article skimmer."

Article Skimmer by The New York Times

While "First Look" wants to compare the article skimmer to "Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch," I simply find it an interesting -- Ad-free -- interface.

In fact, if Dave Winer hadn't put together this alternative for free, I might have found myself willing to pay up to $25 a year for that slick interface. Here's Winer's podcast on what he would pay for from the Times.

Of course, now I can just take Winer's river of news and spice it up with some CSS.

Don't worry, Rex Hammock will pay for it.

Happy, Pat?

This morning I discovered the Times Labs blog, where the Times Online is writing about innovation in online journalism and sharing experiences.

It was through this blog that I found out about the Digging into Data Challenge.

DIDC was announced by agencies in the U.S. UK and Canada to search for ways to use the huge amounts of data that have become available to the public.

The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question "what do you do with a million books?" Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data -- far more than they could read in a lifetime -- what does that mean for research?

Applicants have to form teams from two out of the three countries. A list of data repositories is provided, although it doesn't look like you'd have to use those specific datasets.

DIDC is being sponsored by "the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada."

Submit a "Letter of Intent" by March 15, 2009, final applications are due July 15, 2009. Winners will be announced in December, and will receive grants to build their projects.

Over at Mindy McAdams' Teaching Online Journalism, a list is being compiled of the most annoying journalism discussions.

So far (from the post on Alexandre Gamela's series):

1. Is Twitter Journalism?
2. Death of the Blogosphere
3. Citizen Journalism
4. Bloggers vs. Journalists
5. The Death of Newspapers

My additions (in the comments):

6. Paywalls
7. It’s Google’s Fault
8. Linking
9. Comments

Others (in the comments):

7.5. Google should pay restitution for driving traffic to my news site

10. “X is not journalism!” and “Journalism is not Y!”

I think these conversations pop up every few months, though I haven't kept track of who is having them. Is it the same people over and over? Or, do different people encounter the same questions as the printies move online? Can we build an F.A.Q. for newbies, listing the different points to each argument?

Having the same conversation over and over again does not progress make. We need to move beyond these questions and find new ones.

Some new questions:

How can we support journalism? Do organizations need to turn non-profit? Or get their work funded by the community? What online advertising models are being used and are they effective? How can news organizations collaborate?

Got more discussions you hate? More questions that need answers? Leave them in the comments!

The MediaShift Innovation Spotlight looks in-depth at one great mash-up, database, mapping project or multimedia story that combines technology and journalism in useful ways. These projects can be at major newspaper or broadcast sites, or independent news sites or blogs. The main spotlights will run every other week, with mini-spotlights running on the off-weeks.

And this week we're back to our normal column. I found a really great project produced by two individuals who did not set out to create journalism, but have done so nevertheless: BronxRhymes Uses Locality, Maps to Track History of Hip-Hop.

BronxRhymes is an attempt to raise awareness of the history of hip-hop in the Bronx, the northwestern borough of New York City where the musical style is thought to have originated. The history of hip-hop is illustrated through rhymes and plotted on an online map.

Inspired by music, history and technology, Masha Ioveva and Claudia Bernett created a way for the community to become engaged in its history, at a time when gentrification may be wiping it away.

Please let me know of any innovative projects you are working on or have seen lately. It doesn't have to be from a major newspaper; it just has to be an innovative blend of journalism and technology. Please e-mail me at mtaylor[at]megantaylor[dot]org to submit a Spotlight recommendation.

Today I found out that the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) holds a monthly multimedia contest (and has since 2006).

Over the last year, multimedia storytelling at newspapers has dramatically increased. Software programs like SoundSlides and Audacity have helped simplify the production of audio slideshows for online. Web-based video journalism is also gaining momentum. Many photojournalists are being asked (or told) to add video to their storytelling arsenals. In the midst of all this change, it became clear to many that a contest was needed to showcase this new work being produced by NPPA members. More importantly, I believe this multimedia contest will become a great learning tool for our members. Being able to see and judge everyone else’s entries will hopefully spur innovation and inspiration.

The contest is only for NPPA members, a tradition of industry associations that I'm getting really tired of. I know you want to recruit members and you need people to pay dues, but in the tradition of free web tools, I'll bet you make more friends by providing services first.

Luckily, you don't ahve to be a member to see the list of winners. There were a lot of projects that I haven't seen, which makes this a good resources for rounding up examples. I usually keep track of multimedia projects via Multimedia Shooter and Interactive Narratives, among other sites.

I was very surprised to see that Zach Wise's Thirst in the Mojave got second place for its category. It's definitely one of the best examples of multimedia storytelling I've seen recently.

Go check out January's winners, and if you're a NPPA member, don't forget to submit your projects for February.

Hat tip to Innovative Interactivity for writing about the contest.

I started out this month really wanting to highlight newer, better projects in my Innovation Spotlight Series at MediaShift.

I spent a week or so collecting, sorting, e-mailing, and calling. I've spent the past 2 weeks doing interviews. And I ended up with 4 or 5 projects I wanted to write about.

Wait a sec, my posts only come out every other week...

I had two choices: hold onto some projects for next month or do mini-posts on my off-week.

I didn't want to hold onto things because I'm sure that I'll be flooded with great new projects next month as well. I was concerned that the inconsistency of the mini-posts - I won't always have the time or material to do them - would affect the series.

But I got over that. And thus I present you with a mini-Spotlight, discussing the natural evolution of journalism from data collection to online tracking tool: ProPublica Puts Spotlight on Tracking TARP Money.

Please let me know of any innovative projects you are working on or have seen lately. It doesn't have to be from a major newspaper, it just has to be an innovative blend of journalism and technology.

Poynter is hosting another conference in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Journalism That Matters: Adapting Journalism to the New News Ecology

The conference will take place March 1 - 4, 2009.

The New News Ecology means new jobs, new tools, new relationships, new
businesses.

But journalism's very survival -- at least its values and functions -- depends
on the ability of news organizations -- and citizens -- to adapt to a
dramatically evolving landscape.

Where, now, does the news industry end, and begin? As some newsrooms shrink and
morph, what -- and where -- are the new roles for journalists -- and journalism --
in a broader civic sphere? How do we match journalism with the work of
non-profit organizations, government, civic and even advocacy groups . . .
without abandoning its core values and functions to democracy? Is it time for a
national journalism service corp?

Links:
Media Giraffe Project - Newsecology
Register
Slideshow

I really miss going to conferences. Hopefully soon I'll be able to afford them again.