David Weinberger sums it up nicely: “The Convention folks think their job is to script an event for the news media, and the news media don’t want to cover an event that’s been scripted.”
Political conventions
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Category Archives: Journalism
Convention blogging
Three of our reporters are heading for Boston to cover the Democratic Convention. As reporters for state news networks, they focus on the state delegations and do a lot of their work at the hotel where the delegates are staying. Along with our “regular” news coverage, each of the reporters will take a stab at blogging the four-day event as well. Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson posted some wonderful reports (via email) from the 2000 convention, but we just didn’t have tools (or the word “blog”). The other two guys are experienced reporters but are new to this kind of writing (as far as I know). Should be interesting.
Edward R. Murrow Awards
Warning: Self-serving shop talk follows. The Radio-Television News Directors Association announced the winners in their annual Edward R. Murrow Awards competition today. This is kind of a big deal in the radio and TV news business. This year they started out with 3,182 entries and gave 74 awards to 53 news organization. The regional winners were announced a few weeks ago and today they announced the national winners. And one of our network websites won.
Entries fall into one of three categories (Network/Syndication Service, Large Market and Small Market) for radio and the same three for TV. And this year they added a category called Websiste Non-Broadcast.
Our entry (Missourinet.com) won in the Radio Network/Syndication Service category. Pretty cool given that the competition was ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN and god only knows who else. You gotta figure there’s some “online journalists” in NY and Atlanta scratching their heads and asking each other, “What the hell is a Missourinet? Somebody get a map!”
For some reason the RTNDA website provide the urls of the Website winners but didn’t create links. That seems a little clueless to me.
*Radio Network/Syndication Service: Missourinet, Jefferson City, MO
*Television Network/Syndication Service: MSNBC
*Television Large-Market: News 14 Carolina, Charlotte, NC
*Television Small-Market: Capital News 9, Albany, NY
*Radio Large-Market: KSL-AM, Salt Lake City
*Radio Small-Market: WBLL-AM, Bellefontaine, OH
*Website Non-Broadcast: Washington Post, Washington; Belo Interactive, Dallas
I’ll probably never know what they judges liked about our site. And let’s face it, those big national network websites have some cool features our site does not. But I can name a few things we’ve got that are unique or cool or both:
Crash Reports: Missouri State Highway Patrol accident reports, updated 24/7.
Legislature.com: Live debate audio from the state legislature. Then we archive. We’ve got it back to 2002.
Supreme Court Arguments: Oral agurments (live & archived). I think we have nearly 500 arguments online.
Missouri Death Row: Ours has become the “official” site for Missouri.
Last time I checked, there were no other websites featuring this content. On the planet. At least not the way we do. Of course, there’s a lot we can do to improve our site but, for now, it’s nice to know someone appreciates the effort. The big award show is October 4th in NY. Gomer Goes to Manhatten in a Rented Tux.
Time.com on blogs
“…blogs have gone from an obscure and, frankly, somewhat nerdy fad to a genuine alternative to mainstream news outlets, a shadow media empire that is rivaling networks and newspapers in power and influence.”
Dan Gillmor on rolling his own news
“I realized I was probably getting a better report than anyone watching television in the United States. It was more complete, more varied. In effect, I’d rolled my own news. It was a convergence of old and new media, but the newest component was my own tinkering to create my own news “product” — a compilation of the best material I could find. It was a pale imitation of what we’ll be able to do next year and in future races, but it worked.”
The wire service of tomorrow?
The Associated Press has unveiled more details of the forthcoming shift to eAP, the Electronic Associated Press, a new initiative to make AP a more interactive network of multimedia content. [CyberJournalist]
Google’s new News Alerts.
Google has invented another great tool: Google News Alerts, which are e-mailed to you when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify. Email news alerts aren’t new but what makes Google’s so powerful is that Google News trolls 4,500 news sources continuously throughout the day — and you can set the alert to send you links to related articles as soon as Google News find them. So if you’re writing about the debate over the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, for example, you can set an alert to send you an e-mail as soon as any of 4,500 news sites posts an article containing the words “gay and bishop.”
All the news, all the time.
According to CyberJournalist, Google News beat out BBC News Online, MSNBC.com, Poynter’s Romenesko and allAfrica.com to win 2003 Webby Award for best news site. I’d sure like to be a fly on the wall at AP headquarters. I spent a few (pre-Web) years trying to develop and market an “alternative (to AP) wire service.” All of the news and information was “out there.” And there was no shortage of radio stations (our target market) hungry for the information. The challenge was connecting all the dots. We had a big old expensive satellite channel to move the information one way and we busted our hump to “aggragate” (I always liked that word) the information. But people just didn’t want to pay for information. At least, not very much. Fast forward a few years and damned near every newspaper in the world is putting some or all of their stuff online.
The big record labels tell me that although I paid for my copy of the Metallica CD, I can’t rip the songs to a CD and give it to a friend. While they might win this one, keeping me from sending a copy of today’s big news story to five friends (who each send it to five friends).
I always thought the most important part of the Associated Press wasn’t it’s reporters and editors but the “connectedness” of all those newspapers. A way for them to share the news they gathered. Can we agree that has changed forever?
USATomorrow.
A major step toward the creation of portable electronic newspapers. Imagine a future where everyone carries around single-sheet electronic newspapers that automatically update wirelessly as news breaks.
Cursor-cursed funeral parlors.
“Today’s sorry newsrooms–silent, smokeless, boozeless, cursor-cursed funeral parlors–bear no resemblance to the divine hell-holes that persisted at newspapers and wire services until the mid-1970s. They were seas of grunge and debris…a universe of controlled chaos, suspended in a perpetual stinking fog of cigarette smoke and worse.”
— Diana McLellan, journalist, former gossip columnist, and longtime Washington editor of Washingtonian magazine