“I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.”

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Steve Mays

“Your authority starts with, “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” If “anyone” can produce media and share it with the world, what makes the pro journalist special, or worth listening to? Not the press card, not the by-line, not the fact of employment by a major media company. None of that. The most reliable source of authority for a professional journalist will continue to be what James W. Carey called “the idea of a report.” That’s when you can truthfully say to the users, “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” Or, “I was at the demonstration, you weren’t, let me tell you how the cops behaved.” Or, altering my formula slightly (but retaining the essence of it…) “I interviewed the workers who were on that oil drilling platform when it exploded, you didn’t, let me tell you what they said.” Or, “I reviewed those documents, you didn’t, let me tell you what I found.” Your authority begins when you do the work. It should be obvious from this that if an amateur or a blogger does the work, the same authority is earned. Seeing people as a public means granting that without rancor.”

— An excerpt from a post by Jay Rosen, advising the next generation of journalists:

“Why network news hasn’t mattered since the seventies”

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Steve Mays

Matt Taibbi opens up a family-size can of whup-ass on CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan. Here are a couple of grafs:

“Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn’t mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here’s CBS’s chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that’s killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag. And the part that really gets me is Logan bitching about how Hastings was dishonest to use human warmth and charm to build up enough of a rapport with his sources that they felt comfortable running their mouths off in front of him. According to Logan, that’s sneaky — and journalists aren’t supposed to be sneaky.”

“As to this whole “unspoken agreement” business: the reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she’s like pretty much every other “reputable” journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she’s supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you’re covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard? On the campaign trail, I watch reporters nod solemnly as they hear about the hundreds of millions of dollars candidates X and Y and Z collect from the likes of Citigroup and Raytheon and Archer Daniels Midland, and it blows my mind that they never seem to connect the dots and grasp where all that money is going. The answer, you idiots, is that it’s buying advertising! People like George Bush, John McCain, Barack Obama, and General McChrystal for that matter, they can afford to buy their own P.R. — and they do, in ways both honest and dishonest, visible and invisible.”

I’ve stopped watching television news for the same reason I’ve stopped donating to political campaigns and answering our land-line phone. Almost all bullshit.

“The internet: Everything you ever need to know”

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Steve Mays

This list — by John Naughton– is pretty good. If one of the Learfield Grown-ups came into my office and asked, “So, what do I need to know about this internet thing? Keep it to 10 things or less.”, I’d send him this article. Here are just a few nuggets. I encourage you to read and bookmark the page.

“We’re living through a radical transformation of our communications environment. Since we don’t have the benefit of hindsight, we don’t really know where it’s taking us. And one thing we’ve learned from the history of communications technology is that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies — and to underestimate their long-term implications.”

“The trouble is, though, that everybody affected by the net is demanding an answer right now. Print journalists and their employers want to know what’s going to happen to their industry. Likewise the music business, publishers, television networks, radio stations, government departments, travel agents, universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of others. The sad truth is that they will all have to learn to be patient. And, for some of them, by the time we know the answers to their questions, it will be too late.”

“HUXLEY AND ORWELL ARE THE BOOKENDS OF OUR FUTURE — Aldous Huxley believed that we would be destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear.”

As a tool for a totalitarian government interested in the behaviour, social activities and thought-process of its subjects, the internet is just about perfect.

“Copying is to computers as breathing is to living organisms.”

These snippits make the article seem more negative than it is. That probably says more about me than the list. I especially liked the survey asking folks in the German city of Mainz (in 1472) what they thought about the implications of Gutenberg’s printing press.

Jay Rosen: Ethic of the Link

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Steve Mays

TV station gets iPads, saves on paper and looks hip

Posted on April 24, 2010 by Steve Mays

Last week, news anchors and producers at Barrington Broadcasting Group’s WFXL Albany, Ga., replaced their paper scripts with electronic versions displayed on the iPad. They project the move will save nearly $10,000 a year in paper costs. From the original story:

“Newscast scripts are composed as usual. But rather than printing to paper, the final version is formatted as a PDF file and transmitted to each iPad via e-mail. The PDF translation is handled by iAnnotate by Aji.LLC, a $7 program sold and downloaded via Apple’s App Store.

Although WFXL doesn’t employ iPads as teleprompters, it could if it chose to. Apple’s App Store already offers two third-party applications for scrolling copy on the iPad: Nairo Techology’s iPrompter for $2.99 and Bombing Brain Interactive’s Teleprompt+ for $9.99, which allows any iPhone to double as a remote controller.

In addition, hardware vendor Bodelin Technologies offers a new version of its through-the-lens ProPrompter HDi display, which mounts the iPad as a prompter monitor on both studio and field cameras. The $850 device includes “professional” display software, which is also controllable through an iPhone or iPod Touch.”

And they look pretty cool. No small thing in the world of TV news.

I predict it will become common practice to cover the Apple logo with the station logo.

Steve Safran on RTDNA@NAB 2010

Posted on April 14, 2010 by Steve Mays

“The future of broadcasting” is the title or subtitle or subtext of nearly every panel here. But I’m not seeing a lot of the future. I’m seeing and hearing people who want to keep a hold onto the past. They want to do it in some futuristic ways, sure, but using a template that has passed its expiration date.”

“…as the RTDNA winds down its relationship with NAB, I’m a little sad. When I first started coming to this convention in the early 2000s, the discussions were about “the future.” The discussions are still about “the future” except it’s all Back to the Future. 3D. Protecting journalism from the hoards of camera-toting iPhoners. Broadcasting television in a slightly different way. Fundamentally, the discussion may be about the future, but it’s not nearly futuristic enough.” — Full post here.

Bob Priddy gets props from national news org

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Steve Mays

My friend and colleague Bob Priddy received some much deserved recognition at the opening session of the the Radio Television Digital News Assn/National Assn of Broadcasters annual meeting.

Bob, a 27-year member of the RTDNA board, is stepping down this year and they gave him not one, but TWO awards. The John Hogan Award, named for the founder of RTDNA, is given for distinguished service to the organization. The second award, the newly introduced Bob Priddy award, was presented to Priddy and will now be given to board members who exemplify Priddy’s distinguished and consistent service to RTDNA.

Bob is probably the best reporter I’ve ever met. More importantly, he is one of the best people I have ever met.

Principles for reporters & bloggers in a networked era

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Steve Mays

From Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog. Mr. Bradshaw’s post has lot of useful links that I did not include below.

To verify & contextualise what’s online
- Because finding things to publish isn’t difficult – for anyone.
- Because the voices that stand out online are those that dig behind the statistics, or give meaning behind the headlines.
- Because curating context is as important as curating content.
To digitise what’s not online & make it findable
- Because in a networked world, information that’s not online is, to all intents and purposes, for most people hidden.
- Because journalists have always sought to bring hidden information to a wider audience – but in the networked era that’s no longer a one-way process. SEO, tagging, linking and social media marketing are just as important as publishing.
- Because online, information has a life of its own: adaptable, aggregatable, mashable.
To empower communities & make connections between
- Because the web is a tool as much as a channel.
- Because journalists have always been generalists whose strength is in making connections between diverse areas – in the networked era that role is reinvented as a connector.
- Because serving communities sometimes means looking out as much as looking in.

Truth 2.0

Posted on March 20, 2010 by Steve Mays

Arianna Huffington makes some predictions of what comes next for the Internet and I sure hope she’s right. A few excerpts:

“An online tool that makes it possible to instantly fact-check a story as you are reading it — or watching it on video. Picture this: It’s last summer and you are reading or watching a story about health care, and Sarah Palin or Betsy McCaughey is prattling on about death panels. Instantly, a box pops up with the actual language from the bill or a tape rolls with a factual explanation of what the provision in question really does. And this is a non-partisan tool. So when, in the midst of the legislative debate, President Obama says “I didn’t campaign on the public option,” the software will fire up and instantly show you where support for the public option appeared in his campaign plan, and clips of all the times he mentioned it in public after he got elected.
A .com innovation that immediately provides a reader or viewer with the background knowledge needed to better understand the data and information being delivered as news. The powers-that-be — both political and corporate — have mastered the dark art of making information deliberately convoluted and indecipherable. For them, complexity is not a bug, it’s a feature.
Our future tool will also automatically simplify needlessly complicated laws, contracts, and linguistic smoke screens. So when a politician or Wall Street CEO performs the usual verbal gymnastics in an attempt to befuddle and bamboozle us, his words will immediately be translated into clear and precise language. It will be Truth 2.0.
In the future, software will be created that allows us to pull the curtain back on the corridors of power and see who is really pulling the levers. A great early iteration of this was provided by the Sunlight Foundation during the recent health care summit. During its live streaming of the discussion, the Foundation offered a dose of transparency by showing, as each of our elected officials was speaking, a list of his or her major campaign contributors. It was simple, powerful, and spoke volumes about the extent to which many players in the summit were bought and paid for.

I think this will happen because it can happen. I hope this scares the shit out of the politicians and power-brokers.

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“We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts.” — Sam Harris

Category Archives: Journalism