Category Archives: Journalism

Commentators must have standards, too

I’ve always loved movies — I saw “The Little Mermaid” in the cinema when I was about 2 and a half, and the rest is history. In middle school and high school, I wrote reviews for my parents and other family members to read and occasionally for my high school newspaper. In my 8th grade gifted class, we had to interview a professional working in our area of interest. I contacted Bob Butler, the film critic at the Kansas City Star, and asked him about his work. He replied in great detail and showed good humor toward my teenage-minded questions, and to this day I remember that and appreciate the time he took replying to me.

Much of my journalism experience up to this point relates to opinion writing and commentary. I wrote a column for my high school paper, served as the opinion editor and wrote and assigned staff editorials as editor-in-chief. My first job at the University Daily Kansan involved writing book reviews for Jayplay. I spent my sophomore year as a long-distance columnist before manning the opinion desk for a semester and working on the editorial board for an additional two semesters after that.

The big misconception I see about opinion writing? It’s the idea that, because they’re presenting an “opinion,” a person can say or write whatever they want. Oh, no no no no. The top-quality columns and editorials will involve just as much reporting and research as any straight news story, and it’s these writers’ knowledge of what they’re discussing that makes their voices so critical.

Bearing that in mind, I was surprised to read yesterday on Deadline that Movieline had sacked Elvis Mitchell over an error in his review of the film “Source Code.” According to Nikki Finke’s Deadline article, the studio screened a final cut of “Code” for Mitchell to review. Yet in his review, Mitchell took issue with Jeffrey Wright smoking a pipe in the film — an act that director Duncan Jones said on Twitter had been included in a draft of the script but was cut for the actual film. Yet it ended up in Mitchell’s review. Finke wrote that Movieline formally asked Mitchell to explain himself, and eventually terminated his contract entirely, after he’d worked there a scant three months.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mitchell, just know that he’s no small-timer; before joining Movieline, he worked as a critic for the New York Times, appeared on television and is a fixture on the festivals circuit. For a seasoned critic like him to make that kind of a mistake is almost … scandalous.

The reader comments accompanying the Deadline article are all over the map. Some speculate that he left the film early, or didn’t see it at all, and based his review on a copy of the script he had. Others suggest that he read the script and saw the film, and just got confused. Still others defend him and suggest that we don’t know the whole story. Whether they support him, many commenters suggest that he might be given a pass were it not for other erratic behavior, such as backing out of working on Roger Ebert’s review show and a development program with Columbia Pictures, both missteps that Finke discusses in her article.

Ultimately the only person who knows exactly how or why the discrepancy occurred is Mitchell. Not being in the theater with him, it’s not my place to say that he saw the film or not, because obviously I can’t know. But this episode, which brought down a highly respected film critic, should be a cautionary tale for opinion writers, a lesson telling them to take care and make sure they get their facts right. Film critics — including Roger Ebert — make mistakes all the time when it comes to characters’ names and relationships and even some basic plot points. What probably cost Mitchell was that his error was made not when describing the film, but when judging it. A troublesome mistake, clearly, but one that all aspiring opinion writers should be wary of.

This is news?

Full disclosure: For a long time, probably a good 5-6 years, CNN was “my” news station. I had always thought of its journalists as being fairly on-the-ball and objective (or at least, my version of objective, which may or may not be someone else’s). It was also the only news channel I could get in my dorm room, so it was convenient.

I haven’t regularly watched it in quite some time, mostly because I’ve been out of the country. At the time I last watched it, though, I had noticed a marked — and, to my mind, fairly rapid — descent into inanity.

Call me a snob, but I never did like the whole iReporter thing. Some people really appreciate “citizen journalism” and think it has value. To my mind, members of the general public, especially those on the scene of major events, can and should make great sources, and time and again their photos and video make compelling supplementary material. But that’s what it should be, in my opinion — supplementary. It should not replace the work of journalists — people not only trained in writing, editing and news-gathering, but also in ethics, judgment and legal theory. Likewise, Twitter trends can be a good starting point for news items, but they should not be the news item. Not only because Twitter can suffer from herd mentality, but also because a lot of what’s on it just isn’t true (according to Twitter, Johnny Depp died, like, four times last year).

So this trend toward relying on people-on-the-street for news items had already somewhat turned me off. Imagine my horror when I got on Gawker earlier today and saw this. Jon Stewart, bless him, ripped CNN a new one over some of its segments. They range from corny (Stream Team, which … I don’t even know) to borderline offensive (You Choose the News). The example of the latter segment involved an anchor (read: glorified infotainment card-reader) giving the audience three possible story topics. People would text to pick which one they wanted to know more about.

This concept might be cute or funny if it was for animal stories or some other fluff. But the topics to choose from were: the Afghan government’s takeover of women’s shelters, homeless female Iraq/Afghanistan veterans and the arms trade in Abu Dhabi, which has implications for Africa and the Middle East. As Stewart said, “Those all seem kind of important.” Someone in the comments helpfully pointed out that in the time CNN spent shilling (I almost wrote “whoring”) the segment, they could have covered all three stories in a fair amount of detail.

Granted, it’s not just CNN. It’s an easy target because Stewart did such a good job ridiculing it. After spending almost five months living in the UK, I think maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the BBC. The BBC has its share of cute stuff, but more often than not it covers the world hard-core. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, even Wisconsin: The stories are there. Analyses of fashion, technology, film and music sit next to market reports, biographies of world leaders and multimedia coverage. Reader input is requested and used, but it sits alongside the coverage, giving it depth and perspective.

I wondered, how could the BBC (and even other sources like Al Jazeera English) get things so right and CNN and its ilk get things so … tone-deaf? I believe the answer is that the BBC is considered a public good. Its budget comes from license fees paid in by anyone with a TV set or access to live broadcasts. It is beholden to the British public (and Her Majesty, by Royal Charter), not to any corporate behemoth. Granted it has its own problems — people still accuse it of some bias and some of its anchors’ salaries are under fire — but I don’t think it would ever treat serious news like some sort of raffle prize. Despite accusations of bias (which you’ll find anywhere), it strives to be as non-partisan as possible given its structure and funding. And it’s everywhere.

On the other end is CNN (and Fox and MSNBC and to a somewhat lesser extent the networks), taken to corporate news’ inevitable conclusion: the watering down of issues and news turned into entertainment and entertainment trying to pass itself off as news.

Stewart, Colbert, truthiness and journalists

One of my (few) regrets since moving to England is that I won’t be in the U.S. or anywhere near Washington DC when Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert stage their dueling rallies, the Rally to Restore Sanity and the March to Keep Fear Alive.

Imagine my surprise when I read that NPR was banning its news employees from attending the rally. The New York Times and Washington Post, while allowing their employees to attend, have also given them strict guidelines on how to behave. Don’t wear supportive shirts, don’t give any impression of support, try hard not to laugh (no, really). The Times’ directive in particular makes use of the Royal We (it might as well be) and has the distinct flavor of an Old Testament God hurling down orders from on high. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s Colbert Nation wristband.”

Washington City Paper hilariously lampooned such guidelines in its own tongue-in-cheek staff memo regarding the rallies. My personal favorite guideline is #10: “Feel free to laugh heartily at any jokes that target the terrorists.”

And there, I think, is the rub. It’s OK to laugh at terrorist-targeted jokes because it’s easy and requires little in the way of political or journalistic courage. It comes down to news agencies’ skittishness about their credibility and a mad dash to snuff out anything that might remotely resemble a conflict of interest. Despite Stewart and Colbert frequently mocking both sides of the political spectrum, it’s clear which side has organizations nervous.

Media ethicist and Miami Herald columnist Edward Wasserman summed it up perfectly in his Oct. 25 column. He notes that hand-wringing over whether employees attend a DC celebration of satire (is The Onion next on the chopping block?) dilutes very real conflict-of-interest dilemmas. Conflicts of interest are taken extremely seriously, and at their core, they undermine a reporter’s ability to fairly and objectively report a story. A true conflict of interest, Wasserman notes, is something like “the business reporter who covers a company in which she owns shares.” It is not employees attending a comedic event off the clock.

He goes further and says that it’s actually against news judgment principles — seeking tenets of prominence, conflict, proximity, unusualness, timeliness and impact — not to allow reporters to attend the rallies. Telling a reporter not to attend a well-publicized, controversial, first- and possibly only-time, celebrity-attended, interesting event on their own time is akin to telling an off-duty firefighter to stay away from any burning buildings he sees.

It comes down to courage versus cowardliness. Are news organizations secure enough in their own integrity to allow their employees to attend the Colbert and Stewart rallies off the clock, or are they so afraid of the conflict-of-interest shadow that they think that not allowing their employees to attend will make any difference at all to the people most likely to scream “BIAS”? People out to undermine news organizations will always find something to nitpick. If it wasn’t this event it’d be something else.

Most ominously, Wasserman says, is the question of how news organizations will handle stories and events that actually have legitimate ethical and moral implications when they can’t or won’t face a satirical event head on.

How London can use Foursquare

Now that I’m able to successfully take my mobile crack, er, media addiction on the road (thanks to an iPod Touch and, I hope, an Android phone in the near future), I’ve become a major fan of Foursquare. What is Foursquare? Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that not all of my friends are journalism/social media junkies, and most people probably aren’t familiar with it.

Think of it like Twitter on the move. Basically you “check in” at different venues to which you travel — shops, restaurants, bars, airports, train stations, landmarks, bus stops, churches, grocery stores, boutiques, shopping malls, a damn boat. Experience-wise, you get out of it what you put in — ideally you’ll leave tips and notes at places you’ve been, telling the people who arrive after you what to see, do or eat there. For instance, after having a stellar curry in Canterbury, I promptly listed a tip on the place’s Foursquare listing.

If you check into a place more times in the past 60 days than anyone else, you become the mayor, a post you hold until someone else boots you. You can see where your friends have been, and earn badges for various things, like checking into specific types of venues, checking into many different venues, or checking in a certain number of times.

If you use your imagination, the application is entrepreneurial gold. Several months ago, Gap and American Eagle (I believe) both offered discounts if you checked into their stores. Starbucks offers drink specials for its mayors. The mayor at a Wetherspoon pub in the UK gets 20 percent off his tab. It rewards brand loyalty and in turn, the venue receives your business, and your tips populate the venue’s Foursquare listing. Brands like Zagat, Bravo, The History Channel and the Wall Street Journal have their own special badges that you can earn if you follow them. To earn the Zagat badge, for example, you just need to check in at five different Zagat-rated restaurants.

But what about something such as, say, tourism?

Cities like New York, Chicago, Boston/Cambridge and San Francisco and even entire states like Pennsylvania have badges designed to give people incentives to explore them, like a scavenger hunt. As I was rooting around online looking for free WiFi hotspots in London (which I’m visiting tomorrow to see friends, woo), it occurred to me just how awesome a London-based collection of badges (both for tourists and people who actually live or work there) could be.

  • Check into 10 different Underground stations and get a Tube badge.
  • Hit 3+ musicals or other shows and get the West End badge.
  • 3+ gallery check-ins? Give ’em a Turner badge (a generic Warhol badge already exists for gallery check-ins).
  • Five words: “I’m on the London Eye.”
  • Hit Paddington, King’s Cross/St. Pancras, Waterloo, Victoria and Charing Cross and get a Rail Rider badge.
  • Multiple check-ins in the City gets you a Financial Whiz badge (I know WSJ does something similar for financial district check-ins in New York).
  • Check into 5+ castles or royal residences (not necessarily just in London) and earn a King/Queen for a Day badge.
  • 5+ churches, cathedrals or historical houses of worship, like St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey, ought to be good for something … pious.
  • London pub crawl badge? Yes, please. Even better, narrow it down by the specific beer associated with each pub.
  • A Borough Hopper badge for visiting 5+ different boroughs, like Chelsea, Westminster, Camden and Southwark.
  • A Sloaner badge for checking into 3+ shops on Sloane Street, or Harrods.
  • The London 2012 badge is so obvious I’m not even going to elaborate.
  • 3+ museums should get you a Rosetta Stone badge.
  • Double-decker badge for 5+ check-ins on a bus.
  • There’s already a badge for checking in on or near a boat, but what about on or near the Thames?
  • Ultimate London badge for checking into 15+ predetermined landmarks (this would be an awesome scavenger hunt/travel itinerary thing).
  • London Nightlife badge for checking into 3+ predetermined bars or night clubs.
  • The Footie badge for checking into 3+ football matches.
  • Earn a Green London badge for visiting 3+ city parks.
  • Check in 5+ times while crossing the Thames and get a Bridge Too Far badge.
  • And this isn’t even counting event-specific badges for things like Fashion Week, the opening of Parliament, Wimbledon, general elections, Trafalgar Square rallies, major sporting events, the queen’s birthday and Guy Fawkes night.

I came up with 20 specific badges right off the top of my head. In addition to the badges, tangible rewards are also easy to figure out — check in on the Eye, get a discount on your next ticket. 15% off museum/gallery gift shops if you earn those badges. Discounted train fare, free entry to landmarks, store deals. So why isn’t anyone (the local government, Transport for London, a media group or someone) doing this already?

Do you really want the Yanks to have all the fun?

In defense of high-school journalism

My week-long travel series will resume tomorrow. Thanks everyone for the good response.

I was once a high-school journalist.

My district, Shawnee Mission, is/was arguably, pound for pound, one of the most quality journalism districts in the country. Pacemakers, Columbia gold and silver crowns, national student journalists of the year, design of the year. You name it, we won it.

We’re scattered all around now — most of us went on to something else, but I know of designers and photographers, reporters and copy editors. People for whom working on the Epic, Lair, Indian, Harbinger and Patriot was the start of a life-long commitment to our field. Others among us are lawyers, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, police officers, musicians and artists.

I’d go so far as to say that without my journalism education at Shawnee Mission West, I probably would never have studied journalism at KU, never would have worked on the Kansan and never would have come to love editing.

I was a news reporter my sophomore year of high school, then the feature and opinion editor and finally the editor-in-chief. I was able to immediately apply what I had learned to working on the Kansan.

That’s why I was dismayed to learn today that as of 2012, journalism programs in Kansas will no longer receive state funding. We’re on our own now.

This may be a mere annoyance in more affluent districts, but what about rural schools? I was extremely lucky to work on good computers with updated, professional-level software. What about the kids using old copies of Pagemaker on beat-up PCs? With many schools using bare-bones resources as it is, these cuts could very well be the end of high-school newspapers and yearbooks across the state. But hey, that’s what Facebook’s for, right? Right?

While KU’s journalism school draws students from all over the country, much of its core comes from students who have benefitted from rock-solid journalism education in Kansas high schools. Will cutting journalism funding temper enthusiasm for the major at KU? Will students coming in with no training in news judgment, design, AP style or software use be at a marked disadvantage next to their suburban or out-of-state classmates?

The arguments for cutting journalism funding make little sense to me.

It doesn’t require “high skill” sets?

You mean I didn’t have to get an undergraduate degree to be a journalist? Or learn how to use computers, video and camera equipment and software? Sit down in front of a blank InDesign template and we’ll see how “high skill” it can be.

It’s not “high wage”?

Few people have ever gotten rich out of being practicing journalists. But most of us make a comfortable, if modest, living doing what we love. If high wages are the only real indicator of success, why don’t we all just go become corporate raiders on Wall Street? This implies that accumulating wealth gives a career its value, and this is not true. To be accurate, the requirement should be a “living wage,” which journalism provides.

It’s not “high demand”?

Yes, the industry is going through a lot of changes now, and long-term employment is uncertain. But you know what? Nearly everyone I know from KU who wants a job in journalism has one, whether in news or public relations/advertising. Many others are working in other fields, based on their journalism degrees. Obviously there’s a demand somewhere.

There’s also more to journalism than learning to write and tell stories. It’s about working with people, teaching your incoming green reporters the ropes and mentoring them, making judgment calls, learning business acumen and becoming a better communicator in general.

And I’m sorry that that kind of education is no longer worthy of funding in Kansas.

Six ways to stay (or get) sharp

One of my basic rules of being a good copy editor (other than all that grammar Nazi stuff) is to know a little about a lot. Yeah, most of us on non-universal desks specialize in some way, either in news, sports, arts, business or features, but it’s always a good idea to be familiar with a variety of topics. It’s hard to edit stories with authority if you don’t have a good grasp of basic current events and trivia.

Know what the top-grossing film of all time is, considering inflation? (It’s “Gone With the Wind.”) What about who won the 1976 World Series? (The Reds swept the Yankees.)  Who on earth is the President of the European Council? (Herman van Rompuy.)

“But Kels,” you say, “how does one learn all of this and become more well-read?”

Here are six ways to increase your general knowledge that don’t involve eating an encyclopedia.

1. Watch “Jeopardy.”

My grandmother is not college-educated. She only recently got a passport (she’s going with us to London next month). She’s still using dial-up Internet. But she knows a freakish amount of cultural minutiae. How? “Jeopardy.”

“Jeopardy” is on pretty much every week day, and its rotating categories ensure that you’ll never get bored. You can also watch the Kid, Teen and College versions of “Jeopardy” and goggle at how some nerdy 12-year-old knows more than you do.

2. Visit Sporcle.

Apart from being perhaps the greatest time-waster since Minesweeper, Sporcle offers a lot of knowledge disguised cleverly as quizzes. If it exists, there’s a Sporcle quiz on it. Countries’ exports, beer consumption, movie quotes, European monarchs, Hogwarts staff, all-time leading NBA scorers. You may feel like an idiot if you can name only 10 Danish monarchs (the ones named Christian, yeah!), but surrendering and clicking the “I Give Up” button is perhaps the greatest lesson of all.

2. Set up Google Reader and use it.

I subscribe to a few dozen sites and blogs through Google Reader. Most of them are tech- or journalism-related, but a few are for business, politics, travel, cooking, entertainment and other areas. Whenever you find a blog or site you like, link it to your Google Reader. You don’t even have to read every blog entry that comes in; skim and see what’s interesting. You’ll be amazed at what you learn. You can also supplement a Google Reader blogroll with a Twitter feed; follow your favorite bloggers, writers and personalities on Twitter. If you follow only your in-person friends on Twitter, you’re missing out.

4. Consume foreign media.

Because domestic (domestic meaning whatever country you live in, not necessarily just American) media inherently only offers a limited or even biased viewpoint, it’s imperative that you look at news sources outside your border. It may be the anglophile in me talking, but pound-for-pound (no pun intended), it doesn’t get any better than the BBC in terms of global, even-handed reporting on all levels. I also like Der Spiegel.

As a bonus, pick a news source from a country whose language you’re studying. Not only will you get news from another perspective, but you’ll also practice your foreign-language skills.

5. Travel smart.

The only museum in the bum-you-know-what town you’re driving through celebrates a mutant ear of corn. See it anyway. That historical society down the road? Pay it a visit. The brass plate on the downtown bank says someone was shot there 125 years ago trying to rob it. Cool, look him up (or her; I pass no judgment).

Some museums and historical sites are more glamorous than others (many of which can be seen in the photos of yours truly), but all can be valuable if you’re open-minded. No museum is too small, too cheesy or too weird that it can’t be enjoyed.

6. Play in pub quizzes

These are more popular in the UK than in America (in my experience, anyway), but a lot of bars and restaurants are doing them now. The concept is simple: Go out with a group of friends, participate in a trivia contest, have a few drinks and eat. If you win, you get money, drinks or some other prize. If you lose, you still had fun, and you got to learn some new stuff. Win-win.

So there you have it. Six fun, relatively pain-free ways to expand your general knowledge and help you be a better copy editor and a better citizen of humanity in general. Happy learning, kids.

Time, Afghanistan and Conflicts of Interest

A couple of weeks ago, when I saw Time’s cover story about women in Afghanistan, something about it seemed … off … to me. It’s difficult to describe, but as soon as I saw the cover, my Spidey sense went off.

The cover in question features a young Afghan woman named Aisha, whose husband’s family cut off her nose and ears after she attempted to run away. The sell line on the cover states (not asks) “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.”

I remember thinking that it seemed to have a vein of demagoguery. With opposition to the Afghan war rising (or, at the very least, more people asking critical questions about why the U.S. and NATO remain there), this article seemed like a punch in the gut. “If we leave,” it seems to imply, “this will happen.”

The problems with that are A) while women’s rights are obviously important, that’s not why the U.S. is there, B) the U.S. being there didn’t prevent Aisha’s mutilation and C) the Hamid Karzai government has passed laws that are decidedly anti-women, apparently with the U.S.’s implicit blessing. So using the dangers Afghan women might face in the U.S.’s absence to frame the debate of involvement seems like a red herring. Surely the U.N., local advocacy groups, NGOs, missionary groups or other bodies would be better suited than the U.S. military to go to the mattresses for Afghan women.

After reading the article and making the aforementioned mental notes, I set the story aside. Yesterday, however, I saw a piece from the New York Observer questioning whether Aryn Baker, the Time reporter who wrote the story and had (she’s since been reassigned) the magazine’s Afghanistan/Pakistan beat, might have had an ulterior motive or conflict of interest in writing the story.

It turns out that Baker’s husband works on a board with the Afghan government that pushes to get foreign direct investment into the country. He had also worked with and ran companies in the past that solicited development contracts from both militaries and private companies.

In other words, at face value, it looks like Baker’s husband, and by extension Baker herself, would be gaining monetarily from continued U.S./NATO involvement in the region, and it looks curious at best and dishonest at worst that Baker happened to write a magazine piece that seems to advocate continued military involvement.

Time has, of course, defended Baker and denied a conflict existed (its full statement is included at the tail end of the Observer story). But the issue here, I’d say, is the appearance of a conflict. It may be that Baker has no monetary stake in the Afghan operation, or that it didn’t cross her mind when she wrote the story. In fact that’s probably the case; I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.

Perception is reality. If it looks like something is rotten in Denmark, then that will color people’s perceptions. Time had the opportunity to actually fuel a solid, grounded debate about implications of a U.S. withdrawal. Instead it finds itself hustling to defend a reporter’s integrity, and in a worst-case scenario, any further reporting it does on Afghanistan will be somewhat soured by this. Any number of writers could have taken on the story; that it was someone in Baker’s precise position was unfortunate.

Which brings me back to my Spidey sense going off. Now I know I wasn’t expecting a conflict-of-interest story to emerge, but I do know that my gut told me that something wasn’t quite right. I don’t know whether I had a sense that more was going on than it seemed, or if I had a negative reaction to what I thought was an appeal based more on emotional reactions than rationality.

Either way, this is a good example of trusting your gut. It’s also a lesson that journalists don’t exist inside a vacuum. We make human connections, we network, schmooze, marry, travel and spend money. And when our human lives intersect with our journalistic lives, it doesn’t take much to put our reputations on the line.

I’ve got your social media strategy right here

Every so often I find something online (or someone tells me about something) that makes me think, “Why didn’t I think of this?”

Whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy is one such gem.

In the year I spent managing Kansan.com, our biggest goal was to get more traffic to the site and get readers involved. We started manually managing the paper’s Twitter account. We added more polls, asked for reader submissions and ideas and increased multimedia offerings. If Foursquare had been around in any significant capacity, I’m sure we could have done a hell of a lot with it.

I feel like “social media” was the main buzz phrase my senior year of college. I spent a significant amount of time that year, and this past year, carefully cultivating an online presence in the “right” places. While I avoid consuming tech products for their own sake (I don’t own an iPhone or other smart phone and only very recently bought an iPod Touch), I like to think I’m fairly “with it” technologically, lest this come off like the rantings of an old cat lady screaming at kids to get off my lawn. I “get” the new media infatuation. But there are some problems.

My biggest annoyance with social media is basically what the aforementioned site makes fun of: People seem to be building it up as something more grandiose than it really is. And I can’t really understand why. Most of the phrases found on the site are ones I actually recognize, either from someone’s CV I’ve seen, a company manifesto or a press release. Somewhere out there is a guy, God bless him, who earnestly believes he’s “providing brand ambassadors with compelling conversation hooks to enter into communities and fuel advocacy” (quoted from the site).

I’m trying to figure out if this is just good old-fashioned CV posturing/bragging (if so, if it wasn’t their mad tweeting skills it’d be something else), or if new media kids are deliberately trying to be arch and vague about what it is that they do to maintain an air of importance and indispensability. If it sounds that important, it must be difficult, right? Or at least, something very few other people are capable of doing. Imagine that you’re a middle-aged manager who’s never tweeted before and barely knows how to send e-mail. Wouldn’t you be slightly impressed if a young whippersnapper came in and told you how awesome social media was, using language like that?

Part of it too is just being as young as I am. The basic job of managing a Twitter feed, starting a Facebook group, running promotions using Foursquare and writing a blog doesn’t sound terribly impressive to me simply because I’m so used to doing it and seeing it done. Perhaps if I were older and less familiar with those applications, I’d be less cynical about flowery language and rhetoric used to describe it.

On the news side of things, I’m afraid that the usefulness of the social media hasn’t caught up to the technology. We have social media apps out the ying-yang, but people are still trying to figure out what to do with them. It also doesn’t do us any good if we raise a generation of journalists who can format an iPhone, edit random video clips and check in on Gowalla but don’t know how to edit, report, lay out a page (and in this digital era, design skills are necessary for the Web, too), compose a photo or communicate with people in, you know, person.

The technology should never be bigger than the story you’re trying to tell. You should also never shoot for shinier tech displays in story-telling when simpler ones will do. I’m out of J school now, but I have this fear that the current new media hype will result in tons of alumni with little to no skills in the basics. I’ve been asked for advice before — What would you tell new J school graduates? And my answer then was the same as it is now: You can know how to use all the technology and applications in the world, but if you don’t know basic reporting skills, you’re screwed. And yes, of course, there’s plenty of room for Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and so on in journalism. But it all depends on how you use it.

I guess a good baseline for young journalists should be the answer to this question: “If the Internet broke down tomorrow and your iPhone/laptop turned into a paperweight, could you still report this story?”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta go check my Twitter feed.

Parting with an old friend

I’ve known him for more than five years (I guess it’s a him?) and he’s been a loyal companion. He puts up with constant use, he rarely complains and he goes with me everywhere. Despite being on the older end, he still looks pretty good. He’s my silver fox. Or at least, my aluminum fox.

He’s my 2005 PowerBook G4 laptop.

I bought him with my own money, along with my 5MP Canon point-and-click (which is also on notice), a first-generation iPod Photo and a printer. He got me through the end of my senior year of high school, three years at KU, a year in England and two (soon to be three) summer internships. I’ll always have happy memories of him.

But it’s about time to move on.

Before I leave for school in September, I plan on hitting the Apple store and picking up my aluminum fox’s great-great-great-grandson: a 15.4″, 2.66 GHz, 500GB HD, antiglare-screened MacBook Pro. And probably a 32GB iPod Touch, but only because that back-to-school promotion is on and my current iPod is going to be four years old at Christmas. I swear.

Getting a new computer for a new school year got me thinking about my relationship with my current computer. I have term papers, photos, music, website designs, page layouts, manuals and God only knows what else on here. It represents half a decade of accumulated digital “wealth.” I know I’ll miss his familiar keys, size and weight. It’s going to take time to get used to a newer model.

But he’s been gimpy lately. These newfangled websites slow him down, and he’s not as quick on his feet as he used to be. His keys show signs of wear, his top panel sticks up slightly (an oopsy in Indianapolis) and he’s getting harder to keep clean. Despite belonging to a “multimedia journalist,” he doesn’t have the juice to run most applications I’d use. So I think the humane thing to do is put him out to pasture — recycle him or pass him along to someone else. He’s still got a good life in him; I just don’t think it can or will be with me.

Oh, I’ll miss him.

A typical night-editing shift at the Kansan

True story: I have recurring dreams (nightmares?) where I still work at the Kansan. Sometimes I’m stuck behind a computer writing HTML for the site. Other times I’m in the reporting class, and still others I’ve had people actually come to my house and tell me that I have to “be editor next semester, because there isn’t anyone else to do it.”

Mostly, though, I have dreams about night editing. From August 2007 to May 2009, I lived in the newsroom Wednesday nights, either night editing, designing or copy editing. It’s a blur of nearly missed deadlines, late basketball games, hyphens where there should be em dashes and that “” bastard who somehow always had something open.

It can be difficult to describe night editing to a layperson. Can’t be that bad, right? For educational purposes, I present “Night Editing At The University Daily Kansan.” (Yes, reading Cracked has caught up with me and I’m now fascinated with flow charts.)