We are always looking for opportunities to add multimedia features to our stories, and the most popular kind of feature we can add is video.
Eventually, it would be great if the reporters would pitch video ideas on their own initiative. To this end, here’s a link to a post on Net Worked, What Makes A Good Video Story. Rebecca Aguilar sits down with several seasoned video journalism veterans and gets the titular scoop. Worth a read.
Journalists often talk and write about how bad it is, which makes me wonder why we find it acceptable to do almost nothing to prevent it? The general attitude towards plagiarism checking seems to be, “Let’s save our money and let readers and other people catch the culprits.”
This comes from Craig Silverman at the Columbia Journalism Review. He’s right about one thing: Every time a journalistic plagiarist is outed, news critics and pundits get up in arms about plagiarism for a few weeks before letting the issue blow over.
I don’t like the idea of running everything a newspaper produces through a plagiarism-detecting algorithm, but there’s got to be something else we can do to keep journos honest.
My suggestion: Open up the journalistic process to public scrutiny. Encourage reporters to keep blogs where they chronicle their research. Some people call this “showing your work,” just like back in high school algebra. If everything we do is out there for the public to see, we’ll have an incentive to stay honest, and we might just earn back some of the trust that people seem to have lost in journalists over the past few decades.
I don’t know who made up the rule that news reporters aren’t supposed to respond to public comments about and critiques of their work. Maybe it’s not even a rule. Maybe its one of those arbitrary rules that somebody thought was a good idea once upon a time, though it really had no basis in life — like not ending an English sentence with a preposition.
Either way, it’s about time we got over ourselves as some institution of capital-J Journalism and responded to readers in the comments sections of our sites, engaged with them on Twitter and answered their questions on Facebook.
As Robert Quigley at Old Media New Tricks writes, “People seem to think we’re a giant, uncaring media corporation. They’re pleasantly surprised when they get a real human response.”
For the sake of argument though, what’s the justification for maintaining a wall of silence? Why should we not respond to reader questions and concerns? Anyone?
A new Pew study shows that young people use the heck out of the Internet; they just don’t seem to be using it to blog. They also use the heck out of social networking sites, just not Twitter.
If you’re still waffling about whether to use Twitter for personal or professional reasons, check out this post from Sree Sreenivasan, a journalism professor and the dean of student affairs at the Columbia Journalism School.
It includes links to all manner of Twitter introductions, tutorials and other resources. Some of his links can help you find people to follow. Others will help you see how Twitter can be engaging and, most importantly, useful.
There’s also some fun stuff near the end, videos, jokes and such.
And, if you want to get on a social media roll, check out this other post by Sreenivasan, which provides tips and primers for all sorts of social networking sites, from Facebook to LinkedIn.
And hey, one more thing: Take a good look at the blog that he’s put up. Sreenivasan is using a blogging service called Tumblr, which provides users with free blogs that are drop-dead simple to use. If you’re looking to start experimenting with blogs, Tumblr might be a good place to start. WordPress.com and Posterous are also good.
As always, if you have any questions about this stuff, stop by any time.
Image from the Flickr Commons
More encoding “gremlins” snuck into the poll this week. Please, please, turn off “smart quotes” on your machine if you must continue using Microsoft Word to compose.
Better yet, use a plain text editor such as Notepad (on Windows) or TextWrangler (on Mac) to write everything that goes onto the Web.
This just looks bad.
Our latest Chronicle video, shot by Michael Gibney, edited by me.
Will C. Holden covers MSU football and men’s basketball. He has been with the Chronicle since 2008. Originally from Denver, he began his journalism career working for the Seattle Times, Tacoma News Tribune, Kitsap Sun and Tacoma Weekly. | Articles | Twitter
Gidal Kaiser covers the local prep scene as well as Montana State women's basketball and other MSU Olympic sports. He is a Chicagoan, a Marquette University graduate and has eight years of professional experience. | Articles | Twitter
Chronicle Bobcat Coverage
More gremlins
Here we go again:
Similar to the last time I mentioned this issue:
Or the time before that:
Or, god help us, the time before that
Would we let errors like this slip into the print version?