Here’s a good feature on NPR about the verification company Storyful.
In both a text and audio story, David Folkenflik tells the story of how Storyful works:
The company is constituted of a team of several dozen digitally savvy journalists operating around the clock in Dublin, New York City and Hong Kong to identify and acquire material from social media platforms for their clients — and to authenticate that content so it can be trusted for use in print. Storyful is scarcely known by the wider public — and highly regarded by digital journalists.How It Works
Storyful’s editors rely on a “heat map” of traffic on a variety of social media platforms from users previously designated as credible to trigger awareness of incidents as they occur. They then pull down video, audio, text and images and try to authenticate that material, and send continuous updates to clients who are seeking information about that story.
What strikes me about this story is the way it shows how people are using journalism skills to make a living in ways they probably didn’t even imagine when they were learning those skills:
On any given story, editors might run down the origins of dialects on tape, use metadata to figure out when a picture was really uploaded or check Google Earth to study terrain shown in videos. They compare weather conditions shown in a video against meteorological statistics for the day that it supposedly shows and call up shipping registries about stories that involve tankers.“What I’m doing is applying … traditional journalistic skills to a new medium,” Megan Specia, then a duty editor for Storyful, told me recently at the company’s New York offices.
This is one of those stories I file away to pull out and look at any time I start to feel anxious about the future for people with those skills.
It’s been three months since the New Yorker made 231 of its greatest stories available online to celebrate a website design, so you must be finished reading that collection by now.
So you should have plenty of time to dig into 100 Years 100 Stories, a celebration by The New Republic of its 100th anniversary.
That’s it. Go read. I’m planning to start with George Orwell’s Brilliant Guide to Writing Well, from 1946. But you can start anywhere.
Data journalism is a hot trend in the last few years, but there are so many numbers in sports that you could argue sportswriters have been doing data journalism since before data journalism was cool.
We haven’t always done it well, but we’ve been doing it.
While it isn’t sports related, Trevor Butterworth’s piece When Data Journalism Goes Wrong has some good lessons for sportswriters who want to tangle with numbers.
The main lesson is pretty much the same as the prime directive for tangling with things that aren’t numbers too: Question everything.
Butterworth breaks down two posts on the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, Think you drink a lot? This chart will tell you and Why the U.S. should start taxing soda like cigarettes and alcohol. He examines where the underlying data comes from, questions the motives and methods of various people behind them, and proceeds to generally, in his own words, “follow the footnotes and check out the data.”
Butterworth concludes:
The risk for wonk journalism is that you either lose in audience as you expand in analysis, or you dumb down and end up dumb. The rub is, you can’t tell good data from bad without doing analysis.
Early in my career, on the night sports copy desk at the old San Francisco Examiner, I made up a rule for myself that I still live by as both a writer and an editor. It’s an extension of the rule that says to check every name and every number: If you see any kind of math in a story, re-calculate it yourself, because you have to assume it’s wrong. At least 37 percent of the time—about one in five—it will be.
There were three really interesting pieces I read last week tied to departures in the media biz. They don’t really have anything to do with each other, but together they give three glimpses that serve as a little snapshot of some big issues in media at the moment.
OK, only two of them do. We’ll start with them.
Dave McKinney, a longtime political reporter with the Chicago Sun-Times, resigned last week and explained why in a personal blog post headlined “Why I left.”
The reason is a little complicated, but it has to do with what McKinney writes is his feeling that the Sun-Times “no longer has the backs of reporters like me.” He writes that he was taken off his beat, put on leave and later denied a byline after the campaign of Bruce Rauner, the Republican candidate for Illinois governor, accused McKinney of having a conflict of interest. And then the Sun-Times, which declared in 2012 that it would no longer endorse candidates for elections, endorsed Rauner.
All this after the Sun-Times had called the Rauner accusations an “attack” that bordered on defamation. McKinney asks:
Was all this retaliation for breaking an important news story [in which Rauner looked bad] that had the blessing of the paper’s editor and publisher, the company’s lawyer and our NBC5 partners? …Readers of the Sun-Times need to be able to trust the paper. They need to know a wall exists between owners and the newsroom to preserve the integrity of what is published. A breach in that wall exists at the Sun-Times.
It’s had a chilling effect in the newsroom. While I don’t speak for my colleagues, I’m aware that many share my concern. I’m convinced this newspaper no longer has the backs of reporters like me.
There has traditionally been a “wall” between a media outlet’s newsroom and business interests, as well as between the newsroom and the owners’ powerful friends and political interests. We’ve heard a lot in the last few years about that first wall becoming more permeable, and about how that can be a good thing, with content creators taking on a more realistic view that what they’re doing is part of a business, and needs to succeed to survive.
It’s the other wall that McKinney is talking about. Is that one becoming softer too? And if so, what will the consequences be?
Another unhappy departure is chronicled by Rebecca Carroll in the New Republic: “I’m a Black Journalist. I’m Quitting Because I’m Tired of Newsroom Racism.”
“It’s a strange and incredibly demoralizing time to be a black person in American media,” Carroll writes, continuing:
The words “racist and “racism” have cynically become clickbait, all while various newsrooms are claiming that they want to hire more writers and reporters and editors of color, but don’t. What it feels like you are hearing is: We’re not really trying to diversify our newsrooms, because we don’t actually have to.Among the challenges that make racism so difficult to fix, and so odiously constant, is that white people often don’t even recognize when they’re saying or doing something that cuts their black colleagues to the bone. Or worse, they do recognize when they’re being racially insensitive, but then demonstrate some semblance of regret and move on unscathed. If we can’t say anything about this kind of behavior—or don’t—then who will? What’s more, if we do speak up, particularly if we are among the chosen few who are granted a voice in mainstream media, at what cost?
If you don’t think racism is a real issue in media—and if you don’t, chances are you’re white—you should read Carroll’s piece.
On a happier, if wistful note, is news that “iconic” baseball writer John Lowe is retiring from the Detroit Free Press. You may have heard the Fox broadcast crew mention this during Game 2 of the World Series. Here’s Fox’s Jon Paul Morosi and Ken Rosenthal writing about Lowe.
They both mention how much Lowe loved baseball, loved writing about baseball, had a positive outlook, and helped younger writers. That’s a pretty good way to approach the daily grind.
It’s easy to forget that when you write about sports, you’re potentially writing about almost anything. Politics, economics, race, violence, substance abuse. There’s almost nothing that gets covered on news sites that couldn’t, somehow, end up on a sports site.
So while a rampaging shooter like the one who terrorized Ottawa this week doesn’t figure to be a part of sports coverage, it could happen, depending on where or at whom that shooter shoots, or threatens to shoot.
That’s why I think sportswriters, not just hard news folks, can get a lot out of this Mother Jones report by James West, headlined “Canada’s Coverage of the Ottawa Shootings Put American Cable News to Shame.”
West notes that while the situation unfolded live with lots of sketchy details and unconfirmed rumors, the CBC’s coverage, anchored by “the unflappable Peter Mansbridge,” was very different than what we’re used to in the U.S.:
This live bit of level-headed reporting by Mansbridge, from around 11:10 a.m. Wednesday, should be given to journalism students around the country. It basically contains everything you need to know about why CBC did its audience proud:
MANSBRIDGE: And so, the situation is, as we say, tense and unclear. And it’s on days like this—we keep reminding you of this and it’s important—it’s on days like this, where a story takes a number of different pathways, a number of changes occur, and often rumors start in a situation like this. We try to keep them out of our coverage, but when they come, sometimes from official sources, like members of Parliament, you tend to give them some credence. But you carefully weigh it with what we’re also witnessing. It’s clear that the situation is not over. It is clear the police are in an intense standby situation and continue to be on the lookout, and until somebody blows the all-clear on this we will continue to stay on top of it and watch as the events unfold.
West continues: “Exacting and painstaking, but never slow or boring, Mansbridge weighed the credibility of every detail, constantly framing and reframing what we knew and, most crucially, how we knew it.” (Emphasis in the original.)
That’s a great example of Lennay’s Law in action. Here’s video of the quoted coverage.
Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post from 1965 to 1991, died this week at the age of 93. Whenever journalism giants die, there are lots of stories around about their lives and careers.
I usually find it fruitful to read as many of them as I can find.
Bradlee, familiar to non-Beltway insiders as the character played by Jason Robards in the movie version of Woodward and Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” was not a sportswriter or a sports editor. But he liked sports and, evidently, understood well the role of sports journalism. His obituary, linked in the lede above, notes that when he took over as managing editor of the Post in 1965, its most famous writer was a sportswriter, Shirley Povich.
Here’s NBA.com and TNT reporter David Aldridge, who got his start at the Washington Post, writing on Facebook:
Working at The Washington Post was the anchor for my professional life. All the lessons I learned about journalism came from my nine years there, and all those came with Ben Bradlee at the helm. He didn’t run the Sports section, but he was the undeniable boss of the paper. He loved Sports and was quite fond of our immediate boss, George Solomon (the feeling was mutual). So, while he wasn’t there every day, Ben would come back to the section quite often to see what was going on. He was not that interested in the score of the game last night. He wanted to know if anything big was cooking. (Per David Maraniss’s outstanding biography of Vince Lombardi, It was Bradlee who first found out Lombardi was coming to D.C. in 1969 to coach the Redskins, having been given the scoop by his close friend, the late owner of the team, Edward Bennett Williams. Bradlee told Sports, which printed the story. THAT was Ben Bradlee’s idea of a big story.)
New Yorker editor David Remnick was a Washington Post reporter from 1982 to ’92. In a thoroughly entertaining remembrance, he writes of Bradlee, “Among his many bequests to the Republic was a catalogue of swaggering anecdotes rich enough to float a week of testimonial dinners.” The piece ends with one of them.
Here’s a great letter Bradlee once sent to a PR flack from a circus who had complained that the Post’s Style section hadn’t published a story about someone’s retirement. The kicker is a nice statement of purpose when it comes to dealing with press agents: “I would like to be sure that you understand that we trust our editors’ news judgment and that we distrust yours.”
More reading:
Ben Bradlee Wrestled With Racial Issues by Richard Prince, Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
Ben Bradlee: His sense of Style brought a new sensibility to features by Martha Sherrill, Washington Post. The headline refers to the influential Style section, which Bradlee introduced.
Post bigshots on Bradlee: Donald Graham. Leonard Downie.
A Story About Ben Bradlee That’s Not Fucking Charming by Peter Maass, The Intercept.
Journalists reflect on Ben Bradlee’s life and career by Benjamin Mullin, Poynter.org.
Stick with me for a second as I talk about this ivoh.org blog post about the new site Ebola Deeply.
After all, the headline on Mallory Jean Tanore’s piece is “What media outlets can learn from the Ebola Deeply news site,” and we’re all media outlets, right?
The site, launched last week by Lara Setrakian, a former ABC reporter who also founded Syria Deeply, is dedicated to nothing but coverage of the Ebola outbreak. A note of disclosure: I’ve met Setrakian a few times and think the world of her and her work.
Here’s Tenore:
Increasingly, nontraditional news sites like Ebola Deeply and Syria Deeply are filling gaps by publishing stories that legacy news outlets may not have the capacity or resources to cover in depth.Journalists can learn something from these sites, which break down complex information in a way that’s easy to understand. Ebola Deeply does this partly by offering readers a variety of ways to consume information.
In addition to written stories, the site features Google Hangouts, a Twitter feed, videos, a timeline of events related to the epidemic, and a case map [showing] the number of deaths and infections around the world.
Thanks for sticking with me, because here’s my point: Where are “the gaps” in what you cover, or might cover? That’s where the opportunities are to do great things. That’s something I’ve learned from, among other places, sites like Ebola Deeply.
Looking for an internship, fellowship or other educational program to kick your journalism career up a notch or two? Check out this Poynter.org post, which lists, at this writing, 34 of the best of them.
Note that the URL says there will be 27 of them, so you might want to keep checking back. The list is growing.
As Poynter’s Benjamin Mullin notes, “October through January is internship application season.” Some of the application deadlines are already coming up. It would have been helpful if the list were in order of deadline dates, but here are the ones with October cutoffs:
The Virginian-Pilot—Oct. 24
The New York Times James Reston Reporting Fellowship—Oct. 31
The Dallas Morning News—Oct. 31
The Miami Herald—Oct. 31
All of the programs Mullen lists, he says, are paid, even if the pay amount is sometimes missing.
They’re not listed in the Poynter post, but Bleacher Report has two paid educational programs that we think are among the best as well, the Advanced Program in Sports Media, which focuses on sportswriting, and the Advanced Program in Editing and Content Management, the focus of which should be clear from the name.
Both are paid, 12-week programs for advanced journalism students or early-career professionals. Two things set them apart from most other programs: One is that they’re part time, usually taking about 10 to 15 hours a week, and the other is that students telecommute. There are no travel or living requirements.
Visit the links above for more information and the applications.
The BBC Academy asked Mark Frankel, who oversees the network’s Twitter accounts, a series of rapid-fire questions about best practices for journalists.
Because of the 140 character-friendly nature of his answers, the interview has a certain “Rain Man” quality, but there’s a lot of good advice for journalists. A sample.
2. What should you think about before you write?Truth or rumour? Share with colleagues first. Can I explain it clearly in <140 characters? Do I need to credit someone? #bestpractice
3. Who are your tweets aimed at?
Not just existing followers. Think trending words & hashtags & cc others with Twitter influence to help your tweets travel #bestpractice
4. What ingredients make for an effective tweet?
Brevity, clear language, humour/light touch, judicious hashtag, a good pic and link (when relevant) #bestpractice
Definitely good advice. Definitely. And there’s more where that came from about double-checking sources, attribution, being careful with breaking news and more.
That #bestpractice hashtag isn’t all that useful because it’s used so widely about all sorts of things other than Twitter best practices. But Frankel does link to other sources of best practices for using the social network.
Thursday was the 10th anniversary of Lionel Messi’s debut with Barcelona. Bleacher Report covered that milestone in four ways, and I think they’re a nice cross-section of some of the different types of content available as you think about how to cover any event or topic.
There were two fairly traditional pieces, one looking back and one looking forward:
Lionel Messi Travels 10 Years from Shy Uncertainty to Stellar Name at Barcelona by Guillem Balague.
Predicting Where Barcelona Star Lionel Messi Will Be in 10 Years’ Time by Rik Sharma.
There was a slideshow that rounded up quotes about Messi:
Lionel Messi: Quotes on Barcelona Star from His Coaches, Team-Mates and Rivals by Mark Patterson.
A video featured the moment of Messi’s debut for Barca:
We Remember: Video Shows Leo Messi’s Barcelona Debut, October 16, 2004
And a pair of graphics, each accompanying a brief story by Patterson:
Lionel Messi: Exploring Barcelona Forward’s Trophy Cabinet 10 Years After Debut
Lionel Messi in Numbers: Graphic Shows Barcelona and Argentina Stats Since 2004
Finally, to encourage engagement, there was a Twitter contest in which fans could win a shirt and an exclusive print by artist Stan Chow:
Win a Lionel Messi Shirt, Exclusive Print to Celebrate 10th Anniversary of Debut
I wonder what we’ll be able to do for his 20th anniversary.