Posts filed under 'Uncategorized'
November 28th, 2008
Start with two assumptions: (1) The human brain equates “it’s in writing” with “it must be true”; and, (2) I am a fan of, and user of, social networking because things like blogs, e-mail, Twitter and Facebook keep me instantly in touch with family and friends.
(If you are under 80 and don’t know what those things are, you need to get connected. Social networking is about the only way you’re ever going to hear from your grandchildren. If you’re over 80, consider it optional.)
This is not, however, a lesson in technology. It’s about what can happen when the brain believes what it reads. Two examples: one about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India; one about viral e-mail.
Within seconds of the Mumbai attacks this week that killed at least 119 and left hundreds more injured, hundreds of 140-word or less posts flooded Twitter. These “tweets” as they are known are simple messages, tiny pieces of information that, in this case, offered the first news from eyewitnesses in Mumbai. We posted the Twitter link on rrstar.com so that our readers could follow the news out of India as it happened.
Usually “tweets” are little more than “Linda is petting the cats right now,” but when major news happens, Twitter posts offer insight only those at the scene can provide. We used Twitter to follow the NIU campus killings earlier this year.
That’s the good news about the networking capacity of Twitter. The bad news ought to be obvious: A lot of people use social networking sites to spread rumors, gossip and just plain nonsense. These trolls get a kick out of making stuff up, turning partial truths into overblown fear-mongering. We saw plenty of that in the presidential campaign and it happened with the tweeting out of Mumbai. CNN.com did a good wrap-up piece on the Mumbai Twitter posts.
Viral e-mail is probably more familiar to you. It’s all those e-mails your friends forward to you with notes with some form of “a friend I trust sent me this and asked that I forward it to you. It is true.” I get dozens of them from readers who are convinced they’ve been forwarded news that needs to be printed — and it often has a message that says the “mainstream media is covering this up.”
I have yet to read a viral e-mail that’s actually newsworthy. Often they have some element of fact, but the context is missing or the fact has been twisted to support an untrue conclusion. Before you forward these e-mails, check them out on snopes.com. Snopes does an excellent job of vetting the facts in these notorious e-mails.
Social networking and digital sharing are awesome technologies and used honestly they are a superb way of sharing news and information. The challenge is knowing which information is true. Start with this: If you don’t know the original source, doubt the information. If the source is the ubiquitous “Anonymous,” really, really distrust it. Then, research the information across multiple sources, comparing and contrasting how each source is interpreting the facts and context. If you’re using bloggers as your sources, make certain the blogger is doing original reporting and research and not just blowing off opinions.
Or, just stick with real journalists. Yeah, we make mistakes. Yeah, we sometimes let our opinions get in mix. But, we use original sources, we report on and quote multiple sources, and we generally get it right.
November 26th, 2008
OK, so it’s not “cool” to be thankful. Too many of us have turned so cynical — and the serious cynics appear to love trolling the Web — that we can find the bad news in everything. Anyone who is thankful gets accused of being, well, Pollyanna or silly or, heaven forbid, not serious enough. We admire the tough ones among us; we only pretend to admire the gentle and truly grateful.
But, I am thankful. This has been without a doubt the roughest year of my 36-year newsroom career. It caps three previous years, each of which I said were the most challenging. This was the year we laid off or bought out seven journalists who brought decades of community and institutional memory to the News Tower. Each of them has landed well; I see several regularly and I know they’re OK. But not having them in the newsroom remains an enormous loss.
It was a year in which the economy blasted off a cliff and continues to careen toward a frightening landing. The only questions remaining are whether we will land head first and die most certainly; or whether we will land full out, bloody, broken and on life support but with a slim chance of making it out alive. We are not finished with unemployment numbers that make us once again the worst in the state and well on our way to being number one in the country.
It was a year in which my beloved newspaper industry lost its vision and began imploding. Oh, we brought a lot of it on ourselves, but to see journalists and their employers fall so far so fast is stunning.
There are two kinds of brains in such chaos: the one that is energized by the possibilities and the one that is paralyzed by them. Far too many of us allow the chaos to lead to paralysis — and among those there can be no thankfulness. They find themselves locked into dark holes staring out as the mess crumbles in on them.
So, how in the world can I be thankful? Why am I energized by the possibilities that abound within such chaos? I could list a thousand ways, but let me share just one. Last week we held our annual newsroom staff meeting. We use the meeting to review what we’ve done in the past year and outline the plans for the coming year.
One would reasonably expect the mood of this year’s meeting to be particularly glum. Sure we were named best newspaper and best Web site in the state. Sure we won awards, launched new and successful products and did good stuff covering local news. But, that’s just stuff done while worrying about everything else.
After all, these are the journalists who rode that awful year with me; they know, even better than I, how tough it has been. I started the meeting by saying just that and I acknowledged the awful things we had weathered and the toll it had taken on all of us.
And then I asked this question: So, we all know that even in the middle of the worst year ever, there had to have been some good news. Anyone want to share one?
Hands went up all over the room and these usually taciturn, skeptical (some would say cynical) journalists talked over each other as they added yet another reason for celebrating: a story done well, an engagement announced, a new baby on the way, a promotion, and the list grew.
Maybe things like that happen in your staff meetings. They don’t happen in newsroom staff meetings — ever. That day it did happen. We clearly are not paralyzed by our fears.
Now, if you’re reading this online, post a comment and tell the world why you are thankful. If you’re reading it in Sunday’s newspaper, send me an e-mail at lgcunningham@rrstar.com.
Thanks be to God for the strength to find energy, not paralysis, in our fears.
November 20th, 2008
When you’re 13 not much matters except boys, your girlfriends, music and maybe must-do homework. Oh, and not liking being told what to do by your parents. At 13, you’re certainly not terribly distressed by who wins the presidential election, whether the stock market is up or down (as long as you keep getting an allowance), or what new political legislation is making its way through city council.
Not at 13. Not until the adult world crashes through your fluffy teenage cocoon. Not until it was Nov. 22, 1963, and you were 13 and in eighth grade algebra class and the teacher starts wandering around with tears streaming down her face and saying things like “oh, my God, the Russians will invade us now.”
Finally, she stopped fluttering like Henny Penny and turned to the class who was watching her in stunned horror — with no small amount of amusement, I should add — and explained: They just shot the president. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.
Ah. Dallas. Where’s that, we wondered from our classroom in Augusta, Ga. Kennedy we knew, well, sort of. The idea of a presidential shooting was so far removed from our 13-year-old reality that we simply sat there waiting. Waiting for cues: How are we supposed to respond? Do we cry like the teachers? Should we be worried that the Russians were to bomb us in our sleep as the teachers were saying was going to happen? Were we supposed to go to our next class? Was the test in next period going to be postponed? What about cheerleading practice after school?
They let us out of school early that day and we hopped the bus or walked home to watch hours and hours of television, where we could stay up late and learn things no 13-year-old should need to know.
That was the day my generation of baby boomers learned our world was not safe. The day we learned adults didn’t understand much more than we did, and they certainly did not have the answers we sought. They weren’t so omnipotent after all. That was the day baby boomers learned that big and powerful — as an individual or a country — was not a guarantee of immortality. We were never the same trusting children after that November day.
We have spent the past 45 years distrusting, wearing a mantle of cynicism that too often precluded celebrating the best humankind offers. We became the hardest working, most demanding generation in 100 years and we grasped for ourselves the best we could get with little thought about what was good for the group, for the whole.
Good for me, that was what we learned on Nov. 22, 1963. Our over-reaching “what’s good for me” shows itself in auto executives who fly corporate jets to Washington to beg for a handout. It shows in our unrelenting militarism that says do it our way or we’ll whop you up-side the head. It shows in a staggering greed that created a global financial scheme that rewarded the ones inside and is devastating those outside.
At 13, we are not supposed to know that bad things happen to good people. When we learn too soon, we pay the price for a generation to come.
November 5th, 2008
Tonight as the newsroom quieted down, settling into the last hour of detailed work before the press start, I shared with them this note. It’s for them, and it’s personal. I wanted you to share it, as well.
Tonight you were part of history…
Every 100 years or so, a wrenching shift in generational history takes place. The last one came in the late 1920s, and the world that followed was different. Tonight marks another such before-and-after. Coupled with the tectonic shifts in the global economy and the world’s unrest, Barack Obama’s presidency will create the environment in which a new world will grow. We can choose to create the new world of hope that Obama so eloquently challenges us to become; we can choose to do otherwise. May we choose wisely.
I watched you tonight, each of you in this newsroom who did what needed doing, who rose successfully to master a hundred headaches, almost disasters and assorted profanity-inspiring glitches. You worked as a team. You came in on your days off, stayed late, came back, and connected yourselves to what journalists have done since we drew stick figures on cave walls: We told the stories of a people.
Today and tonight you told that story well. You served almost 300,000 people in the Rock River Valley. You did important work that cannot be replaced by a technology, a widget or some “user generated content” provider. You worked with integrity, accuracy, credibility and you maintained the trust between us and our readers. We in this News Tower have done this so many times before. We told the stories of space shuttles, of tornadoes and NIU campus killings. Of elections in 2000 so close we couldn’t call them. Of World Trade Centers and wars in Vietnam. Of Nixon and 25 percent unemployment. Of children dancing on stage at the Coronado. Of weddings and funerals. Of state titles in sports. We tell the stories that make the muscle of who we are, of who our readers are.
For me, for the “old” ones in this room, we have been here in the Tower through so many of them. Tonight, though, is different. Tonight is a before-and-after moment. I am humbled that I could share it with you, with a newsroom that knows in its soul — from our most senior staff to our youngest — that we do more than a job. We do the right thing. I am proud of you. Godspeed.
November 4th, 2008
I’ve been in some newsroom somewhere on election nights since 1970. There is no better place to be. Some things have changed beyond recognition. Back then, we counted resulted by hand, added them on spreadsheets with calculators and prayed we’d get enough results to be able to declare winners for the next day’s newspaper. It was not unusual to go to press with less than 70 percent of the vote counted. I can remember as recently as the early 1990s, when we had yards and yards of blank newsprint circling the walls of the newsroom, each with a different race being tallied by hand.
Today, it’s all electronic. Quieter, quicker, less frenzied, far more accurate, and, yes, a bit less exciting.
There are things that have never changed. Pizza remains the junk food of choice in every newsroom. And, not the healthy kind. The news report remains fundamentally “who beat,” with enough “people on the street” reporting to keep the numbers from bumping together.
It’s always electrically quiet in the newsroom between 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on election night The reporting is done, the polls are closing, the plans are in place. Those who went home to take a nap are heading back in. Preliminary page designs, which used to hang on the walls, now sit in their electronic file folders. (And, yes, we have two different ones ready, depending on the outcome. In 2000, we had three….)
The late shifts await the onslaught of results, stories, photos — and now videos and interactive graphics — that must all be processed in just a couple hours. We wander aimlessly and do stuff at our desks that we probably ought to have done several weeks ago but just didn’t have the quiet moments to do. I’ve been reviewing the 2009 budget and writing operational plans. Not exciting, but necessary, and well, it occupies the brain until the results first trickle, then flood, in.
I can hear the ebb and flow of laughter in the newsroom and the clicking of keyboards. A walk through the newsroom shows desktop PCs with Facebook pages, an rrstar.com election site, a photo gallery probably from a family event, a story from the New York Times and another from Fox News. Killing time. Now I smell the pizza. That means we are close to 7 p.m. and an hour closer to “back to work.”
Thirty eight years of election nights. Each with its own personality. All with one thing in common: On these nights, the people with whom I work do good stuff.
November 4th, 2008
No matter where — or when — you vote today, you’ll be standing in line with like-minded folks. If you’re like I, in the past you’d swing by the polling place, pop in, color in some circles, chat up the poll workers for a couple minutes and whip back out, usually in 15 minutes from door to door. Not today. As we hear from reporters and voters scattered around the Rock River Valley, this will, indeed, be a record turnout.
The challenge is the number of those little cardboard voting booths. First Free had about eight, and could have used three times that many. Be patient. Please don’t let the lines scare you away. They move pretty quickly, the company is good — and it’s definitely for a good cause.
I got to First Free by 6:20-ish and was downtown in the News Tower before 7:30.
Be sure, too, to check out the photo galleries assistant online news editor Andy Brown is posting to rrstar.com. Whether you’re an Obama or McCain supporter, these collections of Associated Press photos will make you proud to be part of this American system.
November 4th, 2008
Standing in line at First Free church with a couple hundred good folks all ready to do one thing: vote today. the line at 6:20 a.m. is 20 minutes long. By 6:45, it’s headed for an hour. It will be like this all day.
And no one minds. Smiles and friendly chatter among young and old, black, white, Asian and Latino. I feel the electric air. Everyone here knows it’s a day they will talk about the rest of our lives.
Where were you when ….
I am almost there. Ten minutes max. My turn…
November 3rd, 2008
Got a call this morning asking if I knew how and where to find a copy of the sample ballot. I know we published it in the paper a week or so ago, but in case you want you own copy today, here’s a good way to get one, along with a ton of other election info:
Winnebago County Clerk: Polling places, sample ballots
RRStar.com: Great “compare the candidates” interactive tool that includes national and local elections, background on the candidates and let’s you create your own sample ballot of just your choices. Much more than we published on Sunday in the print Voters’ Guide.
Rockford voters: The site’s not as deep as Winnebago County, but it’s the best place to locate your polling place if you live in the city.
October 30th, 2008
If the Register Star stopped publishing would rrstar.com cover the news as well? Yes, someday. Web news is in its infancy. It needs its mother around for a while to hold its hand until it can go it along. How long? At least 10 years; maybe 20.
The best way to ensure a vibrant, high-quality, credible Web-only news world for the future? Buy a newspaper subscription today.
There’s a good discussion going on something I posted yesterday.
October 29th, 2008
David Carr writes for the New York Times and nytimes.com. He knows news for print and news for online — and he “gets it”: If print news operations cannibalize their core operations (the staff that does news, information and advertising), there soon will be little or nothing of credible value on the Web.
It’s a conundrum and a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy: You like getting your news, information and advertising online. Untrue though it is, common wisdom says “newspapers are dead because everyone is going online.” So, doesn’t it make sense to stop printing newspapers and just do everything online?
Carr does a superb job of laying out the landscape in a print-and-Web column this week. (You might have to register to read it, but here’s the link.) To whet your appetite, here’s a quick excerpt:
“At the recent American Magazine Conference, one of the speakers worried that if the great brands of journalism — the trusted news sources readers have relied on — were to vanish, then the Web itself would quickly become a “cesspool” of useless information. That kind of hand-wringing is a staple of industry gatherings.
“But in this case, it wasn’t an old journalism hack lamenting his industry. It was Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google.”
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