Archive - 197, 0
The Future of the Newspaper
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 11/19/2008 - 19:38
The future of newspapers took on a new urgency in Connecticut when Editor and Published wrote about Two Connecticut Dailies Facing Shuttering if a Buyer isn’t Found. Those of us that follow media discussions at conference after conference may have grown a tad weary of the topic. Sure, there is a constant stream of stories about newspapers cutting back and dire predictions about the impact this will have on news coverage and our democracy, but the world continues to function. This, however, if something different, people warn me. Two newspapers may shut down completely.
I remain unimpressed. I remember when cities lost their morning or evening newspapers and continued to function. I remember when small towns lost their papers and everyone still seemed to know everything that was going on. No, the concern about the possible demise of local newspapers sounds an awful lot like the possible demise of banks or car manufacturers, and I expect that we’ll get through all of these events just fine.
Rick Green, of the Hartford Courant has an interview with Steve Collins, who is a reporter for one of the newspapers facing potential demise. Rick writes, “News blogs, which are popping up all over, aren't the answer, Collins said, because they can't possibly provide the breadth of a local paper.”
I appreciate Collins’ situation. He may be out of a job soon. Yet, I’m not sure that I agree that blogs can’t possible provide the breadth of a local paper. I’m not finding much in the local papers around here about the Woodbridge Board of Education meetings or the Woodbridge Democratic Town Committee meetings. With the exception of the videotaping of the Board of Education meetings for the government channel, I don’t believe there is anyone besides me reporting on these meetings. As to finding news about local births or high school sports scores, I’d much rather read the blog post by a grandmother whose daughter has just delivered a new grandchild or the father who has just seen his daughter win a swim meet.
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Rate on NewsTrustWordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 11/19/2008 - 08:43
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Racking Cider
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/18/2008 - 21:06
Today Kim and I siphoned off the cider from the first firmentation jug into the second. We will give it a few days to settle and then bottle it. We poured off a glass to see how it came out, and we're very pleased.
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The Tale of Three Superintendents
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/18/2008 - 15:29
As I write this, I believe my seven year old daughter is sitting in the superintendent’s office explaining to him what she has said online. Those of you who have followed my coverage of the Doninger case might expect me to be irate. In fact, I am ecstatic. Let me explain.
When Avery Doninger was a junior at Lewis Mills High School, she was secretary of the student council. She worked hard to help organize a battle of the bands at her school and at one student council meeting was told that due to scheduling issues, the Jamfest would need to be rescheduled or moved to a different location. She, and some fellow students reached out to the community to encourage parents to contact the school administration and urge them to reconsider.
The school administration did not take kindly to being contacted by parents and confronted Avery and the other students, telling them that unless certain conditions were met, conditions that Avery did not believe were possible, Jamfest would be cancelled.
That evening at home, she wrote in her personal diary something to the effect, “Thanks to the douchebags at the central office, Jamfest is cancelled.” She went on to describe how all the calls from parents had pissed off people at the central office and she encouraged more parents to call.
The problem is that her personal diary was on Livejournal, a website where many people write there personal thoughts so their friends can see them. Some weeks later, the son of the superintendent found the diary entry and pointed it out to her mother. Her mother responded by forbidding Avery to run for re-election as class secretary. Nonetheless, Avery won the election as a write-in candidate, which the school refused to recognize.
Avery has since graduated and is spending this year as a volunteer for AmeriCorps. However, a lawsuit lingers. Avery’s mother did not believe that the school should punish children for things that they do at home. That should be the purview of the parents. Mrs. Doninger spoke with the school about appropriate punishments for using language that some find objectionable. Yet the school administration was intransigent.
Mrs. Doninger then filed a suit against the school for violating her daughter’s freedom of speech. As is typical for cases like this, they move slowly. The school argued to have the case moved from the Connecticut courts to the Federal courts. The Doningers sought a preliminary injunction to allow Avery to take her duly elected position as class secretary, but the District court did not grant the injunction. This was appealed to the Second Circuit which did not override the judges decision.
Since then, the superintendent has retired. The principal has been reprimanded for emails that she has sent violating students’ privacy. Some of these emails have been released because of Freedom of Information requests and paint a picture of a vindictive school administration seeking vengeance as opposed to protecting the school from significant disruption. In fact, it appears that any significant disruption stems not from the blog post, nor even from the email the students sent, but from the initial decision of the school administration, yet again postponing or canceling the Jamfest.
Last week, I was back in District Court, where the defense was arguing for a summary dismissal of the case. The plaintiffs presented evidence that had not been available during the hearings for the preliminary injunction and argued that the dispute of facts of the case warrants a full jury trial. The defense argued that the facts in dispute were not material and that even if they were, the whole thing should be dismissed because of qualified immunity.
The qualified immunity argument seemed especially twisted. To show qualified immunity, you need to show that reasonable people would argue whether or not the principal’s actions were legitimate. Much of this hung on whether or not reasonable people might guess that at some point in the near future the courts might overturn previous decisions that the reach of schools to punish students for what they say stops at the school gate.
Now, a reasonable school administration would probably settle this out of court, unless the school administration really wants to assert its right to reach into students’ bedrooms. So far, such reasonableness seems to have eluded the Region 10 School District.
This takes me back to Dr. Stella, who is the superintendent for the Woodbridge School District. Like many school districts, the Woodbridge District is struggling to find how to use the Internet to enhance the education of its students. Last week, Dr. Stella attended the convention of the Connection Association of Boards of Education (CABE). At this conference he attended a session entitled, “New Ways of Communicating in an Electronic Age”. The presenter was the third superintendent that I wish to highlight.
David Title is superintendent of the Bloomfield Public Schools and he spoke about his blog. As far as I can tell, Dr. Title has not used the word “douchebag” to describe people that he disagrees with. Instead, he has set an example of how superintendents can use the Internet to get the message out about what is going on at the school.
I can only imagine what would have happened if Avery attended the Bloomfield Public Schools. I imagine him telling Avery that he understands that her post was on a private diary at home and published on the Internet, which gives space for more emotional outbursts, but that he feels she should work on communicating her views in a more positive and articulate manner. Perhaps he would even have asked her to write a guest post, on his blog, about how students could better deal with their frustrations and be heard by the school administration and the public. That would have been a true example of using blogs to communicate and educate. Yet, unfortunately, Avery was not in the Bloomfield Public School system.
I, on the other hand, am fortunate. I went to the Board of Education meeting last night where the CABE conference and Superintendent Title’s presentation was discussed. After the meeting, I had an opportunity to talk with Dr. Stella about the issues of making sure that the Internet is used as effectively as possible to further students’ education while at the same time, not putting students at undue risk.
I mentioned Fiona’s Radio Show which she does every Sunday evening at 6:30. Fiona and I talk about the events of the week. It provides a great opportunity for some quality father-daughter time, and is building an archive of recordings that Fiona will be able to go back years hence, to find out what her life was like when she was seven. I suggested that perhaps some Sunday, Dr. Stella could call into Fiona’s radio show.
Dr. Stella was intrigued. He suggested that Fiona should find a time to come down to his office and tell him about her radio show. That is why my daughter has gone to the superintendent’s office this afternoon and why I am pleased about it. Dr. Stella and Dr. Title are examples of superintendents working hard to use new communication tools to improve their schools. I’m sorry that Avery didn’t have a superintendent like that to deal with, but I hope that this story, and others like it will be an encouragement to superintendents across Connecticut to move into a Twenty First Century that teaches and encourages intelligent use of new communications media.
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The Woodbridge Strategic School Profile
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/18/2008 - 12:40
Every year, the Connecticut State Department of Education issues Strategic School Profiles, which get discussed at the Board of Education meetings for the schools across the state at their November meetings. Last night, the Woodbridge Board of Education discussed the Strategic School Profile for Beacher Road. Unfortunately, the new strategic school profiles are not yet available online either at the State Website or at the Woodbridge Board of Education Website.
For a data hound, it was a great meeting. There was all kinds of little tidbits. 3.1% of the students are classified as talented and gifted. 8.8% are listed as participating in special education. 17.4% are from minorities, with Asian American students making up the largest group. Board members asked questions about trends and further details to determine if the policies and budgets of the school were having the desired effect. Some of this became fairly detailed and the superintendent, Dr. Stella, spoke about the need to prioritize which areas of additional research the board would like his staff to pursue.
As I listened to this, my mind wandered back to the workshop on Watchdog Reporting that I attended on the previous weekend. All of this information is available online and any board member, blogger, member of the press or citizen of the town can easily go out and to their own research.
Some of the data is in PDF files which are harder to extract data from. Some of the data is in a database that can be queried from a web page. There is also a summary of much of the data available as a spreadsheet. An enterprising researcher would contact people from the State Department of Education to see how much of the data could be obtained in a raw format that could be loaded into spreadsheets and databases.
One statistic that people expressed concern over was the percentage of students passing all four fitness tests. In 2005/6, 41.1% of fourth graders completed all four fitness tests. The number was unchanged for 2006/7. I don’t have the numbers for 2007/8 but I seem to recall them as being about the same. Yet for schools in the state, it was only 33.6% in 2005/6 and 33.5% for 2006/7. It may be that there is something wrong with the tests. For sixth graders, the numbers were different in 2005/6 36.6% passed all four tests, but in 2006/7 climbed to 62.6%
As the economy falters, people will be looking even more closely at the money spent on our schools and how effective the money is being used. In addition, there may be more demands on the school as more students need free or reduced price lunches and more students need after school care through programs like extended day as more parents need to work to make ends meet.
While the school appears to do a good job of analyzing the data to make sure that our students needs are met as fully and cost-effectively as possible, having school board members and members of the public go out and analyze the data is useful to help find other ways that our schools can be improved.
This leads to another part of the report. In Woodbridge there is one computer per 2.9 students. This is slightly better than the one computer per 3.6 students which is the state average. However, as of the 2006/7 report, only 67.3% of these computers were high or moderate power, compared to 89.5% on a statewide basis. The school continues to refresh its computers, and I suspect the number is much better now, but it is an area that needs vigilance. Beyond that, we need to make sure that besides having good computers, we have teachers that can help the students make the best use of these computers and, ideally, that this learning gets brought into the parents homes so parents can make better use of the Internet as well, like being able to research strategic school profiles.
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Making Sense of #motrinmoms
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/17/2008 - 09:39
Recently, Motrin created an advertisement which started off with “Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. In theory, it seems like a great idea.” It continues with, “Supposedly it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the bod tend to cry less than others, what about me?” The voice-over goes on to say the pain is worth it because “it totally makes me look like an official mom so if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.” All of this is part of Motrin’s trademarked campaign slogan, “We feel your pain”.
Mommy bloggers were in an uproar and it was the top topic on Twitter for much of the weekend. This has resulted in a predictable backlash with people asking if that many people can have PMS on the same day or we there wasn’t more outrage about a bill to combat child pornography barely passed.
I’m not an ad exec, nor a psychologist, but I have a few different thoughts to share on this. First, I should note that the doctors with one of the highest premiums for malpractice insurance is obstetricians. People will put up with a lot of pain, but if you mess with their kids, well there is an old saying that Hell has no fury like a woman scorned. Well, there is a much worse fury, that of parent whose feels that someone or something is getting in the way of them nurturing and protecting their offspring.
Another tack on this is this whole, “we feel your pain.” Have you ever tried to comfort someone who is suffering? Perhaps they are simply depressed. Perhaps they are morning the loss of a loved one. Perhaps they are suffering from some other type of grief. Telling that person that you know exactly what their feeling, or suggesting they should just take a pill and snap out of it; not only is that not particularly effective, it can be down right dangerous.
So yes, it would be great if the outrage and indignation of #motrinmoms could be redirected to outrage and indignation about our broken health care system, about poverty, and issues of child care, and many other related issues, but mocking a mother’s parenting choices hits closer to home than any of this.
Now, let’s take another step back and look at this in terms of what is going on in advertising, marketing and society. Last year, I attended a couple advertising and marketing conferences where the speakers dismissed Twitter as being inconsequential. Motrin has already started sending out apology emails. The website is down. Many hypothesize that it won’t be back up until they get through their crisis meeting this morning.
Whether or not you believe that a lot of people should or shouldn’t have gotten pissed off about the advertisement, a lot of people did get pissed off, and I’ve always thought that a number one rule of advertising and marketing was to not piss off your customers.
Beyond that, the customers are well connected thanks to sites like Twitter and various mommy blogging sites. Smart advertising checks to see how the ad will play with a focus group before releasing it into the wild. Really smart advertising understands that media is a 24/7 phenomenon and you need people standing by to address a crisis as it happens.
In the old days, you could do that by having a public relations person staying in touch with traditional media outlets. Things have changed. Now, you need community savvy people staying in touch with online communities, like Twitter. Hollywood2020 has a report about contacting the ad agency responsible for the debacle and no one at the ad agency even know about the online storm.
Stepping even further back, the choices we make about how we parent are all part of the culture wars, and at least one blog has started talking about this as another skirmish in these wars. This is another aspect worth following.
So, why am I so interested in this? This is a fascinating study in the role of social media. It is fascinating to watch how this traverses the Motrin website, twitter, blogs, YouTube and on into traditional media. It will be a case study for years to come, and you can participate right now.
I did my part. Regular readers of my blog will have seen my parody of the Motrin ad. If not, scroll down and take a look.
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Recent ma.noglia bookmarks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/17/2008 - 04:01
Here are pages I've recently bookmarked with ma.gnolia:
Salon.com Life | I can has cheezburger ... and pathos?
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My Motrin Ad Parody for #motrinmoms
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/16/2008 - 21:42
After all the discussions today on Twitter about Motrin's horrible ad, I figured I would make my parody on it. I whipped it together quickly loosely transcribing their text, and recording it on my laptop (poor audio quality), and slapping on some images. Enjoy!
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My response to #motrinmoms
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/16/2008 - 20:17
The Twitterstorm dujour is about Motrin’s new online video. I’ve loosely transcribed the video:
Posting videos online seems to be in fashion.
I mean in theory it’s a great idea
There’s YouTube, Facebook, Blip.tv and who knows what else they’ve come up with
Supposedly it’s a real bonding experience
They say that customers you reach via social media tend to complain less than others
But what about you?
Do Ad execs that fail at social media cry more than those who don’t?
These things put a ton of strain on your agency.
Did I mention your reputation?
Sure, you’ll put up with the pain, because it’s a good kind of pain.
It’s for your client.
Plus it totally makes you look like you’re a hip agency.
So if you’re ads look tired and crazy, people will understand why.
Motrin, we feel your pain.
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Investigative Reporters, Editors and Bloggers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/16/2008 - 10:07
Yesterday, I attended a workshop on Watchdog Journalism hosted by Southern Connecticut State University and the Connecticut Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. In essence, it was two Investigative Reporters and Editors workshops combined into one full day of information.
The talk was very oriented towards people in traditional media, using buzzwords of the industry that I had times had to stop and figure out what they were saying. In addition, it was oriented towards people working in a newsroom, addressing issues about how to pitch stories to editors, how to make sure that the media companies’ legal department was properly informed of your investigations and so on.
Nonetheless, the conference was a treasure trove of ideas and hints on how to do better investigations and I would love to see more bloggers participate in workshops like this.
One idea that got me thinking was the admonition about getting organized and having a mix of quick hit stories together with stories that take longer to develop. I don’t know how I compare to other bloggers, but I’m not particularly organized. Almost all of my blog posts are ones that I write as a quick hit. Something happens, and I write a blog post. I might spend some time digging into the data for a story, doing some background work, and verifying information, but all of this is in a quick hit mode with the time between conceiving of a blog post and the time when the post is online being anywhere from less than an hour to less than a day.
In terms of doing watchdog journalism, you may need to spend a lot of time gathering data and information, watching trends develop and noting when something out of the ordinary happens. I have so many irons in the fire right now, I’m just not sure how I will incorporate this into my blogging, but the idea is intriguing and I’ll look for a way to get this done.
Another useful hint they had was that when you are working on a large investigative story, try to have a nugget of a small story inside of it so that if the large story collapses, you still have some sort of story to run with. Likewise, they spoke of the advantages of doing a “rolling investigation” where you come out with your first story, and then continue the investigation and do follow up afterwards.
This has the advantage of getting stories out the door, as opposed to working on a large story and then for some reason, never managing to get it finished. In addition, once your first installment is out, you may get more tips and you may change the course of what is happening. Follow-up stories add pressure for reform.
One of Kim’s top issues last year at Common Cause was the Citizens Elections Program. We have now gone through our first cycle with the program and there are plenty of interesting issues to follow up on. How did people spend their campaign funds? What parts of the program did not work as well as they could have? When the General Assembly gathers, how will the program affect the interaction between lobbyists and legislators?
Another interesting story to follow is ACORN. Now that the election is over, what has happened to the various cases brought against ACORN? What is happening to counter cases? Some of this will require longer term research and digging.
Another thing that was repeated frequently was that when you do longer term reports, write sections as you go. It captures the feelings of the moment better.
With this setting the tone for the day, we dug into how to do better investigative report. Neil Reisner of Florida International University spoke about making effective use of the Internet. This is something of particular interest to bloggers, and Neil’s comments started off provocatively suggesting that the Internet is Evil, that Google is the Devil and the Wikipedia is worst of all. They are too easy and the discourage reporters from being enterprising. We end up using the easiest source, one that shows up in Google, instead of the most informative source, and they may even lead us to false information.
He spoke about the invisible Internet, those parts of the internet that have not been indexed by search engines. He claimed that two thirds of the Internet is invisible to the search engines, and as an example, he noted websites that you can enter information into a form to gather information, but that the information from the results of the search is not something that gets indexed.
He provided a great list of resources faster than anyone could copy them down. Fortunately, however, he saved his presentations and will be making them available online. As I write this, the PowerPoint for his second presentation is up at betterwatchdog.wetpaint.com, and the PowerPoint to his first presentation should be up there soon.
He noted using sites like reporter.org to find resources and links to other journalism organizations and PowerReporting to find online sites for searching all kinds of data that doesn’t show up in Google.
He noted various government portals such as FedStats, First Gov, GPO’s list of databases, GAO Reports, and of particular interest, the GAO’s Official Guide to Special Investigators. I should find time to simply go out and explore these sites in much more detail. Neil noted that if you get yourself on the GPO mailing list and you’ll never be lonely again. He also talked about Census data and getting on their mailing list.
For international searches, he recommended the CIA’s Factbook, NationMaster which serves as an aggregator of various internation reports and the UN’s website.
One useful hint he mentioned was using White Pages ‘find neighbors’ search when gathering information for a story, as well as sites like Pipl for deeper searches about people online.
Later in the day, Neil taught another section on understanding the dataflow. Information online may start as a paper form filled out at a government office, or as data entered directly into a computer. It may have been aggregated and if you dig deep, you may be able to gain access to the underlying data and or documents. He encouraged people to always ask for the underlying data. He also told a great story about how he found one person by searching for tangential information. “You look for what you’re looking for, but you also look for what you’re not looking for.“
Tisha Thompson of WTTG, the Fox affiliate in Washington DC also taught two sessions. One was “The art of finding and cultivating sources” and the second was “The art of the Interview”. In many ways, the most important points that she spoke about were being respectful and honest. Treat people nicely, recognizing what they are going through and they will give you the information you are looking for. Don’t burn people. Don’t ambush them. Be careful of legal issues. Make sure you keep proper notes, yet also make sure you protect yourself and any informants you have, especially if they are a whistleblower.
It was great to hear her perspective on interviewing, about why the Palin and Couric interview was so good, why interviewers might need to appear dumb at times. She spoke about carefully orchestrating an interview, especially if it is a confrontational interview, and how some people will end up talking in the language of their profession and you have to dumb down what you’re saying and asking to get them to explain things in a way that people not in their profession will understand.
Other sessions included an attorney for the Freedom of Information Commission talking about how to get the information you need using FOI requests and complaints, a person from the Wall Street Journal talking about the importance of knowing how to use spreadsheets, database and statistical analysis packages, and Doug Haddix who is IRE’s current training director talking about how to make stories bullet proof.
It was an extremely valuable workshop which I’m glad I attended. Hopefully what I learned there will improve my blogging, and I’ll be able to get more interesting watchdog stories added to my blog going forward.
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