It is 4 a.m. Saturday and Nordic people are having a party someplace near me on the second floor of the Marriott.
They are slamming their doors and saying "Jah" loudly.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Show and Steal
Two sessions at SFJ are public sharing of ideas. The number of ideas is overwhelming, with what felt like a hundred pdfs to look at.
Lisa Glowinski's organization, More Content Now of Downers Grove, IL, has provided a very nice survey in Dropbox. Here's that link:
Lisa Glowinski's organization, More Content Now of Downers Grove, IL, has provided a very nice survey in Dropbox. Here's that link:
Voice
Roy Peter Clark provided a simple way of explaining what is meant by the writer's "voice." It is not that all of our prose should be easy to read out loud, although this is increasingly a requirement among multimedia reporters.
A writer's authentic voice conveys the illusion of that writer speaking. It's not about aural performance, it's about personality that comes off the page — and it is assisted by the white space created by punctuation and paragraphing.
Right as he said this, I grabbed a pen and made a note on the back of a scrap of paper: "Tell Bobby Ampezzan to stop leaving his deletions in notes format while he's revising his stories."
Clark quoted someone named Don Frye <sp?>: Voice is the cumulative effects of all the moves that the writer uses to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader.
But "voice" is not about oral/aural performances, even though reading the sentences aloud can be a good tool for coaching a writer to recognize his awkward phrasing and lack of clarity — unless reporters insist upon reading their crap aloud in their very most pompous imitation Walter Cronkite.
Clark admitted that sometimes, as he is recording himself reading his books for their audiobook publication, he finds himself revising the syntax. Although his producers usually catch him, there are bits of his audiobooks that do not match the print product.
(Also, Eric Deggans told us that since he began doing his radio commentaries for NPR, he has been coached to drop apostrophe-type clauses and put all his sentences into a simpler noun-verb order.)
Oral performance requires a different cadence.
Thinking about this section of Clark's talk, I have decided that here is yet another reason we still need print: not merely for the experience of reading while holding paper or the convenience of its durability and persistence, but also because print allows a style of expression unavailable in the oral and even the digital formats.
White space reinforces cadence.
And layout conveys a mood. Even in handwritten forms.
A writer's authentic voice conveys the illusion of that writer speaking. It's not about aural performance, it's about personality that comes off the page — and it is assisted by the white space created by punctuation and paragraphing.
Right as he said this, I grabbed a pen and made a note on the back of a scrap of paper: "Tell Bobby Ampezzan to stop leaving his deletions in notes format while he's revising his stories."
Clark quoted someone named Don Frye <sp?>: Voice is the cumulative effects of all the moves that the writer uses to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader.
But "voice" is not about oral/aural performances, even though reading the sentences aloud can be a good tool for coaching a writer to recognize his awkward phrasing and lack of clarity — unless reporters insist upon reading their crap aloud in their very most pompous imitation Walter Cronkite.
Clark admitted that sometimes, as he is recording himself reading his books for their audiobook publication, he finds himself revising the syntax. Although his producers usually catch him, there are bits of his audiobooks that do not match the print product.
(Also, Eric Deggans told us that since he began doing his radio commentaries for NPR, he has been coached to drop apostrophe-type clauses and put all his sentences into a simpler noun-verb order.)
Oral performance requires a different cadence.
Thinking about this section of Clark's talk, I have decided that here is yet another reason we still need print: not merely for the experience of reading while holding paper or the convenience of its durability and persistence, but also because print allows a style of expression unavailable in the oral and even the digital formats.
White space reinforces cadence.
And layout conveys a mood. Even in handwritten forms.
$30 weekend
 |
| Jim Haag |
Virginian-Pilot was the source of several easy to pull-off ideas in the Show and Steal, and it's the employer of this utterly charming man, Jim Haag.
Jim is funny and willing and supportive of everyone, but if you really want to talk to him, find the smoking area and wait there.
Photo stories idea
 |
| This is from Sara Quinn's handout showing various ways to tell a story and amplify the telling using visual elements. |
Let Photo have a guaranteed quarter page routinely, to tell a story and be a bigger byline. Call it theirs. Let them own it.
They shoot a lot of potential stories they don't get to tell in print — printable stories that are latent in the online galleries they shoot already.
Writing tools
My introduction to Roy Peter Clark was so confusing at the conference's opening reception that I was dreading a bit the session he led for us on our last day.
And so I was wrong.
He's entertaining and he uses musical illustrations and his arguments involve a lot of synthesis and metaphor, but the info he laid out for us Saturday morning was clear and sure did look like a set of coaching tools we could use, to help our interns learn the difference between reports and stories.
He has a set of writing tools on iTunesU. These are podcasts.
Then he has four books, Writing Tools (2006, 10th printing, 100K in print), The Glamor of Grammar (11 chapters on punctuation, "and I don't apologize for that one bit"), Help for Writers was designed as mobile app ($1.99, parts of writing process as he understands them, 10 solutions to the main problems of each), How to Write Short.
He's under contract to Little Brown for Undressing Gatsby, what writers can learn from rereading the classics.
For instance, in weaker writing, the best part of the story often can be found hiding inside a sentence.
Find it, and rearrange the words to take advantage of the power of cadence to evoke importance (which he referred to as "heat").
"The Queen, my lord, is dead."
In his day, English allowed Shakespeare other options for the order of the words —
• The Queen is dead, my lord.
• My lord, the Queen is dead.
• Dead is the Queen, my lord. [I am supplying this one, he didn't.]
In our day, thanks to Star Wars, we can add
• Dead the Queen is, my lord.
In the version that Shakespeare chose, if you numbered the main words in their order of importance to the meaning, Queen=2, lord=3, dead=1
The most emphatic word is at the end, dead.
This is an ancient observation, he told us, citing as evidence a line he found in an essay by some Roman rhetorician from the age of Nero that Clark called "the Q man" (Quintilus? I have no idea ...), to wit: Sometimes orators find that they'll take a word or phrase that's imbedded in the meaning and lay it at the end.
And as in the common practice in humor, the punchline should come at the end.
So his point was, we could improve a lot of our prose at once simply by remembering that the punchline goes at the end of the sentence.
And so I was wrong.
He's entertaining and he uses musical illustrations and his arguments involve a lot of synthesis and metaphor, but the info he laid out for us Saturday morning was clear and sure did look like a set of coaching tools we could use, to help our interns learn the difference between reports and stories.
He has a set of writing tools on iTunesU. These are podcasts.
Then he has four books, Writing Tools (2006, 10th printing, 100K in print), The Glamor of Grammar (11 chapters on punctuation, "and I don't apologize for that one bit"), Help for Writers was designed as mobile app ($1.99, parts of writing process as he understands them, 10 solutions to the main problems of each), How to Write Short.
He's under contract to Little Brown for Undressing Gatsby, what writers can learn from rereading the classics.
For instance, in weaker writing, the best part of the story often can be found hiding inside a sentence.
Find it, and rearrange the words to take advantage of the power of cadence to evoke importance (which he referred to as "heat").
In explaining how to "order words for emphasis," he began by asking us to think about a line from MacBeth:
In his day, English allowed Shakespeare other options for the order of the words —
• The Queen is dead, my lord.
• My lord, the Queen is dead.
• Dead is the Queen, my lord. [I am supplying this one, he didn't.]
In our day, thanks to Star Wars, we can add
• Dead the Queen is, my lord.
In the version that Shakespeare chose, if you numbered the main words in their order of importance to the meaning, Queen=2, lord=3, dead=1
The most emphatic word is at the end, dead.
This is an ancient observation, he told us, citing as evidence a line he found in an essay by some Roman rhetorician from the age of Nero that Clark called "the Q man" (Quintilus? I have no idea ...), to wit: Sometimes orators find that they'll take a word or phrase that's imbedded in the meaning and lay it at the end.
And as in the common practice in humor, the punchline should come at the end.
So his point was, we could improve a lot of our prose at once simply by remembering that the punchline goes at the end of the sentence.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Ethics in a Digital Age
Kelly McBride, senior faculty at Poynter, is widely interviewed as an expert on ethics in media, and she and Tom Rosenstiel compiled an anthology I'd like to read: The New Ethics of Journalism. It proposes a new code for ethical journalists.
She predicts that journalism ethics will change in this age of [insert your favorite cliche about the wild west of digital communications].
In the past, the pillars of ethics for our business were basically Truth, Independence, Minimize Harm. We needed independence so we could create a mass audience, for our business model. Being independent meant people could trust us. And we vigorously guarded "the essential stewardship role a free press plays in our society." (That's from her handout, which I'll duplicate for you.)
But today, independence means almost nothing because our audience has seen totally too much failure from too many information providers. Totally.
Independence is an old value. Transparency is the new value.
We need to be transparent so people understand why they should trust us.
Trust still translates into revenue. What has changed is the quality that translates into trust. With so many sources of information coming at them from all sides, readers are no longer persuaded that we are independent and therefore trustworthy. They've seen us fail.
But when we are transparent we generate trust.
She sites as evidence of how the world has changed a photo shot by Chris Sweda for the Chicago Tribune during a lightning storm in 2010. The photo caught a simultaneous strike on the Sears and Trump towers. It was perceived as faked even though it was real.
These days, she says you have to show the audience why they should believe it.
And she thinks Storify is a good tool for that. Link to your sources. Lay them all out so the reader can follow your research.
Her talk was much too brief for me, but she did touch several topics. For instance, do we misread unreliable Internet sites and in our haste repeat false information from them because they seem to confirm our bad assumptions about our communities?
For instance, apparently, that Americans include a bunch of racists.
After the selection of Miss America, BuzzFeed printed some shockingly racist reactions from social media. In reality, only a teeny part of the responses on social media to the selection of an ethnically Indian woman as Miss America were ugly racist rants. But BuzzFeed highlighted a few nasty racist remarks about her, and 5 million people shared that item in a week — because they were appalled.
News media picked up the BuzzFeed angle, the one presuming racism. And by and large those media outlets didn't say where they got the idea that a bunch of racists were all over the Internet badmouthing Miss America. They were not transparent.
If they had been, their communities might have been able to put the bad information into proper perspective. Because users know that BuzzFeed does not aspire to truth. It aspires to be bizarre and entertaining. Truth is not part of the contract it makes with the audience.
After her talk I noticed a small display of transparency in the ladies room, one that instantly inspired trust:
Don't be annoyed by the vulgarity! This is really and truly a great application of authority amplified by transparency. Usually the stalls order us to behave this way. They almost never explain why.
She predicts that journalism ethics will change in this age of [insert your favorite cliche about the wild west of digital communications].
In the past, the pillars of ethics for our business were basically Truth, Independence, Minimize Harm. We needed independence so we could create a mass audience, for our business model. Being independent meant people could trust us. And we vigorously guarded "the essential stewardship role a free press plays in our society." (That's from her handout, which I'll duplicate for you.)But today, independence means almost nothing because our audience has seen totally too much failure from too many information providers. Totally.
Independence is an old value. Transparency is the new value.
We need to be transparent so people understand why they should trust us.
Trust still translates into revenue. What has changed is the quality that translates into trust. With so many sources of information coming at them from all sides, readers are no longer persuaded that we are independent and therefore trustworthy. They've seen us fail.
But when we are transparent we generate trust.
These days, she says you have to show the audience why they should believe it.
And she thinks Storify is a good tool for that. Link to your sources. Lay them all out so the reader can follow your research.
Her talk was much too brief for me, but she did touch several topics. For instance, do we misread unreliable Internet sites and in our haste repeat false information from them because they seem to confirm our bad assumptions about our communities?
For instance, apparently, that Americans include a bunch of racists.
 |
This is a screen grab from comments on cnn.com |
News media picked up the BuzzFeed angle, the one presuming racism. And by and large those media outlets didn't say where they got the idea that a bunch of racists were all over the Internet badmouthing Miss America. They were not transparent.
If they had been, their communities might have been able to put the bad information into proper perspective. Because users know that BuzzFeed does not aspire to truth. It aspires to be bizarre and entertaining. Truth is not part of the contract it makes with the audience.
BuzzFeed also is not transparent.
I hope I am doing a good job boiling down what McBride said.
If you want the audience to trust you, she says, don't trust an aggregator like Buzzfeed. If you want to talk about the social media on the Internet, look at the actual social media on the Internet.After her talk I noticed a small display of transparency in the ladies room, one that instantly inspired trust:
Don't be annoyed by the vulgarity! This is really and truly a great application of authority amplified by transparency. Usually the stalls order us to behave this way. They almost never explain why.
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