Teaching Online Journalism

‘Curation,’ and journalists as curators

Mindy McAdams — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:31:24 +0000

The Latin root of the noun curator means “to care.” We know the word primarily in connection with museum collections, which may make some folks think of dusty old boring things, or preserving history — and maybe that’s not your idea of what journalists should be doing.

But when Jeff Jarvis talks about “curation” — which he has been doing for quite a while now — he means the activities of sorting, choosing, and display, which museum curators perform based on their extensive knowledge of the subject area of an exhibit.

Think about any museum exhibition you have enjoyed, whether it presented ancient artifacts from Egypt or spacecraft from NASA. Then consider the job of the museum curator. If we talk about curation, we refer to more than a simple act of filtering. (Filtering calls to mind that old journalism standby, gatekeeping.) I visualize “filtering” as the process of straining chicken broth, in which one dumps all the junk from a giant soup pot into a strainer, and what comes out is nice clear stock. This is also something that journalists do, but it can be pretty useful to differentiate that from curation.

There are also times when we need and want organization. That could be curation … It could be summary (which Wikipedia amazingly provides even and especially in providing snapshots of knowledge in big news events — though without the curation of links). In the Mumbai story, GroundReport curated — or organized and facilitated — people, finding Twitterers in Mumbai … to report and write (Dec. 2, 2008).

Jeff has defined curation as “the need for editors to create order, to correct and vet” (Nov. 3, 2008), and while that nicely distinguishes curation from reporting, it sounds a lot like plain old editing.

So I’m going to list some aspects of journalistic curation that fit well, I think, with the museum version of curating:

Selection of the best representatives: If a museum curator has access to 10,000 small clay tokens from ancient Iraq and Syria, how many — and which ones — should appear inside the glass case? If a journalist is going to provide links to reliable sources about planning for retirement (or breast cancer, or choosing a college), which are the best, clearest, and most up-to-date?
Culling: How many links is enough, and not too much? If the museum curator puts 100 of those tokens in one case, my eyes will glaze over.
Provide context: Will you include a bit of explanatory text to show me how each source differs from the others? Why am I looking at this one? Where is it from? How old is it? Why is this one significant?
Arrangement of individual objects: Within one display case, or within a room, the museum curator is considering how different items work together or complement one another. In modern museum displays, all emphasis is on the audience, the people who visit the museum, and their experience. Journalists could stand to learn something from that idea. The audience is not coming from the same place as you are. When journalists are compiling a set of assets for one story, or a set of related stories, or a single story composed of multiple accounts, what arrangement or juxtaposition will be most effective in providing a good and satisfying experience to the audience?
Organization of the whole: In larger exhibits, the museum visitor walks through a series of rooms to view the objects on display. This is another aspect of the experience, and it can be successful, or it can fail by confusing or overwhelming the visitor. In many successful exhibits, a large or striking artifact is placed in or near the first doorway. This lures the visitor inside. If the pathway through the exhibit is varied and easy to follow, the visitor is likely to emerge with a sense of satisfaction. It’s not important that each visitor stops at each display and reads each placard. Visitors can choose their own pace and their own level of intake.
Expertise: The curator of a textiles exhibit is not someone who just encountered textiles for the first time last week. More likely, that person has been studying textiles — and their history, production and use — for many years. One of the strongest implications in the word curation is, I think, the idea of expertise. If the journalist-curator doesn’t have a background in South Asia and terrorism, then she’s a poor choice to curate a page about the Mumbai attacks. Her choices will likely be naive, possibly even detrimental. I’m not saying the journalist needs a Ph.D. in South Asia history — but if you work with young students, as I do, you’ll see that sometimes they throw together a bunch of links or resources that would actually embarrass your news organization (e.g. amateur Web sites, or Web sites compiled by high school classes, or commercially biased sites). Seat-of-the-pants reporting can be fast, and errors can be corrected as we go. Curation indicates a more careful process, with research and fact-checking and solid sourcing underneath it.
Updating: In a standing exhibition, such as Egyptian art at the Met in New York, the curators will change it up every so often. In journalism, depending on the topic, we might change it up once a week, or once a day. But even longstanding “exhibits” could benefit from a face-lift now and again.

Feel free to add your own.

What we now know about blogs

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:36:25 +0000

Technorati has released its always-interesting annual State of the Blogosphere report, and this year they surveyed 1,079 bloggers about their histories and current practices. Here are some tidbits I enjoyed:

U.S. bloggers = 57 percent male (parity is near); European and Asian bloggers = 73 percent male
Global bloggers, 18 to 24 years old = 9 percent of female, 15 percent of male
Global bloggers, 25 and older = 91 percent of female, 85 percent of male
One in four bloggers spends 10 hours or more blogging each week
77 percent of the bloggers surveyed comment on other blogs
Technorati “top authority bloggers” post often — more than half of them post five times a day or more; and they are also twice as likely as other bloggers to tag their blog posts
Technorati’s database shows that 1.5 million blogs were updated within seven days before the study

What sort of blogging do they do? Technorati asked the bloggers surveyed to categorize their blogs as personal, professional, or corporate (blogging “for your company in an official capacity”):

Four out of five bloggers are personal bloggers who blog about topics of personal interest. About half of bloggers are professional bloggers — blogging is not necessarily their full-time job, but they blog about their industry or profession in an unofficial capacity. 12% of bloggers blog in an official capacity for their company.

However, 40 percent of the bloggers surveyed said their topics were outside of these categories — for example, the 2008 election, alternative energy, art, beauty, blogging, comics, communication, cooking/food, crafts, design, environment, internet/Web 2.0, Jamaica, and media/journalism (source page).

Many bloggers have more than one blog, and 59 percent “have been blogging for two years or more.”

Advertising: Female bloggers were found to be more clued in about advertising: 16 percent of women used an ad network, compared with 7 percent of men; 41 percent of women used an affiliate newtork, compared with 32 percent of men.

Community: Women were more likely than men to use a blogroll, link to other blogs, appear in blog directories, and produce content for other blogs (source page).

Perks: The survey also indicated that blogging yields benefits to the bloggers.

One in four have been invited to participate in an event as a result of their blog, one in five have contributed to a print publication as a result of their blog, and almost as many have found themselves on TV and/or on the radio (source page).

Traffic: Half of the active blogs in the survey attract more than 1,000 visitors per month. (I think that number is too low to be interesting, but I guess it shows that these blogs are not merely diaries for the author and a handful of friends to read.)

10 most used tags: News, Music, Video, Internet, Blog, Politics, Life, Business, Videos, Movies.

Making money: Although the majority earn little or no money from their blogs, there are some bloggers who profit handsomely.

Among active bloggers that we surveyed, the average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than 1 million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000.

In the section of the report titled The How of Blogging, there are some nifty charts showing popularity rising and falling for certain tags over a particular time period, e.g. “Obama” in September 2008.

Another chart on that page shows tools used on the blogs, such as video hosting or Twitter feeds; this would make a nice list for a graduate student project.

There’s another nice chart listing the activities of “active Web 2.0 participants” on the page titled Brands Enter the Blogosphere.

Timeline of online journalism milestones

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:48:43 +0000

Andy Dickinson took my list from yesterday and combined it with Paul Bradshaw’s list and constructed a cool timeline of online journalism milestones:

Please upgrade your browser

Visit Andy’s blog here.

Breaking news online: A short history and timeline

Mindy McAdams — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 15:45:49 +0000

The events in Mumbai, and news coverage thereof, have got me thinking about big news events I remember having a significant impact online, or via online reporting. Maybe these are milestones in the evolution of news reporting.

April 19, 1995: American terrorists (not Muslims) bombed a federal government building in Oklahoma City (168 people died and hundreds were injured). I was working at The Washington Post’s very new online news operation, which had no Web presence yet (it ran on a proprietary platform, sort of like the old AOL). We journalists used the Web frantically and continuously to gather facts and background information throughout the day and into the night. The Web was our primary tool, and we were many hours ahead of the print newsroom. But in 1995, most journalists did not have access to the Internet at their desk.

September 11, 2001: The Internet failed. Sites such as CNN.com were inaccessible within minutes after the second plane struck the World Trade Center. News sites scrambled to adjust, with all Ted Turner’s properties (for example) converting their servers to carry CNN news. We watched this event on television — for days. However, the Internet also triumphed: We received numerous eyewitness reports from inside New York via blogs and e-mail, at a time when phone access was compromised for almost everyone trying to call in and many trying to call out. An early study of how people used the Web at this time: Online Structure for Civic Engagement in the September 11 Web Sphere, by academics Kirsten A. Foot and Steven M. Schneider.

July 7, 2005: Bombs exploded in London tube trains and on a bus, and passengers reported the aftermath by sending photos snapped with their mobile phones. Longtime journalist Tim Porter documented this on his blog, and even National Geographic saw fit to comment on the role of cell phone cameras in reporting these events.

February - April 2006: Paris was burning, and hundreds of Flickr users posted photos throughout the protests.

September 2006: A coup d’état in Thailand, reported to be peaceful and bloodless, was shown to be exactly that in contemporary photos posted on Flickr.

April 16, 2007: A gunman opens fire at Virginia Tech, killing 32. Students on the campus shared rumors and news reports among themselves via their native communication channels, such as Facebook; big media eavesdropped and re-broadcast these reports. In addition, a Wikipedia page created at 15:16 UTC (11:16 a.m. local time) on April 16 was updated and edited throughout the day by multiple authors. I may be wrong, but I think this was the first really significant use of a Wikipedia “current events” page. Noam Cohen wrote a good article about this phenomenon for The New York Times.

August - September 2007: Protests and government suppression in Burma (Myanmar) could not be covered on the ground by most journalists, of any nationality — so people inside the country risked everything to send news out, mostly via mobile phones. BBC News made particularly good use of these wrenching eyewitness reports.

November 26, 2008: Terrorist attacks at several locations in Mumbai, India, were reported on Twitter almost immediately after they happened. An article at Forbes.com sums up the role played by Twitter.

Have I forgotten anything?

Related: See Paul Bradshaw’s blog-specific post from earlier this month: Are these the biggest moments in journalism-blogging history? You’ll see references to Matt Drudge/Monica Lewinsky; Trent Lott; “Rathergate”; and other famous incidents of journalism blogging. Not quite the same as what I’m listing here. Maybe I should call this “from the scene” or “eyewitness,” to distinguish it from Paul’s excellent list, which is more about uncovering, questioning, and caling to account — the functions of blogs acting as a cohort to MSM. Paul and I do have some overlap in our lists, particularly September 11, the London bombings, and Burma.

Twitter, Mumbai, and 10 facts about journalism now

Mindy McAdams — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:55:47 +0000

I think everyone knows that what’s happening in Mumbai is on Twitter, being updated live.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote about it on Wednesday, and he has a nice screenshot in the post to show you what it looked like then. Flickr and Wikipedia also provided frequent updates from the ground. Arrington didn’t mention Global Voices, which put together a good package on the attacks based largely on blogs. The Big Picture has the best news photos.

The example of Mumbai reinforces a few things I am always telling journalists about our online future:

Breaking news will be online before it’s on television.
Breaking news — especially disasters and attacks in the middle of a city — will be covered first by non-journalists.
The non-journalists will continue providing new information even after the trained journalists arrive on the scene.
Cell phones will be the primary reporting tool at first, and possibly for hours.
Cell phones that can use a wireless Internet connection in addition to a cellular phone network are a more versatile reporting tool than a phone alone.
Still photos, transmitted by citizens on the ground, will tell more than most videos.
The right video will get so many views, your servers might crash (I’m not aware of this happening with any videos from Mumbai).
Live streaming video becomes a user magnet during a crisis. (CNN.com Live: 1.4 million views as of 11:30 a.m. EST today, according to Beet.tv.)
Your print reporters need to know how to dictate over the phone. If they can get a line to the newsroom, it might be necessary.
Your Web team must be prepared for this kind of crisis reporting.

In addition, we might discuss whether the mainstream media are superfluous in these situations — or can they perform a useful service to the public by sifting and filtering the incoming reports from the center of the events?

How to uninstall old Flash players

Mindy McAdams — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:30:43 +0000

While doing a search on a Flash question, I came across a useful tip at — surprisingly — Fox News. A reader wrote to Tech Q&A and described a problem with Flash Player 10 and Windows Vista Ultimate. The reader is getting an error message that says the necessary version of the Flash Player is not installed. But the reader quite definitely does have Flash Player 10 installed.

I have had this same problem, not only in Windows Vista but also on Windows XP and the Mac OS. So getting a solution was great, and I thought I should share it:

The Flash Player installer has a long history of failing to fully remove older versions. I suspect the problem has something to do with interference from an old artifact. You need to get rid of it.

Things to remember: First, if you have more than one browser installed (Internet Explorer and Firefox, for example), you actually have two versions of Flash Player to get rid of — it’s installed as an Active X control for IE, but as a plug-in for Firefox, Opera and other browsers.

Second, the Add/Remove Programs applet build into Windows is not the best way to get rid of previous versions. Instead, download and run Adobe’s Flash Player Uninstaller, which promises to remove Flash “from all browsers on the system.” You can find it here.

And if you’re the type who wears both belt and suspenders (just in case), then you should scan your system and make sure all versions of Flash have been removed with the free Secunia Software Inspector. You can run that from here.

Finally, after you’ve removed all traces of previous Flash Players, go back to Adobe and get the latest and greatest. [Here.]

Remember that you’ll have to get the both the Active X version and the appropriate plug-in if you have more than one browser installed.

In fact, now that I think about it, your problem might be that you have the correct Flash version for IE, but a stale Firefox plug-in, or vice versa.

I’ve even encountered a Flash Player version problem when opening SWFs from my hard drive — not sure whether this will address that, but it’s worth a try.

Why no blog posts?

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:48:55 +0000

It’s been downright tough to even think about blogging lately, with a combination of regular work, extra committee work, and a trip to Argentina to speak at a conference and train journalists.

If you’re looking for something to do over the long weekend (U.S. holiday), you might have a peek at my links and notes (in English) for three days of training: audio, slideshows, video, blogging.

Photojournalism sites recommended

Mindy McAdams — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:54:25 +0000

This comes from Mark Luckie’s blog, “10,000 Words”:

Amazing photojournalism: Where to find the best in news photography

Nine sites — there’s sure to be one you don’t already know.

I’m surprised he left out Magnum in Motion. Whenever I go browsing there, I find amazing stories.

Laptops for everyone: OLPC repeats ‘Give One, Get One’

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:49:32 +0000

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) will send one Linux laptop to a child in a developing country if you pay for two. You’ll get one to keep. That’s mine, above, from December 2007. Click the image to see my complete set of unboxing photos.

Related posts:

MVPs for October 2008

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:20:04 +0000

Most visited posts on this blog October 1, 2008, through November 1, 2008, according to Google Analytics:

Number of absolute unique visitors (October 1 - November 1): 11,955

Number of pageviews (October 1 - November 1): 25,861

Traffic from Google searches: 6,983 (43.67 %)

Direct traffic: 2,885 (18.04 %)

See past MVP lists for this blog.