I'm sitting at my desk with the printed off transcripts of interviews, research, several pens and a large mug of coffee. My Firefox has about 10 tabs open at this point and I'm pulling down research details from various sites that I've bookmarked, getting the minutiae I want for the sections of my article.
I'm taking a break from writing the article, and dealing with sorting through the interviews, because I need to finish the blog entries for my C.A.R. class, and also because I need a break from the article itself and because my head hurts. (Too much coffee, perhaps?)
I need to shut off my phone and focus on producing a new outline with the stuff I've gotten back recently and then start putting what I've got into the skeletal structure of the new outline. What I really need to have done at the end of the day is a somewhat fleshed out article and sidebar with notes as to what else I need to make it complete. This shouldn't be too difficult, it's just going to be time consuming.
I think I'll go turn off my cell phone and brew some more coffee.
But, before I do that, I need to get inspired...end-of-the-semester-itis is setting and and it's a nice day. I want to go for a walk. The hockey playoffs are going on and the Pens dusted the Habs, 6-3, last night. The Bruins/Flyers game is on right now and I wouldn't mind watching that, either. But this is what I do. I love to write and so I'm going to write.
Inspiration:
Saturday, May 1, 2010
I Greatly Dislike E-Mail Interviews
I like doing live interviews...I've never had a problem with it, it just sort of seems natural to me. Like meeting someone new and, since I moved every 3-4 years since my dad was in the Air Force, I got pretty good at meeting new people.
My basic philosophy is to prepare as much as I can for the notice given to me. Since I'm on the radio, many times I'll simply get the "So-and-so is coming up to the studio in 15 minutes and you're going to interview them live on air." The first time I did this I was very, very nervous...in fact, every time I interview someone I'm nervous, probably more nervous than they are, but I also enjoy it and I think I'm pretty good at it...though nowhere near as good as I'd like to be.
That said, being in school and not having the resources to record phone conversations, video conference with people in a way that can be archived (as it stands now, I cannot find any way to record Skype video chats on my MacBook...boo, open source community, boo) kind of leaves me with only one option, since I'm interviewing people from all over the country: e-mail interviews, because there's no way the J-school is going to send me all over the country...though I wish they would.
E-mail interviews just plain SUCK, there's no other way around it, they are horrible. I hate writing questions for them because I try to write them in the way that I would actually say them, were I interviewing the person live, and that just doesn't work...especially since I have a habit of only putting main points down on my notes when I'm going to interview live and that makes it hard to translate into full questions for people to answer over e-mail.
It's much easier to follow up on questions in live interviews, to redirect or change what you're trying to ask to get at what you're wanting to know...ugh, you have to send three or four e-mails sometimes to get what you're after because the people being interviewed don't understand what you're trying to ask...which brings me to the phrasing.
I feel as though my phrasing is off in e-mail interviews and they don't really represent my true personality. (Which makes me feel like a total jackass when I'm interviewing people whose work I've been reading for a while, and whom I respect, like Sarah Jaffe and Alyx Vesey.)
Eh...whatevs. It's like Frank Sinatra says, "That's life."
My basic philosophy is to prepare as much as I can for the notice given to me. Since I'm on the radio, many times I'll simply get the "So-and-so is coming up to the studio in 15 minutes and you're going to interview them live on air." The first time I did this I was very, very nervous...in fact, every time I interview someone I'm nervous, probably more nervous than they are, but I also enjoy it and I think I'm pretty good at it...though nowhere near as good as I'd like to be.
That said, being in school and not having the resources to record phone conversations, video conference with people in a way that can be archived (as it stands now, I cannot find any way to record Skype video chats on my MacBook...boo, open source community, boo) kind of leaves me with only one option, since I'm interviewing people from all over the country: e-mail interviews, because there's no way the J-school is going to send me all over the country...though I wish they would.
E-mail interviews just plain SUCK, there's no other way around it, they are horrible. I hate writing questions for them because I try to write them in the way that I would actually say them, were I interviewing the person live, and that just doesn't work...especially since I have a habit of only putting main points down on my notes when I'm going to interview live and that makes it hard to translate into full questions for people to answer over e-mail.
It's much easier to follow up on questions in live interviews, to redirect or change what you're trying to ask to get at what you're wanting to know...ugh, you have to send three or four e-mails sometimes to get what you're after because the people being interviewed don't understand what you're trying to ask...which brings me to the phrasing.
I feel as though my phrasing is off in e-mail interviews and they don't really represent my true personality. (Which makes me feel like a total jackass when I'm interviewing people whose work I've been reading for a while, and whom I respect, like Sarah Jaffe and Alyx Vesey.)
Eh...whatevs. It's like Frank Sinatra says, "That's life."
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Teh Interwebs & Searches
Tim Berners-Lee talking about the internet, the web and hypertext links on TED. He also talks about linked data and how amazing it would be if the government's information were all posted as linked data and raw data, which will allow so many valuable uses than are currently available. "RAW DATA NOW!"
I need to start culling the deep web for information for my story. I'm not talking about a Google search, I'm talking about going rogue all over the internet...hardcore data mining the invisible web.
Google can't find everything, for all the information that is indexed, there is so much more than isn't. Dr. Baltrip gave the class a statistic, that roughly 20% of the data on the web is searchable. This means you may not be able to find information you need...but, you can find it if you know how.
There is some information, of course, which is purposely unsearchable, and rightly so. Financial information, social security numbers, personal medical information, etc. This information is protected by security, such as firewalls.
For that information that isn't unsearchable on purpose, here are the tips Dr. Baltrip gave to our class.
Dr. Baltrip gave us a five step process. (Which, in my opinion, is significantly better than a twelve step process.)
We can control the type of information we're looking for. And example of this is databases, you can search for only databases.
One example of a search engines that search the invisible web is Lycos. You can also use specialized sites that are more specifically geared to what you're looking for, Google Scholar and ipl2.
You can use robots, the details on how to use robots can be found here.
You can add the word "database" to the search criteria.
And you can use wildcards, such as "*" and "?", which search various forms of a word or phrase.
To search better, brainstorm terms that are similar to the information you're searching for, in Google you can use the colon (:) and then .org or .gov, to search only certain types of sites. You can also type "Filetype:" and Google will search only one kind of file, for example .ppt for Powerpoint, .xls for Excel, etc. You can search entire sites from Google, by typing "site: k-state.edu", for example, to search only within K-State's website.
There are several versions of Google, such as Google Trends, Google Books and the Google News Archive Search. Google also has a section, Google Chart Tools, which allow you to use data to create a variety of charts.
I need to start culling the deep web for information for my story. I'm not talking about a Google search, I'm talking about going rogue all over the internet...hardcore data mining the invisible web.
Google can't find everything, for all the information that is indexed, there is so much more than isn't. Dr. Baltrip gave the class a statistic, that roughly 20% of the data on the web is searchable. This means you may not be able to find information you need...but, you can find it if you know how.
There is some information, of course, which is purposely unsearchable, and rightly so. Financial information, social security numbers, personal medical information, etc. This information is protected by security, such as firewalls.
For that information that isn't unsearchable on purpose, here are the tips Dr. Baltrip gave to our class.
Dr. Baltrip gave us a five step process. (Which, in my opinion, is significantly better than a twelve step process.)
We can control the type of information we're looking for. And example of this is databases, you can search for only databases.
One example of a search engines that search the invisible web is Lycos. You can also use specialized sites that are more specifically geared to what you're looking for, Google Scholar and ipl2.
You can use robots, the details on how to use robots can be found here.
You can add the word "database" to the search criteria.
And you can use wildcards, such as "*" and "?", which search various forms of a word or phrase.
To search better, brainstorm terms that are similar to the information you're searching for, in Google you can use the colon (:) and then .org or .gov, to search only certain types of sites. You can also type "Filetype:" and Google will search only one kind of file, for example .ppt for Powerpoint, .xls for Excel, etc. You can search entire sites from Google, by typing "site: k-state.edu", for example, to search only within K-State's website.
There are several versions of Google, such as Google Trends, Google Books and the Google News Archive Search. Google also has a section, Google Chart Tools, which allow you to use data to create a variety of charts.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Online Journalism Ethics (or how I learned to love attribution and stop worrying)
Why do ethics matter?
This semester we've been working to become better journalists (editing, writing, design & interviewing.) I've always thought that ethics are the most important thing journalists can have, study and discuss. Most of the questions I asked in my News & Feature Writing class were regarding ethics and ethical decisions that my instructor made while on staff at newspapers. She's a great resource, since she also teaches the ethics class I'll be taking in about a year.
With ethics, it's not enough to know what people did in certain situations but to know why they made the decisions to do what they did so that you can evaluate situations based on those examples and apply your own personal ethics to them.
There are three levels of ethical responsibility
I. Self - Personal ethics
II. Institutional - Ethics which guide the organizations that we work for
III. Societal - Not laws but ethics concerning the beliefs and customs of a society
In class we listened to a 911 call from a woman who later died. There was some discussion about if, as journalists, we would release the audio of the actual 911 call. My take on it is no, if the story is simply about the fact that the woman died but I would probably use it if the story were about the 911 operator doing something incorrect.
The incident occurred in the Miami area, two Miami stations chose not to air the call and two stations chose to air an edited version of the call.
We read an article from freedomforum.org about traditional journalism and open-source journalism. I found this to be an interesting article and I had never considering using online communities as fact checking proof readers. I can see that, in certain instances, this would be a very useful tool. I'm not sure if it's something I'll be using for my article about sexism in the music industry, but I could see using it going forward on articles with subjects I'm not real sure about.
The Online News Association was set up to try and make sure online journalism keeps to the same ethical standards as other forms of media.
We then looked at an article about copyright infringement online and discussed if quoting another article or piece of media is ethical or not. I prefer to post links to things I'm referencing and attribute them and I've never quoted someone I didn't interview myself without attributing it. In fact, if you don't attribute something you didn't do yourself, that's plagiarism. And plagiarism is never good. When in doubt, attribute.
We talked about a great site, the Student Press Law Center, which we've discussed before, but is just a great resource for student publications and student media.
Dr. Baltrip also provided links to the Internet Society (ISOC) & Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which are resources that helped set internet standards, and are also good resources for ethics, etc.
This semester we've been working to become better journalists (editing, writing, design & interviewing.) I've always thought that ethics are the most important thing journalists can have, study and discuss. Most of the questions I asked in my News & Feature Writing class were regarding ethics and ethical decisions that my instructor made while on staff at newspapers. She's a great resource, since she also teaches the ethics class I'll be taking in about a year.
With ethics, it's not enough to know what people did in certain situations but to know why they made the decisions to do what they did so that you can evaluate situations based on those examples and apply your own personal ethics to them.
There are three levels of ethical responsibility
I. Self - Personal ethics
II. Institutional - Ethics which guide the organizations that we work for
III. Societal - Not laws but ethics concerning the beliefs and customs of a society
In class we listened to a 911 call from a woman who later died. There was some discussion about if, as journalists, we would release the audio of the actual 911 call. My take on it is no, if the story is simply about the fact that the woman died but I would probably use it if the story were about the 911 operator doing something incorrect.
The incident occurred in the Miami area, two Miami stations chose not to air the call and two stations chose to air an edited version of the call.
We read an article from freedomforum.org about traditional journalism and open-source journalism. I found this to be an interesting article and I had never considering using online communities as fact checking proof readers. I can see that, in certain instances, this would be a very useful tool. I'm not sure if it's something I'll be using for my article about sexism in the music industry, but I could see using it going forward on articles with subjects I'm not real sure about.
The Online News Association was set up to try and make sure online journalism keeps to the same ethical standards as other forms of media.
We then looked at an article about copyright infringement online and discussed if quoting another article or piece of media is ethical or not. I prefer to post links to things I'm referencing and attribute them and I've never quoted someone I didn't interview myself without attributing it. In fact, if you don't attribute something you didn't do yourself, that's plagiarism. And plagiarism is never good. When in doubt, attribute.
We talked about a great site, the Student Press Law Center, which we've discussed before, but is just a great resource for student publications and student media.
Dr. Baltrip also provided links to the Internet Society (ISOC) & Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which are resources that helped set internet standards, and are also good resources for ethics, etc.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Looming Deadlines for Journalistic Slackers vs Movie Quotes
I'm pretty well-suited to be a journalist, I think, because I'm a huge slacker and I procrastinate like nobody's business. Only when I have a looming deadline do I really kick into gear.
"This is not a hand-holding sort of exercise," Dr. Baltrip said of the semester-ending project that will be the culmination of all that we've learned in Computer-Assisted Reporting class.
She gave us a sheet about "birthing" a project and it says "write with authority." I would like to think that every time I write, I write with authority...just like I speak with conviction.
We're coming down to the wire now, as the draft of the draft of my main story is due next Thursday, April 22nd. Like O-Ren Ishi in Kill Bill, "Now's the F#*&ing time!" Or, to quote a slightly different film, "Get busy livin, or get busy dyin."
By the end of this weekend I hope to have all e-mail interviews submitted and a schedule of times for the audio interviews I have with local musicians on the subject of sexism in the music industry.
I'll be editing those bad boys in either Audacity or Adobe Audition, which is something I quite enjoy.
Let's do this.
"This is not a hand-holding sort of exercise," Dr. Baltrip said of the semester-ending project that will be the culmination of all that we've learned in Computer-Assisted Reporting class.
She gave us a sheet about "birthing" a project and it says "write with authority." I would like to think that every time I write, I write with authority...just like I speak with conviction.
We're coming down to the wire now, as the draft of the draft of my main story is due next Thursday, April 22nd. Like O-Ren Ishi in Kill Bill, "Now's the F#*&ing time!" Or, to quote a slightly different film, "Get busy livin, or get busy dyin."
By the end of this weekend I hope to have all e-mail interviews submitted and a schedule of times for the audio interviews I have with local musicians on the subject of sexism in the music industry.
I'll be editing those bad boys in either Audacity or Adobe Audition, which is something I quite enjoy.
Let's do this.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Journalism and...Math? What the what?
It's true, Dr. Baltrip is forcing us to learn math...but it's "fun" math (if such a thing exists.)
I haven't had a math class since I so gloriously failed my College Algebra class my first semester at K-State...and this isn't a math class, which is good.
We discussed statistics, in their more basic form...percentages, averages*, medians...
This was by no means an entire two hour class about statistics...nor was it similar to an out and out statistics class, which is also good, since I've heard they're quite boring.
One of the things that averages and medians are good for is comparing employee salaries. An example given was salaries of 7 employees:
$19,000
$20,000
$22,000
$24,000
$25,000
$230,000
In this example the median salary is $23,000 and the average is $51,857...a big difference.
Dr. Baltrip used this example to illustrate the point that, in many cases, the average and median salaries must be reported in order to tell the full story. (This was also stressed by my News & Feature Writing professor, Bonnie Bressers.)
Statistics lie. They can be manipulated to, pretty much, say whatever someone with an agenda wants them to say. This is why it's important for Dr. Baltrip to teach us these things and why it's important for people reading things in the media to be skeptical of statistics and understand what they're really saying. Most people, I'd wager, would think of "median" and "average" as the same thing. Dr. Baltrip's example from above illustrates that point perfectly.
"Plurality" is the number when you take the number of votes the top vote getter got and the number of votes the second place vote getter got. She stressed that plurality only refers to the difference between the top two vote getters. The difference between the second and third vote getter in an election is not referred to as a plurality.
For charts and graphs, it is necessary to include definition of the population sampled, exact wording of questions, margin of error and source/sponsor of poll. It's also good to included when and how the data was collected.
Some online math help websites for journalists Dr. Baltrip hipped us to:
Math Center
Percentage Calulator
Bloomberg Currency Converter
Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator
Basic Calculator (Most of us probably have one of these on our computers...or our phones.)
* "Average" is the same as "mean."
I haven't had a math class since I so gloriously failed my College Algebra class my first semester at K-State...and this isn't a math class, which is good.
We discussed statistics, in their more basic form...percentages, averages*, medians...
This was by no means an entire two hour class about statistics...nor was it similar to an out and out statistics class, which is also good, since I've heard they're quite boring.
One of the things that averages and medians are good for is comparing employee salaries. An example given was salaries of 7 employees:
$19,000
$20,000
$22,000
$24,000
$25,000
$230,000
In this example the median salary is $23,000 and the average is $51,857...a big difference.
Dr. Baltrip used this example to illustrate the point that, in many cases, the average and median salaries must be reported in order to tell the full story. (This was also stressed by my News & Feature Writing professor, Bonnie Bressers.)
Statistics lie. They can be manipulated to, pretty much, say whatever someone with an agenda wants them to say. This is why it's important for Dr. Baltrip to teach us these things and why it's important for people reading things in the media to be skeptical of statistics and understand what they're really saying. Most people, I'd wager, would think of "median" and "average" as the same thing. Dr. Baltrip's example from above illustrates that point perfectly.
"Plurality" is the number when you take the number of votes the top vote getter got and the number of votes the second place vote getter got. She stressed that plurality only refers to the difference between the top two vote getters. The difference between the second and third vote getter in an election is not referred to as a plurality.
For charts and graphs, it is necessary to include definition of the population sampled, exact wording of questions, margin of error and source/sponsor of poll. It's also good to included when and how the data was collected.
Polls never, ever predict an outcome. Not ever.
Some online math help websites for journalists Dr. Baltrip hipped us to:
Math Center
Percentage Calulator
Bloomberg Currency Converter
Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator
Basic Calculator (Most of us probably have one of these on our computers...or our phones.)
* "Average" is the same as "mean."
Flip, Flip, hooray!
In Computer Assisted Reporting today we learned about using Flip cameras.
These are small, relatively easy to use digital camcorders, ostensibly on which we'll be recording our interviews for the semester-ending project in our class.
I'll probably be using the camcorders that we use for my Digital News class, however, as they are easier to stabilize (they come with tripods, you see) and probably provide better video quality and the settings are more customizable.
We'll be uploading the videos to YouTube and inserting the videos into our final project website.
**Fechas Importantes**
-Our final draft of the sidebar story is due Tuesday, April 13.
-Our final draft of the main story is due Thursday, April 22.
-Our interview transcripts are due Tuesday, April 27.
-Our final story, sidebar and media must be posted to our site by Friday, May 7.
The end of the semester is approaching and I'm starting to feel the pressure. I have a feeling I'll be spending a great deal of time in the video editing bays soon...for both this class and Digital News.
These are small, relatively easy to use digital camcorders, ostensibly on which we'll be recording our interviews for the semester-ending project in our class.
I'll probably be using the camcorders that we use for my Digital News class, however, as they are easier to stabilize (they come with tripods, you see) and probably provide better video quality and the settings are more customizable.
We'll be uploading the videos to YouTube and inserting the videos into our final project website.
**Fechas Importantes**
-Our final draft of the sidebar story is due Tuesday, April 13.
-Our final draft of the main story is due Thursday, April 22.
-Our interview transcripts are due Tuesday, April 27.
-Our final story, sidebar and media must be posted to our site by Friday, May 7.
The end of the semester is approaching and I'm starting to feel the pressure. I have a feeling I'll be spending a great deal of time in the video editing bays soon...for both this class and Digital News.
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