Katharine Lackey

Vantage Point

Angie Jones: This isn’t the only story here, Rex. The protesters…
Rex Brooks: Which I don’t give a shit about, and unless they set themselves on fire, they’re not our story.

During the movie, Vantage Point, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Rex Brooks, repeatedly points out, “We’re here for the summit, not the sideshow” when her cameraman and anchor try to stray from the approved upon script — a press release-type read on a summit between world leaders — ignoring the protesters who flank all sides of the podium.

As media corporations have continued to merge, forming expansive companies that span multiple media outlets. many have criticized the moves, saying that the combinations are lethal for the American public who are increasingly only seeing one view of the news — despite the multiple vantage points any story can take.

We’ve been discussing this a lot lately in one of my communications theory classes and, recently, we watched part of the documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which spends a lot of time discussing what happens when news comes from only a few media sources.

In the class discussions that followed, the professor talked a lot about the issues mentioned in the film, but tended to emphasize how the creation of professional journalism has created an industry that relies on official sources who provide journalists with pre-written press releases. How non-partisan journalism was created out of a business model because it sells more papers, rather than in a strive to provide viewers and readers with both sides of a story. How budget cuts and decreases in staff size, which have run rampant in recent years, is merely a result of company ownership over media instead of single media enterprises. As a result, foreign bureaus have been cut completely, disallowing journalists from really investigating foreign issues and depriving Americans of knowledge of foreign countries.

From this vantage point, the media conglomerations are viewed as despicable corporations, whose only focus is on the business of making money.

Here’s my problem: There’s a specific reason why journalists rely on official sources. Why journalists try to report in a nonpartisan way. There’s a reason why newspapers have needed to cut back in recent years, including removing foreign bureaus.

To start, official sources are important in an article because they can provide insight into a situation that the ordinary person would otherwise not understand. And any good journalists knows not to rely on a press release, unless under dire circumstances. Indeed, I’ve had many a call where the spokesperson has said, “Well, did you see our press release?” … “Yes, I did, but we don’t go off releases and I have a couple questions that weren’t answered in the press release.” I’m not sure if experts fall into the official source category, but for me, at least, an official source is one that can provide knowledge to a given situation. Joe Schmo down the street, on the other hand, can only provide his musings on the world which are much more likely to be widely inaccurate, skewed, and left or right-leaning.

Which leads to the second point — nonpartisan journalism is utilized, I believe, not as a tool for selling more newspapers (just look at some of the obviously partisan media out there such as Huffington Post or the Daily Kos) but as a way to get both sides of the story. If someone were to read a completely skewed story either to the left or right, would they believe it if they knew nothing else about the situation? Does the credibility of newspapers (although it is waning) make people believe what they read?

Finally, I’m sad to report that, like most other businesses, newspapers and other media need money to stay in production. Sure, it’d be great if we could bypass that need, but unfortunately we can’t. Like any business, newspapers have budgets that rise and fall given supply and demand among other things. As advertising revenue has yet to catch up with print revenue, though, we are hurting. Once those advertising dollars catch up online, though (and they should, eventually), I’m sure we will see fewer layoffs and buyouts. Until then, we’ll just have to rely on The Associated Press for our foreign content.

Now, this isn’t to say that they’re aren’t problems with media conglomerations. I wholeheartedly agree that there are, but my point is that the problems aren’t those that were emphasized during the lecture. The problems aren’t those that were on the PowerPoint I wrote down.

The problems with media conglomerations has to do a lot with vantage points. Not so much when a newspaper company owns several different newspapers spread throughout the country, perhaps with a few television or radio stations thrown in, but when a company with vastly different interests, such as Walt Disney, or General Electric owns major news organizations. When we have to deal with media that has corporation interests to protect, which is why we may not see an indepth report done by NBC on any evils General Electric is hiding. Or why VH1 may stop broadcasting and refer to MTV when the music awards are on.

The companies have the power to shape not only our news, but, in turn, how we view the world.

Banned: Blogging and Twittering

Where do I even start on this one …

Alana Taylor, who I discussed a couple weeks ago for a post she wrote for MediaShift, has been banned from blogging and twittering on the class she remarked on in her post.

Her original post popped up on Romenesko with a line about how she disliked carrying the bulky New York Times to class. The post about her banned status also showed up on the Poynter blog yesterday.

Taylor’s article took a close look at the class she was taking called “Reporting Gen Y,” raising questions about the ability of the class and NYU to prepare students for a future career in journalism, which is increasingly become more and more multimedia-driven.

We won’t be seeing any more posts from Taylor, though, since her professor wasn’t exactly appreciative of the critical look at her teaching and the class.

Let’s start with “Twittering” since that’s a bit easier to dissect.

It’s one thing to ban twittering during class — as it would fall under the distraction clause, but it’s an entirely different thing to ban it after class is over. First of all, you can only say so much in 140 characters and as a social networking site, Twitter is no different than Facebook in that students will moan and complain about classes on the site. Could professors start to follow their students on Twitter to see if they update their status during class and thereby give them a lower grade for participation since they were essentially ‘texting’ in class?

And if this NYU professor is setting a precedent, could students at other schools, especially private ones, be admonished for twittering after class how they hate a class, or a professor? Could they even twitter ‘nice’ things about the class? What about just remarking on the classwork or an exam coming up? What happens when we shift this debate to a public college or high school?

Onto the more sticky point — blogging.

Without students like Taylor blogging about the classes they’re taking in J-school, would we know how bad the situation is? How much J-schools are failing?

Does Taylor’s blog and others like it draw attention from other J-school administrators so that they change the policy of only providing print classes to print journalists and broadcast classes to broadcast students?

If we eliminate all blogging about J-school classes, where will we end up five years from now compared to where we would end up with prolific blogging on J-schools?

Lots of questions and probably few answers we can all agree on.

Some have replied to the newest MediaShift post saying that Taylor was being “sneaky,” that she was going behind her teacher’s back in directly quoting her.

I’ve run into semi-similar situations where I’ve wanted to take something from a class and remark on it. Always worried about upsetting people, I’ve usually just been generic and said “my journalism professor” or “a student in the class.” Even then, I worry that criticizing a professor would have backlashes should that professor find my post.

But should I really have to worry?

I go to Penn State, a public university. We house a First Amendment Center and many knowledgeable journalism professors who understand that students have rights too.

Professors hope their words and teachings will surpass the classroom, remaining with and influencing a student for years to come. What better way to preserve their teachings and spread them to a wider audience than by students blogging about it?

Romenesko = Irksomeness, Gruesomeness, Tiresomeness

I was just typing up an email to someone where I mentioned Romenesko, the popular Poynter blog. Turns out, spell checker has some interesting suggestions for spelling.

Take a look:

Closeup:

Another Sept. 11

Another year passes as America remembers that solemn day 7 years ago.

On that day, I sat in an Arlington, Va. high school, located just 10 miles from the Pentagon. I remember how the sky was such a clear blue that day, how it was a bit chilly that morning. And, of course, I remember the shock of it all. The television on in every classroom. The frantic call to my father who was in downtown D.C.

I remember going to bed that night with the realization that the world was forever changed.

I remember those events so clearly, as do many other Americans, and yet, as we continue to move toward the future, the press coverage of the anniversary events decrease.

While The Washington Post had excellent coverage of the Pentagon Memorial opening today, coverage across the board by major networks was minimal, perhaps a little more prominent than last year but only because of the presidential race.

Requirement: Student Newspaper

I’ve been working at The Daily Collegian, Penn State’s independently-run student newspaper, for five semesters now, just over two years. Until this semester, I have always been a reporter.

I still remember my first story. A student group concerned about animal rights was petitioning the Penn State dining commons to switch over to cage-free eggs.

To be polite, it’s not my best article.

And that’s the thing with journalism: it takes practice. Since that first article, I have grown exponentially as a reporter and writer, going so far as to write in-depth pieces last semester.

I’ve talked with students who are trying to make a difference by making the campus a little more green. I’ve talked to Iraq War veterans returning to Penn State. I made the two hour trip to visit Shanksville a couple days before the Sept. 11 anniversary last year. I’ve talked with professors whose only hope is for a day when young people will understand the importance of voting. And I’ve even been so lucky as to interview Valerie Plame Wilson and Barack Obama.

These experiences could not have happened in the confines of the classroom and I have, by far, learned more from my Collegian experience than all my journalism classes combined. I’m sure many young journalists have experienced much of the same.

The blame for this lack of classroom education? It doesn’t fall entirely on the J-schools. Penn State could do a better job by requiring fewer theory classes and more reporting classes (which would, in a perfect world, combine multimedia reporting as well as print).

But part of the blame falls on the students themselves. Sitting in my upper-level news reporting class, two students rudely type away on their computers while the professor talks about the importance of leads. One is playing a card game online, the other is checking her friends’ AIM statuses. The typing and mouse clicking are so loud that I have trouble concentrating on what the professor is saying.

Luckily, I know what goes into lead writing, but most of the other students in the room haven’t written a lead for a year, maybe more, since they took the lower-level reporting class.

I faced a similar situation while in my copy editing class last fall. At the end of the semester, we had a group project where we edited stories and placed them on a front page layout in Quark, complete with photos. Despite the professor’s excellent teaching skills that harped on AP style for a number of common items, I was left substantially editing the other student’s copy.

$10,000,000.

Um, no.

$10 million.

Sacramento, CA

Nope.

Sacramento, Calif.

These are the very basics of editing, and the essentials that any reporter should know by heart from the AP Stylebook.

You can’t learn journalism in a vacuum, or a classroom for that matter and a semester’s worth of reporting or editing is quickly forgotten. While not everyone can write for the student newspaper on campus, everyone should tryout. So what if you don’t make it? You can try again the next semester and editors will look highly on your determination.

You have to be your own advocate in today’s journalism industry and the best way to start down that path is to join the student newspaper. It’s the best prerequisite not only for your journalism classes, but also for your future career.

J-schools continue to falter

If the newspaper industry is dealing with rough times, J-schools are equally faltering as they attempt to wade the transition from old media to new media and develop classes to teach students the skills they now need in order to be competitive in the real world.

Alana Taylor, a student at NYU, discusses her experience at the school in a post at MediaShift. The class Taylor is taking, “Reporting Gen Y” is, at the very least, a move forward by the university which understands that its students need more than just good writing and/or editing skills to be successful after graduation. She points out that the professors at NYU typically require students to bring the bulky print edition of the New York Times to class instead of relying on the internet version.

But for many students, this awakening is coming too late — Taylor comments on “Reporting Gen Y” which includes several ‘duhs’ for her. But, as is all too common, her fellow students don’t seem to already know the value of blogs, of Twitter, of other networking or journalism tools. For her fellow students all this talk about blogging was new.

I faced this myself when I had to ask the Board of Editors at the Collegian last week if we could get our paper on Twitter.

“First of all,” I said, “who knows what Twitter is and what exactly it does?”

(blank stares)

After a brief summary, I explained the benefits that other news organization have found by using the service and told other editors how through RSS feeds we could set up the account with virtually no maintenance whatsoever.

While the editor in chief was quick to accept Twitter (as an experiment at the very least), I’m still astonished at the lack of online innovation and knowledge among other reporters and editors. Perhaps they don’t understand the social networking site? Perhaps they think it’s dumb — why not just use Facebook or Gmail status, some probably say? But have they ever used it, to its full advantage? That’s the sort of problem with Twitter. You have to really use it in every single way possible as a journalist before you can reasonable say yes it does work or no it doesn’t.

I myself was skeptical about Twitter at first — how could this help me report? How many of my friends actually use it? But, I’ve found the service exceedingly useful through feeds from news organization as well as networking with other young journalists. It even got me into Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalist, an up-and-coming blog just for young journos to discuss the industry.

Blogging is another sticky point. I’ve heard editors and reporters alike grumble about having to post on a blog, some saying they don’t really understand it. I know less than a handful who have personal blogs.

While I’m sure it’s hard for J-schools to keep up on the new technologies that emerge each year — like Twitter — they should be stressing that blogging is essential (and fun!); they should be teaching audio and video skills; the skills that have been around for at least five or more years but are still not taught enough.

Every student who pays a ridiculous amount of money to go to J-school, in my case, well over $100,000, should come out knowing how to edit audio, edit video, stream live video, use flash, use soundslides and more.

Evaluating one of the best sites out there

This post originally appeared on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalist, a blog for young journos.

Well this post poses a bit of a dilemma for me. I work as a copy editor for The Daily Collegian, an independently-run student newspaper at Penn State. Therefore, I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to critically evaluate the paper, although I will say that we are doing more to update our blogs and bring more multimedia content online.

The other newspaper in town, the Centre Daily Times is our competitor so it’s probably not fair for me to comment on them either.

Which leaves my “hometown” newspaper — The Washington Post. I prefer the paper’s design to that of the New York Times which I think sometimes has too many one column stories on the front.

Online, the Post does an equally, if not even greater, job of presenting the news and providing plenty of multimedia content. The front site is amazingly easy to navigate with a photo in the left hand corner to draw the reader in and then a one column view of the top news with small text and links to stories near the bottom of the page.

It also appears that the Post is now twittering live sports but has somehow added the feed directly to their Web site thereby eliminating the need for readers to navigate away from washingtonpost.com to view the feed. This is great because it eliminates the view of some editors that using Twitter during live events could direct traffic away from the main site. As an editor, I would continue to push the use of Twitter, expanding it to other events, such as White House press conferences, Supreme Court hearings among other news events.

The Post has been great about adding video and audio content online and its easy to find stories with such content from the front of the site because of the icons that lead the way. A video and photo gallery bar is located near the end of the page — perhaps that could be moved up for made vertical so that it could fit in the large amount of white space the Post has to the right of the page.

Another great thing about the Post is that it frequently sets up Q & A’s between the reporters and readers, especially with more interesting or investigative stories.

One thing that has to go is the multiple pages for articles. With the Internet, this is no longer necessary as text can virtually go on forever. It’s annoying to have to click to go to the next page and sometimes I don’t read the story past the first part because of that.

For some stories, the Post will prompt you to login or sign up but the site is so good that taking a few minutes to sign up is well worth the time. I’ve been using the site this way for years and only occasionally have to sign in when I’m on a different computer.

Overall, the Post should be what local papers strive to imitate, albeit with a much smaller staff.

Gustav shows best/worst reporting

Reporting about natural disasters is a staple of journalism and brings out both the best and the worst in articles and newscasts.

Reporters and editors at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans stayed at the paper despite evacuations, warnings and power outages. The paper itself has not been printed since Saturday and power went out Monday, so the newsroom has been running entirely on backup generators. The paper has been continuously updating its Web site the whole time. One staffer even rode out the storm on a shrimp boat!

At Louisiana State University, 10 staffers of the student-run Daily Reveille remained in their newsroom, updating their Web site even though the university announced it would be closed through at least Wednesday. Now, LSU has extended its closure through the remainder of the week because of the excessive damage to campus. Yet, the staffers still remain, taking photos of the damage on campus so that those students who evacuated can see what’s going on. During the height of the storm on Monday, there was even a live video feed from the top of the Reveille’s building on campus, although the newsroom lots its power and therefore feed during the afternoon.

The dedication of both these staffs made seem odd to some non-journalists. Aren’t they risking their lives? Shouldn’t they be heading the evacuation warnings? But keeping a horde, albeit small horde, of reporters and editors behind in a city served by a local paper is essential in today’s world and highly valued by those who did have to flee the area. While national organizations such as CNN and MSNBC do roll into town for large news events such as these, the coverage is not nearly as local and extensive as it is when the town paper covers it.

But where there’s a disaster, there’s always a news reporter putting him or herself in harms way when in front of the video camera. As the Washington Post points out:

Is it really a hurricane, or even just a “tropical depression,” unless a TV reporter in a hooded windbreaker is flopping around in the wind and rain like a landed flounder?

Is it really a weather story at all unless the TV people can go outside in the storm and, while risking bodily injury, warn viewers that they shouldn’t go outside in the storm and risk bodily injury?

During Hurricane Gustav, reporters from CNN and Fox News braved the elements to show people just how dangerous it was.

CNN’s Rob Marciano was nearly blown off a New Orleans rooftop as he pointed out the “whitetops” in the surging Mississippi River. His colleague Don Lemon was at street level, in what appeared to be a big open parking lot, warning viewers that wind-borne debris “can really shear through you.” Another CNN correspondent, Brian Todd, hit the jackpot: He had to hang on to a pole while doing his report from Baton Rouge.

The winner:

Geraldo Rivera. Fox News Channel’s self-described “warrior journalist” wasn’t content to shoot his story about New Orleans’s levees from the relative safety of a sturdy bridge or overpass, like his colleagues at MSNBC and CNN. Rivera went to the base of one of the levee walls, practically daring it to collapse: “The walls are holding,” shouted Rivera, as if covering the fall of Jericho, “but it is fierce here.” At least he got splashed by the “over-topping” waters.