atlantalarry

The World's Oldest Journalism Undergraduate plays the class availability lottery

I'm getting my degree under what is called the GSU 62 program.  As long as I'm willing to sign up for classes on the first day of a semester, during late registration, tuition is waived.  It's a program available to people age 62 and older, and fills classes which would otherwise not be filled to capacity.

It's a great program, except for a couple of related Catch-22s. 

The first is that classes tend to fill up before the first day of a given semester, leaving you with slim pickings.  This isn't a problem when you're starting the program, because the pool of classes you have remaining in your degree program is larger.  But when you only have 10 classes left before graduation, it narrows your options considerably.  I call it the "class availability lottery".

The second challenge is that it creates a very frantic first day of the semester.  At 7 AM (approximately a half hour from now), I'll sign up for classes online.  Depending on what classes I get, I may have to immediately drive downtown and attend a class I didn't even know I would be taking an hour or two previously.

That said, it's a fantastic program for older people who are at the end of one career, but not interested in settling into a life of fishing or golf (neither of which I do). 

For the fee waiver I can live with uncertainty.  I don't have any complaints with the program itself.  It's mutually beneficial to the people in the program and the university.  We get a tuition waiver, and the university fills classes which otherwise would not be filled.   So in fifteen minutes I'll get to discover what I'll be doing for the next few months.

If you are speaking in public, keep it short!

I'm an avid member of a local Toastmasters club.  I love public speaking, both as a speaker, and as an audience member.  But one of the many great things my years in Toastmasters has taught me is the value of keeping speeches as short as possible.

There a few situations in which long talks are necessary.  

University professors have to cover a subject thoroughly, and the students have textbooks and other supplementary materials at their disposal so that they are not required to retain everything said in the lecture.  

Participants at a workshop or continuing education session expect to get a lot of information for the fee they have paid.

But most speeches should be much shorter than the hour or more that lectures and workshops often require.  In my own experience watching the audiences when I've listened to a variety of speakers, the average speaker can hold an audience's attention for about five minutes, and a spectacular speaker for 10-15 minutes.  After that, eyes wander, a few people begin whispered conversations to their neighbors, and a few other people begin taking restroom breaks.

Consequently, if I'm asked to speak, and I'm given a half hour speaking slot, I prepare a seven or eight minute speech.  I then take questions from the audience.  If too few people ask questions, I first attempt to engage the audience in direct conversation by asking them a few questions I've prepared in advance.  I then give a very short wrap up, also prepared in advance, and leave the podium early if necessary.

I have been thinking about the length of speeches lately for several reasons.  Roy Peter Clark, journalist and teacher, recently wrote an article on the journalism website Poynter entitled 3 big lies that public speakers tell and why journalists should care.

The three lies he addresses are

1. "You can interrupt me at any time"
2. "I want this to be a conversation"
3. "There will be plenty of time at the end for questions"

It's a good article, and if you are interested in techniques of public speaking and engaging an audience, you should read it.

A second reason I've been focused on brevity in speaking is that I am an advocate of brevity in writing.  Speaking is different than writing in a number of different ways, but one thing they share is a need to hold the attention of the reader or audience for the entire length of the work, and to convey the maximum amount of information and impact using the fewest number of words.

As an exercise I often go back over blog posts I wrote years ago, and do a rewrite that shortens the work without losing the information or meaning of the original.  In nearly all cases the edited version is better than the original.  Speaking is similar.  Speaking for the sake of filling the time slot is always a bad idea.  

Decide what information you want to give the audience, and what you want the emotional impact to be, and write a speech that accomplishes your goals in the shortest amount of time.

Your audiences will thank you. 

Why I'm taking on the insane project of changing my career to journalism late in life

I bill myself as "The World's Oldest Journalism Undergraduate".  It may not be strictly true.  I have not polled journalism departments to find out if there are undergraduates older than 63 anywhere.  But I'm very old compared to the other students in my classes.

Going into the field of print journalism under today's conditions may not seem like a rational decision, even for a young person.  The industry is not financially well off.  The Pew Research Center's yearly State of the News Media has been depressing reading over the past ten years, a relentless story of declining ad revenues and newsroom layoffs.

So why would I go into this field?  

Because I love writing.  Because my retirement income gives me the luxury of changing careers without worrying about how it will affect my family's economic state.  But most of all, because professional news reporting is critical to democracy in ways that bloggers and "citizen journalists" can't begin to address in their current form.  

I've written online for nearly twenty years, and at one time this blog was reasonably popular among Atlanta neighborhood activists, New Urbanist planners and architects, and smart growth advocates.  But it had the usual limitations of a one person, part time endeavor.  I couldn't spend the amount of time monitoring government meetings and court sessions, developing inside sources, and doing research, that a professional, traditional, full featured, full time news room could handle. 

One of the best observations on the limitations of "citizen journalism",  and the effect of layoffs in the newspaper industry, comes from David Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and the creator of the TV series The Wire.  It is from a blog post about a change in Baltimore police policy that restricted information on the identity of officers involved in shootings.  Simon decided to investigate the policy himself.  He focused on the performance history of one particular officer, named McKissick, recently involved in a fatal shooting, and had this observation:

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. 

Simon's article is worth reading and pondering by anyone who cares about the flow of accurate information in our society, and the effect of the decline of the daily newspaper on our right to information.

I do not know exactly what I'll be doing, once I've gotten my journalism degree.  I'll be 65 years old at that point.  My short term plan is to set up a local online news publication, and to buy articles from freelance writers who are already expert in various topics.  But whatever I do, I hope to fill one of the gaps left by the current state of the news industry.  Wish me luck.

Ethics and Blogging

I've been blogging for over 11 years now, and I've taken on the role of The World's Oldest Journalism Undergraduate to make a late life transition from  IT into journalism.  I've also set up the infrastructure for an online news publication called the Atlanta Tortoise ("Slow News is the Best News") that will be launched in the spring of 2015.  At the rate of two courses per semester I'll graduate with a BA in journalism, with a concentration in print journalism,  in slightly under two years.  So according to plan, by the time I get my degree I will have had roughly 12 years of experience blogging, and one year running a news site.

The reason I wrote the description above is to give you an idea of my own relationship to both blogging and journalism.   Both are important to me.  Blogging democratized the crafts of writing and publishing, and opened up the public arena for new and diverse voices.  Professional journalism and a free press is necessary for  public engagement, democracy, and progress.  Those may seem like boilerplate feelgood platitudes, but they are true.  We need both a means of hearing the voice of the general public, even if it's a rude cacophony,  and a full time professional press, with the resources and mission to "Seek Truth and Report it".

One of the unfortunate aspects of the economically painful transition from traditional forms of print journalism, to online journalism, is that the borders between blogging and reporting, and between opinion and hard or investigative news,  have been blurred.  Many of the most popular newsites are really expanded blogs, and the difference in standards that should be applied to this new type of media has been  unclear.  This is not a question of "bias", or even of "balance".   It's a matter of developing reasonable standards for making the difference between hard news and opinion clear to the reader, and for giving the public a roadmap for  determining which publications to trust.    This is not an easy task, and written and enforced guidelines are crucial.

Which brings me to the point of this article.  I strongly believe that the established ethical principles should apply to any article presented as hard news or investigative reporting.  That includes both the standards for gathering the news, and the standards for the finished product.  The most straightforward starting point is to make the Society of Professional Journalism's Code of Ethics the minimal acceptable standard.  I would be thrilled if the public read that relatively short document, and held their news providers, both hardcopy and online publications, to that standard.

Blogging is a bit different.  Even when blogs cover events in the news, they are clearly written from the viewpoint of the writer.  The cost of entry for blogging is very low, so the standards for verification and fact checking, and for truth and fairness, have often been low also.

To some extent the casual and loosely fact-checked nature of blogging has infected the culture of online journalism across the board.  At least one of the recent plagiarism scandals arose in part from the lack of emphasis on attribution and originality in the culture of publishing on the web.  Cutting and pasting is native to the online form.

I believe that anyone writing anything for public presentation needs to operate with a deliberate and written code of ethics.  This doesn't mean that bloggers can't be opinionated, satirical, expansive, sarcastic, creative, clearly biased, and activist.  It means that their writing should be grounded in the basic decency and responsibility that comes from having an ethical code.

In that spirit, I've decided to adopt, for this blog,  the short version of the Code of Ethics for Bloggers and Social Media and Content Creators, developed at mor10.com.   I'll be studying the longer version of the document, and considering whether I want to adopt it in toto,  or whether I need to develop a customized document.

The picture gets even more complicated when social media is added into the mix.  What does it mean to be ethical on Twitter, Facebook, or any of the other dozens  of  types of new media?  How should bloggers and professional journalists use social media, and how should they behave?  I don't yet have a clear opinion on the subtleties of interaction on those newer, faster moving media.  But when I do,  the readers here will be the first to know.

The World's Oldest Journalism Undergraduate carries on

I'm at the end of my fourth semester as the World's Oldest Journalism Undergraduate. I had decided to get the first part of the science requirement and my entire arts requirement out of the way this semester, so I'm finishing up Introduction to Biology, and Introduction to Theater. Both courses were interesting, but I'm anxious to get back into journalism classes.

 

 My ideal coursework for next semester would include finishing up my biology series, and taking either one of the media writing classes or Ethics in Media. The only non-journalism requirement I have left is Public Speaking. Speaking doesn't really bother me (I'm an avid member of an active Toastmaster's club), but I'm ready to get back into the coursework I'm here for.

 

 Depending on how time consuming my classes are next semester, I'll be launching The Atlanta Tortoise in either early or late spring. I've already put the infrastructure in place, including a website with an issue-based Wordpress magazine module and a "leaky" paywall, similar to the subscription model the New York Times uses.

 

I've also begun assembling a pool of freelancers who specialize in a number of different areas. Since the subject matter is going to strongly reflect my own personal idiosyncrasies (if this isn't fun and satisfying to me there's absolutely no reason to put the money and work into it), I've sought out people whose work I've seen, and whose approaches to their subjects interest and entertain me.

 

I've allocated sufficient resources to purchase enough articles at freelancer starvation rates to fill three monthly issues. The Atlanta Tortoise will not be The New Yorker, either in payment rates or in initial name recognition of the writers, but my goal is to reach that caliber within ten years, and to help build the careers of a great team of writers.

 

For now, though, I have two final exams approaching, so I'd better turn my focus back to the Krebs Cycle and electron transport systems. There will be ample  time for the inverted pyramid of journalism later.

Coming up for air after exploring the gamergate swamp

First, here is a disclaimer.  This post is on a blog, and it's my opinion.  I'm under no obligation to present "the other side of the story".  So if anyone involved in the sustained internet harassment campaign known as "gamergate"  reads this, and wants to shout "ethics in journalism",  knock yourself out.  But I'd encourage that person to do a little reading about the difference between hard news and editorial opinion.  It's obvious that for all the talk within gamergate about journalistic ethics, gamergate has absolutely no grasp of the differences between hard news, product reviews, criticism, and editorial opinion.

I'm not a "gamer" in the currently accepted use of the word.  I don't have a gaming console (and wouldn't know what to do with it if I had one), and I don't understand much of the terminology thrown around by the hardcore gaming community.   The games I play are the ancient Asian board game Go, a primarily facebook based casual game called Castle Age, and retro Pacman.

While I'm not a gamer, I developed a significant interest in gamergate, an internet mob set up to harass several prominent women in the gaming community.  The primary reason I have a specific interest in internet trolls, harassers, and  flame war obsessives, is that about ten years ago I was cyberstalked by a mentally deranged individual across several forums for over a year.  My stalker had discovered via my blog that my wife had died, so he set up several impersonation accounts under variations of her name, and began posting disgusting messages from those accounts.  He also did what is now called "doxxing" (posting personally identifying information about the person being attacked).

I filed a police report to document the abuse in case it spilled over into the "real world", left the forums in question, and the incident died down.  I suspect the cyberstalker chalked it up as a "win".

Gamergate, despite denials from the people involved, began as a campaign to harass a game developer named Zoe Quinn, who had created an online interactive game called Depression Quest, about what it's like to be depressed.  Quinn's former boyfriend posted a long meandering attack on her, which led to intensive harassment and misogynistic attacks  by an internet mob of gamers who were opposed to the introduction of social issues into game.  You can read about the incident in her own words in the article 5 Things I Learned as the Internet's Most Hated Person.

After a few weeks of the harassment campaign against Quinn, the people behind the movement evidently decided that the optics of naming the attacks after the subject of the attacks was not creating great press, so a right-wing character actor with a twitter account posted a link to a video attacking Quinn with under the  hashtag #gamergate.  Gamergate then decided to deflect attention from the fact that their main activity was harassing  a handful of women by creating the slogan "it's about ethics in gaming journalism", and by starting a number of charity campaigns.  Thus began the lipstick-on-a-pig phase of gamergate. 

Two years earlier, a feminist named Anita Sarkeesian had been subjected to the same treatment by many of the individuals involved in gamergate.  Several other women were added to the target list as feminists, inside and outside the gaming community,  began speaking out against gamergate.

I've been reading the twitter traffic on the #gamergate hashtag, and reading as much of the strategy discussion among the gamergaters on two of their other forums as I can stomach.  Recently, as an experiment, I posted a negative message about gamergate on the twitter hashtag.  Within a few seconds I had nearly 50  replies.  I was expecting pushback, but that's the first indication I'd had of just how fanatical the people caught up in this internet mob are.

I'm not going to post on the #gamergate hashtag again, and I'm going to keep my interactions with gamergaters limited to circumstances where I think it might have a positive impact.  Many naive young people, craving a sense of camaraderie, have been attracted to gamergate.  I doubt that I have any ability to convince them that they are supporting and participating in a hate group.  Internet echo chambers are a powerful deterrent to critical thinking.

The press has, for the most part, accurately identified gamergate as an internet harassment mob.  If you'd like to read more about it, this interview with Arthur Chu is a good starting point.  Or you can just do a web search.  An enormous amount has been written about it since the initial attacks on Zoe Quinn.

If I write about gamergate again, I'm going to focus on why the internet is such a fertile ground for outpourings of vitriol and rage.  But for now, I need a break.  I feel like I've been inhaling swamp water.

Misleading headlines about scientific studies -- a pet peeve of mine

I dislike headlines about scientific studies that give an inaccurate picture of the conclusion of the study, and today I found an excellent example.  Publications love to do twists on "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" when reporting on studies involving apples.  I regularly read Science Daily, which aggregates information on scientific studies, and generally does a pretty good job of it, with decent summaries and links to the source of the content of their articles.

Their current issue, however, ran the following headline: "An apple a day could keep obesity away".

The problem with that headline is that the study featured in the article makes no such claim.  In defense of Science Daily, the same headline was used in WSU News, the source of the report.  But Science Daily's editor's should still know better.  As a publication reporting on science, they have a responsibility not to make the same bone-headed mistakes often made by the media in general. 

The study itself. conducted at  Washington State University, examined the effects of various types of apples on the colon bacteria of mice.  The connection with obesity in the study is that nondigestible compounds found in apples, particularly Granny Smith apples, promote beneficial colon bacteria which might reduce inflammation in obese people, thereby lowering the risk of type II diabetes.

There is no claim in the study that apples will reduce obesity, which is strongly implied in the headline.  The article, on the other hand, presents a more plausible account of the findings of the study, based on  the summary published by Washington State University.

We are living in a world where advances in science have a big impact on our lives.  The press has a responsibility to report on scientific issues in a manners which gives the public an accurate picture.  Science Daily does a good job at this in most respects.  The articles always include links to the original source of the material, and their articles tend to accurately reflect the content of the studies.  They need to tighten up on their headlines, though.

The arrest and harassment of journalists in Ferguson

I've just finished reading two good articles by Kristen Hare at Poynter.org, a site for journalists.  Both articles are about the arrest of journalists during the protests in Ferguson Missouri.

The first is entitled So you got arrested in Ferguson, now what? The article focuses on the arrest of Matthew Giles, a grad student at NYU.  He was in Ferguson researching  the differences between national news coverage and the experiences of the people being covered.  He had been issued press credentials by NYU, and they had been approved by the police press liason in Ferguson.  Consequently he was clearly a member of the press, certified by both his organization, NYU, and the Ferguson police.

You should read the article.  It describes the circumstances of the arrest and his experience afterwards, and gives a list of recommendations for reporters who find themselves in a similar situation.

The second article contains a list of the reporters who were arrested covering the Ferguson story.

I'm aware that reporters are sometimes  the Rodney Dangerfield of American culture, who often "don't get no respect".  People on the political right wing, in particular, often accuse the media of "liberal bias".  But the press comes under attack from every side of the political spectrum, depending on the details of story they are covering.

Some criticisms of the press are justified.  The media often chases the garish headline rather than give adequate attention to the information people need to know.  Stories about Amber Rose or Donald Trump are obviously entertaining to a broad section of the public, but have little impact on our lives as individuals, or as a nation.

Ferguson, on the other hand,  was a story worth covering.  Although some people believe that the issue of strained race relations in the United States has been solved, events like Ferguson indicate that in many ways, we are living in multiple countries, rather than in one unified nation. 

Pew research does excellent polling of the attitudes of the American public on various issues.  A recent survey on the public's reaction to the Ferguson shooting found that whites and African-Americans had starkly different views on the subject.  80% of African-Americans accept the statement "This case raises important issues about race that need to be discussed."  Only 37% of whites answered yes to the same question.  Another Pew survey went into greater detail on perceptions of equality of treatment by the police, and reveals a similar divide in the public's perception.

It is the job of the press to uncover the information the public needs to understand events which affect their lives.  As the percentage of whites within the population declines, and the percentage of African-Americans and Hispanics increases, it is particularly important that the press be able to present a clear and accurate view of the state of race relations in the United States.  Ferguson provided a window into those relations, and the press needed to have access to the community.  The police should only have interfered with the press if the press were actively and obviously impeding the ability of the police to maintain order.  In the case of Ferguson, until the arrival of the state police, the police were creating more disorder than they were preventing.

Law enforcement in Ferguson badly botched many aspects of the crisis in that town.  The harassment of the press was just one in a long list of inept over-reactions.  But a free press is necessary to both democracy and our ability to solve problems as a nation.  The press needs to fight back against abuses by officials through its own organizations. and through civil liberties groups, and the police departments need to better train and educate their officers in the rights of the press and the public.  Most importrantly, the public needs to understand why a free press is necessary for their active participation in a democratic society.

 

My take on the Dylan Byers article about Vox.com

Dylan Byers, who covers the media for Politico, wrote an article entitled Vox not living up to the hype, explained.

 The title sums up the gist of the article.

In the beginning paragraphs Byers presents opinions critical of  Vox from a host of unnamed sources within the news industry.   Beginning the article with a stream of anonymous individuals made the article weak from the outset.

An article of this nature should not need to be peppered with phrases like "many journalists and news editors",  "some say", and "industry sources say".  Byers is a journalist, writing about the opinions of other journalists.  Certainly he could find a few sources willing to talk on the record.

Here's one of the oddest examples:

Some argue that, far from a radical reinvention of journalism, it's closer to a redeployment of the old models: three parts Wonkblog — the blog he had at The Post, which explained current events and policy debates through charts and data — and one part Wikipedia, with “explainers” on big issues like ISIS and the Ebola outbreak.

I have no reason to believe that Byers is making up the "Some" who have arrived at this very specific proportional formula.  Vox does have critics.  I've read a number of critiques of Vox by journalists, most notably Roy Peter Clark's article A new explanatory journalism can be built on a strong foundation.

I generally enjoy stories by Byers, so I don't have an ax to grind, but I think he could have turned this from a weak set of criticisms into a very good article with a few changes of emphasis.

One of the topics this article hints at without explicitly mentioning is traditional print journalism vs. web-only news sites. The entire news industry is going through a revenue crisis, but newspapers and news magazines have been hit particularly hard. Pew Research's annual report The State of the Media has been a depressing read for the past few years.

Traditional outlets are learning how to effectively use digital media, but print publications have enormous expenses that web-only publications don't. In specialized media aimed at journalists (Poynter.com, Columbia Journalism Review, etc) the undercurrent of tension between people with backgrounds in traditional journalism and those who grew up within internet culture is  palpable.

From a practical standpoint I would consider anyone crazy who launched a news startup which included a print edition. But existing publications don't have the option of divesting themselves of that expense. I suspect some of the unnamed sources in the Byers article are reacting as much to anxiety over industry changes as they are to Vox.

Another issue is the form of writing known as the "inverted pyramid", in which you cram the "who what when where why" of the story into the first few lines. Traditional reporters chased their story, then constructed an opening  "lede" of the following form:

"Monday evening the city council voted to require that all dogs be controlled on a leash while in public. This was in response to a recent string of attacks by dogs."

Journalists who began their careers writing on the web can't see the point of maintaining a form which was a necessity in the 19th Century because of the expense of sending long articles via telegraph.  And it isn't an issue of concise versus lengthy articles.  The web creates the potential for many possible forms of news delivery beyond the traditional format.

I suspect that the unnamed journalists and editors in the article miss the point of Vox. Novelty is a red herring. I doubt that Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell,  Matt Yglesias, Sara Kliff, or any of the other Vox writers are under the illusion that they've invented a unique genre. What they have created is a web-only publication featuring a number of excellent journalists, which explicitly practices explanatory journalism. It doesn't matter whether they use "cards", "slides", or "listicles". That's just a formatting issue.

Byers would have been better off framing this as as an issue of the tensions between web journalism and traditional  hard copy journalism, rather than putting forth the weird notion that a heavily capitalized, well written publication with growing popularity has failed after five months.

FYI:  I edited the first paragraph of this post for clarity about a week after I initially posted it.  Nothing about my argument has changed.  I merely cleaned up a few awkward sentences.

Year two of my life as the World's Oldest Journalism Undergraduate is about to begin

I'm not certain that I'm actually the World's Oldest Journalism Undergraduate, but at 63 years old, I'm sure that I'm close to the top of the range.  On August 25th I'll reach a landmark.  It will be the beginning of my second year of being surrounded by students roughly one-third my age, and being taught by professors half my age.

I'm looking forward to it.  I took one course in the seven week  summer semester, and I'm now returning to my two course schedule.  It's my version of a full course load.  I'll graduate in about another two years at this leisurely rate.

My level of excitement about embarking on a new career is still high, although the four week break was pleasant.

This semester my plan is to take the first in a series of media writing classes.  I have two journalism courses behind me, but one of them was a research class, and the other was an overall survey of the communications industry, which included an overview of public relations and publicity.  Media writing should get me into the nitty gritty of crafting sentences and paragraphs.  That's why I'm back in school, and I'm excited.

I'm in no hurry to graduate.  I've already set up the infrastructure for a local online news site specializing in explanatory journalism, and I intend to launch it in the spring of next year.  I'll already be grinding out stories before I finish the course work for my degree.  The classes will improve my craft, the diploma will be a good credential, not to mention a boost to my ego, but I can write and hire freelance writers before I finish the program.

Life is good.