atlantalarry

Are comment sections on news sites salvagable?

I love discussion.  I've been involved in discussion and debate on the internet since 1988, when I got my first online account as a computer science student at Georgia State University, and discovered the usenet and bitnet forums.  The internet was a much smaller world, then, mostly populated by people in the technology world.  Trolling and flamewars were already common, but at that time the signal to noise ratio, or number of useful and interesting posts compared to childish rants, was acceptable.

Recently, though, I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that freewheeling and unmoderated forums on the internet quickly devolve into useless trolling, and either moderation or a requirement that people use their real names are necessary to ensure good quality discussion on serious news and political sites.

The Chicago Sun-Times recently turned off its comments.  Craig Newman, the managing editor wrote:

The world of Internet commenting offers a marvelous opportunity for discussion and the exchange of ideas. But as anyone who has ever ventured into a comment thread can attest, these forums too often turn into a morass of negativity, racism, hate speech and general trollish behaviors that detract from the content.

He further wrote:

Again, we are not doing away with comments. But we do want to take some time and work on the qualitative aspect of how they are handled and how we can foster a productive discussion rather than an embarrassing mishmash of fringe ranting and ill-informed, shrill bomb-throwing.

When moderation of comments is proposed, commenters often complain about censorship and first amendment violations, issues that have nothing to do with moderation policy.  Publications have the right to control the quality of the material which is distributed in their name and at their expense,  including comments by readers.

Exactly how wretched is the financial state of print news media?

I'm active in a Toastmaster's club. One evening I was scheduled to deliver a speech, and the evening's toastmaster introduced me as follows:

"Larry is back in school pursuing a journalism degree so that he can die alongside the newspaper industry."

It was a funny quip, but it had an uncomfortable ring of truth.

The Pew Research Journalism Project produces a yearly report called The State of the News Media. This year's report was released in late March. While it acknowledges that digital journalism is making some gains, the report paints a bleak picture of newspaper revenue decline, and revenue is the lifeblood of the industry.

Here's are two excerpts from the section entitled The Revenue Picture for American Journalism and How It Is Changing:

Advertising, at least for now, still accounts for the majority of known news revenue—a little over two-thirds, by this reckoning. But the advertising-supported business model is in a state of churn. Print advertising continues its sharp decline. Television advertising currently remains stable, but the steady audience migration to the web will inevitably impact that business model, too. Digital advertising is growing, though not nearly fast enough to keep pace with declines in legacy ad formats. And, while new forms of digital advertising gained momentum in 2013, the online advertising market seems to favor a scale achievable only by few.

Audience revenue is the next largest source of income for the industry, accounting for about a quarter of the total news pie through subscriptions, cable fees and individual giving. It is growing—both as a dollar figure and as a share of the whole. But audience-driven revenue growth does not necessarily signify that more people are paying for news. Rather, the data suggest that, in aggregate, more revenue is being squeezed out of a shrinking—or at least flat—base of paying consumers.

So ad revenues, the largest source of income for the news media, is dropping. Subscription income is increasing, but the increase is probably due to squeezing more money out of existing customers, rather than by expansion of the paid subscriber base.

The report mentions a few positive developments. Technology entrepreneurs and companies, who have a deeper understanding of the internet and its possibilities than most of the leaders of the traditional news industry, are starting to invest heavily in both established news organizations and startups. There is also a movement toward non-profit journalism, funded by grants and contributions.

But, overall, the report suggests that the print news media continues to be in turmoil and decline. If you want further information read Pew's State of the News Media 2014.

Yet Another Explanation of Explanatory Journalism

The term "explanatory journalism" has been used a lot lately,   A number of high profile websites dedicated to explanatory journalism have been launched within the past year, including Vox.com, the newest incarnation of Nate Silver's  FiveThirtyEight.com, the recently launched New York Times's section entitled The Upshot,

So what is explanatory journalism?

John McDermott provides a nice, one sentence definition of explanatory journalism in an article at digiday:

Explanatory journalism is a form of reporting that attempts to present nuanced, ongoing news stories in a more accessible manner.

The excellent thing about this definition is that it focuses on the most important trait of explanatory journalism rather than on specific methods.  Vox relies on slide shows, FiveThirtyEight on graphs and analysis of data, but both sites try to provide explanations and context for complex stories as clearly as the subject matter allows.

Isn't all journalism supposed to be explanatory?

Not really.  The classic "hard" news model relies on organizing an article into what's known as the "inverted pyramid".  The inverted pyramid is a holdover from the days of the telegraph, when a storm in the middle of the country might damage a telegraph line, and interrupt the transmission of a story.  The reporter submitting the article over the wire would cram the most relevant facts into the first sentence or two, and any background later in the article.  If the transmission were interrupted, the story could still be run using just the most basic facts. 

The traditional way of accomplishing this top heavy form of writing was with the "Five Ws": who? what? when? where? why?.  It led to a very terse style of journalistic writing.  It also led to sentences like "The city council passed a bill Tuesday requiring that all dogs be on leash, in response to the recent rash of dog attacks."

When reporting on things like leash laws the inverted pyramid is a very good structure.  All the information most people need to know is in the first sentence.  When the topic gets more complex, the inverted pyramid begins to break down.  Imagine fitting stories about Middle East peace talks, or the Affordable Care Act, into this structure consistently.  This is where expanatory journalism is in its element.

Is explanatory journalism a new invention?

No.  Roy Peter Clark, who is now at Poynter.org, a site for journalists, has been writing about explanatory journalism for decades, and recently wrote the informative article  A new explanatory journalism can be built on a strong foundation.  The Pulitizer Prize has included the category of Explanatory Journalism (later changed to Explanatory Reporting) since 1985.

Why is there so much interest in explanatory journalism recently?

Journalism, like most other fields, has its trends and fads.  But I think the reason for its popularity now is the explosion of sources of information brought about by the internet.  Explanatory journalism slows it down a bit, and offers point by point explanations of complex issues, in the context of a sea of internet noise swirling around those issues.

Is explanatory journalism always easy reading?

No.  The difficulty varies with the subject matter.  While the slide shows on Vox tend to be clear and easy reading, the typical article at FiveThirtyEight requires time and thought.  Some subject matter is easier to simplify than others, and FiveThirtyEight takes on a great deal of material which is data driven, and data driven articles require some focus on the math.

Where can I go to find out more about explanatory journalism?

I'd start by reading examples of the craft.  The following sites are a good starting point:

Vox.com

FiveThirtyEight.com

The Upshot from the New York Times

QuickTake at Bloomberg,com

The Pulitzer Prizes for explanatory journalism (1985-1997)

The Pulitzer Prizes for explanatory reporting (1998-present)

Here are a few articles on the web discussing the trend toward explanatory journalism:

Explaining what's behind the sudden allure of explanatory journalism by John McDermott

A new explanatory journalism can be built on a strong foundation by Roy Peter Clark

A Brief History of Explanatory Journalism by Natalie Burg

 

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Is Unbiased Journalism Even Possible?

I have been spending a great deal of time lately reading and thinking about journalism's code of ethics, and the notion that journalism should be "unbiased".  It's a very practical issue for me at the moment, as I develop guidelines for the online news site The Atlanta Tortoise. 

One of the decisions I have to make involves my own political behavior.  I've always been politically active, both in my community and online.  I've also frequently contributed money to political campaigns and organizations involved in advocacy.  News organizations generally prohibit employees from publicly expressing political opinions outside the editorial pages.  The Associated Press, for example, includes the following language in  The Associated Press Stylebook 2013 (Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law) :

Anyone who works for the AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP's reputation as an unbiased source of news.  They must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum, whether in Web logs, chat rooms, letters to the editor, petitions, bumper stickers or lapel buttons, and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.

Before the Tortoise begins publication, I have to develop a policy on my own political pronouncements and activities, and stick to it.  I doubt that whatever I come up with will be as restrictive as the AP policy, but on the other hand reporting on local campaigns while playing an active role in them could undermine the credibility of the publication.

A second issue regarding bias is the content of the news itself.  There is a whole political cottage industry monitoring the real or perceived bias of various news outlets.  In reality, there is no way to avoid bias, because as soon as a publication decides to report one story, and ignore another, it is exhibiting a bias.  It has made a decision that one story is worth reporting, and the alternative story isn't.  Balance is another concept related to bias.  It is easy to come up with absurd examples to show that some degree of bias is necessary when attempting to balance opinions on an issue.  Should a spokeperson from the Flat Earth Society be invited to comment on articles related to earth science?  Should a Ku Klux Klan leader be given a spot on discussions of race relations?  My answer to both these question would be no, and in fact I'd draw the boundaries even more narrowly.  Some people and organizations don't have input worth including, and writers and editors should be making decisions about how many viewpoints to include in a story on a particular topic.

The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists  doesn't use the word "bias" and only uses the word "balance" in an unrelated context.  It does hint at it in the following lines, though:

Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.

 

Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.

 

These are both reasonable statements, although neither gives a very clear guide for behavior. 

So it might be a good idea to back up and ask a basic question.  Why is bias a bad thing? The primary negative outcome of bias is that it often causes distortion of the truth by filtering out information which runs counter to the preconceptions of a writer or editor.  In the cognitive sciences it's known under a variety of names, depending on the specific example, including "confirmation bias", "cognitive dissonance", and "selective exposure".  Sue Ellen Christian, a researcher in the School of Communication at Western Michigan University, wrote a paper entitled Cognitive Biases and Errors as Cause—and Journalistic Best Practices as Effect.  

The abstract of her paper states:

This article argues that basic ethical principles of U.S. journalism as described in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics are the result of, and a response to, cognitive bias and error. Cognitive biases and errors necessitate journalistic best practices to correct or attenuate them. Social cognitive processes explored include stereotyping, confirmation bias, and attribution. These concepts are noteworthy because each may be activated by the practice of journalism, and each has been shown to be susceptible to attenuation through specific practices. The article concludes with ideas for integrating cognition into journalism education.

I think this is the key to developing a reasonable principle around both bias and balance.  Journalists can't be expected to eradicate their biases, and they can't be expected to achieve perfect balance in a story.  What they can do is understand their own biases, and to take steps to avoid those biases affecting the accuracy and completeness of their articles.  The existing codes of ethics and policies attempt to do this by setting up simple rules.  Focusing on why bias is often detrimental to good journalism, and techniques for recognizing and, if need be, circumventing those biases could be a more productive approach than any concise code of ethics.

 

 

 

The Atlanta Tortoise

Friends and family probably think of me as the Jethro Bodine of Atlanta.  Jethro, a character in the 1960s sitcom "The Beverly Hillbillies", would change from one unlikely career goal to another with each episode.  At various times he wanted to be a brain surgeon, a spy, a private investigator, and a movie producer.

Like Jethro, I've toyed around with a number careers, with varying degrees of success.  After working a variety of industrial and warehousing jobs, I owned a commerical cabinet shop for few years, then embarked on a twenty year career in information technology.  After I retired from the IT world, I tried my hand at online retailing (which was boring beyond description), and writing fiction.

About a year ago I took an inventory of the things that interested me the most, the activities I enjoyed, and my skill set.  Everything pointed to three things: writing, community issues in the City of Atlanta and its near suburbs, and technology.  I enrolled in the Journalism program at Georgia State University, and started the process of setting up an online news site.  Online news and analysis is a good fit for all three of my passions.

The form of journalism I'm interested in pursuing is known as explanatory journalism.  At the national level the best know explanatory news sites are Vox and FiveThirtyEight.  The site I'm setting up is known as The Atlanta Tortoise.

I chose the tortoise as a symbol because the site will not deliver fast breaking news.  In the spirit of the Slow Food movement, news is best delivered with care and thought behind it, and I don't believe those are attainable within the current fast news cycle.

The Atlanta Tortoise will officially launch on January 1, 2015.  In the meantime the site is up with the announcement and a list of editorial principles.  The content will consist of a mix of my own writing and as many original, good quality, local freelance articles as I can acquire within the budgetary constraints of a new organization.

I'm in a local Toastmaster's club, and a friend introduced me at a meeting one evening as follows:  "Larry is back in school pursuing a degree in journalism so he can die alongside the newspaper industry."  It was a hilarious introduction, but the decline of hardcopy newspapers doesn't mean the death of news. The media may be undergoing techological changes, and revenue models may be changing, but the internet won't kill the need for journalism any more than the transition from monks with quills to printing presses killed book publishing.  I hope the Atlanta Tortoise is a positive, if only small,  contribution to the transition of the local news media.

National Novel Writing Month begins

It's the afternoon of November 1st, and I'm on the verge of falling asleep as I type.  Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, and I've hammered out my first 2,000 words (2037 to be exact) of what will be a first draft with a minimum of 50,000 words by the last day of the month. I wrote about this in a previous post.

Last night, Halloween, I decided to hit the ground running on the project, and after I'd finished distributing candy to costumed children, I stayed up until midnight so that in the first seconds of November 1st I could begin writing  the first chapter of the novel.  I worked from midnight until 1:20, slept for a few hours, then spent another hour writing.  My plan is to work on the novel for a minimum of 3 hours per day, which should put me on track to reach 50,000 words early.

Of course in thirty days I'm not creating great literature.  This is the first draft of a formulaic science fiction novel.  After thirty days I'll begin editing and rewriting.  I expect to have a publishable novel within about three months.

But now, I think I'm going to take a quick nap.

 

An update on my novel

The month of November is going to be busy for me.  As I stated in an earlier post, I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month, an event whereby people from around the globe make an attempt to write a novel with a minimum of 50,000 words in 30 days.

The rules are minimal.  You commence writing on November 1st, and feed your novel into a word-count tool at the end of the month to determine whether you were successful.   The emphasis is on completing a rough draft within the time limit, not on creating a polished, edited, finished novel.

Advance preparation of an outline, research, and character sketches are allowed, so that's how I'm occupying my time prior to the November 1st starting date.  My own approach is to use my chapter outline to determine where I start writing on any given day.  If I'm stuck on one chapter, I'll start on another and come back to my sticking point later.

After the contest is over I'll spend another two months editing and polishing, so my actual time spent on getting the novel ready for publication will be three months.

It is a science fiction murder mystery.  It will be set on an artificial planet on the edge of the asteroid belt.  It's somewhat formulaic (drawing from common features of both sci-fi and mystery), but then again anything I hammer out in 30 days, and 50,000 words, would have to have a tightly  limited number of subplots and a simple main narrative.

As part of my research I've been reading two books.

The first is The Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe by George Ochoa and Jeffrey Osier.  The book is a guide to avoiding bad science in constructing the setting and technology for sci-fi stories and novels.  Written science fiction is speculative, so skirting the edges of plausibility is allowable to some extent.  But I'm going to try to keep the details of the story as believable and scientifically realistic as possible.

The second book I've been reading is Writing Mysteries, edited by Sue Grafton. It's a series of article on the craft of mystery writing, by Sara Paretsky, Tony Hillerman, and a number of other writers.

My plan is to work on the research, outline, and character sketches up to October 31st, then hit the ground running with the novel itself starting on the first day of November.

A 50,000 word novel in a month

Since I'm a person of many interests, cursed with a somewhat short attention span, deadlines are good for me.  Publicly announcing my deadline on a particular project is even better, since it creates accountablility, even if embarrassment is the only consequence.

After considering several post-retirement careers,  I've settled on writing.  It's something I've always enjoyed, and it doesn't take a lot of motivation for me to sit at the keyboard and write.  Doing it in a focused and disciplined manner has been my main challenge.  I've been submitting short stories to publications regularly over the past few months, have been ruminating on several ideas for novels, and have even written a few chapters of two of those novels.

But I needed something to jolt me into creating a complete first draft of a novel.  I found an event that fits the bill.

David Seah wrote a post on his  blog entitled National Novel Writing Month 2012.  It described a yearly international event whereby aspiring writers encourage  and pressure fellow participants to write the rough draft of a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.  Since November is fast approaching, and I've made a committment to myself to write daily anyhow, I decided to take the plunge, and officially enter the event.

If you are an aspiring novelist, and need something to focus your effort, and create a structured deadline for yourself, this may be the event for you.  The official site is  http://www.nanowrimo.org.

So stop fantasizing about that novel, and start writing.  I intend to do short progess reports on my own effort through the month of November.

Getting serious about submitting my writing

The body of this article is a post I made on the Writer's Digest community blog.  I've been writing for a long time, but it's just been over the past month that I've decided to get serious about it.  The post below is about my current approach to getting my tools together.

Judging by various articles on writing I've read, some writers have a problem motivating themselves to actually write, and finish their work.  That isn't exactly my problem.  I can sit at the keyboard in the morning and come up with dozens of ideas for stories.  I can also allocate time to hammer out and polish an article or short story from any of those ideas.

My problem has always been submitting, and then tracking those submissions.

A few weeks ago I decided to sit down and devise a system of submission and tracking for short stories. 

First I worked up a list of publications along with their submission guidelines.  If they accepted electronic submissions I bookmarked their submission page in my browser, if they only accepted submissions by mail I added their address and editor's name to a running list.

I created a spreadsheet organized by story.  Alongside the title of the story I included date of completion,  a list of prospective publications based on the nature of the story, a corresponding list of submission dates (to track where the story actually was at any point in the submission-rejection-or-acceptance cycle, and the status of the story (in development, submitted, accepted).

What this allows me to do, when a rejection comes, is simply mark the article rejected by the periodical's name on the spreadsheet, submit it to the next publication on the list, and mark the date of submission next to that publication.

That takes care of tracking the actual submissions. 

Another problem I had was losing control of the version of the story.  I'd do rewrites to a story, come back to it a few weeks or months later, and discover that I had two or three versions of the same story.  This was aggravated by the fact that sometimes I'd do edits at my desk computer, sometimes my laptop, and I was saving my work, inconsistently, onto a thumb drive.

I solved this by setting some policies.  I created a folder entitled "Writing".  The sub-folders within Writing are for each story, and contain any files associated with that story (outline, notes, the story itself).  I save my work frequently as I edit, and several times per day I save the whole Writing folder and its sub-folders to my thumb drive.  I haven't used my laptop to do edits since I set these policies a few weeks ago, but my plan is to carry the thumb drive with me, and carefully transfer edited stories between the laptop and the desktop using the thumb drive.  In the past I've tried Google Docs for editing, but I often edit where I have no network connectivity, and don't want to be dependent on the web.

One other thing I've done is set up templates in my word processing software for the formats of each of publications on my list.  I use Open Office, but every modern word processing software package I'm aware of has templates of some sort.  This way, when I start a story, my name, page numbers, and contact info are inserted automatically, along with the settings for font and spacing.  All I have to do is open a template for the first publication I plan to submit to, provide a title, and start typing.

One other thing I do is have envelopes ready, including a few envelopes addressed to me for SASE, so that if I'm submitting to a publication which doesn't accept electronic submissions, getting them a hard copy is quick and easy.  It minimizes the impulse to procrastinate.

As a result of these changes to my habits and system, I've submitted three short stories (which were already written before I made these changes) within the past week,  and I have another story nearly ready for submission.

Over the next few weeks I'll be working up a similar system for non-fiction queries.  I'll post a description here when I get it worked out.