Syllabus, Handouts, Lectures and Blog
Welcome!
This is the course website, where I’ll occasionally be blogging and where all lectures, handouts and useful links will be posted. We’ll go through the site during class. I encourage you to bookmark this and reference whenever working on a project or studying for the midterm. My goal is to make this easier for you, not more difficult.
Today, we’re talking about Twitter and there will be assignment due next week.
Cheers,
Alex
Today we’re going to dissect the best practices for putting together a natural-sound audio story.
We’re going to deconstruct this example:
layeredproject
This is not a perfect example and we’ll discuss why in class.
To do some hands-on editing of these files and to see all the pieces I used to create it, download this .zip file (284 MB; it will take some time).
Pieces included:
You may also want to reference this Audacity editing tipsheet as well.
The Atlantic is finally in the black.
By merging their print and web advertising departments, removing ad distinctions between print and web, bringing fresh faces into the newsroom and putting heavy emphasis on social media, the 153-year-old magazine has finally turned a profit in an economic climate most papers have found to be restrictive.
The New York Times reported on the small magazine’s victory, emphasizing that what worked for them would not necessarily work for larger publications.
Whether The Atlantic’s new business model will be the salvation of heritage publications remains to be seen. But it does give a bit of hope to our previously failing career.
An article published on Dec. 12 in The New York Times discusses Facebook’s role in monitoring free speech and guiding the modern conversation about censorship. With its more than 500 million users and one billion pieces of content per day, the article points out that the individuals responsible for monitoring that the terms of use are followed have some heavy decisions to make.
For example, following the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi in October, Facebook’s content monitors traced and removed accounts of individuals posting hateful and threatening messages on a Spirit Day remembrance page. A lot of these offenders were fake profiles; “troll” profiles as they are called.
Mr. Willner and his colleagues silenced dozens of troll accounts, and the page became usable again. But trolls are repeat offenders, and it took Mr. Willner and his colleagues nearly 10 days of monitoring the page around the clock to take down over 7,000 profiles that kept surfacing to attack the Spirit Day event page.
But what the Facebook monitors have to also do is decide heavier questions of public and private figures. This includes when an 11-year-old girl was being threatened in comments. Because the girl had appeared in a music video, she was considered a public figure and her mother’s complaints were not heard.
The Times writes:
A Facebook spokesman said the company had left the page up because it did not violate its terms of service, which allow criticism of a public figure. The spokesman said that by appearing in a band’s video, the girl had become a public figure, and that the threatening comments had not been posted until a few days ago. Those comments, and the account of the user who had posted them, were removed after The New York Times inquired about them.
It is a fine line that Facebook will have to walk and I wouldn’t be surprised if this issue continues to plague the website. By virtue of the amount of its users and user-generated content, Facebook is the largest forum for publishing speech. It will be in its best interest to do as little as possible in censoring what is written on Facebook in order to avoid legal battles over the First Amendment. On the other hand, Facebook has a social responsibility to its users. Because of its prominence, Facebook needs to be willing to address issues of hate and discrimination on its own website. Internet bullying is escalating and Facebook needs to be willing to make decisions to protect its users.
Another reason to delete your Facebook account. The Israeli army is now using Facebook to find draft dodgers.
Military service is compulsory in Israel and most serves in the Israeli Defense Force, but many try to get out of it. Some get doctors to say they have medical conditions, and others use family connections to not serve. But some girls claim to be “too” religious, which is an acceptable cause for exemption.
But now the army is using Facebook to see if those girls are serious about their religious devotion. Soldiers in the human resources department of the IDF are now checking Facebook to see if the girls are attending events on the Sabbath, posting on Sabbath, eating in non-Kosher restaurants or wearing immodest clothes.
Apparently this Facebook-trolling technique is working. The HR department of the IDF has already caught several girls pretending to be religious to get out of their army service.
So for all of you planning on moving to Israel and lying about your religious status to get out of army service, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!
So The New York Times got rid of its social media editor this week. The Poynter article explains that the NYT no longer felt like it needed a social media editor because social media should be the job of all reporters. Fair point, but then what exactly did the social media editor do?
Gawker took that up when NYT first created the position 1.5 years ago. “New York Times Hiring ‘Social Media Editor’ To …Do Something,” Gawker wrote. Jennifer Preston, who is the only person who held the job, was essentially meant to get the rest of the company using social media in the most brand-building way possible.
When The NYT created the position the company’s internal memo stated:
…the point is that an awful lot of people are finding our work not by coming to our homepage or looking at our newspaper but through alerts and recommendations from their friends and colleagues. So we ought to learn how to reach those people effectively and serve them well. At the same time, more of us are using social networks to find sources, contacts and information.
It was a good and smart move for the time, I think. It’s even more telling that the position is no longer needed. According to Twitaholic, The NYT is the 29th most popular Twitter account. (Can we really expect it to compete with Lady Gaga, Britney Spears or Justin Beiber?)
I don’t know if other newsrooms have or had a Social Media Editor position, but I understand what The NYT did. It does take some work to get reporters on board with realizing that their work can no longer just stop at filing copy. Modern media entities need to be where their readers are, and their readers are on Twitter and Facebook. As silly as her job sounded, Preston’s role in getting the rest of the newsroom on board with how to properly make the most of social media was a great call by The NYT.
The learning curve with social media is pretty fast. I doubt The NYT ever thought this was a permanent position they were creating, but there was a time when it was needed and they addressed it at the time.
Former WikiLeaks members have left the controversial whistleblower website to form OpenLinks, according to Mashable. Instead of gathering information and releasing it willy-nilly to the public, this new site will obtain the documents, then work to connect the releaser of the information with the different organizations that would release it. I guess if a disenfranchised soldier wants to release some attack information, he definitely wants to make sure that only his hometown newspaper gets the scoop.
While I mock, this does seem to be a more agreeable way of doing the whole “Internet watchdog” thing. This way, just like the Pentagon Papers, the newspapers or media outlets, with their lawyers and ombudsmen, can decide responsibly whether the public needs to know it and what the potential ramifications are. OpenLeaks’ stated goal, according to Swedish site DN.se is to remove itself from the political quagmire that WikiLeaks finds itself in because, as DN.se’s source said, none of the newspapers who published the cables have gotten in a lick of trouble.
I know exactly why that is. It’s this funny thing called the First Amendment that doesn’t apply to Swedes.
Ok, the headline was really just catchy and gripping. I have no beef with the Maccabeats from Yeshiva University. The a capella group recently gained fame thanks to their Hanukkah parody of “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz. I wish them only the best in producing more a capella songs, which are the auditory equivalent of cotton candy, sickeningly sweet and all fluff.
What I do hate is the way they were hyped by the media. It’s a group of Jews singing about Hannukkah. Who cares?
I am Jewish. I have no problem with Jews. But I recognize that Jews represent about 1.5% of the population. Nevertheless the video (linked to above) has been written in about in, the last I saw, The New York Times and Washington Post Express, played on the radio and shown on “The Today Show.” The group even gave a live performance of the song on “The Early Show.”
YouTube sensations, unless they are really truly funny and pervade everyday society, should be left in the sphere of blogs. They should never make the jump to traditional news outlets. To quote my Tweet when I found The New York Times article, “Really @nytimes? The Maccabeats? That is news? What have you done? | http://goo.gl/rvBkZ #wtf#allthenewsthatsfittoprintmyass“
This graphic is absolutely awesome. Poynter’s David Shedden talks about it in his latest post and if you haven’t already, you should stop reading and go check it out. The rest of this post can wait until you’re done being dazzled by how many times people have thought of news ways to connect with one another.
The graphic reminds me of a conversation that I had with a professor in the journalism school. Facebook and social networking websites in general are not a new concept, he was saying. All the Internet has done is made it easier for people to do what they have been doing for years. For example, scrap booking. He made the argument that scrapbooks, like Facebook pages, are just ways that people log their lives. On Facebook, all of our friends can see it at once. With scrapbooks, people used to have to share them with one another. Sure, you had to physically get it from person A to B, but the idea is the same: connecting with other people.
Shedden writes:
I was especially glad to see the timeline include Compuserve, Usenet and BBS systems as early technological pioneers. Although they didn’t call it “social media” at the time, these types of services created the foundation for the online social networks we use today.
Those things were before my time – and probably before the time of anyone reading this blog – but that’s just the point that I like so much about this timeline. We’ve been social networking since before we called it social networking. This graphic by Skloog puts all that history in perspective in a way that is streamlined and easy to digest.
For a while, we have known that the Internet was going to change newspapers. Now, it seems Apple, or, namely, the iPad, will change magazines.
As if he doesn’t already have a finger in every pie, Richard Branson is launching his own iPad magazine.
Poynter reports that Project, developed by Branson’s media company, is expected to launch tomorrow. This coming on the heels of news from News Corp. that the media company will have an iPad only newspaper called Daily slaps into perspective that Apple is changing media as we know.
Perhaps naively, I really did think magazines had a fighting chance. In some way, I still do. Though the gloss and feel of the iPad makes it magazine capable and may replace that “I just like to hold it in my hands” novelty that has helped magazines survive, we’re still talking about $500.
Magazines have always been niche publications, but iPad magazines are the next step: niche for the rich. I’m curious to see how the foreseeable slew of exclusive “tablet media” (there is another iPad magazine, Nomad Editions, coming later this week) will fare.
Just how many subscribers do they think they’re going to get? And what multimedia features will make these tablet magazines that great? I mean, my favorite thing about magazines is ripping them up and taping them onto my wall.
