Schwanksta :: Fuzzy Journalism

So I was having a conversation with Brett Roegiers the other day, and he mentioned a blog post by Derek Willis on what he calls “Bomb Throwing” in the newsroom. In a general way, he talks about the new wave of online journalists dropping bombs on their colleagues in the form of Nelson from the Simpsons: “Haw haw, you’re medium is dying!” So long and good luck. Don’t worry, you can always read about what’s going on in our newsroom blog. Willis’ blog post is more specifically targeted, but I’m not going to get into that.

He has a point, though — you can’t just tell everyone that their model is wrong and flawed, and your way trumps all they know. Not only that, but a lot of the proposed ways to “fix journalism” I’ve heard don’t seem like they will stand the test of time. Live-twittering events is all well and good, but only a certain subset of the population will understand or even seek such a thing out. Pretty flash graphics, maps, videos and slideshows are great, but they’re only things that aid in reporting and understanding. They’re not enough by themselves. They’re like the toppings on your sundae.

I’ve seen a lot of preaching to the choir about online journalism, but much less real-world action in trying to get the people most involved with news organizations to understand the core issues. If nothing else, we need to remember that even though we’re nerds, the people who will most likely use the site probably aren’t.

And it really does start with re-working a news website from the bottom up. If you build with the idea of relational information at your core, you’ve transformed yourself from a daily story factory to an information powerhouse. This should include, but certainly not be limited to, tagging names and places inside of stories so that they can be tied together.

That’s what people really go to the paper for: information. Yes, the features and profiles are interesting too, but at its heart a newspaper is an information organization. There’s no need to define it by its medium, and there’s no reason to stifle ourselves as journalists — purveyors and gatekeepers of information — to the limitations of print.

People have the idea of news ingrained in their skulls as text blob stories with the occasional graphic to spruce the place up. When really, the same parts that went into that story could be re-synthesized for the Web to become a much more in-depth breakdown. What’s more, people are so fed up with “media bias” — well why don’t we remove a layer of translation and post our primary sources, interviews, etc. online? I’m all for transparency.

What I’m saying is, we have to do more than add cool APIs and tools to our journalism repertoire. We have to fundamentally re-think the news website and how we use the mountains of information we collect. Right now, a lot of good information is rotting on hard drives. Even at the Alligator, where I work as the managing online editor, we’re as much to blame as our CMS in how we use our resources. I’m trying, but as I’m sure anyone in my position knows, it’s not an easy fight.

So I was making the rounds on my RSS reader the other day, and came across something worth sharing. The New York Times has a (new?) interactive storytelling technique that lets you pause the audio, view the primary source documents inside of the Flash window, download them to your computer and go right back on with the Audio.

It’s pretty bad-ass, and it really excites me to think where the Internet could head as a medium to share the news. I also really like the idea of transparency that something like this brings. Now not only can you have a reporter take you through the pertinent parts of a document, but if you’re interested you can check out the whole thing to draw your own conclusions.

Take a look at their interactive story; you’ll be glad you did.

(props to Megan for forcing me to post.)

Not me personally, of course; I actually sort of like public records (yeah, I know, make fun of me).

One of my classmates, however, was annoyed enough with our fact finding assignment on the book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case” that he or she posted a short rant on angryjournalist, a new blog where the beleaguered members of my chosen profession can bitch:

Angry Journalist #414:

I HATE FACT FINDING. I hate book reports. We know they screwed up the Duke Lacrosse case. Let’s not beat a dead horse.?I also hate MLA format. Who the fuck needs a works cited? Seriously? like, what the fuck? Who cares? It’s freaken fact-finding — like we’re going to try and forge our sources with a lady who spends her waking hours finding facts.

I agree though, wanting standard works cited page was weird for an assignment in j-school…I got around it by, um, not following directions.

There’s long been a rule, known in some circles as Cheez’s First Law of the Internet (no doubt other communities have codified it in different forms), which states that while talking about someone else’s grammar or spelling, you have a nearly 90% chance of making an error.

Apparently, even the venerable New York Times isn’t immune to the natural rules we’re all governed by. In a bizarre article engaging in a little literary celebration of the semicolon and its use by a public service announcement on the subway, the article mentions Lynn Truss’s “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a humorous book on grammar. At the bottom of the article, however, a correction appears:

Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

I can see where the writer probably made the mistake: the book’s title is based on a joke, in which a Panda shoots up a restaurant because a poorly-punctuated wildlife manual says that the mammal “eats, shoots and leaves.” The proper construction would be without the comma, as was apparently printed, but clearly the book title leaves the comma in for a reason.

I just find it amusing that the NYT would mis-punctuate the title of a grammar book in what would appear to be a slightly snobbish article on punctuation — if only for the fact that, in some circles, the use of a semicolon is probably considered snobbish in and of itself, celebrations thereof doubly-so.

And yes — this article’s title is on purpose.

Note: I wrote this for a class

You can hear it from at least 30 feet away, a high-pitched buzz saw noise confusing you on your way to class.

“Nnnnnnnnnnnn-whrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

From what I can tell, that’s the sound of initiative. It’s also the sound of an ECO 8 model helicopter starting up.

When Miles Moody, a second-year mechanical engineering student at the University of Florida, realized his summer robotics course had been cut, he took matters into his own hands.

Using eBay to procure the parts, Moody built a remote-controlled helicopter to learn more about robotics engineering, the field he wants to get into.

“You learn a lot by just taking it apart, fixing it and putting it back together,” he said of his project.

Teaching yourself can be costly, though. He estimates that he initially spent $300 on the kit (eBay, of course), plus at least an additional $100 in parts (also eBay). In fact, he’s created a bit of a side business on the auction site, selling things like video game systems to keep his ‘copter funded.

“I’ll sell anything I can buy for cheap,” he said.

The kit was used, and an 11-year-old design, but he likes it because the company hasn’t changed it since.

“That’s German engineering for you,” he said.

It uses an electric, brushless motor, which won’t wear out; a lithium polymer battery, which is a $100 battery he got for $25 off eBay; 2.4ghz wireless control, like a cordless phone; digital gyroscope to stabilize the rear rotors (”So you don’t have to constantly adjust it yourself,” he explains); and four servos, which control the various movement aspects (tail rotor pitch, pitch of main blades, as well as forward and back motions).

“Unfortunately, I’m not that great of a pilot right now,” he said, embarrassed, hovering it a little below the lip of the stadium.

He wants to add a camera to the design, meaning Moody could potentially control the device without seeing it. He’s already attached his camera phone and taken an aerial video over the stadium lawn, peering toward Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.

While the camera would be an accomplishment in its own right, Moody has more interesting plans for his helicopter. He wants to turn it into a fully autonomous drone.

He says the military has been into rotary systems lately, not only jet propulsion. The reason is rotary systems, like his ECO 8, can hover in an area and get a 360-degree view.

He’s very convinced of the future for fully autonomous vehicles like the one he’s building. He says camera-mounted helicopters helped the search after Katrina, allowing rescuers to see inside places they couldn’t reach.

He says he wants to get into defense research, partly because his father, Joseph R. Moody, created the Grip Pod: a vertical gun grip that extends a bi-pod, currently in use by the military and law enforcement.

“I guess I’m following in my dad’s footsteps,” he said, grinning.

Eventually, he wants to use a $2,000 research grant from his National Merit scholarship in a robotics lab at UF. But first, he has to get into it.

Here’s the video from Moody’s camera phone:

I know that it might seem I’m merely offended as a journalist on this one, but I’d say it’s offensive in the most universal sense. It seems sophomore State Sen. Jeremy Ring has decided that literacy, liberal arts and even business are no longer quite as important in Florida, and has proposed a tiered system for distributing the state’s lottery-funded scholarships.

In this brave new world of scholarship dividends, any student eligible for 100 percent tuition under the current law, yet not majoring in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, education or a health profession, is worth approximately 30 percent less to the state than his or her brethren.

Yeesh, now there’s a number to make you feel good about yourself. I guess you really can put a price on an education like mine, and that price is 80 percent of my tuition, plus $237.50 per semester for books and other materials. Those in the ostensibly “more important” fields, however, would get 110 percent of their tuition covered, and $330 per semester.

Here’s the kicker, though: those eligible for 75 percent tuition coverage currently (”Florida Medallion Scholars”) would now get an 85 percent scholarship if they go into these technical fields. Meanwhile, those poor bastards following their hearts and minds in other directions will get shafted, only receiving 55 percent coverage. For those of you playing along at home, that’s less than half of what a top-tier engineering student would get.

What blows me away is that despite the effort that goes into achieving a full Bright Futures ride, Ring is willing to give those with lower test scores and GPAs a larger slice of the scholarship pie — based solely on what you want to study. It’s just antithetical to the very idea of its scholarship; the state should be fostering education in all forms, not just those they choose. From its own website:

This Florida Lottery-funded scholarship rewards students for their academic achievements during high school by providing funding for them to pursue postsecondary educational and career goals in Florida.

I don’t see anything about abusing the system to promote specific careers anywhere in there, but maybe I missed it.

So this is what Sen. Ring really wants to say to Florida students not interested in his pre-approved paths: “I don’t care how intelligent you are, study this or cough up.” Awesome. If the state wants to pay some of its brightest students less, out-of-state scholarships might suddenly seem a whole lot more tempting. The last thing Florida needs is a brain drain and a geek influx.

Don’t think I’ve forgotten about business majors, either. Apparently, they don’t make the cut for top-tier degree seekers. Now tell me: how many people who want to get into business will settle for a sharp cut in scholarship funding? Probably not the brightest of the bunch.

Thankfully, the bill has no current House sponsors yet, and I hope it stays that way. What a whackjob.

Read the St. Pete Times’ The Buzz article here. Read the Alligator’s coverage here