I’m releasing it under the GPL, so as the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation might say, “share and enjoy!”

Feel free to add or suggest words and phrases. Code is in Python.


import random


def thornton_tweet():
  old_tech = ['voicemail', 'newspapers', 'paper', 'the Associated Press', 'old journalists', 'the front page', 'inches', 'pens', 'pencils', ]


  new_tech = ['the Internet', 'social media', 'blogs', 'twitter', 'gigabytes', 'video', 'Steve Jobs', 'Apple', 'RSS', 'TechCrunch', 'Web 2.Oh', ]


  random.seed()
  random.shuffle(old_tech)
  random.shuffle(new_tech)


  print "Did " + new_tech[0] + ” kill ” + old_tech[0] + “?”


Some sample output:

Did TechCrunch kill the front page?

Did Web 2.Oh kill voicemail?

Did Steve Jobs kill pencils?

Did gigabytes kill inches?

Did Steve Jobs kill newspapers?

Did the Internet kill the Associated Press?

Did video kill pens?

Did TechCrunch kill paper?

The next revision will include support for tweets such as: “old_tech is dead.”

Inspired by the conversation occurring in my last post, and spurred by some video I don’t feel like editing, I’m going to flesh out my theory on how newspapers should treat their data.

To borrow from a comment, I can’t stand when people say that we’re being held back by those who “don’t understand X-web-service.” There needs to be a clear shift in news websites and how they handle the information that the organization collects before we worry about getting our readers to Twitter. (I know it might seem like I’m beating up on Twitter, but it’s one of those very useful services that simply takes too long before you understand its capabilities. I like it, I swear.)

Non-news Web services teach us a lot about how conversations and interactivity evolve on the internet, but I don’t necessarily see the future of journalism in them. Part of the draw to newspapers is the ease of use and the idea of a single point for information. Besides reading and page-turning, no special skills go into obtaining the news therein. Information needs to be *that* accessible and simple for our online readers.

Dave Stanton makes a good point, and that’s that newspapers should hire statisticians. This becomes even more relevant when we begin to link our information together and patterns will no doubt begin to emerge in the data

In any case, the type of system I’m proposing would have to be extremely context-aware. This would most likely come about by the combination of human inputs (in-story tags, etc) with what the system knows (links forged within the database, acrobatic algorithms, whathaveyou).

Take this with a grain of salt, as it’s sort’ve spur-of-the-moment, but…:

Imagine if every person a newspaper used in a story got a database entry, Person (could be subclassed to Source, etc. if necessary). You post a story about this person, and tag it [storytag:person role="primary"]Pegeen Hanrahan[/storytag] (it would need probably need to be more nuanced than just saying she’s the “primary person in this story”).

Your system knows already from the general story tag that this is a “local_election” story. This means that as you publish, the CMS would update her database entry with a link to this story, and and Article object would be created for it with the new-found knowledge that it is a “local election story primarily about Pegeen Hanrahan.” Now you, as the editor or reporter, can choose what related information to bring up and display about either Pegeen or local elections.

The same links can be made backwards in the database, too. If you post another story a week later about Pegeen or local elections, the CMS should pull this story from the database as a reference link, among others.

Now, of course, that’s a simplistic explanation and example. What if it’s a story about Pegeen Hanrahan, during a local election, primarily about her promises to give more money to the local animal shelter? Puling up other stories about the election might fit, but what if the animal shelter is in dire need of funding, and the story is heavily about that?

Well, then the tags should dictate: [storytag:focus]Gainesville Pet Rescue[/storytag]. Assuming your reporter has done their job and gotten some financial information for the pet rescue, and hopefully inputted it by now (all input of primary sources should happen before the story is tagged & parsed), the CMS should automatically pull up the record and ask what to include from it in the story. If nothing else, it should automatically link the name in the story to a new page which will display some of the contents of the database record.

I don’t know if you can really get past the human element of it, and I’m not sure if you’d really want to. I’m sure you could write some code that would approximate what I propose reporters/editors/online staff do, but I think the human touch would probably result in more relevant info.

Clearly my example tags are probably not the best way to do this, but it works for a spur-of-the-moment show of what I’m talking about. Perhaps the best way to handle it would be to have the metadata separate from the actual article, or as a part of the database’s Article model (there would of course be models for Video, Business, etc.). But either way, the point remains the same: we tell the computer what the article is about, and it gives us the related information we should include.

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.

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.)

So all-in-all, exciting times. Unfortunately, that leaves less time for this site, but the crime map is still constantly being updated. I may migrate the map on over to the Alligator’s website, but the host (also Town News) so far won’t give us access to a Perl interpreter, which I’d need to run the back-end. Also, it’s a Windows system…blegh.

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.

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.

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: