Nieman Journalism Lab |
- After a major First Amendment ruling, Boston police settle a cellphone recording lawsuit
- Thirty-seven percent of the links you’re sharing are “awesome” — but how many are “rad”?
- How a talking rodent is one of the pioneers of the opinion pages at The New York Times
| After a major First Amendment ruling, Boston police settle a cellphone recording lawsuit Posted: 27 Mar 2012 01:53 PM PDT
The city of Boston will pay $170,000 to settle a lawsuit that forced a landmark ruling on a citizen’s First Amendment right to record the activities of police officers in public. The settlement, announced today by the ACLU of Massachusetts, ends a case that produced a significant victory for those who believe citizens — and journalists — should have the right to record police activity in public places. In October 2007, Glik he said he saw police officers arresting a teenager in the most public of places — the Boston Common — and pulled out his cellphone to start recording video. Within minutes, he was under arrest for illegal electronic surveillance under Massachusetts’ wiretapping statute. The case raised the hackles of both privacy groups and news companies — including The New York Times Co., Dow Jones, NBC Universal, and more who publicly came to Glik’s defense. All charges were dropped, but until recently the Boston Police Department had maintained for years that officers had the right to arrest people for recording their activity. Glik sued the city, saying Boston police violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights. The First Circuit appeals court ruled unanimously last fall that Glik was “exercising clearly established First Amendment rights in filming the officers in a public space” and sent the case back to a lower court. “When a U.S. Court of Appeals rules on a constitutional issue, even though that’s not binding in other federal circuits, it can be viewed as important guidance and precedent,” said Jeff Hermes, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center, which joined with news organizations in a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Glik. “And the strength of the First Circuit’s statement, that this First Amendment right does exist, was so striking that it received much more attention than other police-recording incidents in other jurisdictions,” Hermes said. The Boston Police Department has since reversed its stance. The officers involved in the Glik case were disciplined, and training materials were updated to tell officers “there is no right of arrest for public and open recordings” under the state’s wiretapping law. “The law had been clear for years that openly recording a video is not a crime,” Glik said in a statement today. “It’s sad that it takes so much for police to learn the laws they were supposed to know in the first place. I hope Boston police officers will never again arrest someone for openly recording their public actions.” Elaine Driscoll, a BPD spokeswoman, responded in an email:
Glik’s case was certainly not the last in Boston or elsewhere. Last fall, a 21-year-old man sued four Boston police officers who he said wrongfully arrested him for recording video of his friend’s arrest outside a police station. Earlier this month, Boston paid $1.4 million to settle with a man who said he suffers brain damage after he was tackled and beaten by a Boston police officer while trying to record video during a traffic stop. Video-recording technology is now ubiquitous and pocket-sized, and suddenly the tools once available only to professional storytellers are now in the hands of millions of people. Precedent-setting cases like Glik’s can be a boon to news organizations, which have tussled with police departments for decades over the right to record from the front lines. There are numerous documented cases of photojournalists being arrested while trying to cover the Occupy Wall Street protests last year. Miami photojournalist Carlos Miller — himself arrested three times for recording cops in public, he says — covers similar cases on his blog, Photography is Not a Crime. “The First Amendment includes the freedom to observe and document the conduct of government officials, which is crucial to a democracy and a free society,” said Sarah Wunsch, an attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts, in a statement. “We hope that police departments across the country will draw the right conclusions from this case.” Photo of Boston police officers by JonPack used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Thirty-seven percent of the links you’re sharing are “awesome” — but how many are “rad”? Posted: 27 Mar 2012 01:02 PM PDT
Three weeks after news-sharing network News.me launched its iPhone app, the network is beginning to get an idea of the kinds of stories that its users are sharing — or at the very least, how they’re reacting to what others share. News.me bills itself as a service that delivers “must-read news” from your Facebook and Twitter accounts. In other words, it takes all of that baby-photo clutter (sorry, babies) out of your newsfeed and comes up with just the links your friends are sharing. But News.me also enables "reactions" to shares that are only visible within the app. You can either make up your own reaction or you can pick from this list of one-word presets: Wow, Awesome, Sad, Ha!, and Really? Here’s how News.me General Manager Jake Levine explained the presets:
Sorting emotional responses into a defined set: It’s something NBC Local’s sites tried back in 2009, asking their readers to be furious, intrigued, laughing, sad, bored, or thrilled by stories. (The feature’s since disappeared.) And it’s something Facebook does every day when it asks you to “Like” something on the Internet. In a Tuesday blog post, Levine revealed new data showing that News.me users opted for preset reactions — rather than creating their own custom reactions — most of the time. Of the 62 percent of reactions that came from the preset list, Levine says people tapped “awesome” 37 percent of the time. “Wow” was next most popular, with 23 percent of preset taps. “Sad” was tapped least often, 10 percent of the time. But what does this tell us? Are people more likely to share “awesome” stories? Or are people more likely to describe what they share as “awesome”?
That raises the question of how people customize reactions when they opt to forego the preset reactions, which is 38 percent of the time, according to Levine’s data. He hasn’t yet pulled the raw data on custom reactions, but Levine says he has some anecdotal ideas about what he’ll find when he does. “People are mimicking the one-word reactions, picking a word that better fits,” Levine told me. “Like, ‘interesting’ is a very common reaction, but it’s not included in our five [preset options].” In other cases, people will customize an “actual sentence, which is probably less common,” he said. And then there’s a trend that News.me is incorporating into the next version of its platform. “It’s really interesting that people are quoting from the article when they react to it,” Levine said. “In the next release you’ll be able to highlight a portion of the text, and you’ll be able to react with that quote.” Reactions on the cutting room floorChoices like “Wow” and “Really?” are vague enough to be applicable to all sorts of stories, which may offer clues as to why the narrower (though still subjective) “sad” was used less frequently. “One of the things we were debating was, do we want to have a negative adjective?” Levine said. “Do people want to see that in their streams?” Deciding on which words to use in the first place involved a spreadsheet and a email brainstorming session with “five of our smartest friends,” Levine says. Here are some of the proposed reactions that got left on the cutting room floor: — Shocking Armed with new ideas about how people are using News.me, Levine and his team are preparing an update that’ll be ready to go in about two weeks, he said. The changes you can expect include a speedier experience, clear distinctions between what’s being shared on Facebook versus on Twitter, and a “really cool gesture” that will enable users to save a link to read later. Levine says a phone conversation with one of News.me’s most “active reactors” on Wednesday will help inform News.me’s continued evolution. “What he started to see — which was encouraging to us — was that [reactions were] the beginning of a conversation with other people,” Levine said. “Now how do we make it easy for us to bring people into that conversation? That’s how we’re thinking about the data.” |
| How a talking rodent is one of the pioneers of the opinion pages at The New York Times Posted: 27 Mar 2012 08:00 AM PDT
Semiaquatic rodents don’t typically go around penning opinion pieces for The New York Times. Yet a piece told from the perspective of a river rat — also known as a nutria or coypu — recently became one of the newspaper’s most popular video offerings. “In the video section of the news department, a piece about invasive species would probably have experts talking about invasive species,” said Jason Spingarn-Koff, curator and producer of Op-Docs, a video opinion section that The New York Times launched in November. “You would not have an animated rodent talking about invasive species.” The video he’s describing is Drew Christie’s four-minute film “Hi! I’m a Nutria,” in which a curious cartoon rodent explores his species’ path to Washington State.
The short film is humorous and information-rich, but it also raises a larger question: How long does it take for someone — an invasive species, a human — to become a native? It’s a subject that filmmaker Christie says has always “fascinated” and “perplexed” him. “I’ve always wondered why there’s never an official standard like, Once you’ve been here for 75 years and three months you get the official badge,” Christie told me. “Like everything, it’s so vague. Going through a kind of weird, roundabout way of asking the question is sometimes the best way of doing it.” Bringing a new storytelling form to the TimesWhile the first-rodent perspective makes Christie’s film unusual for the Times, the fact that it raises both timely and enduring questions is what makes Op-Docs special. Here’s how Spingarn-Koff puts it: “How can we combine this unusual storytelling with timeliness, and potentially pioneer a new type of documentary news?” Op-Docs also has the “heritage” of The New York Times op-ed section at its core. “So rather than a total startup, we are evolving an existing form,” he said. But the newness of the not-yet-five-month-old project also encourages creativity and experimentation. Here are the rules for what makes an Op-Doc: Films ought not be longer than five minutes, and they have to contain some kind of opinion. But even those guidelines aren’t hard and fast. First of all, opinions — especially when they’re expressed through a visual medium like film — can be subtle. Take, for example, Jeff Scher’s “Focus,” a blurry view of the New York City marathon that Scher shot with a point-and-shoot camera he “tricked into shooting out of focus.” “Part of what we consider ‘opinion’ is just seeing the world in a new way, and that can sometimes be very simple,” Spingarn-Koff said. “That’s what the marathon piece does. It just says, ‘Look at the marathon runners in an unexpected way.’ Sometimes we want to have pieces that are delightful or entertaining, and I think that’s consistent with the opinion section.” The length requirements are somewhat malleable, too. “Focus” was only two minutes long, while Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s film about Palestinian rights clocked in at just under 10 minutes. Filmmakers are also free to experiment in ways that aren’t often found in traditional reporting. That was the case in “Bike Thief,” in which filmmaker Casey Neistat locked up his bike on the streets of New York then ostentatiously “stole” it to see how passersby would react. “I don’t know if the news department would do something like that,” Spingarn-Koff says. “Someone putting themselves in this incredible situation, and doing an urban psychology experiment, and voicing strong opinions through his experience— it’s just a very different type of storytelling. I think when Op-Docs are most successful — and maybe this is something that’s a little different than news — they’re often about something bigger. They operate on a higher level.” Here’s the first piece that Op-Docs published, which uses rare footage of Richard Nixon on the campaign trail shot on Super 8 film by his aides, as a way to explore his landslide 1972 victory. If Op-Docs can find a timelier news peg, all the better. When the president of the Maldives was ousted last month, Spingarn-Koff asked filmmaker John Shenk — who was working on a longer project about the deposed politician — to cut a couple of minutes of film for Op-Docs on short notice. Shenk agreed, and The New York Times coupled his film with an op-ed that the former president had submitted to the newspaper. “That gave me a sense that Op-Docs can actually have a breaking news function as well,” Spingarn-Koff said. “You don’t really think of documentary filmmaking as having that function. We’re still exploring the power of this outlet and what we can achieve.” One unexpected achievement: Op-Docs will soon be screened theatrically, in a series at the IFC Center in New York. “You never think of web videos going theatrical,” says Spingarn-Koff, whose favorite way to watch Op-Docs is on an iPad. “You start feeling this is really different than television…We put them out in high definition, and it’s beautiful. We dont have a television station, and we don’t need a television station.” Access to a wide audienceHe won’t provide specifics about web traffic or play counts, but Spingarn-Koff says the response to Op-Docs has been “great.” For filmmakers like Christie, the opportunity to have work showcased on the Times’ website represents a huge opportunity for exposure. “I could be putting things up on my own for millions of years and it probably wouldn’t get the viewership that it does by being on the homepage of The New York Times,” Christie said. “I have no clue how many views [it got], and I didn’t read any of the comments because I was too scared…The process was all very painless — even the 50 fact-checking emails back and forth.” (For the record, the comments section in response to Christie’s video is robust with compliments about the film, discussion of what it means to be “invasive,” whether it matters that nutria are cute, and what they might taste like; “possessed of a nutty flavor,” one commenter muses.) [Louisiana-born editor's note: They kinda taste like rabbit.] Christie’s “really very cool” experience with Op-Docs included receiving an email from PETA president Ingrid Newkirk, who praised his film and suggested he make one about “how one million chickens are killed per hour,” Christie says. (“I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had just had chicken for lunch,” he said.) “Hi! I’m a Nutria” may be Op-Docs’ latest hit, but its first viral success was a piece by Academy Award winner Errol Morris that The New York Times published in November. In “The Umbrella Man,” Morris explores the nature of evidence and investigation by recalling the conspiracy that surrounded the man who stood beneath a black umbrella on the sunny day of Nov. 22, 1963, at Dealey Plaza, and can be seen in the background of photos of John F. Kennedy’s motorcade just before his assassination.
The search for truth about JFK’s assassination “seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic,” Updike wrote. That idea stuck with Morris, who says for years he’s wanted to make a movie about the assassination investigation that would allow him to indulge his “obsessive interest in the complexities of reality.” That obsession — which requires looking at something up close and from far away at the same time — is part of what makes “The Umbrella Man” such a good fit for Op-Docs. Here’s how Josiah “Tink” Thompson — an expert on the Zapruder film of the assassination, and the subject of Morris’ short film — puts it: “If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on.” Photo of nutria by cocoate.com used under a Creative Commons license. |
“Part of what we’re trying to do is keep these words as open to interpretation as possible, but when it comes down to it, there are some people who would just never use the word ‘awesome,’” Levine told me.
“I can’t speak out loud so I’m going to talk to you through mental telepathy,” the orange-toothed nutria tells his audience. 
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