Kamis, 01 Desember 2011

Could Pulitzer changes mean an award for live-tweeting?


Nieman Journalism Lab

Posted: 30 Nov 2011 12:15 PM PST
Are we closing in on a Pulitzer Prize for tweets? Today the Pulitzer Prize board announced changes to the awards competition, with the headline being: Pulitzers will now require entries to be submitted digitally, saving dozens of poor newsroom clerks the labor of cutting and pasting newsprint onto 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheets. That’s news in itself, but more interestingly, they’re also altering the Breaking News category to emphasize real-time reporting.
It’s a step away from the punctuated publication cycle newspapers were tied to in print, and an acknowledgement of breaking news becoming real-time news, even at a news organization that still buys ink by the barrel. When a crisis happens, be it natural disaster, tragic accident or man-made calamity, we’ve come to expect consistent updates, whether through a liveblog, raw streaming video, or live tweeting.
Here’s how the Pulitzers officially described the Breaking News prize until today:
For a distinguished example of local reporting of breaking news, with special emphasis on the speed and accuracy of the initial coverage, using any available journalistic tool, including text reporting, videos, databases, multimedia or interactive presentations or any combination of those formats, in print or online or both.
And here’s the new language:
For a distinguished example of local reporting of breaking news that, as quickly as possible, captures events accurately as they occur, and, as times passes, illuminates, provides context and expands upon the initial coverage.
In today’s press release, the Pulitzer board says “it would be disappointing if an event occurred at 8 a.m. and the first item in an entry was drawn from the next day’s newspaper.” (Full disclosure: Nieman Foundation curator Ann Marie Lipinski is co-chair of the board.)
In other words, the new language seems to ask for multiple snapshots of the active, in-the-moment, messy-at-times reporting outlets are giving their readers. (The revised instructions also suggest the entrant include a guide to how that reporting evolved over time, “detailing the chronology of events in a breaking story and how it relates to the timing of items that comprise the entry.”) It’s a way of displaying the strength of a news outlet’s reporting during a developing situation that requires the best of a news team: Gathering reports, filtering out noise, finding context, and doing it all rapidly. All of that’s not really reflected in the next day’s paper, which, let’s face it, has the hindsight of a day’s reporting to provide. Live-action reporting is no longer the preserve of TV and radio.
Of course, this sort of online, of-the-moment material could be part of an entry before today’s announcement. Today’s announcement is a shift in emphasis. The Houston Chronicle’s Pulitzer-finalist entry in 2009, for instance, was entirely made up of online material.
The Seattle Times received the 2010 award for its coverage “in print and online, of the shooting deaths of four police officers in a coffee house and the 40-hour manhunt for the suspect.” In 2009, The New York Times was awarded for its reporting on the downfall of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, with the jury crediting the Times for “breaking the story on its Web site and then developing it with authoritative, rapid-fire reports.”
Live blogs and Twitter are where lots of rapid-fire reporting lives now. There were the blogs with live video or text updates on the tornado that destroyed Joplin, Missouri, or the Boston Globe’s live tweeting from Whitey Bulger’s first court appearance. The New York Times deployed both a live blog and a brand new breaking news Twitter account to cover the approach and aftermath of Hurricane Irene.
Perhaps this change could increase entries in the Breaking News category, which attracted the fewest entries of any last year and in which no winner was named in 2011. For a competition that once gave awards for Telegraphic Reporting and eventually opened the door to online-only outlets, it may be only a matter of time before someone breaks the ProPublica barrier and wins for live-tweeting.
Posted: 30 Nov 2011 08:00 AM PST
Errol Morris, before he became the renowned director and author he is today, was a private detective.
In a talk last night at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Morris discussed how that job’s fundamental spirit of inquiry has informed his documentaries, among them Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, and Tabloid. “I only discovered very late in the game that I was a journalist,” he said. But his work has always been, on some level, journalistic. And academic.
As he joked: “A detective is just a paid epistemologist.”
Morris is also an inventor, his most famous creation being the Interrotron (named by his wife, he said, who appreciated the name’s apt marriage of the words “interview” and “terror”). And Morris, fittingly, spent much of his talk — one punctuated and illustrated by clips he’d selected from some of his most celebrated documentaries — discussing the journalistic work his invention facilitates: interviewing subjects and sources.
What he’s most interested in when he conducts those interviews, he said, is a kind of journalistic version of mens rea: literally, and in the legal sense, “a guilty mind.” In Morris’ sense, mens rea isn’t necessarily about guilt, legal or moral or any other kind; it’s about appending the why of a person’s action to the action itself. And about doing so on an individual, personal level. This is the thread that has animated and connected his documentaries, which have specialized in both upending received wisdom and finding the humanity behind it. And it’s the question that has connected Morris, the investigator, to his sources. “What were they thinking?”
Answering that question requires, above all, “a willingness to listen,” Morris said. Obvious, yes, but also often forgotten — particularly in the documentary context, where directors are often, implicitly, actors in the work they produce. Though interviewers often ask their sources questions to which they already know the answers, he noted, it’s far more productive that they be guided by true curiosity, by a true desire to learn something new. “An interview,” Morris said, “really should be a surprise, an excursion into unexpected terrain.”
Because of that, “I can’t interview someone if I don’t like them,” Morris noted. Skepticism is key, of course — “I think skepticism is truly such a wonderful thing,” he said — but respect has to be there, as well. His conversation with Robert McNamara, for example, for The Fog of War — an interview notable and somewhat shocking for its candor and humanity — benefitted from a telling mix of empathy and epistemology. “I’m not a Catholic priest; I don’t want to hear his confession,” Morris said. “I’m far more interested in hearing his story than in passing judgment.”
And withholding judgment, in its way, empowers curiosity, allowing new doors to be opened and new perspectives to be seen. It allows Morris — the filmmaker, the interrogator, the journalist — to take nothing for granted. As he put it: “Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious.”
Image by Nubar Alexanian used under a GNU Free Documentation License.
Posted: 30 Nov 2011 07:00 AM PST

Apple has its own in-house university; so does McDonalds. Also on that list of corporate colleges: Time Inc. But instead of another institution to help the ambitious find a glide path to middle management, Time’s institution is more j-school than Hamburger U.
At the three-year-old Time Inc. University (imaginary mascot: The Fightin’ Henry Luces), the core curriculum is journalism, ranging from writing and the art of the interview to video storytelling and news on mobile devices. And digital courses make up the majority of the classes, as the company tries to keep staffers learning about the newest tools and techniques in the media universe. The 150-plus courses include topics like “10 Things You Need to Know to Run a Digital Business,” “The Beginner’s Guide to Mobile,” and “How to Get the Most Out of Breaking News Online.” All of the courses, which usually run as one-day sessions, are led by staff from within the company and are taught at Time Inc.’s HQ in New York.
Corporate universities are an old concept. At Pixar University, that means “a complete filmmaking curriculum, classes on painting, drawing, sculpting and creative writing.” Apple University, perhaps with more urgency than ever, strives to create a curriculum that shapes executives in the mold of Steve Jobs.
But unlike some corporate universities, Time’s program is not specifically reserved for or aimed at managers or executives — it’s wide open to anyone in any job across all their titles. Maybe that’s more community college than ivy, but it hints at a philosophical choice for a company with 115 magazines (21 here in the U.S.): That reinvention won’t happen in board rooms and corner offices alone. Time Inc.’s taking a dual approach, with training open to all as well as a track for executives. (Separate from Time Inc. U, the company holds Digital Labs events bringing in editors, presidents and other executives to meet with leaders in the world of tech, including Tim Armstrong from AOL, Jason Kilar of Hulu, and Stephanie Tilenius of Google, among others.)
All together, it sketches a picture of a company still heavily invested in the print business, trying to reposition itself from the bottom of the org chart to the top.
Fran Hauser told me the courses are about developing a kind of working knowledge of new media for people that can improve their jobs, if not their understanding of the industry. Hauser, president of digital for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment Group and Lifestyle Group, said a good chunk of the people taking the courses are in departments unconnected to the digital side of the business. Hauser taught the “10 Things” course and focused on areas like building an online audience, new methods of market research, and strategies for using social media. Hauser, who’s got experience in online media from previously running People’s digital division and Moviefone, said the following the latest tools and trends is critical, but changing the way people make decisions is what’s important.
“One of the things I talk about is it’s easy to become overly attracted to the shiny new toy. A lot of times we’ll be sitting in a room brainstorming and someone will inevitably bring up an idea around a new capability out there, but it’s always important to think about the consumer you’re reaching,” Hauser said.
The classes are also a form of knowledge sharing across different magazines. If a particular strategy spiked mobile traffic for Sports Illustrated, or a social media campaign increased followers for Entertainment Weekly, they all can get together in one room to trade secrets. Again, when you’re a company with more than 100 magazines spanning healthy cooking, personal finance, entertainment, and home repair, that can be a particularly thick web to cut through.
John Cantarella, president of digital for Time Inc.’s news group, said a number of the courses have a “this is how we did it” vibe that eschews theoretical talk for a more pragmatic approach. When Time.com found success with the work they were doing around social media it only made sense to share that with other magazines who could readily apply it to their own work, said Cantarella, who’s led a class called “Building an Audience Through Social Media.”
“We’re a big company, so it’s a question of how do you share information across lots of people,” Cantarella said. “How do you get people who work at This Old House Interactive with people at Time or Real Simple? It’s a great way to bring people together.”
Image by Cody Geary used under a Creative Commons license.
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