Investigative journalist: “Look for the nerds”

Lise Olsen, investitgative journalism for the last six years at the Houston Chronicle visited the advanced reporting class today, and one of the things she said stuck out. It was “Look for the nerds.” She meant the people who know where information is buried in computers and files. Mostly computers these days.

We had a great time hearing her explain the complexities of doing investigative journalism, and the care with which it must be done.

I’m posting her handout with its advice on websites. A great resource. It’s on the upper righthand corner with Jessica Robertson’s advice for beginning reporters.  So now you have it, beginning and advanced reporting.

Great advice from one of our graduates

Jessica Roberterson visited David McHam’s advanced reporting class Monday and gave some great advice that I am posting on the blog in upper right-hand corner reserved for essential information. Jessica graduated from the UH School of Communication in 2006 with a concentration in print journalism and was one of the senior reporters at The Daily Cougar, where she  covered the administration. In her last semester, she began writing for The Baytown Sun and stayed there until September 2007, when she came to UH Bauer College of Business as the college’s communications manager. You might see her around the building. She is pursuing a master’s degree in mass communication studies.

She offers great tips about writing for papers, any and all of which could apply to writing for the Daily Cougar. But the lead advice works in any situation, which is this: handle small tasks with grace and good will. Be open and gracious with people. You never know when you will need to call on them for something really important. As you cultivate your intellectual skills cultivate your personal skills.

When I first started reporting for a daily newspaper, I asked the senior avuncular editor in charge of hiring what the most important quality of a reporter was, and he didn’t say intelligence, or skepticism, and certainly not cynicism. He said, “You’ve got to like people.”

Texas Tribune launches tonight

I just got off the phone with Evan Smith, former Texas Monthly editor, now editor of a  web-based nonprofit journalism site called Texas Tribune. The Tribune will focus of Texas politics and public policy and it will be a test of  whether public-spirited Texans will support journalism.

About 9 this  evening the Tribune’s temporary web site will come down and possibly about 11 the new Texas Tribune will be launched. It won’t be as simple as pressing a button at midnight, Smith said. Nothing in the digital world is that easy, I maintain.

But it sounds as though Smith is going to do some in-depth journalism and it won’t just be inside politics in Austin. One story is a big five-parter on education. Another is an El Paso politics story.

There will be humanly edited aggregations of Texas stories and a blog roll of about 25 Texas bloggers. The Tribune has a staff of  about 20, enough reporters and editors to do some heavy lifting in a state that needs it. Matt Stiles, the former Houston Chronicle reporter who has visited UH journalism classes several times, has joined the staff. 

And this will be of interest to Daily Cougar writers and editors: The Texas Tribune will pull the best college journalism on Texas public policy and politics and link to it. The editor for this feature is a grad student at the LBJ School for Public Policy, Rachel Raft.

Internet rumors

Elizabeth Kolbert has written a book review about the Internet and the rumor mill in the November 2 New Yorker that will be required reading in my opinion writing class in the spring. It’s about how ideologues reinforce one another by bunching up. Here’s passage:

And what holds true for the news sites is even more so for the blogosphere, where it’s possible to spend hours surfing without ever entering new waters. Conservative blogs like Power Line almost always direct visitors to other conservative blogs, like No Left Turns, while liberal blogs like Daily Kos guide them to others that are also liberal, like Firedoglake. A study of the twenty most-visited blogs in each camp in the months leading up to the 2004 Presidential election found that more than eighty-five per cent of their links were to other blogs with similar politics.

The Internet makes it possible for like-minded people from all over the world to reinforce one anothers views, such a the notion that no one has ever seen President Obama’s birth certificate. 

Of all the metaphors about democracy, one of the most treasured is the “free market” of ideas. Only with a rich competition of ideas does democracy flourish, and good ideas inevitably will overpower bad ones, just as people will prefer to buy good cars over bad ones. 

But there’s also the possibility that bad ideas will drive out good ones, that emotions will win out over reason. If you believe that a black man is destroying your country, then all the more reason to delegitimatize him by saying he wasn’t born here. 

No one in politics seems able to fault themselves. It’s all about being right. This from this morning NY Times:

The No. 3 Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who attended one session with the president, recalled that in the 1960s, when he was a Congressional aide, Democrats and Republicans worked together on civil rights. He said he saw no possibility of a bipartisan health bill.

“White House officials don’t want one or don’t know how to do one,” Mr. Alexander said.

Bleeding newspapers and the digital future

The Audit Bureau of Circulation has released the bad news about newspaper circulation. Both the Houston Chronicle and the NY Times carried stories on Tuesday. The Chronicle reported this a drop of “14.2 percent daily and 6.3 percent on Sundays in the April-September period, compared with the same six-month span in 2008.”

With advertising revenues dropping, publisher Jack Sweeney said the new strategy is to get readers to pay more:

“Revenue from circulation needs to carry a bigger portion of our business going forward, so prices continue to be increased,” Sweeney said. “Even with increases of over 30 percent across all delivery options, Chronicle daily delivery still is only 73 cents a day. With a stamp currently costing 44 cents to deliver a first class letter, a copy of the Chronicle at your door is quite a value.”

Well, yes, but….

Joe Leydon sent an interesting story quoting Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who compared print to the Titanic. Even if the Titanic had not hit the iceburg, it was going to go out of business because of the airplane, he said.

Newspapers face the challenge of how to master the digital technology, and here’s what I think the problem is. The core task of reporting and editing the news remains. But how to deliver it?

That’s the realm of digital technology and I’m wondering if newspapers have the world’s best computer engineers and other digital innovators working for them. I doubt it. They’re all over at Google and Microsoft and Apple making the big bucks. The Chronicle’s search engine is notoriously clunky. Sometimes you can’t find a story on the web the day it is printed because the webpage has crowded it off. And Internet readers don’t have much patience. Newspapers are not leading in digital technology, they are still using it as an afterthought.

Newspapers are going to have to invest heavily not just in technology but in the creative people who can do things with technology, just at the point they are losing money and firing editorial people. They probably need to spend a lot of money on digital innovation. That’s where the opportunity lies. 

About fifteen years ago when film cameras were still in action and the digital transition was not complete, most professionals used Nikons. Nikon built the most durable cameras with the best optics. But Canon  saw that the camera was no longer an optical device to print images on film. It was an optical device to convert light into pixels. The best camera was going to be the camera with the best computer inside. Canon surged ahead of Nikon and Nikon has been trying to catch up ever since.

Of course, it took about sixty years for airplanes to wipe out the passenger steamship business. The changes in newspapers are happening much faster.

 

 

A Texas hero who spoke for the powerless

The federal judge, William Wayne Justice, who died last week at the age of 89, was a hero for Texas. Here’s a link to my piece about him in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle opinion section.

I went to the funeral last Monday, and it was quite something to see so many federal judges in their robes and so many lawyers and politicians who respected him. The Texas Observer has run the homilies by one of his law clerks and by his successor as federal judge for the Eastern District of Texas. 

There are a lot of people in Texas who despised Judge Justice. Clearly they hadn’t met the man or carefully read his decisions. Some friends who arrived early said the church in Austin had been searched by bomb-sniffing dogs and police just before we arrived.

Deadline for 2010 Internship Applications is Nov. 2

PRINCETON, N.J. (Oct. 22, 2009)–Students have until Nov. 2 to apply online for the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s internship programs for 2010 in multimedia, news and sports copy editing and business reporting.  

 Applicants in all majors are invited to apply.  Candidates apply via the Fund’s Web site,https://www.newspaperfund.org, by clicking on “Programs” then “College Internships.” Each student must register as an Intern Applicant in order to login and complete application forms. All programs require students to upload a resume and transcript. The editing programs, intended for juniors, seniors and graduate students, require a 500-word essay explaining why the applicant is the best candidate for the position and a one-hour editing exam. Tests have been sent in bulk to 350 on-campus test monitors. Students on campuses without designated monitors must email the Fund at djnf@dowjones.com to request the test be sent to a professor at their college. A list of monitors is posted on the Web site.

 Business reporting applicants can be sophomores, juniors or seniors. They must also upload three to five clips, write 500 words on why they want to cover business news and take a reporting test by Dec. 1. They must list the professor who has volunteered to administer the exam on their application form.

 International students and U.S. students studying abroad are eligible to apply; professional journalists and recent graduates are not.

Prosecutors go after student journalists

if the new model of news gathering [see below]  is for university journalism programs to provide content, consider this story from the Student Press Law Center. 

Prosecutors have subpoenaed not only the notes and stories of university students who worked fro the Innocence Project to clear a convicted murderer, they have also demanded their grades and their off-the-record notes. Not a pretty picture.

A new model for university journalism?

The Columbia Journalism school recently asked Leonard Downie Jr., a long-time editor of the Washington Post and  Columbia  journalism professor Michael Schudson  to create a “new model” for news reporting. Their full report is posted at the Columbia Journalism Review. The Washington Post published a summary of the report by the authors, and among them was the role that university journalism programs could perform.

– Universities and colleges should become institutional sources of local, state and accountability news reporting, following the lead of pioneering journalism schools whose faculty and student journalists staff community news and investigative reporting Web sites.

In general, the report  calls for more nonprofit efforts at gathering local news, including public television and radio. The writers seem to believe that news gathering seems destined to become less of a business and more of a public service enterprise.

There are problems with both models, the chief one being the tendency of non-profits, like for-profits, to have sacred cows. Do you really want to investigate the biggest company in town when it either advertises with you or gives you money in the annual fundraising drive?

NY Times media columnist David Carr weighed in yesterday about the report. He’s skeptical:

All we have to do is get the government to open the kimono on databases, foundations to rethink their priorities, universities to become newsrooms, rewrite the federal tax code, get public broadcasting overlords to think local, and commercial broadcasters to kick in money for the public good, and we will have a dependable news infrastructure for a new, more complicated age. If only it were so simple.

Copy editing internship

Joe Leydon sent this link to a copy editing scholarships from the American Copy Editors association.

The association has posted a challenging copy editing test on its website. A good reminder of what a difficult profession it is. Give it a shot.