A Message on Journalism Comes from a Weird Place

Okay, "gun to my head" my favorite genre of movies is romantic comedies.

Looks like I just got shot. I mean come on you are not clutching your Sno-Caps in suspense. You aren't gasping for air out of pure terror. You aren't weeping or sobbing uncontrollably (I'm not that sensitive guys). It is happy. The ending is safe and structured. And if the right "wingman" character is casted to waywardly aid his or her friend in their pursuit of love, you may gather a few giggles out of it.

So, that is precisely why I spent the night before Easter on the couch with my mother and sister viewing Morning Glory. It is a romantic comedy (surprise) starring Rachel McAdams (naturally), Diane Keaton (at least she was in the Godfather), and Harrison Ford. The latter sounds pretty badass. However, I'm here to assure you it wasn't.

I was shocked to discover as the movie wore on that it was extremely relevant to the modern media world. Harrison Ford plays a seasoned, grizzly veteran of the evening news desk. He champions hard news and content of journalistic value. He is paid by the network IBS (there's one of the giggles), but for the most part is retired from daily news.

McAdams plays an ambitious young producer who dreams of leading the Today Show from behind the scenes. She gets hired to salvage IBS' dreadful morning show and immediately fires Diane Keaton's co-host. She is given an ultimatum by the station to raise ratings to a certain level by a certain time, or the show would be pulled.

Through an arduous process of getting ridiculed and scoffed at, McAdams gets Ford to agree to co-anchor the morning show. What results is awful for ratings. Keaton attempts to show ersonality, while Ford sticks stubbornly to hard news stories. Eventually, the pair push the show to the brink of failure.

McAdams starts to turn the corner by sending their apprehensive and socially awkward weatherman across the country to participate in borderline stuntman activities. The ratings finally rise, though, when Ford does an investigative piece that leads to the arrest of the governor of New york (score one for journalism).

In the end, McAdams gets an offer from the Today Show and turns it down to work with Ford. At first, Ford was incredibly reluctant to embrace the entertainment side of the show. But in an emotional and tense moment at the end of the movie Ford caves in and makes his favorite egg breakfast dish on the air. Ultimately, it was the content that was the polar opposite of journalism that raised the ratings and pushed the show over the top.

Again, this was just a movie, but it still held some interesting insights to the television world. The Today Show is a great example. Matt Lauer and Ann Curry are capable of doing and have done tremendous journalistic work. However, it is their ability to do the other stuff that sets them apart.

Oh, I should mention that throughout the movie Rachel McAdams was falling in love. Regretfully, it was not with Harrison Ford. But him and Diane Keaton was a better match in the end anyway.

How one newspaper used Facebook to build readership ... and make money

We've engaged in a lot of discussion this quarter about the role social media plays in news. I came across this article today and thought it was worth sharing.

In this post, the editor of the Lake Country Sun (a weekly newspaper in Gradford, Texas) talks about how his newspaper used its Facebook page to spread news about wildfires in the area.

Mark Engebretson, the managing editor of the Sun, discusses Facebook and Twitter as tools for disseminating credible news that the community needed. His essay was published by the Texas Center for Community Journalism at Texas Christian University. I particularly liked the last paragraph:

As communications become more advanced, we must also advance. Newspapers will not become relics of a bygone era, but will remain as the written history of today for tomorrow’s generations. Tweets and Facebook postings will be lost, purged for more space, but the written word will last far into the future. The trick will be in dedicating the resources necessary to integrate the past with the present and prepare for the future.

Also worth noting: As traffic to the website surged because of Facebook and Twitter traffic, advertisers took note. Web advertising almost quadrupled, and new advertisers were also looking for space in the print product.

Engebretson made this observation:

By posting instant updates on Facebook that were accurate, The Sun gained not only exposure, but also credibility and that credibility is what added to the advertising revenue and will continue over the next several weeks.

Here is a link to the whole essay:

http://digital.community-journalism.net/blog/facebook-increases-readership-and-advert

Privacy

I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversations regarding privacy throughout the last few classes, so I just wanted to give my opinion on the matter here on the blog. I think that I definitely agree with Kevin's sentiments that we need a broad reaching form of legislation to help alleviate cyber privacy issues, and issues with privacy in general. As a student in our class stated, legislation is fluid. Just because our technology is growing more rapidly than our legislation is, does not mean that we can't write legislation that will impact types of privacy that we have not come up with yet. A net-type of legislation can, and will help to improve protection that we will receive, and deter the ways in which companies are delving into our private lives.
On the other hand, I think that we need to remain cognizant of fact that we are the ones who give out this information the majority of the time. We give out our age, phone number, credit card number and religious affiliation. Not that we are entirely to blame, though we must realize that we are a contributing factor to the beast that is privacy violations.

How to block cookies you don't want

Eerily related to our class discussion today, the website How to Geek has posted a step-by-step guide to disabling the cookies of decidedly more questionable nature. The post also gives us a quick, concise explanation of what a cookie is and what it does.

A cookie is simply a small file that a web site places on your computer to store information. The process itself is totally benign and can even be helpful when cookies do useful things like store your shopping cart information between sessions, save you from the hassle of logging into a site every time you open and close your browser, and other helpful time savers. The ones that give cookies a bad name track users without their explicit knowledge and help advertisers (among others) build profiles of users. Many people want to limit the amount of information that is gathered about them and do so by limited the kind of cookies that their browser accepts and/or retains.

From there, the site takes you through the settings menus of the three major browsers; Chrome, Firefox and IE. Granted, the methods outlined in the How to Geek post will require some extra curating work from you, the user, but I think you'll find some peace of mind in it.

Both Chrome and Firefox support private browsing in some shape or form. If you're a Chrome user, you have the option of browsing in Incognito Mode. If you use Firefox, you can use private browsing found in the privacy settings menu. The video below talks more about Chrome overall and focuses in on Incognito Mode at about the 1:25 mark.



Hopefully you'll find the How to Geek post helpful, and I encourage you all to read the whole thing. You can also visit the native site of your browser of choice for more information on what your privacy settings mean and how your information is used.

As we mentioned in class, there's no ON/OFF switch, no silver bullet, nothing that will handle and solve every Internet privacy issue, but it serves us all to better understand the technology and be more in control of our own private information.

Facebook secretly hires PR firm to throw mud at Google

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief, at a town hall-style meeting with President Obama last month. In the past, Mr. Zuckerberg has extolled the virtue of transparency.

Editor's note: Social media is all the rage. Micro-blogs like Twitter are increasingly popular and seen as alternatives to traditional news sources. Citizen journalism and social media are often pointed to as examples of how information will be both collected and disseminated in the future. But given what we have discussed and read in this class so far, is Facebook journalism? Or is it just a digital bulletin board? And would any self-respecting journalistic organization act along the lines of what is reported in this story? So what can we conclude about social media. It may be content and it may be popular - but is it journalism? Please respond to this post. - MT

NYT - For years, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, has extolled the virtue of transparency, and he built Facebook accordingly. The social network requires people to use their real identity in large part because Mr. Zuckerberg says he believes that people behave better — and society will be better — if they cannot cloak their words or actions in anonymity.

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” Mr. Zuckerberg has said.

Now, Facebook is being taken to task for trying to conceal its own identity as it sought to coax reporters and technology experts to write critical stories about the privacy implications of a search feature, Social Circle, from its rival, Google.
The plan backfired after The Daily Beast revealed late Wednesday that Facebook, whose own privacy practices have long been criticized, was behind the effort. It didn’t help that some of the technology experts who were encouraged to criticize Google dismissed the privacy concerns around Social Circle as misplaced.

Facebook insiders, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said the company hired the well-known public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to suggest stories about Social Circle to reporters because it did not want the issue to turn into a Facebook versus Google story. Social Circle is an optional feature of Google search that uses publicly available information from social networks to personalize search results.

In a statement issued Thursday, Facebook said: “We wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.”

Companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere routinely approach reporters and analysts with stories about the so-called misdeeds of their competitors. But journalism and public relations experts criticized Facebook for doing so anonymously and insisting that Burson-Marsteller not reveal its identity.

Facebook, Foe of Anonymity, Is Forced to Explain a Secret - NYTimes.com

What is a citizen journalist?

I wanted to take the time to give my feedback on a question that was asked a while back in this blog regarding what a citizen journalist is. I am usually under the thinking that in order to be a journalist you must have specific training, tools and knowledge to complete this task. I think that most of my opinion most likely stems from the fact that I am a current journalism student paying thousands of dollars for a piece of paper that says I am a journalist, though I felt that the resources made available to me actually were what made me a journalist. My opinion has drastically changed. I feel as if the world of journalism in and of itself is changing, and as the way it stands now I think that there should almost be a new term made up for those journalists who have not been through the training, schooling that most professional journalists have one through. Maybe it is just my bitterness coming out, though I feel four plus years of me studying this craft does warrant some recognition! I am more than appreciative of the work that citizen journalists do, and the cause that they stand for, though I think that what they are capable of doing, and what students such as ourselves upon graduation are capable of doing are two different things. A citizen journalist has the same goal in mind, disseminating useful information, though writing style, technique and display of this information are things you can't just learn by yourself.

Google Suggest and public discourse

I recently ran across an interesting article about how Google starts dictating public discourse before the search button ever gets hit.

Last year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published the findings of a study involving the Google Suggest feature, which automatically fills in the search field based on what Google things you want to search for (or perhaps what they want you to search for).

Their research focused on searches involving nanotechnology. They found that, over time, Google Suggest steered those looking for information about nanotechnology toward articles about health-related research and away from other scientific and social applications that are more common (USA Today did a good job of explaining the scientific stuff in easy-to-understand terms).

The bottom line: Google is overemphasizing the role nanotechnology plays in health research.

Wisconsin communications expert Dietram Scheufele, one of the co-authors of the study, told USA Today that Google "is shaping the reality we experience in the suggestions that it makes, pointing us away from the most accurate information and toward the most popular." Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

"I don't think Google is making us 'stupid' but we do see the potential for a self-reinforcing spiral in search suggestions away from the most accurate information toward the most popular," Scheufele later told USA Today. "The whole idea in science is to look at a lot of sources of information and form a comprehensive picture of the situation, not to any one 'best' paper."

The authors of the study speculated that the problems they found would translate to other topics, like politics. Makes sense to me - what do you think?

Here are the first few paragraphs of a news release explaining the Wisconsin study:

WEB SEARCHES MAY SACRIFICE ACCURACY FOR POPULARITY

MADISON - By adding a subtle nudge to each of more than 1 billion search requests every day, Google may be steering the direction of public discussion.

Begin typing a word in the search box at google.com, and the Google Suggest feature starts kicking in ideas - "tiger" begets "tiger woods," "tea" draws "tea party movement" and "craig" will summon "craigslist."

"It is meant to be helpful, but from a public discourse perspective it is worrisome," says Dominique Brossard, a University of Wisconsin-Madison life science communication professor.

Brossard and four colleagues studied Google's data for nanotechnology-related search terms and the associated Google suggestions from October 2008 to September 2009.

In a study published in the May issue of Materials Today, the researchers found a reversal in the top 10 nano search terms, with economic impact (word such as "stocks," "jobs" and "companies") searches giving way to health ("medicine" and "cancer") searches over the course of a year.

By the time August 2009 arrived, users who typed "nanotechnology" into the Google search box were getting a list of suggestions topped by "nanotechnology in medicine" despite the phrase's standing as the sixth-most popular nano search term.

http://www.news.wisc.edu/releases/16051