Crowdsourcing and flexible lines

The idea is this: call on your readers to give you the stories, to look at your FOI documents, to find the things that are within their expertise so you can use your expertise and find the story.

Is it a good thing? Are putting ourselves in line to rely too much on the audience?

Worse, are we giving up our position as the agenda setters?

But still, we choose which stories to highlight, and in many ways this is an invaluable resource for getting stories the public wants but that journalists would rarely be able to search out.

The problems here though just reinforce the multitude of decisions that have to be made by newspapers and journalists on the web daily. Where are those lines - and as they become more "flexible," are the flexible enough not to break under pressure.

I don't know, and I doubt I ever will. However in this case, I think crowdsourcing is a good thing - as long as it's crowdsourcing and not crowdreporting or crowds as the newspaper

Newspaper stories must be in print...right?

So as we are all pushing toward this new media wave in newspaper journalism, we have print stories that either run alone or have multimedia (video or audio) stories along with them - but as newspaper industry journalists, can we run just video?

Personally, I don't think we should. These videos are a fantastic supplement to stories in print, but the format and style of the news content in videos on newspaper Web sites doesn't lend itself as well to representing a story in a standalone fashion.

For instance, my favorite newspaper videos are ones that focus on one person, one story, one very visual event that is part of a bigger issue. The print story sets it up and the video drives it home. I think the combination makes fro a very poignant message in a lot of cases.

I think that if we were to start running stories only in their web video format, we would start having to make the content of our videos and the news style of them like that of broadcast journalism, and I think that would be doing the audience a disservice.

Broadcast journalism certainly has its place, but it is grounded in one place and it is a blending of hard news and very short burst clips of personal experiences. But in newspaper journalism, running print and video stories in the style that has developed for them does - at its best - highlight the best of both worlds.

interesting stats found during research

I have found a number of interesting stats while I've been researching my final paper/thesis/rant, and part of what I'm trying to do is coalesce these different numbers into some semblance of a coherent and believable hypothesis.

Anyway, here's the interesting numbers I've found:

According to one set of stats, 30.9% of those with incomes under $50,000 a year have internet access in their homes. At the same time, 32.7% in that group said they had accessed the internet from work, home or other in the past 30 days. Obviously, those stats go well together. Their alignment suggests that people with internet access are using it.

According to another set of stats, 100% of libraries in areas with a "poverty status" above 40% have internet access, suggesting that these libraries are pushing to offer internet access to low-income areas.

But putting those numbers together suggests that for people in the "lower" income brackets (and yes, $50,000 is a pretty high income, but I'm trying to draw a corellary, tenuous though it may be), people who use computers are likely to be mainly those who have them.

So, is this huge push for library access useful?

I would like to do that poll - for low-income areas, what percentage have computers at home, what numbers access the internet at home, and what numbers access the internet from the library - also, what numbers are willing to access from the library.

All this research I am trying to put together is to answer the question of whether or not online media can serve the needs of low-income communities.

Blogs Blogs and more Blogs

What does having a blog do for you as a journalist?

I mean, yes, the papers and media outlets we all want to go work for are looking for young people with new ideas and media skills such as creating Web sites (check), updating sites (check), knowing the software (check) and blogging (double check).

But for how long is this skill going to be something they look for when considering our applications?

I feel like when this craze wears off — and people once agains realize that while blogs work for some things in the journalism world, they really don't work for others — will personal "personal opinion" blogs (like this one) make me obsolete (or at least undesirable) in the workforce.

At the same time however, I rather relish this opportunity to give even a little opinion, having to hold it in under punishment of death (okay, not quite) in my other journalistic endeavors.

This is so far such a short lived wave that, while I am learning everything I can about being a fully online and internet and multimedia savvy journalist, I really fear that it will be like learning everything you could to be an expert on "New Coke" and then being crushed when it turns out to, in fact, be pretty useless in the end — you would have been better off sticking with the old.

But I may have "soon-to-graduate-journalism-student" paranoia.

Even recipes are better online

That title's a little sensationalist, but as someone who loves to cook, I've found that the internet even beats my favorite foodie magazine Bon Appetit. In magazine form, honestly, it has too many ads and too many stories about food and wine at restaurants I will likely never visit.

I feel like a traitor to my profession having said that honestly. But I get the magazine for the recipes, and one site - epicurious.com - gives me all those and more. The site pulls recipes from the archives of Bon Appetit, Gourmet and healthy recipes from SELF.

(There may be some more, but those are the main ones I care about.)

Anyway, thinking about how I kind of really do feel like getting my recipes is better online than going to the printed product made me feel like a hypocrite. To an extent, I am like those people who pick up The Daily Texan (or whatever newspaper you like) just to do the Crossword, or just to read the classifieds or get movie times.

But it is an undeniable fact of our generation - we want what we want, nothing else and nothing more. So how do we reconcile that with the fact that without those ads and extraneous stuff, these publications can't afford to put out the stuff we like (unless they are entirely internet based, but that requires hosts who are willing to keep things consistent for a rather small profit (if there is any profit at all.))

So what am I saying? Basically that we all need to be aware of what we are doing when we put on our blinders and search the web for only what we want to see. Me, I'm going to remind myself at the grocery store that picking up Bon Appetit could also give me good tips on how to do things and how others do things in addition to just providing me with recipes.

And if we want the Web site half of the site to continue, we sure better keep reading in print.

Does music have a nationality?

I was reading an article a UT J-student wrote about online downloads and they mentioned Radiohead's now famous "free" In Rainbows download.

(Surprisingly, I'm not going to talk about downloading.)

What struck me as odd was that this writer refered to them as "English rock band Radiohead." While I cognizantly recognize that, or course, the members of Radiohead are British, aren't we past the age where we need to refer to them as such?

In the past (say way back when in the 60s for woodstock and even through the 70s and 80s), bands like The Who and The Clash were touted as "British rockers" because of the distance implied. EX: "All the way from across the pond, it's THE WHO!"

But these days, that distance is almost nonexistent. Musicians, actors, artists, politicians - everyone jumps the pond with no more fanfare than it takes to blow your nose. The focus is not on the distance anymore, its just about the music ... man. (I feel so cliche.)

Something unusual, like a Singapor-ese (Singapor-ean?) rapper might warrant the label "from Singapore," but especially artists from Europe, while they may come from one country, they are not a NOVELTY! Their songs are heard all over the world thanks to iTunes, illegal downloading, legal downloading (you go, Radiohead!), live broadcasts on TV and online, and a wide range of tours that can go anywhere in the world with relative ease.

So to recap - rock band Radiohead. Not British rock band Radiohead.

Thank you.

Podcasting blues

This year marks my first foray into podcast news.

I've been trying to do it on a shoestring, which basically involves the following: Free Audacity editing downloag (just google it and you're good), a roughly $50 Olympus VN2000 digital recorder that I've had since freshman year for reporting and a $10 mini jack plug to transfer interviews and narration to my computer for editing.

Surprisingly, it has been working okay - I'm at least producing something. However, the background noise and soung quality that I'm getting is frequently falling out the bottom of the boat. I could "check out" a $600 digital recorder with high quality mic, etc. from the Journalism School, but then what would I do to when I don't have that equipment (...for instance at the less well funded college paper ...)

So now I need some tips on how to make this work better. IF you have any, please share.
Here's some I have:

1. Don't record near your computer - the whirring noise WILL be picked up

2. When you're recording narration, don't breathe heavily in between sentences (maybe turn your head if you can't do that.) When your voice goes down, the mic will amplify the sound of your breathing and make you sound like an obscene phone caller

3. Background noise behind an onsite interview is generally okay, so DON'T try to compensate by shoving your mic in your subjects face. You'll tick them off and get wierd peaks in your interview

4. Don't overedit your sound. There's lots of tool in audacity for "noise removal" and "diffusing" and that's all well and good, but sometimes they make things worse. Case and point, I was doing an interview in a store that had incredibly loud, low pumping music in the background which I tried to remove to make the interview more clear and not blow the audience's eardrums out. In the end, the interview was clearer, but the program also seemed to remove all the low-range qualities of her voice making her sound unnatural