Reflections on Omaha 10/10/10

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

Updates with more links coming

I had a great visit Monday to the Omaha 10/10/10 conference held at the University of Nebraska at Omaha this last weekend.  The conference was designed to look at communication technology development in all fields a decade into the 21st century.  The sessions I was able to attend really looked at how news and marketing were making use of new media tools, especially the so-called social media.

In addition to audience at the UNO campus, the conference was also webcast live using UStream.  While there are plans to edit the video into highlight programs, the archives of the live video are not available online.

I was part of a panel at 8:15 a.m. called “Social Media, the First Amendment and the University: Communication, Information, Technology, Art & Education.  Included on the panel were keynote speaker Dr. Kuy Ho Youm of the University of Oregon (who is also the AEJMC vice president), Dean Gary Kebbel of the UNL College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Dr. Carol Zuegner of the journalism program at Creighton U.; Dr. Dr. David Helm of the UNO Department of Art & Art History, and Dr. Jeremy Lipschultz, director of the School of Communication at UNO.

The quantity of information and ideas in just the half day I was there was almost overwhelming, but I’m find the best way to review what I heard is to go back and review all the Twitter feeds that came from the sessions.   You can see them by following this link or searching for the #omaha10 hashtag.  Be forewarned.  There were a lot of people posting.

Trying to mention everything I learned would be impossible, so here are a few highlights:

  • Silicon Prairie News – An online publication dealing with heartland entrepreneurship issues.  Jeff Slobotski and Dusty Davidson talked about Silicon Prairie and about the Big Omaha conference.
  • Find out how Abby Jordan of eCreamery.com came up with blueberry and oreo flavored ice cream. Or how Princess Lasertron (aka Megan Hunt) is selling a different kind of bridal design. Or how Josie Loza of the Omaha World Herald uses social media to help her cover the out-and-about scene.
  • Nathan T. Wright, founder of Des Moines-based social media firm Lava Row talked about 10 trends in social media, web culture, and emerging media. I don’t have a copy of his excellent presentation, but here are my notes that I posted on Twitter:
    • The term “social media” will go away.  The net has always been social
    • Facebook is an identity company.  Facebook is now the mainstream.
    • Social media will bring a big disruption to the finance industry.  Facebook credits now being sold at Target.  Could Facebook become a bank?
    • Newspapers are ditching paper.  But news brands remain.
    • The social web is coming to your living room through hulu, Netflix, and iTunes.
    • Vehicles are becoming mobile media devices, with apps!  Ford is working on Fiesta Ware.
    • Our devices will unlock layers of metadata all around us.
    • Social CRM (customer relationship management) becomes a big industry
    • Twitter evolves into a sophisticated information and news network.
    • New loyalty marketing platforms are emerging.

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More SCOTUS Westboro Church Case

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

Here’s a quick roundup of several interesting stories on Westboro Church funeral protest case:

I may add to this as I gather more articles.

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Does What Happens in Philly Stay in Philly?

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

That would be a no.  What happened in Philadelphia? The National Republic Senatorial Committee shot an ad disparaging the West Virginia Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate for being too close to President Obama.  Perfectly acceptable political rhetoric.  What wasn’t acceptable was the casting call that went out for the male actors in the ad. According to Politico.com, the casting call said “We are going for a ‘Hicky’ Blue Collar look. These characters are from West Virginia so think coal miner/trucker looks.”  West Virginians, not surprisingly, were not pleased by the language in the casting call.  The lesson?  In the age of the Internet, Truth 2 prevails: There are no mainstream media.  And anything you say or write will eventually get distributed through online channels. You can no longer assume that something that is said in one community won’t get repeated quickly almost anywhere.

UPDATE: This story is all over the news web today.  The Plum Line notes that Democrats are smart to be hitting back on this story, but he questions whether it’s a big enough deal for the press to play along with them.  He notes that the offensive casting call was written by a contractor, not by the NRSC.

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SCOTUS – Does Westboro Baptist Church Have Right To Picket Funerals?

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

UPDATE: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to picket funerals.

The Supreme Court of the United States is hearing arguments today on the case of Snyder v. Phelps.  Fred Phelps, the leader of a Kansas church not connected to any of the Baptist denominations, has taken to holding protests at the funerals of military personnel who have been killed in combat.

Albert Snyder is suing Phelps because of the protest Phelps led at the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in 2006.  Phelps and company carried placards at the funeral with messages such as “God Hates You.”

Albert Snyder was awarded $11 million for intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy.  A federal appeals court threw out the verdict on First Amendment grounds.

The Westboro protestors were kept at least 1,000 feet away from the funeral at all times, following local limits.

Aside from the legal remedies, the Westboro protestors are frequently kept at a distance or drowned out by the sounds of the Patriot Guards, motorcyclists who attend military funerals to prevent disruptions.

The Washington Post had an editorial today that was highly critical of the protestors but defended their right to free speech. The paper also ran a commentary from Maryland’s attorney general who argued that some things simply can’t be defended.

You can find some additional links on this issue from a post I had back in 2006.

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We Were Promised Jetpacks – Day 2

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

Not surprisingly, CNN’s Jeanne Moos had fun with Fox’s mistaken story about the LAPD buying 10,000 jetpacks at $100,000 a pop. She did manage, initially, to miss the fact that Fox corrected the story approximately 40 minutes after it ran.

On the other hand, we now know where the jetpack story originated – The Weekly World News, home of Bat Boy.  Getting fooled by a story on WWN ranks right up there by repeating an Onion story as true.

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Truth 7 – There is No They Dept. – We were promised jetpacks

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

Except when it’s tragic, it’s funny to see news organizations caught with their pants down when they didn’t bother to check on the truthfulness of stories they report.  The news organizations decide that the story is good enough that it ought to be reported without any effort to verify it or even check to see if it makes sense.  We saw this back in August when The Chive’s Dry Erase Board Girl pretended to be quitting from from her job as a stock broker’s assistant.

Well, as you might have guessed, it’s happened again.  This time Fox News bit on the story that the Los Angeles Police Department was going to buy 10,000 new jetpacks at a cost of $100,000 each.  Aside from the craziness of the LAPD jumping into the whole jet pack thing, did anyone bother to do the math?  That would be a billion dollars on jet packs.   A quickee look online shows that the the LAPD has an annual budget in the range of $1.2 billion, this just isn’t so.  But, hey, why let details get in the way of a good story?  To their credit, Fox had a correction on the air within 40 minutes.  (By the way, this is more a critique of cable news in general than Fox in particular….)

By the way, if you were hoping for the indie band We Were Promised Jetpacks, this is for you:

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Samples of Newspaper Series

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

My in-depth reporting class is working on a pair series about the funding of K-12 education and higher education.  Here are some samples of great newspaper series from the past (which don’t have anything to do with education funding…)

  • Left of Boom
    The Washington Post’s series about how the U.S. military responded to the use of IEDs in the war in Iraq.
  • Immigrant Students
    A series from 2008 from the Dallas Morning News about how North Texas’ public schools are been affected by immigration.  A year-long project that followed 60 new immigrant students and their teachers at a local high school.
  • Reasonable Doubt
    2009 Pulitzer Prize winning series from Arizona’s East Valley Tribune about how the sheriff’s focus on immigration  enforcement led to neglect of other issues.  This is a significant series in part because it was done by a suburban paper on a limited budget.
  • Seeking a Good Death
    Pulitzer Prize winning series by Philadelphia Inquirerreporter Michael Vitez and photographers April Saul and Ron Cortes on  critically ill patients wanting to die with dignity.
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30th Anniversary of Janet Cooke’s “Jimmy’s World” Fabrication

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

It was 30 years ago this week that the Washington Post published Janet Cooke’s fantastical “Jimmy’s World. ”  Cooke was hired by the Washington Post to improve its coverage of the African American community. She was a young African American woman who claimed to have a degree from Vassar, and she was a excellent writer. On Sunday, September 28, 1980, Cooke delivered just the kind of story she had been hired to write—a compelling account of an eight-year-old boy named Jimmy who was a heroin addict being shot up by his mother’s boyfriend. Although the story was compelling, it wasn’t true—something that was not discovered until the story was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Days after Cooke won the award, reporters learned that her college credentials had been fabricated, and soon she confessed that Jimmy’s story had been made up as well.

Cooke obviously had not behaved ethically in fabricating the story and her credentials. But Bob Woodward, who was one of Cooke’s editors, also accepts responsibility for printing the story. Woodward explains the journalistic and moral lapse in an interview with Ken Adelman in the August 1994 Washingtonian magazine:

When we found [the story] was a fraud, we exposed it ourselves, putting all the information, very painfully, in the paper. We acknowledged a lapse of journalism.

It took me a while to understand the moral lapse, which was the more unforgivable one. I should have tried to save the kid and then do the story. . . . If it happened now, I’d say, “Okay, where’s this kid who’s being tortured to death?”

My journalistic failure was immense, but the moral failure was worse. And if I had worried about the kid, I would have learned that the story was a fraud. There would have been no journalistic failure.

Interestingly, because the kid didn’t exist, I’m taken off the moral hook.  There’s no gravestone in Northeast Washington with, “Jimmy, age 8, died of a heroin overdose because Washington Post editor Bob Woodward lacked courage or conscience.

Fourteen years after Cooke’s story was written, retired Post editor Ben Bradlee was still haunted by the story and by the blow it delivered to the paper’s credibility.  He told American Journalism Review back in 1995: “That was a terrible blot on our reputation. I’d give anything to wipe that one off.”

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Ralph Hanson
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Apologies, Ramadan & 9/11

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

On September 11th, the Portland Press Herald ran a long, thoughtful story on its front page about the local observance of the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

What would normally be considered a relatively non-controversial story became extremely controversial because this year the final day of Ramadan fell on Sept. 11. Topping things off for the paper was the fact that it planned on running all of its Sept. 11th anniversary stories in the Sept. 12th Sunday paper.

The response was instantaneous and furious.  Letter writers, e-mailers, and callers were uniformly upset that the paper did not have a story on the front page about the 9/11 anniversary.  And many were upset that there was a story about Ramadan on the front page that day.

On Sunday, 9/12, the day the paper planned to give extensive coverage of the 9/11 anniversary, the paper ran the following apology:

We made a news decision on Friday that offended many readers and we sincerely apologize for it.

Many saw Saturday’s front-page story and photo regarding the local observance of the end of Ramadan as offensive, particularly on the day, September 11, when our nation and the world were paying tribute to those who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks nine years ago.

We have acknowledged that we erred by at least not offering balance to the story and its prominent position on the front page.

What you are reading today was the planned coverage of the 9/11 events. We believed that the day after the anniversary would be the appropriate occasion to provide extensive new coverage of the events and observances conducted locally and elsewhere.

In hindsight, it is clear that we should have handled this differently and with greater sensitivity toward the painful memories stirred by the anniversary of 9/11.

But the apology wasn’t the end of the story. Why? Because some people read that apology as saying there was some kind of connection between peaceful practitioners of Islam in the United States with the the terrorists who attacked this nation back in 2001.

That was the central theme of story that ran last weekend as a part of NPR’s On The Media.  In the story, OTM’s Bob Garfield had a somewhat confrontational interview with Richard Connor, the Press Herald’s editor and publisher.  In the interview, Garfield tried to get Connor to acknowledge that the apology made the “connection between Islam and radical Islamic terrorists.”  Connor refused to do so.  If you read the comments about the story on the OTM web page, you’ll find that some listeners found Connor to be overly defensive, while others viewed Garfield as belligerent.

In my view, neither of those observations are particularly helpful.  Connor had obviously had a bad week and was tired of being criticized by all sides about his paper’s coverage of the issue.  Garfield was just as clearly trying to hold Connor accountable for what he had to say.  Neither was at his best.

What was helpful was a followup to the Sept. 12th apology that Connor published on Sept. 19th that hasn’t gotten as much attention.  Connor writes:

I have failed my writing hero, E.B. White, whose guiding principle, outlined in the classic “Elements of Style,” was: “Omit needless words.”

If I’d followed that rule last week, I would have responded to criticism of our newspaper on 9/11 with this:

“Our coverage of the conclusion of the local Ramadan observance was excellent and we are proud of it. We did not adequately cover 9/11 on the 9/11 anniversary, which also should have been front-page news, in my opinion.”

Why would I have omitted the other words in last week’s column?

Their lack of precision led to mischaracterization and misunderstanding. They were used to prove the maxim that a lie travels faster than truth. Mostly they allowed those with a personal ax to grind or a political agenda to advance to twist and misinterpret.

I meant to apologize for what we did not print — front-page coverage of 9/11 on the anniversary of a day that stirs deep and unhealed wounds. I was in no way apologizing for what we did print in a deservedly prominent position — a striking photo of our local Muslim community in prayer.

What Connor says here is what he probably should have said the previous week – that the paper did a good job of covering Ramadan and a bad job of covering the Sept. 11th anniversary on Sept. 11.  This apology is particularly good because it doesn’t talk about “who might have been offended,” but rather about the quality of judgments made at the paper.  Our media would serve us much better if our editors and publishers were more willing to explain publicly why they do what they do.  And to make clear statements of what they stand for.

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