GBJ multimedia blogs

Using a blog to sketch, draw mind maps

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:28:00 -0400

Nicole has been using her blog to draw some sketches and play with mind maps. Fundamentally, play is about creativity and imagining things. So a lot of what our mind does when we are not concentrating is play with new ways of looking at things. We make connections that we cannot seem to make when we are trying too hard. When we let the mind loose, creative things happen. Nicole’s sketches and ramblings are here, here and here.

My first boss at a daily newspaper knew how to unleash creativity in headlines. He would play around with some of the key words in a story and just let it rip. So to write a headline for a story about the history of a coal mine (a potentially boring topic), he would play with words associated with songs or poems or just facts: ”coal” “lump” “shaft” “pick” “collapse” “49er” “Clementine” “carbon” “soot”. He would write 10 or 15 different playful headlines, many of them awful, until he came up with something clever and compelling. He came up with this: “Coal mine owners got the gold while workers got the shaft”.

Karen summarized a report on “News in a Networked World” from Pew. Among the most interesting of the 12 observations about how news is changing were the views of the audience. Users’ perceptions of news media bias are growing, the audience is getting more fragmented along partisan and ideological lines and people are losing faith in news organizations. The implications for us? What do you think? Personally, I think these trends emphasize the need for professional journalists to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack by their ethical standards and the transparency of their news gathering processes. In other words, just be straightforward with readers about how information was gathered. If you use an anonymous source or if a reporter goes undercover, explain why you did it and be frank with readers about the drawbacks of these practices.

Blogging isn’t just about writing. Elva shows us the potential of using multimedia in a blog by posting her slideshow of Tibet photos along with her narration. Somehow the slideshow seemed more impressive when displayed on the blog than when it was submitted as a homework assignment. I looked at it in the context of a published work for all the world to see.

Unnamed source kills credibility for her

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 23:03:00 -0400

Young has some reflections on our attachment to social networks and devices rather than people. Students will text someone who is across the room rather than engaging in a face-to-face conversation. What does that mean? she asks. “Balance between realistic world and virtual world is necessary for me,” she concludes. She also was angered by a Reuters report on Bo Xilai and his wife that relied on anonymous sources. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, named names in its report and was thus more credible. That’s precisely the point, isn’t it?

Tini Tran, the AP foreign correspondent who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, impressed Daniel with her passion for her work. She impressed me as well. On the one hand, I wished that more students had come to hear her. But then those who did attend might have had a less intimate, less compelling experience. She clearly enjoyed the feedback from students. After her intense study of Chinese here at Tsinghua, maybe she is ready to get back to reporting.

Elva posted her Tibet slideshow, which is something that all of the members of the class can do (usually there is a “sharing” or “publish” option in the software that allows you to choose “embed”. Then take the embed code and put it into the blog. She also covered the visit by Mike Chinoy of CNN, who covered China for 30 years. Chinoy was showing a documentary he produced on President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. Chinoy commented that a reporter covering China today has a much easier time of it than 40 years ago, when they were trailed by “minders” all the time. China is more open today.

Nicole has some cool sketches from her travels that you should check out. Doodling and blogging have something in common: they are what our minds produce when they are supposedly idling. But “idling” is a form of creativity. We make unexpected connections and creative leaps when we are letting our minds wander, when we are not in the intense laser focus of study, test-taking, writing a news article on deadline.

Should you use a digital recorder in interviews?

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:51:30 -0400

The senior editor in the features department of Xinhua News Agency discourages reporters from using digital recorders during interviews, Elva reports. The editor, Ms. Huang, believes that reporters will fall into the trap of merely taking dictation and not try to rearrange the information from the interview in an interesting way.

Personally I think it is a good idea for the reporter to rely on taking notes because that in itself helps filter out a lot of unnecessary information and makes the reporter focus on what is being said.

At the same time, I think it is a good idea to record interviews in order to capture specific quotes that are especially interesting. It ensures that you, the reporter, are not putting the other person’s words into your own words. The recording helps make sure that the voice you capture in your written piece sounds like the voice of the person. The digital recorder is a good backup.

When I was working in England, I found that most journalists learn shorthand as part of their training. Almost no one does this in the U.S., and it is too bad that we were not forced to learn the skill. We all develop our own system of abbreviations and so on, but shorthand would help you capture more, miss less.

Karen has two posts: on the dangers of communications technology and social media as portrayed in the BBC’s series “Black Mirror”. And she comments on a Financial Times article about how Chinese singles are seeking life partners in Weibo.

How to pronounce “sybyzghy”

The assignment to create a slideshow with sound sent Cameron in search of good examples, and he found a really good one. On his recommendation, I watched several of the slideshows in an eight-part series on the music of the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz, two ethnic minority groups from the Xinjiang province in China’s far west. The music and the reporter’s narration provide the sound. We get to meet a 9-year-old prodigy on the stringed dombra and one of the few females (perhaps the only one) who has been taught to play the Altai flute, called a sybyzghy — without the narration, we would never know how to pronounce it.

Nicole writes about how more middle school students from China are trying to get into high schools in the U.S. as a way of getting a head start on their careers. There is an entire industry that has sprung up in China to help students and their parents with the application process, filling out the forms and so on. It has also led to some fraud. This could be a great subject for an investigative story.

I always enjoy reading Daniel’s blog, perhaps because he named it after me, but also because he has interesting things to say. His most recent post analyzes the issue of poverty and how it is measured. He points out that figures obtained from gapminder.org, a site that he recommends for any of us looking for data on almost any topic, can be interpreted in many different ways. Indeed. That’s what we have to do; analyze with a skeptical perspective.

Reasons I like multimedia

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 01:42:00 -0400

Cameron’s post on the power of radio, and the power of the podcast “Giant Pool of Money” in particular, describes a discovery: radio can cover a topic that might normally put off the average person.

“But these guys presented the story with simple vocabulary, a cohesive them, vivid characters, and a presentation style that made the information digestible to the everyday man.”

He reminds us that we always need to be open for discovery from unexpected places.

One part of being a journalist is calling attention to a person in a public forum, a news medium. This can be uncomfortable, and Daniel experienced that in taking photographs for last week’s assignment.

This presents two options in the pursuit of capturing good photographs:
The photographer must be immune to socially awkward situations (ie. not give a s**t), or
The subject must be willing/able to act naturally in the presence of a camera

Daniel chooses the latter. There is a delicate balance between invading someone’s privacy (the laws are different in various countries) and performing the service of informing the public. Is it OK for a fashion writer to shoot pictures randomly on the street and then publish those pictures without the subject’s permission? It’s legal in the States to do that. Keep the word respect in mind and you will avoid a lot of problems. Treat people with respect and you can both get the journalistic work done and not make people feel they have been invaded.

Nicole reports on how an American living in the Philippines posted a video about “20 Reasons Why I Don’t Like Philippines” and touched off an online firestorm. Ten years ago, this kind of media event would not have been possible. Nicole provides a link to the space where the debate is furious. When you go public with your opinions on the Web, you never know how far they will spread, who they will touch and how people will react. Once your thoughts are on the Web, you don’t own them any more.

And Elva discovers baseball with some photos of players on the Tsinghua campus. The season opens in a little more than a week.

"Luck is the residue of design"

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:47:06 -0400

“Luck is the residue of design”

- Branch Rickey

Is journalism dying? It's morphing

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:15:00 -0400

It was with great empathy that I read Cameron’s thoughts about how the web may be destroying the originality of writers, given its emphasis on linking and readability by robots. As a print journalist by training and experience, I can understand how appalling it is to consider that much of what determines the audience for an article is not a clever headline but a literal headline that an algorithm can understand. Metaphors don’t work on the web.

I see the same things, but come to a different conclusion. The linking and collaborative aspect of online journalism has the potential to enrich a writer’s work and to bring it to a new, wider audience.

Writers want to be read; they would like to see if their work has the power to hold someone’s attention. Sometimes they want to hear what their readers think. The web makes this much more achievable.

The writer as rugged individualist, as creative hero, as millennial outsider lives on. They still hang out in bars, live outrageous lives and create great stuff. They also check their email.

Daniel comments on the hypocrisy of the West in its labeling of China’s investments in Africa as neocolonialism. It seems a more benevolent way to exert power than what the West brought in the past century. Self-interested, of course. Soft power rather than hard.

His observations about Amazon’s algorithms coming to know us better than we know ourselves is a bit scary. The Wall Street Journal explored this issue in a series called “What They Know”, which tracked how websites we visit leave cookies on our computers that accumulate information on our web behavior. Public outcry and pressure from lawmakers has pushed some of the biggest web companies to agree to adopt a no-track button.

I wish Young would translate the word cloud from Hu Jintao’s work report so we non-Mandarin speakers could see how much of it parallels Obama’s State of the Union address.

We need to thank Nicole for alerting us to some online photo memes that we might not have been aware of — planking, owning, batmanning, horesmanning etc. OK, maybe you all already knew about them, but news to me.

You should also check out her observations about the elements of design and its role in removing barriers to communication. Readable typography, for example