Andria Krewson is a journalist in Charlotte. She produces Under Oak and Global Vue. Reach her on Twitter at @underoak.
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We looked inside some of the posts by underoak-blog and here's what we found interesting.
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danah boyd about Facebook - and media
From Medium: Part of what media learned long ago is that fear and salacious gossip sell papers. 4chan taught us that grotesque imagery and cute kittens work too. What this means online is that stories about child abductions, dangerous islands filled with snakes, and celebrity sex tape scandals are often the most clicked on, retweeted, favorited, etc. So an entire industry has emerged to produce crappy click bait content under the banner of “news.”
Guess what? When people are surrounded by fear-mongering news media, they get anxious. They fear the wrong things. Moral panics emerge. And yet, we as a society believe that it’s totally acceptable for news media — and its click bait brethren — to manipulate people’s emotions through the headlines they produce and the content they cover. And we generally accept that algorithmic curators are perfectly well within their right to prioritize that heavily clicked content over others, regardless of the psychological toll on individuals or the society. What makes their practice different? (Other than the fact that the media wouldn’t hold itself accountable for its own manipulative practices…)
Somehow, shrugging our shoulders and saying that we promoted content because it was popular is acceptable because those actors don’t voice that their intention is to manipulate your emotions so that you keep viewing their reporting and advertisements. And it’s also acceptable to manipulate people for advertising because that’s just business. But when researchers admit that they’re trying to learn if they can manipulate people’s emotions, they’re shunned. What this suggests is that the practice is acceptable, but admitting the intention and being transparent about the process is not.
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'God bless the Winston Salem Journal'
Links to the coverage of elections in Boone, N.C., from community members and the Winston Salem Journal, praised by Rachel Maddow: Winston Salem covers the shout-out. Elections board changes meeting minutes. Continuing elections coverage from the Winston Salem Journal. Youtube video of elections board meeting from TheJessePresnell, 15 minutes, more than 31,000 views.
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Rachel Maddow praises the Winston Salem Journal for its coverage of the Watauga County Board of Elections.
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The Harry Golden Rule of Satire
"The Harry Golden Rule, properly stated, is that in present-day America it’s very difficult, when commenting on events of the day, to invent something so bizarre that it might not actually come to pass while your piece is still on the presses.
During the fifties Harry Golden observed that white people in his part of North Carolina didn’t mind standing up with black people, they only minded sitting down with them, so he suggested that the way to integrate the schools was to simply take the chairs out and have the kids stand up at their desks. I think he called it, 'Harry Golden’s Plan for the Vertical Integration of the Schools.' About a year later some library was ordered integrated by a federal court and it proceeded to take the chairs out.
This is what is called, “being blindsided by the truth,” which is a real problem ... in America."
- attributed to Calvin Trillin at Mutant Poodle. Corollaries and similar thoughts: "Satire doesn't stand a chance against reality anymore." - Jules Feiffer in 1959 Poe's Law.
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Philly mayor says magazine yelled "Fire" in a crowded theater
...Finally, I ask that the [Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations] Commission consider specifically whether Philadelphia Magazine and the writer, Bob Huber are appropriate for rebuke by the Commission in light of the potentially inflammatory effect and the reckless endangerment to Philadelphia's racial relations possibly caused by the essay's unsubstantiated assertions. "While I fully recognize that constitutional protections afforded the press are intended to protect the media from censorship by the government, the First Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not an unfettered right, and notwithstanding the First Amendment, a publisher has a duty to the public to exercise its role in a responsible way. "I ask the Commission to evaluate whether the 'speech' employed in this essay is not the reckless equivalent of 'shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theater,' its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations an incitement to extreme reaction. Only by debunking myth with fact, and by holding accountable those who seek to confuse the two, can we insure that the prejudices reflected in the essay are accorded the weight they deserve: none at all." Phllly Mayor Michael Nutter letter to Philly magazine and many others. Content from Reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/1ah5a5/text_version_of_mayor_nutter_letter_re_being/
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Scaling up, or not, with online classes
This excerpt is from an article at PBS MediaShift from January 2013. The whole thing is worth reading and includes video of Alberto Cairo talking about MOOCs. This excerpt is useful for those who think online learning is a way to scale up and make universities more efficient.
Robert Quigley, a multimedia journalism lecturer at UT-Austin, taught a 94-student online class in social media journalism for the J-School this summer. ... But Quigley says it not only took several times as long to prepare as a traditional class, but he also found himself working 14- to 16-hour days to keep in touch with students, yet still missing face-to-face contact.
"It turned out to be a good experience and experiment," said Quigley. "However, it took everything I had to teach it, and then some. Online is part of the near future in education, and I welcome change. But people need to realize that to do this right, we'll need to put in a lot of effort to be sure it's a quality product. In order to do that, it's going to take a lot of resources (time) from faculty." Quigley added that after returning to teach the course in a classroom this past fall, he has decided to move it back online permanently beginning this spring.
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Parties, real issues and North Carolina
Whither political parties in North Carolina? Gary Pearce notes that the money flow in North Carolina is outside of traditional parties, at Talking About Politics. Meanwhile, in Charlotte, both the left and the right howl about Panthers stadium money talk behind closed doors at a city council meeting. Check the first comment on this Observer story, up-voted 111 times. (Comments on Observer stories generally come from the right). From the left -ish, Matt Comer of QNotes howls (and that's mild, compared to more words he added on Facebook.) Also meanwhile, new governor Pat McCrory won't commit to a position on climate change. And a daffodil blooms in my yard on Jan. 15. Based on 27 years in North Carolina, that's the earliest ever, by two to three weeks.
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Flickr mobile screenshot on Flickr.
Flickr screenshot
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Tow report: Hackable workflow
Recommendations: "We want to argue that news institutions of the future, apart from simply being smaller and revenue agnostic, should have three defining characteristics.
They will have a hackable workflow.
They will embrace a form of what we call ‘networked institutionalism,’ and many of the largest, national journalism organizations should embrace local accountability journalism in partnership with local news outlets.
Finally, news institutions will have to dramatically rethink what counts as ‘valid journalistic evidence,’ find new ways to evaluate this new evidence, and program these collection and evaluation process into their hackable workflows."
- Tow report
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Proceed until apprehended
If you were looking for an ideal mantra for a journalist, writer, analyst, media artist, data miner or any of the other roles and tasks that matter today, ‘Proceed until apprehended’ is a good one.
- Tow report
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Tow report on change and a key virtue
...perhaps the single most important adaptive trait is to recognize that that we are in a revolution, in its sense of a change so large that the existing structure of society can’t contain it without being altered by it.
In a revolution, strategies that worked for decades may simply stop working (as many already have). Strategies that seemed impossible or insane a few years ago may now be perfectly suited to the current environment. This period is not over, and the end is not even in sight; the near future will hold more such reversals, so that even up-to-the-minute strategies of a few years ago (RSS feeds and staff blogs) may fade into prosaic capabilities, while new ones (the ability to hunt for mysteries instead of secrets, the ability to bring surprising new voices to public attention) may become newly important.
More than any one strategy or capability, the core virtue in this environment is a commitment to adapting as the old certainties break and adopting the new capabilities we can still only partially understand, and to remember that the only reason any of this matters to more than the current employees of what we used to call the news industry is that journalism–real reporting, about whatever someone somewhere doesn’t want published–is an essential public good.
- Tow Center
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Tow report on public personas
Public persona was once the exclusive territory of the high-profile columnist. Now it is part of the job of every journalist; editors and reporters, designers, photographers, videographers, data scientists and social media specialists all have their own perspectives and accountability for storytelling. This requires judgment exercised consistently and publicly; whatever the medium of publication, information is now instantly shared, discussed, annotated, criticized and praised in a live, uncontrolled environment.
- Tow report
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