Reflections of a Newsosaur: Maybe others should copy early LAT deadlines

By Michael Becker | Published: February 22, 2010

As rev­o­lu­tion­ary as fore­thought might be in some news­rooms, the smart front pages pro­duced at the LAT since the tighter dead­lines were imple­mented sug­gest that early closes could lead to more of the deep, inter­pre­tive cov­er­age that news­pa­pers are uniquely equipped to deliver.

By play­ing to print’s sin­gu­lar capa­bil­ity to illu­mi­nate com­plex and sub­tle sub­jects, pub­lish­ers can strengthen the com­pet­i­tive stance of the prod­ucts that gen­er­ate the vast major­ity of their revenues.

And that would be a good thing, too, because print can­not pos­si­bly match the speed, drama and time­li­ness that CNN or Twitter can bring to any break­ing story.

Unfortunately for news­pa­pers, too many edi­tors and reporters feel their front pages have to match the evening news, instead of set­ting the agenda for the day on which they appear.

This anachro­nis­tic think­ing leads to stale and unimag­i­na­tive front pages that tend to rein­force the grow­ing pub­lic per­cep­tion that news­pa­pers are stale and unimag­i­na­tive products.

via newsosaur.blogspot.com

This is a sim­ple change that could make for some big results in improv­ing the qual­ity of news­pa­per front pages. However, you’d have to over­come a heck of a lot of iner­tia in news­rooms that are used to the later deadlines.

Cross-posted from my Posterous site at Becker’s Online Journal

Posted in Miscellany | Leave a comment

Buttry on plagiarism

By Michael Becker | Published: February 21, 2010

In light of the recent pla­gia­rism scan­dals,* Steve Buttry entreats jour­nal­ists to make their pre-writing processes more trans­par­ent and to be more dili­gent in their note taking.

As many peo­ple do when they write about pla­gia­rism, Buttry “pla­gia­rizes” most of his post (cita­tion needed). Of course, he’s not really pla­gia­riz­ing. In fact, his whole point boils down to:

See, I lifted a lot of mate­r­ial for this post. But the quo­ta­tion marks, attri­bu­tion and links turn shame­ful pla­gia­rism into hon­or­able research.

Buttry (or one of the peo­ple he quotes) sug­gests that we make sure to put quo­ta­tions marks around every­thing we paste into our notes from other sources. He does not sug­gest reporters imme­di­ately retype every­thing they read in their own words; that invites errors in tran­scrip­tion. Copy and paste can work, if the reporter takes the time to pay atten­tion to attribution.

And now, because I can, here are some of my choice book­marks to arti­cles deal­ing with pla­gia­rism over the past few years:

* I sup­pose you could call this an ever­green post, since there will always be “recent pla­gia­rism scandals.”

Posted in Ethics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

To Catch A Plagiarist

By Michael Becker | Published: February 20, 2010

Journalists often talk and write about how bad it is, which makes me won­der why we find it accept­able to do almost noth­ing to pre­vent it? The gen­eral atti­tude towards pla­gia­rism check­ing seems to be, “Let’s save our money and let read­ers and other peo­ple catch the culprits.”

via cjr.org

This comes from Craig Silverman at the Columbia Journalism Review. He’s right about one thing: Every time a jour­nal­is­tic pla­gia­rist is outed, news crit­ics and pun­dits get up in arms about pla­gia­rism for a few weeks before let­ting the issue blow over.

I don’t like the idea of run­ning every­thing a news­pa­per pro­duces through a plagiarism-detecting algo­rithm, but there’s got to be some­thing else we can do to keep journos honest.

My sug­ges­tion: Open up the jour­nal­is­tic process to pub­lic scrutiny. Encourage reporters to keep blogs where they chron­i­cle their research. Some peo­ple call this “show­ing your work,” just like back in high school alge­bra. If every­thing we do is out there for the pub­lic to see, we’ll have an incen­tive to stay hon­est, and we might just earn back some of the trust that peo­ple seem to have lost in jour­nal­ists over the past few decades.

Cross-posted from my Posterous site at Becker’s Online Journal

Posted in Miscellany | Leave a comment

The looming coupon crisis

By Michael Becker | Published: February 20, 2010

Coupons could be the next cri­sis for the news indus­try, says Jeff Jarvis:

The prob­lem with dig­i­tal coupons and cir­cu­lars has been porta­bil­ity: the extra and incon­ve­nient step of print­ing out supresses use. But now enter the smart phone and the long-fabled day of the smart, mobile coupon may actu­ally arrive. If I can check into a flight with a scan of my iPhone shouldn’t I be able to buy toi­let paper with it?

He’s say­ing that adver­tis­ers have been rely­ing on news­pa­pers to dis­trib­ute their coupons for years, but the Web pro­vides a way to cut out the mid­dle man and save money. It won’t be long, Jarvis writes, before the ad indus­try fig­ures this out en masse and takes another source of rev­enue away from newspapers.

The log­i­cal thing for news­pa­pers and news orga­ni­za­tions to do is fig­ure out how to do this before some enter­pris­ing startup does it first.

Posted in Print Culture | Leave a comment

School Sued For Spying On Students With Laptop Cameras Says It Was A Security Feature, Turns It Off

By Michael Becker | Published: February 19, 2010

The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania was recently sued after allegedly spy­ing on a stu­dent using a school-owned lap­top via the laptop’s built-in Web cam.

In this note to par­ents, sent Thursday night, which we obtained, the school says it was a secu­rity fea­ture, and that it was only used “for the nar­row pur­pose of locat­ing a lost, stolen or miss­ing lap­top” and that the dis­trict “never acti­vated the secu­rity fea­ture for any other pur­pose or in any other man­ner whatsoever.”

If true, this sounds more rea­son­able, but it’s still a bit creepy. The dis­trict has dis­abled the feature.

via businessinsider.com

This story was fea­tured on the CBS News tonight too. Crazy stuff.

Cross-posted from my Posterous site at Becker’s Online Journal

Posted in Miscellany | Leave a comment