CONFUSING READERS

Choire Sicha is a new name to me, but his post about the contradictions in newspaper headlines on stories about tsunami aid is revealing.

Confusion in the early days of a major disaster is understandable. What's not is the range: no matter how confusing the situation, aid can't both pour and trickle in. Stuff like this convinces readers that media is incompetent or, worse, showing its biases.

There's a Canadian connection, too: the National Post headline "Canadian donors amaze," and others like it, have Sicha wondering if there's an international competition to be named Most Compassionate.

SOURCE: BOING BOING
11:41:45 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

BUILDING NEW MEDIA

Before the holidays, I mentioned I was working through my ideas about one possible way of doing journalism in a new way. My thinking was kicked off by what Tim Porter, Jay Rosen and others have been writing about the failings of existing media and the promises of the new.

As I wrote a couple of weeks back, I don't have a business model in mind, or even a "platform." But over the next little while, I want to expand on what I've been thinking, a bit at a time. I can't point to the final overall picture, because I haven't seen it all yet. But bits and pieces are becoming clearer, including the first two editors:

The preliminary mandate for the public editor would be to find, create and encourage the development of an engaged readership. It would be the public editor's responsibility to develop and foster an active blogging community: recruiting, basic training if needed, support. The public editor's involvement with content would not be to edit, but to find the links and connections, to bring the efforts of the engaged readers together and make them available to the public. Discussion forums, wikis and other forms of conversation would also be the responsibility of the public editor.

The investigative editor would carry out traditional investigative and computer-assisted journalism, but also be responsible for gathering and making available and accessible as much information as possible; public data bases, freedom of information requests, public reports and documents, public meeting agendas and minutes, and so on. The goal would be to continually develop a central library of all publicly available information for the region, that was easy for anyone to access and use.

Those are the broad-sweep duties of the two positions (supported, as needed, by the necessary technical staff). I'll post more over the next little while. Comments are welcome.
7:44:19 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

WORKING JOURNALISTS

For journalists and journalists-to-be: the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma has a section on Covering the Tsunami, offering advice to help journalists cope with covering the disaster.

Dart is a must-use resource for all journalists: the information they have for coping with having to cover a major tragedy applies as much to the smaller tragedies we too often have to deal with.
2:42:38 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

TALKING STORIES

The WFMU interview with Susan Orlean is up at the radio station's archive site and well worth setting aside about 50 minutes of your time to listen to. (It's RealAudio streaming audio.) Lots about her new book, but also some worthwhile insights into the process of finding interesting story ideas.
2:31:31 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

COVERING DISASTER

Happy New Year. I'm back in Vancouver and attempting to get caught up not only on email, but on the internet coverage of the terrible tragedy in the Indian Ocean. A couple of links that have caught my eye so far:

Freelance journalist Kevin Sites has a nice piece of journalism, Paradise Tossed at his web site.

The New York Times has an excellent package of graphics and photos that gives a comprehensive look at the tragedy. (Source: Multimedia story-telling.)

Also at the NYT: Andrew Revkin has an excellent piece, How scientists and victims watched helplessly, that was published in Friday's edition. (Registration may be required.)

The BBC has a nice, short animation explaining how earthquakes happen. (Source: Interactive Narratives.)

There is much more out there that I haven't had a chance to see yet, and there are many, many "nonprofessional" sites that have blogs, photos and other reports from the region, showing again how journalism has changed.

UPDATE: Rebecca McKinnon has a post that contains an extensive list of links to blogs and wikis dedicated to covering the tsunami and its aftermath.
2:00:41 PM  LINK TO THIS POST