Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

1975 South Bronx nativity (image from NYT.com)

Folk artist Joseph Sciorra constructed this unique nativity scene, set in the South Bronx, circa 1975.

My very first post on this blog was about photos of the Bronx during that time.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with a few people – a bar owner, an unemployed 30-something, a pastor – who are worrying about the near future of the city in this recession.

Maybe a look at this scene (click here for some details) is a good reminder of what the Bronx has overcome and what it will hopefully never have to face again.

As the debate whether Gov. David Paterson should appoint Caroline Kennedy as the next U.S. Senator heats up, many questions arise about her qualifications.

But to bluntly oversimplify her qualifications of philanthropy and law into one word, it would be her name.

As a Kennedy she would have the ability to raise money and awareness for the issues of New York State.

The fact that Kennedy has not had to pay her “political dues” does not really concern me.

The real questions I would like to know are not about her qualifications, but rather her intentions.

I want to know, why she has decided at this moment to enter politics, what her agenda would focus on as Senator, and how she plans on helping the economically depressed and bleak, upstate New York.
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So last week, Google released maps and lists charting everything from online users’ most frequent questions on a national scale to specifically New York City’s search penchant. The rest of the story is pretty boring and doesn’t reveal much in the way of novelty (national users searched “American Idol”-related phrases while NYC-ers searched obscure architects and physicists), though, and the idea that Google is tracking our searches on a mass basis is pretty much old news at this point.

What I find infinitely more amusing and interesting is the fact that Google tracks trends, beyond the flu trends , to the personal web history – on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. If you’re signed into Gmail, Google tracks and displays this information via lists and bar charts. Your most frequent search terms, your frequency of activity this past year, how many searches you conduct per week on average, what day of the week you search most frequently, and what time of day you use Google search most often. You can view the results overall, over the past 7 days, the last 30 days and the last year.

Overall, my search activity spikes on Wednesdays with a pretty symmetrical upside-down bell curve over the course of the week. My search times peak between noon and 5 p.m.. My search traffic was practically non-existent from January through April when I was working full-time… but then steadily rose through late Spring and Summer months before skyrocketing in October (probably from the Jewish holidays and boredom/procrastination).

Screenshot of Google Trends web history bar charts

Over the last 7 days, my search activity spiked on Sundays and I averaged a high of around 14 searches between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
The #1 phrase entered through Google was the Interactive Fundamentals blog. The top 5 all had to do with word game and free book searches. Although this week, “women’s health mag” and “non-FDA approved drugs” squeezed in at #4 and #5, respectively.

The ready availability of all this information can be a boon and a bane. Fascinating statistical log or Big Brother watching over you? The way I see it, it’s not really watching over me since the info is just one of millions of data sets like it in existence and for the most part, is used only to fill in data sets for the national search rankings. To the part of me that is still skeptical and ever-weary, though, it is somewhat unsettling, seeing all that information collected there and knowing it’s stored somewhere else, either a few miles away or much further.

Wanna know which experienced journalists were laid off today?…Yeah, I don’t really want to hear about it anymore either. But if you’re curious, check out Twitter’s new feed: The Media is Dying.

Between the 60+ of us, we drink an obscene amount of coffee in just one day.  Imagine all the coffee grounds we leave behind…and now, imagine all the diesel fuel we could make!

Scientists in Reno have developed a process to make fuel out of those left over grounds.  They say it’s relatively easy and efficient, and theoretically could produce up to several hundred million gallons of biofuel per year – at $1/gallon.

This NYT’s article points out what might just be the best part: the exhaust from the grounds smells like coffee.  If only the exhaust clouds of 7th Ave were replaced with the scent of a double mocha soy latte…

I don’t if you guys heard but we are in a recession. And I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t save any of  my money. 

To a large extent I have cut down on some expenses since school started and I stopped making real money. But there is still health expenses, and living expenses which take a huge cut out of my monthly budget. Obviously there are things I could do to pinch pennies, but truthfully I just don’t think to do it. 

I’m not sure if it was just something I’ve never thought to do, but I sure know I was never taught to do it. There was always a sort of “figure it out on your own” mentality in my family.  

I figured out credit cards really quickly on my own when I took out a bunch at the tender age of 18 and one month and spent a lot of money I didn’t have. Still paying one of them off seven years later. 

Yet in times of economic crisis, a person’s savings become incredibly important to livelihood. When push comes to shove that’s what is going to help people get through. 

I hear about my friends in severe debt from school, or credit cards and I wonder, is it an American thing? or a generational thing? 

The Times has a great interactive series on the crisis called “The Debt Trap.” The series includes an amazing graph that shows most Americans have an average savings of $392 dollars per year and around $120,000 per year in debt. What? That’s insane to me. 

CUNY’s own Barbara Raab has some good things to say about saving money, but she also notes that it isn’t easy being thrifty.

 I think the solution is really to start teaching people about money, credit, and saving at a young age. I know that a class in high school on this stuff would have helped me much later on. 

But maybe the recession will force us all to re-evaluate our spending habits, and when we (if we) ever get the economy back to into an upswing I’ll be sure to put some money in the bank and keep it there. Hopefully there are lessons here we can take to heart and actually remember. 

Until then we always have the sage-like Suze Orman to help us. 

So President Bush was the target of two shoes thrown at him – quite haphazardly – by an Iraqi television journalist whose employer, Al Baghdadia, is based in Cairo, Egypt. In the video clip viewed ’round the world, Mr. Bush tells a security agent that he is fine after the incident, later joking about the incident and telling the assembled press that he didn’t feel the least bit threatened by the attack. The journalist, however, may not be so fortunate.

While an attack on any world leader, however innocuous the weapon and bland response from the attacked, is cause for alarm and legal consequence, I have serious doubts about the existence and stability of any current Iraqi justice system. They didn’t have a fair one before the U.S.’ 2003 invasion and they haven’t had a chance to build one now, and with a history of lack of due process in the region, regardless of professional standing and international attention, it seems a very real possibility that Muntadar al-Zaidi, the journalist apprehended, faces either a violent fate or an untimely demise.

The words that al-Zaidi shouted in Arabic while throwing his shoes have been widely translated to have been: “This is the farewell kiss, you dog!” However, an unaccredited blogger at The False Oswalds expands the translated quote to “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog. … This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”
Whether this is accurate or not, I don’t know, but CNN expands the translation to: “You killed the Iraqis!” These add another layer of context to al-Zaidi’s motivation for the assault.

In that CNN article, it is also noted that al-Zaidi is the same journalist who was kidnapped in November 2007 on his way to work and then released three days later. I do not know if there are reports of what happened to him during his captivity, whether he was tortured or not. But I imagine that after the initial impulse to throw his shoes at President Bush wore off and he was surrounded and restrained by security agents, his mind flashed to those three days from one year ago and he came into a panic about his current situation. That is the only thing I can think to explain the blood trail on the carpet and the cries from an adjacent room while other Iraqi journalists apologized to the President and Mr. Bush made light of the situation.

I would love for someone to brief the U.S. president on the final translation so that after the jokes have subsided, he will no longer lack understanding of al-Zaidi’s cause. And hopefully, he will actually reinforce his claim that this show of protest – which is more than just an empty ploy for attention – is proof of democracy in Iraq by ensuring that Mr. al-Zaidi is not executed or tortured for his form of expression.

The pharmaceutical industry is coming under fire for allegedly hiring ghostwriters (writers who work for pay, but not a byline) to write positive reports/analysis of clinical tests on drugs with possible efficacy issues – and then recruiting notable doctors to stick their names on it. This issue has been bandied about for months and suspected for longer, but now U.S. Senator Charles Grassley from Iowa is renewing the fight.

Is the fact that this possibility has surfaced doesn’t surprise me troubling? Even before I declared my concentration in health/medicine reporting, I was aware of the corruption and rampant abuse of power by what is referred to as Big Pharma. Government deregulation and regulation on a slew of business and healthcare policy issues end up benefiting these corporate entites, whether allowing unapproved drugs and drugs with possible side effects to go on the market before they are fully vetted by the FDA or removing/weakening price caps on prescription drugs so that Pharma can charge more for less and profit from donations of life-saving drugs to Third World countries. And of course there are the deceptive drug ads that have had varying levels of regulation over the last two decades.

Journal articles are an important “first draft” introducing new developments in medicine to the public and are among the sources used by health professionals and medical reporters in their story research. Doctors and reporters already look at journal articles with a wary eye, and the likely possibility of journal articles being fabricated can be even more detrimental to the trust people place in such written work.

And that doctors would sign on to put their names on these works they haven’t written – even if they agree with what is being written – is egregious and says they condone this deceptive practice. Like the regulations placed on drug advertisements, all that would be needed is for the doctors to acknowledge that this IS NOT their work. It would be better if it were, but if this is the way they want to roll, then disclose your affiliations.

It is tantamount to plagiarism.

Hundreds of Staten Islanders rallied on Saturday to save their South Beach firehouse from a night closure.  Engine Company 161 on McClean Avenue will close between the hours of 6pm and 9am as of January 17.

The Department said the plan would save the city $8.9 million by cutting overtime hours.  Island residents fear the city’s proposed night closure to save money will cost lives.