Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

Earth Day 2009. New York City’s Grand Central station was the host location of this year’s Earth Day Festival. 108 participating organizations were present at the festival last week. Little stands crowded next to each other, with colorful and hands-on displays which offered tips and new ways on how to save energy, which household products one can use which will be safest for the environment, and some tables that were just for fun. There were a variety of creative green enterprises represented, which had for sale products manufactured from cardboard, sails, and even elephant dung. Many of these green projects are publicly- funded, and promoted innovative technologies like a hybrid bus, fueled by different types of energy; the expansion of bike lanes; and tax credits for solar panels on green rooftops. The event was free and open to all.

12:25 pm

Five minutes from now, the Rev. Al Sharpton is scheduled to lead a rally outside 133 64th St. in Manhattan, at the corner of Lexington Ave., the building where accused securities fraudster Bernie Madoff lives.

Madoff is out on $10 million bail but confined to his home. Sharpton and other critics contend that this is much more lenient treatment than minorities accused of crimes receive.

12:32 pm

Still no Sharpton. The crowd is small, maybe 15 people. Channel 4 and 7 newsvans are here.

12:35 pm

The police have set up barricades in the middle of 64th St., and people are gathering across the street from Madoff’s building.

12:40 pm

About 10 people have started marching in an oval inside the police-barricaded area, shouting “Hey hey, ho ho, Madoff has got to go” and “Justice for everyone.”

12:53 pm

The number of people marching and chanting has increased to about 27. They are mostly African-American, plus a few older white folks.

Hey! Sharpton’s here! He has joined the marchers.

12:58 pm

The chants are all about equal justice now. There are several photographers here, as well as curious well-dressed Upper East Siders who look like the economic downturn hasn’t hit them quite yet. Several cops are standing around looking placid.

1:02 pm

The marchers now number more than 30, and a few more white people have joined the ranks. Suddenly they’ve gone silent. Still marching, no chanting. OK, now a National Action Network spokesperson is explaining why they’re here.

1:09 pm

The woman at the microphone, Tamika Mallory, spoke of a two-tiered justice system in the city and called it a blatant injustice. Sharpton spoke after her, echoing her comments. Here is an excerpt from his speech (not the greatest quality audio, partially due to the photographer’s camera next to me clicking incessantly):

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1:15 pm

After a few more minutes of chanting, the protesters wrapped it up, applauding their own efforts. Members of the press, including me, descended on the group asking for interviews.

Michael Hardy, general counsel of the National Action Network, discusses the double standard of justice that led his group to organize today’s protest:

On December 10th, Sean Hetherington and Aaron Hartzler organized Day Without A Gay. They asked people to “call in gay” to work and spend the day volunteering for GLBT and/or human rights organizations. The idea was intended to demonstrate the contributions of the GLBT community to the nation’s economy.

The event coincided with the International Human Rights Day and was conceived in response to California’s Proposition 8 initiative which banned gay marriage. According to press reports, the turnout was low.

No word yet on whether or not there will be a repeat next year.

EIES, the Electronic Information and Education Service, is a radio broadcasting service for the blind in northern New Jersey. It uses 150 volunteers to read newspapers, magazines and books over a special frequency out of Seton Hall University in South Orange. Listeners as far as 25 miles away get a special radio in exchange for a small donation. They can get the news all day long in their kitchens, living rooms or bedrooms.

EIES has been doing this for 34 years and not much about the process has changed.

Volunteers read for two hours at a time, which adds up to 112 hours of broadcasting a week. They don’t read from computer screens and they don’t even skip over the weekly sales circulars. They read the paper in its entirety. So in an age where newspapers are dying, EIES has been called by some volunteers, “the last bastion” for newspapers.

A lot of the volunteer readers are older and may not be comfortable with computer screens.  But that’s not the only reason EIES sticks with the paper. The newspaper layout makes it easier to read the news in some sort of order, starting with the front page and the day’s headlines. And they read it word for word. So in an age when technology has taken over, EIES looks to the past.

The EIES studio, which is in an old building down the street from Seton Hall, is a kind of tribute to the newspaper. There are stacks of them on the floor. There’s rustling and page turning and a sense that newspapers will be around, at least at EIES, for decades to come.

A couple weeks ago, some people who live on my block in Fort Greene put this holiday abomination out in front of their building:

All I can think whenever I walk by it is, “How high is their electric bill going to be?”

Some people really go overboard with Christmas to the point of wasting insane amounts of electricity. Is it ego, misplaced enthusiasm, competitiveness or something else that drives them? I don’t know. I do know that when Chevy Chase covers his entire house in thousands of lights, it makes me laugh.

With environmental sustainability becoming a higher priority for more and more people, LED Christmas lights are a hot item. Not to the touch, though: they burn cool. That makes them less likely than traditional holiday lights to start fires or singe little kids’ fingers. These shining beacons of eco-hipness last longer, reduce pollution and save you money on your electric bill. They may cost a bit more than the regular lights, but the Environmental Defense Fund says the cost is easily offset in a year or two by the electricity savings.

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.

Photo by Tracy Chimming

This add served up a desperately needed shot of caffeine on my way home one night, while I wearily tried to keep my eyes open for fear of missing my stop on the Q train. As I focused on the words my first instinct was a jolt of defensiveness. Dumber?  ”Great!” I thought.  ”I’m in Journalism school, heading home at 11p.m. and this add is trying to make my job even harder!”  Yes, I am aware of all the statistics that indicate that public trust in journalists is at an all time low. But really, I thought this was a below the belt jab, a marketing “upper cut.”

The Independent Film Channel launched this project, which they say reveals the truth behind the news and examines the current state of investigative journalism and how it affects our perceptions of the world around us.  A visit to the web site revelaed a host of episodes covering everything from supposed “news fixations and taboos” to the effects of the “pundit-driven” news culture. 

Launched on November 18, project affiliates include Arianna Huffington and Gideon Yago. My issue is, if you’re going to examine the state of the news then you should raise a question not make a statement. While there is value in analysis and accountability,  the add could have read, ” Is the news making you dumber?” It’s possible to rouse public awareness and curiosity without perpetuating negative perceptions.

Photo: Nick Loomis

The most time-consuming, enjoyable and rewarding project I completed this first semester in journalism school was a package for Broadcast class about growlers. If you don’t know what growlers are, or even if you do, watch the video on the New York City News Service, then come back and read the rest of the post.

When we initially pitched ideas in class, my classmates and teacher John Schiumo seemed to like the two I’d come up with: “Life on a tugboat” and a recycling exposé. I liked them too, but I thought they might be logistically tough to pull off. When it came time to request the story we wanted to work on, I put ego aside and chose the idea proposed by this guy. I had never heard of growlers before, but after learning that they’re a vessel for carrying beer I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Even if the story turned out to be uninteresting or the people we interviewed were jerks, I would still get to drink beer while reporting. You can’t beat that.

Things turned out much better than the worst-case scenario. Not only did I get to drink beer, I learned a lot and got to meet some really great people. I also became a believer. The first time we filmed at Bierkraft, I bought a growler of Hop Obama. Now I’ve added another growler to my collection, acquired last Friday on a trip to the Captain Lawrence Brewery in Pleasantville, NY.

The inside of my fridge

The brewery is open to the public on Friday evenings and Saturdays for free tastings. I’d had their Freshchester Pale Ale before, but the other offerings on tap were new to me. When I first saw “Espresso Stout,” I had doubts. I’m not a serious coffee drinker and I wondered if the taste would be overpowering. To my pleasant surprise, it was subtle and smooth. I couldn’t resist getting 64 ounces to bring home.

I’m hopeful that after I’m done with J school the media landscape will be less dire and the skills I’ve learned will be impressive enough to land me a decent job. But whatever happens a year from now, I’ll always have beer.

By Maya Pope-Chappell

Photo by Maya Pope-Chappell

With budget cuts, ad losses, layoffs and newspapers going bankrupt, it’s hard to be optimistic about the state of the journalism profession.  Speaker Bill McCandless, Executive Editor of Multimedia for TheSreet.com, spoke a couple weeks ago and said that most of the mainstream newspapers will go bankrupt in 14 months.

Wow, what a future to look forward to.

With the second class of CUNY J-School students graduating next week, the prospect for them is even more sour.  They are walking away with a degree in hand but with very limited job options.  Not to mention the dire economy.

I’ve talked with a few of my fellow students, both in the graduating class and the December 2009 class, and many are worried.  Some of the conversations I’ve had have ranged from, there are really no options, to complete pessimism and questions over their decision to enter into the field of journalism.

Many news outlets and publications are coming up with innovative ways to bring the news to their audience, from including more video and multimedia content on their sites, to producing original content only found online.   This is where I think I fit in and where I believe the most opportunities lie.  So I myself, while nervous about my options in journalism, remain optimistic about the future.

This industry lull is simply in a period of transition.  Transition after all is the best time to come up with new ideas and be on the frontlines of changing and shaping the industry into what it will become in the future.

What are your feelings about the journalism industry?