Category: Journalism/media 2.0

Blogging about writing about blogging about writing

That headline is likely longer than this post.

I won’t be doing as many posts on Sunday and Thursday nights, as that’s when I write my Monday and Friday pieces for my on-air gig.

Of course, tonight I wrote about this new “baby” of mine, a different place to talk about journalism, KTVZ, the Internet, and probably other stuff as well.

I also promised all my posts won’t be ‘Barney-length’ opuses, so… let’s just say I’m glad to see you here, especially if it’s after seeing me on the air, and… leave it at that 😉

Another teen tragedy, alas

Read all about it – and the dozens of comments on it – at http://www.ktvz.com/global/story.asp?s=8388713.

This time, because of a snarky but well-timed criticism of some partial info we got from school district, I had the never-fun task of calling the family – hoping so much a spokesman or friend would answer. Instead, it was the teen’s stepmother, who was relatively gracious, considering what that family is going through, who helped straighten out the info.

We’ve had about 40 comment postings so far – but 25 THOUSAND viewings of the comments. Clearly, these totally unrelated teen-death tragedies have struck a major nerve, and people not only want to speak out but read what others say – good, bad and, yes, ugly. I’m not sure I’m drawing a firm enough line on the personal attacks people feel the need to send out, often protected by the much-abused anonymity, but there have been enough good wishes, thoughtful remarks and cogent discussion that it’s worth the hassle.

I think. 😉

People who think we relish bad news should see how bad I was trembling after that phone call. I offered condolences, I asked if there was anything we could do, I said I can’t imagine what they’re going through – and I can’t. It’s one thing for a beloved football and wrestling star to run away from a police stop and die in a mysterious manner. But for a clearly troubled teen, close to graduation, to flee police, SHOOT AT THEM and eventually take his own life, despite police efforts to end it peacefully – that one hangs just as heavy, if not heavier.

Bad choices. But then come the armchair quarterbacks, the parent-blamers, the police-blamers, the society-blamers, and those who defend against them. It’s almost like a badly choreographed opera – predictable in its sour notes and occasional sweet sounds.

To me, above it all, is the sweet sound of a community getting to weigh in – again, good, bad or ugly. I’d love to set rules of decorum, but that’s like trying to arrange the world to one’s liking.

It’s too messy for that, but with that mess comes all the joy as well. You can’t separate them.

Enough ruminating. Thanks to NHL, it was a longer day at the station, oddly enough, and emotional for me, as well. Hoping for a few calmer days…

 

Tragedy, tech and spell-check

This is not going to become a blog full of daily, lengthy defenses/explanations of our work at NewsChannel 21. But while I sit here with police scanner up, trying to help the night crew figure out just what’s going on in a pursuit/search/?? out Pronghorn/Powell Butte Highway way, it seems like a good time to state a few things “for the record.”

1. We, as did other media, offered extensive coverage of an unusual, tragic sequence of events in which a star Culver athlete ran from police at a Bend traffic stop and somehow suffered fatal injuries.

It was suggested we were calling him a hero when he set a bad example. I weighed in there, I’ll weigh in here. To some extent, this reminds me of the Tyler Eklund incident last year, when we didn’t lead the attention on that young man, we simply followed an emotional outpouring from the community. When hundreds show up at an impromptu candlelight vigil at the Culver High football stadium, something has struck a major-league nerve. Rumors are flying. We won’t report them, and will delete comment postings with them as soon as we can. Everyone has enough pain up there to need any more inflicted by those who abuse the anonymity.

To separate the way this young man lived from how he died is difficult, but must be done, no matter what the cause of death is found to be. The more that young people can be reminded that even the best among them make bad choices – and a single bad choice can lead to tragedy – the more the danger of further tragedies is lessened.

We will go wherever this story goes, painful as it may be, and are very thankful for a remarkably honest set of information and heartfelt revelations by coaches and family. It’s not an easy time to be on camera and share your deepest emotions. How could we not pay attention? How can anyone watch and not be moved?

2. We’re beta testing some new things at KTVZ.COM, and it always reminds me of the frustration of not being able to solve everyone’s technical problems. We’re working to fix the small typesize and other usability matters. Your patience is appreciated, input welcomed and venting – well, if you must.;-)

3. Some kindly point out typos – others have gone so far as to question our commitment to our craft. I pulled my hair out the other day when I realized that the spell-check that’s done when I finish and post an article only checks the headlines and captions! I have to run a manual, “click the icon” spell-check for the story itself to be checked! So from now on, I will, of course, and you’ll see fewer typos. I hope…;-)

Story choices and the never-perfect formula

Other day, got an e-mail from a nice lady:

Has there been any news reports on the new Sonic Burger opening in Bend? Just curious about it since the last couple days cars have been lined up down the highway waiting to get into the restaurant. I didn’t see anything about it on your website.

My reply:

Well, no, we haven’t covered the latest restaurant opening frenzy in Bend. The paper had a photo and caption, just adding to the hordes who got the word through word of mouth or passing by. We figured it was pretty well known and didn’t need a “free ad” from us- heck, even read a blogger waxing poetic over their little ice cubes.

Her reply – again, in a tone so much appreciated compared to the nasty, accusatory stuff we all too often get:

I appreciate your reply Barney, but I see it in a completely different way. So here’s an example of how one reader/viewer thinks: 
It’s not just the latest restaurant opening frenzy in Bend; it’s so much more. It’s a traffic congestion story for one. On Wednesday, May 21st, traffic was backed up coming from the North as far back as the jail. It became such an issue that the highway department lit up a big flashing sign warning drivers of a heavy traffic area. Peoples lives and commutes were being effected.
You’re not the paper. Who cares what the paper had; not everyone looks at the paper. Is it your norm to pick and choose stories based on what the paper is doing? Isn’t every single news story you do a “free ad” in one way or another? Does KTVZ support the economy in Bend? What about the jobs that are being provided for by Sonic? 
Who cares if you were criticized for doing a story on Trader Joe’s. Shouldn’t dictate how you handle something now. I believe the majority of us appreciated hearing about a new business opening in that area of Bend. Progress is beautiful. Improvements are wonderful.
People in North Bend and Sisters now have a quality fast food restaurant on “their” end of town. It’s been a long time coming. This is a big deal to us. A piece of land in our town is now bursting with life after years of being vacant and depressed. It’s nice to see improvement there after watching the Tom Tom close and the truck stop shut down. I love that things are happening there again.
Sonic has a really good bacon cheese burger toaster. My son really likes them and wants to go get one right now.
And last but not least…It’s a happy story as opposed to sad or scary…which is primarily what we’re used to hearing. We need more happy, exciting and fun in our lives right now. Times are hard. You’re missing out on all the fun. Let’s hear it for Sonic. Welcome to Bend.

And again, my reply:

…you make all your points very well. One thing I forgot to tell YOU was – I’m NOT the news director and am only one voice in about four (news director, show producers) on what we do/don’t cover. And I win some, lose some. Every day I do a list of 30 or so story ideas, and on good days, roughly a third turn into stories. There’s always hundreds more story ideas than there are time in the show, reporters not already tied up, time conflicts etc.
Yes, the paper influences what stories we do and how we treat them, to some degree. So does radio, our TV competition, etc. We don’t necessarily DO or NOT DO stories based on what others do, but it DOES play a role – as it does for every media outlet.
We sure don’t want to look like we’re chasing the paper (or anyone else’s) tail – some folks think we just rip stories out of the paper and read them – nothing could be further from the truth. Give me two stories of roughly equal importance (a judgment call there!), one that other media outlets have had and the other newly discovered by us, and we’ll always do the latter – we don’t want to look/sound like everyone else.
 This is a worthwhile discussion…”

…and I went on to ask if I could post it here. Haven’t heard back, so I figure it’s safe, leaving out her name (I’ll add it if she’s comfortable with it.)

So, let me add on a few thoughts. Some folks think we should cheer good economic news. Others think we should spend more time on the bad things folks do. Heck, we did what I thought was an innocuous story on the crummy weather heading into the weekend, and … well, here’s the post by someone labeled “Stay positive”:

Can we keep the negative news confined to the TV broadcast please? Why does everyone in the world with an internet connection need to know that we’re having bad weather during the first big weekend of the summer season? What good does that do for the Realtors and tourism-driven businesses?”

That prompted the predictable reaction from other commenters of “what in the world???” – and I have to admit, I even wonder if it was tongue-in-cheek? Surely, no one expects us to tilt our coverage to not tell outsiders the weather isn’t perfect every holiday?

We also had a story recently about a USA Today article that referred in its headline to Bend as “the new Boulder.” The reaction in postings was strong, and predictable – many incredulous that anyone could do a nice write-up about Bend – asking if he’d ever even VISITED the place – and others pointing to the long, familiar list of problems here (housing prices dropping like a rock, not enough well-paying jobs, a city government running short of cash, etc. etc.)

It all reminded me of one of my first stories at The Bulletin, back in 1991. Talked to authors of a book called “50 Fabulous Places to Raise Your Family.”

They started with a list of 250 or so metro areas. They thought they’d have trouble narrowing it to 50 – they had trouble coming up with 50 – and they decided they needed to talk to newcomers, because in just about every city listed, the longer folks had lived there, the more incredulous they were that anyone would ever think that town was a good place to raise a family!

That’s because the longer you live somewhere, the more familiar you are with its shortcomings, the more you take for granted its niceties – or miss what it was like when you arrived (wishing someone had shut the gate behind you).

People in Bend like to think that’s something unique to here. It’s a universal trait. Reminds me also of what a fired city manager told me years ago, after he got the heave-ho after many years in the job: “Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.”

So if you do a positive story about the place you live, you’re a chamber-of-commerce suck-up, a member of the Good Old Boys. If you do a negative one, you’re unfairly attacking, etc. etc. It’s gone from “you can’t please everyone” to “good luck pleasing anyone.”

But still, we keep trying. 😉 What do you think? What if you were a news director – what would be your guiding principles about “free ads,” story selection, etc? Because if nothing else, the Internet has made it possible for everyone to play the role of “news editor,” picking what topics they’re interested in, etc.

Glutton for punishment – and news!

I should be upset, but I’m energized by the busiest Central Oregon Saturday, news-wise, I can remember in months.

Fitting it should be on a Memorial Day weekend – a fairly unusual, even bizarre set of incidents that had me working far more than planned tonight. I should be bummed, but I’m not. It was interesting because of the variety, even though the top story is another tragic mystery, of a Culver teen who died running from a police traffic stop in Bend.

People must think I never sleep. (That’s more our cat Salem’s doing. I’ll have to tell you about him sometime. He puts us to bed, wakes us up far too early with a talking whine that cuts through any level of sleep. But he means well, the mangy varmint. 😉

Thunder, lightning and article comment wildness

The trick with blogging, I’ve decided, is to do it often enough you get in the groove and don’t feel every entry has to be stellar, Shakespearean and for the ages.

Yeah, right.

I’ll be talking a lot here about my favorite Website and the changes and permutations there. Er, here. (You see, our plan is to insert this blog INTO the Website, and to do that for several folks at the station. Me first, of course;-) Thanks to my UPS, despite thunder and lightning, I feel safe ruminating for a few.

We began an article rating and comment system earlier this year, and just changed to one provided (in beta test) by our Website provider, World Now, through its partner, JS-Kit. Already, my wish list is growing (bigger typeface! No gray on white! etc.) but I do like much about it – especially that it’s built-in to our CMS (content management system), not a bolt-on (though my pal Karl Sanford in Palm Desert built a heck of a bolt-on;-)

Anyway, I’m not “pre-moderating” the comments in the new system, like I did before. But I think the ability to vote on others’ comments or mark them as offensive have kept a little bit of the wild and weird and nasty from emerging.

So far.

You see, I’ve likened anonymous article comments to an open-mic night in a place with all the lights out. Some will say worthy things, and others will, in essence, belch into the microphone, abusing the anonymity.

Always been that way.

So the comments I see each day have been interesting, enlightening, entertaining, head-shaking, bizarre, sad, depressing, and frightening in either the “these people don’t live here I hope!” or “Boy, would we get sued posting this” way.

Still, as I told all in the co. I work for, lack of dialogue of this kind makes a Website seem, cold, sterile, one-way and old fashioned. It’s worth putting up with the crazies or near-crazies to hear what people think, feel and say. It’s actually resulted in on-air stories some times. And like this blog, it’s also allowed me/us to clear the air and explain things on occasion.

I’ve also learned that I don’t have to weigh in a lot and, for example, defend the station or myself from non-constructive, harsh, unfair criticism – others do it for me, without me ever asking to. It’s sort of a self-regulating mechanism.

I surely can understand how the corporate world is scared, especially in a legal sense, of such unfettered dialogue. The point I’ve tried to make is that these conversations are happening anyway. Wouldn’t you like for them to happen within earshot, rather than behind your back – so you can be aware and take action, even respond and explain?

And of course, the answer usually is, “Well, yeah, but…” and the buts are all very logical and understandable, but they don’t reflect the reality of what my favorite new media blogger, Jeff Jarvis calls “news as conversation.”

People have too many time pressures, too many options for gathering information the old ways to think we can just take the old styles and put them in this new medium. We are not the gatekeepers of information any more, and it’s naive to think so. We just want to be their favorite hangout, a good source of information and a lively dialogue spot – enlightening and entertaining, and yes, sometimes aggravating.

Such is life…;-)