Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Q. How is a roulette wheel like the National Republican Senatorial Committee?
A. Both of them are moving a lot of money around Vegas. Also, they're both in the graphic I made to accompany the story:
In other news--literally: here's my Blue Dog Guide being linked by the Wall Street Journal. Well... by a very kind CQ editor who also writes for the Wall Street Journal. But it's the thought that counts.
11:07 x Thomas x /journalism/new_media x link x 0 comments
Went to go do a voice-over at the Bank the other morning--they needed it fast, and their usual go-to people had gone-to somewhere else. Turns out it was an old script that I'd actually recorded with someone else in the voiceover chair about a year ago. So fortunately for me, most of it (excepting the changes and additions) had already been edited for speech.
I could tell where they had added new paragraphs. Not because I remembered it, but because they do not use a serial comma. Now, there are people who believe that the serial comma is incorrect, including (sadly) many journalists and newspaper style guides. These people should never be allowed within 90 feet of a voiceover script. I personally feel that the serial comma is just good writing because it is usually less ambiguous than the alternative. Regardless, in voiceovers and speechwriting, it should be mandatory. I feel very, very strongly about this.
A common reason for including the serial comma in writing is to mimic the pacing of the spoken word. When reading from a script, it works the opposite way: the written work needs to be paced so that it can be quickly and effortlessly parsed by a reader. Try it yourself! Read the following sentence aloud:
To evaluate behavior, we can consult with supervisors to determine if staff are demonstrating the newly acquired knowledge, habits, skills or behaviors.When reading a list in English, the last item is usually emphasized differently from the items in the middle--it's given a kind of "full stop" treatment. Without the serial comma, it's easy to skip over that emphasis and nonverbally combine skills and behaviors into a single list item, particularly if it coincides with a line break. This is confusing for listeners--and more importantly, it will frustrate good VO talent, who will want to use precious session time and vocal energy to do the line over properly.
To sum up: Good punctuation will keep your voiceover talent from killing you. Save lives. Use the serial comma.
17:30 x Thomas x /journalism/communication x link x 1 comment
Politifact, by way of CQ Politics, finds that the National Journal's ranking of Obama as "most liberal" might be, just maybe, a little suspect due to methodological error.
This is not news, frankly. The idea that Obama is definitely and objectively the "most liberal"--in a Senate that includes self-described socialist Bernie Sanders--is ridiculous. And after the magazine described John Kerry in 2004 as "most liberal," call me paranoid, but I suspect there's an editorial trend or narrative in play here.
But it is also amusing to me that this comes by way of Politifact, which is the CQ/St. Petersburg Times "truth squad" or factchecking team. In an election year, these things pop up like roaches in a dirty-bomb strike zone. They are big fun for journalists and editors--examine speeches and commercials for semantic slips and distortions, then trot out a few paragraphs of dry prose explaining exactly how and why that statement is or is not "spin." And perhaps, in this political era of Nixonian parsing, we need that.
But I hate truthsquadding, as it's called around the newsroom. It is the worst kind of gotcha journalism, and I think the industry can do better.
The basic idea of these fact-check columns, as far as I'm concerned, is flawed. It's flawed because it's redundant: our job, as journalists, should be to tell the truth and explain the obscure--to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, as they say, and with emphasis on the latter. If reporters are doing their jobs, there should be no need for a "special" department devoted to catching inaccuracies, because it should already be happening in the regular coverage. The fact that such departments exist is a tacit admission that accuracy isn't a concern elsewhere. And since I happen to know that CQ and St. Pete both have hard-working and dedicated fact-checking and research teams that go over our coverage with a fine-toothed comb, I sometimes wonder why it is that we are acting like we don't.
But more importantly, truth-squadding is journalism that refuses to see the big picture. To some extent, on the left or the right, who cares if someone takes some liberties when bragging on themselves, or when denigrating their opponents? What would be more important would be to examine not the wording of their speeches, but the impacts and outcomes of their policies.
On the other hand, that would require a lot of work, and a lot of interviews with experts, and possibly passing the reporting work over to someone with relevant expertise instead of the house pundit. And if the op-ed pages are any indication, I'm not sure that the media as an industry is willing to take that step.
11:44 x Thomas x /journalism/investigation x link x 2 comments
Well, no. It's the Republican Study Committee:
Who are rivals of the Blue Dogs, apparently, being at a serious disadvantage when it comes to fundraising right now. You can read the story here. When they found out that Alan was doing a story on them, they pretty much insisted on the same treatment. I like the design on this one--less animation, but also much less blatant white space while still remaining (hopefully) tasteful.
I hesitate to place the next link under "journalism," but I can't multi-category to "politics" in Blosxom, so here it goes: CQ's VP Madness, Democratic Edition. I wrote most of the code for this when we did it for McCain, and then added features this time for tracking your votes from round to round. I guess that makes it kind of the Family Feud of brackets, since the whole thing's a popularity contest. Great work was also done by the CQ Special Projects team on the graphic design and the database backend, which is obviously what really makes the thing tick.
10:57 x Thomas x /journalism/new_media x link x 1 comment
I, For One, Welcome Our Tech Journalism Overlords
Ars Technica has been acquired by Conde Nast, who also own Wired Digital. They'll be expanding greatly but will remain independent. Sadly, they're not opening an office on the East Coast.
I'm not sure what this means for me--Ken's post seems to say that it will be basically business as usual, just for larger values of "as usual." At the very least, it looks like I picked a pretty good time to start contributing to them.
11:51 x Thomas x /journalism/industry x link x 0 comments
My problems with the Newseum are personal, I think. When I visited it with Belle and my parents last week, they had a good time. As did I, for the most part. But there are still a few things that bug me about it a little.
First of all, in a town stuffed to the gills with great free museums, it's hard to believe that they want $20 a head. I understand that it's a brand new building with state-of-the-art equipment, but I can't imagine many families choosing to visit it over the Air and Space, American History, or Natural History museums, which are also filled with some pretty neat--and probably more kid-friendly--materials. I'm not even sure I'd choose it over those museums, and I work in the news industry.
Second, several of the exhibits rub me the wrong way. Like the room on reporting history, sponsored by News Corp, which seems to spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing journalistic errors, partisanship, or malevolence (and who benefits from that perception, I wonder?). More pervasively, there's a tone of self-congratulation to some of the rooms, like the section of the Berlin Wall that stands in the basement. Yes, journalism covered many groundbreaking events. But there's a fine line, for me, between acknowledging the role of journalism in spreading the truth, and crediting it with a crucial role in those milestones. The important story about the Berlin Wall wasn't the reporting of its fall, it was the activism that brought it down.
There's little modesty on display, is I guess my point, if that makes any sense. And part of the problem with modern journalism, in my opinion, is that it thinks it's a lot more important than it really is.
But for me the central irony of the Newseum--a last gasp by an industry rapidly being overtaken by the Internet--is that it probably would have worked just as well, or better, as a web site. Snarky, I know, and you can say the same about many museums. But take the Pulitzer photography exhibit: a few photos are blown up and hung with explanations on the wall, and that's genuinely interesting. But the majority of the exhibit is every prize-winning photo, printed at 5x8 scale and mounted in a mass around a central column with no particular organization or order. It's a bottleneck for foot traffic, and really a poor way to display what are supposed to be the best news photographs taken each year.
A Newseum Online wouldn't have to replace the current museum--there are always exhibits that work better in person, like the collection of newspaper front pages going back to the start of the United States. But there are many things, like the Pulitzer exhibit or the interactive features, that it could do with more depth and greater diversity. And as such, it'd serve the purpose of advocating for journalism far more widely than a $20 glass shrine behind the National Gallery of Art.
Bonus picture: While we're on the topic of the website, this is some fantastically poor subhead writing.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/industry x link x 0 comments
Hey journalism: this is the Internet. Let's act like it.
Dumping video straight online is a flawed idea, I'm convinced. Not that it doesn't work, in the crudest sense of the phrase. But it's like using the Internet to sell rotary telephones. You're doing it wrong.
Whether we like it or not, the Web trains us to interact with content in new, non-linear ways. Take hyperlinking (please!): during the average blog post or news article at a relatively hip outlet, there will be lots of links inside the article, any of which basically derails the flow of the narrative onto a new, temporary track. That is a drastic change from the way journalists have thought about writing for years--so much so that I'm constantly being sent articles on "how to link" by coworkers who are trying to adjust.
Once you've spent enough time online, of course, this becomes second nature (making the forwarded articles more than a little tedious). In fact, it becomes addictive and even desirable--if nothing else, it lets you back up your assertions immediately, and synthesize it with other works. But the hyperlink does require you to understand that the medium is no longer a broadcast proposition, even for documents: you can't simply assume that people will read your piece start to finish. Instead, they're going to interact with it, drift away and come back as they follow their own path through the hyperlinked text.
Web video takes a step back from this. Sure, it's got a pause button, and when contained in a content-management system like YouTube it can be shared/linked/commented. But it's primarily a one-way street, especially as implemented by the majority of news organizations. I think this is part of the reason that media types are often particularly eager to leap onto the streaming video bandwagon: it feels familiar and controlled.
Here's my take: to do this right, we need to get past the broadcast mentality with web video, and move to something like smart videos, which incorporate some of the same non-linearity of web text. For example: while watching a video, you should be able to click for more information--the equivalent of an inline link. While someone explains something, you should be able to slide open a pane and explore the data behind their statements. When the video's over, you should be able to link to recent media on the same topic via an RSS feed. You should also be able to "skim" longer videos--jump through them by using an outline or overarching structure (B-SPAN had a primitive version of this, and the TED conference has a very nice interface for it).
This accomplishes a number of important goals. First, it appeals to viewers who, after years of surfing the Internet, really do have the attention span of a frightened mayfly. I've mentioned before that I doubt these people actually exist, but if they do, here's a way to keep them interested for a few more precious advertising-sellable seconds. Second, it turns the video into a dialog, and one that interacts with the rest of the site, where previously it was isolated from that content. Finally, it extends the lifespan of videos by making it possible for them to remain valuable as teaching and package resources even beyond when their intended topicality has passed.
The really good news is that this isn't hard to do. We've been working with BrightCove at work, and they provide a decent API for embedding their streaming video component into a custom Flash app that provides these services. Building it without BrightCove would be more frustrating from a service and bandwidth point of view, but isn't necessarily any more technically difficult. A few lines of code, a carefully thought-out index file written in XML, some attention to design, and you're all set.
There's really not an excuse any more, except that you don't have the time to do it. And that is, to some degree an acceptable excuse--we're all busy people, I know I am--but I don't think it will be acceptable for long.
11:14 x Thomas x /journalism/new_media/video x link x 0 comments
The Blue Dogs have one of the most successful leadership PACs in the House at the moment, said the CQ story.
Great, I said. Who are the Blue Dogs?
One of the things I'm working on for CQ is "explainer" journalism. The publication goes out to a fairly rarified audience (or particularly unrarified, depending on your view of Congress), and so it often makes high assumptions about the legislative knowledge of its readers. But as my editor often points out, CQ's audience also includes the people who just started on the Hill 15 minutes ago--and even among the more experienced readers, nobody knows everything.
Unlike, say, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Blue Dogs are not self-explanatory. Yet they've become a swing vote on economic bills in the House, and we mention them a lot. So who are they? Who are the members, what do they care about, and why are they blue? To answer those questions, I put together this graphic:
The idea of "trading cards" came first, honestly. But as I thought more about how these lawmakers are a swing vote, I figured we could also use it metaphorically--we labeled it "Wild Cards: A CQ Guide to the Blue Dog Coalition."
Although it was posted Monday morning, I wasn't actually satisfied with the applet until the afternoon, when I added party unity information directly to the cards. That info had been delayed because I didn't have access to it in the database, so instead I was just linking to the relevant webpage. That works, but to me it defeats the purpose--if all I'm going to do is present CQ's existing member information, why not just link to those pages? The graphic supports the story much more clearly if the user can see the relevant stats directly, without having to open new browser windows. I had to write a screenscraper to pull it off our site--by this point, I'm getting pretty good at handling Flash, so I used Actionscript's RegEx support to translate the HTML into XML--and then integrating it into the cards was a relatively simple matter.
And yes, that's Wallace on the front card. We're hoping the fame won't go to his head.
11:45 x Thomas x /journalism/new_media x link x 0 comments
There are lies, damn lies, and press releases.
On April 1, Rochester University put out a press release about a researcher who has invented a new way to analyze a clarinet recording and turn it into a new kind of MIDI file for a physical modeling synth. The recording and the synth are not groundbreaking, but the analysis is mildly interesting if it can actually pull expression data from a recording.
Unfortunately, the PR flack didn't write that. Instead, he wrote "music file compressed 1,000 times smaller than MP3," and used provocative quotes from the researchers in question to imply that this technology could be the future of music. By the time Ars asked me to write about it, at least one news outlet had screwed up the story based on the release. Even after I interviewed the team leader and put something together, Wired had reproduced the faulty "1000x better than MP3 compression" headline on their Gadget Lab post.
I don't expect Wired to read Ars before posting to get the real story, of course. But the press release reads as instantly fishy to someone even with my limited digital audio education. It would be nice to have some confidence that a news outlet covering audio tech would be able to reach the same conclusions.
The real problem is twofold. One is that the flacks apparently felt comfortable writing a release about technology that they obviously didn't understand, and were willing to take liberties for a bit more controversy. But perhaps the more serious dilemma is that tech writers fell for it.
A couple of weeks ago, there was another article in Wired about the competition between Engadget and Gizmodo. These two gadget blogs are huge moneymakers online, and they're constantly racing to get the scoop on each other. This, it seems, is the lesson that some online news sources have absorbed: go faster, not deeper. But the opposite, I think, is a more valuable use of journalism online. It doesn't take any skill to do coverage fast--just a subscription to a press release service and a quick hand on the copy and paste. But expertise and a reputation for accuracy are what draw eyeballs. A couple of hours extra won't change that.
22:29 x Thomas x /journalism/ethics/online x link x 0 comments
This CQ story features an interactive Flash graphic by yours truly. The story is pretty cool journalism, in my opinion, and the graphic does several things that I think are noteworthy:
The UI is almost all generated programmatically. This is partly because projects like this are very short-term, and so it's really just as fast for me to define everything in code as it would be to create something more maintainable. But it is also because, as I've learned in this and a previous project, Flash's UI elements can be frustratingly primitive. Items like textboxes and lists are not really fully-developed components, they're clever attempts at mimicking those components using Flash's vector graphics and event capabilities.
For example, the original idea was to make the lawmakers a simple listbox, and color gold those names with earmarks. Unfortunately, changing the color of a listbox in a selective fashion means subclassing the cellrenderer and creating new methods--you lost me at "subclassing," honestly. And Flash's datagrid is just a collection of listboxes, so it's much the same--no coloring or formatting individual cells without a lot of work.
Now in this case, the portraits turned out to be much better, even if it did mean writing my own mugButton object. But compared to other rapid development languages, this feels clumsy to me. I think if I were a full-time programmer, instead of someone who just has to dabble in it every now and then, it'd drive me nuts.
Not to mention how obtuse the Flash IDE continues to be--and since the Flex SDK doesn't include the tween class or some of the components I wanted to use, I was stuck with Flash. Dropping into Visual Studio (to confirm that it is possible to interact with datagrid cells at a lower level there) is a stark reminder of the difference between Flash and an environment with rich, responsive code hints and real editing windows.
14:39 x Thomas x /journalism/new_media x link x 0 comments
