Readings yaaaay

Poynter Online

The picture of the guy with a crow on his shoulder was misleading.
In David Poulson’s entry he writes about how Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism created the Michigan Echo. This digest contains one-sentence summaries of stories from Michigan daily newspapers that link to the full story. This digest was then published by feed and e-mail. Convenient!
Turns out all this convenience led to some serious drama concerning some land in Michigan. Many people had access to the stories from the Michigan Echo and could comment with their opinions. They could also post more sites and online petitions.
This is such a good example of interactive journalism. The community could get involved and not just be a passive audience, like many audiences are. They could say what they want and create debates, which is great for a community. All the journalist did was put the information out there and the public just did what they wanted.


Using a Timeline to Tell a Story

This blog entry was about how to incorporate interactive timelines into multimedia journalism. The timeline is a great way to display a number of events in a way that the reader can easily understand what’s going on. The way the timeline is set up seems really cool. It seems extremely informative to the reader and would be helpful in understand the story more. It would be a great idea for multimedia journalism to use timelines whenever possible.


Chapter 4

Quotes! This chapter focuses on the use of quotes in one’s story. It starts out by informing the reader to only use unique quotes and to not quote bits that weren’t said in an interesting way. By summarizing what someone said and not using direct quotes you are also saving words. We also learn that dialogue can be a wonderful addition to a story when used correctly. This is called “showing”, in contrast to “telling.” We then learn that if someone important says it, it may be quote worthy. And again we learn to be accurate.
Paraphrase! It condenses! And clarifies!
I really enjoyed the phrase “orphan quotes.” It reminds me of Annie. The sun will come out tomorrow… So, in summary, avoid partial quotes. They can be sketchyyy.
Correcting quotes…tricky tricky. People have all different opinions on this topic. The book says that most newspapers handle this issue on a case-by-case basis. That makes complete sense to me because correcting quotes could be great in one situation then horrible in the next, like some of the examples the book uses.
Oh man, vulgar words. What to do, what to do? This is another shaky area in journalism. The book does a wonderful job though in briefly explaining these types of problems and what to do. Again though, it has to be assessed on a case-to-case basis.
Don’t make up quotes. When you don’t know what to do, paraphrase.
Attributions! I liked the example in the opening paragraph about not attributing a 7-year-old who saw a gang shooting. Other than that, attribute away! Okay, not really. Don’t do that.
The attribution part of the chapter then goes into how to attribute, which we have learned in other courses. Oh, and you can’t “wink” a work by the way. I always thought you could… Huh.
Turns out not everyone wants to be attributed. Shocker. This creates some problems. When a reporter doesn’t attribute it lacks credibility, makes you wonder if the person is lying, and could lead to a breach-of-contract suit.
Chapter 4 ends with how to handle quotations from the Internet and other concerns. It brings up some juicy things like e-mail interviews and Jayson Blair.

From 9/16/07