thecyberbrains.com

Oh fun. For Halloween I get to go as a leper. Or a teenager.

I don’t like to make light of people whose lives are hell – and I also am not poking fun at lepers. But I’m certainly getting the look.

Like a lot of men my age, my skin is paying me back for the abuse I gave it as a boy. In northern California’s blast-furnace summers, we started the summer with intentionally acquiring a cherry-red sunburn. The theory espoused by our elders is that after you burned once, you healed with a tan that spared you of further sunburns.
It didn’t really work, but even in black-and-white family photos you can see I turned dark as well-worn pair of Oxfords. And in a few, you can see my nose threatening to peel away to a stub.

Lo these many decades later, the blisters of those sunburns are turning into the scaly patches of “sunspots.” Worse, I am indeed a cancer survivor, though in the most unheroic way. I had a couple of basal cell skin cancers removed a few years ago. They are the most common form of cancer (a million new cases a year) and seldom kill you unless they are ignored. Not ignoring them means carving them out with a scapel.

But they start with those sunspots. So every year I have the doc squirt the latest crop with liquid nitrogen. It doesn’t hurt at first, but in a few days it looks and feels like someone stabbed the spot with a hot poker. And like a burn, it heals and away.

This year my dermatologist asked if I would try a new treatment that lasts five years or more and doesn't burn. I just had to put up with a red and spotted face for about a month.

Ergo the leprous look. Each night I rub fluorouracil cream onto my face and ears, and each morning I awaken with spots that are a bit redder. After three weeks of this, the spots – and chance of cancer – are supposed to go away.

Fluorouracil is pretty neat stuff. It’s a chemotherapy chemical that attacks the DNA of screwed-up cell while leaving the good skin alone. Kind of a smart bomb for overly bronzed bodies. No pain but great gain.

By the end of the week, my face should be in full bloom. So now the big question: Do I dab on some of my wife’s makeup or celebrate the season with a ghoulish countenance?

I suppose I could also just put on a geeky plaid shirt and flip-flops. In some of my classes, no one would ever know . . .

My recurring nightmare is back. I’m in front of a large and irritable crowd trying to explain what “news” is. They keep talking about Bill O’Reilly. When I try to clarify the term, they bring up Rachel Maddow and Rush Limbaugh.

I can’t take it! What is the world coming to?

But when the night sweats ended and the morning’s coffee cleared my head, I started to wonder if the world is just coming to new reality I helped create.

Tuesday I attended an interesting lecture by media watchdog Jennifer Pozner. Pozner is the passionate critic of the press who heads Women in Media and News. Although she could use an editor to keep her from wandering off the point, Pozner did a very good job of demonstrating how the talking heads on television have strayed even farther off track by turning the political debate into a trivial discussion of hair-dos, cleavage and how black is black.

I heartily agree with her observation and am an equally passionate advocate of media literacy education to help citizens sort the seed of news from the chaff of commentary. (continue reading…)

Sports fans with cash, the unsuspected impact of broadband and words you can count (if not count on) head the research reports this fortnight. And then there is that rumor of bad news for Twitter…
Clyde
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Clyde Bentley
Print & Digital News
Missouri School of Journalism

Who’s on first: Media Life Research produced a fascinating profile of American sports fans this fall. Fans of any sport tend to have high levels of education – 29 percent have college degrees compared to 16 percent of non-fans. Predictably they are more likely male (53%), but have higher income than non-fans. They are more likely to be political moderates than non-fans, half are married, they are much more interested in international events and like to take risks and fix mechanical things.
The report also ranks various sports by demographics. Golf fans are oldest, hockey has the fewest minority fans. It is a good read for both editors and marketers.

Eyes on video: As with other online news content, the biggest challenge facing newspapers as they expand the use of video is finding a workable business model. Media economist Robert Picard, writing in INMA’s Ideas magazine, said news organization face a rising demand for video tempered by rapidly changing technology and a faltering ad-based budget.

Picard said 90 percent of newspapers now offer video on their sites and approximately two-thirds accept consumer-generated video. But Picard says news video has its best value if it is original rather thansyndicated. The primary value of video is not monetary, but an enhancement of the news business.

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I probably should be more worried about NBC than I am, but I’m just happy someone noticed my little blog. I received a message the other day through Flickr that someone wanted to post my photo of Tina Fey posing as Sarah Palin on NowPublic. The photo is really just a screen capture from the SNL sketch. That’s why I’m a little worried, but as I told NowPublic, what could NBC possibly take from me?

The reason I’m most excited, however, is I learned about a new site that’s doing a lot of what I’m trying to preach in my research and in my classes. I probably should have known about NowPublic before. Time magazine named NowPublic one of its top 50 Web sites in 2007. It’s a world-wide citizen journalism venture based in Vancouver, B.C. and like NewsVine or Digg, it allows users to flag stories from the traditional media, blogs, or even Flickr accounts, they think are important.

What I think makes NowPublic different and what I appreciate about the site based on my brief experience, is the site seems to have a commitment to big J journalism. First off, NowPublic didn’t have to ask for permission to use my photo. It’s on Flickr, and I’m smart enough to know that everything on Flickr is fair game. Just ask the poor girl whose pictures became part of a Virgin Mobile ad campaign. The Creative Commons License only requires sites to give the author credit.

Second, and more importantly, NowPublic seems like it has found a way to convey the importance of factual reporting and dedication to hard work and fact-finding to the average person without the conceipt normally espoused by the professional journalist. I really like this page, that features the site’s editors top tips. I love how they start with “Reporting is an adventure,” and end with tips on interviewing. I think I’m going to have my students in online journalism click on the “If You Are Totally Stuck for a Story, Take a Walk” link because it’s such good advice for anyone.

In addition to the conversational nature of the site’s journalism “training”, its stated mission makes me want to contribute:

At NowPublic, we have a very simple definition of news: “News is new information on current events.” In our experience that’s what people look for when they’re looking for news - whether they’re buying a paper or searching the web. Your news will likely fit into one of three kinds of story:

1. Your eyewitness account: Original, relevant information about a current event that you have actually witnessed, documented, or researched;
2. New information: bits of information you have collected, arranged, tied together and put into a context in relation to a current event;
3. Commentary: your advice or analysis directly related to a current event.

Students struggle so much with defining news. They seem to watch to attach value judgments, such as what’s important or what promotes democracy, to it, when really I think news is a lot closer to what NowPublic has described. I’m going to keep my eye on NowPublic, not just because the site asked to use my picture. I’m watching it because I’m hopeful the site can fulfill its mission of making the news more accessible to us all.

Musicians intrigue me beyond description. They are our access to an alternate universe where countless emotions flow freely on the backs clefs and dancing notes. From thin air, musicians pluck magic that sticks in my brain for days, weeks or a lifetime.

I’ve always wanted to have music, but that simply is not my lot. Words live in me. Music just visits.

Monday I had more than a simple visit; I was treated to a visage. Itzhak Perlman’s face, to be exact.

Last spring my wife asked if I would like a special musical treat for my March birthday. Cecile knows I can’t tell a sonata from a sing-along, but she also knows I love “historical” opportunities. That’s how we ended up with front-row seats for violinist Itzhak Perlman’s scheduled Columbia concert.

A health problem kept the Perlman from playing for my birthday, but the cherubic master finally came to Jesse Hall this week.

I’ve been to concerts of many kinds in many halls. I am often sadly disappointed by classical music performances that seldom seem as good as listening to my own stereo. But this time Itzhak Perlman’s face was no farther from me than if it had been on the television in my living room. That face became the concert for my eyes that his Stradivarius gave to my ears.

Perlman doesn’t play music. He releases it. To watch him tuck his violin beneath his chin and look down the strings is much like watching a pigeon fancier touch the bird to his lips before giving it to the sky.

And when he plays, it is a constant conversation with the score. Some notes he had to coax – furrowing his brow in concentration. Others he welcomed with a big smile. And during a Beethoven sonata, I swear that Perlman seduced the music into the air.

My lasting impression, however, will be of Itzhak Perlman playing Stravinsky’s Suite Italiene. He greeted the piece as an old friend, laughed with it, reminisced with the sernata and danced the jig of friends for the tarantella.

I watched in awe as he cracked open the door to that other place where beautiful sounds eliminated crowds, the exhaustion of touring and even the polio that hobbles Perlman’s legs. He did not read the notes on the stand before him so much as he glanced back to make sure his friends were still following him into the concert hall. His was not the stare of concentration, but the approving gaze of love.

Today I peck at a tuneless keyboard and try to capture some small part of the wonder I experienced last night. I still don’t have music. But at least I’ve come face to face with it.

And that in turn gave me words.

A false report on CNN’s iReport that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack was taken down yesterday, but the damage was done. Apple’s stock dropped sharply on the “news” and now the SEC could potentially get involved to figure out if there was market manipulation here.

This is a good example of why you need editor gatekeepers in the process. They need to have a light touch, but on news this big you need verification. And it should have been easily verifiable. We preach that here at Missouri, and others in the industry do this as well.

What this should not be is “evidence” that citizen journalism doesn’t work. HIstory tells us that the early days of professional journalism encountered similar problems with inaccuracy or outright fraud. Any new enterprise requires some trial and error here, and it would be inaccurate to say that participatory media has no future because of the exploits of one fool.

Cell phones are big, but the Blogosphere is bigger. While Technorati’s report on the Web’s wunderkind is enough to keep you reading for weeks, the fortnight’s useful reports ran the gamut from simple snooping to a phone that may change your TV to the not-so-funny papers. Clyde

State of the Blogosphere: Technorati released its eagerly awaited benchmark of the blogging world in a massive and highly detailed format for 2008. Posted in chapters over five days, it offers a compendium of Web research from the demographics of bloggers to the content they provide to the rise of commerce in the blogosphere. Some highlights:
• Technorati has indexed 133 million blogs since 2002. The 2008 count was in 81 languages from 66 countries.
• While not all blogs stay active, Technorati’s engines noted 7.4 million blogs that posted in the 120 before the study, 1.5 million that posted in the 7 days before and 900,000 that posted in the previous 24 hours.
• 48% of the bloggers are from North America, 27% from Europe and 13% from Asia.
• By surveying a sample of U.S., European and Asian bloggers, Technorati found 66% globally are male and half are 18-34. But in the U.S., 57% are male and only 42% are 18-34.
• 74% of surveyed U.S. bloggers have college degrees and half have incomes of more than $75,000. Professional blogs beat out corporate and personal blogs in both visitors and revenue.
• A stunning 52% of U.S. bloggers sampled reported they carry advertising on their blogs with median annual revenue of $200 and more than $75,000 for blogs with 100,000 or more visitors per month.
• While three quarters of bloggers globally cover three or more topics, personal/lifestyle content is most popular (54%). Technology takes second with 46%.
• For better or worse, news is the third most popular identifiable topic – 42% of blogs. Politics are discussed on 35% of blogs. Sincere and conversational writing styles are most popular, with confrontational/snarky at a minimum.
The report goes into detail on the time and monetary investment in blogging, the issue of anonymity and how revenue is generated, among other items. It’s a must-read for anyone who “lives” on the Web.

“Reporting” on Palin? – Hackers used a simple process known as social engineering to gain access to vice presidential candidate Sara Palin’s Yahoo Mail account. Social engineering is similar to some investigative reporting. Yahoo, like most e-mail services, allows you to recover a forgotten password by answering pre-determined questions about yourself. Social engineer hackers use Web sources to guess the answers.
It took 15 seconds to get Palin’s birthday on Wikipedia and there are only two ZIP codes in Wasilla, AK. The security question about where she met her spouse took a bit of searching and guessing by CNET testers, but “Wasilla High” worked.

Attack of the Droid – T-Mobile’s G-1 phone powered by Google and backed up by Amazon is hot news in the tech world. But the real significance for the media world is the software that powers the phone: Android.
The new Google operating system gives the G-1 most of the common smartphone capabilities, but its power is aimed more at the Web experience than e-mail or voice phone. Observers say the browser on the G-1 gives the iPhone a run for the money.
Android may also change the way all cell phones are marketed. Unlike Microsoft or Palm operating system, Android is compatible with all the major phones systems and chips. Android phones for other cell carriers are expected soon – while the iPhone is tied to a five-year exclusive with AT&T. The opportunity is there for the European marketing system that sells unlocked phones that let the user pick the carrier.

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I know I’m a little late on this one, but I had to say something because one of the hardest things

I was ever asked to do as a reporter was to cover a funeral. I covered plenty of them in my career, and I always worried that I was intruding on a private family moment. I even photographed the service of the former Mayor of Barstow who died young from cancer, and I felt so conspicuous standing at the back of the chapel, wielding a bulky digital camera with a large telephoto lens.

Despite my fears, however, I was always surprised at how well received and appreciated our coverage was. Families told me the newspaper helped the grieving process with their published tributes. Friends remarked how nice it was to know what happened even if they couldn’t be here. I came to realize that funeral coverage, especially of those people who had already been prominently featured, was a vital public service the newspaper should offer as long as it was done with respect.

I’m not sure what to think about the controversy surrounding the Rocky Mountain News’ decision to cover the funeral of a young boy who died when a truck smashed into an ice cream store. Too much of the criticism I think has been focused on the technology the reporter used to cover the service - Twitter - and not enough has been focused on its intent. Twitter should not be summarily dismissed as a viable tool for journalists, even for those covering funerals, but both journalists and audiences need to understand its advantages and limitations to use it most effectively. (continue reading…)