| November 8, 2006 | Elex Success |
Even though I've been awake and working for most of the last 48 hours, I'm definitely excited about the Elections results, AND  I'm excited to point out that SearchEngineWatch just published a post titled "In the Elections Results Race, Yahoo!'s the Winner," saying that Yahoo!'s Election Day 2006 coverage was better than Google's, MSN's, and AOL's. They called out this interactive map that Chris built in the post. Considering this is pretty much one of the only positive pieces of press I've seen about Yahoo! vis a vis Google in the past year (see this Drift post "The Swift-Boating of Yahoo!" for more info), I'd say it was a smashing success.See, just as I pointed out two years ago in my post and flickr photoset describing how the 2004 Presidential Elections as covered at Yahoo! there are benefits to having actual human journalists taking care to gather and present information, rather then computer algorithms choosing and presenting news -- especially about important, controversial, and complicated topics. Labels: chris, elections, google, journalists, map, media, news, reporting, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 2:58 PM 
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| August 8, 2005 | Peter Jennings Was My Favorite Broadcast Journalist |
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I met Peter Jennings (and also rode up in an elevator with him) when I worked as an intern at ABC News in 1995. I was working for Diane Sawyer on "Prime Time Live," but we would always go stand on the catwalk and watch when Peter taped "World News Tonight." Peter Jennings was always my favorite broadcast journalist to watch work. He made fast and furious notes on all the copy that was given to him. I always got a sense that he was very interested in what was talking about, and that he was interested in conveying stories as accurately and thoroughly as he possibly could. It's very sad to hear that Peter Jennings succumbed to cancer on Sunday. It's hard to say what the future of broadcast journalism holds now, with the retirement of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel. Times, they are certainly a' changin'. So, who will give us the news now? Diane Sawyer? Hari Sreenivasen? Bloggers? Citizen journalists with video cameraphones? What do you think? Labels: journalism, journalists, news posted by Jess Barron @ 11:53 AM
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| April 6, 2005 | "Mr. Brokaw, what do you think about bloggers?" |
 Yesterday Tom Brokaw spoke at Yahoo! Campus as the latest guest in "the Influentials Yahoo! Speaker Series." At the end of his speech, we were given the opportunity to ask him questions. I went up to the mic and asked, sp "Mr. Brokaw, as someone who was raised by my maternal grandparents (who were first-generation immigrants), I appreciate your comments on 'The Greatest Generation,'" I said. "Secondly, I appreciated your comments about the role of the citizen and the obligation to take personal responsibility. My question is, what do you think the role of the citizen journalist is, and specifically what do you think about bloggers?" He answered that he thinks it is great that the internet has provided the opportunity for various voices to be heard. He also answered that he's an avid reader of Yahoo! News. He did point out that he is wary of the political polarization to far-left and far-right that has been occurring in the blogosphere (no, he did not actually use the term "blogosphere" -- that is just me paraphrasing). I recorded his entire speech and the Q & A via my iPod and iTalk adapter, and I'll be posting the MP3 online to share later tonight as soon as I get home. He basically said that blogging is good in his opinion. These are some very weird times for broadcast journalism. First, Dan Rather announced his retirement. Then Tom Brokaw announced he would be stepping down late this year. Last week Ted Koppel announced he would be leaving "Nightline" after 25 years. Today Peter Jennings announced he has lung cancer, though he will continue to work while undergoing treatment. What is happening with all the great white men of broadcast journalism? It's making me feel old. I think we all (and citizen journalists/bloggers, in particular) have a lot to learn from the successes and failures of Jennings, Brokaw, Rather and their colleagues. It's a mistake for online news people to discount TV news as a dead medium as we move onto this new way ot tell stories. And TV news is not a dead medium. TV news *does* seem to suit and satisfy a segment of the U.S. population very well, particularly in the older side of the demographics. Many folks in my grandparents' (and parents') generations feel comfortable and perfectly fulfilled by getting their news items selected and read to them each evening by someone who they respect and trust. Unlike younger people in our generation, many of these avid TV news viewers do not want to have to sift through the information themselves on the Internet or maybe they don't think they have time to do it, or don't feel comfortable doing it. My dad, for example, is a huge TV news fan, and every single night he watches the evening news, and I don't think he will change this habit. Believe me, after 10 years of me working on the Internet and singing its praises, he's still not interested in getting his news via the Web as a primary source. At least not yet. When I decided to attend Vassar, I knew I wanted to be a journalist. This may seem a bit strange to anyone familiar with the college, because Vassar does not offer a Journalism or Media Studies major. It's a liberal arts college, and they take that really seriously. Still I wanted to attend the school. I talked to several journalists, students, teacher, and professors about this "problem" of Vassar's lack of a journalism major -- and came to the conclusion as a high school senior that I could be an even better journalist if I had a rich and varied liberal arts education. But I didn't stop there. I took every single media-related course that was offered. I wrote for the college newspaper ("The Miscellany News") and by my senior year I became Editor-in-Chief. While taking classes, I also interned at the local city paper ("The Poughkeepsie Journal," or "Po-Jo" as it was called), and in New York City first at ABC News' Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer and second at David Lauren's now-dead "Swing" magazine. One of my favorite things about interning at ABC was to watch "Nightline" with Peter Jennings from up on the catwalk in the live studio. Peter Jennings is my favorite of all these guys. Peter Jennings is a whirlwind. He does not just accept the text written for him -- he makes furious notes in the margins and adds his own thoughts/questions off-the-cuff. He's impressive to watch from behind-the-scenes. For a while around this time, I was convinced I wanted to be a broadcast journalist. My dad's mother would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would say "A journalist." And she would kind of frown for a second considering the lack of glamor and money a newspaper writing career would provide, and then she'd think for a moment and start to smile, saying hopefully, "A broadcast journalist? Those women are so smart." (No doubt she was thinking of Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer.) Hence, I was veered a bit in this direction. But my internship at ABC -- though fulfilling and interesting -- ultimately convinced me that broadcast journalism was not 100% right for me. I realized that the topics highlighted in our weekly newsmagazine show were really limited by which topics appealed to the most mainstream of people. Like almost all newsmagazinw programs, the "investigative reporting" leaned toward hidden cameras catching babysitters and nannies hitting children in their care and exposing local hotel chains that didn't properly clean the rooms. These may be actually be important topics that people do care about, but they weren't the types of issues I personally to which I wanted to devote my career and my life. (Here is the tongue-in-cheek account I wrote about my internship with Diane Sawyer at ABC that was published in the campus newpaper when I was a senior at Vassar. Labels: blog, blogger, influentials, journalism, journalists, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 1:08 PM
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| March 3, 2005 | Are Blogs to Blame? |
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Tom Regan, who I met last month at Poynter, posted to his Christian Science Monitor blog called My American Experience a piece positing that Americans' news and information consumption is today largely made up of opinion pieces rather than actual reporting and that this has a very dangerous impact on public opinion. He points to a Harris Interactive Poll showing that 64% of Americans *still* think that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al-Qaida. While I agree that Americans are consuming more opinion-influenced "news," and I do agree that blogs contribute to this somewhat -- I think that more of the blame in this case needs to be given to FOX News and conservative radio commentators. I just don't believe that any bloggers (right-wing or left-wing) have this huge of an influence on the opinion of the average American yet. For instance, is there any one blogger with readership over 1 million yet? (All the most influential newspapers in the U.S. have online readerships over 2 million). I would bet that the average American still does not read blogs regularly to get their news. Anyone agree/disagree? Add your comments at the end of Tom's post. Last week I did also see an Op/Ed piece that editorial cartoonist Ted Rall wrote on "Bloggers and the New McCarthyism". Rall also focused on the danger of these right-wing blogs. It was interesting to me that Rall pretty much ignored that there are any non-right-wing blogs out there. Am I underestimating the "threat" of right-wing blogs? Labels: blog, blogger, journalism, journalists, news, newspapers posted by Jess Barron @ 11:44 AM
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| January 29, 2005 | The Journalism of Online Futures |
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I am about to fly to Florida to visit my dad for a day and see his new house in North Port, and then attend this Poynter seminar on "The Future of Online Journalism" in St. Petersburg. The 40-person Poynter group is truly made up of luminaries (a.k.a. smart people) of the journalism world, who you might recognize from holding such titles as: How I got myself involved with the likes of these folks -- I'll never know! OK, OK... as much as it pains me to, sometimes I guess I actually do need to take myself seriously for a moment. I suppose I have worked on some pretty kick-ass technologically forward-thinking and creative projects over the past 9 years. One of my greatest strengths is that I never take myself too seriously, however that also seems to be one of my biggest weaknesses too. I wonder if it's always that way for everyone that their strengths are their weaknesses too. In filling out the homework assignment for the course, I just realized that it's been almost 9 years since I've been working professionally on the web and almost 10 years since I've been doing this website. The most interesting question for me to think about was #6 -- "What do you imagine you would be doing today if you hadn't gotten into online news (or if the Internet hadn’t come along)?" My response: "Magazine journalism, independent 'zine publishing, and/or pirate radio." I realized I value having a voice in independent self-published media, but realize I'll need to sell work to a major established company as well in order to make money. I guess that has always been my career philosophy. Labels: journalism, journalists, news, online posted by Jess Barron @ 10:25 AM
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