Through some googling I accidentally discovered a lovely paragraph from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield on shorthand. For journalism students in strange and largely British tracts of the world who are forced to learn the half-maddening, but vital, skill of stenography I thought this passage might be poignant if not a little funny.
I must note as an unfortunate aside that I have not read much Dickens (dust continues to accumulate on a copy of A Tale of Two Cities I picked up from the Salvation Army two years ago), I understand the main character of David Copperfield, like the author himself, learns shorthand to cover parliament. I thought this was an apt description of adjusting to the odd language, regardless of which strain of shorthand you happen to be learning.
From the beginning of chapter 38:
I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence) ; and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself theio then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it: then, beginning again, I forgot them ; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system: in short, it was almost heart-breaking.
Jennifer Lush of Editor’s Weblog makes an interesting point that despite the rise of blogging among the unwashed masses, there’s a hole in video blogging that journalists can exploit:
Video blogging, quite simply a blog which employs video as its medium, is a phenomenon which hasn’t shown the same success as its text-based parent amongst everyday web users. Despite the fact the ‘tools of the trade’ – cameras, editing software, and a platform to broadcast – are no longer unaffordable or complex obstacles, the significant investment of time to produce something that is of a publishable quality is still a drawback for many.
She says that while any man with a decent command of language and a fresh perspective can out blog a trained journalist, it’s a lot harder to out video-blog someone who is trained and experienced in video.
As the saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words, and journalists should take advantage of the skills they already have, with some modifications for the online audience, and make the most of the void in the video blogging market.
In related news, the Telegraph’s report that Twitter was about to launch video blogging turned out to bogus.
Here’s a nice yarn for you: a print journalist named Adam Jadhav quit his job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to begin a new life travelling and blogging.
Since I entered J-School, I’ve been dreaming of being a foreign correspondent. Unfortunately, the journalism industry doesn’t have the scratch to afford many of those these days.
finally pulled the trigger this summer, told the bosses I’d be quitting and bought plane tickets. I am bound for the developing world, with a stop in Kenya and before an eventual long-term stay in India. There will be sidetrips elsewhere (Thailand for at start, but who knows where the winds will blow).
His blog is adamjadhav.com. He has also made a rap video to celebrate his transition, which feels rather hackeneyed considering the number of rap parody songs out there, but it is midly entertaining:
We must wish Adam the best of luck on his new journey and hope that he gets plenty of freelance work to support his travels. Dare we say Adam Jadhav, “‘international journalist 2.0″, could exemplify the opportunties that are open to intrepid word-smiths in the so-called new era of journalism?
Either way, this is an inspiring story to any journo student yearning to become a foreign correspondent but worried about being restricted by a miserly newspaper company.
I know a few people who will be heartened by Adam’s tale…
His response echoes the words of most cynical commentators in the online news debate: people may pay for niche media like the Wall Street Journal but fat chance getting anyone to pay for general news.
“In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity.”
“So my guess is for niche and specialist markets … it will be possible to do it but I think it is unlikely that you will be able to do it for all news.”
While the perspective isn’t a new one, Schmidt’s comments are interesting for two reasons:
1) This is from Google, and if Google know anything its how people use the web.
2) As Editor’s Web Blog points out, his comments seem to contradict a proposal the company put forth this month to the Newspaper Association of America which laid out a micropayment system for online news. Here’s their summary of the proposal:
Google believes that an open web benefits all users and publishers. However, “open” need not mean free. We believe that content on the Internet can thrive supported by multiple business models — including content available only via subscription. While we believe that advertising will likely remain the main source of revenue for most news content, a paid model can serve as an important source of additional revenue. In addition, a successful paid content model can enhance advertising opportunities, rather than replace them.
Do these words feel a tad hollow given Schmidt’s recent remarks?
ABC reporters overheard Obama call rapper Kanye West a jackass during an off-the-record chat Obama was having with CNBC. Obama was criticising an outburst Kanye had at the MTV Video Music Awards, where he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to say he thought Beyonce deserved the award.
Obama made the comment not strictly off-the-record, but during the pre-chatter before an interview on CNBC – which is considered kind of off-the-record. Chumps from ABC overheard the comments through a fibre optic line the network shares with CNBC, one of the chumps tweeted:
“Pres Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.”
Nuttiness ensued. The Whitehouse had no comment.
The question this beckons is what kind of guidelines journalists may need in the newsroom around social media like twitter.
Twitter, a technology that’s a natural tool for reporters who love to tell people what they know whenever they know it, has raced ahead in usage before many news organisations have developed policies to govern its use, said Richard Wald, a former ABC News executive and professor at Columbia University.
“You need to reinforce the sense that you have to verify before you publish,” Wald said. “The policies may be very comprehensive, but they may not be adequate to the technology that news organisations have.”
Lets be sceptical for a moment and not buy into new media paranoia: is this a typical scenario that could pop up with any story that is poorly fact checked? Or, as Wald suggests is Twitter, with its speed, rapid dissemination, and easy digestibility, opening up a whole new can of worms?
Well, kind of. A rogue ad has surfaced on The New York Times website that commandeers your browser and directs you to a fraudulent anti-virus website.
This is a note left on their media and advertising section:
“Some NYTimes.com readers have seen a pop-up box warning them about a virus and directing them to a site that claims to offer antivirus software. We believe this was generated by an unauthorized advertisement and are working to prevent the problem from recurring. If you see such a warning, we suggest that you not click on it. Instead, quit and restart your Web browser.”
It will be interesting to see the full story as more details come to light.
You can’t trust the news. You know this and I know this. We are smart people.
So that’s why once every blue moon, when the media fat cats have their backs turned, I dish up what they don’t want you to see. As a media insider I have this access. I know the people, I have the connections, and I have an outlet that doesn’t deal in so-called ‘fact checking’.
You may have heard earlier this week that Radio New Zealand’s political reporter, Julian Robins, stumbled upon a notebook left on the street by a Treasury official outside of parliament. The notebook detailed a potential merger between New Zealand’s spy agencies. There was fallout, the government blushed, and something that should have been secret was no longer so secret.
Juicy scoop? Yes. Convenient? Suspiciously, yes. Unfounded reports from my hearsay division give me rock solid details this was a set up.
The SIS, concerned it may have to cede power to the Government Communications Security Bureau if a merger went ahead, acquired the civil servant’s notebook and conveniently planted it in Robins’s path.
The story surfaced (Julian Robins, you predictable bastard) and the merger is less likely than it ever was. After all, whats the fun in making secret closed-door rearrangements of your spy agencies if the rest of the country knows about it?
It is a tribute to that typical New Zealand humbleness we find it so difficult to accept that our own intelligence agencies could be this devious.
A month hiatus from blogging? What hiatus. Lets stop living in the past.
The Lovejoy Journalism and News Literacy series of blogs has thrown up an interesting piece by New York Times photo editor Becky Hanger about how much we can trust newspaper photos.
He notes a number of altered photos that in recent years were splattered over front pages the world over.
“In the summer of 2006, the Reuters news agency moved a freelance photographer’s photo showing smoke rising from a Beirut suburb after an Israeli airstrike. Later it was revealed that the photo had been manipulated in Photoshop to increase and darken the smoke. Reuters cut ties to the photographer and removed all of his photos from its archive.”
So how can we tell a fraud? We can’t. Hanger says an editor has to trust his photographers and readers have to trust the outlet they’re reading. You know, that old chestnut.
The big story this week was Rupert Murdoch’s declaration of war against free online news. His trumpet echoed around similar comments made by Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy who threatened the Australian citizenry with further cuts to newsrooms if we don’t start paying him somehow.
Once foes, now allies bound by a common threat. You, you greedy news-thieving sonofabitch.
And, a thought occurs, let us hope that they do form pay walls. There would be nothing sweeter for a public service website like NewsWire if barriers were put up around our regional rivals at the Dominion Post and their website Stuff.co.nz.
This is of course the great fear of Murdoch, McCarthy and their mogul cohorts, that the stingy and persistent internet user who meets an ‘insert credit card number here’ at the end of a google search will keep searching until they find something free.
And certainly, if internet porn has taught us anything, they will. But both Murdoch and McCarthy would be wise to remember that the internet did not kill off the porn industry in San Fernando valley, and chances are in this brave new world there will be room for both pay and free internet news.
It may just mean that pay sites will have to be more inventive to compete with the amateur with a webcam.
It can be difficult task for the everyday man to awake on Monday morning and remember what awareness week he has stumbled into.
Yesterday I was embarrassed to learn I had made no preparations for Rail Safety Week. A few hours later someone else hit me with Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Some research has indicated my sources were both inaccurate. Rail Safety Week coincided with Maori Language Week last week. Breast Cancer Awareness Month, likewise, is slated for October. An easy mistake to make, Charity Village informs me that we have now entered the UN sanctioned World Breast Feeding Week.
My trick for next year is to remember Breast Feeding Week coincides with Amnesty International’s Freedom Week (according to this morning’s Dom Post) which, of course, precedes Islam Awareness Week.
These are not ill-intentioned calendar events but, please charity and lobby groups, I am only one man. I love you all equally but I only have so many days in my Earth year.
Through some googling I accidentally discovered a lovely paragraph from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield on shorthand. For journalism students in strange and largely British tracts of the world who are forced to learn the half-maddening, but vital, skill of stenography I thought this passage might be poignant if not a little funny.
Posted by Dan 
Google CEO and internet tyrant Eric Schmidt was recently asked 
ABC has discovered it may need to set rules 
Well, kind of. A rogue ad has surfaced on The New York Times website that commandeers your browser and directs you to a fraudulent anti-virus website.
You may have heard earlier this week that Radio New Zealand’s political reporter, Julian Robins, stumbled upon a 
The big story this week was Rupert Murdoch’s declaration of war against 
It can be difficult task for the everyday man to awake on Monday morning and remember what awareness week he has stumbled into.
