yelvington.com

This comes from Mark Luckie’s blog, “10,000 Words”:

Amazing photojournalism: Where to find the best in news photography

Nine sites — there’s sure to be one you don’t already know.

I’m surprised he left out Magnum in Motion. Whenever I go browsing there, I find amazing stories.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) will send one Linux laptop to a child in a developing country if you pay for two. You’ll get one to keep. That’s mine, above, from December 2007. Click the image to see my complete set of unboxing photos.

Related posts:

• The $200 Linux laptop, fully loaded
• Microsoft doesn’t want world peace

Most visited posts on this blog October 1, 2008, through November 1, 2008, according to Google Analytics:

1. Recording phone calls: For reporters
2. Stuff to teach the next journalists
3. Reassessing newspaper video
4. Why you should learn to love data
5. You don’t own this corner anymore

Number of absolute unique visitors (October 1 - November 1): 11,955

Number of pageviews (October 1 - November 1): 25,861

Traffic from Google searches: 6,983 (43.67 %)

Direct traffic: 2,885 (18.04 %)

See past MVP lists for this blog.

Poynter’s News U is presenting a “Webinar” today at 2 p.m. Eastern Time (Nov. 13, 2008). Fee: $24.95. You can also watch a recorded version later if you pay them.

Details: Understanding Video Compression for Journalists

Thanks to Denise McGill of NPPA for the tip!

I’m going to ask you to think about a workshop — but not one for beginners.

Think about the workshop you would like to attend if you are an online journalist, or an online producer, or a photojournalist who shoots video, or a data reporter. In other words, you are someone who already does online or multimedia work.

Now, two requirements:

1. You have to bring one other person from your newsroom, and the two of you must work together in the workshop.
2. You have to pitch an online project as the price of admission.

This would be a workshop where you come with a partner and work on a real project that both of you want to do. The workshop leaders and instructors would be people who can help you make significant progress on the project.

So what kinds of things would you want to learn, if you could attend a workshop like this?

Andy Dickinson wrote a very good post about this (There are no stories on the web) last week, and with all the U.S. election business, I didn’t get a chance to highlight it till now.

Right now I’ve got my journalism students in the middle of some work that really is not a story. I keep referring to their story as their “topic,” because that seems more appropriate. They are writing about a topic. They are collecting data related to a topic. They are interviewing experts about a topic. But they are not telling a story.

Maybe when they are finished with all the pieces of this assignment, they would be ready (really ready) to tell a good story related to their topic. That would require them to find real live people who have lived out some aspect of the topic. For example, bullying is one of the topics. One way to “tell a story” about bullying is to go to some schools and interview some officials, e.g., teachers, the principal, the school nurse.

I would argue that the result of that superficial effort is also NOT a story. It’s nothing but some facts strung together with quotes, and it’s not real reporting any more than paraphrasing Wikipedia is reporting.

Ultimately, stories come from people. They come from the collective experiences, social contexts and relevance of communities. To find a story and know why it’s a a story, you have to be part of or active in those communities. That’s something that ‘traditional’ journalism is supposed to be good at. Understanding the communities/audience they serve. Being relevant through the intimate knowledge of a patch. Having the ‘in’ at the ground floor of a story.

Andy is talking about finding the story online (and whether you can); I’m talking about the basic idea of a story.

Is it really a story if all you have in it is information? Even if you interview a child about being bullied — or being a bully — do you really have a story if you haven’t watched the bullying take place?

One of our doctoral students spent Election Night grabbing screen captures from 98 different news Web sites, from about 11:30 P.M. EST until almost 6 a.m. Wednesday morning. The fruits of his labor are viewable at Iterasi, a free Web site that allows you to capture and save any Web page — with all its text selectable and its links still clickable — with a single click. How cool is that?

Each page you capture is stored in a personal account, which you can choose to share with others, or not. The exact time when you saved the page is stored with the page itself, and you can tag each page as you prefer.

Iterasi is in a free beta right now — I’m betting they will charge for this service at some point, because it certainly would be a fabulous tool for use in all kinds of research projects. There’s no download or software required other than a simple browser plug-in (IE or Firefox).

Thanks to Gary Ritzenthaler for doing the screen grabs and sharing his data.

It’s probably only because I am a huge fan of the NBC-TV series The West Wing (1999-2006), but I felt a sense of déjà vu when I started clicking the hyperlinks embedded in this New York Times story about Obama’s newly named chief of staff.

By clicking through to the linked bios, I learned about Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse, who will serve on the transition team, as well as the incoming Leo McGarry (Rahm Emanuel).

Who will be Obama’s C.J. Cregg? Who will be his Josh Lyman?

Now, back to online journalism (ahem) — The Washington Post also has links in its story about the Emanuel selection (see Rahm Emanuel), but the pages are generated by a search — there is no personality in them.

The New York Times pages, in contrast, make me feel like I’m seeing a story unfold. I’m meetng the players and getting to know them. It’s another example of “Story trumps data.”

There’s a fine collection of interesting election graphics from news organizations and some magazines, at DesignO’Blog (thanks for the tip, Mark Barilla).

The one from GOOD magazine, while not interactive (print version only), is worth a look — it’s about issues, not votes.

You should also check out the 3-D how-each-county-voted map at washingtonpost.com. It rotates!

Erica Smith (of graphicdesignr, a blog you ought to read) posted a timeline of how the results came in, state by state.

Kottke.org has the maps — lots of maps! (Link via Newley Purnell.)

Happy browsing!

The New York Times has put up a wonderful package of Obama’s Election Night speech, with a dynamic transcript and a useful navigation bar. Listen and watch again.

Although the popular vote was not a landslide, the map redrawn with the size of each state scaled to represent its population makes it clear that we are a majority blue nation. An explanation of the method used is here.

Via Steve Yelvington on Twitter.

I grabbed 16 screenshots throughout the evening, about half showing the vote maps at various news organizations and the other half showing the updated home pages after 11 p.m. Eastern Time.

Here’s the slideshow (at Flickr).

I think my favorite headline was at El País (Madrid): “Obama culmina el sueño de cambio” (Obama completes the dream of change).

Kenya declared a national holiday in honor of Obama, for Thursday.

This is the best use of Twitter so far. My gosh, I can hardly stop watching this. This is much better than news media reports (on voters voting, I mean). I have the shivers!

You do NOT need to be a Twitter user to see and enjoy this.

Just open the Web page and watch.

Update (Nov. 5): Not so cool the day after, naturally.

See America voting through a Flickr slideshow (tag: election08).

This link should begin with the most recent uploads all day.

Update (Nov. 5): Still okay the day after, but not as cool as watching it as it was happening.

A Florida media law firm, Thomas & LoCicero, sent around a tip sheet for journalists this Election Day. What follows is copied exactly from the firm’s e-mail:

In anticipation of Election Day and in recognition of Florida’s checkered voting past, here are some general issues that may arise in your coverage of voting in Florida. If you have questions about specific newsgathering situations, you should seek more in-depth legal advice.

Access to Election-Related Public Records

• Election records: Generally, election records are open to public inspection under Florida’s Constitution and Public Records Act. Ask for the record and require the agency to cite a statutory exemption by number, if the request is denied.
• Access to ballots: After the election, you have the right to inspect ballots and take notes regarding the votes cast. You are not entitled to copies of the ballots, however, and you may not touch the ballots. Sections 119.07(5) & 101.572, Florida Statutes.
• Voter registration and voter records: You have the right to inspect and copy records concerning registration list maintenance programs. The following information, however, is confidential and exempt from public disclosure: declinations to register to vote; information relating to the place where a person is registered to vote or where a person updated a voter registration; social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and Florida identification numbers for voters or applicants. Section 97.0585, Florida Statutes.

At Polling Places

• The terms of Florida’s statute provide that the only interaction with voters permitted within the 100-foot zone surrounding Florida’s polling places and early voting sites is “exit polling,” a term that is undefined. The 100-foot zone should be clearly marked at each polling place.
• Though journalists may be physically located within the 100-foot zone, journalists’ highest risk of violating this statute involves interaction with voters prior to their voting (most often, when they’re in line). Photographing waiting voters within the zone – without interacting with them – is likely legally permissible. That does not mean that law enforcement and/or Supervisors of Elections will not try to stop such newsgathering within the zone.
• Although the statute technically bars questioning exiting voters who have already cast their votes, case law calls into question the constitutionality of prohibiting journalists from asking questions of voters who have already voted within the 100-foot zone. Journalists are likely legally permitted to ask questions of exiting voters. Please note that various Supervisors of Elections interpret this statute in various ways – some asserting that questioning is unlawful. In such circumstances, you may be asked to stop questioning exiting voters within the zone – or even arrested. You should consult with your editors on how to respond in such situations.
• Outside of the 100-foot zone, a journalist’s interaction with voters is not be restricted by this statute.
• Journalists are NOT allowed in polling places – except to cast their own votes, of course.

Thomas & LoCicero’s Tampa Office
400 N. Ashley Drive, Ste. 1100, Tampa, FL 33602
P.O. Box 2602, Tampa, FL 33601-2602
Ph. 813-984-3060 fax 813-984-3070 toll free 866-395-7100

Thomas & LoCicero’s South Florida Office
101 N.E. Third Avenue, Ste. 1500
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
Ph. 954-332-3619 fax 877-967-2244 toll free 866-967-2009

If you’d like clarification or more details, I suggest you contact this or another law firm.

The first image below shows a story that was on the Web front of The New York Times on Sunday, Nov. 2. It’s a feature interview with a woman who hand-fits the neck of a guitar to the body of the instrument.

The second image below shows an online graphic that appeared in the Travel section of The New York Times in February 2008.

Why on earth would you neglect to embed a link to this graphic within the story that ran on Sunday? I know the answer — the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. But this is the kind of thing that news organizations absolutely must improve.

There’s also a nice Travel section story from February — about touring the guitar factory in Nazareth, Pa. — that isn’t linked to either one of the above items.

You want a reader to view more pages and stay longer on your site? Then you’ve got to stop wasting assets this way.

Now we’re talking about breaking away from the so-called rules of online video.

So watch this, and see what you think:

Original video (bigger) here. (See the 270 comments posted there.) Videographer Benjamin Reece is a filmmaker and interactive architect from New Orleans.

Last night, David Simon appeared on The Colbert Report. Here is the episode. To go straight to Simon, click the controller bar at the 14-minute mark.

The Wire is a five-season series that ran on HBO. Not being an HBO subscriber, I am watching the series for the first time now, via Netflix DVD rentals — and I really LOVE it (not surprising). I started with Season 1 in September and am now close to the end of Season 4. It’s a great story and very well told.

Simon, the writer-producer of the series, was a cops reporter at The Sun (the surviving daily in Baltimore, Maryland) until he took a buyout — way back in 1995. (Sheesh, I didn’t even know they had buyouts that early. Frigging Tribune Co.!) This might account for why I have been thinking that the series is like the best journalism I have ever seen about America’s inner cities — except that it’s fiction.

If you followed us for sixty hours, and you find yourself caring about these issues more than you thought you would, then perhaps the next step is to engage and to demand, where possible, a more sophisticated and meaningful response from authority when it comes to such things as the drug war, educational reform or responsible political leadership. The Wire is about the America we pay for and tolerate. Perhaps it is possible to pay for, and demand, something more. (David Simon, in a letter to fans of The Wire)

Thanks to Ron Sylvester for the tip (via Twitter)!

Note to international readers: I consider this series to be very realistic, based on the years during the 1990s when I lived in Washington, D.C., where the situation was similar to the one portrayed in Baltimore in The Wire. Other American crime shows (such as the many “CSI” and “Law & Order” varieties) do not tell a complex, multi-dimensional story the way The Wire does. It’s a very ugly story, but it is our story, here in many of our cities. The fourth season is all about our inner-city schools — I think most people who have been in those schools would agree with me when I call that season “journalism.” (When you go to Washington and tour the monuments and museums, you don’t see anything like The Wire — and when you go to Baltimore and tour the Inner Harbor, you also don’t see any of that. But it’s there, all right. Just not where the tourists are.)

While I was shamelessly picking the brain of Matt Waite in recent weeks, he advised me that if I don’t have more than three to five weeks to spend on “data” (sort of akin to what we used to call “computer-assisted reporting”), what I should focus on is teaching the students something about data visualization.

So I hunkered down and hauled all my Edward Tufte books* off the shelf and did hours of Google searches and mined all my old bookmarks. Then, as usual, I figured I might as well share.

And if I’m lucky, some of my esteemed readers will share back, with some cool examples I haven’t seen yet!

• First, there are my Delicious.com links to data+examples. Right now there are only 22 bookmarks, because I’m kind of stingy with what I bookmark.
• Great Data Visualization Tells a Great Story, by Nathan Yau. This is an awesome short blog post by a guy who’s finishing a Ph.D. in data visualization at UCLA — and who did a three-month internship at The New York Times. There are all kinds of wild and crazy ways to visualize data, but Yau reminds us that in journalism, the story’s the thing. (His excellent blog is FlowingData.)
• Will Sullivan recently posted 25+ bodacious and inspirational visualizations for data, interactivity and new storytelling forms. Something for everyone there.
• At The New York Times’s new Visualization Lab, you can see the datasets and download the raw text files. Over at IBM’s associated Many Eyes site, you can compare Visualization Options Available in Many Eyes — this offers a good overview of types of charts and graphs that are commonly used to represent data. You can build your own visualization here too.
• Probably the best list ever: 175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources, from Meryl K. Evans.
• Mark Luckie recommends the Information Aesthetics blog, which certainly does serve up a lot of juicy goodness (but it’s too much for me to keep up with).
• Finally, how about a few free tools to play with? I’ve used FusionCharts Free (free Flash charts) with students in the past. amMap is a free mapping tool. XML/SWF Charts are another free Flash solution that, like FusionCharts, can be generated without the Flash application.

*Tufte’s Envisioning Information was published while I was in grad school, and $50 seemed like an impossible sum. But after I had pored over his earlier book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, many times in the public library, I went ahead and bought Envisioning Information, price tag be damned. It’s one of those books that didn’t so much teach me how to do things; it taught me how to think.

Many journalists tell me that the numbers for Web site visitors are watched very closely in their newsrooms. They know which videos get clicks and which ones don’t. They know which thumbnails translate into high numbers for photo galleries. These numbers are driving a lot of decisions about resources — and content — on news Web sites, from what I gather.

I wonder whether the number-watching is focused on the right numbers.

You big guys can laugh at my little numbers, but I really would like to know if there’s any pattern to be discovered among those folks who view more than two pages. If there is a pattern, that would be some very useful stuff to know.

Likewise, I’d love to know what the folks who stay so long are liking so much. The 78 percent who are gone in 30 seconds don’t interest me. I think I would learn more from studying the 12 percent who hang around longer.

These charts come from Google Analytics — but surely you can get something comparable from your Omniture data.

I know there’s all kinds of crazed devotion to hits and clicks and pageviews, and I know “time spent” is problematic in its own right. But what I’m looking at here is a question about what a site is doing right.

Analyze that, and maybe we can learn how to do more of it.