yelvington.com

And so we copy editors thought this whole presidential politics and international relations and what to call what was complicated enough already ...

Read this from the Miami Herald's James Burnett:

It is short-sighted and disingenuous for my elevated peers to keep referring to Obama as black or African American. He is biracial.

And while his skin color...and Clinton's gender, and McCain's age shouldn't matter in terms of their qualifications, how we address those characteristics should matter to you.

Oh yeah. Let the fun begin.

Is it Myanmar -- the choice of the ruling junta -- or Burma, the choice of the U.S. government, which never recognized the junta as a legitimate government?

It gets messy -- and complicated. See the debate at the American Copy Editors Society discussion board. Strong views all around.

Language Log also weighs in. The AP favors Myanmar. (Search for Burma).

John McIntyre, who is in charge of desks at the Baltimore Sun, puts it well:
It's hard enough for the copy desk to make decisions about what will be intelligible to the audience without our having to rule on the legitimacy of governments and the legacies of colonialism.

There was a time when AP was one of the prototypical short command chain, maximum flexibility organizations. As a news editor, I reported to a bureau chief (and indirectly to the managing editor) who reported to the president in New York.

The latest memo announcing Howard Oreskes' hiring as managing editor for U.S. news, however, just continues the layering of administration that seems to be a hallmark of the current administration. And it may be needed in this new-media world, where the emphasis is on content verticals and monetizing those.

Oreskes will oversee the work of AP’s bureaus in the 50 states, which will be reporting up to him through four regional operations being created in 2008 and 2009. He’ll also supervise the work of the Washington bureau, the news service's largest domestic bureau, and AP's national feature, beat and investigative reporters.

Oreskes will be one of four managing editors, joining John Daniszewski, in charge of international coverage; Kristin Gazlay, in charge of business news and training, and Lou Ferrara, in charge of sports, entertainment and a merged multimedia and graphics department.
True story: A news source called me the other day after having spoken to a news editor at an A bureau. The source was concerned, saying the news editor told him: "Right now, I don't know who I report to."

I guess you can spell bureaucracy with "AP."

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, projecting from a new German study, suggests that most users read about 20 percent of the words on a Web page and at most 28 percent.

Nielsen's calculations rely on a formula he derived from the study's dataset. The formula suggests users spend 25 seconds plus an additional 4.4 seconds per 100 words on a page. Nielsen's result is that -- assuming a fairly fast reading speed of 250 words per minute -- you have to have fewer than 111 words on a page for half of them to be read.

As he says, the curve declines precipitously from there.

Interesting reading, given the Poynter Eyetrack study of last year that suggested that once an online user chose to read a story, he or she finished much of it, even for a longish 19-inch story (still 62 percent).

However, the two studies might not conflict. The German study used software that intercepted pages and other behavioral data. Poynter used eyetrack, which physically tracks how far a person physically goes into a page, but does not track how many words each is actually reading.

Given the wide acceptance that most Internet users are scanners, it's possible they were reading few actual words even though they were going deep into a story. We would need time data from Poynter to determine that.

Bottom line is that while we keep studying it, we really don't have a truly solid handle on user behavior, partly because of the changing nature of the Web.

In any case, the folks at newspaper sites, already plagued by users' infrequent and relatively short visits (read that table: eight times a month at about five minutes a pop is nothing to write home about when you compare it with newspaper readership stats or stickier social sites like My Space) might want to take notice.

(Cross-posted on the Newsplex08 blog.)

If you haven't checked it out, click over the Newspaper Association of America's "Zooming in on Online Video" report. I'm still going through it, but there's some good stuff, such as the section on things to take into consideration to produce good video. Excellent blog links at the bottom, too.

Also covered: Ads, set-building and video live from the field.

Kathy Gill, a senior lecturer at the University of Washington reams Gannett for the way it handled video playback of what was supposed to be a stream from a recent editorial board meeting with Barack Obama. (The post is a couple of weeks old, but I just discovered it through a list I'm on.)

Newspapers still keep proving they can do stupid video tricks -- the kind that send viewers/readers clicking for the exits. Among them Gill cites, some of which now seem to have been corrected on the Indy Star video site:

• Poor linkage to the videos and poor visibility. (Indy, for instance, has a little "multimedia" tag in its top navigation. You have to scroll down almost a page to see the larger display area that explains multimedia includes video. But Poynter's Eyetrack III study showed that below the first screen, readers start searching for headlines to catch their fancy, with clicks dropping off. Put another way, a compact home page that does not require vertical scrolling tends to lead people into the site more, which is where the multimedia is. So if you have to scroll down to learn what "multimedia" is, it might not be very effective.)
  
• Proprietary players that do funky things. (For instance, it seems almost every time I try to watch a video on Gannett's player from Maven, it stops inexplicably in the middle. Just happened again as I was trying to watch the Obama video. It's still frozen 10 minutes later as I write this, with the Pause button, not Play, still showing.)
• Page header tabs that tell you nothing, The Indy Star's for instance, just says "immersiveplayer."
• URL's so long that not even a mother could love them. (As Gill notes in a post earlier this year, other companies, such as Boeing, for which she worked, learned to link these ASP and other database monstrosities to human readable URLs a decade ago. The point of it all is that if people can mouse over and read the URL, they might actually want to go to your site, but if it's gibberish, not so much.)

A few things she complains about seem to have been fixed:

• More than the opening and closing clips from the editorial board meeting are up (though I just clicked on another and no response. All it gives me is a black screen and "transferring data from "release.theplatform.com").
• No ability to spread virally. There is now an embed code, as well as e-mail, link and share with social networks.
• Search for other related videos seems to work OK.

Hey the video's up now - only took four minutes.

Oops. it just stopped again, 3:47 left into a 6:14 piece on Obama's views on China.

If newspapers want to play in the big leagues on this stuff, they've got to stop frustrating the user experience. Maven's big front-page splash on its site is that it delivers more advertising inventory. Doesn't mean squat if Gill and others can't watch it (the player also apparently does not work in Linux - see the link from Gill's site) or can't find it. (Maybe now that Yahoo has bought Maven, the kinks will be ironed out.)

Hey, finally got through that China video. Third time's a charm.

Newspapers need to meet these criteria:

1. Video has to be as consistent in playback as YouTube or some of the other similar sites. I can't think of a time I've had a YouTube video stall while I was on broadband. Maybe it's happened, but I've never seen it.
2. Video has to be enabled to be easily embedded, linked to or otherwise shared.
3. But also disable the auto-start. The whole point of the Web is to leave the user in control. I'll decide when I want to start something. And can the automatic rollover to the next video. Maybe I want to look at this one again.
4. Along those same lines, when the video is ended, don't disable the scroll bar. Maybe I want to go back and review something I didn't quite catch.
5. Use links that real people can read.
   

My colleague David Weintraub, who occupies the same nook as I do oh so far, far away from the main office, has been blogging for Black Star. Good stuff, especially if you are into teaching -- or learning -- visual communications.

David is an accomplished photographer. His latest post (yeah, yeah, try not to look at the date, OK; I said I was behind) is a good recap of the joys, mostly, of teaching the beginning and advanced photography classes. Some good thoughts, I think, that apply far beyond just photo classes:

• Here's the take-away message for me from all this: given something fun and creative to do, students will figure out the technical challenges -- this is their reward for being so-called digital natives. They still need to be taught the broad concepts: developing a story arc, shooting sequences and details, editing for maximum impact, and using audio effectively. (David was talking about having them do slide shows.)
  
• The students themselves told me they need more training in basic photographic principles -- good old f-stops and shutter speeds, lighting ratios, depth of field, etc. I think I've succumbed to the "set it on auto" syndrome. ... The fact is, the current crop of auto-everything digital SLRs are so good that you can hardly go wrong by using the auto setting. But what I heard from my students was instructive: they weren't learning much from letting the camera do the thinking. They wanted to be in control and, if need be, learn from their mistakes. (That's something we all can remember as more and more of this stuff just becomes turning to a site on the Web, be it audio, video, slide shows, site creation, etc.)
• I've found that teaching is a delicate balancing act: sometimes you provide as much information as possible, and sometimes you stand back and get out of the students' way. Knowing when to do which is a challenge.

Also, read two of his previous posts:

• What do you tell students who want to be photographers in the age of everyone-can-do-it photography? (Hint, that they need to realize they are not just photographers, but visual problem solvers. And I like David's implicit endorsement for why many vis comm students should take my editing class: They may also be called upon to write captions, press releases, articles, and produce infographics.)
• A solid piece exploring the bounds of ethical practices in visual communication.

As I told David, my only quibble isn't with him, but with Black Star, which has the blog set up rather weirdly. There is no way I have found to click on a link and see all the posts David has written. No archive of past posts, no clickable link on his name. And if you go into the main blog, rising.blckstar.com, and click backward, I'll be danged if I see any of his posts. Unless I'm being exceedingly dense (highly likely), Black Star is running afoul of some key points of the blogging ethos. It's also making it hard to know when to go to the site to read Weintraub since the RSS feed is of the main blog only, not broken down by contributor.

On the other hand, Black Star is using Joomla, which brilliantly is one of the few content management systems that allows you to immediately download a PDF of a post (yes, it's not that hard to print to PDF these days, but this one is formatted correctly the first time -- ever run into the fun of printing some sites in a Mozilla browser? -- and is quick). Again, a small quibble that so few sites seem to get -- include a URL in that printout. Maybe I want to hand it off to someone else who wants to see the thing digitally or who wants to cite it down the road.

Don't I wish.

Two of my colleagues, Scott Farrand and Dick Moore, are about to embark on a two-week multimedia journey to Munich with 16 students. It's the second year we've done this.

See their blog, Multimedia Maymester in Munich.

They promise to raise a stein for me. Yeah, great. (I just get to be the blog jockey.)

Most interesting announcement this week from NBC about how it is redoing its news operation out of WNBC in New York -- and it's hardly a ringing endorsement for local TV as we now know it.

According to the New York Times article, NBC is shifting the station's resources, de-emphasizing the station (WNBC is coming off the Web site and it will just be called NBC New York) to be part of a "content center" that will feed a 24-hour cable channel as well as gas pumps, taxi cab screens, etc. In that, it's smart. "Convergence" means a lot more than just print, broadcast and online.

But a few bon mots from John Wallace, NBC's new president for "local media" (again, de-emphasizing the "station" aspect).

Mr. Wallace said that local television “has a perception issue right now as to whether it is a sustainable business long term.” Once a huge generator of cash for media companies, local stations now have an “eroding and aging” audience and have become “slow-growth business,” Mr. Wallace said, adding that their revenue growth averages between 1 percent and 3 percent.

“We look at our content, and we believe it’s relevant content,” Mr. Wallace said. “It’s just not convenient because of the way people’s lives have changed with technology.” ...

Providing round-the-clock live news will not require NBC to hire more employees for the new channel; it plans to rely instead on expanding the duties of its present staff members, which Mr. Wallace called “a work-flow change.” He said, “There will be no added staff. We’ll just use them differently.”

Producers, for example, whose previous focus had been “getting the show on the air at the assigned time,” will be retrained to produce video segments instead of shows, with the goal being to spread the segments across various local NBC platforms, be they the news channel, the Web site or the taxis.

He said he expected "some natural resistance." Well, at least he's not laying it between the lines, huh? I wonder if broadcast journalism programs across the country are paying attention.

If it works in New York, NBC plans to expand it to its other large-market stations. I doubt this would work the same way in smaller markets (not enough taxis after all {grin}). But, of course, if NBC pulls this off with the same (I'm betting eventually smaller) staff in the larger markets, then we all know others will be watching and we know what rolls downhill ...

Chuck Fadley of the Miami Herald and proprietor of the Yahoo newspaper video group had insightful comments, noting that this could also be a direct competitor to newspaper Web sites during the office day when a lot of people go to local news sites for breaking news. In response, Bill Dunphy warned that if it becomes a head-to-head situation, newspapers could be the ones that eventually suffer -- while they are better staffed, it's hard to compete with that much additional overhead.

Stay tuned.

What if all the words written on on the journalism and new-media blogs about how the future is digital and everything needs to be "Web first" and we need to be totally rethinking the way we write, report and present news -- well, what if it was wrong?

Yeah, I'm being provocative, and I don't totally believe that. But what if the "public," whoever that is, wasn't quite as excited about all this technological change and brave new world stuff as we are?

Hang with me a minute. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I work with a smaller paper whose leaders are concerned about the future and want to move into the digital arena more forcefully than they are now. (I'm going to hold back the name of the paper for now, but down the road hope to do a series of posts about how things progress.)

I was there the other day, and my first question was a simple "why?" Why do you think it is so critical to rush headlong into video and interactive and rearranged workflows, etc.? Well, circulation is dropping, they said.

Yes, but wrong answer.

I could have given them 18 strategies right then and there for improving their digital presence. And every one of them could have been wrong.

The problem: They had no real idea where their subscribers were going. Were they going online? Or were they just dropping out? Maybe, in a cruel twist of logic, the most effective thing they could do would be to

*Use scarce resources to improve the paper and let digital ride for now*

What? But that goes against all we keep reading and hearing and ....

Except, if you don't know where your subscribers are going -- or where your potential audience is -- in terms of technology and information consumption, you can't make intelligent decisions.

Yeah, yeah. Spare me the "you gotta try different stuff" and "good enough is good enough." I know the mantra by heart. I preach it every day in class and at meetings around the country.

But part of the news industry's problem --and that includes all us digital soothsayers -- is that it suffers from the "looking up the well hole" syndrome. In short, it has no view of the horizon.

But instead of climbing up out of the hole and checking, too many journalists and newsrooms tend to guess (long known as editor's instinct) or assume. Yes, the national surveys show an online nation, one that supposedly gets the news more and more online. But when I get down on the ground, I don't always see it. When I talk to editors, many have no real clue what is happening to their readers, how those readers are getting their news, or even if they are getting it at all. When I talk to people in bars and malls, you'd be surprised at the number who are not switching the paper for online; they are simply switching off. Some say they might take the paper again if it were just a whole lot easier to use and got to the point with stuff they needed to run their daily lives (insert your favorite "hyperlocal" link here, but they don't always say that, either).

I was prompted to think about this once again by a recent post and a comment to a separate post.

The post was on Mindy McAdams' blog where she counseled patience and empathy for the technologically impaired among us. She began: I was recently reminded that not every person who uses a computer every day understands the instruction “Minimize that window.” I'm not sure there was as much sympathy as antipathy in the overall thread of post and comments, but whatever.

The comment was to a post by Pat Thornton in which he talked about the need "to build cool shit." Marc Mateo wrote:

But if we build cool shit, we may just have piles of cold shit.

I came to the realization after a newsroom conversation today that I have two distinct “classes” of friends: those that are “connected” and those that aren’t.

It’s the ones that aren’t that I suddenly found interesting.

They’re not some gaggle of technological luddites or anything, they are by and large normal people with normal lives… who have never heard of Twitter. They don’t blog and they don’t follow blogs either. They use computers, they have broadband connections, they find things with Google, but they go days before checking their email. They have mobile phones but they don’t send text messages. They don’t fear technology… but they don’t wallow in it either.

It is to these people that our “cool shit” can be meaningless.

And I worry. I worry because they far out number my “connected” friends. Do they know something I don’t?

I have lots of those friends, too. When you are in the middle of all hell breaking loose, it's easy to forget that your collaborators may not be following your lead quite as much as you might think.

We haven't even really begun to see some of the massive changes; when TV goes digital and all that bandwidth opens up for mobile applications, the pace of innovation in the mobile space will be dizzying. (Personally, I'm betting eventually on a Dick Tracy-type wristwatch computer, but one that projects a digital space onto another surface and can pick up your finger movements along that surface for navigation, thus providing ultra mobility but also a decent-sized viewing area.) And any media company that doesn't have someone thinking about a mobile strategy (and obviously a lot don't, based on the condition of their Web pages) is just*plain*dumb.

But it's good to remember, sometimes, that everyone isn't like us. Listen - and learn.

---
Update:
The Readership Institute adds to the discussion by asking whether time spent on site (or page views, for that matter) really capture what Web use for news sites is all about.

In our recent work with teens and young adults we heard many times that they go to news sites to get the news. That's it. They're not interested in spending time on these sites doing anything else. If that's the case (and it seems to be - wait for our report in July), newspaper sites are at a disadvantage compared to many other sites when it comes to how much time people spend on them. Shouldn't these sites be measured in terms of how well they serve their audience? How quickly people can find what they're looking for? How well they lay out issues, or provide added value to the news of the day with digests, timelines, maps, data banks, etc.? Just because you can measure time spent - across media, which is nice - doesn't mean you should, or that you only rely on that measurement. Newspaper sites are in essence trying to compete in a race that is not their own, and risk handicapping themselves by letting others define them.

Vin Crosbie has just completed a year teaching at the Syracuse University journalism school and doesn't much like what he's found.

What I found were faculties resistant to change and students whose insights and mastery of new media were being eroded by the authoritative resistance to change of so many professors.Crosbie buried the lede, though:
I've also discovered that media academics follow, rather than lead, their industries. Though schools of medicine, law, or engineering lead their industries, developing the new techniques and doctrines their industries use, this isn't so with media and media schools. I realize that there are exceptions, but most schools of media still inculcate students to hew to the past, rather than sow the present or future.There are lots of reasons for this, and please, do not take this as a defense of academe (see an earlier post about the ivy walls). There are some institutional reasons he doesn't mention, but since I've now done this for seven years after leaving industry (and a couple of years earlier at another major school), let me add some context (consumer warning, as with all broad statements, your results may vary):

• Institutional inertia: Despite all the innovation preached on campuses, you will at the same time find no more hidebound institutions anywhere. Process is often prized over (or mistaken for) progress. Pomp and circumstance, and a caste system, are inherently the result. Exhibit: Take a close look at graduate education and you will find, in many ways, it has not really changed in decades.
• Inferiority complex: This seems endemic to communications programs.
  
• In too many institutions, this is reinforced from above. For instance, the consultant who came to our school several years ago on behalf of the university president and said, in so many words, "Why should a prestigious university be teaching journalism?" Why, of course ... after 9/11 you got all your news from the International Hemorrhoid Review, did you?
• Too often the communications programs are not looked on as full academic partners but as "service bureaus" -- oh, we need a "communications" component to this or that project. Or, oh, do you have someone who can write/design/edit this?
• There is valid debate whether "communications" as a discipline really has any organic theories of its own. Yes, we have gatekeeping and framing and agenda setting and the like, but when you look closely, a serious argument can be made that most of those really have roots that go back deeper into psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. Our basis is really more that of applied theory. That can be a tough sell when other disciplines on campus feel they have a more organic tradition. (And never forget, every professor is at some point going to have to be reviewed by those "others" for tenure and promotion.)
• Shooting ourselves in the foot. We have some strange shibboleths in this branch of academe:
• Deprecation of textbooks and similar works when it comes to tenure and promotion (as if writing a textbook is something you dash off in your spare time). This contrasts with some other disciplines that expect their faculty to write a book or two every few years.
• Emphasis on single-author papers. The powers that be can deny it all they want, but every young academic in journalism/communications has been told that to be the second author on a paper is worth, essentially, squat. This contrasts with some of the hard and biological sciences where "et al." gets as much credit as the lead author (good old "Al"; hope to meet him sometime).
• Less recognition for getting published in "secondary" journals. Again, in the "hard" sciences (of which I have some acquaintance, having been an astrophysics major early in my career), there certainly are the prestigious journals like Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, etc. But there also seems to be more recognition given to "lesser" but specialized journals - think of the ol' Hemorrhoid Review. In communications, we have a problem -- many of our lesser specialized journals (such as Newspaper Research Journal, Journalism Educator, etc.) don't really count. The result of which is ...
• Researchers get lousy citation scores. Why, you say, you certainly can't reduce a body of academic work down to a few numbers, like a FICO score. Think again. It's done all the time and can be determinative of a faculty member's future (rumors abound on many campuses of this or that administrator or tenure committee member being a "score jockey"):
• A researcher's H score, basically a measure of how widely his or her work is cited by others.
• A little outfit called ISI (the Institute for Scientific Information) and its journal impact factor. If your journals are not accepted by ISI into this ranking (many of the secondary communications ones, as opposed to those in other fields, are not), woe is you.
• This has immediate and potentially devastating consequences over the next few years. For the first time, communications doctoral programs are being included in the National Research Council's decennial review of graduate programs. Tons of prestige not just nationally but inside your own university ride on this (not to mention tenure, promotion, etc.) Part of this involves the ISI journals. Woe is us.
  
• Lack of industry support. It is one of the delicious ironies of Crosbie's post that he cites a slavishness to following an industry that by and large does not support its academic branch particularly well.
• The anti-intellectualism of journalists/journalism is long and well-thrashed out. And if I read one more post decrying the value of a journalism education, I think I'll go mad (not that it isn't a valid point for debate -- just enough already). I recommend this excellent retrospective by James Carey. And if you want more, here's a Google search. Knock yourself out. (I fear this estrangement will only grow as most communications/journalism programs are now requiring the Ph.D. for faculty and deprecating professional experience with the master's. I think there probably needs to be a balance, but having a bunch of MAs on your staff doesn't get you power points. The antidote to this, in a bit of irony, may be all the layoffs in the industry. Some of those folks are likely to go back and get their doctorates and bring some significant experience along with them.)
  
• Journalists/communicators rarely read the research that applies to their business. Come on, admit it. When was the last time you read Newspaper Research Journal or some of the others focusing on the industry? But, as a for instance, I have an NRJ article from the 1990s, a decade before the recent implosion, basically calling BS on the long-voiced shibboleth that as people got older they read newspapers. So you were taken by surprise why? (I can't speak for other professions, but some, at least, have continuing education requirements that force their practitioners to keep up. Of course, we can't do that in journalism, nor should we. There's that little First Amendment thing.)
  
• Industry funding of the academic side pales when compared with other branches of the university. Most funding comes from foundations. So let's compare:
• Typical foundation grant: four, five, maybe six figures. Few will pay "overhead" or "equipment," etc. Might fund part of researcher's salary and provide GA support. (Now remember, this is in an industry suddenly screaming for R&D to help it get out of this mess.)
  
• Typical federal grant (think hard sciences here, the "communication" component of these as opposed to "journalism." Other humanities have access to federal funding, too, but admittedly usually at much lower levels than the sciences.): Five, six, even seven or eight figures. Often fund lab, researcher's salary, research assistants. Oh, and 40 to 50 percent comes right off the top and goes into the university's general coffers for "overhead."
• So now for the lightning round. You are a top state university administrator. You can choose between the folks bringing in big grants with big overhead funding or those bringing in relative dribs and drabs from foundations. Quickly now -- the legislature's about to cut your state support again.
  
• From the miscellaneous pile:
• Journalism is one of the few professional programs that does not have a license at the end. Again, a good thing, but a bit complicating in the ivy halls. Those other programs have a measurable, rather standard course of study. Journalism has what? In an age when the rage is about measurement and accountability, this complicates things.
• If you don't look at journalism/communications as a professional program but as an academic one, then, like many of the social sciences and humanities, the gold standard becomes preparing as many for graduate study as possible. That's one of the measures for the more traditional academic tracks -- how many of your students went on and got advanced degrees. But for journalism/communications, see the discussion of anti-intellectualism above. (A further complication is that a good chunk of our students seek out "professional" master's degrees, not the traditional M.A. with an eye toward the Ph.D. This gets a bit muddy, however, because there is no absolute standard nomenclature. Some schools may give an M.A. that is more professionally oriented without a thesis, while others, such as ours, have an MMC track for that.)
• Journalism/Communications have a Janus problem. Journalism tends to want to be (and the industry virtually demands it) the more professionally oriented program. Communications wants to be the more academically oriented one. That makes for some interesting debates inside the ivied walls.
• Journalism/communications faculty exist within larger institutions that may have vastly different priorities. You simply have to acknowledge that in any discussion. These are people's livelihoods you are talking about (it's no fun to go through what a tenure-track faculty member has to endure just to find out he or she has diminished chances of tenure because of these external factors). You can rail for or against tenure all you want; that's not the issue here. Peripatetic journalists probably don't see a problem in this -- just find another job. But once turned down for tenure, that complicates things for academics. Let me put it from the academic perspective: I doubt most journalists would survive a six-year "tryout." (Disclosure: I am not tenure-track. I can be fired at any time.)
  

None of this is by way of excuse. But Crosbie's post, while useful, is incomplete, as are many of the writings about journalism education. I thought it useful to pull back the curtains a bit from Oz and discuss all the other things going on, sometimes at cross-purposes.

And not everything is quite as flawed as Crosbie paints it. Jeff Jarvis, who has joined the faculty of City University of New York, has a much more upbeat view.

(If you want to read more -- and well -- on the crosscurrents and history of journalism education, you can do no better than read all the documents, including Carey's, from the 1996 Siegenthaler Chair course at Middle Tennessee State: Journalism Education, the First Amendment Imperative, and the Changing Media Marketplace. I also recommend Mindy McAdams' The Slow Crawl of Journalism Education from this past November. Her description of how an industry advisory board essentially kept Florida from making major advances into new media instruction for many years puts some further meat on Crosbie's observations about the relationship with industry.)

In this case, Zamzar, a British-based online file conversion service.

In both free and paid versions, this service will convert media or document files among various formats, including some pretty odd ones.

I haven't tried it, but it lists the ability to convert the new Microsoft Office "x" formats, which are not backward compatible, to the older formats (in other words from .docx to .doc). That's a heck of a lot more convenient than downloading Microsoft's converter.

It will also convert one type of compressed file to another.

The major limitation of the free version is the relatively small total file size (100 mb, which isn't a lot if you are working with media files) and no online management of your files.

I get caught up from time to time in a great site, Slideshare.net. If you haven't heard of it, it allows people to share their PowerPoints and similar work (as if we didn't have enough PP pollution, already, huh?)

As you can imagine, there's a fair amount of dreck, but then there are things like David Armano's excellent look at marketing and the online experience -- hint: editors and publishers need to pay attention.

Skip the cheesy intro music and tune into this video from Clay Shirky's recent talk at the Web. 2.0 conference on his idea on why we have a "cognitive surplus" that is powering people's desire to create, share and derivate online.

His thesis, briefly and inadequately stated, is that TV -- specifically the sitcom -- served as an opiate for the masses post World War II as people found they suddenly had all this free time to manage. He calls it a "cognitive heat sink" from which we are emerging and beginning to realize it is a "cognitive surplus" that can be harnessed.

Shirky always gets you thinking.

The "quality" debate goes on in traditionally print circles about video.

See Dirck Halstead's editorial, "How Not To Do Newspaper Video," in the latest edition of The Digital Journalist.

Then see Peg Achterman's "leavening" in response on the Newspaper Video discussion group.

Lee Smith, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, thinks so, starting with the New York Times:

The time has come for the nation's wealthiest colleges and universities to rescue its leading newspapers — resources almost as vital to higher education's purpose as libraries, laboratories, classrooms, and concert halls. ...

Let me be clear. I am not arguing that newspapers must be preserved in their historical newsprint form. Many younger readers in particular prefer getting their information electronically. The familiar bundle of paper in plastic landing on the doorstep may well disappear over time, as newspapers migrate to the Internet to meet the audience.

What must be preserved is the complex and expensive enterprise of collection that underlies a newspaper — the labor and brain-intensive work of reporting, writing, and editing the millions of fragments of information scattered across the planet every day.Interesting proposition. Let me make an observation, however. Higher education, as it is now largely practiced in the U.S., is one of the ultimate middlemen. Despite all that's been written and said about decentralizing and asynchronizing education, much of the education "industry" and its endowments in this country are tied to edifice complexes (ask anyone going up for tenure how easy it is to get credit for the outsized amount of time putting a course online can take). And it gets more pronounced the higher up the chain you go (try mentioning a "professional" Ph.D., which some business leaders now want instead of the traditional three-year hair shirt and servitude variety, to a panel of academics -- then duck).

But the Internet time and time again has shown it kills middlemen. Case in point, newspapers (used in the ecumenical sense of the large, multipurpose newsroom). So while Smith's thought is interesting and provocative, perhaps it's best for higher education to stay focused on that light at the end of the tunnel. Hint: It's not the exit.

The Web site to go with the new book "Principles of Convergent Journalism" is up and running.

I decided a Wiki was the best form instead of trying to build a site from scratch. It makes sense the way we can break things down into Web sites, blogs, details of the book, reviews, etc. I used Wikispaces, because I am familiar with it.

Drop by at http://pcj.wikispaces.com. We'll be adding things, but we'd also like your suggestions. Hopefully, there will be enough useful links on there that you will bookmark it.

We also aren't ignoring the criticism. The first review we link to is by Alfred Hermida, who didn't like how we have two chapters on "repurposing." But we argue that to ignore reality right now would be disingenuous. Please read our response.

So much to write about, so little time, especially at the end of classes, with grading, etc.

I've kind of gone to ground lately because I know if I start posting I'll get far behind (also knee-deep in a research project). So aplologies. But let me point you to one recent clip from HBO's "Costas Now." It pretty well encapsulates the blog/anti-blog, generational, philosophical -- pick your term -- schism we see.

This was the appearance of Deadspin's Will Leitch and blog opponent Buzz Bissinger (with Cleveland receiver Braylon Edwards thrown in for an athlete's commentary) on Costas' program.

Lots of heat; some light. Mostly mud wrestling.

I kind of like one of the comments that followed:
This isn't just "Bissinger vs. Leitch". This is "Bissinger vs. Leitch, Deadspin, blogs, wireless internet, PDAs, synthetic motor oil, the space shuttle program, electric typewriters, the four-slot toaster, automatic transmission, and the rise of pharmaceuticals".

Too often, in the midst of some valid criticisms of some of the excesses, this is how I fear we come off.

Mediabistro's D.C. Fishbowl was one of the first to report yesterday that Sandy Johnson was out as AP's Washington bureau chief, and it follows up with AP Exec. Editor Kathleen Carroll's internal e-mail noting another big change: AP is folding its broadcast operations into its main news chain of command.

Today, the company is announcing several changes that essentially join the once-separate broadcast units with the appropriate AP department overall. You'll hear more about that from Tom Brettingen, the chief revenue officer.

For us, it means that the news departments at the Broadcast News Center and AP Television News will report into the overall AP News department, effective immediately.

Kevin Roach, currently executive producer for Online Video, becomes acting head of all U.S.-based broadcast news operations. And Sandy MacIntyre, Director of News for APTN, will have the same role for all non-U.S. broadcast news operations. Both will report to me.

It was about three decades ago when AP's broadcast operations moved from New York and set up its own outpost in D.C. During that time not only did it kind of operate in its own orbit (though in the field there could be close cooperation between the "print" and "broadcast" folks), it created some of the cutting-edge (for its time) software for broadcast. Most recently, it's created an AP online video operation as a turnkey for member papers and other sites, though both the video player and the too-long stories (it's the Web, not TV) continue to come under criticism in various quarters.

With the AP also consolidating its editing operations (click on the AP label below for more), having just posted jobs for 13 editors in Atlanta, it's interesting to follow the twists and turns as the once-venerable news service tries to contract and find its way in the new-media world.

(Carroll's e-mail, BTW, says Johnson was offered another unspecified position inside AP and is thinking it over.)

E&P's Joe Strupp has an interesting analysis of it all.

It's always important to get the numbers right, but I can't think of areas where it's more important than in science and business reporting. People make decisions based on what you report in those areas -- decisions that can affect their health or their wealth.

Thus comes today's lesson that not only the numbers -- but the prepositions -- are critical. The story is the recapitalization plan by troubled banking company South Financial Group. (Yahoo finance link).

From The State newspaper this morning (that link will expire in about seven days because of McClatchy's ill-advised archive policy -- someday someone's going to get that even if you put it behind the wall, leaving a link to find it on the general Web is smart; you might even sell a few more archive hits):
South Financial is raising $250 million from a preferred stock offering, up to an additional $100 million from other borrowings and cutting the common share dividend by four cents a year — a move bank officials estimate will save about $52 million in 2008.From the company's news release (which you will also find picked up at Reuters and several other places):
TSFG's common stock cash dividend will be reduced to $0.04 per share on an annualized basis. This will enable TSFG to preserve approximately $52 million annually in retained capital.
You might notice a small difference -- with a big effect: The State uses "by," while TSFG uses "to." It's a 68-cent difference per share, as a matter of fact, and that adds up pretty quickly. The State would lead people to believe the drop in the dividend is 5 percent (based on the current dividend of 76 cents per share), when the actual drop is 94 percent.

The State's graphic just reinforces the error.

The Greenville News, TSFG's hometown paper, got it right and threw in a few other useful details, but everyone missed the bigger story here, and that is how a recapitalization plan is going to drastically change the common stock picture of this bank. Instead of throwing around arcane terms, it would have been nice to see business stories cut to the point: TSFG's shareholders will see serious dilution of their investment along with the slash in the dividend. And it appears some insiders may be getting a sweet deal in the process.

The explanation:

• The 250,000 shares of preferred stock ($1,000 each) at a 10 percent dividend are mandatory convertible shares. In other words, the bank has no choice. Three years from now those shares must be converted into common stock.
• When they are converted, at 153.846 shares of common to one share of preferred, the resulting addition of almost 38.5 million shares will increase the outstanding shares by more than 50 percent. That seriously dilutes current equity.
• The conversion is at $6.50 per share, a highly favorable price (shares closed at $6.86 Friday), unless the bank's executives are, essentially, saying they think the bank will actually tank in the next three years.
• The preferred holders get voting rights as though they held all those common shares. If current shareholders don't approve granting those rights, the yield on the preferred shares increases substantially.
• The company press release just talks about unidentified "institutional" investors, but the 8-K and Tampa Bay Business Journal say some current directors also are buying the shares. Their identities are not disclosed, and apparently neither Columbia nor Greenville thought to ask about what would seem to be highly relevant information (though Greenville did a follow-up interview with CEO Mack Whittle).
  

As you might guess, I was a business reporter at one time in my life. And the current state of business reporting at too many papers is distressing. Nothing I've laid out here was hard to find or particularly arcane if you are supposed to be covering business. It's all in the company's release and its 8-K filed with the SEC. Those and other links are available at several places on the Web, most commonly Yahoo finance. A moment of thinking would have brought it all together.

It took me about 10 minutes to read them and lay out the numbers. Should we expect anything less from our newspapers whose writings may be affecting people's lives?

I don't have a problem with newspapers cutting back. It's a business reality. But if you are going to do less, do it right.