Techniques
The Techniques category contains articles about the various skills in journalism, especially how they relate to new media.
Research
Written by Pierce Presley Thursday, February 04 2010 09:02
Alternate title: If Your Mother Says She Loves You on the Internet, Make Sure She's Not a Spambot.
<--- Not my mom
I don't know about you, but I get tired of all the stories in newspapers, magazines, journals and whatnot about how the Internet has eroded all the checks and double-checks that kept misinformation, propaganda and just plain stupidity out of newspapers, magazines and journals. And then someone puts a death notice on Sinbad's Wikipedia entry.
The cautionary story here isn't what you might think at first. The easy moral is "don't trust anything on the Internet"; the real moral is "it's still up to you to verify information you find". Sorry, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Wikipedia can be one heck of a resource, not only providing detailed background but links to actual sources; it can also lead you astray, because anyone can edit the entries. So do what you would do with information you found some other way: check it out. Track down the resources listed and follow the links listed at the bottom. Look into the edit history and examine the user pages of the recent editors, especially if they made major edits. Search for info some other way and see what you find. Obviously, your effort should match the importance of the story (and of the information you're seeking within the story), so don't spend six hours chasing down the name of the lab assistant on the Muppets. (It's Beaker. You can trust me.) But if it says Sinbad is dead, look up his publicist or agent; if it says Lithuania is an African country, find a map or two; if it says the CIA planted either the current president or his predecessor to better control the worldwide cotton candy market, take a screenshot and post it on Twitter.
Additionally, be very aware that Google (or any search engine) won't find what's not in its database. So the very new, the obscure, the password-protected and the only available in a darned PDF or an image file will not show up. Well-mannered spiders will even stay out of a website with a restrictive robots.txt file.
There will also be differences between how Google and, say, Bing rate search results, so you should search a couple of different ways. Dogpile.com will search Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com. (If you're like me, the most you've seen of the last two is crapware some programs try to install in exchange for money. If your business model relies on people being too dense to avoid your product, that's pretty sad … but you probably won't go broke.)
There are also specialized search engines for some kinds of obscure data, sometimes called the "dark Web", and for special types of information, like Google Scholar. Keep a current library card—they often have access, remote or in the flesh, to several databases that would cost money for you to get to—and keep an eye out for other ways to access odd sources.
A word on numbers: figure them out already. Too many journalists got (and are getting) into the field as a way to avoid college algebra. But even if you're not reporter, editor and copy editor on every story (plus photographer, videographer, producer and coffee-making intern), you should still know enough to avoid grievous errors. For example, somehow Family Circle put in a recent story that a serving of potatoes has 21 grams of vitamin C, which is off by a factor of a thousand and would be more than 7 percent of a large potato by weight. (Data from the USDA Nutritional Data Laboratory.) If nothing else, you should know that vitamins are measured in milligrams. (FYI: vitamins A, D and E are sometimes measured in International Units, or IUs, just to make things confusing, and IUs don't have an easy relationship to weight measurements.)
But to reiterate, your sources' reliability will vary, but it's up to you to do the research to keep from damaging your credibility, whatever everyone else does.
— Pierce
Organization
Written by Pierce Presley Friday, February 05 2010 04:04
There are some who would say me talking about organization is like a hooker talking about chastity: familiar with the concept, perhaps, but lacking in implementation.
They're right.
I have an unfortunate tendency to run right up to deadlines before using my brand of simple tricks and nonsense to save the day. I have a tendency to collect everything or nothing when researching (at least when I'm not getting distracted by shiny things). I can lose track of time, my keys, my car and just what in the heck I'm in the store for. I make files, then piles of files, then groups of piles of files. Then I take it all apart and start over fresh. I am horrible at remembering to put tags on files so I have a single, lonely hope in hell of finding them again.
The upside to this is when I say some organization method, philosophy or tool works, it's probably near indestructible.
My four-step plan to improving your organization:
- Look at the different methods. There are probably millions of these throughout history, from the Roman room to Covey's habits and quadrants to the Pomodoro technique; these may focus more on time management, organization, memorization or some other aspect, but I'm throwing them all in this bucket.
- Pick a method or different aspects from several. I would suggest that you start with one, at least to switch out aspects. For example, you can use quadrants to choose what to do, but use another methodology for collecting and storing your tasks, and another for handing projects, possibilities and reference materials. Just make sure you're covering everything. But get a system in place without too much todo. It's all too easy to get lost in reading about methods and thinking about how they will work and what they'll help you accomplish. There's a reason Merlin Mann warns us against "productivity porn".
- Give it a try. One of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten was to try new methods in small, clearly defined parts of one's life. This goes for applications as well as methods. So try Getting Things Done for household errands or Google Calendar for you kid's school functions. If you run across something that you are pretty sure will work in every part of your life, go for it.
- Seek improvements. Every new thing to come down the pike won't be an improvement. In fact, most won't be worth the effort of changing. But every once in a while something will come along that will revolutionize how you do things. (One of them for me was Google Calendar, which just blew away my cobbled-together Outlook monstrosity of a calendar. But it might go the other way, from Google to Outlook.)
Rinse and repeat.
My personal system is a mixture of GTD, Pomodoro, the Homefile Financial Organizing Kit, Google Calendar, GMail, Remember the Milk and probably some things I'm forgetting. Basically, I collect inbox items in either my actual GMail inbox or the bottom of an eight-tray-high stack of letter sorters by my desk; any tasks due in the next week are put into RtM immediately, others are processed on Fridays (ditto for appointments into GCal); tasks are organized by project (including a Misc. project for miscellaneous tasks); each project with paper gets a manila folder; everything has a place (things to be filed, receipts, things to be mailed, office supplies, etc.); do things that take less than two minutes as soon as they come up; give recurring tasks and long-term projects specific days to work on them (e.g., JFF is slated for Mondays through Fridays, with optional weekends, at least until the majority is up; my personal website has tasks on Mondays and Thursdays; my family blog has tasks on Tuesday and Sundays; my homage to the Book of Lists has tasks on Wednesday; this makes it a no-brainer to determine when something should be scheduled; otherwise I put everything on Mondays and have to keep moving the tasks back); set reminders for everything everywhere I can; scan things I can't stand to lose into Evernote using my Fujitsu ScanSnap. It's working so far, though I'm always on the lookout for something better.
Writing
Written by Pierce Presley Friday, February 05 2010 07:19
Writing is certainly one of the things covered on this site that I know most about, but it's one of the ones I'll cover the least. Why? Because I hope you have a good grasp of news writing (you are a traditionally trained journalist, aren't you?) and that talking about subject-verb-object, AP Style (though I have something to say about that elsewhere), paragraph and sentence structure, and all the rest would be beating a dead horse. If you don't know news writing, or you want to brush up your skills, look to the Meta Resource post and there will be some links to follow.
Outside of the basics, I'll just say a few words:
- On the Web, headlines or post titles are absolutely crucial. People will not read your work if they don't get hooked by the head unless they're already interested in your subject, and maybe not even then.
- Headlines should ideally be tweetable or easily truncated.
- Headlines and ledes should use key words.
- Writing should be punchy, bright prose.
- Pay attention to Jakob Nielsen's proclamations on usability.
- Link to sources, to competitors, to readers.
- If you have to be first, note where information is unverified.
- Verify everything eventually.
- If you make a mistake, correct it at least as prominently as you displayed the erroneous information.
- Correct within the text rather than posting a whole new article.
- Learn the rules.
- Learn when to break the rules.
Mind Mapping
Last Updated on Monday, April 19 2010 14:45 Written by Pierce Presley Saturday, February 06 2010 10:13
Mind mapping can be a powerful tool for exploring, organizing and visualizing problems, websites, stories and even business models. It can be done with nothing more than pen or pencil and paper, or you can use any number of computer programs.
Mind mapping begins with a circle or oval in the middle of your page. In this instance, we put "Journalism Fast Forward" in the middle. Then we added the broad topics that became the sections. The we added the types of article, then the narrower topic areas that became the categories. We could add the story titles or subjects, but that would be a mess. Far better to start a new mind map around each section or category.
There are as many ways to mind map as there are people doing it. Give it a try!
— Pierce
