Center for Citizen Media

Tom Stites, a former newspaper editor and a deep thinker about the journalism craft, gave a speech last summer that won plenty of well-deserved attention. In that talk — which we guest-posted here, entitled “Is media performance democracy’s critical issue?” — he posed a key question about our future.

Now he’s back with an essay about the need for great journalism. It appears here in four parts. (You can also read the entire essay here; we’ll also post a PDF version soon. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

Here’s the final installment :

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Columbia Journalism Review: Parsing the “Surge”: Now we have “surge,” the word that’s been recruited by the administration to sum up its new Iraq policy, to be unveiled in a speech tomorrow night. Used to describe the addition of 20,000 troops to the Baghdad area, “surge” has become, in the last few weeks, part of the public discourse on Iraq (i.e., as one anonymous Republican strategist told the New York Times, “They’re going to cast it as a choice between withdrawal and surge”). The word has the benefit of seeming active, strong, and quick – a surge is a lightening strike, over and done, the opposite of, say, a quagmire. The other advantage is the other words that “surge” replaces, like “escalation,” with its Vietnam-era connotation.

The task for the press has been to make sure that it’s clear that this is President Bush’s word, a descriptor that at the very least belongs within quotation. So far, so good. It seems that a history of being burned by insufficient skepticism of the Bush administration and its policies has taught journalists and editors to put nearly everything in quotes.

The media’s willingness — again — to be stenographers instead of actual journalists is tiring. Not surprising, though.

Tom Stites, a former newspaper editor and a deep thinker about the journalism craft, gave a speech last summer that won plenty of well-deserved attention. In that talk — which we guest-posted here, entitled “Is media performance democracy’s critical issue?” — he posed a key question about our future.

Now he’s back with an essay about the need for great journalism. It appears here in four parts, which we’ll run today through Thursday. (You can also read the entire essay here; we’ll also post a PDF version soon. (Part 1, Part 2.)

Here’s the third installment :

Continue reading →

(I originally wrote this for PR Week magazine.)

Several weeks ago, UCLA acknowledged that some of its computers had been hacked. Obeying a state law, it notified more than 800,000 people that their personal data, including Social Security numbers, might have ended up in the wrong hands.

The fact that the data got loose wasn’t all that striking. Unfortunately, that’s all too common. What struck me was this statement from a hapless UCLA honcho: “We have a responsibility to safeguard personal information, an obligation that we take very seriously.”

When and where have I heard that before? All kinds of times and places, actually. It’s becoming a mantra that means almost nothing.

Try this: Plug “we take” and “very seriously” into a Google News or Yahoo News search. You’ll get hundreds of hits, albeit some repeats, where some big institution – corporate, educational, government, whatever – makes a giant blunder and then issues a “we take (insert the violated policy) very seriously” statement.

The news indexes of Google and Yahoo contain only the recent past, and not all media organizations. Run the same query on LexisNexis, and the number of hits grows exponentially. In other words, we have a trend.

Privacy violations, a drumbeat these days, constantly get this treatment. On December 15, the AP reported charges against a New Hampshire teenager who allegedly stole credit-card numbers from McDonald’s customers, with this quote from the company: “We take these matters very seriously…”

On December 14, after it was revealed that patients’ medical data went missing from a data-management company in Ohio, the healthcare provider’s spokesman intoned, “(W)e take this sort of thing very seriously,” according to a Pennsylvania TV station.

Taking things seriously isn’t limited to privacy slip-ups. A Texas district attorney, reacting to a Dallas newspaper’s successful campaign to unseal Catholic Church documents about alleged sexual-abuse cover-ups, said, “We take these kinds of abuse scenarios very seriously” (The Dallas Morning News, December 15).

And when a Maryland day-care center lost track of two children in a recent week, a spokeswoman told the local newspaper, “We are very sorry this has happened at our center and we take this matter very seriously.”

Of all the taking-seriously pronouncements, the day-care one seems most genuine. First, according to the news report, the center quickly and toughly dealt with the staffers who were allegedly responsible. Second, losing track of kids is ruinous for a day-care center.

Almost invariably, however, when I read or hear someone taking such things seriously, I think: They care mainly about getting caught, not screwing up. Otherwise, these things would happen far less often.

No doubt, this language is at least partly lawyer-driven. You can take something seriously – sort of, kind of acknowledging the mistake – while avoiding a hint of actual guilt.

But PR weasel-words don’t make the situation even slightly better, especially given the frequency of their use. They fuel cynicism and devalue the language.

A straight apology? That, we might take seriously.

Tom Stites, a former newspaper editor and a deep thinker about the journalism craft, gave a speech last summer that won plenty of well-deserved attention. In that talk — which we guest-posted here, entitled “Is media performance democracy’s critical issue?” — he posed a key question about our future.

Now he’s back with an essay about the need for great journalism. It appears here in four parts, which we’ll run today through Thursday. (You can also read the entire essay here; we’ll also post a PDF version soon. (Part 1 is here.)

Here’s the second installment :

Continue reading →

UPDATED

Tom Stites, a former newspaper editor and a deep thinker about the journalism craft, gave a speech last summer that won plenty of well-deserved attention. In that talk — which we guest-posted here, entitled “Is media performance democracy’s critical issue?” — he posed a key question about our future.

Now he’s back with an essay about the need for great journalism. It appears here in four parts, which we’ll run today through Thursday. (You can also read the entire essay here; we’ll also post a PDF version soon.)

Here’s the first installment:

Continue reading →

You might think that corporations are the most top-down oriented institutions when it comes to communications. I suspect that tendency is widely shared — and that unions are among the more reluctant when it comes to embracing conversational media.

This seemed clear this morning during a speech and subsequent workshop this morning with PR people from the National Education Association, the biggest union representing public-school teachers in America. Again again, the discussion came around to what some of the union folks clearly considered the dangers in being considerably more open and conversational with the NEA’s various constituencies.

I urged them to consider the opportunities more strongly than any potential dangers. I say the same thing when offering ideas to corporate folks, and am continually struck by the old-media orientation that persists in both camps.

One of the most telling moments of the session came when we were chatting about whether the union websites should point to their opponents’ sites. To me, this is an obvious thing to do — to create educational portals that lead people to varying sides of a vital national debate over the future of public education. To the NEA folks, this was a lot less obvious, and in at least one man’s view a total nonstarter.

People who are advocating for one side of an issue make a mistake, I believe, when they don’t directly engage with their opponents. I’m not suggesting that the NEA put up prominent links to some of the nuttier organizations that consider public education an evil, not a vital national policy and resource. (Actually, it might be a good idea, given that most rational people would find the NEA utterly moderate by comparison).

But there’s lots to gain, and little to lose, in having the confidence of one’s own ideas to publicly debate the issues. At the very least, it forces people to make a better case for their own views, because the other side(s) will poke holes in flimsy arguments.

We all learn more from people who disagree with us than from people who agree. That argues for more transparency in communications, and more conversation.

Micah Sifry: How-To: Seven Ways to Find Local Political Blogs. If all politics is local, then locally-focused blogs are obviously important to anyone engaged in politics. But since the internet doesn’t come with zipcodes attached to urls, it’s not obvious how to discover these nodes of conversation and community? How to find blogs that are local hubs? Here are seven easy (and free) steps you can take.

Meanwhile, Andrew Rasiej pitches A Better Buzzword: “voter-generated content.”

Slate’s Jack Shafer looks at the “stupidest drug stories of the week,” in what he calls only the “latest examples of rotten drug journalism” — an epidemic that shows no sign of abating.

UPDATED

Nielsen BuzzMetrics discusses its purported “Top 100 Blog Posts of 2006” with a brief introduction, but makes the actual list only available in PDF format. Lame.

UPDATE: The list is now online in a non-lame HTML format

The measure used by the company is the number of links to the individual post by individual blogs, which is arguably a good metric.

But the survey puts the (terrific) Crooks and Liars site into the top 100 almost two dozen times, which shows the difficulty of this measurement. Why? Because as far as I can tell, all of the links are to posts where C&L was simply republishing videos from other sources. For the most part, pointers to those postings are, in fact, pointers to the videos, not the C&L commentary.

Lists like this may not be all that illuminating, but they definitely are good PR for companies that put them out, which I suppose is their main purpose.