It Wasn't Sunil Tripathi

The Atlantic has a sobering write-up of how the Internet falsely identified missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi as one of the Boston bombing suspects yesterday.

[T]here was a full-on frenzy as thousand upon thousands of tweets poured out, many celebrating new media's victory in trouncing old media. It was all so shockingly new and the pitch was so high and it was so late at night on one of the craziest days in memory. That Redditors might have identified the bomber hours before anyone but law enforcement seemed like amazing redemption for people who'd supported Reddit's crowdsourcing efforts.

Hughes himself, the primary source of the information on Twitter, tweeted, "If Sunil Tripathi did indeed commit this #BostonBombing, Reddit has scored a significant, game-changing victory." And then later, he continued, "Journalism students take note: tonight, the best reporting was crowdsourced, digital and done by bystanders. #Watertown."

Within a few hours, however, NBC's Phillips had confirmed with his sources that two Chechnyan brothers were the primary suspects in the case. Their names and stories came out quickly. This horrible deed of misidentification ended mercifully quickly. Apologies were made.

Journalism students should still take note, of course - this is stuff you learn the first week of class. Don't make assumptions. Stuff from the police scanner is unconfirmed and should not be reported. Check and check and check your sources.

Whoops

Neglected the journalism blog again because I remembered I also like writing about fiction and music and cats and stuff.

If you're interested in reading any of that in no particular order, you can check out my Tumblr: cnell.tumblr.com.

Photography

A portrait of me from the photographers of the Otago Daily Times, during a training session last week.

Crucial lesson: keep the face in focus.

Law & Order: Dublin Edition

Court reporting has its moments. Especially in Ireland apparently.



"The plaintiff said of the experience, 'It frightened the shite out of me altogether, Lord Jesus.'"

Presidential Snark

Ahahaha:

Official White House Response to "Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016":

This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For

The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn't on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

• The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
• The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
• Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

That's awesome, I don't care who you voted for.

Review: Sweet Tooth

Originally published in the Greymouth Star, 10 January 2013

Imagine Jane Austen writing a spy novel set in 1970s London, and you’ll have a decent idea what to expect of the latest book from Atonement author Ian McEwan.

Beautiful, conservative Serena Frome, a third-rate mathematician with a passion for books, is groomed for recruitment to the British intelligence service by her much-older lover. She is assigned to the “Sweet Tooth” project, a secret effort to fight the Communism culture war by funnelling government money to anti-Communist writers.

Serena’s first recruit is Tom Haley, a charming artistic sort who writes short stories about lust, betrayal and self-delusion. Her fascination with these stories leads to an attraction to Tom and they begin an exciting affair, spending their weekends going to classy restaurants, drinking champagne and discussing literature.

But the longer the affair continues, the harder it is for Serena to keep her mission a secret or avoid the suspicions of MI5 – especially when Tom uses their money to write a dystopian novel about the excesses of capitalism.

Sweet Tooth is a classic McEwan book, with the same slow pace and long, introspective chapters as Atonement and On Chesil Beach. The Cold War discussions are interesting if you like history and politics, and the descriptions of British intelligence call to mind the dimly-lit bureaucratic intrigue of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

But if you’re hoping for a thriller, you’ll be disappointed. Early hints of violence and danger never go anywhere, and the only real surprise is a clever plot twist at the very end, which makes you want to go through the book all over again to pick up the clues you missed.

Body Image

The NZ Herald Online went unintentionally meta in this article about the need for positive female role models to battle "the epidemic of eating disorders and self-harming among young girls":

I can't tell if the ad undermines the article or reinforces it, but either way it shows the risk of combining news, advertising and automated web design.

Current Events

How's this for media gossip. Today NYT's Brian Stelter got the scoop that Current TV - famous for hiring, bickering with, firing and being sued by Keith Olbermann - has been bought by Al Jazeera, which means Elliot Spitzer, Jennifer Granholm and the other lefty pundits will be dropped too:

Al Jazeera plans to shut Current and start an English-language channel, which will be available in more than 40 million homes, with newscasts emanating from both New York and Doha, Qatar.

Time Warner Cable responded to this news by dropping Current TV, and right-wingers on Twitter started an Islamophobic hashtag game about new show ideas like "Stoned in Afghanistan" and "Arabia's Funniest Home Beheadings."

And now it turns out that Glenn Beck tried to purchase Current himself last year but was rejected because he's "not aligned to [their] point of view".

Remember when that scrappy documentary series "Vanguard" was doing award-winning exposés on organised crime and Olbermann was going to single-handedly save journalism from corporate interference? Where did it all go wrong, you guys? (About five minutes after KO signed on, yes, I know.)

The Making of "Snow Fall"

I finally got around to reading The New York Times's multimedia feature "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek", which has been attracting a lot of attention from web-savvy reporters.

Basically, it's a long, in-depth article about a deadly avalanche in the Cascades near Seattle, illustrated by videos, photographs, audio clips, slideshows and animations that come to life as you scroll down the page.

I really like the format. It combines classic long-form writing with the smooth interactive experience that people now expect from online media, and the graphics and videos make it easier to concentrate on the story and keep track of all the details.

In a team interview with Source, NYT's graphics director Steve Duenes explains: "We wanted to make a single story out of all the assets, including the text. So the larger project wasn’t a typical design effort. It was an editing project that required us to weave things together so that text, video, photography and graphics could all be consumed in a way that was similar to reading—a different kind of reading."

If this is where print journalism is headed, then I'm encouraged - but it's looking more and more likely that I'll need to dust off my computer science degree if I want my career to go anywhere. And here I thought I'd escaped.

2012 in 4 Minutes

Happy New Year.

 

via Ryan James Yezak

Orwell on Book Reviewers

One of my indulgences over Christmas was a little collection of George Orwell essays, one of those "Great Ideas" books from Penguin. I'd only read 1984 and Animal Farm before this, and I'd like to read his journalism and nonfiction - particularly now that his work isn't being crammed down my throat by high school English teachers.

I enjoyed (kinda) his essay "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," in which he describes such professionals as sad, frumpy little men surrounded by dusty papers and half-empty cups of tea.

"[T]he prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash ... but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever. The reviewer, jaded though he may be, is professionally interested in books, and out of the thousands that appear annually, there are probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about. If he is a top-notcher in his profession he may get hold of ten or twenty of them: more probably he gets hold of two or three. The rest of his work however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence humbug. He is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time."

Man, Orwell must have been a hoot at parties.

The Ezra Klein Show

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We've been seeing a lot of Ezra Klein on MSNBC lately. Washington Post's "Wonkblog" editor is now Rachel Maddow's go-to substitute host, and there are rumours floating around that he may get his own show. That's how Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry got their start on the network, after all.

I like the guy and he's really smart, so I wouldn't mind seeing him join the lineup. He needs work, though. You can tell he's trying to develop more on-screen charisma, but right now he's copying Maddow's inflections and mannerisms too much. (Don't worry, Ezra, Chris Hayes used to do that too and he's much better now.)

If the show rumours are true, my suspicion is that MSNBC is trying to tap into the geek love generated by Nate Silver's polling triumph in the 2012 election - which is funny, because Nate Silver apparently hates punditry.

P.S. Yes, I know I talk about MSNBC people all the time. I haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, it's just that Fox News is too absurd and CNN is too boring, and all my other favourite news sources are on the Internet. I think of the network as a tidy case study of everything that is good and bad about cable news.

Richard Engel, Superman

I'm relieved to hear that NBC's chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and his team are safe after being kidnapped and held for five days in Syria:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Engel's ordeal reminded me of his theory about the four stages of stress a reporter goes through while covering war zones, outlined in his book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq:

• Stage One: I'm invincible. Nothing can hurt me. I'm Superman.
• Stage Two: What I'm doing is dangerous. I might get hurt over here. I'd better be careful.
• Stage Three: What I'm doing is really dangerous. I am probably going to get hurt over here no matter how careful I am. Math and probability and time are working against me.
• Stage Four: I have been here too long. I am going to die over here. It is just a matter of time. I've played the game too long.

It's not time just yet, thank goodness. Welcome back, Richard.

Six Months In

I have been a full-time reporter at a daily paper for six months now. I made a list of things I'd learned when I was fresh out of journalism school, so I thought I'd add some of my practical experiences so far.

• Working in a small town is rough at first. It takes ages to figure out all the local gossip and even longer for people to trust you; and in the meantime there's nothing to do on the weekends and you can't get a decent coffee anywhere. But it's worth it in the long run, because you end up trying a bit of everything and learning about a part of society you might not be familiar with.
• Nothing really prepares you for interviewing a man who just got laid off from his job, or facing an angry parent whose child is being bullied at school because of an article you wrote. All you can do is stay calm, be fair, and try to have as much empathy as possible. Never lose sight of the fact that you are affecting people's lives in a very real way.
• You'll also get a lot of political staffers and corporate PR people angry with you, and there is aaaaabsolutely nothing wrong with that. You just annoy the crap out of them. (Politely.)

The Onion: "F*ck Everything"

The Onion nails it with their gut-wrenching article on the shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut - not just America's anger and despair, but also the thoughts running through reporters' heads as they try to cover a tragedy of this scale:

Despairing sources confirmed that the gunman, armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle—a fucking combat rifle, Jesus—walked into a classroom full of goddamned children where his mother was a teacher and, good God, if this is what the world is becoming, then how about we just pack it in and fucking give up, because this is no way to live. 

I mean, honestly, all 315 million Americans confirmed.

Sometimes journalistic detachment is impossible.

Character Sketch

A sketch from Michael Arthur of playwright Tony Kushner and MSNBC pundit Rachel Maddow at the "Duets" event at Joe's Pub in New York City, via MaddowBlog.

From the New Yorker: "[My persona is] not a fake me, but it is a slice of me. Like, I am a person who has depression, and I don’t let depressed Rachel on television."

Post-Industrial Journalism

Journos will find plenty to inspire and even more to worry about in "Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present", a study from Columbia Journalism School's Tow Centre. It's a dense read (check out Poynter's write-up if you're in a hurry) but worth setting aside an afternoon.

Basically, the report says that the transformation of American journalism is unavoidable, "that the journalism industry is dead but that journalism exists in many places", and journalists and news organisations have to be much more versatile in order to survive. Alarming, but kind of exciting if you like a challenge.

Hobbit Politics

I was enchanted with Lord of the Rings when the first film came out in 2001. I saw Fellowship in cinema literally a dozen times, and let's be honest, where do you think I got the idea to move to New Zealand in the first place?

So it's been interesting to live here during the filming and production of The Hobbit and realise just how much political maneuvering goes on in New Zealand's film industry these days - including the Prime Minister signing autographs on the red carpet, because he all but made these movies himself. And won the Rugby World Cup! Read it and weep, Labour.

You can get a sense of the behind-the-scenes lobbying and PR scandals from this political round-up by Bryce Edwards at the New Zealand Herald.

"Hollywood, by and large, swung in behind Barack Obama in the recent US presidential elections," Mr Edwards says. "Our own leader's relationship with the 'dream factory' is somewhat different, involving John Key swinging the Government, its limos, our taxes and even our laws in behind Hollywood."

Liberty Booze

If you want to brush up on the basics of the American Constitution, you could do worse than making yourself a drink (or nursing a hangover, in my case) and curling up with What Prohibition Has Done to America by Fabian Franklin.

Fabian was a civil engineer and mathematician who went on to become editor of the Baltimore News and later associate editor of the New York Evening Post.

He worked himself into a conservative fury over Prohibition in 1922, accusing supporters of the Eighteenth Amendment of perverting the Constitution, undermining America's respect for the law, destroying our federal system and weakening our sense of individual liberty.

The Founding Fathers, he declared, "did not for a moment entertain the idea of imposing upon future generations, through the extraordinary sanctions of the Constitution, their views upon any special subject of ordinary legislation. Such a proceeding would have seemed to them far more monstrous, and far less excusable, than that tyranny of George III and his Parliament which had given rise to the American Revolution."

Study Project

I've given in and bought a Kindle. The part of me that loves rummaging through second-hand bookshops is horrified, but in the end practicality won out. My reading list is too long, and I don't have the time or money to buy hardcover books, or wait for paperback editions, and then lug them around in boxes every time I change addresses. I'll still buy books that have special meaning to me, but for the most part I've gone digital.

I plan to step up my reading on journalism and politics, and the Kindle could be really useful for that. I can download free resources from websites like Project Gutenberg and then step away from the Internet to avoid distractions (ahem), and I can buy the latest books without traveling to a city or shipping them all the way from America. Not a lot of fancy politically-themed bookshops in Greymouth, you see.

What I'm hoping is that by following journalists and scholars on social media and doing independent study while learning basic reporting skills at my job, I can gain some insight and sharpen my focus on where I want my career to go. A four-year journalism degree is beyond my reach for now, but I suspect I can learn quite a lot just by knowing where to look.

We'll see how it goes. Expect more ramblings about what I'm reading, along with the usual snarky jokes. Like these ones!