Michael O'Connell, Author at It's All Journalism

#340 Genre films continue to dominate box office in 2018

Every January, journalists of all stripes look back to assess what the biggest stories of the previous year were. Nowhere is this annual reflection more noticeable than on the entertainment beat, where book reviewers and movie critics roll out their year-end Top 10 lists.

Last year, It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell sat down with Jason Fraley, the entertainment editor at WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C., to discuss his Top 10 movie list for 2017 and top grossing movies of that year. Fraley is back on the podcast this week with his latest year-end review.

“I enjoyed that there was a lot of range in the year,” Fraley said, of the 2018 crop of movies. “I think that the top, top movies were, I’d say, a cut below some previous years. One year you had Boyhood, Birdman, there were several big juggernauts released the same year, so I’d say a slight down tick on the top ones. But in terms of the general range, I’m super thrilled with it.”

It was in 2018 that for the fist time a genre film — The Shape of Water — took home the best picture Oscar at the Academy Awards Ceremony.

Genre movies continue to be among the top grossing movies of the year as well as the most critically acclaimed.

“Even the blockbuster superhero [film] was Black Panther, which we’re definitely going to get to near the top of the list. That was fantastic,” Fraley said. “That was a well made movie that was also the box office champ. A Quiet Place, just like Get Out last year, horror flicks were really well done and seen by a lot of people. That was, I think, in the top 15 of the box office, but also super well done, really acclaimed.”

But, Fraley assures us that serious movie lovers need not fret, musicals like A Star Is Born and festival darlings such as Roma, If Beale Street Could Talk, Green Book and BlacKkKlansman drew a great deal of attention from critics and moviegoers alike.

“In terms of overall macro-level, I think there was a lot of range this year, which I really appreciated,” Fraley said. “Because not every year you great great movies in every genre like that.”

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, producer Michael O’Connell welcomes WTOP entertainment editor Jason Fraley back to the podcast to discuss his Top 10 movies of 2018. They talk about some of the recent trends in the the film industry and which movies the public came out in droves to see.

#287 — That time of year when reporters count backwards

It’s All Journalism – Year in Review

Each December, the It’s All Journalism crew likes to look back at all the conversations we had over the past year. On this week’s podcast, Producers Nicole Ogrysko, Amber Healy, Amelia Brust and Michael O’Connell discuss their favorite podcast episodes of 2018 and what topics they’d like to cover in the new year.

We also looked back at the most downloaded episodes of 2018. Below you’ll find the 10 episodes produced in 2018 that our listeners downloaded the most. Do these match your favorite episodes of 2018? If not, why not take our anonymous online survey to let us know what episode was your favorite.

Top 10 podcast episodes of the year

#290 — What’s it like to report from North Korea?

#291 — Ear Hustle’s remarkable success in podcasting from prison

#296 — Cinematic video journalism shakes up old model of visual storytelling

#293 — Need new skills? ONA is here to help

#300 — The who, what and where of podcasting

#299 — Can journalism survive in a post-truth world?

#288 – Telling stories of the past to change the world’s future

#298 — Investigative journalism helps restore lives robbed by injustice

#297 — Learning, relearning and unlearning the magic of broadcast

#287 — That time of year when reporters count backwards

#337 Facebook shakes up how media pros interact with their audience

Facebook made a much publicized change to its algorithm early in 2018 that had a dramatic impact on what content users saw on their feeds. The move was made ostensively to weed out bogus news sites and bots spreading deceptive information. Greater emphasis was given to acquaintances and pages with which users frequently interacted.

“I think what happened is Facebook realized that there are a lot of people that didn’t necessarily believe in Facebook anymore and they’re a business and there’s a lot of businesses who are on there and use their advertising,” said Jayna Wilcox, senior digital sales strategist for 2060 Digital, the marketing arm of Hubbard Radio.

Part of Wilcox’s job is to engage with Hubbard’s audience through social media, both in online posts and advertising. According to her, Facebook’s changes had a big impact on how advertisers and news outlets used the platform.

“We have definitely, from an advertiser perspective, seen many things happen such as some of the targeting tools taken away,” she said. “There’s a lot more where you have to be authorized in many cases, depending on your industry or what type of ads you’re doing, especially political. So it’s really just cracked down on it and in an attempt to gain back the trust of a lot of its advertisers and the audiences.”

Despite the hurdles Facebook has thrown in front of media outlets, newsrooms and their marketing departments can still follow a few best practices to help improve performance.

“Number one, looking at it from an organic standpoint, make sure your page is optimized,” Wilcox said. “It’s as simple as updating information in your about section, which links right up to SEO [search engine optimization]. It’s as simple as making sure you are verified. Head into your settings and get that page verified so that you are keeping a consistent brand, whether that be throughout your website, your Facebook presence, your Instagram presence. So little things like that right off the bat are very important.”

Another not so obvious fix is varying the type of posts you add to your Facebook feed — and stop using stock photos, for chrissakes.

“Think about the type of content from a creative standpoint,” Wilcox said. “If you’re using a bunch of stock photos after stock photos, at some point the audience is gonna realize that that doesn’t feel organic and they want to feel like there’s a real person behind the message. So even something as simple to us going live on Facebook, seeing a face, a real person, you know, having that combination and variety of content will also help in that. Just from an organic standpoint.”

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, producer Michael O’Connell talks to Jayna Wilcox, senior digital sales strategist for 2060 Digital, about how newsrooms and their marketing departments can improve their audience engagement on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

#335 It’s time to design newsrooms people want to work in

The modern newsroom is changing — not just in the digital space but in the real world as well. Newsrooms used to be bustling, cavernous and cluttered, great for putting out a daily paper, but not ideal for fostering collaboration and improving employee morale.

Dana Coester, a professor at the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University, learned a lot about modern newsroom design during the university’s makeover of its Innovation Center. The aim for that project was to design a space that reflected the way newsrooms were changing their work spaces. After some more research on the subject, she published a study for the American Press Institute about how to improve newsroom design.

Dana Coester

“I heard editors again, again talk about the things that they hated about their old newsrooms,” she said. “They would describe these as these crazy little hovels.”

Redesigning a newsroom isn’t just about making it look better. It’s more about realigning the space to fit and enhance the employees’ workflow.

“The industry as a whole has moved away from that sort of cubicle model anyway,” she said “But if you think about newsrooms, journalists aren’t often at their desks and because they are out reporting and the idea that you would have all of this real estate given over to row after row of mostly empty desks.”

Add on top of that the ongoing downsizing across the journalism industry and many newsrooms had become very dire places to work.

“That’s kind of a morale downer, when you see an acre of chairs, in a really big [space] like the New York Times newsroom,” Coester said. “And, when that space can be given over to all of these sort of flexible, movable spaces that people can come and go, use as needed, and you aggregate sort of in impromptu ways.”

For her study, Coester visited a number of publications, including Quartz and the Virginian-Pilot. She discovered newsrooms that had incorporated more open space, natural lighting and designated gathering spaces to promote a positive work environment and more collaboration.

“They’re all of these theories and innovation about how people approach objects and spaces when things have assigned sort of parameters, then people tend to only think of it in the context of the assigned parameters,” Coester said. “So when you have furniture that’s movable, when you have spaces that are not designated spaces. Now of course we had our sunlit studios and things that have to be specific to a particular activity. But the more you move away from having spaces being assigned spaces to a particular activity, the more it forces the people who are using them to use their imaginations and the space.”

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, Producer Michael O’Connell talks to Dana Coester, a professor at the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University, who recently published a study for the American Press Institute about how some publications are redesigning their newsrooms to make them more collaborative and positive work spaces.

#330 Lawsuit against Trump aims to counter assault on free press

What happens when the person sworn to protect the Constitution, through rhetoric and governmental actions, begins to threaten the First Amendment? For a group of nonprofits interested in protecting freedom of expression, the answer is to sue.

On Oct. 16, PEN America, the Protect Democracy Project, and the Yale School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump for the attitudes he’s expressed toward press freedom as well as using his governmental powers to threaten media entities.

Kristy Parker

“Dating back to the early days of his campaign, he started issuing threats that if he became president, he would use the government powers to retaliate against media entities that were critical of him,” said Kristy Parker, legal counsel with Protect Democracy, who represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

“He started singling out again from the very early days of his campaign, entities like CNN and the Washington Post, and since he has become president, he has continued with that behavior and has actually used his government powers to retaliate against media entities that he believes have criticized him or have covered him unfavorably,” she said.

Trump’s attacks have not been limited to just words. The Justice Department has taken antitrust enforcement action against the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. The latter is the parent company of CNN, one of the frequent targets of the president’s ire. Trump also issued an executive order authorizing the Postal Service to look at raising the postal rates for Amazon, a company founded by Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post.

“[PEN America] felt it was very important to do something to make a stand about the fact that these things actually are not just a a violation of norms by this president, but actually things that violate our First Amendment,” said Parker.

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Kristy Parker, legal counsel for the Protect Democracy Project, about the lawsuit her organization, PEN America and the Yale School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic recently filed against President Donald Trump. They discuss why the three organizations think the president’s actions are not just out of the norm, but violations of the First Amendment.

#304 — Fighting for truth through transparency and sunlight

#327 – Black Dance Magazine aims for January relaunch

Dance has long been an important part of Norma Porter’s life.

“I’ve been dancing since about 4,” she said. “I started at a local studio … (and) moved on to a program at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell smiles with his former classmate Norma Porter, publisher of Black Dance Magazine.

But by the time she was in high school, she was a little burned out on that world and took a break.

Porter’s parents wanted her to pursue a degree in a program that would have better odds at a stable career, leading her to study journalism with a minor in dance at American University.

It was the interactive journalism program at American University that put dance back in the forefront of her life.

A class assignment involved either speaking to a journalism startup about their business model and how they got off the ground or to develop a business model for a new publication.

“I had been out of dance for a long time,” she said. Porter had an idea for a publication focused on dancers, and dancers of color in particular, written by dancers and aimed at schools that had otherwise been largely ignored by mainstream media publications.

“There are two major black dance companies that most people know about, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and the Dance Theater of Harlem. Those were the only companies you saw,” Porter said. “There’s got to be more. I think the journalistic person in me felt there had to be other people like me, in cities across the country, or self-taught dancers that were making dance and performing. Their stories needed to be told.”

She discussed her idea with one of her former teachers, Carol Foster with the International Association of Blacks in Dance, who mentioned the organization’s annual conference that happened to be coming to Washington, D.C., in just a few months.

“I was pushed out there and it was interesting because I probably would’ve never done it,” she said.

Porter introduced the concept for Black Dance Magazine in early 2013 and published three issues that year before going on hiatus so Porter could take a longer, more serious look at the publication and its audience.

Now Porter lives in Philadelphia, working at Temple University, spending a lot of her time with the Boyer College of Music and Dance. She’s seeing more dance and getting ready to relaunch the magazine in January 2019. This time around, thought, the magazine has nonprofit status through its relationship with the International Association of Blacks in Dance. Porter is also running a GoFundMe fundraiser to start the project out right.

On this week’s It’s All Journalism, Producer Michael O’Connell talks to publisher Norma Porter about the relaunch of Black Dance Magazine, which tells the stories of dancers of color. Porter is running a GoFundMe fundraiser for the magazine, which will relaunch in January.

Underground press pioneer John Wilcock, 91, dies

John Wilcock, 91, a British journalist who was a pioneer in the underground press of the 1950s and 1960s, died Thursday in a care facility in Ojai, California.

It’s All Journalism interviewed Wilcock in 2017, and he spoke about his early involvement in the underground press in the 1950s.

“There were nine papers in New York City, nearly all dailies or weeklies, fairly big papers,” Wilcock said. “I’d worked through papers with a million, 2 million, 3 million circulation. I’d always been very interested in little papers. Although there were plenty of little papers in England, or were then, there were hardly any of that type of journalism here.”

John Wilcock

An ambitious man, Wilcock and a group of four friends founded the Village Voice, a legendary publication read religiously by the trendy, the counterculture, the artists and the young in New York. It is also considered the first alternative newsweekly in the country.

“We weren’t much interested in daily news but we were interested in people and what they did,” Wilcock recalled. “We had everything in [the paper] — sports, every type of thing except current events.”

While the entire team viewed themselves as equals, Wilcock quickly became the paper’s columnist. According to legend, the late Leonard Cohen, among many other notables, read Wilcock’s columns without fail.

Wilcock, in addition to helping to create the Village Voice in New York City and finding himself near the middle of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, was the editor of Echo Magazine.

As the ‘60s turned into the ‘70s, the underground press Wilcock helped to pioneer in the U.S. grew. But after 1972, the publications that might’ve been considered “underground” a few years prior had changed mindset.

“They might’ve called themselves the underground press but it was different,” he said. “They were grown-ups who acted in a very civilized way and didn’t play around. We were very serious but we weren’t tied down like the straight press, doesn’t say certain things, can’t say things in a certain way. We were totally free and easy, we printed anything that appealed to us.”

Ethan Persoff, a writer and graphic novelist, who chronicled Wilcock’s career in a series of comics, spoke to It’s All Journalism about Wilcock’s journey through American journalism and the art world.

“Even approaching 90, I’ve never known someone to be so urgent and capable about pushing things into a kind of being,” Persoff said. “I think that was his role in the ‘60s. That part of your soul doesn’t die out.”

Wilcock’s story involved him in the same orbit as many famous people during high-profile events, yet his name isn’t fodder for history books.

“All these people he was around, they were permanently remembered,” Persoff said. “How is it he gets left out? The more you learn about John, you do see, and this is represented really nicely in the comic, he would make something and then something would happen and he’d get thrown out.”

#246 – Journey down the underground press rabbit hole

#318 – These may be the 750 best movies of all time

If you’ve listened to Jason Fraley’s previous appearances on our podcast, you know that he is passionate about movies.

Fortunately, his job as the entertainment editor at WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C., affords him the opportunity to share his love for good filmmaking with his audience, both online and on the air.

Jason Fraley is the entertainment editor at WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C.

But even Fraley admits that the daily grind of covering the entertainment scene can get a bit tiring. It’s a challenge sometimes to keep things fresh. So, as a treat for his audience, he created a comprehensive Best Movies of All Time list to help people get through the dog days of August.

As a digital journalist and fan of movies myself, I can attest that people love best movie lists. And Fraley’s list is a great example of how to take a simple idea and roll it out in big way.

Rather than a Top 10 ranking or a Top 100 list like the one released by the American Film Institute, Fraley has brought together 750 great movies and divided them into the Top 25 films in 30 different genres. Every day, from Aug. 1-30, Fraley is teasing out a new genre with a video, which he adds to the interactive blog he’s created. It’s there that he talks to his readers, defending his picks and hearing all about their favorite flicks that he somehow forgot to include.

It’s a massive, fun project that anybody who loves good movies will get lost in.

On this week’s It’s All Journalism, producer Michael O’Connell talks to Jason Fraley, the entertainment editor at WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C., about the Best Movies of All Time list he’s created. The multimedia project includes videos, an interactive blog and a breakdown of 750 great movies into 30 unique categories.

#287 — That time of year when reporters count backwards

Jason Fraley is the entertainment editor at WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C.

Creating a Podcast: How to Edit Audio in Audacity

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell explains how to edit and mix down multiple audio tracks to create a finished podcast using the free open-source Audacity program.

#312 – Podcasting: A way to promote press freedom abroad

It seemed like a crazy idea, traveling 7,000 miles to talk to Tajik journalists about podcasting. According to Reporters without Borders, Tajikistan ranks 149th out of 180 countries on the 2018 World Press Freedom Index — the U.S. ranks 40th. Podcasting was the last thing the country needed.

At least, that’s what I thought at first.

But spending 9 days in country talking to young people and media professionals, I realized that podcasting could be something of great valuable in Tajikistan.

Certainly, the country, its people and those journalists striving to tell impactful stories there, face many challenges.

From an economic standpoint, the country is poor. Many people emigrate to other countries in the region, primarily Russia, to earn money to send back home.

From a technical standpoint, Tajikistan does have the internet and many people own smartphones, but service is slow and expensive.

Much of the information the public receives originates from state-run media and there are laws against criticizing government officials, in particular President Emomali Rahman. There is an independent press, but it struggles, both politically and economically, under these restrictions.

So how does podcasting make a difference?

: Guzal Mahkamova interviewed me for Tajik radio and then I interviewed her about what it’s like being a journalist in Tajikistan for It’s All Journalism

: This group of young journalists helped me to record a podcast in Khujand.

: My home base for much of the trip was the American Space in the capital city of Dushanbe. I recorded several podcasts in both English and Tajik.

: I got to talk about podcasting and being a journalist with members of the journalism club at the American Space in Isfara.

: I spent a Saturday in Bokhtar recording two podcasts with students from Bohktar State University. This group recorded a conversational podcast in Tajik about things that scared them.

: This group of students from Bokhtar State University recorded a podcast about learning to speak English.

Podcasting is a bottom-up form of storytelling. It’s cheap to produce. You don’t need a big media outlet to create or distribute it. The creator controls the content.

It’s also a personal medium. Unlike video or text which requires the audience’s full attention, podcasting is consumed passively, often alone. Audio stories consumed this way have a powerful effect on listeners, they are moved emotionally by what they hear and inspired to take action.

The students and journalists I spoke to wanted to tell stories that made a difference in their communities. Most of them had never heard a podcast before. Those that had certainly hadn’t heard one in their own language.

Part of the presentations I gave involved playing American podcasts to demonstrate the different styles of audio storytelling. However, I quickly figured out what was more meaningful for my audience was to help them create a podcast in Tajik or Russian, the second-most commonly spoken language. Once they heard their voices in that format, it all clicked.

The highlight of my trip took place in Bokhtar, where we recorded two podcasts, one in English and the other in Tajik. While the first was a simple Q&A interview, the second was a free-form conversation about what things the six participants were most afraid of. There was no structure, just six young people talking and cracking jokes. It was a true podcast.

It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell travels to Tajikistan at the invitation of the U.S. State Department’s Speakers Program to train young journalists in podcasting.