ItsAllJournalism, Author at It's All Journalism

Exercise 3 – Telling a Story with Identifiable Sound

Podcasts are an audio medium, so a produced piece needs to fill in all the details that our other senses would normally pick up on. How do you tell someone that it’s night or day? Or if you’re inside or outside? Maybe you’re telling a story about a sea captain on boat. Does the narrator just say, “Captain Davy Jones walked a across the deck of his tugboat?” Is that the best, most interesting way to relay that information? Probably not.

Audio may at first seem to be a limited storytelling medium, but it’s actually superior in many ways because of its limitations. All you need to do is engage the audience with your words, your voice and the sounds you use to illustrate your story. Those are all things you can control.Continue Reading …

Exercise 4 – Editing an Audio Interview for a Podcast

Occasionally, a producer will have to edit a piece of audio they didn’t record and make it work as a standalone podcast. This means cleaning up the audio to improve the sound quality, identifying the strongest elements and weaving them together to tell a cohesive narrative. They may also have to record wraparound narration and insert other audio elements, such as natural sound and music.

Instructions: In November 2016, I interviewed Meredith Somers, a reporter for Federal News Radio. The interview was edited and posted as an episode of the It’s All Journalism podcast.Continue Reading …

#254 – Cartoonist Adam Zyglis and the all-consuming news cycle

Reporters have beats, starting each day with an understanding of what’s expected of them and their work for the next few hours.

Cartoonists wake up with a blank slate, a clean screen, with a looming deadline and no shortage of stories to illustrate.

“Church and State” by Adam Zyglis (May 7, 2017)

Adam Zyglis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Buffalo News, starts his day responding to readers.

“I feel responsibility to reply to readers and engage them and get the conversation going,” he says. After that, he’s left to ponder whether his editorial cartoon for the day will be local or national, something that reflects his life as a father in view of a bigger story or divining a way to make the international reflect the city he serves.

“Reporters have certain beats but editorial cartooning, anything of interest to the reader is fair game to you – sports, education, local issues, state issues, national, international. The struggle is to stay as current as you can and stay informed enough” to get a salient point across in a small space.

A constant consumer of news, between NPR on the car radio and talking with and reading the work of his reporter colleagues, Zyglis believes cartoonists draw what they know and, in some sense, what they feel.

“Nation of Immigrants” by Adam Zyglis (Feb. 1, 2017)

“I think a lot of cartoonists, one tool we use it to take a part of current culture and use that to make a statement on current events we’re talking about,” he says. “I’m always consuming whatever’s out there and following my colleagues as inspiration. I try to be original, but every cartoonist should see what’s out there.”

Oddly, Zyglis didn’t major in art in college. “I was raised by super practical parents and was talked out of art school,” he says. Instead, he studied computer science and math, thinking he’d bring together the left and right sides of his brain in computer graphics. The suggestion of an Honors English professor to draw for the university paper moved things in a different direction.

“Math, you’re working in symbols. You break down a problem into an abstract formula and create a solution,” he says. “Political cartoons are all symbols. If you look at expressing an opinion as a problem you need to solve using creativity, it’s like in higher maths, solving theorems.”

He also likens editorial cartoons to poetry, using symbols and select phrases that could have multiple layers of meaning to convey a message. It’s a technique he uses often and one that was noted by the Pulitzer Prize committee awarding him the honor in 2015.

— Amber Healy

Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Adam Zyglis of The Buffalo News tells It’s All Journalism producers Amber Healy and Michael O’Connell about the challenges of covering the current political climate. He also talks about he tries to highlight the important stories that often get overlooked.

#129 – Cartoonists react to Paris attack

#253 – Newslab trains journalists to master digital media

In her career as a journalist and teacher, Deborah Potter knows the underlying skills needed to do the job well haven’t changed much.

“There are common issues journalists and newsrooms are dealing with,” says Potter, president and executive director of Newslab. “Writing is still huge. I still go into newsrooms and do writing workshops. There are still ways to improve your writing. That’s a passion of mine since I was a working journalist myself.”

Deborah Potter is the president and executive director of Newslab.

Potter spent the first portion of her career at CBS News, working on both the radio and television teams. In the mid ‘90s she left network television after a stint with CNN and tried her hand at teaching, spending a year at American University in Washington, D.C.. She was recruited to the Poynter Institute in Florida and, after spending three years there she was recruited again, this time to help kick off Newslab.

“At the time (it was) a one-year, let’s see what happens project, funded by the Park Foundation,” she says. “The goal was to figure out a project to help local television do a better job of covering important stories.”

Funding for the initial year was extended for several more, but then Potter and her team were left to make it viable. Newslab offers trainings and workshops to newsrooms, providing tools and insights on how to continually adapt and improve media practices to best serve readers, listeners and viewers.

“We no longer focus exclusively on television. We’re doing a lot of stuff with digital and how you can tell stories on different platforms differently, and you should because they really are different,” she says. “When ‘new media,’ as it was called at one time, first started, you could just take the same story and essentially present it on different platforms. … I hope that’s not what people are doing anymore. Stories need to be told differently.”

For example, Potter recalls early advice to not try and do too much with video on websites because “you can’t tax these pipes too much. Now everyone’s got HD video in their pocket. It’s changed a lot in terms of what capacity is. The ways you’re going to tell a story have changed.”

— Amber Healy

Deborah Potter, president and executive director of Newslab, draws on her career as a broadcast journalist at CBS News and CNN, to help train newsrooms on how to make the most of what “new media” has to offer. She offers her take on the current state of digital media and interviews It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about his upcoming book, Turn Up the Volume — A Down and Dirty Guide to Launching a Podcast, to boot.

#240 – A funny thing happened on the way to the newsroom

#252 – Going native: Branded content helps sustain journalism

Readers would rather have branded content available through their favorite news organization’s website than see a pop-up or banner ad, but publishers and ad creators need to understand what type of content will best speak to that audience for their joint venture to be effective.

Melanie Deziel, founder of MDeziel Media, the first editor of branded content for the New York Times and publisher of The Overlap League newsletter, says her charge is to “help publishers and advertisers work together to create co-branded stories that are going to appeal to them in a way that’s hopefully additive to them,” not confusing or distracting.

Melanie Deziel

She’s worked not only with the New York Times but also Time, Inc., owner of Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Food & Wine and of course Time magazine, to incorporate branded media that resonates and adds to the readers’ experience while on their website or in their publication. But knowing what the audience expects and wants from a given publisher is key.

“For a long time, advertisers were coming to publishers and media companies solely for their reach,” she says. “They wanted to get in front of that audience, that banner. Now we’re able to sell our storytelling expertise and our knowledge of the audience in a way that hopefully creates much better content for the audience. The audience gets a better ad experience, the advertiser gets to tell more in-depth stories than they could in standard (advertising practices) and the publisher or media company finds new revenue streams that satisfy both the advertisers and the readers.”

In the era of “fake news,” Deziel stresses that most native advertising content has nothing to do with breaking news coverage and great lengths are taken to ensure readers can clearly and easily differentiate paid content from news articles.

“We want to make sure disclosure is clear,” she says. “No advertiser wants to pay for content that no one knows they paid for. That’s part of the value proposition for them, to get their name in front of the audience as a provider of good content. The advertiser wants clear disclosure and labeling.”

Some publishers are incorporating wholly different URLs to distinguish native branded content from their news articles, such as “paidpost.nytimes.com instead of nytimes.com,” Deziel says. It’s not universal that all publishers are taking this step, but it’s a tactic the industry is considering and moving toward.

As for confusing sponsored content with “fake news,” it comes down to transparency and timing.

“Given how long it takes to create content, going back and forth and getting approvals, it’s rarely timely content. … It’s typically more lifestyle content, tip or instructional content, profiles of individuals,” posts that are more evergreen. “Hopefully those two things in combination allow us to make sure there’s not a lot of confusion in critical breaking-news scenarios of sponsored content muddying the conversation. The more we deal with fear and justified skepticism from our audience, the more pressure it puts on us as sponsored content creators to make sure we’re doing our part” to eliminate confusion.

Melanie Deziel, founder of MDeziel Media, the first editor of branded content for the New York Times and publisher of The Overlap League newsletter, talks to It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the growth of native advertising as a revenue source for digital news outlets.

#119 — Branded Content: The New York Times finds new life in old business model

#251 – Tribeworthy wants to be ‘Yelp for news consumers’

If it were possible to tell, before reading an article, whether the author wrote from a biased perspective, would people choose not to read it?

Chase Palmieri is the CEO of Tribeworthy, a platform he describes as “Yelp for news consumers.” Users on TribeWorthy give ratings to articles based on the lack of bias, logical fallacies or other manipulative techniques or practices that might try to sway a reader’s opinion with emotion instead of facts.

Chase Palmieri is the CEO of Tribeworthy.

Palmieri comes from a long line of entrepreneurs and went to school to follow in his family’s footsteps, but he didn’t want to start “businesses to pay the bills. I wanted to try to solve some big problem.” He’s been responsible for his family restaurants’ Yelp campaign for several years, which provided inspiration for his entrepreneurial endeavor.

“I see how Yelp changed the environment for restaurants, how they operation, how they think about customers and feedback and how it’s raised the standards,” he says. “I was wondering, as an avid news consumer, why I’m not able to leave any of this feedback on articles, feedback or accountability to the authors at news outlets.”

He pulled together a team of six friends, all self-proclaimed news junkies, and since January 2016 have been developing Tribeworthy.

“We’d post stories and we would talk to each other and discuss problems within that story and identify these flaws in these articles, which is kind of what led to Tribeworthy and crowd-contested media. The idea was we were working together on these Facebook groups to identify what were credible sources, what were the problems with the information, what was the spin.”

Palmieri says he understands why people like getting their news from Facebook, even as the social network has acknowledged its role in spreading bad information during the previous election cycle. Facebook users “can see on the article what other people they know are thinking and feeling about that article.”

On TribeWorthy, users begin by selecting whether an article can be trusted or if there’s something to contest.

“When you contest an article, it brings you to four main categories: Bias, illogical, not credible or mistake,” Palmieri says. “If you found that the author was using a particular logical fallacy, you would select ‘illogical’ and then you can actually select which logical fallacy (was used, including) red herring or straw man. You’d be able to tag that fallacy to the article so the next person who comes to that article can see that perhaps the author was using that logical fallacy as an appeal to emotion to try and manipulate the reader.”

He does understand that people will wonder whether users will manipulate the ratings on articles based on their own particular preferences and biases.

“The most you can do to hurt or bring down an article is to claim it has a particular bias,” Palmieri says. “You can’t even identify it as a right or left-wing bias. You can say an article has a bias, an agenda behind it, but in doing so, we’re going to allow articles that don’t speak from that perspective to rise to the top. People can more quickly find the most objective and significant articles of the day.”

— Amber Healy

Chase Palmieri talks to It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell about Tribeworthy, a platform he describes as “Yelp for news consumers.” TribeWorthy users rate articles based on a lack of bias, logical fallacies or other manipulative techniques or practices that might try to sway a reader’s opinion with emotion instead of facts.

#229 – Uncovering fake, clickbait-y and not really ‘news’ news sites

#250 – Engaging readers while keeping out the nasty

Even the most openminded parties need gatekeepers.

News platforms and websites are no different says Daniel Ha, co-founder and executive officer of Disqus, the comment management system Ha created with a long-time friend just about a decade ago. They met as teenagers and bonded over their shared enjoyment in creating and building online communities, whether in the form of chat rooms or other online meeting spaces for likeminded people.

Daniel Ha is the executive officer and co-founder of Disqus, the commenting platform.

“Disqus started, now that I think about it, back then, we wanted to find a way to build for the future of online communities,” Ha says. He noticed, as the internet grew and expanded, that people were naturally collecting together within single-focused groups and, as that process evolved, a community leader and thought leader would emerge. “All these participants were becoming content creators. This thesis that the future of online communities and how they would plug into media online was evolving and it needed to fit with the online publisher’s interest.”

To be successful, an online community – or, in Disqus’ case, a network of online communities – needs to have a clearly set tone and expectations for behavior established.

“If you’re not going to be a host or set the tone for the party, is it going to be a frat party or a wine and cheese affair, and you don’t control the guest list, you’re going to have anyone and everyone in there,” cluttering the message and distracting from the topic at hand, he says. “Every single good online community that exists, whether it’s a subreddit or using Disqus or Facebook for comments (on a publication’s website), they thrive because they have people … paying attention, setting the tone and creating a good atmosphere for the best people to participate and driving off people who are just there to create trouble.”

If those troublemakers should find their way into a comments section, Disqus has new tools and methods on hand to address them. Unsurprisingly, it’s something that’s come up from users more in the past few months than in the past.

In addition to refining their profanity filter, the team behind Disqus is incorporating new tools that are “less of a hammer when it comes to banning people,” including a “time out” space where people are temporarily suspended from participating and posting comments. Another is stealthier: “You can ban a user and they can participate but the only people who see their comments are themselves, so they’re not incentivized to create a separate account and jump back into the fray.”

Ha and his team also are working on new toxicity controls, “using our data and working with partners to pick up on good moderation habits and using that to suggest actions on what content may be considered toxic, which ones might be hate speech or harassment. Those are tools we want to provide.”

— Amber Healy

Daniel Ha, executive officer and co-founder of the Disqus commenting platform, talks to It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about how websites can engage their readers in conversations on their comment boards. He discusses strategies for keeping out trolls and developing a rich social experience with your audience.

#173 – Tech thwarts threat of online trolls

#249 – Blake Gopnik and the art of art criticism

It’s been nearly 20 years since Blake Gopnik accidentally became an art critic.

Formally trained as an art historian “with a dose of philosophy and psychology thrown in,” Gopnik’s first break came at the Globe and Mail in Toronto when that paper’s main art critic went on book leave and Gopnik filled in as a freelancer. When the art critic left for another job, Gopnik was hired to replace him

Blake Gopnik is a critic-at-large for artnet News and writes about art and design for the New York Times.

“I was there, I had my pencil sharpened and I was ready to replace him for the summer,” Gopnik recalls. “Then he got a different job and left and there I was, holding the bag, at Canada’s major newspaper as their art critic.”

Now Gopnik is a critic-at-large for artnet News and contributes to other major publications, including the New York Times. Previously, he spent 10 years as an art critic with the Washington Post. He’s also working on a biography of iconic artist Andy Warhol.

“It’s important to recognize that Andy, the persona, is one of his creations,” he says. In writing his book, it will be “extra important to unpack that in an interesting and important way.”

His work on the Warhol book, and the challenges that presents, mimic some of the obstacles facing art critics.

While “art criticism shouldn’t be the Consumer Reports of art, it shouldn’t give a thumbs up or thumbs down,” it also shouldn’t isolate people who have a curiosity.

“I believe that art criticism, if it’s going to matter, it has to be more ambitious. The cliché about journalism is that it’s the first draft of history and I think art criticism should be the first draft of art history. It should matter in that way,” he says. “It should really try to say something important about art. We’re going to get it wrong on a daily basis, there’s no doubt about it, just as normal journalism gets things wrong. But I want to at least try to say something that matters.”

After 20 years in the critic’s chair, he’s got some advice for his fellow analysts.

“I think art critics should be more like science journalists. We should be some kind of intermediary between the smartest people who talk about art, the smartest writing from art historians and the general public,” he says. “That’s, I think, an unusual model for art criticism but it’s one I like.

“There are people who spend their entire lives trying to figure out the smartest possible thing to say about a work of art. Those people are paid good money from universities and are called art historians,” Gopnik continues. “It seems like art critics to ignore them or even have contempt for them…Those people really are responsible for moving the conversation forward.”

And one more thought to consider?

“The word ‘timeless’ should be removed from the word processor of any art critic.”

— Amber Healy

Blake Gopnik, the daily art columnist for artnet News and contributor to the New York Times, talks to It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell about art criticism and his upcoming biography of Andy Warhol.

#246 – Journey down the underground press rabbit hole

#248 – Migratory Notes: Immigration news with context

It’s easy to look at the conversation about immigrants in the United States and ignore everything that came before Inauguration Day 2017.

But that’s missing a big part of the story, say Daniela Gerson and Elizabeth Aguilera, co-creators of Migratory Notes, an immigration newsletter. Both Gerson and Aguilera have extensive careers in which covering immigrant communities has played a major role. In the newsletter, which began publishing shortly after the Trump administration’s first attempt at implementing restrictions on immigrants from predominantly Islamic countries was introduced, they look not just at current policy but reporting that takes the story to the personal, in-home level.

Daniela Gerson

“Some of the best coverage we’ve seen has taken all of the emerging digital tools and ways to connect with audiences as well as subject and do that along with great reporting that doesn’t take what Trump has said, what they’ve decided today and put it into context,” Gerson says. She points to coverage from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as exemplary, going beyond the headlines and putting context to the lives that will be most directly changed by proposed legislation.

But they stress that President Donald Trump isn’t working in a vacuum and note that many had called President Barack Obama the “deporter in chief” during his administration.

“It’s important to put things into context for the audience. Stories highlighting this increase in deportations, apprehensions, arrests, but also that this was going on under Obama,” Aguilera says. “This is a forever thing here in the U.S., but it’s being approached in a different way under Trump, which is why everyone’s watching it.”

Remember, too, that it’s not just one person whose life might be forever altered by deportation.

“This is so much a family story. When talking about status, most people live in mixed-status families,” Gerson says. “If and when deportations increase to the numbers the Trump administration says it will do, it will impact many more people than those who are deported. People are getting there but this is a family story.”

Elizabeth Aguilera

Aguilera adds: “There have been a couple stories about a grandmother in San Diego who was apprehended and detained. She has a son-in-law in the military. This is a military family. She provides daycare for the grandchild. In L.A., a father was arrested in front of his child, she’s 13 and she used her cellphone to video the arrest. She’s a U.S. citizen. He’s got four U.S. citizen daughters, he’s been here 25 years.”

But whether immigration officers will be knocking on their door is not a top concern for many immigrant families, they say.

Once, Gerson and her team worked with the local police force to improve their interactions with the Chinese population in town, helping them setting up an account on the Chinese version of Twitter. There are now more than 40,000 people following the account, asking questions ranging from whether a child can be left home alone and what to do following a hit and run crash.

“The assumption that their top concern is policy or what’s going to happen is not realistic for the communities themselves,” Aguilera says. “They care about education, public safety, the economy, jobs, they care about finances, things most everyone cares about. Immigration might rank much lower on their list of things they’re concerned about on a daily basis. I think that’s the difference between reporting traditionally and reporting in the community.”

— Amber Healy

Immigration reporting is the subject of this week’s episode of It’s All Journalism. Host Michael O’Connell chats with journalists Daniela Gerson and Elizabeth Aguilera, co-creators of Migratory Notes, a weekly email newsletter focused on immigration. Their goal is to explore the wide-ranging issues found under the immigration umbrella and share stories that provide context to this very complex topic.

#211 – How to avoid bias in reporting stories of race and violence

#247 – Can the Washington Post do that?

It’s the one question asked more frequently in the weeks following the inauguration of Donald Trump and the steady stream of executive orders issued from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Can he do that?

For Allison Michaels, it’s the question at the heart of her new podcast for The Washington Post, in which she and a team of reporters and guests try to answer each week.

Allison Michaels

“After the election, we took an inventory of where the Post had succeeded and where we could grow. When we looked to the idea of creating a podcast in this space, we looked to the questions people wanted answers to,” she says.

Time after time, people wanted to know whether Trump could actually do all the things he’d promised as a candidate and, after the inauguration, the actions he set out to implement via executive order. The title of the podcast, “Can He Do That?,” was an easy decision.

“We wanted to get to the heart of what people wanted to explore. People wanted to explore it conversationally, to figure it out for themselves, to go on a journey.”

The first episode launched the Monday after the inauguration and has been growing in reach and audience numbers ever since. As an editor, Michaels needed to learn how to think and ask questions like a reporter, so she turns to the team she has on hand to provide a nuanced, historical perspective on the topics at hand.

“One thing that makes our podcast operations at the Post even feasible is the fact that we have content creators and experts around the room that want to be a part of this,” she says. “One thing that’s really exciting about this podcast: We really are reaching audiences we wouldn’t otherwise be reaching,” including younger audiences and those living internationally, and there’s a particular interest among Canadians.

Can He Do That? is a weekly podcast produced by The Washington Post and hosted by Allison Michaels.

The preparation for each episode begins with a review of listener- and reader-submitted questions and suggestions. Then a reporter is identified as an expert source and they try to secure his or her “buy in” to work on the podcast that week, followed by someone who can provide historical perspective on the issue at hand. Great efforts are made to include voices from both sides of the political aisle, to refrain from muddying the already murky water with partisan politics.

Michaels says the listeners love the information they’re getting, in part because it includes that historical context.

“We reach people all over the world, with all different levels of knowledge,” she says. “For people with less knowledge, they find reward in a clear and easy understanding of this material. To the people who are tapped in, they have shared that they got something totally new out of this, which is a direct, clear answer to the questions that they have, but with the added context and added knowledge of Washington Post reporter expertise.”

It’s important to include as many voices as possible, as many perspectives as possible, especially on some of the more controversial actions that have been floated by the president, she says. Marty Baron, the Post’s editor, “has famously said we’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.”

“What good, credible journalism comes down to is the ability to hold people accountable based on history, based on precedent, based on law and based on things that accountability is founded on,” she says.

— Amber Healy

Washington Post political editor Allison Michaels joins It’s All Journalism producers Michael O’Connell and Nicole Ogrysko in studio this week to talk about her podcast, Can He Do That? In each episode, Michaels and a her guests try to shed light on the limits of executive power as wielded by the Trump administration. The discussion also explores how newsrooms can use podcasts to expand on their coverage and engage new audiences.

#238 – Trump’s ‘hurry-up offense’ keeps press corps scrambling