Reinventing the News: Wired Journalist

Some view the online frontier with fear, an unknown entity that will surely threaten journalism as we know it. Others, though, view it with excitement. For those of us that fall in the latter, there's Wired Journalist, a new tool for online multimedia journalism and social networking. I was easily able to share photos of Boston shoppers spending money despite fears of an economic crisis. Along with joining my college's group, I joined a Blogging Group--imagine that! Wired Journalist has the potential to be a great tool for up-and-coming journalists using all the Internet has to offer, but it seems its membership is still low. I think for it to be successful, it needs to be an active community of people posting projects and giving critiques and spreading ideas.

Reinventing the News with the Boston Globe

Journalists become journalists because they like words--not numbers. And their aversion to numbers soon becomes a fear. The longer they don't use math, the more they think they can't compute numbers. Soon even trying to figure out how much you owe for tip at a restaurant becomes a challenge. But statistics and percentages are used powerfully in news reports every single day. This week, Boston Globe reporter Matt Carroll spoke to my online journalism class explaining how the newsroom thinks he is a math wizard simply for doing basic Microsoft Excel functions, and I'll take a look at three databases that could make for news stories.

My eye first jumps to the Boston homicide map, an interactive platform displaying the location and frequency of murders for 2007. I zoomed into the area I live, known to be unsafe in certain sectors, to find that in the last year there were very few murders. Creepily, though, the map combines the information on those killed and even in some cases their picture on a clickable map item. Using this map, if a large number of homicides happened in one area, a reporter could put a face on these crimes and bring them together to start a safety initiative.

Next I looked at gay marriages in Mass. for 2005. Obviously, Provincetown was up there with 660.4 wedded gay couples per 100 heterosexual couples, but other unheard of towns like Leverett (150) and Pelham (200) had high rates of gay marriage. Then I looked at Real Estate Value Estimates to see how these town's real estate values compared with towns that had low rates of gay marriage. For these two databases, if the evidence was there, a reporter could make a connection between real estate prices either rising due to the growing amount of gay couples or the gentrification these wedded couples could be bringing to these small towns (now just speculation). So if you chose to be a journalist to get out of crunching numbers, you're out of luck. The future, I'm told, is database journalism.

Reinventing the News

As our upcoming presidential election becomes more of a reality show than a major political matter, it only makes sense that the entertainment machine would follow. Spoofing the controversial July 2008 "Fist Bump" New Yorker cover, Entertainment Weekly has Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert making fun of an already outrageous presidential season. I think the original New Yorker cover is brilliant even though it came under intense heat for being insensitive about possibly misleading uneducated voters who were on the fence about Obama (though would they be reading the New Yorker in the first place?)

This spilling of politics onto an entertainment magazine is an indicator, however, of the shrinking number of news magazines. According to Folio, the number of news magazines in America and Canada has dropped 39 percent from 75 to 45 publications in the last five years. Do people not care about politics, or are they simply finding other means to get the news?

In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in database journalism, or the gathering of facts from databases in a cohesive or interesting way and distributing it to the public. One of these such sites is Factcheck.org, which is full of articles debunking each candidate's jabs at each other. The site seems impartial, using straight number to check both candidates equally. It is very to the point, but mainly seems to focus on ads or speeches instead of the overall positions of the candidates.

Politifact.com, another example of database journalism, at first seems more convoluted to go through, but is actually more entertaining. With animated graphics, the candidates are judged on their truthfulness and how often they flip on issues. You can also click on tags of certain issues and see the validity of each candidate's claims and how often they've flipped on issues. This site is more interactive but still information is being told to you rather than you manipulating it.

FactCheck and Politifact are great tools for people looking to educate themselves on the candidates in an engaging manner, but check out Project Vote Smart and the Washington Post's Vote Database for the ultimate resource in candidate information. These are databases in the truest sense of the word: they are dry and all-encompassing. While not engaging, Project Vote Smart is the best, focusing on presidential candidates and local leaders from every state.

My So-Called Life

A new life for Life.

More than 70 years after influential publisher Henry Luce started the first American all-photo magazine, Time Inc. and Getty Images are reinventing Life Magazine as a Web site offering free photos from top photographers from around the world for non-commercial purposes. How's that for changing times?

This isn't the first time the magazine has tried to be resurrected--in fact, it's been shut down three times before, as recent as when Time stopped publishing it as a newspaper supplement in April 2007. But the history of Life is so monumental to magazines and American history that the name still carries significance.

This is also the first time that the resources of the professional photo market will be available to consumers, including over 3,000 news downloadable photos and the extensive archives of Getty and Life Magazine.

While this seems like a clear indication of magazines moving solely online (the Magraker's biggest fear!), the new Life.com will be more a resource of photographs than a photojournalistic magazine.

The site is expected to go live early 2009.