Anthony DeBarros

With journalism in the midst of a reinvention, there’s no shortage of opinions as to which content or practitioners will carry the flag forward. We’ve read enough about whether data is journalism, and we can fill a book with opinions on bloggers and whether what they do is journalism or not.

But here’s another question: Regardless of what you’re doing — writing, coding, designing — is it worthy of being called art?

On a recent trip to New York, we stopped in Mountainville to tour the Storm King Art Center. It’s a 500-acre sculpture museum with works by Maya Lin, Andy Goldsworthy and others who take simple elements and arrange them in fresh, surprising ways. We toured the fields, and we saw stone, glass, metal and earth all crafted into surprising shapes. The place is massive and so are the works. For example (click for full size):

Beethoven’s Quartet (front) and Pyramidian by Mark di Suvero:

Frogs Legs, also by di Suvero:

Storm King Wall by Andy Goldsworthy, snaking through a stand of trees:
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Filed under: Journalism by Anthony on Jul 3, 2010
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Concise, clear writing is one of the journalist’s best assets. No matter which platform you’re feeding — print, web, mobile or a technology to be named later — good writing separates the amateurs from the pros.

Here are seven ways to improve your word skills. And if these whet your appetite for more, try Roy Peter Clark’s excellent Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer or William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s classic The Elements of Style. Also helpful are the sections on writing mechanics and grammar from the Purdue Online Writing Lab.

1. Put commas in their place.

You can solve half of the world’s comma problems by remembering this rule:

Add a comma between two independent clauses linked by a coordinating conjunction — and, or, nor, but, yet, for. An independent clause has a subject and a verb. Don’t throw a comma before a coordinating conjunction unless what follows is an independent clause.

Right:
The thief stole a television and a laptop, but he left behind a bag with $1,000.

Wrong:
The thief stole a television and laptop, but left behind a bag with $1,000.

2. Conquer its/it’s confusion.

Not knowing the difference between its and it’s says “amateur” the way Chuck E. Cheese says “stimulation overload.”

For the record:

Its = possessive; “belongs to it”
It’s = “it is”

Right:
The team lost its game by one goal.

Right:
It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

3. Keep sentences short.

You’re not writing the great American novel. You’re conveying information to readers. Stick to one or two thoughts per sentence. If you have more than two commas in a sentence, try to split it.

Cringe-worthy:
The Burkett County legislature voted Monday to add six new police officers to the county force, adding staff at a time when the county budget is already 5 percent ahead of last year's spending, a level that some activists say will add to a deficit, which at $250 million is already on pace to bankrupt the county by 2012.

Better:
The Burkett County legislature voted Monday to add six new police officers to the county force. The move adds staff while the county budget is already 5 percent ahead of last year's. The level, some activists say, will add to a $250 million deficit that's already on pace to bankrupt the county by 2012.

4. Be active.

Active-verb construction — sentences in subject-verb-object order — carries more punch. Although it’s not imperative to write every sentence that way, avoiding passive sentence construction adds punch to your prose.

Limp:
The mayor was struck by the protester's sign.

Stronger:
A protester's sign hit the mayor.

Notice, also, the substitution of “hit” for “struck.” “Struck” is a word often found in police press releases; others are “perpetrator,” “brandished” and “apprehended.” You don’t use those in conversation. You say “man,” “waved” and “caught.” Write the way you speak — you’ll sound less phony.
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Filed under: Journalism, Writing by Anthony on Jun 13, 2010
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Last week’s launch of The Bay Citizen, a San Francisco journalism non-profit that will, among other things, feed The New York Times’ Bay Area report, adds one more piece to a journalism mosaic that’s increasingly experimental, entrepreneurial and, dare I say, hopeful.

It’s pretty amazing, really, to see what’s emerged over the last several years. It’s the antithesis of journalism pre-1995.

Back then, news reporting mostly came in five basic flavors: newspaper, radio, TV, magazine, book. Now, enabled by technology, forced by the economy and in recognition of core declines, journalism’s finding a way forward in smaller, independent ways:

• Non-profits spinning up to handle investigative or regional journalism. ProPublica, with its recent Pulitzer, is one of the most prominent. But there’s also California Watch (from the Center for Investigative Reporting), Voice of San Diego, The Texas Tribune, Texas Watchdog and many others.
• Educators breathing life into investigative journalism, such as those at American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop.
• For-profit, web-only journalism startups. Washington, D.C., has the soon-to-launch TBD.com from Allbritton Communications. The Faster Times bills itself as “a new type of newspaper for a new type of world.”
• Data, maps and stories targeted to the block where you live (Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock).
• “Community-powered reporting,” where the public suggests and funds stories (Spot.us).
• Hundreds or thousands of bloggers and citizen journalists who are writing about their town or street — and organizations that  aggregate or network them.

I call it a hopeful sign, even if some of it’s not brand new. While legacy journalism battles to refashion itself, and lays off thousands of skilled journalists in the process, from the wreckage emerges a hint of a rebirth.

Particularly encouraging: They often focus on investigative journalism or local coverage that’s been the victim of cuts at legacy institutions, and they’re making smart use of data and analytic journalism.

Whether these efforts thrive or fizzle will, I believe, be determined largely by the quality of the content they produce. But their emergence is good news, whether you’re a journalist fresh out of college or one who needs to reinvent yourself 20 years into a career. Or a reader.

Update, June 1, 2010: Check out this list of promising local news sites from Michele McLellan. There’s even more to this mosaic than you might realize.

Filed under: Journalism by Anthony on May 31, 2010
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Out of the 9,000 words in James Fallows’ recent Atlantic piece “How to Save The News,” this quote from Google News creator Krishna Bharat resonated most with me:

“Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” [Bharat] told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.   …  I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

During my undergrad journalism studies at Marist, then-professor David McCraw assigned us Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus — a chronicle of the 1972 presidential election from the view of the reporters covering it. Aside from coming away thinking that R.W. Apple was quite the character, the book introduced me to pack journalism — the tendency for news media to follow one another to the point where they all say mostly the same thing.

It’s this tendency that Bharat — in a world where search engines reveal and aggregate everything written on a topic — finds unsustainable. I agree. It seems to me that:

• Unique content is a journalism organization’s most valuable currency.
• Width, depth and quality on a topic builds uniqueness.
• Uniqueness breeds reader loyalty.
• No one will pay you for something they can get free elsewhere.
• Trying to match “the pack” on stories that wire services and others already have covered pulls you away from achieving bullets 1 and 2. So, either find something unique to say or don’t bother.

These hold true whether you’re a blogger or a worldwide brand, whether you’re doing stories, photos, news apps, graphics or databases. Why? Because, as Fallows’ story says, the assumption being made by Google (which seems to be smart) is that people actually are willing to pay for news. But not just anything:

… People inside the press still wage bitter, first-principles debates about whether, in theory, customers will ever be willing to pay for online news, and therefore whether “paywalls” for online news can ever succeed. But at Google, I could hardly interest anyone in the question. The reaction was: Of course people will end up paying in some form—why even talk about it? … The deeper differences [between news orgs and Google] involve Google’s assumptions about what the news business will have to do to “engage” readers again—that is, make them willing to spend time with its printed, online, or on-air products, however much they cost.

If this is true, and I suspect it is, news organizations need to answer a basic question:

What do we have that readers can’t get anywhere else?

Filed under: Journalism by Anthony on May 16, 2010
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A reporter called recently for tips on setting up “a CAR desk” in the newsroom of a decent-sized community newspaper. The editor had watched the reporter’s success at gathering and analyzing data and, as typically happens,  now wanted the reporter to train the rest of the newsroom.

Here was my advice:

Focus on a few: Instead of holding building-wide Excel classes or database journalism seminars, start with just one or two reporters who show a combination of interest and decent technical smarts. That lets you go deep on a couple of beats rather than spread yourself thin. Also, success breeds success. Watching a few reporters land great stories will possibly spur interest from others.

Have the right goals: Goals like “publish one CAR story a week” miss the point. Better objectives are to have data-thinking ever present in the reporter’s mind, have the reporter well-versed in her beat’s data sources, and have the reporter develop basic data skills. From that, stories will flow.

Inventory data: Speaking of data sources, have each reporter you work with find out the sets of data local governments keep. File FOIA requests for table layouts and database schemas. Get the data, then study it. That will spur story ideas.

Crawl first, run later: All the hot talk in data journalism these days is on Web frameworks and visualizations, but there’s plenty of work for the beginner in the land of Excel and Access. Build those skills as a starting point.

Your thoughts? Add a comment below …

Filed under: Analysis, Journalism, Workflow by Anthony on Feb 6, 2010
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