Seattle Post-Times

A big journalism confab to kick off 2010

Before we all disappear into the holidays, I want to put in a plug for a conference I'll be attending shortly thereafter, here in Seattle. It's called "Re-Imagining News and Community in the Pacific Northwest" and is organized by a national organization called Journalism That Matters. Actually, they're billing it as an "un-conference," which means the agenda will evolve over a period of days:

An overall convening starts with several hundred people, then quickly self-organizes into a series of smaller interest groups which report out ideas and action steps to the whole.

It will be held Thursday through Sunday, Jan. 7-10, at the University of Washington. You need to register in advance.

As bullets fly, the Seattle Times tweets

In the age of Twitter and streaming police radio communication, the bar for a newspaper is high when news breaks. Over the past couple of years we've come to see that crowd-sourced journalism is well suited to fast-breaking news. Thousands of eyes on the streets (or ears listening to the police scanner) can be a substitute for authoritative reporting — to a point, at least.

Meanwhile, among news outlets still practicing one-to-many journalism, television has long held the edge on timeliness, with helicopters and live pictures.

So when four Lakewood, Wash., cops were slain in the Tacoma suburb of Parkland this week and a manhunt ensued, news junkies of course turned to Twitter to find out, to report, and to opine. The first person to report the apparent capture of fugitive Maurice Clemmons was a scanner-listener. Out in the real world, the helicopters were scrambled and the microwave masts were raised and press conferences were broadcast. A typical 21st century response to news.

But in the end — no, come to think of it, from the beginning — the story of four dead cops and one dead suspect was owned by our legacy ink-on-paper monolith, The Seattle Times. With as big a newsroom bureaucracy as they come, the Times turned a nimble double play by providing deep reportage and super-timely alerts, many from the streets.

My friend helped find Wired's vanished writer

My friend Jeff Reifman, a Web developer and activist freelance journalist, has been busy. His crusade calling attention to Microsoft's Washington state tax dodge has gained some traction, leading to an interview on public KUOW-FM [25 MB MP3] in Seattle.

Jeff's also featured in the new issue of Wired — though not for getting Bill Gates and company to pay their taxes. Jeff is a key figure in the fascinating tale of how Wired readers tracked down writer Evan Ratliff, who in August decided to see if he could vanish from the grid. It's a fun read. Ratliff sets it up:

The idea for the contest started with a series of questions, foremost among them: How hard is it to vanish in the digital age? Long fascinated by stories of faked deaths, sudden disappearances, and cat-and-mouse games between investigators and fugitives, I signed on to write a story for Wired about people who’ve tried to end one life and start another. People fret about privacy, but what are the consequences of giving it all up, I wondered. What can investigators glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real life?

Enter Jeff:

On August 24, a former Microsoft group program manager in Seattle named Jeff Reifman read about the hunt in Wired. Reifman, self-employed these days, had recently launched a series of grant-funded Facebook applications to study the engagement of young people with the news. From a technical standpoint, the contest seemed intriguing.

On August 27, working on a desktop in his living room, he created Vanish Team, a Facebook app dedicated to information and discussion about Ratliff. He announced it on Twitter, and people began clicking over to check it out.

The hierarchy of victimhood

Jack Shafer, Slate's media writer, takes a look at the Balloon Boy case and explains why newsies are such suckers for stories like that — why they forgo the discipline of verification that is supposed to inform good journalism. In doing so, he offers this simple hierarchy to explain newsworthiness:

... in the hierarchy of victimhood, young beats old, female beats male, domestic beats foreign, fur beats scales, defenseless beats well-armed, pregnant beats nonpregnant, and kittens beat everything.

... A keen reader of media manners and former Wife Swap participant, [Richard] Heene obviously appreciates that a 6-year-old in peril is irresistible media bait. God knows what fiendish stunt Heene would have attempted if the family's cat had just given birth to a litter of tabbies.

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• Cynical reporters have a soft spot for anybody who claims victimhood. (slate.com)

Without a job, it's an adventure

Michele Matassa Flores

My good friend and former boss, Michele Matassa Flores, writes today at Crosscut about being out of work and the effort involved in qualifying for Washington state unemployment benefits. (Michele is a former editor and reporter at The Seattle Times, and whoever you are, you should hire her.)

To earn one's keep, one must conduct three "job search activities" per week and keep a log of that activity. But as Michele points out, the definition of "job search activity" depends on who's citing it, although all agree that applying for a job certainly qualifies. The problem is that you aren't supposed to apply for just any job. It has to be a job you are qualified for. So can you count cold calls? Coffee with potential employers? Coffee with friends who have leads? Yes, perhaps, maybe.

In the end, applying for jobs is the goal. And it's not hard to do in the Interwebs age. But there aren't that many jobs out there for which one is neither under-qualified nor over-qualified, especially if you are at an advanced stage of your career.

So everyone's applying for anything and everything. It's

... tough to find three suitable openings to apply for every week for months on end. And it sometimes leads to nuttiness. Corporate CEOs apply for entry-level office jobs. People with no experience apply for executive-level positions. A journalist friend of mine seriously considered applying to be a train conductor. His initial thought: He does like trains.

That journalist friend of hers would be me. Someone read that and tweeted: "I didn't know you liked trains." Well, now you know.

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• It's like a full-time gig (crosscut.com)

You have a constitutional right to practice irresponsible journalism

Image by team doster via Flickr

Ever since he came on the scene, I've been a big fan of Seattle Times baseball writer Geoff Baker. He's a great beat reporter, and just as important in this day and age, he gets the new media landscape. He writes an excellent blog. He engages his readers and is down with the local baseball blogosphere. He's tireless and was born to do what he does.

Today Baker posted his thoughts about a recent controversy involving former Seattle Mariner Raul Ibanez and Jerod Morris, a blogger elsewhere who, offering statistical analysis but no other evidence, has implied that perhaps Ibanez's improved recent performance is due to something other than his own hard work. In his own blog post, Baker rips Morris a new one, without naming him, and suggests that it's time for non-professional journalists to get some training and learn to look their subjects in the eye when writing critically of them. This is where Baker loses me. There's a certain lack of nuance to this analysis, much as I respect his baseball coverage.

NAMIWalks in Seattle raises $97,000

I was the official photographer at today's NAMIWalks event in Seattle. More than 800 people walked at Magnuson Park to raise money for Washington chapters of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). More than $97,000 was raised by participants in the state's fifth annual NAMIWalks for the Mind of America. (I helped.)

NAMI says that one in four adults — an estimated 57.7 million Americans — experience a mental health disorder in a given year, and one in 17 lives with a serious affliction such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

You can see more pictures of the walk at my Flickr page.

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• Mind: To Fight Stigmas, Start With Treatment (nytimes.com)

A bias which you might share

Image via Wikipedia

I am about to pitch a worthy cause, but I don't want to do so without exploring what that means for me as a journalist.

I haven't until now gotten involved in raising money for philanthropies, mostly because I have been in the news business for more than 30 years and I have always believed that the best thing I can do for society is do that one thing well. And to do it well I need to be detached.

I haven't made political contributions. I don't even sign petitions. Once you associate yourself with a point of view in a traceable way, however benign that point of view might seem and however self-evident is your right to do so, you make it harder to move credibly in multiple circles of influence and opinion, and journalists need to move in multiple circles with a minimum of baggage if they are to assemble a semblance of the truth.

That notion is laughed at by many non-journalists and, increasingly, by journalists, too. In the Internet era, the vogue thing to do is let it all hang out, to wear your biases on your sleeve. It's a valid state of being but one fraught with its own limitations, starting with a lack of credibility among those who don't share those biases. That leads to diminished access and influence, and worthy journalism is influential.

The thin Bluetooth line

Image via Wikipedia

Seen in the North Precinct: a Seattle Police Department patrol car driven by a uniformed officer wearing white audio ear buds and talking on a cellular phone held to his right ear.

Emergency vehicles are exempted from Washington's ban of handheld mobile phone use behind the wheel, but perhaps the police department should invest in some Bluetooth ear pieces anyway, as I did to comply with the law. As for the ear buds, I don't know why a cop should be listening to a music device while driving, but perhaps it was a podcast of the shift roll call.

I've been meaning to write about mobile phone use while driving. It seems that no one is abiding the law that took effect in 2007. A couple of weeks ago, I saw an angry motorist pull alongside another vehicle on Northeast 45th Street in Seattle and, using hand gestures, berate the other driver, who was talking on a cell phone — as both vehicles were moving.

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• Police Chief Gets Into Car Accident While Checking His Blackberry (techdirt.com)
• Neighboring blog goes in-depth with SPD North Precinct (phinneywood.com)

Washington News Council 2.0

John Hamer, the executive director of the Washington News Council and a former Seattle Times colleague of mine, says the organization he helped found a decade ago is at a crossroads. At a time when media criticism can be practiced by anyone with a blog, and when media performance is critiqued in real time, what role should WNC play?

History takes a back seat to ad revenue

Puget Sound ferry riders, remember those wonderful historical photos that adorned the walls of the three Jumbo Mark II Class boats, the MV Puyallup, MV Tacoma, and MV Wenatchee? The selection of nicely framed blowups was appropriate to each vessel — old-time pics of those cities' distant past.

Well, they're gone, replaced by wall-sized advertising, presumably because Washington State Ferries is navigating the economic storm that has state government listing to starboard ...

Long unemployment lines in cyberspace

Image via Wikipedia

I just went online to file my weekly unemployment claim with the state of Washington, and instead of the multi-page process during which I pledge I've been looking for work and not being paid elsewhere, I got this message:

We are experiencing a high volume of usage at this time, please try again later. The internet application is available 24-hours a day from Midnight Saturday through 5:00pm Friday. Monday through Thursday after 5:00pm is our least busy time.

This is a first. I knew the call centers were under siege, but a Web lockout surprised me.

Washington state's January unemployment numbers are due to be announced later this month.

Fun facts to know and tell

From this article:

• State estimate of unemployed in the city of Seattle: 91,400. City population: 594,210. (Percentage of city population unemployed: 15.4 percent.)
• Washington unemployment rate: 7.1 percent. National: 7.2 percent. State unemployment total: 251,700.
• Washington's maximum weekly unemployment benefit: $541. National rank: 8th. Highest: Massachusetts, at $900 per week.

The Legislature is considering a bill that would increase the weekly benefit (which is determined by how much you were being paid during the year before you were laid off), and also reducing the employment security insurance premium paid by businesses — a move advocated by the governor as a double stimulus.

Unemployment benefits are subject to federal income tax. If Congress wanted to help even more, it would yank that rule. For me, it would mean an additional $54.10 a week, which is what the state is withholding from my weekly check.

Related: "It's all hands on deck at jobless call center"

Update: U.S. unemployment was 7.6 percent in January

In Seattle, no news is news

There's a lot of buzz in Seattle about what to do about the apparently imminent demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the precarious financial state of the Seattle Times Co.

With the P-I likely to cease print publication and possibly disappear even from cyberspace in mid-March, and with The Seattle Times thought to be poised for another layoff and perhaps even bankruptcy, there's growing fear we could indeed become the first big zero-newspaper town. (Allow me to reiterate my previous prediction that we will.)

In the public arena, a growing number of largely under-informed but concerned citizens is calling for some sort of community involvement, at the least to define the problem (a growing shortage of meat-and-potatoes news coverage) and perhaps even to find a solution (an angel to buy the P-I, or maybe loosely coordinated news coverage by emerging Web journalists).

And from the private corporate worlds of the the two dailies emanates deafening silence. That of course doesn't mean trees aren't falling.

Down and out but not dead in Detroit

Great piece of reporting and writing here in The Weekly Standard by Matt Labash. "The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep" stars Detroit News reporter Charlie LeDuff, who used to be a New York Times star but now chronicles "forgotten people in forgotten places" of LeDuff's hometown.

When councilwoman Monica Conyers got in hot water for calling her colleague "Shrek," Charlie arranged to have her sit down on-camera for an interrogation by a group of middle schoolers. She proceeded to get a condemnatory lecture on how to behave like an adult from the kids. Charlie then interviewed her, convincing her to recite lines from the infamous Shrek-ish city council meeting, with him playing the part of her, in her sassiest Detroit voice. ("You know you not my daddy!" he said.)

It was a good stunt, as evidenced by its getting picked up (without attribution) by a number of national media outlets. But then he turned around and wrote a wrenching story on the girl who schooled Conyers--a 13-year-old who is ashamed to be poor, whose parents sell candy out of the trunk of a rattletrap Cadillac, who is not allowed to bring her books home from school because there aren't enough, and who dreams of escaping this city.

It's a long, engaging, surprisingly hopeful read that should make any newspaperperson proud.

Detroit's P.R. nightmare

As I anticipate another visit to my home state of Michigan, this article resonates: "Lousy Marketing—Not Lousy Cars—Killed Detroit." The writer makes a compelling case that the quality of the cars made by the Big 3 isn't so much the issue as the industry's relationship with customers, from advertising to dealerships. It's counterintuitive: Image lags reality.