River Walk Tour Webcast

Fair pay and fair play

Today is fair pay day. Here’s my part:

I got into the journalism racket back in 1975, when the newbies were relegated to the manual typewriters and when it was considered too demeaning for a male reporter to be assigned to the “Womens” section of the newspaper.

Although I’d completed one meager semester of journalism in college, my gender was enough to qualify me to fill in for the Womens Editor at the Vineland Times Journal. I learned on the job how to describe the design, fabric and lace on the wedding dresses of the prominent daughters in town. I selected recipes, and crossed my fingers that the kind people in the back shop would save me from my non-existent headline and layout skills.

I couldn’t change it, but I never forgot.

When the women’s editor returned from leave, the paper assigned me to fill in for one of the two staff photographers who was out for surgery for a month. My qualifications? I owned my own Cannon FTB and a lens or two, and I could develop film and make black and white prints (thank you Dad!).

I was pretty proud to be in the elite crew until I walked into the darkroom and saw the pinup calenders with half nekkid women on every vertical surface of the room. No, I was told, I could not take them down during my month in that job. That just wouldn’t be respectful of the men photographers, now would it?

I couldn’t change it, but I never forgot.

Fast forward about ten years to the Dallas Times Herald newsroom, where my editor, Ernie Makovy,  was giving me my annual review. Makovy was a friend and teacher every day, so there wasn’t much for him to add. He told me to stop splitting infinitives, and said I wasn’t doing bad otherwise.

Well, OK, I’d been on a team of reporters who were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service Journalism, so I guess I wasn’t screwing up too bad.

Makovy reached in his pocket and pulled out a little folded piece of paper. He opened it, looked down at the scribbled number on it and said, “You’re getting a raise to $35,000 a year.”

Holy cow! That was more than $5,000 a year more than I was making at the time. But it wasn’t for prize-winning journalism.

“That’s to bring you to parity with the guys,” Ernie said, still looking down at the paper. Seems there had been a class action lawsuit, and the paper had either lost or settled, I still don’t know.

I couldn’t change it, but I never forgot.

Fast forward to 2004, when I was hired to be Content Director of MySanAntonio.com. I looked at the roster of people working for me. I looked at their qualifications. Their experience. Their gender. And their pay.

The gender gap glared up at me from the page.

I hadn’t forgotten. And finally, I could change it.

So I did.

The Twitters tell the story

I was asked to be the wrap-up Rapporteur for the 10th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin last week.

The conference had the Twitter hashtag #isoj, and, partly because it is Webcast live, people were watching and Twittering about it in real time on at least four continents. (Here is a link to the #isoj Twitter stream). By the afternoon of the conference’s second and final day, April 18, there were about 1,500 Tweets with the hashtag #isoj.

Thanks to some extraordinary panelists: NowPublic News Director Rachel Nixon, Paul Brannan of the BBC, chron.com Interactive Editor Dwight Silverman and statesman.com Internet Editor Robert Quigley, the “audience-as-storyteller” muse took flight.

For my wrap-up, I went with the muse and tried something different: I let the audience tell the story through their Twitters.

This slideshow is not particularly linear, although I did “group” the Twitters around ideas: First, the back channel conversation, then the collaborative layers being added by the audience around the world, then the discussion of business models for news, then the discussion of non-linear multimedia storytelling. Last, I grouped together comments around the main theme of collaborating the news and news as a conversation.

Besides telling and interpreting and adding to the conference story, the Twitters told their own stories, including a matter-of-fact, but reverberating comment on the lack of diversity on the panels.

I’m sure I didn’t do this perfectly, but considering that I created this 80-slide package in real-time – and added the last slide just minutes before presenting it at about 5:15 p.m. that day – I think it is an interesting rough draft.

Please check out the slideshow and tell me what you think! I know that the audience (read: you!) often has far wiser things to say than the perpetrator of this blog ;~)

Fiesta fireworks

Fiesta Fireworks over Fort Sam Houston

Newspapers don’t own journalism

I always thought it was odd to hear flat out declarations that there can be no life on other planets in the absence of water. How egocentric! So you’re saying that life can only exist if it’s precisely like us?

Really?

That’s the feeling I’m getting right now in the woe-is-us, hand-wringing sob-fest about whether life and our democracy can survive the death of some newspapers.

With all due respect to some great newspapers where I’ve worked, I don’t give a damn about the paper they’re printed on.

What I care about is journalism.

And you don’t need special 3-D glasses to see that completely fabulous, raise the rafters, award-winning, democracy-preserving journalism is being committed and published many times a day in life forms other than newspapers.

Guess what else?

Some online news operations, including two where I was a top manager, have been profitable for years, while upholding the highest standards of journalism.

Here’s a bit of what I saw from an editor’s perch:

• TheStreet.com Silicon Valley reporter Adam Lashinsky’s coverage of the two-tier IPO disclosure practices by investment bankers in 2000 led to Reg FD, the SEC regulation aimed at leveling the information playing field for all investors.
• TSC’s intrepid senior financial columnist, Herb Greenberg, gave shareholders and regulators got an early heads up on the extraordinary accounting fraud at Tyco.
• Had it not been for TSC reporter Adam Feuerstein’s dogged coverage of the biotech firm, ImClone, we wouldn’t have had such a rich lesson from Martha Stewart in what happens when you sell stock and don’t tell the truth.
• Then on Sept. 11, 2001, TSC columnists wrote some of the first online news, blogs and context about the tragedy, even as one of our own died in the North Tower.

Were we perfect? No.

Was it journalism. You betcha.

For more examples of the kind of journalism that’s been committed outside the world of paper, check out the Online News Association’s awards gallery, whose members range from the BBC News and Frontline to Slate and NewWest.

Fast forward to 2007, when the San Diego public radio station, KPBS, performed an amazing public service by using Twitter and a Google maps mashup on its Website to broadcast alerts and illustrate the danger during the deadly wildfires that swept Southern California.

Then in 2008, there was Josh Marshall’s unflinching journalism at Talking Points Memo, which prompted the resignation of the Attorney General of the United States.

Don’t get hung up on the life form: TPM is published with blog technology, and I get updates thrown on my browser’s front lawn by Twitter via RSS, (thank you Dave W!).

Update: And anyone who didn’t see Marcy Wheeler’s breathtakingly good journalism from the blog Emptywheel quoted on the front page of the New York Times, well check out the story right here.

That’s the kind of journalism that helps me sleep well at night.

I spent the first 20 years of my career inside print newsrooms, and I have nothing but admiration for the print folks whose journalism has made the world a better place. (Check out the winners and finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service Journalism. I’m proud to be on that list, in the company of a team of reporters from the late, great, Dallas Times Herald.)

It is precisely out of respect for those journalistic achievements that I will not lament the demise of newspapers that ignore the public good. David Simon details such a case in this chilling piece in the Washington Post. I’ve also written about instances where having a monopoly on the newspaper market turned watchdogs into sycophantic, naval-gazing, paper tigers. Those newspapers – and the corporations that own them – deserve to decompose with the fish.

But those forces no longer control the conversation – if they ever did. This is spring again, a time for celebration.

Centuries ago, the discovery of movable type meant that Martin Luther no longer needed permission from the Pope to publish his work.

And today, our ideas, conversations and questions won’t be stifled when the newspaper owners run out of cash and ink and stop their giant presses.

We control our own free presses with funny names, like Drupal and Joomla and WordPress, YouTube and Blip and Twitter, Flickr and Utterli and Ning.

And yes, Virginia, there really is a healthy and irrepressible thing called journalism.

Update: Please forgive my unintentional sins of omission and add the following to the list of great un-paper journalism: Politico, The Huffington Post, MarketWatch, Pegasus News and Voice of San Diego.
I will gladly add more as folks knock the cobwebs from my brain!

Train in Brackenridge Park

Pecan Season in San Antonio

Native American nuts

more about "Pecan Season in San Antonio", posted with vodpod

Students, Denver and the Fifth Estate

I’m in Denver today with a group of University of Nevada, Las Vegas students who are kind enough to call me their teacher. Fellow-learner is more like it.

Once again, we’re experimenting with the future of journalism — using the latest tools in different ways to help people get news and better connect with information, events and newsmakers.

The students are using Nokia N95 cellphones to stream video live from Denver and the Democratic National Convention straight to the Web. But that’s not all. The video is being broadcast on our Web channel at Kyte.tv that lets anyone with a computer or smart phone chat via text with the students and their video subjects live, in real time.

So if you have a question, you can type it in, and the student journalist can see the question on the phone, and pass it along to the delegate, protester, elected official or whomever. You can even ask them to change the camera angle. It’s transparent, so anyone watching can also see the question and comment on it or type in a follow up.

You can also subscribe to our Twitter feed here, where you’ll get notified every time the video stream goes live>

Historically, the Fourth Estate — the press — has been in charge of deciding what questions to ask. But this week on our channel, the Fifth Estate — the people – will have a voice and access to power.

That means the people in the East Paradise neighborhood next to UNLV — a remarkably diverse and historically underserved area — will have just as much access to their elected officials and delegates as reporters do.

I was 28 when I first got to cover a convention, and it was the utterly scripted 1984 re-coronation of Ronald Reagan in Dallas. I covered the feds — the FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, Secret Service — and I remember trying to worm some information out of one of the agents about people being arrested. “Robert Ludlum will have it in print before you do,” he glowered.

Having been double-dog-dared, I worked as hard and as fast as I could, and just two days later, Jerry Needham and I had a double-byline story stripped across page one of the Dallas Times Herald about the supposed plot to attack the convention center via hang gliders.

For today’s reporters, news is just a nanosecond away from worldwide broadcast on the Web. And instead of talking to people, we can have a conversation about the news even as it is happening. That’s a great advantage, because as we know, the Fourth Estate commonly asks pretty clueless questions and could use all the help they can get from the Fifth Estate.

I cannot imagine a more fabulous time to be a journalist!

The students and I have many people to thank for this extraordinary opportunity, most importantly, Ardyth Sohn, Director of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies, who lured me to Vegas, sight unseen, to teach convergence, new media, digital journalism, multiplatform reporting and Web publishing and design, even though I could barely pronounce the word syllabus and had never written one in my life.

And we couldn’t have done this without a generous grant to support civic journalism from LasVegasNow.com, KLAS-TV Channel 8. That provided students with reporters’ backpacks, MacBooks and cameras to explore and document the neighborhood. The money also supported the student-developed Website, East Paradise, and it paid the four students’ way to Denver.

I am tremendously grateful to Nokia, where some good-hearted folks had the technical chops and the vision to imagine what kinds of remarkable things can be done with the powerful N95 cellphones that only recently became available in the U.S. They loaned the students (and their lucky teacher) phones to experiment with this summer for this project.

Over at the San Francisco startup, Kyte, people went way, way far out of their way to help us load beta software and launch a classy-looking channel for the video and chats. You can make my day by embedding our Kyte.tv channel in your Website or blog and spreading the word.

And thank you to my fellow learners, Reid Geary, Ariel Gove, Sandra Herandez and Denitsa Yotova. You truly are the ATeam!

I hope you will watch, participate and tell us what you think.

The offline mind

incurious \(ˌ)in-ˈkyu̇r-ē-əs\ lacking a normal or usual curiosity : uninterested <a blank incurious stare> synonyms: see indifferent

- Merriam-Webster

I am not at all relieved that John McCain, an acknowledged computer illiterate, is now “learning to get online,” without help.

Here’s what he told the New York Times:

Q: But do you go on line for yourself?

Mr. McCain: They go on for me. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need – including going to my daughter’s blog first, before anything else.

Some people are equating McCain’s Internet ignorance with his age. But I think those folks are dangerously missing the point.

My dad is a couple years older than McCain, and I’ve lost count of how many computers he has built from scratch, starting with itty bitty pieces and an empty CPU case. Most days he emails me so often that it seems like he is in the same room, and not 1,729 miles away.

My mom, who was born the same year as McCain, first used computers in 1969, and by the early 1990s was running a university library Web site. She still finds email more convenient and efficient than picking up the phone.

Conversely, I have met and even worked with people in their 30s who still need help “logging on,” and who sincerely fear the Intertubes, bloggers, MySpacers, Facebookers and other online aliens.

This is not about age.

It is about evolving and learning, which requires a healthy, normal curiosity.

I remember my favorite English lit professor, Richard Mitchell, discovering that a young man had elected to take his class even though it was not a requirement for his degree in public safety, en route to joining the New Jersey State police.

“And then I realized,” said Dr. Mitchell, “that I would much rather be pulled over by a trooper who had read Milton, than one who had not.”

Now we have a presidential candidate who isn’t even curious enough to check out email, as shown by this exchange in the same Times Q&A:

Q: Do you use a blackberry or email?

Mr. McCain: No

Mark Salter: He uses a BlackBerry, just ours.

Mr. McCain: I use the Blackberry, but I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail.

So.

Would I rather have a president who is curious or one who is not?

Mom and Dad and Dr. Mitchell all taught me that it is OK to not know everything, but it is not OK to disengage your brain.

To question is the answer.

Gazpacho, cool soup for a hot day

We’d been married less than 10 years when we bought this old house on Mahncke Park, but our cookbook collection was already big enough to demand its own built-in bookcase in the kitchen.

Each of the books has a story, which kind of explains why this librarian’s daughter thought it made sense to house Like Water for Chocolate on the top shelf, along with the other Mexican cookbooks.

The one I opened today is A Taste of San Francisco, published in 1990, a dog-eared testament to the nearly four years we spent living in El Cerrito and commuting to work in San Francisco.

The newspaper wages were so low then, relative to the cost of living, that we could only afford to go out to eat about four times a year.

Gazpacho ingredients waiting to be married

What I could afford was to cook my way through the book, learning the great restaurants and the works of 80 Bay Area chefs through the pages of the “culinary variety show” compiled by the San Francisco Symphony.

Today, as it has done many times before, the book falls open by itself to the very well-loved page 214, which has a recipe for Gazpacho from talk show host Narsai David, of KCBS Saturday Kitchen fame.

The photo here is from another hot summer day four years ago, when I gathered the Gazpacho ingredients on the kitchen counter and realized that both the components and the soup are art — as easy on the eyes as they are on the tongue.

Gazpacho

1 cucumber, peeled

1 large red onion, peeled

1 large red bell pepper, seeded and deribbed

1 pound tomatoes, peeled

3 or 4 cloves garlic, peeled

3 or 4 sprigs fresh basil

1 cup clam juice or chicken stock

1/4 cup wine vinegar

1/4 cup virgin olive oil

2 cups tomato sauce

Juice of 1 orange

Tabasco or other hot sauce

Grated zest of 1/2 orange

*my optional additions:

Peeled avocado halves or quarters

cooked baby shrimp or crab meat

Instructions

Finely chop 1/2 cup of each of the cucumber, onion, bell pepper and tomato and place in a soup tureen.

Place remaining cucumber, onion, bell pepper and tomato in a blender or food processor. Add garlic and basil. Add as much of the clam juice or stock as needed to obtain a smooth puree; add to the soup tureen. Stir in vinegar, oil, tomato sauce and orange juice. Season with hot sauce to taste. Add orange zest. Cover tureen and refrigerate for 2 or 3 hours to let flavors marry.

* Place avocado half in soup bowl, spoon shrimp into the cavity where the seed was, then ladle Gazpacho around and over the avocado.