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After watching the “Gangnam Style” video, my kids asked me what Gangnam was. So I decided to take them on a little Google Street View tour.
I just plunked the cursor down on a random street in the Gangnam district of Seoul, and I got a surprise when we got to street level — the first frame we saw looked remarkably like Westminster Highway in Richmond, where I used to drive the kids home from daycare.
I put together two comparable images. What do you think? Is it just me?
Gangnam's on the top, Richmond's on the bottom.
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Occupy Wall Street gives birth to Occupy Vancouver this week, which may explain the political bent in this, the sixth installment of links I liked this week:
- I just discovered Peter Lewis, who explained in a post earlier this week that the outgoing CEO of the Gannett newspaper company will receive $37 million after overseeing the company while its stock priced dropped from $72 to $10. He compares Craig Dubow’s performance to that of Steve Jobs, and in a later post explains why it’s a fair comparison.
- After the Globe and Mail caused a ruckus this week with some subversive captions on a celebrity photo gallery, Toronto Standard made the keenest observation: “…a national newspaper makes fun of celebrity obliviousness, and even dares to show some sympathy to some anti-establishment views, and suddenly thousands feel like they’ve just glimpsed a glitch in the matrix. What should be entirely normal is now strange.”
- David Cohn writes that The Daily Show is not political satire, it’s media satire.
- This is quite interesting for a talking-head video. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff explains how views on family are related to a person’s political ideology.
- “A newspaper can happily support a few reporters and an ad guy if it gives up the paper, the offices and the rest of the trappings,” writes Seth Godin.
- Steve Yelvington does a great job of condensing the Digital First news philosophy into the real essentials.
- And finally, an appreciation of two of the best hockey players the NHL has seen — from somebody who isn’t even a Canucks fan!
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Journalism blog 10,000 Words posted today about how The Guardian will began sharing parts of its story schedule publicly, to get pre-publication feedback and guidance from its audience.
I like this idea, and have for as long as I’ve worked online. However, implementing something like this raises some practical considerations. They have nothing to do with secrecy, and everything to do with timing.
We hold our first formal news meeting of the day at 10 a.m. Our schedule hasn’t completely taken shape by that time. Inevitably a few more ideas, and possibly some good ones, will trickle in by early afternoon.
To make our schedule public after the 10 a.m. meeting, we would have to compose a coherent blog post telling readers what we have in mind and what we need from them. That takes time.
Then we’d have to wait for the response. We likely wouldn’t get much feedback to act on until readers had their lunch breaks, read the post and provided some input. By then it’s 1 – 1:30 p.m. So if any new angles were to come up, we’d have three, maybe three and a half hours to act before offices start shutting down and people stop answering their phones. Not a lot of time.
Maybe I’m showing more concern for the 24-hour news cycle than a digital journalist ought to have. After all, stories can always be carried over to the next day — they take however long they take, and can be published when they’re ready. But 24-hour thinking is hard to shake when you hold a news meeting every 24 hours. And while I’ve never believed the fear of being scooped should stop newsrooms from crowdsourcing, even I would hesitate to leave spilled secrets out there overnight.
What do you think? Is it an experiment worth trying?
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Every weekend I round up a few links that caught my interest as they drifted past during the previous week. Many are related to digital journalism and writing, but they may also touch on my other interests like sports, music or life in Vancouver. Here’s the fifth installment:
- Ezra Klein gets to the bottom of what this whole Occupy Wall Street thing is about, and I agree.
- Interesting thoughts here about what news organizations can learn — not so much practically, but philosophically — from the recent Facebook changes.
- Don’t remember how I found it, but here’s a site dedicated to helping journalists make a living abroad.
- And on that note, a new fellowship for Canadian journalists who want to do an international project.
- The good stuff in this post about how Steve Jobs changed journalism comes near the end. There aren’t enough thinkers like Jobs in news.
- In case you haven’t seen all of these already, a roundup of creative tributes to Steve Jobs.
- A friend tipped me off to this site offering free downloads of live bluegrass and Americana music.
- And another cool music site, where you can dig up just about every cover song and its original.
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For someone who deals with crime news daily, I’ve spent very little time in a courtroom. I’ve received plenty of copy from the courthouse, but have never written any myself. I’ve always wanted to see a trial from the inside by serving on a jury, but when I got my call recently, I had to pass it up.
The summons arrived by mail about a month ago, directing me to the courthouse downtown at 9:15 a.m. on Tuesday. With two major projects to launch at work this month, it wasn’t a good time.
I arrived at B.C. Supreme Court to find a diverse crowd of about 200 people gathered in the atrium, looking as clueless about the whole process as I was.
They were selecting for two trials: a 14-day extortion trial beginning on Oct. 11 and a 25-day murder trial beginning on Oct. 12. This was all explained to the group by a sheriff, who described how the morning would go: You enter the courtroom, sit down, and they begin drawing numbers. You hear your number, you come forward. The sheriff lets you speak to the judge if you feel you can’t participate. The judge either excuses you, tells you to stand aside while selection continues, or leaves it up to the lawyers.
“If counsel challenges your selection,” the sheriff told us, “don’t take it personally.”
With what I have on my plate right now, I would have welcomed a challenge. I wasn’t alone in this.
We took our seats in the courtroom, including a big man in a wheelchair who got a special spot up front. It wasn’t until the judge read out the formal charge of second-degree murder that I realized he was the accused. His plea: “Not guilty.”
The judge gave us a sober speech off the top about the importance of this civic duty, and discouraged us from begging off unless participation would cause us genuine hardship. I doubted “super busy at work” would meet his definition of hardship, so decided to let the lawyers decide my fate if I was the first one called. I had spoken to my boss about it, and he seemed to think a member of the tabloid press could count on a challenge from one side or the other.
A young woman went first and broke the ice. Her boss would pay her only for “a few days” of jury duty, she told the judge. This was a five-week trial. The judge let her stand aside.
The line shuffled forward. Most people asked to speak to the judge. The ones who didn’t were either sworn in and sat down in the jury box, or were challenged by the lawyers and returned to their seats. The lawyers don’t have to give any reason for their challenges, so when somebody’s challenged, everyone else just stares at her and silently speculates while she returns to the pack.
I got through the first selection without being called. That jury got a brief pep talk from the judge and was told to return next Tuesday at 10 a.m. They’ll work Tuesday through Friday for five weeks, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a 90-minute lunch break and coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon. Not a bad deal if you’re still getting a salary from your employer. Once they begin deliberations, however, they won’t be allowed to leave.
For the second trial, it was the same judge and the same process, but with new lawyers and a new accused: a tiny Filipina woman wearing a hoodie.
My number came up when the jury box was half full. By this time half the people called had asked to be left out, so I was comfortable telling the judge about my projects at work. “So you’re in a situation where, if you’re not there, it doesn’t get done?” he asked, before letting me stand aside. I was relieved, but now I’ll never know whether one of those lawyers had planned to challenge my selection. That would have been interesting.
I think I would have preferred the extortion trial to the murder trial. I guess most people would choose the latter, but I was vaguely familiar with the murder case and it was the kind we see over and over again in the newsroom: a couple of down-and-outers get into a fight on skid row and one of them ends up dead. That’s not particularly interesting to me. I was much more intrigued to learn how this tiny woman who speaks only Tagalog came to be accused of extortion. It seemed like a better story, and a window into another world — one that’s out there in Vancouver, but about which I know little.
Twelve people will get to hear it. I’ll be at work, wondering if someday I’ll get another chance.
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Every weekend I round up a few links that caught my interest as they drifted past during the previous week. Many are related to digital journalism and writing, but they may also touch on my other interests like sports, music or life in Vancouver. Here’s the fourth installment:
- A great, detailed post from Howard Owens about how to launch your own local news site in 10 steps. These aren’t small steps, but having worked in both community news and digital news, I can assure you that if any blueprint is going to succeed, it’s this one.
- Voice of San Diego‘s New Reporter Guidelines are inspiring. Most journalists would love to take this approach, but could a for-profit news organization succeed with it?
- David Skok reminds journalists that the rush into digital doesn’t necessarily mean they should leave the tried-and-true behind.
- How B.C. surfers have used the satellite imagery in Google Maps to find seldom-surfed breaks along the coast.
- Canadian Business takes a look at what the NHL might look like in 2025.
- “Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects.” Interesting thoughts as always from Seth Godin.
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