New Roles for Journalists

“ Who’s got the biggest smile among our U.S. senators? Let’s find out and exercise our Ruby coding and civic skills. This article consists of a quick coding strategy overview (from the full code is at my Github). Or jump here to see the results, as sorted by Face’s algorithm

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“ Again, this is really difficult, but necessary. I feel that the news outlets making a strong effort to fact-check will be acting in good faith and trustworthy, and profitable. However, this seems like a good way to start restoring trust to the news business.

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“ JR: What are your basic research rules for students? Eric Ferkenhoff: Number one out of the gates is: If you think you have a story, first do a Lexis-Nexis, Factiva and Google News search. Make it a habit. Every story has been done, but it’s about finding the new angle or perspective. I then ask students to look through Google Scholar, Journalist’s Resource — scholarly sources and other databases – to see if their angle is truly new. And if it’s not new, I emphasize that, although it doesn’t kill story, they must then look for paragraphs and passages in articles and studies that hint at some other aspect of the issue that needs to be explored further. JR: You mentioned Journalist’s Resource earlier. How do you use it? Eric Ferkenhoff: It’s been a very timely resource for me. I’ve been working on some projects relating to poverty that are using Census-type data, as well as juvenile justice and education information. It just seems that every time that I’m working on a project, you folks will come out with a compilation of studies and an analysis of studies that are right up the alley of work that I’m doing and teaching. It’s almost freaky how timely it is. I’ll be looking for a particular type of research for my students, and I’ll get the Journalist’s Resource email. And I’ll say, “Well, that was easy!” You cover a wide range and an important range of issues. The classes that I teach draw on a lot of different aspects of government policy. These studies help us immensely in terms of background research and pointing us in the direction of data. I forward the entire email or I’ll take the individual URL and send my class to the site for the studies.

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“ Embattled wholesale satellite broadband contender LightSquared has taken off the gloves. The company has asked the Federal Communications Commission for a “declaratory ruling” confirming its right to use spectrum licensed to the company by the FCC. Not only that, but LightSquared wants the Commission to confirm that GPS makers—who have been complaining of interference risks for months—lack any legal basis to ask for interference protections.

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“ An article in The New York Times highlights two growing collections of words online that effectively bypass the traditional dictionary publishing system of slow aggregation and curation. Wordnik is a private venture that has already raised more than $12 million in capital, while the Corpus of Contemporary American English is a project started by Brigham Young professor Mark Davies. These sources differ from both conventional dictionary publishers and crowd-sourced efforts like the excellent Wiktionary for their emphasis on avoiding human intervention rather than fostering it. Says founder Erin McKean in the linked article, ‘Language changes every day, and the lexicographer should get out of the way. … You can type in anything, and we’ll show you what data we have.’

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“ Companies have long hired journalists for traditional public relations and marketing jobs. But the use of them to create and package what appears to be unbiased editorial content began with Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s former in-house blogger, said Rosen. Scoble, who worked for Microsoft from 2003 to 2006, gained a following for his work there as well as on his own blog, Scobleizer. Now 46, he holds a journalism degree from West Valley Community College and gets paid to produce and manage content for Rackspace, the IT hosting company based in San Antonio. “Right now I go around and interview start-up CEOs on video about their ideas and products,” said Scoble. “When I was at Microsoft I interviewed everyone from the janitor to Bill Gates.” In a similar fashion, journalists and other media people are increasingly finding new comfort zones outside of media. In May, the luxury online retailer, Gilt Groupe, lured seasoned food writer and former Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl to become editorial adviser of its new food and wine e-commerce site, Gilt Taste. The site now combines online commerce and content and employs several editors and paid freelance writers.

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