I learn the most from actually reporting, interviewing, editing and writing. But the classes I take and the books I read are a valuable addition. Between assigned readings and what I found myself, I ended up reading a number of books, if only for a few paragraphs. A few I liked enough to finish and recommend below.

Writing for Story by Jon Franklin

This book was an unexpected find, but a welcome one. I had already worked in journalism classes to do just what the title promised and this new perspective looked promising.

The book did not disappoint. The examples of the author's own stories by themselves make the book worth its price (of course, I got it cheap at a used book store). What makes it practical is how he breaks down his stories, explaining them piece by piece.

 Without denying the need for creativity, he argues that understanding the techniques of writing and practicing them goes a long way. He supports this with specifics on structuring and pacing stories. His advice for finding stories worth telling was useful as well.

Aim for the Heart by Al Tompkins

I read this because it was assigned reading for a fall semester course. But it didn't feel like assigned reading: I liked it. The author's stories are both illuminating and enjoyable. Also, the author's approach to finding emotional stories and telling them effectively is worth studying. I particularly liked his suggestion to tightly focus your story to make it resonate.

The author manages to cover a variety of topics, which are all related to his broader philosophy of telling emotional stories. I thought his sections on presenting numbers visually, interviewing and being a skeptical, but not cynical, journalist were particularly good.

The Artful Edit by Susan Bell

Many books try to teach you how to think like a writer. This book tries to teach you how to think like an editor. Trickier still, it tries to help you get that perspective when you look at your own work. The author's expertise isn't in journalism, and none of her examples are from that field. But the techniques are universal. Her strategies for gaining perspective will help any type of writing.

Some of the techniques I liked best were the simplest, like the suggestion to get away from your computer after you finish drafting and spread out your pages or hang them up. But I also liked the sections that were less immediately practical, like the history of editing and the interviews with writers and poets.

I think succeeded in reading a variety of works: one isn't written by a journalist at all, another by a primarily broadcast journalist and the last by a print journalist who wrote long pieces. One thing I could have done, I think, is read more examples of good journalism. Aim for the Heart and Writing for Story both contain examples of the authors' work — and excellent ones, at that — but focusing on on high-quality journalism would be interesting.

On the other hand, I did read some pretty wonderful pieces this year. Besides one or two from classes, I often find stories on Longform.org that are well crafted. I will highlight some of those soon.

In trying to finish a Storify on a long-gone event, I did some research into digging up old tweets. Twitter is a moving target and most of the information I found is incomplete or outdated. So I thought I'd share what I've been able to figure out.

The problem

Twitter has done well. Really well: to succeed as well as it has is probably the dream of every tech start-up, every internet entrepreneur, every venture capitalist in social media. But Twitter has its wrinkles. You can't use the site for long without being familiar with the Fail Whale, for example. 

One of Twitter's weaknesses is its search. If you've ever used it, you probably have realized it's limited. And if you have saved searches for uncommon hashtags, you're familiar with results you got only days ago disappearing. 

Apparently, the underlying design of the site doesn't allow the site to search back more than a week or so, although Twitter has vowed to improve it. And the API — the way external sites, like Storify, grab or post tweets — only allows access to the past 3200 tweets of a user.

Some here and now solutions

Not to worry, you still have a few tricks up your sleeve. Google, unsurprisingly, works okay. I can retrieve a small sample of the tweets during October 2011 that include '#JOUR1550,' the hashtag used for one of my journalism classes, with this search. I know there were far more tweets than that, but it's better than nothing. To limit by date like I did, go to the sidebar on the left and choose your preferred span or type in a specific range using "Custom..."

Better than Google for finding old tweets is Topsy. It turns up more results than Google for the searches I've done. Using the advanced search, you can also limit results to a date range. When searching an individual's stream, the results are good: it found all my tweets over this past summer.

Snapbird is good for searching a particular user, including yourself. The best use of this may be to get more tweets from users you've identified as tweeting what you want. So if you can identify a few users who tweeted an event more or less constantly, you should be able to dig up their entire feed for the day you're interested in.

I found three other services that look promising, but really aren't that useful. Google has a customized search that is less useful than the previous Google trick — it's harder than just going to Google's webpage and doesn't have the date selection feature. Another is FriendFeed which might find tweets others don't, but it's in a very confusing format. Finally, we have TweetScan, which, in my tests, doesn't turn up much of anything.

But what about the future?

It turns out, if you plan to use tweets in advance, you have a lot more options. (Shocker, right?) For one thing, you can favorite tweets or add them to a curation tool like Storify. You could also copy and paste the link to the tweets into a file (click the date underneath the tweet, then copy the URL). Those links are permanent: People have dug up functioning links to tweets from 2006.

You can also archive your own tweets. The problem is that this only saves the tweets available when you start archiving, although if you have few enough tweets, that could be all of them. There are many of these, so I'm going to dedicate an entire post to them.

Over the long term, your tweets are safe. Even though they can't be found by search, all tweets are available via link (see the one above), so Twitter isn't deleting them. I suspect it will eventually improve its search or allow users to access all of their own tweets. Even if Twitter destroys all its data or goes bankrupt, the Library of Congress has an archive of the site. It isn't searchable right now, but I imagine they will be eventually.

In a medium that's all about the immediate, it isn't a surprise it's so hard to find things older than a week. But several tools do a pretty good job of finding past tweets anyway. Topsy, Snapbird and Google are the best bets at the moment. The future will probably bring more and better options, but for now the best option is to be proactive — archive tweets as soon as you know you want to keep them.

Ryan Ellerbusch and I chose Next Door Foundation for our story's focus and for the first part, profiled its executive director. For the second part we looked at a beneficiary, Stephanie Williams.
 
I have experienced both stories that seemingly fell into my lap — a few phone calls and I was done — and those that seemed to stretch on forever — weeks of trying to get in contact with the right person. This project was on the longer side of things. As nice as it is when things just click, the challenges present a great opportunity to learn.

So what did I learn? Well, I feel that I have a better idea of how to keep in contact with your editor. I had some idea from my classes so far, but this project probably demanded so much in that area, it taught me more about the topic than any of my actual classes. 

I likewise learned quite a bit about communicating with my partner. Keeping each other informed of what you're doing and what you plan to do is important. That might sound obvious and it is, but knowing what and when to communicate is important too and that I learned as well.

In the end, I am happy with how the story and video came out. Neither is perfect, but they represent my partner and I persevering and, in the end, producing a publishable story we can put in our portfolios.

As a part of this semester of Digital Journalism II, I completed a profile on Next Door Foundation's executive director, Carol Keintz. Getting the interview took a lot of legwork, partly due to some communication mishaps.

The assignment wasn't just for the class, however. It is due to be published, along with the second half, on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service's website. So I've gotten the chance to work with the organization's editor, Sharon McGowan and get some valuable feedback.

Keintz told us a number of interesting details about her and her organization's work. Selecting only the most important information was a challenge. In the end, I'm happy with the story Ryan and I produced.

MSNBC's political blog First Read shares the field with some strong contenders, such as NPR's It's All Politics and the New York Times' The Caucus. Such blogs offer a mix of analysis and updates. And recently they have been transfixed by the campaign for the GOP nomination.

How transfixed, you ask? Out of the eleven stories on the First Read's front page at the time of writing, only three aren't related to the campaign. And two of those three relate to the Obama campaign for president in 2012. As a comparison, let's look at the Wisconsin State Journal's "Daily politics briefing," which has enough resemblance to a blog, and yet isn't in a position to focus on the GOP race. It has eight stories, and three relate to elections. One relates to redistricting for the state legislature and the other two relate to.


I'm not blaming First Read for its focus on the campaign. I'm blaming it for focusing on the campaign at the exclusion of everything else. Certainly, MSNBC has a general politics section, which picks up some of the slack. But don't people want to hear about what politicians are doing when they're not campaigning, but governing? 

At the time of writing, a big red banner on msnbc.com announces that Micha Murray has been sentenced. But looking at some other outlets, there's no "breaking news." At the same time msnbc.com was trumpeting the verdict, Reuters was emphasizing Tehran and the New York Times had the latest campaign news about Herman Cain front-and-center. But among broadcast news, the emphasis of Murray's sentencing was the norm: see these screenshots of CNN, CBS News and ABC News. USA Today was one of the few newspapers I found with coverage.

Some of this is due to the constraints of their media. Broadcasters can show you the trial live and it makes for reasonably good TV. The stories Reuters and the New York Times emphasized, could be told well in pictures and words. More important, though, is the audience, as USA Today shows. It is still mostly a newspaper, a text and photos business. But it still features the trial.

I think a similar issue is behind msnbc.com's intense focus. As I have learned, msnbc.com emphasizes domestic news and stories that a broad audience will find interesting. People care a lot about Michael Jackson, so the twists and turns of the trial of the doctor implicated in his death interest them. But generally, people don't care that much about the primaries. And they don't care that much about Tehran, either. So to a certain extent, this editorial decision is all about giving people what they want.

Before I paint a too negative picture, let me add a third reason. Broadcast outlets, particularly msnbc.com and CNN, pride themselves on up-to-the-minuteness. Newspapers, while still aiming for timeliness, often try to be more comprehensive or to find a unique angle. That isn't to say broadcast news doesn't do those or that newspapers don't do breaking news. Rather, because of the history and technical aspects of broadcast and print news, broadcasters are more often going to break stories and newspapers are more often going to give them a detailed look.

Continuing on from my last post, today I will look at msnbc.com's other three blogs. They are all science and technology related, surprisingly. Blogwise, msnbc.com could stand for more variety.

I might as well start with In-Game, msnbc.com's video gaming blog. One of its main features are short videos, each reviewing a single game or covering a specific story. There are also plenty of written posts which focus less on reviews and more on news. 

New hardware devices — like smartphones, ereaders, tablet computers — release so frequently that one could write about it daily. And that's exactly what msnbc.com has done with Gadgetbox. Interestingly, Gadgetbox also has a 

Despite its name, Cosmic Log is not just about astronomy — although it certainly covers that. Much like Body Odd, it's a what's new and interesting in science kind of blog. Articles spread the gamut from serious — like one on genetically engineered bees — to lighthearted — see their roundup of science-themed gifts.

One thing that interests me is how these stack up against stand-alone blogs. I haven't made a detailed comparison, but what I can tell, that difference is probably depth and, to a lesser extent, credibility. For instance, the blogs of Discover Magazine are mostly maintained by people with science degrees, a qualification the writers of Cosmic Log seem to lack. But since msnbc.com's blogs are intended for a wide audience, despite their niche topics, that's okay.  

Last week I looked at msnbc.com's consumer blog, the Red Tape Chronicles. A few weeks ago, I looked at the site's PhotoBlog, as a part of my post on their photojournalism efforts. But msnbc.com has eight blogs and so today I will look at three of the others.

Political cartoons got their start in newspapers, but they've survived the switch to digital. Cartoon Blog of msnbc.com features two different takes on a timely issue in a daily "toon-off." Most comics are drawn by cartoonists employed by other news organizations. Daryle Cagle, who runs the blog, publishes his own comics every month or so, seen here.

Riffing off other news organization's weird news pages (see Yahoo's), Body Odd revels in the odd results medical research sometimes turns up — stories like "Right Handed People Don't Care for Reggae" and "4 Reasons a song gets stuck in your head." Hard-hitting journalism this isn't, but the occasional fluff piece can be OK. 

A look at msnbc.com's investigative and enterprise reporting probably deserves its own post, but I will quickly look at Open Channel, the blog which is all about investigation. The stories are typically short and are often summaries of other outlet's reporting, particularly that of NBC and MSNBC. Nonetheless, it all looks interesting

The interesting thing about these blogs, is they're all specialized, except the investigative blog. I suspect this is a winning strategy. There aren't many blogs that comment on consumer issues, look at odd medical findings or feature daily political cartoons. Fewer still are well-written and frequently updated. This gives msnbc.com a chance to stand out.

Being a large media outlet, msnbc.com has a number of special sections. One I stumbled upon today is its consumer blog, The Red Tape Chronicles. It focuses on the pitfalls of being a consumer in 2011: online scams, ripoffs and technology-induced problems.

The latest story is a remarkable one — interesting enough to make the front page. It tells of Jonathan Barnett's attempt to track down the 50 people who have acquired his social security number. It's surpising because it's almost entirely a personal story and not a basic informative one or guide to preventing it. It does have a paragraph at the end, titled "Re Tape wrestling tips," but the focus is on Barnett's story.

Apparently, this style of article is something of a break for Bob Sullivan, the blog's author. More typical are stories like this one on cell phone contracts. Nonetheless, the identity theft story was well-written. The writing sometimes fell prey to cliches, but it kept my attention and was informative. 

But what about the blog as a whole? I won't go into detail about the articles but will look at a question relevant to Digital Journalism II: How does the blog use social media? The author is active on his (public) Facebook page and his Twitter. Additionally, he seems to use them as more than a way to announce new blog posts. He answers readers questions, replies to other tweets and occasionally, enjoys a bit of levity. So, full marks for interacting with users. He also isn't afraid to link to other articles his readers might find interesting. Instead of sending people away, it makes him look genuinely interested in informing people rather than just trying to self-promote.

On the heels of a debt deal in Europe and the accompanying stock market surge, the news came today that Greece may allow citizens to veto the deal in a referendum election. Facing this piece of big news, MSNBC's wire, msnbc.com News Service, stepped up to the plate and published two stories on this new development.

At the moment, none of MSNBC's television news programs have done anything on the latest news, so the two text stories — one on the referendum itself and one on the American stock market's response — are the ones featured on the top of the page.

The stories are no-frills hard news, which is exactly what this situation calls for. A more feature-story approach is nice and often illuminating in a way hard news can't be, but that takes time. In this case, get the story out the door quickly in a straightforward way was important, and that's what they did.

Msnbc.com News Service is not nearly as well known as AP and Reuters, but it produces solid and timely content — exactly what you want from a news wire.