Blog Posts - Alec Brooks

Community news with high standards

10/27/2011

I first became introduced to Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service when Herbert Lowe, then my News Media Writing professor, brought its founder, Sharon McGowan, to speak to our class. To prepare for the class I read a few of the longer pieces and did some skimming.

Looking at the site for the first time in months, my impression was that education had taken over. After all, two of the four featured stories are related to neighborhood schools. But if you look at every link on the page, the proportion becomes closer to what you'd expect. My other impression — that the quality remained as high as when I first saw it — turned out to be correct.

Looking at the mission statement, the outlet's main interest is "education, public safety, economic development, health and wellness, recreation, employment, youth development and housing." From what I can tell, they stay true to that. The picture above is from a story that covers a local school. A short brief on Halloween covers both recreation and safety. At the bottom, special reports tackle health and wellness, economic development and employment and (again) education. Neither is housing left out: one news item features a talk about neighborhoods.

Gadhafi dead; MSNBC foreign reporting alive and well

10/21/2011

I was surprised by the news from some of my colleagues: apparently their outlets had nothing on Gadafi's death, even hours after. MSNBC fortunately did not disappoint. Above you can see what was up about 2 hours after it was reported.

MSNBC's strength in photojournalism was on display with their slideshow of Gadhafi's life. Most of the photos came from the Associated Press and Getty, but their work compiling the photos from various stories was good work.

The seven stories linked to show that reporters leaped on the chance to inform their readers of all the angles of the case. In the time since, they haven't rested. Just today, reporters have filed a story on Libya's promise to investigate Gadhafi's death, which features a clip from the Nightly News. Five other stories updated today are from the AP.

One of their more in-depth articles from the weekend was an analysis of the effects of Gadhafi's death on markets and prices, particularly that of oil. It's very content-rich: it has a video, an article, a slideshow, a series of briefs on Gadhafi's children and tables of market information.

Since MSNBC retains a focus on broadcast journalism, it isn't unduly concerned about hosting wire photos and stories. It's willing to risk overshadowing some of its work in order to tell a complete story, as long as clips from flagship Nightly News and similar shows remain on top.

Midterm Project

10/18/2011

I have some experience with Audacity, so using it was straightforward. More challenging was compressing my 15 minutes down to 1.5. After my questions, all the extraneous pauses and barely relevant information were removed, there was still plenty to work with.

I definitely had to be ruthless to make the story fit the requirements. It reminds me of William Faulkner's advice to "kill your darlings," when writing. If it didn't advance the story, I cut it, no matter how good or interesting it was.

I was lucky in that the photographs I had told the story pretty well. I did take more when I spotted an opportunity, but I didn't have to go out of my way.

Working with Soundslides wasn't that difficult, aside from the exporting and uploading issues. It was irritating how mistakes that were invisible to me when listening in Audacity suddenly became so much more noticeable when trying to pair it with pictures.

After six weeks of blogging, some thoughts on MSNBC

10/18/2011

MSNBC's coverage of 9/11 was broad and generally well-done. However, in a few places, quality suffered

Through the eyes of MSNBC, I have looked at 9/11, the death of Steve Jobs, the Texas wildfires and many more. In particular, I used these events to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the outlet's online coverage.

MSNBC has not always impressed me. In particular, I was surprised by its lack of live-tweeting and curation. (link) But it did well in terms of its coverage of the 9/11 anniversary (link) and the death of Jobs (link). Its photojournalism was also a strong point.

That is why I feel MSNBC could pioneer emerging forms of journalism and produce some great stories while doing it. No doubt economic pressures are something of an inhibitor: They might not feel they can afford to experiment.
Nonetheless, the changing market will demand that they stay flexible. They need to be adopting new media and technologies to stay relevant, while maintaining established standards and techniques to stay good. They've certainly "stayed good." They just need to stay relevant.

Advice on Audacity

10/15/2011

Audacity's a simple program when lined up with full packages like Logic, but it does the basics well. It's pretty intuitive, too. I've used Audacity on and off for the past four or so years. I'm not an expert, but I've learned a few useful things about the program.

Choose the beta

On Audacity's webpage you can choose to download its newer and less tested beta version. It may be experimental, but it runs without crashing and has more features. For those reasons, feel free to install the beta.

If you do have problems with it, then install the stable version. In any case, save often-no version of any program is immune to crashing.

A tip for amplifying

Clipping is bad. Really bad. Audacity helps avoid it by limiting how much you can amplify your sound.

In the amplify options window, there's a checkbox people often overlook: "allow clipping." Its existence might seem pointless, if clipping is so bad. But there are situations where it's useful. Sometime recording devices pick up loud, unwanted sounds: a cough, a tap to the microphone, an overpronounced p, etc. To avoid amplifying too much, Audacity notices that sound and makes sure it doesn't get clipped. (Never mind that you're going to delete it anyway.) Meanwhile, the part you actually want to hear remains inaudible.

But I don't recommend using the "allow clipping" option. Instead, delete the unwanted loud sections. That way, you still benefit from anti-clipping.

If you want to learn more, UW-Eau Claire has an overview on avoiding clipping in Audacity and the Amplify effect.

Take Notes

When you go from audio to text, you gain the expressiveness of speech. But you also lose easy navigation. You can't search audio for a word and skimming isn't really possible. As a result, we are urged to take notes on our audio so we can find sections we want quickly.

That's good advice, but constantly glancing down at your notebook is inconvenient. Fortunately, Audacity lets you mark important points with short comments. Just add go to add a track and choose "label track", highlight the section you want to mark and start typing. Make sure your selection is in the label track, not the audio one.

Now that you have labels, you can move them around or delete them. To slide the label over without changing the size of the area it marks, click on the circle and drag. To adjust the area the label covers, do the same but click on the arrow instead. Delete the label by clicking on its text area and backspace until it disappears.

You need to be careful how you delete sections when using labels. If you only select the part you want to delete on the audio track, the label track will be unaffected, meaning the labels won't match the recording anymore. Instead, make your selection and drag the mouse down to the label track until you see the segment highlighted in both. Then delete it.

Exporting

Audacity makes saving your files a bit tricky. Just hitting "save" or cmd-S saves everything, but not in a usable way. Instead you need to export to MP3. First, follow these instructions to get LAME. (For legal reasons, Audacity cannot include the software to read or create MP3s. The semi official explanation is here.) Alternatively, the first time you try to export to MP3, it'll prompt you to install the correct package.

Now that you have it installed, you can create files that can be read by virtually any audio program. Just use the export command, found under File. You can click OK on both boxes that pop up after typing in a filename on the first. Note that this process will mix tracks together and remove labels. Those things will be preserved in your Audacity project file, so keep that around until you're completely finished with editing.

Class project 2 -- One at Marquette: Anwar Ali

10/7/2011

Like many of my colleagues, I got to experience the strange beast that is Weebly especially as the finishing touches were applied to our second class project. I also had the experience of doing this on very little sleep.

I learned a lot about what makes a good photo by doing going out and taking pictures and then going back to apply what Professor Lowe and Berford Gammon taught us in the week's classes.

The person I profiled was Anwar Ali, my RA. It was interesting to learn about him, as up until now I didn't know much about him or where he worked (besides RAing).

Producing it on deadline was sometimes difficult and stressful. But it's an experience I'd love to have again. Given all that I know now, I would do many things differently.

Reporting a Death and Remembering a Life

10/6/2011

MSNBC was one of the first accounts on my Twitter feed to break the news of Steve Jobs' death. I heard it first from my Marquette Tribune colleagues, but Twitter was one of the first places I checked to verify and get more information.

Within two hours, MSNBC had already published a memorial video and an article on the first wave of Jobs memorials (along with a Storify that, unlike the article, has been updated several times).

The day after, the front page has four stories: an obituary; a Today Show tribute to his other start-up, Pixar; an invitation for readers to share their reaction and a video of Steve Wozniak's reaction. Their PhotoBlog also published a great collection of fans' tributes to Jobs.

MSNBC can't be faulted for not moving on a breaking news story. We'll see how well they do in the coming days, when they can offer more elaborate journalism. Come back to this post, as it will be updated as MSNBC's coverage expands.

Update(2:50 p.m., 10/06/11): MSNBC has an interesting look at the Chinese reaction to Jobs' death. Apple products were popular in Asian markets and apparently, so was the man behind them.

Update(5:50 p.m.): The Westboro Baptist Church, known for its controversial signs and picketing, is going to protest Jobs' funeral. @MSNBC tweeted a the Today Show's take, focusing particularly on the irony that the announcement was sent on an iPhone.

The Westboro Baptist Church has targeted soldiers' funerals, which culminated in a Supreme Court ruling in March saying their right was constitutionally protected. In the past, they've gotten a lot of media coverage, for better or for worse. It'll be interesting to see what MSNBC does this time.

Westboro aside, MSNBC has also put a slideshow on the front page. Below that, there are links to the stories they've been able to publish less than 24 hours after the announcement.

Update(6:57 p.m.): Here's MSNBC's article with the rest of the Westboro Baptist Church picket details.

Update(11:02 a.m., 10/09/11): Over the past 24 hours, MSNBC has slowly removed its Steve Jobs' tributes and articles from the home page. It continues to update its memorial article, though.

Westboro hasn't been covered much since the article I mentioned Friday. A search on Google News suggests other outlets have passed on extra coverage for the time being, probably because of a lack of new information to publish.

Update(4:39 p.m., 10/09/11): Through its partnership with Entrepreneur Magazine (the magazine has many), MSNBC has published several more articles on Jobs online, long after he's stopped trending and the memorials have left the homepage. One is the memorial article in the last update. The other is "Why Entrepreneurs Love Steve Jobs."

For MSNBC, Photography is a Main Attraction

10/4/2011

The web is a very visual medium, and MSNBC uses this to great effect. They regularly feature photos on the homepage, have a PhotoBlog featuring photos, have an @msnbc_pictures Twitter and have a photo section.

Their PhotoBlog is interesting. The posts are sometimes basic: a photo with a caption, like these photos about BASE jumpers. Sometimes they pair an AP photo with a wire story, like this post on the Lions' victory against the Cowboys. Occasionally, the photographer will comment on his photos, like on this Sept. 9th post. Many of the photos are from AP or Getty, but MSNBC's own photographers have photos featured too.

MSNBC also promotes its photos via a Twitter account, which has a smallish following of 9,000. While this isn't is only a fraction of the follower count of flagship accounts like @msnbc or @todayshow, it's a pretty healthy amount, considering MSNBC isn't known for its photos. (Image twitter accounts for National Geographic, the New York Times and the LA Times are all over 100,000 followers.)

They also have a photo section on their site, which is a more visual version of their already photo-heavy home page:

From here visitors can look at some of their many slideshows, including this one on Afghanistan. That slideshow looks at Afghanistan in 172 pictures, each with a caption. It is much longer than the New York Times' "One in 8 Million" piece, especially when you count the separate slideshows for 2010 and 2009. That means it shares a lot more, but risks losing the viewer midway through. That may not be unintentional: the slideshow seems as though you could end at any point and get something out of it.

While MSNBC works hard to feature the photos themselves, its sections that feature only photography seem to be forgotten, leaving some of their efforts easily missed.

Storify and MSNBC: an Odd Relationship

9/29/2011

Two months ago, MSNC and Storify announced they were partnering up. MSNBC's experiment in letting users pick the top stories, Breaking News, would allow users to turn the site's posts into Storifys. So you'd think MSNBC would be all over live-tweeting and curation, right?

No.

I've been able to find only two examples of live-tweeting by MSNBC. One is the ongoing live-tweeting of GOP debates. The latest was a week ago and covered the Florida debate. They've done others, but they can't really be compared because none of them have been curated. Pre-primary debates are transient things — have you watched any from 2007 lately? — but doing nothing to preserve them means no one can see them even when they're still relevant.

The second was by Richard Engel of the Nightly News. He was live-tweeting events from Libya on the ground in March. Like the debates, it hasn't been saved so it's been buried under everything else he's tweeted. But unlike the debates, people will want to read this months and even years later. Now we can't, unless we go to a lot of trouble.

The only Storify MSNBC has done is a single story on the tsunami that hit Japan in March. It is interesting because it mostly ignores the staple of every other Storify I've read: tweets. Instead, it uses photos from the reporter's Facebook and includes quotes in the text field.

What makes this strange is that MSNBC — like virtually every national or regional news outlet — has a major Twitter presence. Searching "MSNBC" under users gives a long list of results. Every program, anchor, correspondent and editor seems to have an account.

Apparently, my Digital Journalism II class has more experience curating on Storify than all of MSNBC. In live-tweeting, we're a close second. It's strange to think of, but interesting.

How do TV journalists write for the ear? A case study in 77 seconds.

9/20/2011

MSNBC's "Nightly News" on Monday told the story of Jim Morton, a man who was saved by a mysterious rescuer. How did the station's techniques line up with those we learned in "Writing for the Ear," on of Poynter Institute's online courses? Let's take a look.

The story is short: it's just one minute and seventeen seconds. It is probably for that reason that it uses only one scene; and takes only seven seconds to set it up. As the anchor and subjects are talking, we get to see more of the scene -- the man's charred house -- as B-roll.

Interestingly, the clip does exactly what "Writing for the Ear" says not to do; it ends with a quote. And yet, it works. For one thing, the story isn't one about a societal issue, with pro and con positions, so there's no danger taking sides, a danger Al Thomkins warned against in "Aim for the Heart." The story is also one of a single character — the rescued homeowner — so it makes sense to give him the final say.

Unfortunately, the ending is weakened by the last two seconds: careless editing has muted the man's words while continuing to show him talking. It's distracting and takes some of the force out of the closing "kicker" quote. Nonetheless, it is a good example of a "full circle": the man in the story brings it back to his search for the man who saved him.

The story is good, but not stellar. The quotes (Or as "Writing for the Ear" would say, Axx) tell the story, but they barely go beyond that. The quote it ends on is one of the better ones. I also noticed that the transitions were sometimes obvious a problem supposed to be avoided through judicious use of ambient noise and room tone. All this show me that MSNBC found an interesting story, but seemed to only tackle it half-heartedly.