Post type: Longtext

Show people what journalism is, what interactive journalism can be. Show them it’s not all “a reporter shows up, talks to people, goes away and later something appears on the website/in the paper.” Show them that journalism can be curation from the public, soliciting input and feedback instanteously, that comes together in a package with our deep knowledge and library of photos of the area.

And I thought, “Damn. That sounds like FlappyArms.sexy, except actually relevant to journalism. I gotta get in on that.”

It was what you’d call a “hard-and-fast” deadline: Our contract with Caspio for database and data services was changing on July 1. On that day, our account — which to that point had been averaging something like 17GB transferred per month — would have to use no more than 5GB of data per month, or else we’d pay to the tune of $50/GB.

Our biggest data ab/user by far was our user-submitted photo galleries. A popular feature among our readers, it allowed them to both upload photos for us (at print quality) to use in the paper as well as see them online instanteously. Caspio stored and displayed them as a database: Here’s a page of a bunch of photos, click one to get the larger version.

We had to come up with something to replace it — and, as ever, without incurring m/any charges, because we don’t have any money to spend.

Having exactly zero musical education beforehand, I literally had no concept of things like “higher pitches,” or designating which was faster of eighth notes and triplets. One can argue that knowing those kinds of things were important to playing in the band, but that’s also the point of the class — to learn more.

Basically, a significant portion of my education (and free time, to an extent), was determined by a test that asked questions without ensuring that I even understood the answers.

This, of course, turned to be completely false … from a certain perspective. Why, Edward Snowden released documents that indicated that millions of Americans were being spied upon by the NSA! That proves that Clapper lied!

Actually, he didn’t. He certainly wasn’t what I would consider forthcoming, but he didn’t technically lie. From his viewpoint, the NSA collected “metadata” on millions of Americans, and only incidentally — they did not “wittingly” collect “data.”

No one is saying that all stories, or even most will be written by computers, but it’s not difficult to imagine that a good number of them will be simply because most stories today have significant chunks that aren’t deeply reported. They’re cribbed from press releases, interpreted from box scores or condensed from the wire. If we leave the drudge work to the computers, we can free up reporters to do things that computers can’t, and actually producing more, better content. It’s quite literally win-win. The primary losers are those companies who will buy too deeply into the idea that they can generate all their content automatically.

What we wanted was an easy way to get photos from any device (photographers frequently work using only their phones or tablets, because it’s one less and/or lighter piece of equipment they have to lug around versus a laptop) and push it to three places — the web, print and our archive. The simplest solution seemed to be getting the file into our system and then moving it around from there.

Enter Dropbox. It’s extraordinary how even free services can do what used to require expensive services that were frequently more unreliable. Using the free 2GB Dropbox plan, we made sure that all of the devices were syncing to the same account, as well as to the “new” automater machine.

There's a reason the inverted pyramid exists and has been adopted by the journalism profession as the general template for telling a story: It makes sense for a lot of them. You start out with a very specific idea and then go broad the more you write. It keeps young writers from getting too bogged down in specifics, while also making sure they're not taking the 10,000-foot view on everything.

It's a guideline ... And that's all it should be: a guide. It's not inviolate, and it's by no means the best format for every story out there. Even more so than the idea that each story should be expressed in the best format possible, there are almost zero stories where a strict inverted pyramid is called for.

Again, I understand the basic impetus behind this line of thinking. But it fails on two levels, both of them human. One: If you make it in the employee’s best interest to not share vital strategic or business information with a competitor, that employee (provided he/she is acting rationally) will not do so. This worry is, at heart, an admission that a company is not providing its employees with the proper incentive to act against the company.

This problem was compounded when we decided on the scope of the project Our high school football coverage is run by GameTimePA, which consists of the sports journalists from the York Daily Record, Hanover Evening Sun, Chambersburg Public Opinion and Lebanon Daily News. The four newsrooms are considered a "cluster," which means that we're relatively close geographically and tend to work together. Since the last preview, however, GameTimePA had expanded to include our corporate siblings in the Philadelphia area, meaning we now encompassed something like 10 newsrooms stretching from Central Pennsylvania to the New Jersey border.

And we're all on different CMSes.

These are what we’ll call sensible (though regrettable) redundancies. But the problem with technological innovation is that we think that any problem, with enough sufficient amounts of tech wizardry thrown at it, will disappear.

The flaw with this philosophy is that, much as with medicine and side effects, sometimes the troubles with the cure are worse than the problem it was trying to solve.

Live like you’re responsible for someone else. You don’t have to make sure everyone you know is always happy, you don’t have to be available every time the smallest thing in life goes wrong … but at the same time, make it known that you’re available for people when they truly need help.

In the grand scheme of things, being available for that kind of comfort, advice or help is an incredibly small portion of your time, and will be a minuscule part of your life — but it could be huge for that other person.

People who have seen new technology come into use view the technology only in terms of its functionality, a means to an end. Cellphones (and smartphones) are not their lifeline to life itself, they're a means of communication. Sure, they'll learn how to Facebook on the go, post Instagrams to Twitter and message their unruly teen to make sure he gets home before curfew, but if you took it away they'd still survive. They've got paper address books, landlines and actual (still digital, usually) cameras that aren't grafted onto a phone.

Some level of skepticism should be present. As debunking performs a fairly vital part of paranormal investigating, at least for Whispering Spirits, you'd expect the group to be somewhat wary of what it finds. You'd expect each of them (or at least some of them) to examine things with a critical eye, always naysaying each other and operating on a basis of "normal until proven not."

You'd also be wrong. Most of the debunking, it seems, falls to one man — Bobby.

You figure that out, though. There's a certain point where it dawns on you that you will continue to get folds and wrinkles and skin spots. You'll find getting up in the morning takes a little bit more effort, getting into bed a night feels a little bit better, and some midnight you'll discover the pure agony of hitting the bar after work when all you really want to do is go home and sleep.

Theoretically. So I've heard. Hey, I'm not in college anymore.

Rest assured — or be disappointed, for that matter — my next stint does not involve starting my own snowplow company or buying an old ambulance and renting myself out as a medic for hire. I've managed to snag myself a gig as an online editor for the Farmington Daily Times, a small outfit in northwest New Mexico that produces some darn good journalism ... but could use some help on their interwebs (and, hopefully, I'll get to do a little copy editing and page design while I'm at it).

But none of that does any good. I know that's a tough prescription to take (much akin to a "Tough shit" offered when an accusation of unfairness is raised), but it's true. I struggled with it myself in those first few minutes after I went back to my desk after the meeting. I kept flashing back to that first meeting with the publisher, with the thoughts of loyalty running through my head: "I moved to Spokane, I quit my job, I gave my word that I wouldn't jump at the next incrementally better job ... You, on the other hand, laid me off/let me go/fired me six months in."

(These phrases sound like they're different, but only if you're not on the receiving end.)

It’s pretty clear to everyone — people in the stands, his coaches on the sidelines, the other team’s defense — that the best way for G-Prep to win is to put the ball in his hands. Even if you know what’s coming (and since Sankey had 41 carries en route to 359 yards, it wasn’t exactly a secret), it’s still really hard to bring him down.

Hoo boy! As a [technology writer/reporter without a story idea/old person], I've seen my share of changes in life. But [new product] is about to completely alter [area in which new technology will have extremely slight impact].

I’m not entirely sure what I expected when I ordered my tickets for ArenaBowl XXIII for “STANDING ROOM ONLY.” Perhaps a corral where we would be led and allowed to roam around, like free-range chickens.

“This is your pen, and this is where you must stay,” they’d say sternly, but we’d mill around and laugh and visit and generally enjoy ourselves

Minor league baseball. Even the name sounds so ... inferior. “Minor league” has that connotation in today’s parlance: cut-rate. Second-fiddle.

Not good enough.