Brisbane asked NYT readers: “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

This led to consternation from many Times readers, who believed this kind of revelation is part of the basic job of any news organization. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram offered a good roundup of the flap, and at The Guardian Clay Shirky wrote an eloquent deeper exploration of the mindset disconnect between the Times and its readers.

Many people are debating the ethical implications of this issue. However, I’m wondering about the practicalities and possible opportunities.

If the NYT (or any news organization) does decide to point out when sources offer inaccurate “facts,” HOW might they accomplish that? Might there be good options, especially online, that could serve this purpose in addition to inserting relevant text into stories?…

I’m wondering about tools that might visually or otherwise flag to a web reader when a factual assertion has caveats — such as it’s probably not true, or could be stretching the point, or is a conflation, or lack corroboration or sourcing, etc.

It just seems to me that especially in digital media we might be able to do with some of the nuances of gradations of truth in ways that go beyond mere words on a page.

Your thoughts? Please comment below or e-mail me. Offer examples of potential strategies or tools, if you know of any. I plan to use this information in a post to the Knight Digital Media Center site, so expect to be quoted.

Thanks!

It was Memorial Day, I decided to go for a long bike ride to see the beach at Alameda. I needed the exercise, and the weather was perfect. I was enjoying myself greatly — but as I was biking back along Crown Beach in Alameda, I saw police, firefighters, and onlookers gathered. I asked what was happening, and they told me that a man was stranded offshore. A firefighter pointed out into the water, and I could see a head bobbing above the waves, about 150 feet out.

“It’s shallow out there, he’s standing,” said the firefighter. And indeed, the man didn’t seem to be struggling. But he wasn’t waving or shouting for help, either.

More onlookers gathered, and I snapped some pictures. I couldn’t get a good photo of the man in the water, but I photographed the gathering crowd, and tweeted it both on @agahran and @oaklandlocal, a local news/community site where I’m a senior editor.

alameda rescue1

Rescue workers, locals, watch drowning man, Crown Beach, Alameda, CA

I heard locals talking, and asked them if they knew the man. “He was depressed, off his meds, lost his job,” said one neighbor. “He just walked out into the water with all his clothes on. He’s trying to kill himself.”

In that moment, I froze. I couldn’t be a journalist just then. It felt too personal.

Crowd gathers as man drowns, Crown Beach, Alameda, CA

alameda crowd 2

alameda drowning

You can't see him, but the drowning man was about here offshore, Crown Beach, Alameda.

About a year ago, a good friend from Boulder, who’d grown distant, took his own life. Max was a few years younger than me, a doting father, an artist, sociable and often grinning.

But a few years ago, his life fell apart, I’m not sure why. It happened when my own life was in major transition, and I was feeling the stress of that change. While I never considered suicide, I could relate to feeling overwhelmed and rootless.

I’ve been haunted by Max’s death — and really spooked by suicide ever since.

Back on the beach, a kiteboarder zipped out to the drowning man and circled him several times, coming back to report to emergency personnel on the beach. It seemed like it was taking a long time to mount a rescue so close to shore

So yesterday I rationalized: “This isn’t Oakland. I’m off duty. I don’t need to cover this. I don’t want to cover this. I’ve tweeted my pictures, that’s enough for now.”

So I left. I biked across to Bay Farm Island, where I saw an orange emergency helicopter fly in across the water, hover over the man’s location, then leave. And I continued my bike ride, and went home, trying to shake the spooked feeling.

Last night I got a call from the Bay Area ABC station, KGO7, asking for permission to use my photos in their story about the incident. I said yes, as long as their web story linked to Oakland Local. Here is the KGO story. (Getting them to add that link took some further prodding, but they did it — legacy news orgs often overlook/downplay local news startups, and I get tired of that.)

Reading and watching KGO’s story, I realized how I’d messed up yesterday. They got the story right: Why were so many emergency personnel there on the beach, just watching a man drown 150 feet away?

I was grappling with my own complex connection to suicide. When I considered what I’d cover, if I did cover it, I could only envision a typical story focused on the guy who was killing himself. I didn’t want to do that — I’d have felt like that would be gratuitously pimping out his misery. It was yet another reason to turn away.

But KGO got the story right, the story my own pictures told: Where was the rescue?

As it turned out, Alameda police and firefighters are not currently certified to mount a land-based water rescue. They had to cut back on that training due to budget problems. To attempt such a rescue without certification apparently meant the city could get sued. So they just stood there and watched.

Which is horrible. And I should have asked about that.

According to KGO:

The Alameda Fire Department says budget constraints are preventing it from recertifying its firefighters in land-based water rescues. Without it, the city would be open to liability.

“Well, if I was off duty I would know what I would do, but I think you’re asking me my on-duty response and I would have to stay within our policies and procedures because that’s what’s required by our department to do,” Alameda Fire Div. Chief Ricci Zombeck said when asked by ABC7 if he would enter the water to save a drowning child.

Alameda firefighters could not even go into the water to get the body, so they waited until a woman in her 20s volunteered to bring the body back to the beach.

On duty, off duty.

I’d told myself this incident was out of my journalistic jurisdiction, and I was not on the clock for Oakland Local right then. All a rationalization because I was having an emotional response that made me feel helpless, depressed, out of place.

Meanwhile, those Alameda cops and firefighters were on duty — but said that status was precisely why they couldn’t act.

We all failed that day, And Ray Zack, 53, of Alameda, drowned while we stood by.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, my good friends Randy and Kit Cassingham told of a rescue that did happen. Everyone was on duty. But knowing Randy and Kit, if they were off duty, it wouldn’t have mattered. They would have rescued the teenager who fell off a cliff during a post-graduation party in a remote rural mountain area.

I’m not sure what to do with this. But I know now, really know, that a journalist can’t ever truly be off-duty. Certainly not for life-or-death events. I could not have save this Alameda stranger, any more than I could have saved my friend Max. But I should have asked more questions, and not given in to how I was feeling. I don’t blame the Alameda emergency responders for their inaction, but that situation had a dreadful wrongness about it.

I’m trying to figure out what to do with this. Suggestions are welcome, please comment below.

UPDATE: This sad event gave me an idea for the upcoming Code for Oakland event I’m helping to organize. What if emergency response agencies/dispatch could coordinate with qualified local volunteers in all kinds of emergencies? Like, say, people with Red Cross lifeguard certification? Stay tuned…

How to Handle Employee Activism: Google Tiptoes Around Cairos Hero – WSJ.com.

Today at the Knight Digital Media Center, I wrote about new advocacy/awareness tool from Sunshine Week: a model proclamation that news orgs and other activists/advocates can customize, publish, and challenge specific government officials and agencies to adopt. It gets into specifics, at least to some extent.

See: Sunshine Week shows how to call for open government

It’s a good start, but here’s what else I’d love to see from Sunshine Week…

I’d really love it if they called for no more pdf-format publishing of government documents with arcane meaningless titles and no useful metadata. (City of Oakland, are you listening? Nah, I didn’t think so….)

…OK, personally I’m skeptical of the value of proclamations, even ones that call for specific actions. What I’d really love to see from Sunshine Week is an online interactive database where people and groups could file public incident reports about specific examples of government opacity or obstructionism, so we can track this issue better.

plasticlogic

What might a larger-screen e-reader look like? Here's what Plastic Logic plans to release later this year. Whether Amazon will follow suit remains to be seen.

Over the weekend, while I was reading the Wall Street Journal on my Kindle e-reader (I pay $10/month for that subscription), I noticed this headline: Amazon Is Developing Bigger-Screen Kindle. I found the article interesting for several reasons — including that the sole source for the headline’s claim is the unnamed group, “people who said they have seen a version of the device.” I was even more surprised to read that “the new Kindle could debut before the 2009 holiday shopping season, they said.” That’s pretty damn ambitious.

…WSJ.com also noted that an Amazon spokesman “declined to comment on what he called ‘rumors or speculation.’”

Hmmm… could this be a replay of the rumors of an Apple tablet computer that have been recurring for years? (Thanks for the reminder of that, Ron Miller.)

A larger-format Kindle would indeed be an attractive product to many consumers. It would be even more appealing to news organizations that are already selling (or are considering selling) Kindle subscriptions to their content. The Kindle’s current screen size significantly constrains formatting and excludes advertising — and thus news revenue potential for this device.

When considering this story’s conspicuously scanty sourcing, I noticed that this article did not acknowledge that the Wall Street Journal — and every other news org selling Kindle subscriptions — stands to benefit financially from the availability of a larger-size Kindle. In other words, the Journal used a definitively-worded headline to amplify an unconfirmed rumor that, if true, might eventually increase its e-reader revenue stream. And this claim has been widely repeated.

Of course, Amazon’s alleged forthcoming Kindle is not the only emerging larger e-reader option…

I reported earlier that Hearst says they’re working on their own e-reader. And Plastic Logic has been signing up content partners (including news content) for its larger-format e-reader, which Plastic Logic says it will start rolling out later this year. But Amazon is a very strong consumer brand, and the Kindle has consumer market traction — significant potential advantages to publishers seeking e-reader revenues sooner rather than later.

Also, the WSJ tech site All Things D reported April 2 that Rupert Murdoch mentioned that News Corp (which owns the Journal) is investing in an as-yet-unspecified large-format e-reader. Peter Kafka wrote:

“I checked in with a News Corp. spokesperson, who confirmed that I hadn’t been hallucinating: News Corp. is indeed in ‘exploratory’ talks about making an investment in a company working on e-reader technologies.”

So: Could this Kindle story be an attempt by the Journal to nudge Amazon in a favorable business direction? The possibility is strong enough that I’m personally very skeptical about the WSJ article’s key claim. Either a more nuanced headline or stronger sourcing would have made this story less of an ethical gray area.

AM I A WSJ SUBSCRIBER, OR NOT?

…This Kindle-WSJ connection is the kind of thing I love to point out on Twitter. But to tweet it, I needed a link to the story. (You can’t tweet web links directly from the Kindle.) So I had to look up the story on WSJ.com. There, the full text of this particular story is available only to Journal subscribers — which makes me hesitant to link to it, since most people would not be able to read it.

But I found the context surrounding this article intriguing enough (and considered that I probably have at least some fellow paying Journal subscribers in my Twitter posse)… so I thought it might be worth making an exception and providing a link to subscriber-wall content.

I tried to log in to the site as a subscriber, to check that the full article was indeed available there. Guess what? WSJ.com doesn’t think I’m a subscriber — even though I pay for this publication on my Kindle. That’s right: currently there is no way for paying Kindle subscribers to log in to WSJ.com in order to gain access to their full Web content. In fact, the Journal’s own subscription page currently doesn’t even mention the Kindle as an option.

Hmph. Maybe the circulation, business development, and editorial departments at the Journal should sit down together and talk about this one.

Oh, and to add another layer to this onion… Recently I noted in Tidbits that WSJ.com’s managing editor Bill Grueskin and former Dow Jones CEO Peter Kann made some amusing comments about how the site’s initial paid-content strategy was “ignorant.” Seems that under News Corp. management, this misguided thinking continues…

Huessner interviewed me for this story because I’ve been blogging about it on Contentious.com and on E-Media Tidbits. She chose to include a few highly edited and interpreted quotes from me that I think grossly misrepresent my own views and the character of our conversation.

Yeah, being a journalist, I know that no one is ever completely happy with their quotes. I’ve been misquoted plenty in the past, and normally I just roll with it. But this particular case is an especially teachable moment for my journalist colleagues in mainstream media about understanding and covering the role of social media in today’s media landscape.

Today’s a pretty busy day for me, but I didn’t want to let this go unsaid any longer. So I made a little Seesmic video response to this story. Here I am speaking strictly for myself — not on behalf of any of my clients or colleagues. Yes, I am very emphatic here and somewhat critical. Please understand that my frustration is borne of seeing this particular problem over and over again.

Bounds also added to her story a brief quote from Boulder police chief Mark Beckner:

“Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner said indecent exposure was the charge that best fit the violation. ‘We don’t set the law,’ he said. ‘As police officers, we enforce it. We don’t get into the sentencing part of it.”

It doesn’t look like the Camera saw fit to push back against Beckner’s facile claim, which is unfortunate. Because the Boulder police did have another option here. They could have chosen to cite the streakers instead under Colorado statute 18-9-106. Disorderly conduct.…

This law begins:

“(1) A person commits disorderly conduct if he or she intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly: (a) Makes a coarse and obviously offensive utterance, gesture, or display in a public place and the utterance, gesture, or display tends to incite an immediate breach of the peace…”

Now, if the Boulder police want to consider a mass streaking event to be a “coarse and obviously offensive display in a public place,” so be it. It sure wouldn’t be fun to be busted for that, but it might be appropriate.

What’s inappropriate, unjust, and disproportionate is for public servants to hand out citations that, if upheld by a judge, would result in mandatory sex offender registration that wrecks people’s lives permanently — when the offense was not at all sexual in nature!

Again, let’s remember the context here:

• This was the 10th annual Naked Pumpkin Run. This unofficial event enjoys widespread community support and tolerance, as evidenced by the large number of people who were present on the Pearl St. Mall last Friday specifically to enjoy it, and by the large number of runners. Also, in prior years Boulder police had chosen to confine their enforcement actions mainly to crowd management. (Beckner claims this was due to lack of staff in prior years — a questionable and verifiable contention.)
• This law enforcement action put posturing ahead of public safety. Beckner’s intent to position the Boulder police force as looking busy and tough is indicated by his own remarks to the Daily Camera, and to blogger David Thielen. Furthermore, as I told the Camera yesterday and blogged earlier, the jubilant mood of the Halloween crowd swiftly turned negative and potentially dangerous only when people saw the cops citing the streakers. By choosing this course, it’s fair to say that the cops actually manufactured a potentially dangerous situation.
• Streaking pales in comparison to other recent violent crimes in Boulder. As I also wrote earlier, on the very same day as — and only about a half mile from — the site of the Naked Pumpkin Run busts there were two remarkably violent crimes: a gang rape and a racially motivated beating. (No arrests in either case, yet.) These crimes were very much on the minds of people on Pearl St. to watch the Naked Pumpkin Run — I overheard many people discussing their concerns about them. In that context, choosing to crack down on streakers who enjoyed ample public support (and previous tacit police tolerance) shows remarkably bad judgment and timing.

Again, I’m not saying that the Boulder police should selectively enforce laws based on public opinion. However, I am saying this: If the cops view the Naked Pumpkin Run as some kind of threat to public safety, they clearly had at least one legal option to bust the streakers in a fair, effective, and appropriate manner.

Deliberately choosing a form of citation that can ruin people’s lives was grossly disproportionate. That’s not law enforcement; that’s bullying. And that’s not what our cops are supposed to do.

Hi, all. Sorry I haven’t been blogging here much lately, but I’ve been slammed trying to keep my head above water with my client projects. I’m working on a strategy to lighten my stress level (and reduce the near-constant sensation of being pecked to death by ducks) by considering hiring an assistant.

OK, assistants (virtual and otherwise), PLEASE don’t consider this an opening to pitch yourself in my comments! I need to think through some issues first, and here’s a biggie:

Posting to blogs takes an inordinate amount of my time — not writing the post, generally, but simply making the post — logging into a client blog’s back-end system and dealing with its formatting and other idiosyncrasies to make the post go live. This is especially time-consuming for one client’s blog, which relies on an entirely custom-made, clunky, and bug-ridden content management system.

One thing I’d like an assistant to do for me would be to take the post that I’ve completed and edited, along with illustration (if any), log in to the client’s back-end, and actually post the entry — and preview it to check it before it goes live.

I’m about the ethical and logistical issues. Here are the questions I’m pondering:

• Should I get the client’s permission beforehand before giving my assistant access to the blog back-end?
• Should I ask the client to set up a separate login for my assistant, or just give my assistant access to my login for the blog?
• What questions or concerns are the blog owners likely to have about this, and how might I address them constructively?

I’d love to hear thoughts on this — especially from anyone who has outsourced blog posting (rather than writing). I’d especially love tips for training, oversight, expectations, etc. Please comment below!

In my daily links post today, I noted Steve Outing‘s spot-on Jan 6 critique of this weekend’s gaffe by Parade Magazine — the popular full-color, feature-rich magazine wedged into already-bloated Sunday papers around the country. Here’s Outing’s description of what happened:

“Tens of millions of people were treated to an example of print media’s slide toward irrelevance this morning. Parade magazine, which is inserted in Sunday papers across the US, offered up its cover story about Benazir Bhutto: ‘Is Benazir Bhutto America’s best hope against al-Qaeda?’ (Only if you believe in reincarnation.)

“The story, an interview by Gail Sheehy done prior to Bhutto’s death, is particularly relevant now. But it needed to be reworked to acknowledge the assassination, of course.

“…Bhutto was assassinated on December 27. Parade shows up in newspapers with this embarrassingly outdated story 10 DAYS later! …Parade’s site, of course, does acknowledge the assassination, and explains its publishing schedule and why what people received in print is so outdated. And some newspapers ran editor’s notes along with the copy of today’s Parade — though not my local paper.”

Apparently, Parade is still in damage-control mode over this one. Today on Poynter’s site, uber-journo-blogger Jim Romenesko noted this Jan 6. AP story in which Parade publisher Randy Siegel offered this explanation…

“Randy Siegel said Parade went to press on Dec. 21 and was already on its way to the 400 newspapers that distribute it when Bhutto was killed in a Dec. 27 shooting and bombing attack at a campaign rally in her country. The Web version of the story was updated, Siegel said, but it was too late to change the magazine. He said the only option other than running the outdated article would have been asking newspapers not to distribute the magazine at all. ‘We decided that this was an important interview to share with the American people,’ he said.”

OK, I don’t doubt the interview was significant, but come on! Outing’s right, this outdated magazine cover was an embarrassment — and he was right to say at the end of his post:

“I really think that gone are the days when a publication that wants to cover news can afford the luxury of a 2-week print cycle. Parade can either stick to ‘evergreen’ stories …or modernize. That it purports to include news-related coverage on a twp-week publishing schedule just sets itself up to be embarrassed in an age of ubiquitous instant news.”

I wonder if something similar occurred to Karen Matthews, the author of the AP story — because that article offers no challenges to the Parade publisher’s lame excuses. Neither did Romenesko question Parade’s spin. That’s disappointing, because (as I commented on Romensko’s post), AP is a wire service that, for crying out loud, has been doing the continuous-news-cycle thing for decades.

How can we expect behind-the-times news orgs to wake up and smell the 21st century if we simply play stenographer to their excuses?

…Meanwhile, Contentious reader Ken Tolbert commented this morning:

“The manufacturing guys over at Evolving Excellence have some comments on how long publication lead times created the Parade fiasco with the Bhutto article. Interesting about how the digital files are created in India and the publication outsourcing demands.”

Good read, check it out! (Thanks, Ken)

Make no mistake: Online support forums, whether grassroots community efforts or run by organizations, generally do a hell of a lot of good. You can find support forums dealing with just about any issue or community. Personally I’ve participated in some support forums, and have generally benefited from them.

But there can be a dark side that managers and members of online support forums shouldn’t overlook: reinforcing negative triggers in mentally unstable people.

In fact, it’s possible that this dynamic this could have played a role in my own state last weekend, when Matthew Murray shot and killed four people in Arvada and Colorado springs, CO — and then finally killed himself after being downed by a church security guard…

Yesterday Denver NBC affiliate KUSA 9News reported that Murray apparently had displayed a disturbing pattern of behavior on online support and discussion forums run by the Association of Former Pentecostals.

The Denver Post reported that Murray’s final posting to that site, which occurred between the two shootings, plagiarized the final Web manifesto of Columbine killer Eric Harris. (Note: That post has since been removed from the forum, but other posts under Murray’s alleged screen names still exist.) According to 9News, a forum member warned the FBI at that point — sadly, too late to alter the deadly outcome.

Today, blogger Karoli offers serious food for thought about Murray’s forum posts. In Matthew Murray: Toxicity, Online Community, and Religion with a Twist (which I discovered via Twitter), she observes: “Some general observations about these [ex-Pentecostal] boards: The regular members seem to be pretty even-keeled, but definitely healing from a childhood of toxic religion in tightly-controlled family environments. They are not shy about criticizing the groups they escaped from, but in general, they seem to be dealing with their individual pasts in a forgiving and mature way.”

Karoli continues, “One of the limitations and dangers of communities like this is that there will be that one person who is determined not to get help and is actually triggered by participation in discussions about their past experiences, bitterness, and even abuse. [Murray] was one of these.

“Without question, his posts were painting a picture of someone contemplating a dark and violent end, and I’m certain that the leadership of this forum had done everything they knew how to do to help him. Still, even as he felt free to express himself in the safety of online interaction, the members were limited by the barriers erected by that same free space. Some members, trying to be kind and engage him, complimented him on his poetry, which encouraged him to write much more, and the more he wrote, the darker it became.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve seen situations like this online, but it is the first time that I’ve seen it come to this kind of an end. I hope it’s the last, but I am getting concerned about the possibility that participating (and venting) in a venue like the one Matthew used actually inadvertently contributed and gave him the outlet he needed to not seek help.

“…What, if anything, could the moderators or managers at the ex-Pentecostal forums do? Upon hearing the news of the shootings, they knew almost immediately that one of their own had likely been responsible. Could they have done anything else, preventatively? I don’t know.

“They were in a no-win situation. He wasn’t breaking the rules, and despite the encouragement, he was also receiving gentle suggestions to seek help, which he was rejecting. One possibility is to change the forum rules just a bit so that in situations where a member is clearly posting ongoing negative triggers, they are forced into a time-out. The problem with that, though, is that in Murray’s case, it would have felt like another rejection, similar to the one he received so painfully in the past.”

I agree with Karoli: I’m not sure there’s anything more the forum managers or members could or should have done in this case. As someone who’s active in several online forums, including some support forums, that saddens and frustrates me.

What do you think? What can we learn from this tragedy about heeding and acting on early warning signs in support or discussion forums, without undermining the strongly positive goals many of those communities achieve? I’m not pretending to have answers here, but I think this issue needs to be explored — especially with input from mental health professionals.

…On a related note, journalists, bloggers, and anyone should take special care: Don’t let this tragedy foster negative stereotypes of the “walkaway” community of former fundamentalist Christians.

A post yesterday to the x_fundies blog summed it up: “Almost undoubtedly this tragedy could have been prevented if the kid had been able to get appropriate mental help (unfortunately, this is not always an option without court intervention when the kid is being raised in an isolated dominionist household). Now that the fact he was on a walkaway forum has been publicized, there is the real chance we’re all going to be tarred as ‘anti-Christian’ trenchcoat killers.”

(NOTE: This post is an edited version of a post I made today to Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits blog. That version was specifically geared toward journalists and news organizations; this one is more general.)