Did I Really Say That?

Should you ever let sources review a quote before you go to print?  Short answer: No. 

Despite the fact that some news orgs, insert shudder here, are letting campaign officials okay quotes in advance, many others are holding firm.  Here's what AP has to say, via Poynter:

“We don’t permit quote approval,” AP spokesman Paul Colford told me by email. “We have declined interviews that have come with this contingency.” That puts the AP in agreement with 58 percent of the people who said in our Twitter poll that they never let sources review quotes. (The poll is totally unscientific, changing as more people vote, and should be taken with the grain of salt that you normally apply to Twitter.) 

In a followup conversation, Colford said that AP reporters do conduct interviews on background and then negotiate to get certain parts on the record. “You’d be a fool to turn those down,” he said. But, he said, an AP reporter would not go along with a source who said, “I want those three sentences you want to use sent over to me to be put through my rinse cycle.”

Rinse cycle, indeed.  Here's more from Jeremy W. Peters from the New York Times, who writes that quote approval results in quotations that "come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative."  bk

Journatic rhymes with lunatic?

Actually, it doesn't.  But the hyperlocal reporting (using that term loosely) machine, which has admitted to faking bylines and which produces "local stories" offshore (if that isn't oxymoronic, not sure what is...) has admitted to plagiarizing and fabricating quotes in a story on a high school pitcher.

The Chicago Tribune company, which had invested in Journatic and hired it to take over its TribLocal websites while laying off about 20 journalists" killed its relationship with the company. 


More here, via Poynter.  bk

Who do you trust?

A new Gallup poll shows dwindling confidence in TV news, with trust in print falling as well.  From HuffPost:

The survey showed an interesting political split. Overall, Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to trust TV news (34 percent versus 17 percent.) But self-identified liberals were the most disenchanted of all groups, with just 19 percent expressing confidence in the medium.

Gallup said that it wasn't clear why exactly the numbers were so grim. But it wrote that "Americans' negativity likely reflects the continuation of a broader trend that appeared to enjoy only a brief respite last year. Americans have grown more negative about the media in recent years, as they have about many other U.S. institutions and the direction of the country in general."

What I wonder is this:  If Americans have no confidence in journalists to keep them informed, who can they trust?  Their mothers? Twitter?  Campaign ads?

Could this explain why, for example, journalism students cannot name more than one member of the U.S. Supreme Court?

Scary stuff, especially with a major election coming up.  Seriously gives me chills.  bk

Text-book perfect magazine story

Casting about for a sample of a great magazine piece?  Check out the scenes, the characters, the science and the structure in this piece from Sunday's New York Times Magazine:

Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?

Shivers up my spine:

And yours?

A student just sent me a link to a story from Wired on a newly trained sports/finance reporter.  Said reporter is a computer algorithim. No human interaction required:

For now consider this: Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry. The computer-written product could be a pennant-waving second-half update of a Big Ten basketball contest, a sober preview of a corporate earnings statement, or a blithe summary of the presidential horse race drawn from Twitter posts. The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private). Niche news services hire Narrative Science to write updates for their subscribers, be they sports fans, small-cap investors, or fast-food franchise owners.

Is this the end of the world as we know it?  I for one think that the beauty of sports writing -- and possibly all the nuances therein -- might get lost when the byline reads "by Robo Reporter."  But that's just me. What's next? 

Robo-journalism for everything from politics to public policy? 

An algorithim that grades papers?  Wait.  That one I can definitely get behind.

Your thoughts?  bk

Good news for J-kids!

A new study out of Georgetown finds that journalism grads have a lower-than-average unemployment rate, and a respectable salary:

Recent college graduates with an undergraduate degree in journalism have a 7.7 percent unemployment rate, a new Georgetown University study says. Experienced grads have a 6 percent rate, and people with graduate degrees in journalism have only a 3.8 percent unemployment rate. Median earnings, according to the study: $32,000 annually for recent grads; $58,000 for experienced college grads; $66,000 for people with graduate degrees.

 The average unemployment rate for new grads is 8.2 percent, and for all 20 - 24 year olds is 13.2.  Check out the story, with links to the study, here. bk

Staggering and heartbreaking magazine genius

One of the finalists for the 2012 National Magazine Awards: The Aquarium by Aleksander Hemon, published last year in The New Yorker.

Read it here.

Here's a taste:

"Isabel was asleep in the recovery room, motionless, innocent. Teri and I kissed her hands and her forehead and wept through the moment that divided our life into before and after. Before was now and forever foreclosed, while after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle star, into a dark universe of pain."

Today's Newsroom: How to thrive -- not merely survive

Depressing or invigoriating? Five good ways to thrive in the newsroom -- and change the world while you're at it -- via Poynter's Tom Huang. Here's one:

Be a learner. I can’t think of another business where you can learn as quickly, widely and, potentially, as deeply as in journalism. Whether you are challenged to understand the latest trends on your beat, how to comb through an obscure public record, or how to employ a classic narrative-writing technique, you are learning something new every day. We make our living by our wits and curiosity. We get paid to ask questions. That’s pretty cool. So even when learning is scary and exasperating (um, what’s that latest tech tool?), let’s embrace that part of our jobs.

State of the News Media 2012

Go here for the latest report on the state of the news media. According to the results, technology is driving news consumption. Among the findings:

New research released in this report finds that mobile devices are adding to people’s news consumption, strengthening the lure of traditional news brands and providing a boost to long-form journalism. Eight in ten who get news on smartphones or tablets, for instance, get news on conventional computers as well. People are taking advantage, in other words, of having easier access to news throughout the day – in their pocket, on their desks and in their laps.

And:

The evidence also suggests mobile is adding to, rather than replacing, people’s news consumption. Data tracking people’s behavior, for instance, finds that mobile devices increased traffic on major newspaper websites by an average of 9%.¹ The technology may also be spreading this access to groups that were passed over by the first generation of digital. Some rural populations like Native Americans who largely missed the desktop generation, are now moving straight to mobile options that do not rely on broadband access.

And:

Social media are important but not overwhelming drivers of news, at least not yet. Some 133 million Americans, or 54% of the online U.S. population, are now active users on Facebook (out of 850 million monthly active users globally).² They also spend an average of seven hours there a month, 14 times the amount of time people spend on average on the most popular news sites.³ And the number of Twitter users grew 32% last year to around 24 million active users in the U.S. (500 million total accounts worldwide), the company reports. But the notion that large percentages of Americans now get their news mainly from recommendations from friends does not hold up, according to survey data released here

on teling the truth ...

... in interviews. For those times when you're heading off to what might be a difficult interview for a tough story, listen to what NYT columnist David Carr tells NPR's Terry Gross.

One of the first things he often says to sources is that the story is "likely to be big. What do you think the story is that I should tell?"

Here's more:

Historically, I had been a reporter who was very fond of making speeches and very fond of telling people what their stories were about," he says. "[As journalists], we're people who just show up and declare ourselves instant experts on all manner of stories. And we often are only taking a very blunt-force guess about what's going on, and I think it always behooves us to ask the people, especially if you're aspiring to do something good, 'What do you think is going on? What do you think this is about?' "

Carr tells his sources that they shouldn't expect a fluff piece; he doesn't want anyone to be genuinely surprised by what they find in his stories.

"I don't want to sit up in the middle of the night and wonder whether I was unfair to the person — that I didn't communicate to them what is coming," he says. "I don't want anybody to open up one of my stories and have their nose broken by what they read — although I do have to say, at the beginning of the week, I wrote a really mean column, and I didn't tell anybody involved, so I guess that's not always true."

Literature of Fact presentations

In (very) roughly chronological order:

Studs Terkel
Joan Didion
Seymour Hersch
Michael Herr
Calvin Trillin
Nora Ephron
Pauline Kael
Barbara Ehrenreich
Jonathan Kozol
Eric Schlosser
Michael Pollan
Richard Rodrigues
Andrew Law
Michael Lewis
Rick Reilly
Chuck Klosterman
Susan Orlean
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Isabel Wilkerson

Who defines "journalist?"

Is anyone with a cell phone a journalist? Are you a journalist only if you are affiliated with a recognized news outlet?

Does publishing a blog post make you a journalist?

All interesting questions as the definition of journalism grows increasingly blurry. Here's some food for thought from CJ Cornell via the MediaShift Idea lab:

Never has technology unraveled an industry so fast that its professionals no longer agree on what it is that they do. It's not surprising; the sharp line between journalist and non-journalist is so faded that few can see it anymore.

If someone happens to be at the right place at the right time and captures a significant event on his cell phone, it will be newsworthy to some audience. At the moment he tweets the image, does he magically transform from a bystander into a journalist? If he is an employee of The New York Times, most would have little trouble classifying him as a journalist. But if it also was his very first uploaded photo, then really what is the difference between the NY Times employee and the bystander? Who is the journalist?

on objectivity, blanace and fact-checking

Whose job is it to fact-check, especially in an election year? Go here for a nuanced look by Neiman Journalism Lab writer Lucas Graves that goes deep into the murky definition of "journalistic objectivity." It all stemmed from a query by the New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane. Here's a taste:

For anyone who missed it (or the ensuing analysis, rounded up here) the exchange can be summed up in two lines of dialogue:

Times to Internet: Should we fact-check the things politicians say?

Internet to Times: Are you freakin’ kidding?

That was an actual response, and a popular refrain: More than a dozen comments included some variant of, “This is a joke, right?” Several readers compared the column to an Onion piece. By far the most common reaction, which shows up in scores of comments, was to express dismay at the question or to say it captures the abysmal state of journalism today. A typical example, from “Fed Up” in Brooklyn: “The fact that this is even a question shows us how far mainstream journalism has fallen.”

You might also check out some jlinx posts from the last election year. Search terms: speechification and fact-checking

how NOT to pitch

Great advice from The Open Notebook. Among the tips: email rather than phone, pitch a story rather than a topic; and know your market. As for bad pitches? Here's a taste, from David Grimm, editor of ScienceNow:

As far as worst pitch, that would have to be a freelancer who pitched me a couple of years ago about an AIDS study. It was a very controversial study, promoting (if I remember correctly) an unusual therapy. Fortunately, I passed the pitch by our AIDS expert, Jon Cohen, who did some digging and found out that the freelancer’s mother-in-law was an author on the paper. I confronted the writer about this, and he told me it wasn’t a conflict of interest because he could be objective about the study. As we were going back and forth I noticed something else troubling: The freelancer himself was mentioned in the paper’s acknowledgments. When I brought that up, I didn’t hear from him again.

Top that! :-)

Magazines: then and now

Two years ago, Maria Popova put together this look at magazines past, present -- and future, via tablets. At the time she wrote the piece, iPads were still pretty much a twinkle in techno-geeks eyes. Here's how the piece -- which includes a video history of magazines and tablet demos -- begins:

As big proponents of the power of curated interestingness, we have to admit that despite their umbilical cord to the corpse that is the print world, magazines — the best of them, at least — are one of the finest examples of cultural curation. But in order for this editorial-curatorial model to survive and flourish past print, it has to adapt to the platform-blind content ecosystems enabled by technology, while staying rooted in the behavioral and cultural demands of its audience. So today, we’ll try to contextualize all this by looking at the past, present and future of magazine publishing from three different angles, exploring everything from the digitization of print archives, to the emergence of niche, indie titles, to the publishing potential of the iPad.

fair use and plagiarism: redfined?

A good piece from salon.com by Emma Mustich on the ethics of fair use -- and the ways in which the internet -- and our own brains -- have muddied the waters. The post features the opinions of several professions in fields -- from music to fashion to journalism -- where copying the words or ideas of others is often an issueBottom line: when in doubt, don't.

Here's a taste:

Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University

The core of what plagiarism is remains undented by the digital publishing environment. Copying out the words of others and passing them off as your own is still what it always was; wholesale plagiarism is a sacking offense in most newsrooms. It is of course much easier to detect now, thanks to Google text search, but beyond the clear example of screeds of lifted text or images passed off as your own, the issue of who is a plagiarist is also a little more porous at the edges than it was.

In digital journalism, one of the most valuable functions you can perform is to aggregate and link to the content produced by others. We do however also see the problems of “over aggregation,” where credit and sourcing is not clear enough, links are missing, attribution is fuzzy and where the idea of “fair use” is enormously stretched. Is this plagiarism or enthusiastic aggregation?

The increased ease of detection of plagiarism is offset against the temptation to “over aggregate.” As for the broader context of taking ideas and presenting them as new, well, that happens all the time, sometimes knowingly and sometimes accidentally. It is an area where journalism is still thrashing out standards and best practice; there is a sort of arms race of transparency going on in digital news filtering at the moment – who did what first and when. I can’t help feeling that the idea of a plagiarism algorithm is not too far away.

a couple of j links -- strictly for comm 40

Here's a look at what it takes for the New York Times to cover the world -- from a piece in The Atlantic

And here are a couple of links that might (or might not) come in handy when you write your obit:
http://www.obitwriters.org/moreobits.html
http://www.blogofdeath.com/

That's it. bk

what else we lose ...

Via Ted Pease once again:

“Scholars and commentators have been talking for some time about how the death of newspapers could have serious consequences for the quality of newsgathering. My research demonstrates a second, largely ignored ramification. The death of newspapers seriously threatens to put an end to some of the most important legal efforts in our democracy. . . .

“For generations, newspapers and newspaper organizations have expended substantial resources to litigate major cases to the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure that trials are open to the public. They have funded the drafting of virtually every piece of open-government legislation on both a federal and a state level. They have then gone on to fund litigation efforts to ensure that these statutes, once passed, are obeyed by government officials. The death of newspapers can be expected to pose a serious constitutional crisis.”

—RonNell Andersen Jones, BYU law professor and former newspaper editor,
“New study IDs threats the ‘death of newspapers’ may have on open government,” March 2011

(See Jones’ research abstract.)

The other reason why we love newspapers:

Thanks to Ted Pease:

“A 19th century Irish immigrant named O’Reilly called the newspaper ‘a biography of something greater than a man. It is the biography of a DAY. It is a photograph, of twenty four hours’ length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year’s newspapers—which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written—and we use them to light the fire.’”

—Adair Lara, columnist,

The San Francisco Chronicle,

December 30, 1999

the state of the news media, 2011

The Project for Excellence in Journalism just released its State of the News Media Report for 2011, and what the authors found is that it's good -- and it's not. While revenues have increased for almost all media over the past two years, newspaper revenues are still on a decline -- though the authors report that in most cases, cutbacks have ended.

What's most interesting is this finding: While news organizations still produce the content (what we used to call news), it's the tech folks who control its distribution. Which may or may not be a little bit scary. Here's a taste:

In the digital space, the organizations that produce the news increasingly rely on independent networks to sell their ads. They depend on aggregators (such as Google) and social networks (such as Facebook) to bring them a substantial portion of their audience. And now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content. Each new platform often requires a new software program. And the new players take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data.

That data may be the most important commodity of all. In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public’s changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user. That knowledge — and the expertise in gathering it — increasingly resides with technology companies outside journalism.

In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.

Meanwhile, the pace of change continues to accelerate. Mobile has already become an important factor in news. A new survey released with this year’s report, produced with Pew Internet and American Life Project in association with the Knight Foundation, finds that nearly half of all Americans (47%) now get some form of local news on a mobile device. What they turn to most there is news that serves immediate needs – weather, information about restaurants and other local businesses, and traffic. And the move to mobile is only likely to grow. By January 2011, 7% of Americans reported owning some kind of electronic tablet. That was nearly double the number just four months earlier.

The migration to the web also continued to gather speed. In 2010 every news platform saw audiences either stall or decline — except for the web. Cable news, one of the growth sectors of the last decade, is now shrinking, too. For the first time in at least a dozen years, the median audience declined at all three cable news channels.

For the first time, too, more people said they got news from the web than newspapers. The internet now trails only television among American adults as a destination for news, and the trend line shows the gap closing. Financially the tipping point also has come. When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators.

You can also go here to download a podcast of an interview with Tom Rosenstiel on Wednesday's Forum on San Francisco's NPR station, 88.5 FM. bk

Amen

From Today's Word on Journalism:

“For journalists charged with feeding the digital news flow, life is a barely sustainable cycle of reporting, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking and, in some cases, moderating the large volume of readers who comment online. I applaud these journalists for their commitment, but worry that the requirements of the digital age are translating into more errors and eventual burnout.”

—Arthur S. Brisbane, public editor, The New York Times, 1/10/2011
(Thanks to alert WORDster John McManus)

in so many words: good ideas for making writing sing.

Check out this essay by Poynter's Roy Peter Clark that includes several tips for writing short stories that soar or making any writing rise above the ordinary. It's good advice for newspaper writing that can -- and should -- be applied to magazine writing, too.

Here's one tip to make will you hungry for more:

Thaw out the 5 Ws and H

This advice comes from editor Rick Zahler at The Seattle Times. The traditional version of the 5W’s freezes those story elements into informational ice cubes. If you thaw them out, the narrative begins to flow. Who becomes Character. What becomes Action. Where becomes Setting. When becomes Chronology. Why becomes Motive. How becomes Narrative. One of the great reporters of his day was Meyer Berger of The New York Times. He won a Pulitzer in the late 1940s for his narrative reconstruction of a multiple shooting. He wrote it on deadline and at great length. But he also was the master of the short human interest feature. Just before his death in 1959, he wrote a story, about 1,200 words on an old, poor, blind man who was once a classical musician. Then he wrote a sequel:

Eight violins were offered the other day to Laurence Stroetz, the 82-year-old, cataract-blinded violinist who was taken to St. Clare’s Hospital in East Seventy-first Street from a Bowery flophouse. The offers came from men and women who had read that though he had once played with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, he had been without a violin for more than 30 years.

The first instrument to reach the hospital was a gift from the Lighthouse, the institution for the sightless. It was delivered by a blind man. A nun took it to the octogenarian.

He played it a while, tenderly and softly, then gave it back. He said: ‘This is a fine old violin. Tell the owner to take good care of it.’ The white-clad nun said: ‘It is your violin, Mr. Stroetz. It is a gift.’ The old man bent his head over it. He wept.

for the mag class: the science of solid pitchery

Some wise words -- and good linx -- on crafting killer pitches, courtesy of my online writers' group:

Example 1: Here's a pitch that landed David Hochman an assignment from O (Oprah's magazine):

How are you? XXX has been saying such nice things about you lately, and it prompted me to get back in touch with an idea for the magazine. Please take a look at my website to see clips going back to good ol’ E.W. I’ve also written for O before. http://www.davidhochman.com.

As a prelude, let me say that today was a fairly typical Monday around here. I drove my son to school, squeezed in time at the gym, reacted to a thousand digital beeps and dings, and at 5:30, sighed lovingly to my wife as we stood over a box of organic mac & cheese explaining to our six-year-old that, no, he can’t have his own iPod.

To be fair, I have a very rich and satisfying life. My wife and I are deeply in love after twelve years together. Sebastian is an adorable joy, even when he’s pouting (well, sort of). And I’ve had enough positive, engaging experiences and friendships to rank as high as any other T-ball dad on the subjective happiness scale. Not that it’s a competition.

But some days, I do wish there was more. My wife and I talk about it all the time, and that’s the reason for my pitch: How can we bring more awe into our life?

Many people talk about “practicing” gratitude and slowing down for what really matters (three of my efforts on those fronts are here -- http://ow.ly/1JlyL http://ow.ly/1JlwV and http://ow.ly/1Jlzr), but true awe is pretty rare. The scientific research says if you’re lucky, you experience it once or twice a month. But those experiences are likely to make the emotional highlights reel of your year and, eventually, of your lifetime. By awe, I mean that elusive and overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration and amazement in the face of something beautiful, brilliant or otherworldy, and it’s territory I’d love to explore for the magazine.

I was struck by the findings of some Penn researchers earlier this who intensely studied and analyzed the most emailed articles published in The New York Times. The results http://ow.ly/1Jln8 were surprising, and, in fact, awe-inspiring. What topped the list were articles that stirred an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.” In short, articles brimming with awe.

My idea is to explore awe as an unsung emotion and investigate the latest research, the coolest science, and perhaps note some key moments in awe history, while also finding opportunities to up the awe quotient in my own life.

It’s hard to say exactly what awe is, but it’s easy to say what it’s not: the boredom of tracking Twitter feeds, the meanness of anonymous comments online, the fake thrall of too much television and texting.

Maybe this is too much information but I once experienced a moment so awe-filled (I can’t bring myself to say awesome), I still remember every nuance of it. I was a sophomore in college and after staying up nearly all night studying for both an art history and English lit exam, the synapses in my brain suddenly exploded with wide-eyed understanding. The moment was initially sparked by the sight of a button on a garment in an early Leonardo painting and ended five hours later with me truly hearing the music of John Coltrane for the first time. Regardless of the specific prompts, the experience created the sort of connectedness-to-all-things feeling I’d only read about in, well, the lives of the great artists and poets.

I quietly dubbed this powerful and mysterious moment my “epiphany” and it changed everything for me, and still resonates all these years later. My grade point average shot up from 2.8 to 3.9 and it awakened an awareness about what makes great art great, what Whitman and Frost were really talking about, and what T.S. Eliot meant when he wrote about “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.”

I’m not saying I need every day to be a moment in a William Blake painting. But it would be interesting to consciously harness a little of that spirit. A month of awe is what I’m proposing, and I’d start with researchers like Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman at Penn, who conducted the Times survey. I’d talk to architects of cathedrals, choir conductors, a Dan Gilbert or Robert Emmons type or two, and maybe a few connoisseurs of awe like this young man http://ow.ly/1JlgJ, who climbs to ungodly heights without rope, gear or safety net. All in an effort to see what I, my family and your readers can do to bring greater awe into all our lives.

It’s a topic that fascinates me more than almost any other and I’d love to write about it for O.

All the best,

David Hochman

Example #2: Same writer, entirely different approach, which resulted in a story for the New York Times.

Have you heard about Nathan Mhyrvold and his crazy new cookbook? "Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking" Comes out in December. 2200 pages. Retails for $625. The talk of the chef universe, apparently. Some early reactions:

"This book will change the way we understand the kitchen." --Ferran Adrià," '

“The most important book in the culinary arts since Escoffier.” --Tim Zagat

“The cookbook to end all cookbooks.” --David Chang
"A fascinating overview of the techniques of modern gastronomy." --Heston Blumenthal
"Amazing! Unparalleled in its breadth and depth." --Wylie Dufresne

I think Mhyrvold would be a great profile for the section or for the Times magazine even. He's the former Chief Technology Officer from Microsoft who cashed out to focus on the zillion other interests he has, including cooking. He has finished first and second in the world championship of barbecue in Memphis. He holds more than 18 patents, he's a paleontologist and wildlife photographer and has degrees from Princeton and UCLA and worked under Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. For the book, he created a 20-person team at The Cooking Lab to invent new food flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and ingredients like hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes.

Link to his book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Nathan-Myhrvold/e/B003TG79GU/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

To see the sort of interview subject he would be, watch the first three minutes of his TED talk here (I dare you not to continue beyond the first three minutes):

http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_on_archeology_animal_photography_bbq.html

Must. write. about. him.

Example 3: a pitch from another writer for a story that ended up in Discover magazine not long ago:

Hi—

I'm still waiting for some information regarding that other pitch (Chinese fungi repatriation). But here's another article I'm eager to write.

In 1884, after months of a dead-end strike, a group of pissed-off Ohio coal miners decided to sabotage the mine owned by the New Straitsville Mining Company. They loaded coal cars with logs, soaked them in oil, set them ablaze and pushed them into the mine. The mine caught fire, effectively ending coal mining in that part of Ohio. The New Straitsville fire has burned an estimated two hundred square miles of coal, and it still burns today. A few years ago, smoke began rising from the ground in the nearby Wayne National Forest, but the underground fire hasn't set any of the forest on fire, as mine fires in other areas have.

No one is quite sure how many coal fires are underway around the world—either by human activity or natural causes-- but most estimates are in the high thousands. There are hundreds in the United States, thousands in India and China, over a thousand in Indonesia. Australia's Burning Mountain is the world's oldest coal fire, at more than 5000 years old. In China, the world's largest coal producer, it's estimated that up to 200 million metric tons--ten percent of the all the coal burned there--are lost to coal fires. While there are far fewer coal fires in the US, it's possible that the amount of coal burned in mine fires is roughly equivalent to the amount burned for power generation.

In the past, mine fires have been viewed as disasters for their impact on nearby communities –anecdotal reports of higher rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases, ruined landscapes, and the risk of mercury and arsenic poisoning –as well as the loss of a natural resource. But with growing concerns about global warming, experts want to know how much coal fires contribute to greenhouse gases. By one estimate, carbon dioxide emissions from China's coal fires may be as much as 1,120 million metric tons, about as much as US carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline.

The United States Geological Survey has recently launched an ambitious effort to measure the gases from the world's coal fires, beginning with the Welch Ranch Fire in Wyoming. There, a team of scientists found that this one mine emitted 12 tons of carbon dioxide and 270 milligrams of mercury every day. The USGS and its collaborators plan to combine the kind of ground testing used in Wyoming with airborne thermal imaging to develop a more precise estimate of global emissions.

Putting out mine fires hasn't been a huge priority in the past. Sometimes people dig down and try to remove the burning material; sometimes they dump in water or dirt or inject chemicals. These methods are rarely successful; most are also so costly that they are abandoned. In the last few years, though, a pair of firefighter entrepreneurs have developed a patented compressed foam that successfully fills the mine, starves the fire of oxygen, and then biodegrades. "That foam is earth friendly," says Lisa LaFosse', one of the partners in Texas-based CAFSCO. "I let my daughter play in that foam."

With new attention to mine fires' contribution to global warming, putting them out might become a higher priority around the world. But mine fires are complicated to understand and complicated to put out, says Glenn B. Stracher, a geology professor at East Georgia College in Swainsboro, Georgia, editor of Geology of Coal Fires: Case Studies from Around the World, and a member of the USGS team. "The work on these fires is highly interdisciplinary," he says. "You need geology, chemistry, biology, physics, math—there's something for everyone."

My article will discuss the ways that coal fires start, the complications of putting them out and the new methods that seem to be working, and the work of the USGS in measuring emissions and determining the urgency of putting them out. I'll interview Stracher and other members of the USGS team, LaFosse' and her partner, and people who live near one of the coal fires. And I'll visit at least one of the fires with Stracher or another member of the USGS team to get a firsthand look at these underground, ongoing conflagrations.

Interested?

And finally, for a couple of good articles on the science of query writing, go here and here. bk

And then there's this...

Speaking of the demise of journalism: President Obama granted FOX bloviator Bill O'Reilly an interview on SuperBowl Sunday. O'Reilly interrupted him FORTY-EIGHT times. And while chatting briefly about how people perceive him, O'Reilly spelled it out for Obama thus: "They hate you."

Go here to see all 48 of the interruptions. Or here, to watch the whole debacle. A case study in how not to do it. Especially if the president ever grants you an interview. bk

AOL + HuffPo? Good for Ariana, Bad for journalism

And with that, we all suffer: those of us who report the news. And those of us who believe in -- and rely on -- its relevance.

Among all the words spent ruminating on the merger, among the best come from the Los Angeles Times' Tim Ruttan, who suggests that when journalism becomes content, we all lose. He also compares the merger of one site -- AOL -- that pays very little with one -- HuffPo -- that doesn't pay at all to "a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates." Here's a taste:

The media-saturated environment in which we live has been called "the information age" when, in fact, it's the data age. Information is data arranged in an intelligible order. Journalism is information collected and analyzed in ways people actually can use. Though AOL and the Huffington Post claim to have staked their future on giving visitors to their sites online journalism, what they actually provide is "content," which is what journalism becomes when it's adulterated into a mere commodity.

Consider first AOL's pre-merger efforts, which centered on a handful of commentators and a national network of intensely local news sites called Patch. The quality of those efforts varies widely, but the best ones are edited by journalists who lost their jobs in the layoffs and buyouts that have beset traditional news organizations over the last decade. These editor-reporters are given reasonable benefits and salaries that are about what beginning reporters at major newspapers were paid three decades ago. Their contributors, by contrast, are paid a maximum of $50 an article, often less.

The results pretty much conform to the old maxim that you get what you pay for; the best Patch journalism almost invariably is being done by experienced journalists who do the work out of idealism or desperation. What happens when that pool of exploitable surplus labor dries up — as it will with time — is anybody's guess, but the smart money would bet on something that isn't pretty.