Using Facebook for a TV investigation: Proof that social media are great reporting tools.

Digital note-taking tools: A review of free and low-cost software to help you keep track of information.

How to learn social media skills at mid-career: A three-point plan for getting up to speed on social media.

Is there any hope for quality in local TV news?: Review of a documentary that paints a gloomy picture.

Why journalists should learn to love data: Tips and tools for working with data that can lead you to great stories.

Do-it-yourself interactive graphics: How to use ManyEyes.

Recommended journalism textbooks: Originally posted in 2008, an updated list leading off with the second edition of Advancing the Story.

Secrets of the TV stations of the year: The shared newsroom culture and personal connections behind the three 2011 winners.

How to interview children: A tip sheet on how to talk to kids on camera.

Resolve to be a more enterprising reporter: What is takes to turn better stories (posted on New Year’s Eve 2010).

What did I learn by looking back at this list? It seems pretty obvious that tips and how-to posts are most popular with NewsLab regulars, so one of my goals for this year is to bring you more of what you’re looking for. If you have specific requests, please let me know.

In the meantime, here’s to a terrific 2012.

Every reporter eventually runs into a story so important that it’s worth getting the information on a confidential basis. But you’d better understand your news organization’s position on unnamed sources before you make any promises.

Many newsrooms require a supervisor’s approval before confidentiality can be ensured. That usually means the boss will need to know the source’s identity, and the source should be aware of that before making any deals. But how many others in your news organization will be told the name of your source? And how far will your bosses go to support a confidentiality agreement? Will they protect you from having to turn over notebooks or raw tape? Will they pay for your legal defense if you’re found in contempt for not disclosing the identity of a source?

At a recent IRE workshop, Josh Meyer of the Medill National Security Zone emphasized the importance of establishing ground rules up front that apply to both journalists and their sources. “Let them know that if you find at any point that they have lied to you or misrepresented the facts, the deal may be off,” he said.

Lawyer Bert Bruser, counsel to the Toronto Star, advised journalists to avoid leaving any paper trail that could identify a source. Don’t write the name in your notes, he said, don’t mention it in email, and get rid of any documents with the source’s name on them.

Better yet, don’t quote or refer to unnamed sources in your stories. Instead, “use anonymous sources to point you toward key documents, data or story ideas,” panelists said.

One other obvious piece of advice: make sure you and your source agree on what you mean by the words you use when discussing ground rules. I’m always taken aback by the number of journalists and officials who think “background” means “off the record” and vice versa. This glossary of interviewing terms covers the most common ground rules.

Be aware, too, of the perception by some PR professionals that there really is no such thing as “off the record” and who may be counseling the people they advise not to provide any information on that basis.

“If a reporter puts too many twists, turns, or facts into a story, he risks obscuring its message,” Freedman writes in his book, It Takes More Than Good Looks to Succeed at Television News Reporting, now out in a new second edition and available online from the publisher.

In this excerpt, posted with permission, Freedman shares a case study that illustrates a key point: To improve your storytelling, write for your audience, not your bosses.

Not long ago, a reporter sent me samples of his work from a small market. He was twenty-three, still finding his way in his first job, and struggling. “I feel overwhelmed,” he wrote. Translated, that means he had a problem focusing.

The reporter’s clips included a late-news segment about a water main that cracked during a blizzard. Barring complications, a public works crew would replace the damage before the next morning’s rush hour. They did have one concern—that the leaking water might freeze into a sheet of ice and block a major intersection.

In a small city on a slow night, that water main break made big news. The broadcast producer asked our young reporter for a live shot with a package insert. After watching the segment, it was clear that he tried hard with his assignment. If possible, he tried too hard.

The reporter began with a montage of running water accompanied by a symphony of jackhammers. In painstaking detail, he explained how workmen poked holes in the cement and used a special listening device to locate leaks. He filled the piece with so many facts, figures, and obscurities that after a while, it began to look less like a news story, and more like an instructional video about street repair. If a viewer had watched closely, he might have been able to pass a civil service test.

All of the reporter’s problems trace back to one fundamental error. He never put himself in the place of the people at home. He forgot that most of them didn’t care about the specifics of urban street repair. They simply wanted to know when Public Works would fix the break, and if they would need to find alternate routes for the morning commute. The reporter could have given them that basic information in the first fifteen seconds of his live shot.

Then, if he had thought past the assignment sheet, he might have told a narrative story to which anyone might relate—that on a frigid night this crew faced a mean, nasty job. Between their numb fingers, the freezing mud, and the struggle to keep flowing water from turning into sheets of ice, he had dramatic ingredients for a piece with universal appeal.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” the kid asked later. Simple. We chalked it up to nerves and inexperience. He should have taken a figurative step back and trusted his natural curiosity. At that stage of his career, however, this young reporter didn’t have the confidence. He worried so much about missing an element that he overcompensated. Rather than errors of omission, he committed errors of congestion, and crammed too many facts into a ninety-second package.

Put simply, he allowed his fear to confine him.

This is a common mistake. Learn to recognize it, and you will be well on your way to fixing it. When you find yourself in a similar circumstance, whether reporting on politics, economics, science, the law, a union dispute, or some local problem like a broken water line, identify a single theme, storyline, or character, and stay true to it. Get to the point. Write for your viewers, not your bosses. Just because the alphabet begins with “A” and finishes with “Z,” do not feel obligated to detail all twenty-four letters in between.

The next time an assignment overwhelms your focus, that simple rule will help.

Many thanks to Wayne for sharing this excerpt. We have other writing tips from Wayne and a video here.

“Lord, no,” says Jen Lee Reeves of KOMU-TV, who’s on the faculty at the University of Missouri.  ”You can teach yourself anything. You just need a little quiet time.”

At this week’s Excellence in Journalism conference in New Orleans, Reeves shared a simple, three-point plan for getting up to speed: play, create and connect.

“Jump in and play with free stuff,” she advised. ”Share what you love.”

Start by setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts, if you don’t already have them, and use the same picture and name everywhere. Make sure you create a profile with your work information on it. Consider claiming your name on about.me and point people to your content.The point is to establish yourself online.  ”If you call someone to interview them, they are totally going to stalk you,” Reeves said. “If you don’t have a presence online they’re going to be suspicious.”

Next, build a website or a blog and start writing about something you care about, whether it’s cooking or working out or something else. Reeves blogs about her daughter, who was born with one hand. What has she learned from that experience? “It made me better about doing journalism,” she said. “I learned how to build a community on the Web and Facebook and I’m now using those skills for the newsroom.”

If getting personal online feels uncomfortable, write about the experience of reporting a story and link to your own work.  ”I wouldn’t republish a story, but taking a screen shot is perfectly OK,” Reeves said. In addition to her blog, she also has her own “named” website, jenleereeves.com, where she writes about media.

Bottom line? “Our readers, consumers are everywhere and we need to reach out to them everywhere or we are going to miss a source,” Reeves said.  ”We know journalism. Let’s prove it, on all platforms.”

Like small newspapers–and, I would add, radio stations–hyperlocal sites don’t just cover the communities they serve, they’re part of those communities. That affects how they handle everything from police reports to online comments. A few of the key takeaways:

Police news

Most sites won’t publish many of the names and photos in police reports. Thanks to search engines, these reports can follow someone forever. Says Liz George of Baristanet, “We do really have a lot of Google power and we don’t want to use it to ruin somebody’s life.” One site has a policy of deleting all police items after six months.

Social media

Many sites treat Facebook profile material that’s “friend only” as private information. Most view tweets as public information and use them accordingly. Says Mike Orren of Pegasus News, “In our shop we had clear rules: It was fair game if you could access their page without being their friend.”

Comments

Most sites try to require commenters to use their real names. Many review all comments before publication. Their thinking is much the same as that of large news organizations that have switched to Facebook Connect for comments: it keeps conversations civil. “The comments on the other TV, print, paper websites are sort of like the sewer,” says Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent. “They don’t want to spend the money [to moderate comments].”

Advocacy

Most sites do not subscribe to the concept of impartiality, choosing instead to promote certain issues or even crusade for specific causes. “If we can do anything to make Telegraph Avenue less crappy, I don’t see that as abandoning our position above the fray,” says Lance Knobel of Berkeleyside. “I see that as we’ve done something great for the city we live and work in.”

Business and advertising

One of the biggest challenges isn’t unique to online sites–it’s how to keep the journalism and the business side separate when one person or a few people do it all. “There’s a constant tug of war,” says David Boraks of Davidson News.  ”We write about advertisers on our site. It’s inevitable in a small community. I try to make sure that I write about all the businesses here, not just the ones that advertise with me.”

Small papers and radio stations learned long ago that digging up dirt on anyone in the community, especially advertisers, will make them angry and you’ll hear about it directly. But as Don Heider, founder of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy at Loyola University in Chicago, notes, “they’ll get what you’re doing overall, eventually, if you’re fair.”

Read more about how some of these hyperlocal news sites do their jobs in American Journalism Review.

In the immediate aftermath of the Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and the anthrax attacks that followed, newsrooms stepped up efforts to train and equip journalists to cover all kinds of terrorist threats. RTDNF produced workshops in association with the National Academies and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Some newsrooms acquired protective gear; a few even showed staffers how to use it. But inevitably the focus shifted. How many newsrooms even talk about covering a possible terror attack today?

There’s no way to know all there is to know about every possible terrorist threat. But every journalist should know something about what one expert calls B-NICE: biological, nuclear, incendiary, chemical and explosive hazards.

Here are some tips from experts who spoke at the “Media and the First Response” conference in Washington, hosted by the National Academies in 2003. We think they’re still useful today, as is this terrorism glossary and this journalist’s guide to covering bioterrorism.

Be prepared. Know the potential targets in your area. Government buildings, military installations, storage facilities, plants, public buildings, places where large groups gather.

Be alert. Notice the out-of-the-ordinary, and know what it could mean.
1. Something obvious like an explosion is probably a conventional attack. If it’s a dirty bomb (an RDD or radiological dispersion device), says George Whitesides of Harvard, you are more likely to be run over by somebody trying to get away than to be hurt by the radiation. “A dirty bomb sounds terrible, but the risk is moderate.” (Radiation fact sheet PDF)
2. Are there people down? Likely a chemical attack. Stay away. Stay upwind.
3. Unexpected incidents of disease in hospitals? It could be biological, but be very careful with reporting until something is confirmed. (Biological agent fact sheet PDF)

Be careful. If you hear gas escaping, you are too close. If you smell an unusual odor (like new-mown hay, corn, garlic, camphor, or bitter almonds), you may have been exposed and may be contaminated. Avoid further risk by retreating, says Warren Campbell, formerly of the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute. Do not eat, drink, smoke or chew gum anywhere near the scene. You could ingest the substance.

Escape hoods and masks are great devices for one thing only: escape. These are not for reporters to put on in a clean area and go into a dirty area. That requires training, fit testing, and different suits for different classes of agents (from A, the highest protection to D, the lowest).

Change your reflexes. Think of the situation as an unfolding event, not just as a story to cover. You [in the news media] may be a primary target. Terrorists want to take out the first responders, including journalists.

Take action. If you have droplets on you, blot or scrape them off immediately. Don’t scrape hard enough to break skin. If you’ve been exposed to a blister agent, seek treatment. Don’t damage the blisters. If you’re dealing with biological agents, don’t share food or drink. Keep trashcan lids on tight and remove standing water, or varmints and insects can spread the damage. If dealing with radiological contamination, safety can depend on time, distance, and/or shielding. Avoid inhaling dust or smoke. Shower and wash hair thoroughly.

Be informed. Exposure and contamination are different. If you walk through a gas there is no need to decontaminate. Only a liquid or solid will stick. The effects of an attack depend on the substance involved, the route of exposure and the level of exposure. The poison is in the dose. If the route is skin absorption, the weather matters. On a hot day, the rate of absorption is faster. Effects are cumulative. Just because you aren’t affected by one exposure doesn’t mean you won’t be affected.

Know the drill. First responders will typically set up three zones:
Hot—in the immediate area of contamination
Warm—not contaminated yet, but it likely will be
Cold—safe
They will deny entry to both hot and warm zones. A command post will be set up in the cold zone (no suits or masks required). They will establish an access corridor to send people in and a decontamination corridor to get people out.
The incident response team will take these steps:
1. Look for a second device.
2. Remove casualties through triage and send them for medical care.
3. Detect and identify what they’re dealing with, taking samples and testing (not a fast process).
The incident commander can decide to send reporters into the zone and will provide them with appropriate gear. Problem: it’s likely to be a one-way trip for the equipment. It’s just not clear how you would decontaminate a camera.

Know what to ask. Ask officials for a timeline, and ask for it now. Make them tell you when they’ll provide what kind of information in a crisis.
Phase your questions to improve your chances of getting answers.
1. Public health: what is the hazard and how can people protect themselves.
2. Environmental/economic: what is the damage and how can it be cleaned up.
3. Intelligence/national response: what does it mean and what will we do about it.
Ask better questions to get better answers, says Margaret Hamburg, former VP for biological programs, at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Example: Don’t ask when a location will be cleaned up; ask when it will be clean enough to not endanger public health.

Be useful. People are going to make their own decisions. “It’s a Washington fallacy to think people will do as they are told,” says Jay Davis of ANSER. Give people useful information that will help them decide what to do. For example, he suggests this simple rule of thumb:
If the glass is broken in your building, leave.
If the glass is intact, stay there until told otherwise.

Avoid the blame game. When information turns out to be wrong, it doesn’t mean that officials are either scoundrels or incompetent, says Davis. You can draw different conclusions when you have more data.

CHEMICAL ATTACK

• A chemical attack is silent. It doesn’t start with a bang. Symptoms become apparent, leading to fear, confusion, and incapacitation.
• Gases are heavier than air so the plume moves along the ground. Avoid low-lying areas.
• Protective gear is bulky and may not help. You don’t know what mask to put on unless you know exactly what you are dealing with.
• If an attack is indoors, it may not be clear whether ventilation will help or hurt. Do you turn the system off or on?

BIOLOGICAL ATTACK

• Don’t be misled by the 2001 experience with anthrax. This was much more like dealing with a hazmat situation than with a biological attack. It came with a note, at a specific time and place.
• A biological attack is not a “lights-and-sirens” event. There would be no announcement, no signal, no area to cordon off and clean up. The site of release might never be identified.
• First responders are not police and fire but public health workers, emergency rooms. Ground zero would be clinics and labs.

The experts:
Warren Campbell, formerly Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute (now at National Fire Academy)
Jay Davis, director, ANSER Institute for Homeland Security
Baruch Fischhoff, department of engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
Margaret Hamburg, formerly VP for biological programs, Nuclear Threat Initiative (now FDA commissioner)
Alice Gast, professor of chemical engineering, MIT
George Whitesides, professor of chemistry, Harvard

If you’re talented, aggressive, responsible, innovative, socially adept, digitally awesome and perpetually energized, you’ll fit in just fine at the Statesman Journal….Submit a 200-word cover letter, 3-4 clips showing range of work, and a resume…Or impress us with your digital coolness by Tweeting your online resume link to @BillChurchMedia.

A quick look at Church’s Twitter feed shows he’s had plenty of responses. Most of the time, he simply @replied with thanks. But not always.

Guenther’s online resume is worth a look. What sets it apart from several others who tweeted links to Church? First off, he’s gone to the trouble of getting his own URL, which indicates a certain level of familiarity with the Web. Second, it’s clearly a resume and not a blog. Everything you need to know about the job candidate is on one page, with embedded multimedia clips and links. There’s also a handy quick link at the top to download a PDF of the resume for off-line reading.

To create the page, Guenther used a free, do-it-yourself resume template . The HTML template is downloadable; you just edit the file in a text editor or Dreamweaver and then upload it to your website. Once the page was online, Guenther tells me he simply opened it and converted it to a PDF using Adobe Acrobat. He then uploaded the PDF to his own site and changed the code for the “Download PDF” button on the page so that it points to his PDF file. “You have to just know a little HTML,” he says, “but it’s a really nice template for sure.”

Guenther’s main site has a lot more bells and whistles, including Flash projects and a link to his blog. But when asked for a link to his resume, that’s exactly what he tweeted. More props to Guenther for clearly following directions–something employers also say they’re looking for.

[Thanks toIJNet for pointing us to the newspaper's ad.]

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

A recent blog post, 7 tips to be productive when working from home, has some useful suggestions. Set goals, make schedules, avoid distractions–all good advice. But everyone’s different, and what works for Francis Tan may not work for you. “Treat your days like ‘regular’ work days,” he writes. “Many people have found that a 9-5 or 10-6 schedule really helps keep them on track and productive.” He also frowns on working in your PJs. And here I thought one advantage of working from home was the ability to set your own schedule and to wear whatever you want.

My advice? Decide what time of day is your most productive and put those hours on your work schedule. Early risers may find they get a lot of work done in the early morning hours, before anyone else is away. Night owls can be more productive after the rest of the household goes to sleep. By all means, keep some daytime “office hours” for conference calls and the like but don’t feel bound to them. Just keep your cell phone on so you can be reachable during everyone else’s office hours, even if you’re at the hardware store.

As for what you wear, I really think that’s up to you. Some folks do just fine in pajamas and slippers all day. (As the woman in the old telecommuting commercial chirped, “And I still don’t shower.”) Others need to dress up to feel business-like, at least when they’re taking work-related calls.

One point on which I completely agree with Tan: Know when to stop. Some people find that working from home means working 24/7. They answer every call, no matter how late it comes in. They respond to email on Saturday nights. It’s understandable to be anxious about having enough work when you first start freelancing, but there’s no need to overdo it. Those people who are trying to reach you are used to voice mail. Let them leave you a message. It’s OK.

What are your tips for making the most of working from home?

Consider this clip from Tuesday night’s NBC Nightly News report on the East Coast earthquake by correspondent Lester Holt:

That shot of the collapsed wall must have looked familiar to the YouTube user who posted this video from Tysons Corner, Virginia, racking up more than a quarter of a million views in less than 24 hours:

Putting that video on the air may qualify as fair use, but NBC never mentioned where the video of the collapsed wall came from, airing it full-screen with no chyron.  While that may or may not be a violation of copyright–and case law in this area is still evolving–I’d argue that the lack of attribution is a problem.

Most stations I contacted said it’s their policy to credit video to YouTube.  ”Almost every instance where we use it is a fair use instance where we are commenting on the video,” says news director Stacey Woelfel of KOMU in Columbia, Missouri. “We always super it as YouTube video.”

At KUSA in Denver, reporter Kevin Torres says the station’s policy is to attribute video to YouTube, either with a CG or in narration. “We don’t typically use someone’s YouTube handle,” he says.

“I would argue that it’s a transparency issue– letting viewers know and see where you got the video,” says news director Dan O’Donnell of WGAL in Lancaster, Pa. “It’s also a last resort.  We make EVERY effort to reach the person who posted the video on YouTube to see if we can get the original emailed to us– or posted on our own UGC website, ‘U-Local.’”

And then there’s radio. The Voice of America’s guidelines prohibit the use of audio from YouTube videos on the grounds that “YouTube’s terms of service stipulate that embedded content cannot be manipulated or downloaded for use away from www.youtube.com.” VOA reads that to mean that video can’t be downloaded either, so it requires any YouTube video that’s shown on TV to be shot within its actual YouTube page.

We haven’t even touched on the most basic question you have to ask when considering YouTube video: Is it real? Contacting the poster, as WGAL attempts to do, is one key step in verifying not only the source of the video but the truthfulness of the content.

Does your station have a policy or guidelines on the use of video or audio from services like YouTube? If not, maybe it’s time to develop some.

When I was a news photographer I carried a lot of gear in the back of my car. Perhaps the most important thing – and most seldom used – was a small blue duffel bag that I called my “go-kit.”

Inside the go-kit were the essentials for an unplanned overnight stay, just in case. A change of clothes, basic toiletries, a bottle of water, some food and about 50 bucks in cash. After September 11th, I thought about adding a gas mask, and when I worked in Baltimore I carried an old (and dangerously outdated) bullet-proof vest. Those last two items were ones that I, thankfully, never needed.

Tuesday’s earthquake in Mineral, Va., was a big surprise for anyone on the East Coast. While many news operations were simultaneously preparing for likely hurricane coverage this weekend and monitoring the situation in Libya, the tremor below their feet literally shook their day’s coverage.

While it was a relatively minor seismic event, it rightfully was a major news story. The public needed to know why the ground shook, that they were indeed not the only ones to feel it, and that the region’s infrastructure was being monitored for damage.

For news managers, this should serve as a dry-run for their major incident planning and operation. How is your organizational “go-kit” holding up?

Here are some thoughts to get started:

• Is there a standard operating procedure in place for news employees in case of a major event? Should staffers call in to see if their services are needed, or standby to hear from you?
• What contingency plans should the crews follow in case cell phone service is tied up and calls can’t get through? How will they communicate with you, with sources, with each other?
• Are all news staffers capable of gathering news content that is presentable? Have they been given basic training in gathering and sending visuals, stills, or sound with smartphones?
• Are all company-owned smartphones and news gathering equipment in good, working order? Do batteries need to be replaced, or phones upgraded? A small investment in upgrading equipment can bring a big difference in newsgathering.
• Do you have a staffer that can be assigned to receiving and vetting a large volume of audience-generated content? Is this staffer also putting station information out via text messages, social media etc? Are they using social media to research stories, such as searching tweets to find story angles?
• Is your management tree organized, in case the news director is out of reach when major coverage decisions need to be made?
• Do you have a good working relationship with newsrooms in other parts of the region, in case you need to share field production services, such as satellite trucks?
• If you had to evacuate your newsroom, where would you go? How would you put out a product?

Working in news means working in an environment that is always unpredictable.  The unexpected is our commodity, and we need to be prepared to serve our audience with information and context as quickly as possible. Taking time now to assess the response to this dress rehearsal will make your organization that much better prepared for when the go-kit needs to be opened.

[Editor's note: Stan Heist teaches journalism at the University of Maryland. He is a former NPPA national TV news photographer of the year. For more on disaster planning, check the disaster and crisis coverage handbook Deborah Potter co-wrote for ICFJ and these earlier coverage tips and advice on how to develop an emergency plan.]