Feb. 4 is deadline for Alaska Professional Communicator's 2010 contest

This note comes to us from Alaska Professional Communicators, a local group that affiliates with a national press association and its annual competition. Here is the deadline and rules for their annual competition, as provided by their member, Elise Patkotak:

See How Your Work Compares With the Best!
Have you done something at work this past year that you're especially proud of? Ever wonder how it would stack up against the best in Alaska and the nation? Then the Alaska Professional Communicators' 2010 contest is for you.

Alaska Professional Communicators, formerly Alaska Press Women, is made up of both women and men in journalism, writing, photography, public relations, and related fields. For more than 30 years the organization has offered a contest in many categories of communication with winning entries going to the national competition run by the National Federation of Press Women.

The contest is open to all Alaska resident communicators, not just APC members. (Contestants who win first place at the state level must join APC to compete nationally.) The contest includes 78 categories for print journalists, Web writers, book authors, photographers, and more. There's a separate Collegiate Contest for college undergraduates.
Winners get feedback from recognized experts from outside Alaska, as well as certificates and recognition from their peers. Entry fees are low--$20 for APC members, $30 for nonmembers.

The deadline for entering is Feb. 4. Complete contest information is at http://www.akprocom.org/commcontests.php.

Alaska Press Club 2010 news

Thank you for your patience as the Alaska Press Club organizes for J-week 2010, the journalism competition and the annual conference of workshops and banquet.

Here's some current information:

CONTEST DEADLINE: Alaska Press Club entries must be postmarked by Friday, Feb. 19, 2010. The membership form and the contest entry form are both available as PDFs for download from this page. Review contest rules in the December 2008 Polar Bear available by PDF on this page.


CONFERENCE DATES: J-Week will be Thursday through Saturday, May 6 - 8 in two locations. Thursday, May 6, with a focus on radio, will be held at APTI (home of APRN, KSKA, KAKM). While the focus is on radio reporting, all APC members are welcome. The conference moves to Rasmuson Hall on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus for May 7-8, Friday and Saturday. We have the option of using this space on Sunday, May 9, if we have any spillover workshops.

APC Board discussing Spring 2010 conference dates

Currently under discussion is whether to hold the Spring 2010 J-Week sessions May 6-7-8 at UAA. A final discussion and vote by the board is due by Nov. 3, 2009.

2009 APC Board to meet Saturday, Aug. 29, 2009

This is our first opportunity to get together as a board after summer. We'll be teleconferencing Saturday, and getting oriented to the tasks ahead.

Press Club Meeting: Board & Officers Election

Agenda

1. Opening Remarks
2. Treasurer’s Report
3. Conference Discussion
4. Contest Discussion
5. Member Poll
   
6. Election of New Officers
7. Photo of New Board
8. Adjournment

Conference Discussion

• So much Alaska media is Anchorage-centric; it’s interesting to see how Anchorage frequently controls the narrative. With the demise of “AK” in particular, might a statewide theme be appropriate?
• There are two audiences to the Press Club (traditional media and new media); should the club be changing into something new? Traditional journalists might not be as happy with the new direction.
• When you’re the only reporter in a small community, an annual conference is a great opportunity to have your work reviewed and adjudicated, to interact with other journalists, and communicate.
• Should we poll members to see what they think about a new direction?
• There’s a huge value to the Press Club and the conference for those members who are not in Anchorage. Keep people more involved by having multiple smaller events rather than one big annual event.
• What happened to the Polar Bear? It was supposed to be replaced by an e-mail newsletter.
• There are a lot of basic responsibilities involved in the conference and the contest; it’s hard to get extra things done.
• There are a lot of people who can’t be here today, so it would be nice to hear from the membership. The new media seminars were popular and helpful. The diversity of types of media this year was great and should be continued. The days of focusing on just one medium are over. You have to be agile.
• For next year’s theme, we need to take a hard look at who we’re training for future jobs and what those jobs will be. What’s the potential for a job in this state and Outside?
• Entrepreneurial journalism — how do you get the job done when the institution isn’t there? Grassroots journalism is becoming more important.
• We have to look at the lack of diversity in Alaska’s press corps. What are the institutions that are reaching out to a more diverse audience? How can we get them involved?
• This year’s organizers should be applauded for working through so many obstacles. The target is moving quickly.
• Do we have a head count? This year is an anomaly, but do we have numbers from other years? Membership list has about 350 names.

Treasurer’s Report

About $15,000 in the account; that’s down somewhat from past years. We were expecting contest entries to be down, but they were comparable to last year (about $12,000). We’re working on getting reimbursements for volcano-canceled flights. This year’s conference cost less than $10,000.

The Senior Center is a great venue from a financial standpoint; the deposit is a few hundred dollars, and the banquet is the biggest expense. It’s been suggested that, if we want this venue next year, we reserve it now. Members have suggested this year’s conference was too early. This was the only time we had. Later in April is better (after the Legislature wraps up but before finals start at the University, keeping Easter in mind). The University might be a possibility if we want to change venues. It would be relatively easy. There would be a charge, but it wouldn’t be expensive. If a student club signs on as a co-sponsor, the facilities fee will be waived.

Contest Discussion

• Should there be different categories for bloggers? Big blogs and small blogs? Currently there are no special categories for bloggers.
• Should we assign two members to research what other press clubs are doing and come up with a model rather than reinventing the wheel?
• Add a body of work category — five best articles? In addition to (or instead of) awards for specific articles?
  
• Adding new categories means adding judges and increasing workload for board members.

Member Poll

• Maybe we should establish a subcommittee to find out what members of the press want from the Alaska Press Club.
• Could be done as a “webinar,” too.
• What about the possibility of doing an online conference?
• We seem to be more serious lately; we used to have fun.

Election of New Officers

Nominations for the 2009-2011 term:

Shannyn Moore
Tom Hewitt
Suzanna Caldwell
Will Morrow
Ben Stanton
Rindi White (current board member)

All candidates were unanimously elected to the board.

Election of officers:

President: Kathleen McCoy
First Vice-President: Dimitra Lavrakas
Second Vice-President: Shannyn Moore
Third Vice-President: Ben Stanton
Fourth Vice-President: Will Morrow
Secretary: John Creed
Treasurer: Rindi White
Membership Director: Aliza Sherman Risdahl

Adjournment

— Maia Nolan

Liveblogging J-WeekPanel DiscussionRural Alaskans on the Move

Ed Schoenfeld (Coast Alaska), Kyle Hopkins (ADN) and Lori Townsend (APRN) are tackling the issue of urban migration.

Hopkins started covering rural affairs over the past year, and he says ADN pulled the plug on a planned summer series on urban migration because they found the facts didn't necessarily match up to the perception. There's a stereotype, according to Schoenfeld, that there's a mass migration from the villages into Anchorage. In fact, the movement is from small villages into larger villages, from larger villages to regional centers, from region to region. The Wrangell newspaper has a regular shipment to Wasilla, where there are former Wrangellites working construction. It's not a simple, one-dimensional situation. In Southeast, former loggers and fishers from places like Kake are moving away. Some of them have gotten mining jobs in Southeast.

"This is not a story about environment versus economic development. Here's a guy from the village who's gotten a job ... and he's sending money back to the village," Schoenfeld says. Some jobs require workers to move to more remote places. Some rural communities are becoming bedroom communities.

Hopkins lived in Kake in the mid-1980s and had always wanted to go back and do a story — catching up with people he went to grade school with, seeing how the community had changed — but found that many of them had moved to other communities. At the same time, people were beginning to talk about rural migration, and ADN started looking at the issue. Non-profits said they were seeing increased need due to families moving into Anchorage from the villages, but when he'd try to get in touch with a family, it would generally turn out either that the family had moved for other reasons (medical care, for example) or had been on the move for years. It was frustrating at first; were they looking in the wrong places? But after a few weeks, it started to feel like forcing the story. There was no flash of people; it was a slow-building story, not breaking news. Tom Kizzia did a follow-up article in December looking at the numbers, and on closer examination, the numbers just weren't there.

"I find it really confusing," Hopkins says. "When you talk to people, anecdotally, you hear it all the time." The Anchorage School District had 500 new Native students last fall, but the way they tally racial background has changed, so compared to prior years' numbers, "they weren't apples and apples anymore."

Townsend agrees that it's difficult to track down specific stories of relocation to Anchorage; most often, what she's found are people who move into town for the winter and go back to the village in the summer. "A lot of what we see as far as people moving around, it is more village to village and smaller places to hubs rather than coming into Fairbanks or Anchorage." She recalls that, when she lived in the Lower 48, there used to be reports that young people were leaving reservations, but it seemed to be an ongoing pattern. One of the issues she'd like to see more work done around is what happens when villages empty out. What kind of an impact does that have? Alaska villages are very different from the small towns that sprung up along the railroad in the Old West. Those towns may have died, but they didn't have the thousands of years of history many Alaska villages have.

"We try to take little bites at it here and there." Recently she heard about a community where suddenly dozens of houses are for sale; that's a story. Alaska News Nightly is thinking of restarting a segment from "AK" called 300 Villages in which individual communities were profiled. She'd like to focus on issues in individual communities and the issues they're facing. It sounds easy enough to leave and get a job someplace else, but a lot happens in small towns that makes them hard to leave. You have to go there to report; people in small towns are suspicious of outsiders. Making cold calls to the tribal council or the village council is a hard way to get answers.

First Alaskans Institute did a survey about moving frequency and reasons, but it wasn't a scientific survey, although the numbers are interesting, Hopkins says.

Suggestion from the room: Perhaps the story isn't about leaving rural Alaska, but how those who stay are managing to stay. What are they giving up to pay for fuel? How are they heating their homes and feeding their families? The economic question is major, especially among rural Alaskans who have seasonal employment. There's a lot of talk about creating economies in villages, but there's no model that has successfully created economic stability in small communities off the road system.

Townsend says village pride has been increasing among young people; could it be there's a circular effect that's countering some of the outmigration? She's interviewed many Natives who were punished for speaking their language, especially in boarding schools, but now people have a better understanding of what it means to be ripped away from one's culture. In Kotzebue, most of the students at the UAF extension campus are not traditional-age college students, which suggests that traditional students are leaving town to go to school.

Infrastructure in the villages — is it worth $40 million to run power to remote communities? These regions are wide-open to every con man and dreamer who comes through, Schoenfeld says, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. There are a lot of energy technologies, but how many of them are viable in these regions? One of our jobs as journalists is to look into these ideas when they are proposed and see if they are legitimate and practical. There is a rush to economic development, but it also has to be prudent. If one village renovates their cannery and makes it a tourist destination, that may be successful, but there can only be so many renovated canneries (or water bottling plants, etc.).

Townsend says that when she asks village councils if they're losing people, they're frequently reluctant to answer; they may not want to ask for help, or they may be afraid of losing funding.

From the room: I know of a lot of schools that open with ten students and end the year with five. How do I tell that story without jeopardizing the school's funding? Townsend says she has also heard of students registering in multiple districts to help schools stay open. Tenakee is currently using Craigslist to attract new families so they don't lose their school funding. Some schools have kept on teachers they didn't like because the teachers' children kept enrollment numbers high enough to protect state funding.

Cooperation will be important in trying to tell this story; one anecdote from one region doesn't establish a trend, but if reporters can show that it's happening in numerous communities in several reasons, then it's a story.

Sexual assault may play a role in urban migration for young women. Barrow recently had a case that was notable in that a rape actually went to trial and garnered a conviction, which is extremely rare. It's hard to get primary sources on the record for this kind of story, but social service providers often talk about it off the record.

There's also a disparity in employment opportunities. A whole day at AFN last year was dedicated to exploring marketplace opportunities. It's easy to do a story on a startup business bringing jobs to a small community; it's important to remember to follow up and see what happens. There's a tendency to over-report the optimistic stories and not check back. You don't want to only tell the rosy and forget the reality; at the same time, you don't want to overlook the good things that are happening. "As a consumer of news, you're just kind of hungry for more context," Hopkins says. "I'd like to get more on that story." Why do people stay in rural Alaska when times are hard? You have to tell that part of the story, too.

There's another census coming up next year, Schoenfeld says, which means the redistricting questions will come up again: Which regions are overrepresented? Which are underrepresented? Southeast will probably lose a House district, and it may lose a Senate district. Anchorage, Mat-Su and the Railbelt will absorb those seats. Redistricting is really a rural issue. In the past, the Bush has had political power, but if it loses power in the Legislature, it will lose out on resources.

Personal stories can illustrate a lot of these issues. It's difficult to get those stories, Schoenfeld says, but it's important to remember that we need to talk about the personal impacts of all of these issues. Be thoughtful. Think about how you're going to approach people and what you might have to say. If you have the opportunity, as an urban reporter, to go to a rural place, that's an opportunity to look for those people. Even if we don't have an immediate trend, there is a long-term trend of changing people's health, diet, activity level, lifestyle and culture, and you can tell those stories well if you personalize them. It takes an investment of time, especially if you go into smaller communities. People in urban centers are more used to things moving quickly; in rural areas, it can take longer to get people to trust and talk to you. You have to sit down with people and let them talk until they're done talking, Townsend says, which is increasingly difficult. There's a lot of value in establishing relationships with contacts in rural areas — even just a few minutes on the phone each week. Hopkins says that was part of why he wanted to launch the rural blog at ADN: It forces him to reach out into rural communities on a regular basis, and as a result, he's developing contacts in those areas, so when news breaks there, he knows who he can talk to.

— Maia Nolan

Liveblogging J-WeekPanel DiscussionOpen & Transparent Government: Fact or Fiction?

Gregg Erickson, Alaska Budget Report
You have to look at the executive branch and the legislative branch separately. Executive branch has gotten “worse and worse and worse” since he started out. Each administration has learned from the previous administration how to keep things secret. “Certainly, the Palin administration is the worst we’ve ever seen.” He’s said the same about the Murkowski and Knowles administrations. On the other hand, the legislative branch has become much more open and transparent. They still do go behind closed doors, but it happens less frequently. “By and large, the direction of change in the Legislature has been better.” Maybe they have less to hide, or maybe they are less concerned about public criticism. Electronic bill tracking has made things easier to follow; “people are on the record a lot, lot more than they used to be.” You don’t have to be a journalist to ferret things out. Our public records laws are not ideal; Rep. Mike Doogan has sponsored legislation this session that may improve them.

John McKay, attorney
The Palin candidacy shed some light on our public records laws. The most significant change in terms of public records access in the last 10 years has been the change in the public interest attorney rule. We are the only state in the union that penalizes citizens for seeking records, unless it turns out that you’re right. “It’s a tremendous disincentive.” Deliberative process privilege is asserted more and more; for example, it was asserted in regard to the Todd Palin memos during the election. A few years ago, there was a woman appointed to a state commission, and another commissioner happened to have a job as the head of the Republican party. He was using state time to do party business, and the woman became upset because she wasn’t able to blow the whistle on the other commissioner because it was the subject of an ethics investigation. The woman felt muzzled. She was being told that because it was being pursued as an ethics violation, she couldn’t speak publicly about it, but she did finally talk to some reporters. Eventually the ADN filed a lawsuit requesting the public records. The woman, of course, was Commissioner Sarah Palin. Palin talked a lot about openness and transparency during her campaign. We need to appeal to people’s better natures and attempt to enlist them as allies; remind them that they once espoused the idea of open and transparent government.

Jason Moore, KTUU
Moore has been covering Governor Palin since she was mayor of Wasilla, and what he’s seen is the change in Palin over the last six months. He thinks there was a genuine sense during her first two years in office that she was more open, although he attributes that in some ways to the “love affair” the media had with her at first; she was a “breath of fresh air” after Murkowski. He saw that change dramatically once she became a national candidate. She came back and it’s been drastically different; she now has a press office that is as hostile as he’s ever seen. E-mails are “over-the-top” with complaints about how the administration is covered. Before the Republican National Convention, reporters could knock on Palin’s door and talk to her; now it’s “nearly impossible” to get a straight answer.

Gregg Erickson
When Palin came into office, she told ABR she couldn’t understand why Alaska Budget Report was so “crosswise” with the government over public records; she seemed to want to be more open. Two weeks later, ABR submitted a request for transition reports from the Murkowski administration that they knew had been shared outside the executive branch, which should have meant deliberative process did not reply. The request was denied. They were later told they could see the reports, but not make copies or take notes because they would “confuse the public” about what the administration had in mind. The document on top was a memo from the attorney general’s office that indicated that the documents had been redacted as fully as possible. Ultimately, ABR managed to get the documents released. The problem, it turned out, was that perhaps the Department of Law had been “a little too candid” about some of the failures of the Murkowski administration. If you go to court to try to make public records public and you lose, you are on the hook to reimburse the Department of Law. It has “a tremendous chilling effect” on public records requests. You can’t convince a publisher to be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars.

John McKay
What records become state property? Ruedrich blurred the line between personal and public. Recently an Attorney General opinion ruled that personal electronic devices (such as BlackBerries) aren’t necessarily personal if they’re being used to do state business. That doesn’t necessarily mean the state will give e-mails up easily. Bill Dedman of MSNBC wrote an article about the State of Alaska’s attempt to charge him $15 million each for three different requests for state e-mails.

John McKay
Asked about the status of requests for Gov. Palin’s e-mails, McKay said he doesn’t know of any pending litigation. Andree McLeod, who is not a journalist, has filed some requests, but will she take the financial risk of pursuing them? He’s not sure. Just because Todd Palin was copied on an e-mail does not necessarily mean that deliberative process privilege is not legitimate. Deliberative process is not the end of the road; if the citizen can prove the interest of the people outweighs the interest of the government, the privilege can be revoked. Remember that Gov. Palin ran as a reformer, and that’s how she views herself. Hold her to that.

— Maia Nolan

Liveblogging J-Week:Lunch with Anne Kilkenny

Anne Kilkenny opens her remarks by reading an e-mail she received from a stranger last fall:

“Much has been said about the bravery of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Too little has been said about those who have fought in their own ways to hold the line against a shadow from within.”

That shadow is the threat to free speech. Americans can disagree, and agree to disagree, while respecting one another’s rights to free speech, Kilkenny says. “Without you — without a free press, there is no healthy democracy. There can be no healthy democracy.”

Kilkenny jokes that she was not selected for this honor because of the “great journalistic quality” of her e-mail. “You can tell (State Rep. Mike) Doogan, I swear, I wrote that before his comments.” She adds that she didn’t “go hide under a rock” when her e-mail went viral; she realized she had a responsibility to stand behind what she’d said. Kilkenny was present at a city council meeting in which she observed then-mayor Sarah Palin ask about the process of removing books from the local library.

“My selection should not be construed as an endorsement of my opinions, or my politics, or my candidacy for pope,” Kilkenny says. Balanced reporting, she adds, depends on reporters having access to minority and dissenting opinions. It’s fitting that the Press Club chose to represent someone who expressed an unpopular opinion; free speech is not about just telling those in power what they want to hear.

“For two months, I set aside my personal life ... because I did what my conscience directed me to do,” Kilkenny says. “In short, I was selected for doing what you do every day: Telling a story as thoroughly as possible.”

“What can I tell you about the cost of being the messenger that you don’t already know?”

Kilkenny received 14,436 e-mails, up to 3,000 per day, 200 per hour. She replied to questions from about 5,500 e-mails. Most days she worked 18 to 21 hours, replying to e-mails and giving dozens of interviews. She was on the BBC live and did more than 28 interviews with foreign media. On the worst night, she got four phone calls between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., and she learned to tell callers in her sleep how to find her e-mail on the ADN website. When people contacted her with new information, she did her best to help them connect with media. She provided “innumerable” primary sources to reporters. There was a steady stream of reporters through the house.

“At one point, our mudroom looked like the lost-and-found at Heathrow Airport.”

Kilkenny tears up as she talks about the support her husband and son provided. She is proud that her son volunteered for a campaign and wore his candidate’s button to Wasilla High School, and experienced only a little backlash.

“Some people had me canonized and on the bullet train to heaven. Others, about six percent, had me demonized and already on the way to the hot place.” If she only had a buck for every person who thought her use of “irenic” had been a misspelling of “ironic,” Kilkenny said, she’d be in Hawaii. She deeply regrets having used the word “hate”; that kind of word should be avoided like the plague, she says.

“There’s kooks out there, but far fewer than I feared.”

She found two “distressing themes” in the e-mails she received: First, prejudice, including blind partisanship, is alive and well. She was alarmed at the number of people who used the information in her e-mail to reinforce personal prejudices against one candidate or another. Second, she was appalled by the number of people who believe that the First Amendment should be used only to protect speech with which they agree, particularly when it comes to social and religious issues.

Here’s how to deal with people who are in the middle of a media frenzy:

• E-mail is not the best way to contact them. They don’t have time to read it.
• Use the phone. People are in the phone book. She’s in the phone book.
• Call repeatedly, but be patient and don’t get nasty.
• If you do e-mail, put your name and publication in the subject line in caps. (“I got about 10,000 that said ‘your e-mail.’”)
• Clearly define your lead topic and communicate with your interviewee early on.
• Never terminate an interview without leaving contact information.
• Leave a business card with the date and time of the interview written on the back.
• Let the interviewee know where you’re staying in case you leave your custom European sunglasses on her buffet.

Develop and support citizen journalists:

1. Give us validation and credentials. (The ADN was helpful by confirming that she was a person.)
2. Fact-check us. Work together.
3. If you can’t prove something, simply say so. Don’t use the label “partially true” just because you can’t prove it. That implies it’s partially false.
4. Don’t badmouth the public or spread fear of the public. Don’t call attention to the negative effects of media attention. (The negative e-mails were only a tiny percentage.) Why would anyone ever speak up if they thought it would ruin their life forever?
5. Respect your sources. (“I don’t need to go into why.”)

“Maybe I’ll write a book someday. Why not?”

The board could have chosen anybody “but they picked me, a nobody,” to represent everybody.

She closes her remarks by reading an e-mail she received from a survivor of the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps:

Dear Anne,
Too bad there were no people like you in pre-Nazi Germany!

— Maia Nolan

Liveblogging J-WeekNew MediaCommunity Funded Journalism

We’re getting ready to hear from David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us, about community-funded journalism.



Cohn, fortunately, was able to get in late last night despite Redoubt’s continued activity. He calls himself a “recovering tech reporter.” He used to write for Wired, then worked as a freelancer while getting his Master’s in journalism from Columbia. After that, he worked as a new media consultant (although he hates the word “consultant”).

New media is a broad term, and Cohn is beginning by asking the room what we’d like to know about new media — or what we think it is. In addition to gateway media, there’s social media, too, and then database journalism (sites like EveryBlock). He’s sharing an example — watching the growth of Wal-Mart at Flowing Data.


Cohn doesn’t know what the evolution of journalism will look like, but he is confident that there will continue to be a need for journalists. There’s no lack of desire for news — news outlets have more readers than ever — it’s just a question of how the marketplace will emerge. It will look drastically different, and he doesn’t know that it will be sustained by news organizations the way it is now, but it will be an industry, and it will make money.

“Journalism is a process, not a product. Newspapers are a product ... and there is journalism in it. But journalism is a process.” You used to need an institution — like a newspaper — to cover the overhead for the delivery of journalism, but that’s no longer the case. “Journalism itself is alive and well.” But the organizations no longer have the authority to say who is and isn’t going to do journalism. More organizations that have traditionally not been news organizations are now doing reporting; for example, the ACLU was one of the first groups to break news about Guantanamo Bay. It’s an advocacy group, of course, but it did do reporting, and we’re going to see more of that. Journalists will find work, but it won’t necessarily be for a newspaper; it will be for other entities.

“Let’s talk about WikiMedia.” Buzzword: Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is great for some things and not for others; for example, you don’t want your brain surgeon or your airplane pilot to be crowdsourced. Think journalist as community organizer. One example is the Off The Bus project at Huffington Post, which provided ground-level coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign. It’s participatory journalism.


What about online comments — how can they be elevated to be productive and not just divisive? There are different levels of engagement, and commenting is a low threshold, so it’s more likely to incite snarkiness. Ever heard of the 1-9-90 Rule? If you are looking for participation and you have 100 readers, one will participate actively. Eight or nine will comment now and then, and the other 90 won’t be engaged. What are some ways other than commenting that will engage that one reader (and require a level of involvement that will “weed out the jerks”)? You have to engage; it will require time and effort. The more time you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. Cohn tends to have a “yes” attitude, so he’s not advocating for shutting off reader comments, but, as with fishing, you have to throw some back before you land a keeper.


It’s important to be on Twitter, but not because it’s cool. Remember Friendster? It was replaced by MySpace, which was familiar and usable because you already knew Friendster. Then came Facebook — same thing. Twitter is different. Maybe it will go the way of Friendster, but your time on Twitter isn’t wasted, because what Twitter represents is not going to go away. If something comes along to replace Twitter, you’ll know how to use it. He’s also introducing the room to FriendFeed. TweetUps and Meetups capitalize on social media by bringing it into the real world. It’s about making yourself available online. These are tools, not chores. If you think of Twitter as a chore, don’t use it.

One thing you can do as a journalist is take data — like police reports — and make it available in a user-friendly format so citizens can collect information. When you want to do something on the web, find the path of least resistance and stay agile. Don’t spend six months building something that might fail. Try something that will take you a week to build. Example: SeeClickFix, where you can create a map to track non-emergency issues like potholes in your area. Again, don’t be on it just because it’s hip and new; use it as a tool if you can, or don’t.


The first thing to do is to not get sidetracked by the tools. Decide what you want to do, and then find the right tool. ReadWriteWeb is a good site that covers tools like these. Potholes are a great example of an issue that can be covered using participatory journalism; you make the map available, then track reports from citizens.

Journalists sometimes get sidetracked by technology and the fear that we have to build everything from scratch. We don’t. The tools exist already; we just have to use them.

There’s a difference between being on the web and being of the web. The New York Times asks online readers to register, and one of the questions asked is country of residence. The number two response to that question — after United States — is Afghanistan. Why? Because that’s the first country in the drop-down list. Those readers aren’t in Afghanistan; they just don’t want to register. The Times is on the web, but it’s not of the web.


Some news organizations are making use of Second Life, where there is a real economy. Cohn has a friend who reports for Reuters in Second Life, and he covers Second Life events like real news. Second Life may have some possibility for expansion, but Cohn isn’t sure. Like Friendster, Second Life may go away, but what it represents will stay.

— Maia Nolan

Liveblogging J-WeekPhotojournalismVideo vs. Still Photographs: A Walk in Two Worlds

AP photographer Rick Bowmer is going to talk about the transition from still photography to video, a medium in which he’s recently started working. So far the room is not packed, but it’s still early... if you’re just waking up, come on down to the Senior Center. We have coffee!

Bowmer says the AP was late in coming to online slide shows, but once they started doing them, there was a big push for them. Two and a half years ago, the AP selected Bowmer and three other photographers (out of 116) to shoot HD video. He “heard the word experiment quite a bit” — the AP wanted to see what was possible. There was a learning curve — “It’s like still photography on steroids” — but he’s gotten a new appreciation for the medium. He used to be annoyed by news videographers — “They were always in the way” — but now he has a better understanding of what they do. He had to learn Final Cut Pro, and he’d come home at 7 p.m. and work until 3 a.m., playing with video. “After a while, it started making sense.” After about six months, he could pick up the video camera and it felt as familiar as the still camera. He can program it with his eyes closed. Now it’s fun, but for the first six to eight months, it wasn’t. “It’s a labor of love.”

Colleagues have accused him of selling his soul, but Bowmer tries to explain to them that it’s a rewarding medium. Capturing audio was very powerful for him — adding sound to images adds a deepening element to the story. Each of the four photographers who participated in the pilot program approached it differently. Bowmer abandoned stills at first and focused on video, then realized that perhaps he had “stepped over onto the dark side.” After about a year, he started working with both together, which he thinks is a lot more powerful.

“When I go on the road,” he says, holding up his still and video cameras, “these are my weapons. These are my tools.”

With the economy the way it is, it might not seem like the right time to expand into a new medium, but at the same time, video offers more market opportunities.

He’s now sharing one of his first videos — it’s a roller derby story. He opens with a long slow-motion shot of a racer picking herself up off the track as the other skaters move by in the background. He tries to use as many stills as possible, and he likes to use slow or fast motion — “It gives you the power to really tell a story. Using video to go from point A to point Z, you tell the entire story.” Surprisingly, he doesn’t really watch too many movies (although he did take one film class in college).

“It’s just a fun way to tell a story.
I guess I drank the Kool-Aid.”

In another video, about extreme kayaking, he sets a voice-over of a kayaker talking about feeling like he’s moving in slow motion over a slow-motion shot of the same kayaker descending a Class Five rapid. He also uses still shots with the voice-over, which he says he thinks can have a bigger impact than just video. For the video stories, there isn’t a lot of canned voice-over; he tries to use more natural sound to tell the story.

In a recent story about an Oregon family that recently found itself homeless, Bowmer uses long still shots taken from video — close-ups of the family members’ faces in particular. Don’t feel handicapped by video, he says; it’s easy to frame-grab for stills.

Bowmer thinks video is a “pretty powerful medium,” and as an example, he shows two episodes from an AP video series called “Lucky Charms,” about American soldiers serving in the Middle East, and their families back home. Again, he uses organic audio over video and stills, and the effect has a deep emotional impact.

He shows a photo of a man, covered in blood, being carried away from an explosion in the West Bank. It has impact, he says, but without the audio, the story isn’t as complete. There are elements you need, he says, and still photography is a powerful medium, but it is missing something that video can provide.



Take a look at some of Rick Bowmer’s AP videos.

— Maia Nolan

Tom Snapp's family attends press club conference

Tom Snapp's sister, Colleen Redman, brought her son, Scott, by the Senior Center this afternoon to meet some people. He has worked for Conoco Phillips in Anchorage for 25 years as a reservoir engineer. He bears a striking resemblance to his well-known uncle, Tom Snapp. Scott Redman grew up in Fairbanks, a graduate of Lathrop High School, where he was co-captain of the varsity football team.

The Press club's 1st Amendment award is names after Tom Snapp and Howard Rock, founders of the Tundra Times newspaper in 1962. The paper was founded largely to oppose Project Chariot, a bizarre plan by Edward Teller and the Atomic Energy Commission to use nuclear explosives to create a deep water port at Cape Thompson in Norhwest Arcic Alaska in the early 1960s. Tundra Times established a dissenting voice within an Alaska press corps that had been in support of Project Chariot. Tundra Times also led the fight for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

AUDIO PODCAST: Gasline 101

Friday, 3:45-5 p.m.

Program: The fundamental mechanics and politics of building a gasline. Former House Majority leader Ralph Samuels learned on the job and will share some basics about the gas industry that all Alaskan reporters should know.

Listen to the session here:

AUDIO PODCAST: Beyond meetings, making goverment coverage come alive

Friday, 3:45-5 p.m.

Program: CoastAlaska News Director Ed Schoenfeld, UC Berkeley Journalism Professor Bill Drummond and Atwood Fellow Patrick Yack will offer pointers on how to improve local government coverage. Topics: different approaches to the same story, finding personal impacts, covering issues instead of meetings, and involving citizen journalists.

Listen to the discussion here:

AUDIO PODCAST: Panel - Photojournalism, Going to Extremes

Friday, 12-2:30 p.m.

Program: Over lunch, find out how to take compelling photographs while shaking from hypothermia or with your camera frozen. What to carry in that bag. And how to mentally prepare for doing your best work in extreme conditions. Some of Alaska’s finest photographers: Chris Ho, KYUK-AM/TV. Scott Jensen, KTUU-TV, Jim Lavrakas, former Anchorage Daily News photographer. Clark Mishler, author of Anchorage, Life at the Edge of the Frontier. Rick Bowmer, Associated Press, Portland. MODERATOR: Dimitra Lavrakas.

Listen to the discussion here:

Shout out to Erik Hill, ADN photographer who demo'd Sound Slides

We attempted to podcast this session, but sadly the audio card was full and we were unsuccessful. Thank you Erik for your time and good work.

AUDIO PODCAST: Lisa Margonelli - Mapping the maze of oil and gas

Friday afternoon, 2:30-3:45 p.m. (teleconference, Lisa didn't make it out of SF due to Redoubt)

Program: The oil industry can seem like a labyrinth with minatours around every corner. But Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain, has spent years following the network of intricate passages to demystify the oil supply chain. She’ll show you how you can help your readers, viewers and listeners understand how the industry affects our daily lives.

Listen to it here:

Thank the volcano gods, the keynote speaker made it out of Seattle, bound for Anchorage

David Cohn hung on all day in the Seattle airport, waiting for that slip in the throng that would let him skip onto a flight to Anchorage. He said the Seattle airport was wired, so he was happily at work, and he'd wait for all the flights into Anchorage to see if he could get one. He only had to wait until 4:45 p.m. (like, all day.)

In honor of his success, we're offering this shrine to Mt. Redoubt in appreciation for letting one of our Outside presenters slip through.

AUDIO PODCAST: Robert Meyerowitz - The art of intimacy

Friday morning, 10:30-11:45 a.m.

Program: A feature story done well is about intimacy. Maybe that’s why it’s one of the most powerful forms of journalism. UAF Snedden Professor Robert Meyerowitz takes you beyond “who, what, when, where and why” to tell gripping tales.

Listen here:

AUDIO PODCAST: Clark Mishler-Elements of Photography

Friday morning, 9-11:45 p.m.

Program: How to take better pictures no matter what level you're at. Veteran Alaska photogrpaher Clark Mishler will show you 15 elements of shooting that even professionals sometimes miss.

Listen here:

AUDIO PODCAST: Panel - Are we ready for the next big one?

Friday, 9-10:45 a.m.

Program: From quakes to volcanoes, to ice jam floods to fires, Alaska is a state where the question is not if a disaster will happen, but when. Since 2001, every region in the state has experienced at least one disaster. Many have had several. Given the odds, you’d expect newsrooms to be prepared. But are they? PANELISTS: John Madden, Director of the State Division of Emergency Services. Lt. Gen. Craig Campbell, Commissioner of State Dept. of Military and Veteran Affairs. Edgar Blatchford, UAA Journalism Professor who was in Seward in 1964, where the earth opened up and waves washed away the waterfront. Janice Boylan, compiled: The Day Trees Bent to the Ground: Stories from the 64 Earthquake. Tay Thomas, 1964 Earthquake Survivor. Mike Ross, KTUU-TV Anchor who worked at WWL-TV in New Orleans, the only station that stayed on the air during Katrina. MODERATOR: Michael Carey, host of Anchorage Edition.

Listen to the session here: