On January 27, Judge Alvin Hellerstein disclosed in a hearing that Shepard Fairey is under criminal investigation for submitting false images in the case against the Associated Press. Bloomberg News reports that Fairey may invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions related to the case.
Mannie Garcia (Associated Press) / Shepard Fairey
I’ve notice that my students’ eyes tend to glaze over the moment I mention the words “copyright” and “fair use” in a journalism class. So for the past two semesters I have made good use of the current legal battle between the artist Shepard Fairey and the Associated Press.
The dispute centers on the use of a 2006 Associated Press photograph of Barack Obama that the artist Shepard Fairey turned into the iconic HOPE poster during the 2008 campaign.
Shepard Fairey admits he used an AP photo, but argues that his artistic transformation of the image is protected under the doctrine of fair use.
The AP argues that Fairey misappropriated its rights to the image when he created and sold posters and other merchandise with the likeness.
Mannie Garcia, the photographer who took the photo at a National Press Club event, says he owns the rights to the image because he worked as a freelancer at the time and was not an AP employee.
Yesterday the case became even more complex when Fairey admitted to submitting false images and deleting others in the legal proceedings. Fairey initially claimed he used a different AP image that less closely resembled the final poster.
“While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong,” Fairey said in a statement released on Oct 16, 2009. “In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images. I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment and I take full responsibility for my actions which were mine alone.”
In my online journalism classes, we look at the four factors courts consider in fair use cases. Then we listen to interviews with Shepard Fairey and Mannie Garcia that aired on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross in February 2009.
The class discussion has been lively, although the legal definition of fair use can sometimes be eclipsed by the personalities involved. After the discussion, I ask the students to rule on the case. An overwhelming majority of students – who are all undergraduates studying journalism – side with Fairey. A few students have presented an impassioned defense of Garcia, but few defend the AP.
Here are some factors that make the case particularly compelling for class discussion:
I recently picked up a copy of Multimedia Journal by Richard Koci Hernandez. The book came out in 2008, but I couldn’t find a review of it, so I thought I’d write about it here.
Multimedia Journal is not the typical online journalism book. It is only 60 pages long, measures 7” x 7”, and contains no HTML tutorials or manifestos about the future of journalism.
In the introduction, Hernandez, who worked at the The San Jose Mercury News and is now a fellow the University of California, Berkeley, writes:
“If you are looking for answers to journalism’s big questions put this book down. Trying to answer or even ponder the questions on the future of journalism are a huge waste of time and stop you from doing what you’re good at: being creative.”
Multimedia Journal, which was self-published using Blurb, is a series of exercises aimed at tapping into the creative process. Each chapter contains a series of activities (i.e. keep a visual journal, start a vlog, use a flip-book, take a picture every day for a year, collect audio sounds from daily life) and lists of inspiring online resources and books. One of my favorite exercises is called “Document Something You Think Is Boring.”
The value of the book is not an argument, information or research; it offers a series of starting points and the reader must create the value for herself.
Hernandez also makes a case for being anonymous when posting online for the first time, arguing that criticism can stifle inspiration.
Anonymity isn’t something I’d advocate in a classroom, but Hernandez isn’t writing lesson plans. He is concerned about separating one’s ego from one’s creative work – which is a difficult task for anyone. In this context, I like Hernandez’s advice. A few years ago, I kept an anonymous blog about a subject I was passionate about. After a year, I deleted it. I enjoyed writing and posting photographs and sharing it online without worrying about reaction. I wasn’t doing it to advance my career or to build my online “brand.” It was fun. And the fun allowed me to be creative in ways I could not be on the job.
I had an idea of what I was getting when I ordered Multimedia Journal. The first 20 pages can be previewed online. I regularly read Hernandez’s blog Multimedia Shooter, (which is currently being revamped). And I’d seen some of the work Hernandez’s students have created.
If I have a complaint about the book, it is that I was left craving more of Hernandez’s advice and insight. I suggest that readers supplement the book with other resources. Watch some of his video pieces, which help illuminate the exercises and offer concrete examples of how to break out of standard ways of thinking about presenting news.
Also The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University has a four-part video interview with Hernandez, which is worth watching:
A lot of resources on teaching interactive journalism have been circulating around the Web recently. Here are some I found valuable:
Multimedia Standards, a University of Miami class project on multimedia journalism standards
John Temple blogs the MediaStorm Methodology Workshop (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) and post-workshop reflection Ten steps news organizations should take to embrace a multimedia future.
Archived Chat: How Do You Involve Students in Multimedia Rather Than Just Teach It? (Poynter)
How to Use Digital Story Telling in the Classroom (Edutopia)
Video Tutorials from University of Oklahoma’s Journalism School
-Tutorials for Adobe products (Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Illustrator, etc)
-Tutorials for Multimedia Journalism course
-Tutorials for Interactive Multimedia Design course
Handout on Multimedia Storytelling from Steve Buttry, Gazette Communications
Also Mark Luckie of 10000words.net has a book called “The Digital Journalist’s Handbook” due out in September.
The Slow Food movement began in the 1980s when a group of Italians protested the opening of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps. Today, the official Slow Food organization boasts more than 100,000 members in 132 countries.
The Slow Food mantra is “good, clean and fair.” Proponents believe food should taste good, production should minimize harm to the environment and health, and that workers should be paid fairly for their labor. They also hold that we are all co-producers of food, not merely consumers, based on the choices we make.
So why am I writing about Slow Food on a journalism blog? Recently I’ve stumbled across numerous references to the phrase “Slow Journalism” and people who are calling for a similar movement in the news industry.
In a 2007 article in Prospect magazine, Susan Greenberg defined Slow Journalism as:
“…essays, reportage and other non-fiction writing that takes its time to find things out, notices stories that others miss, and communicates it all to the highest standards.”
In a 2007 lecture at the City University in London, David Leigh of The Guardian said:
“Slow Journalism would show greater respect for the craft of the reporter – a patient assembler of facts. A skilled tradesman who is independent and professionally reputable. And who can get paid the rate for the job. A disentangler of lies and weasel words.”
Last fall, the University of Southern California’s Getty Arts Journalism program held a forum on the topic (watch a video here), which it defined as:
“…a growing practice of journalists sharing resources and caring less about beating their competition to the big story than about practicing social justice.”
In June, Paul Bradshaw, publisher of the Online Journalism Blog, used the term Slow Journalism to describe his crowd sourcing reporting project called Help Me Investigate:
“Investigative journalism is about more than just ‘telling a story’; it is about enlightening, empowering and making a positive difference. And the web offers enormous potential here – but users must be involved in the process and have ownership of the agenda.”
I’ve read articles by those who think that the decline in the newspaper and magazine industries is killing any hope of a Slow Journalism movement, and articles by those who believe the Web is the ideal place for a media revolution to take place.
Still, it hasn’t reached anything approaching a movement. At a forum on the topic, one proponent joked that it was the first time he’d been sober when talking about Slow Journalism in public.
What is Slow Journalism?
I haven’t found a coherent definition of Slow Journalism. If you have, let me know. People seem to be using the term in various ways as they struggle to figure out what the future of journalism might look like and what they imagine it could be.
Here is a run at a working definition given what I’ve read and heard.
Slow Journalism…
What Does Slow Journalism Look Like?
Naka Nathaniel, a former New York Times reporter, has talked about his work with Nick Kristof as one example for the future journalism. For several years, Nathaniel and Kristof traveled the globe covering stories of famine, conflict, war, and environmental destruction. Nathaniel shot photos and video to accompany Kristof’s columns, but they didn’t see their work as the end product.
After a 2006 reporting trip to Chad to cover the genocide in Darfur, Nathaniel and Kristof posted their reporting – articles, columns, photographs, video, blog posts, reports, background material, and links to Human Rights organizations — on NYTimes.com. Then they invited readers to use their reporting to continue to tell the story in new ways. They received essays, poems, letters and works of fiction from readers. In addition, Winter Miller, an assistant to Kristof, wrote a play based on her travels in Sudan.
In other words, the reporters picked a story that mattered, covered it in depth, and then turned it over to readers and others to make it better.
But using the definition and example above, I don’t think Slow Journalism is only for the New York Times or large news organizations.
There are many wonderful examples of smaller projects with similar approaches; things like the Common Language Project, StoryCorp and 6 Billion Others are ones that quickly come to mind.
Can It Happen?
Despite the funny name, none of this seems particularly radical. The values of Slow Journalism sound a lot like the advice I received from my journalism teachers and editors. It is the kind of work many of my students aspire to, but fear they might never get a chance to do.
For me, the question isn’t if we need Slow Journalism, but how — given the realities of the news industry — we can make it happen.
Producing journalism that is “good, clean, and fair” takes time and effort. Seeing the audience as co-producers requires a new mindset and a willingness to experiment. And perhaps it requires a rethinking of the definition of news.
Brian Storm, founder of the multimedia company MediaStorm, (who hasn’t used the term Slow Journalism as far as I know) has argued that if news organizations gave up on producing “day-to-day, perishable content” then it could open up the possibility of doing “more in-depth, more investigative, and more robust” journalism.
“People are asked to do less with more and not given the time,” Storm said in an interview. “Time is the greatest luxury in journalism.”
YouTube recently launched a project called The Reporters’ Center, a series of how-to interviews with reporters, editors, and media professionals. There are plenty of big names like Bob Woodward, Nicholas Kristof, and Arianna Huffington. And there are some helpful technical tutorials like how to capture breaking news on a cell phone, how to shoot a basic video interview, and how to promote a YouTube video.
But I suggest scrolling past the celebrity journalists and the most viewed videos to interviews with people from organizations like the Pulitzer Center and Witness.
In an segment called Telling an Untold Story, Jon Sawyer of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting talks about a group of young journalists who went to Ethiopia and Kenya to report on the lack of clean water, which accounts for more deaths than HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined. They produced a series of print stories, photo essays, audio interviews, and video segments that appeared in a variety of news outlets and a Web site called Water Wars. It’s a great example of how to report and produce a story for a variety of platforms.
I missed the live version of this, but here is a transcript of a Poynter News U online discussion about teaching students to tell stories using multimedia tools. Mindy McAdams is the guest. Good questions, good responses, and lots of helpful links.
NOTE: I have updated the list below and put it in a permanent spot on my Tutorials Page.
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I read through my course evaluations from last semester and in addition to comments like “he’s long-winded, but nice enough,” a number of students gave high marks to the free Web tutorials I assigned in my online journalism classes. I was pleasantly surprised because I wasn’t sure how to measure their usefulness, and I had to create graded assignments to make the student actually do them.
But overall, students said they found the tutorials helpful, liked that they could learn at their own pace, and returned to them over and over again.
I found out about many of these tutorials from Mindy McAdams, who has written a great series of posts called a Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency on her blog. NewsU and the Knight Digital Media Center are also great resources.
So below is a list of tutorials I’ve used in my courses. They are all free and all aimed at beginners.
Any you would suggest?
Also this fall, I plan to create a series of video tutorials for my students and will post them here.
STORYTELLING
Five Steps of Multimedia Storytelling (NewsU)
Ira Glass of This American Life on the building blocks of good storytelling (25 minutes of YouTube videos)
Part 1: On the basics
Part 2: On finding a great story
Part 3: On taste
Part 4: On common pitfalls
DIPITY TIMELINE
How to Make a Timeline Using Dipity (Berkey-Gerard)
GOOGLE MAPS
11 Exercises to Learn How to Make a Google Map (Berkey-Gerard)
Google Map Video Tours:
Getting Started
Add a Place
Google Street View
Create a Map
Add Third Party Content
Create a Google Map profile
HTML and CSS
Beginner HTML Tutorial (HTML Dog)
Beginner CSS Tutorial (HTML Dog)
PHOTOGRAPHY
Language of the Image (NewsU)
Photoshop How-To for Online Photos (Mindy McAdams)
AUDIO
Telling Stories with Sound (NewsU)
Gathering Audio by Brian Storm (MediaStorm)
How to convert .wma, .wmv, or .mp3 files using Switch (Berkey-Gerard)
How to Use Garage Band (Knight Digital Media Center)
How to Use Audacity (Knight Digital Media Center)
SOUND SLIDES
Photoshop How To for Sound Slides (Mindy McAdams)
How to Use the Sound Slides (Knight Digital Media Center)
VIDEO
How to Use iMovie (Knight Digital Media Center)
MULTIMEDIA COLLAGE
How to Make a Multimedia Collage Using VuVox (VuVox)
Today, I stumbled upon a worthwhile interview with Brian Storm, the president of MediaStorm, in Nieman Reports.
MediaStorm creates multimedia documentaries for news organizations like National Geographic, MSNBC, Slate and Reuters. They take on serious social issues like the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, families facing economic hardship in the rural Midwest, and posttraumatic stress of American soliders in Iraq.
Here are few unique things about MediaStorm’s approach:
Here are a couple of sections of Melissa Ludtke’s interview with Brian Storm that I found especially compelling.
Brian Storm on the state of the news industry:
For years I’ve been saying it’s time for us to take journalism back. To take it out of the business development role and back into the world of why we got into journalism in the first place. We have to remember back to the time when we decided, “I want to be a journalist.” Why did we want to be a journalist? Did we wake up one day and say, “I want to make a pile of money?” I don’t think any of us did that. That’s not what drives us. We’re curious and want to learn about the world. It’s an incredible gift to enter into someone’s life and tell their story.
On digital access:
The crowd has access to these great digital cameras, to this incredible powerful publishing tool called the Web, and they have expanded the conversation. They have access to distribution that we, as professional journalists, have. This doesn’t make me fearful; it makes me excited. That’s democracy—to have more people, more input, and more access to different perspectives.
On the stories journalists should be doing:
Why are we, as professional journalists, allocating our resources for such daily, perishable stories? We should be allocating them for things that are in-depth, investigative and require the kind of expertise and professionalism that we have. We need to take a deep breath and remember all the things that we used to do, then reconsider given the new landscape and decide what is going to give us the most value over time. What is the role that we need to play? I don’t believe that is day-to-day, perishable content. I think we need to be more in-depth, more investigative, and more robust in what we do. I know that over time, that will actually pay off.
Here are a few of the more substantive parts of my media diet this week:
Joy of Less by Pico Iyer (NYTimes.com “Happy Days” blog)
Iyer says that “the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started.”
Many of the reader responses to Iyer’s article are worth reading as well; better than the average message board.
How Google Trained Your Brain by Douglas Rushkoff (Daily Beast)
In this review of the new search engine Bing, Rushkoff argues that “while Microsoft engages with us as consumers, Google treats us as producers.”
Should Creative Writing Be Taught? by Louis Menand (New Yorker Magazine)
“The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the most renowned creative-writing program in the world. Sixteen Pulitzer Prize winners and three recent Poet Laureates are graduates of the program. But the school’s official position is that the school had nothing to do with it.”
The Watchmen (This American Life)
The radio show puts two reporters on the task of finding the regulators who were supposed to be overseeing the finance industry. Great reporting performed by asking a lot of people one obvious question, “Aren’t you responsible?”
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