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NENPA winter convention scheduled for Feb. 24-25 at new, first-time site in Boston
By NENPA
The New England Newspaper and Press Association’s annual winter convention this year will feature at least one major change and a first.
The convention is moving this year to the Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel on Boston Harbor, its first time at that location.
The convention is scheduled for Friday, Feb. 24, and Saturday, Feb. 25.
The convention also will feature many of the traditional events it has offered for years: Award ceremonies honoring outstanding work in news, advertising, circulation and marketing; the New England Newspaper Hall of Fame dinner; the New England First Amendment Coalition’s awards luncheon; dozens of workshops covering all facets of newspaper work; and vendor exhibits.
Mike Blinder, president of The Blinder Group, based in Lutz, Fla., will present a session on “Leveraging digital services to gain new legacy revenue!” Blinder will provide examples from newspapers in markets of all sizes. Participants will be shown methods of packaging and pricing their product offerings and how best to target advertiser categories to prospect.
Other topics will Blinder cover:
• What digital solutions can be easily sold by legacy advertising representatives and which ones are problematic.
• Who sells digital ads, and whether you need a separate digital sales staff.
• How to bundle digital solutions on every sales call.
The New England Newspaper and Press Association’s Marketing and Advertising Council is soliciting the best revenue ideas from newspapers throughout New England and will present and talk about them during a panel discussion at the convention. The discussion, titled “Thriving not just surviving!”, will touch on the innovative and diverse ways newspapers undergoing revitalization are engaging audiences and generating advertising revenue.
The panel will feature New England advertising directors discussing the best and most successful of the ideas submitted.
More information about the advertising ideas session and about how to submit ideas for the session is available here.
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Contacts for the panel include Mark A. French, advertising director of The Republican, MassLive.com, and El Pueblo Latino, all based in Springfield, Mass., at mfrench@repub.com and (413) 788-1108; Sean McKenna, advertising director of the North of Boston Media Group, whose flagship newspaper is The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover. Mass., at smckenna@eagletribune.com, (978) 946-2161 (office) or (978) 771-1105 (cell); and Tim Brady, advertising director of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor, at tbrady@cmonitor.com.
Those are just two of the many sessions to be offered at the convention.
More details about the convention will be available soon in the Bulletin and elsewhere on NENPA’s website, www.nenpa.com.
Information for this story was provided by the New England Newspaper and Press Association.
Social media twofold boon for journalists: Reporting tool, connection to the community
By Audrey Cooney, Bulletin Staff
‘The guidelines for the best practices for social media are always evolving.’
— Philip Tortora, Former audience analyst,
Burlington (Vt.) Free Press
Social media has connected people from around the globe. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have bridged a geographic gap to unite people in an increasingly tech-dependent world. For journalists, social media holds immense power – if journalists understand its potential, media experts say.
“I think a journalist today needs to use multiple social media tools both for communication and for gathering information,” said Steve Buttry, director of student media at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.
According to Buttry, social media allows a journalist to examine current conversations on a topic, a valuable reporting tool.
“People with firsthand experience or newsworthy opinions on the things we cover are putting their thoughts on social media,” he said. “We wouldn’t hesitate in the old days to say it was important, when reporting, to go out of the office and go to a place like a coffee shop where people were talking about what we were covering. And social media’s sort of the coffee shop of today, only it’s not just in the town you’re working in.”
Now the conversation is international because people can and do share online their thoughts and observations from almost anywhere in the world, he said.
He gave as an example the upheaval at the University of Missouri in November 2015, when students protested against a perceived culture of racial injustice. At the time, students posted on Twitter videos of a pro-protest professor demanding that a student photojournalist attempting to document a part of the protest stop what he was doing and calling for “some muscle” to physically remove the student from a public space. The professor, Melissa Click, was charged with misdemeanor assault and fired by the university. She said a minority professor wouldn’t have been disciplined so strictly and that “I’m a white lady. I’m an easy target.”
Those sorts of primary sources lend authority to a piece of journalism beyond that given by eyewitness accounts, Buttry said.
Buttry said using social media to gather information before writing a story can make a story easier to distribute once it has been written. For example, a journalist who crowdsources questions on Twitter while writing a story can later tweet and link to the story and tag the people who answered the questions, he said. Those tagged can then read the story and share it with their Twitter followers. That establishes a connection between readers and the story, ultimately leading to increased engagement and more readership.
Buttry also suggested posting pertinent stories with Facebook groups that focus on a specific topic, saying that that generates more traffic than posting every story a publication produces just on its own social media account.
“If you’re thoughtful about why people are going to click on it … and if you’re engaging them in conversation before the story runs, they’re going to be more likely to read it,” he said.
Along with enabling the posing of questions about a topic to a large number of people, social media allows reporters to test the waters of what issues the public is interested in, said Brian Braiker, executive editor at Digiday, a digital media and marketing company based in New York City.
“I get a lot of reporting ideas from people because just different people are talking about the same thing,” he said.
In general, reporters can use their personal social media accounts to talk with readers. Braiker said that that helps give a news publication a more personal face.
“We have more of a voice and personalities on our own Twitter accounts than on the main Twitter account … I like it as a distribution platform but I also like it (as) a conversation,” he said.
Micky Bedell, former multimedia editor for the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Mass., The Recorder of Greenfield, Mass., and the Valley Advocate, based in Northampton, agrees that reporters can use their personal accounts to connect with readers. Reporters on local beats can tweet pictures or videos of themselves visiting local businesses or attractions they’ve been assigned to cover, she said.
“Those things show you’re interacting with your sources or you’re actually doing the things you’re writing about,” said Bedell, now photo editor at the Bangor (Maine) Daily News.
Philip Tortora, former audience analyst for The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, said reporters there are encouraged to maintain personal Twitter accounts, and to share stories they write.
“The guidelines for the best practices for social media are always evolving,” he said.
But there are a few strategies that help ensure that reporters are effectively engaging with followers while on Twitter. Tortora said it is imporrant that reporters understand how to use Twitter handles and hashtags, and how to use the relevant hashtag during a specific event.
Twitter lends itself readily to breaking news, partly because it delivers information in short bursts that can later be strung together to deliver a complete story, Tortora said. While a story is still developing, it’s possible to create a page on a newspaper’s website containing a few sentences of information and a string of embedded tweets from a reporter’s personal accounts, he said. Tweets can be added as the event plays out, providing up-to-date information on breaking news until a full story can be written and distributed.
Bedell said the reporters she works with originally had to email tweets to an editor for approval before posting them on their professional accounts. She said the process was cumbersome, and contradictory to Twitter’s fast-paced nature. Now, journalists manage their own accounts, with the expectation that they’ll maintain a level of professionalism.
Tortora said Twitter’s linear nature makes it a good tool for creating a reliable timeline of events.
“If you’re using is (it) as part of your news coverage at a live event, Twitter essentially turns into a personal notebook,” he said.
Tortora gave the example of a hypothetical sports reporter who tweets continuously during a game, then refers back to tweets while writing the game account to be sure of the exact order of plays.
Facebook, like Twitter, allows journalists to reach out to community members in a more personal way.
The Free Press encouraged its staff to create Facebook journalist pages, because of the “profound impact … Facebook (was) having on traffic,” Tortora said.
He said reporters can be reluctant to create separate Facebook accounts for work, and hesitate to share all their work on their personal profile.
Bedell said she encourages all of those she works with to create professional Facebook accounts so they can field questions and concerns from the newspapers’ readers.
“People respond better to actual human beings,” she said.
The Daily Hampshire Gazette received online comments from readers that included “everything from news tips to complaints about their papers not being delivered,” she said.
Facebook and Twitter make it easier than ever for journalists to find eyewitnesses to use as sources.
“From the beginning, Facebook and Twitter for me have always been reporting tools,” Digiday’s Braiker said.
Braiker said he originally joined Facebook after the fatal mass shooting in April 2007 at Virginia Tech, using it to reach out to students at the school as he covered the event.
But relying on social media for facts is a double-edged sword.
“I’ve seen it time and again; particularly with breaking news, there’s a lot of soft information,” Tortora said.
While reporters can keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook to track current events, they should double-check information garnered from a tweet or Facebook post, he said.
Bedell agrees. She said reporters will usually reach out to a person who posted an interesting tweet or Facebook post.
“There’s generally not much reason to source social media as your major source if you put a little more effort into following that lead,” she said.
Although Facebook and Twitter have developed into valuable reporting tools, not all social media platforms are created equal.
Tortora said the Burlington Free Press has accounts on both Instagram and Snapchat, in an attempt to occupy the same space as millennials. He said those platforms, along with LinkedIn, do little to bring traffic to a news site, although they do help to increase a publication’s visibility.
Louisiana State University’s Buttry said LinkedIn can help journalists by providing background details on a source that can either validate or disprove the source’s authority on an issue.
“It’s a broad spectrum of tools, and the importance of it will vary by story, as well as by the ability of a journalist to decide what’s useful in a story,” Buttry said.
Although many people have Facebook accounts, Twitter is frequently more helpful to reporters because accounts are less likely to be private, making the information posted there easier to access, Buttry said.
On the topic of using newer forms of social media such as Snapchat and Instagram, Bedell said it’s important for reporters to be completely comfortable using the new platform.
“If it’s not natural to you and it’s not part of your day-to-day life already, you’re just not going to use it,” she said.
Alison Berstein, a graduate student in the Northeastern University School of Journalism, contributed to this report.
‘(S)ocial media’s sort of the coffee shop of today, only it’s not just in the town you’re working in.’
–Steve Buttry, Director of student media
Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University
‘From the beginning, Facebook and Twitter for me have always been reporting tools.’
–Brian Braiker, Executive editor
Digiday, New York City
We are more than monitors
Jim Stasiowski, writing
Writing coach Jim Stasiowski welcomes your questions or comments.
Call him at
(775) 354-2872
or write to:
2499 Ivory Ann Drive
Sparks, NV 89436.
The TV commercial, which has run so often that I hit mute and recite all the lines in lip-sync with the actors, uses a fake bank robbery to allow the uniformed character to explain why he isn’t drawing a weapon to thwart the bad guys: “I’m not a security guard; I’m a security monitor.”
He calmly tells two incredulous patrons who dropped to the floor in terror that his job with the bank is simply to alert people when there is a robbery. In a tone as flat as the two patrons, he says, “There’s a robbery.”
The message is that while some identity-theft services merely “monitor” such thefts, the company paying for the commercial is far superior because it takes steps to protect its customers.
The little drama touched a nerve with me because the public’s disdain for newspapers and journalists often includes the criticism that we are little more than monitors of activity in our communities, passive observers who pass along what we witness, and that’s the extent of our action.
In fact, we sometimes sustain our image as mere “monitors.” If you’re a reporter or an editor, and you recently got a call accusing you of bias, you may have fallen back on the argument that “We just report the news; we don’t make it.”
Poppycock.
Any time we dig into misdeeds, from mere mistakes to felonies, we are turning such actions into news, for if the misdeeds are never made public, can we really define them as “news”?
If you wish to get all semantic on me, OK, I’ll accept the argument that everything could qualify as “news,” just as placing your garbage cans out for pickup technically qualifies as “history.” But when we do write about misdeeds, our goal isn’t merely to inform; our goal is to bring about change, improvement.
Right before New Year’s Day, The Wall Street Journal had a story about victims, people whose financial reputations were damaged by the unscrupulous acts of Wells Fargo. The story includes this paragraph: “Bank spokeswoman Mary Eshet said in a written statement Wells Fargo is contacting customers identified by the Journal ‘to ensure we resolve their situations to their satisfaction.’”
That goes far beyond mere monitoring; when newspapers act, others often follow.
When I was a reporter in the 1980s, my editor assigned me to see whether merchants sold cigarettes without checking IDs, thus tacitly ushering youngsters into the smoking habit. I thought the idea ridiculous and told my editor so. He prevailed. (Editors seem to do that a lot.)
We recruited a sweet-looking 14-year-old girl, a nonsmoker. I drove her from store to store, 10 in all, and rehearsed her on portraying a scared, unsure novice perhaps buying her first-ever pack from clerks who, by law, were not allowed to sell to anyone younger than 18.
After 10 stops, she had 10 packs of cigarettes. No sales clerk even blinked, and one, the 14-year-old told me, even gave her advice on which brand to buy.
Our hastily hatched sting may have had not the slightest effect on the subsequent nationwide tightening of the sales-to-teens laws, but whenever I see one of those signs promising that stores check IDs for tobacco purchases, I smile.
In our news sections, as opposed to editorial pages, we don’t tell readers or civic leaders what actions to take, but we do more than merely monitor, more than observe. If I spent all those years as a monitor, explain to me why so many people felt aggrieved by what I wrote or edited and called to accuse me of bias.
I blame Teddy Roosevelt and his famous 1910 “Man in the Arena” speech. TR, an enlightened public servant but also no slouch at both ego and self-promotion, was painting a glowing portrait of himself and an insulting one of those who opposed him when he said, in part: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles … The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena … . (W)ho at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
“(T)he critic” he excoriated probably was a reporter. As Louis Filler wrote in his book “Muckrakers: Crusaders for American Liberalism”: “Roosevelt was generally held responsible for the appearance of the muckrakers and identified with them, despite the fact that he himself in anger gave them their opprobrious name.”
Most journalists have dared greatly, and many have fallen short. But very few are either cold or timid, and all have known both victory and defeat.
(Personal to Teddy: You needed an editor. “(N)either” in the last sentence should be between “know” and “victory.”)
THE FINAL WORD: “Opprobrious” means “abusive” or “disrespectful.”
Harry B. Thayer III
Harry B. Thayer III, 81, of Exeter, N.H., died Dec. 27.
Thayer began his career at a Hampton, N.H., newspaper, after learning in a school how to repair and operate Linotype machines.
Thayer then was hired by his father to work at The Exeter (N.H.) News-Letter, where he later was editor and co-publisher. He eventually became vice president and treasurer of the family-owned Exeter News-Letter Co., which published 13 weekly newspapers in the area before it was sold to the Ottaway Newspapers Inc. chain, He was also president of Rockingham County Newspapers in New Hampshire, and later founded Thayer Printing Co. Inc. in Exeter N.H.
In the early days of his newspaper career, Thayer was a volunteer firefighter with the Exeter Fire Department. He later was vice president of the Exeter Firemen’s Relief Association, president of the Seacoast Chief Fire Officers’ Mutual Aid District, and deputy chief of the Exeter Fire Department.
Thayer also held several positions with the town of Exeter, including president of the Economic Development Commission, chairman of the Budget Recommendations Committee, a member of the Zoning Board of Adjustment, and a member of the Exeter Parks and Pool Committee.
He leaves his wife, Janice; four children, Melissa, Heather, Christopher and Amanda; seven grandchildren; three siblings.
The obituaries were written, at least in part, from published reports by Bulletin correspondents Ashleane Alabre, Sophie Cannon, Jenna Ciccotelli, Nico Hall, Bailey Knecht, Joshua Leaston, Hope Oje, and Julia Preszler, undergraduate students at Northeastern University.
Industry News – Jan 2017
Headliners
- Alan White, editor at Eagle-Tribune, is dead at 68
- Providence proposal would ban delivery of free newspapers
- Hearst to centralize Conn. group in Norwalk office
- Globe plans reorganization of its news outlay
- Vt. AG to keep secret the report on five teen deaths
- A third of Conn. school chiefs evaluated in secret
- Court: Public may view questioning of Mass. teacher-killer
- Providence police: limit acccess to bodycam footage
- Vt. Gov. Shumlin reins in public files as he exits
- N.H. makes private meeting minutes more thorough
- Gunshot kills Maine columnist in ‘accidental tragedy’
- GateHouse in Mass. offers news to vision-impaired
- Conn. AG withheld tape of Hartford cop who kicked aman
Obituaries
- Alan J. White, executive editor of Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, Mass.
- Harry B. Thayer III, former vice president, treasurer of Exeter (N.H.) News-Letter Co.
- Doris (Lapan) McKoan, former co-owner, co-publisher of Valley Times of Pittsfield, N.H.
- Walter Edward Mattson, former president, chief operating officer of New York Times
whose newspaper career began in New England - David Michael Jrolf
- Raymond James Siegler
- Marion Remah
- Gerald E. ‘Jerry’ Watson
- Grace Helm
- Michael D. Harmon
- Rachel Halmesmaki Lahti
- Marilyn C. Childs
- Meggan Clifford Clark
- Thomas M. Reilly
- Audrey Long Grasso
- Bernice Arlene (Bates) Rabideau
- Christopher Robert Harding
- Elaine Priscilla (Alden) Kennedy
- Paul Surette
- Raymond F. Messier
- Arnold Field
- Sarah Higginson Begley
- John David Ober
- Daniel D. Price III
- Herbert H. Palmer
- Theresa H. (Eringi) Mazzelli
- Karen Bienvenue
- Joseph S. ‘Papa’ Tomczyk
- John M. ‘Jack’ Radigan
- Josephine Alice (Manganello) Deary
Transitions
MASSACHUSETTS
- Gayle Fee
Briefs
Awards and Honors
Advertising News
- Mass. deal ended there an ongoing fight over legal ads
- Mobile, video leads surge in digital ad growth
- Facebook said to allow mid-roll video ads, share ad $$
- A recap of the course of ad blocking in 2016
- Fake news and other banes of advertising online
- An argument for why ad-driven media will survive
- Mainstream sites’ ad-tech use twice that of fake sites
- Shafer: Craigslist wrongly blamed for classifieds’ death
Advice
- 22 suggestions for attracting users and subscribers
- Roy Peter Clark’s 40 writing lessons learned in 40 years
- Retiring Clark recalls creating culture for better writing
- What to ask before undertaking editorial projects
- A big-city-turned-small-town journalist’s lessons learned
- Suggestions for the best mix for multimedia storytelling
- How typography contrasts can display news hierarchy
- Nine suggestions for fact-checking, verification
- Tips for proofreading copy
Training
Mobile/Online News
Social Media News
- Globe launches Facebook group page for subscribers
- Twitter hiring editors, moves toward news production
- Facebook adding Live Audio
- Fake news, video among 6 social media developments
- Facebook’s 2017: How to add ads to a flush base
- Twitter debuts live 360-degree interactive videos
- Facebook names ex-TV reporter news partnership head
- Twitter mulls adding editing, bookmarking functions
- Focus, human editors keep fake news off LinkedIn
- Vine gone as network, stays as app for Twitter videos
- Poynter’s chronological review of Facebook in 2016
- What Facebook knows about us but doesn’t tell us
- Twitter to add verified account designations to timeline
Legal Briefs
- Vt. AG to keep secret the report on five teen deaths
- Courant: Some Conn. school chiefs evaluated secretly
- Courant raps secret evaluations as ‘unacceptable’
- Recounting Vt.’s spotty record on public records access
- Conn. AG withheld tape of Hartford cop kicking man
- New Boston records czar has ruled against openness
- Mass. records chief quits before reforms takes effect
- Mass. public may view teacher-killer interrogation
- More access urged for Providence cop bodycams
- Providence cops: Limit bodycam footage access
- New Haven, Conn., cop rapped for seizing cameras
- Outgoing Vt. Gov. Shumlin reining in public records
- N.H. mandates nonpublic meeting minutes be thorough
- Mass. transit agency OKs no-bid contract in secret
- 6-year seal to be lifted on ex-Vt. Gov. Douglas files
- Vt. officials don’t track fed requests on illegal aliens
- Brockton, Mass., doubles fee for mayor’s emails
- R.I. Gov. Raimondo proposes reducing public hearings
- Cops to investigate arrest of New Haven, Conn., scribe
- New Haven, Conn., cop rapped for seizing cameras
- Athlete sues UConn over scholarship loss
- Judge rules for cop who seized imposter’s camera
- Conn. judge finds exception to student privacy law
- Mass. state agency makes data breaches public online
- NEFAC, others argue for release of federal mug shots
- Challenges for the First Amendment in the digital age
Industry News
- Providence proposal would ban delivery of free papers
- NEFAC, others oppose ban on 1st Amendment grounds
- Globe plans reorganization to ‘reinvent’ its news outlay
- GateHouse service offers news to vision-impaired
- Edmonds sees some positive signs on newspaper front
- Challenging Facebook, Google; other predictions for ’17
- A tour of newsrooms in the print-digital transition
- The dangers of ‘satellite reporting’
- After successful 2016, Washington Post adds 60 jobs
- Career paths grow for metrics, data analysis
- 150-plus journalism entities in U.S. are nonprofits
- A case for less press criticism, more local coverage
- 5 newspaper leaders look back at ’16, forward to ’17
- Editor: Opinion inserted in some N.Y. Times stories
- Times Insider’s ode to copy editors
- 366 links chronicling fact-checking in 2016
- Journalism grads share similarities, optimism for future
- Recode’s look ahead to 2017 in media, other business
Virtual reality slowly becoming a reality for news storytelling
By Jerome Chong, Bulletin Staff
‘It’s certainly the most exciting technical and creative development in news, and the media in general, right now. Nothing compares to that visceral sense of presence that vr can bring; we’ve seen people be so moved — to laughter and to tears — by the experience that we have created, it’s clear that we’re onto something really big.’
— Nonny del la Peña, Chief executive officer,
Emblematic Group, Santa Monica, Calif.
With virtual reality (VR) technology, a new set of storytelling tools has been given to journalism.
Virtual reality technology has gotten better during the past few years, including the release this year of the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony PlayStation VR.
Virtual reality in journalism is just beginning to take baby steps into the new reality of virtual storytelling, and some news organizations in New England have thought about how this new platform could work for them.
According to Steven Rosenbaum, chief executive officer of WayWire.com and author of “Virtual Reality and Journalism — Can They Get Along?” on Forbes.com, virtual reality has existed for a long time in one form or another.
“VR journalism changes the rules for both journalist and the people that journalism is shared with. It’s hard to know what to call them, not ‘readers,’ not ‘viewers’ and not ‘audiences.’ More like ‘participants,’ ” he said in his Forbes piece.
Nonny de la Peña, chief executive officer of Emblematic Group, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based company that produces immersive virtual reality content and a trailblazer in immersive journalism, is a journalist who uses real-world reporting combined with virtual reality to explore how the two can be used together in storytelling. De la Pena’s “Project Syria,” from 2014, is a virtual reality documentary that allows viewers to experience the struggles of Syrian refugees, especially children, who have been displaced by the country’s civil war.
“Project Syria” weaves together audio, video and photographs from de la Peña’s reporting in Syria, and uses real-time graphics from Unity’s game engine. Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies that is used to develop video games for personal computers, consoles, mobile devices and websites. Through high-resolution VR goggles, VR technology is used to make the user feel as though they are in Syria.
De la Peña thinks that virtual reality storytelling is the future of journalism.
“It’s certainly the most exciting technical and creative development in news, and the media in general, right now. Nothing compares to that visceral sense of presence that VR can bring; we’ve seen people be so moved — to laughter and to tears — by the experiences that we have created, it’s clear that we’re onto something really big,” de la Peña said.
Through the use of virtual reality headsets loaded with sensors that track head and eye movements, a viewer is able to interact with and navigate through different environments as if actually in them.
De la Peña has said that virtual reality will eventually become mainstream.
Gartner, a research and advisory company based in Stamford, Conn., has predicted that there would be 25 million headsets in circulation by the end of 2018 and that 1.4 million units of virtual reality and augmented reality hardware will be shipped during 2016.
Virtual reality differs from other immersive forms of multimedia by allowing the user to be more of a participant than a spectator. For example, 360-degree video or photographs are just images and video that capture the entire scene around the camera. Augmented reality can add visual elements to what we see through a headset or through a viewer such as a smartphone.
“At the moment I see a lot of use for 360(–degree videos) and VR headsets,” said Taylor de Lench, a video producer with The Boston Globe.
The headset’s uses could also extend beyond journalism, including potentially aiding doctors, he said.
According to The Washington Post, Sonya Kim, a physician in San Francisco, uses her virtual reality program Aloha VR to help her elder patients relax.
“We’re still catching up with the software and development of it,” de Lench said of the Globe’s use of virtual reality, but he said the Globe does see the technology being used more and more in the future.
One of the downsides to virtual reality is that the technology can be expensive: a headset like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive costs $600 to $800.
De la Peña said: “Obviously, to re-create complex situations, with high-end animations, the way we do now, it can get expensive, but new tools are coming along all the time to make production faster and cheaper.”
Still, some news organizations in New England are holding off on virtual reality until the technology progresses.
“The potential here is vast, and I think that we will see in the next decade a whole new way people will ingest news,” said Joe Sciacca, editor in chief of the Boston Herald, noting that virtual reality is still in its “experimental journalism” phase.
Sciacca said news organizations are tight on money, and would have to weigh their financial circumstances against an investment in virtual reality technology.
Jeffrey Good, executive editor of the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, The Recorder of Greenfield, the Valley Advocate of Northampton, and the Amherst Bulletin, all in Massachusetts, said smaller news organizations such as those newspapers do not have access to the same kinds of expensive technology a larger outlet might have.
“As the early efforts by The New York Times demonstrate, VR technology holds great promise for pulling readers into the heart of a story,” Good said.
Sciacca said: “(Audiences) want news to be easy to navigate and convenient for them to access,” and they want it to be visually accessible and quick so that they can share it with their friends.
Aleszu Bajak, a science journalist and former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, thinks that few news organizations will ultimately adopt virtual reality. Only companies with large budgets would have the ability to use virtual reality as a way of storytelling, he said.
Because the distribution of news and videos is trending toward Facebook and social media platforms, news organizations have had to adapt to a new business model, and would continue to do so with the introduction of new technology.
If a significant portion of the audience were to switch to using virtual reality headsets, Bajak said, “Everyone would be forced to change the format in which they would produce … videos,” he said.
Videos would have to be created for an all-encompassing 360-degree experience, while still creating normal videos for those who would continue to watch the news on more traditional technology, such as television.
Sciacca said a lot of people in the news media are waiting to see the reaction of the audience as the technology develops and how the audience would be taking to it.
“(O)nce it enters the consumer mainstream, you will see news organization taking part in it,” Sciacca said.
The possibility that virtual reality will become a main source of where people get their news might not be too far away. The New York Times has partnered with Google to create both 360-degree video and immersive VR films. A total of 1.2 million print subscribers to the New York Times have access to those videos through Google Cardboard, Google’s VR application on IPhones and on Android smartphones.
“We’re always looking for new ways to tell stories today; we’re trying to find ways to communicate through different platforms,” Sciacca said, “Think about the power VR has. It has the ability to tell a lot of different stories, and it adds … a whole new dynamic to storytelling. (It) adds a new impact into journalism.”
Jesse Goodman, a student in the Northeastern University School of Journalism and a Bulletin correspondent, contributed to this report.
‘The potential here is vast, and I think that we will see in the next decade a whole new way people will ingest news.’
–Joe Sciacca, Editor in chief
Boston Herald
‘As the early efforts by The New York Times demonstrate, VR technology holds great promise for pulling readers into the heart of the story.’
–Jeffrey Good, Executive editor
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, Mass.
and three sister papers
‘At the moment I see a lot of use for a 360(-degree videos) and VR headsets.’
–Taylor de Lench, Video Producer
Boston Globe
Panelists view new Mass. public records law as step in right direction for access
By Chinyen Chang, Bulletin Staff
‘Every meeting was going to be open to the public. We used it as an opportunity to get even more information on the issue.’
— Massachusetts Rep. Peter V. Kocot
The making of laws and sausages have been linked in a negative way, but a Massachusetts legislator instrumental in Massachusetts’ public records reform views lawmaking and ice fishing as related.
Massachusetts Rep. Peter V. Kocot, a Northampton Democrat and an avid ice fisherman, equated the patience needed for lawmaking to what’s needed for ice fishing.
“There is a tremendous amount of preparation involved. You’ve got to have the right gear. You really have to make sure you’re with the right people,” Kocot said.
Kocot joined Todd Wallack, an investigative reporter at The Boston Globe, and Robert W. Ritchie, a lawyer specializing in municipal and real estate law who is special counsel to the Boston School Committee, in a discussion Dec. 2 at the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association annual meeting about Massachusetts’ new public records law.
The panelists said they think that the law, which takes effect in January, can improve the communication between government and the public and make access to public records more efficient.
“There is an art as well as a science in setting up an effective communication,” Ritchie said.
The law was enacted in June. It is aimed at strengthening enforcement of the government’s providing access to public records by, among other provisions, specifying the amount of fees that can be charged for requesting public records, by requiring that each government agency and municipality designate an employee to handle public records requests, and, for the first in time in Massachusetts, allowing those denied public records to recover lawyers’ fees if they win a court appeal of a denial.
Kocot said that inviting stakeholders, such as the Massachusetts Municipal Association, Common Cause Massachusetts, and the American Civil Liberties Union, to share their thoughts on the major changes proposed for the new law made it easier to understand issues important to improving the existing public records law.
“Every meeting was going to be open to the public. We used it as an opportunity to get even more information on the issue,” he said.
Kocot applauded the benefits of having discussions of the legislation open to the public, even though involving the stakeholders in the process of lawmaking took more time to reach a consensus.
Kocot said the exisiting law proved malleable enough that, by fixing it with an improved relationship between the public and government, requesters of public records can have an easier path to records at a reasonable expense under the new law.
Ritchie criticized the existing law in terms of government openness to the public, but said it can be improved by including in the new law consequences for public agencies that violate the law.
The existing law, in place for the past 40 years, had no real consequences for public agencies that ignored it, he said.
“It tends to be disregarded, because there are no teeth in the law,” Ritchie said.
The Globe’s Wallack said that, from his experience, his requests for public records were pending for lengthy periods, which made him think that there was “no resolution in sight.”
He complained that Massachusetts remains the only state in the United States where the governor’s office, the judiciary, and the legislature are exempt from the public records law, resulting in less accessibility to government documents.
There is uncertainty about what will be permitted to be disclosed and what won’t be, and the release of records varies “based on who handles the request,” Wallack said.
Wallack said the existing law allows the Massachusetts secretary of state’s office to rule in favor of public agencies by letting them decide how long they can take to process requests and to make decisions on approving or denying requests for public records. That encourages public agencies to hide information that is not in their interests, and discourages people from filing requests, he said.
Wallack said uncertainty was fostered under the existing law about how much could be charged for making copies of public documents, often leading to excessive fees being assessed for those copies.
Ritchie said that, from his experiences, his requests for public records were handled inefficiently because files were maintained in a disorganized fashion. He said it is public agencies’ responsibility to identify public records and to organize them effectively, and that there needs to be consequences for not properly keeping records.
Ritchie said the goal of the new law is to encourage an efficient system of keeping public records, and that the right way to go is to digitize records, which can be well maintained and easily reproduced for public access.
“Twenty years from now, a public record is made available almost upon its creation,” Ritchie said. “This bill (comes) much closer to this goal.”
New Mass. laws, award, elections highlight MNPA annual meeting
By Chinyen Chang, Bulletin Staff
Massachusetts’ new public records law and its new requirement for newspapers to publish public notices online were discussed at the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association annual meeting Dec. 2.
The association also presented its 2016 MNPA Open Government Award to Massachusetts Sen. Joan B. Lovely, a Salem Democrat, and Massachusetts Rep. Peter V. Kocot, a Northampton Democrat. The award is given in honor of Bill Plante, former longtime executive director of the MNPA. The award recognizes accomplishments in government transparency.
Lovely and Kocot co-chaired the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight that produced the legislation that led to approval of the new Massachusetts public records law.
The association also re-elected six executive committee members and elected four officers and re-elected one at the annual meeting. George Arwady, publisher and chief executive officer of The Republican of Springfield, Mass., was elected president of the executive committee.
According to MNPA’s year-end legislative report, “the new public record law will significantly enhance the ability of citizens and journalists to obtain records on a timely basis at a reasonable cost and to enforce their rights when they are wrongfully denied access to public records.”
Another new law requires that all legal notices must appear not only in a newspaper’s print publication, but on the newspaper’s website and on a statewide website maintained as a repository for such notices.
In anticipation of the online provision for legal notices becoming law, MNPA launched a statewide website, masspublicnotices.org.
Re-elected for three-year terms beginning Jan. 1 to the MNPA’s executive committee were Arwady; Aaron Julien, president of Newspapers of New England, based in Concord, N.H., and publisher of the Concord Monitor and six other newspapers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire; Sean Burke, president and group publisher of GateHouse Media New England, based in Quincy, Mass., and the largest newspaper chain in New England with more than 100 newspapers; Peter Haggerty, publisher and president of the Woburn (Mass.) Daily Times; Jeff Peterson, publisher of The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass.; and Patrick J. Purcell, publisher of the Boston Herald.
Elected as officers for one-year terms officers besides Arwady were Karen E. Andreas, regional publisher of the North of Boston Media Group, based in North Andover, Mass., and publisher of 14 publications, including its flagship newspaper, The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, first vice president; Jane Seagrave, publisher of the Vineyard Gazette of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., second vice president; and Marianne R. Stanton, editor and publisher of The Inquirer and Mirror of Nantucket, Mass., secretary. Peter Meyer, president of the Cape Cod Media Group and SouthCoast Media Group, based in Hyannis, Mass., and publisher of the Cape Cod Times of Hyannis, The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass., and five weeklies, was re-elected treasurer.
William B. Ketter, vice president of news of Birmingham, Ala.-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., parent company of the North of Boston Media Group, and outgoing president of MNPA’s executive committee, told the annual meeting: “I am delighted to report the state of the MNPA is in good shape. The public record law is an enormous accomplishment.”
Our five freedoms will work, if we work at it
Gene Policinski, inside the First Amendment
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at gpolicinski@newseum.org.
Follow him on Twitter:
@genefac
Our First Amendment freedoms will work — if we still have them around to use.
Those five freedoms — religion, speech, press, assembly and petition — have been challenged at various times in our nation’s history, as many people would say they are today.
But the very freedoms themselves provide the means and mechanisms for our society to self-correct those challenges, perhaps a main reason why the First Amendment has endured, unchanged, since Dec. 15, 1791.
Case in point: The tragic mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., June 12 was followed by a burst of anti-Islamic rhetoric across the country after the killer declared allegiance to ISIS. The speech, however hateful, generally was protected by the First Amendment.
Also, Muslim leaders decried the use of their faith to justify hatred of the United States or homophobic terrorism. And opposition was ramped up to the idea of increased surveillance of Muslims in America and now-President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.
In two rounds of national polling in the Newseum Institute’s annual State of the First Amendment survey, support for First Amendment protection for “fringe or extreme faiths” actually increased after the Orlando attack, compared with sampling done in May.
The number of people who said First Amendment protection does not extend to such faiths dropped from 29 to 22 percent. In both surveys, a little more than 1,000 adults were sampled by telephone, and the margin of error in the surveys was plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
The First Amendment is predicated on the notion that citizens who are able to freely debate — without government censorship or direction — will exchange views, sometimes strongly and on controversial subjects, but eventually find common ground.
Of course, that kind of vigorous and robust exchange in the marketplace only can happen if there is a “marketplace” — freedom for all to speak — and a willingness to join with others in serious discussion, debate and discourse that has a goal of improving life for us all.
Here’s where the survey results turn ominous: Nearly four in 10 of those questioned in the 2016 State of the First Amendment survey, which was released July 4, could not name unaided a single freedom in the First Amendment.
Perhaps not identifying by name even one of the five freedoms is not the same as not knowing you have those core freedoms. But neither does the result build confidence that, as a nation, we have a deep understanding of what distinguishes our nation among all others and is so fundamental to the unique American experience of self-governance.
We have thrived as a nation with a social order and a government structure in which the exchange of views is a key to solving problems. The nation’s architects had a confidence and optimism that such exchanges in the so-called “marketplace of ideas” would ultimately work for the public good.
What would those founders think of a society in which so many people seem to favor the electronic versions of divided “marketplaces” that permit only that speech of which you already approve or that confirms your existing views?
Or worse yet, a society in which the five freedoms are used as weapons — from cyberbullying to mass Twitter attacks to deliberate distribution of “fake news” — to set ablaze figuratively or tear down an opponent’s stand?
As a nation, we cannot abandon the values of our First Amendment freedoms that protect religious liberty, that defend free expression at its widest definition and that provide a right to unpopular dissent, without fundamentally changing the character of our nation.
As a people, we must stand in defense of the values set out in the First Amendment and Bill of Rights some 225 years ago, even as we face one of the deepest public divides on a range of issues in our history.
And we must revisit and renew our faith in a concept expressed in 1664 by English poet and scholar John Milton and later woven deep into the institutional fabric of America: that in a battle between truth and falsehood, “who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”