Journalism, the World and the Future
Discussion of the future of journalism from GMU
Archive for Skills
The Gallup folks just released a survey looking at most desired country for immigration and those who immigrate.
And the possibilities for stories using the Gallup numbers, some Census data and a little shoe leather are limitless.
Young, Less Educated Yearn to Migrate to the U.S.
Canada more attractive to older, more educated adults
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Fifteen countries attract about 500 million of the roughly 700 million adults worldwide who say they would like to relocate permanently to another country if they could. Gallup finds the U.S. is clearly the No. 1 desired destination among these potential migrants, with more than 165 million saying they would like to move there, and neighboring Canada is a distant second with 45 million.
There are some interesting numbers in the survey.
The United States is the country of choice for the youngest and less-educated groups interviewed.
So what do those numbers mean?
Here is one explanation from Gallup:
These differences may partly reflect the emphasis each country’s immigration policy places on different categories of migrants. In the U.S., Department of Homeland Security statistics show family-sponsored migrants account for the largest percentage of those who become legal permanent residents each year, followed by workers. The reverse is true in Canada, where government migration statistics show applicants with higher levels of education, job experience, and skills make up the largest portion of legal permanent residents, and those in the family category make up the second-largest portion.
While the U.S. and Canada have long histories as major immigrant-receiving countries, they also differ in how they welcome new migrants and integrate them into their societies economically, politically, socially, and culturally. Canada’s government actively assists migrants when they arrive, including providing free language-training vouchers. The United States on the other hand, according to a 2008 Independent Task Force report on immigration policy, has no national integration policy and provides little support for English-language classes.
SO, the U.S. policy of family reunification naturally would lead to more younger and less educated people showing up. Think about it, mom and/or dad are in the States and eventually get a Green Card. They then send for their children.
Younger and less educated.
But there is more. (There is always more when dealing with surveys and numbers.)
Where the immigrants come from and their choice of country to move to shows something about the immigrants as well. Take a look at age AND home region:
Canada won in the Southeast Asian respondents between ages 15-24 but the U.S. took all the others. After the age of 24, however, Canada wins hands down.
So there is a regional bias for Canada as well.
Why?
And as soon as the education level goes to completed secondary level, the U.S. falls behind:
This all has policy implications.
But for journalists, let’s look at something else.
What does your county or town look like?
What immigrant groups are there? What are their education levels? Why did they come to Fairfax or Arlington Counties? Why did they move to Maryland or the District?
For some of the answers you can go to the Census Bureau. (You just had to know I was going to promote that treaduer trove of data.) And for others you will have to <gasp!> go out and talk to people.
Let’s get you started:
Here is a table of Fairfax County.
S0501. Selected Characteristics of the Native and Foreign-Born Populations
It is data collected by the Census Bureau during the years 2006-2008. It part of the American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates project.
Once you open the table you will notice a few things.
In Fairfax County:
- 36 percent of the foreign born are white, 42 percent are Asian, 29 percent are Hispanic and 9 percent are black.
- 49 percent of the foreign born are in a college or graduate program, compared to 32 percent of the native population
- 20 percent of the foreign born have a graduate or professional degree, compared to 32 percent of the native population
- 29 percent of the foreign born have an annual income of $75,000 or more, compared to 56 percent of the native population.
Fairfax County is not a typical county. (We all know that.) How atypical is it?
Go look it up yourself.
Reporters Without Borders issued a statement over the weekend about the situation in Thailand. (Media beset by both violence and state of emergency)
The statement discussed the massive censorship taking place by the government — more than 2,500 websites shut down and newspapers intimidated — and violence against journalists on both sides. (Two journalists killed while covering the demonstrations and demonstrators tossing bottles and other debris at journalists.)
But one portion struck me as a lesson about changes in journalism:
Unaware of the risks, foreign tourists have also been “covering” the protests in the hope of being able to sell photos or video footage of the clashes.
These citizen journalists are stepping into situations that could endanger their lives in the hope of selling material to news organizations.
Even the seasoned journalists assigned to Bangkok are nervous about the situation. The RSF statement makes that clear:
Bangkok-based correspondents have little training in covering “conflict zones.”
Journalists understand that at any time we could be tossed into a dangerous situation. And I wonder how many of those currently covering the situation in Thailand ever expected to be in the middle of a series of war zones. (An explosion over the weekend killed a Japanese cameraman.)
But what we all bring to the story is the ability to provide context. That is what our profession requires of us. A picture of a demonstrator means nothing (other than showing anger, frustration, dedication) unless the reader/viewer also knows the story behind the picture.
Pictures and videos help tell the story. By themselves, these graphics cannot tell the whole story.
For more information about the situation in Thailand go to Thai situation dangerous to journalists and media freedom
Several years ago I wrote a piece for my students to remind them that they should not blindly trust spell check.
A publishing house in Australia is learning that lesson the hard way.
Hot water over spell check
PENGUIN Group Australia turns over $120 million a year from printing words but a one-word misprint has cost it dearly.
The publishing company was forced to pulp and reprint 7000 copies of Pasta Bible last week after a recipe called for “salt and freshly ground black people” — instead of pepper — to be added to the spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto.
The exercise will cost Penguin $20,000, the head of publishing, Bob Sessions, said. At $3300 a letter, it’s a pricey typo.
And here is my little contribution…
Don’t Depend on Spell Check
When ewe right, ewe should remember two double Czech you’re spelling. Spell check will knot catch awl miss takes.
As eye sit hear in my office reeding articles, eye one dear how many thymes I have scene speeling errors that should have been avoided.
Spell check a loan does knot prevent mistakes.
Sum times using the grammar Czech helps too identify some miss takes.
Butt knot awl of them.
There is nothing like reeding a story out loud. When ewe reed sum thing and here it, ewe can often sea wear the mistakes are.
I was cleaning up my computer files today and ran across this piece from 2007 from the Roanoke Times.
We all know the importance of getting the quote right. But does that mean running a quote such as:
“Well, like, we were heading down the street and like we were having like a good time, ya know? And like we saw this guy running like fast. Like really fast.”
I think we all agree that needs to be paraphrased!
And then there are accurate quotes with bad grammar that add color and spice to a story — especially a feature story.
Washing quotes clean
Joe Staniunas
Staniunas, of Roanoke, is special purpose faculty in the Department of Media Studies at Radford University.
“Fight Fiercely, Harvard!” … and Tech … and UVa.
If Vic Brancati (“When players break the rules — of grammar,” March 13) had been covering the Black Sox gambling scandal of 1919, he probably would have rendered the immortal line: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” as: “Say it isn’t so, Mr. Jackson!”
And instead of reporting Willie Keeler’s memorable reflection on his career as: “I hit ’em where they ain’t” he might have quoted him as saying: “I hit them where they are not.”
Better grammar, to be sure. But off base, and dull.
It’s true that all reporters trade away some accuracy in quotes; seldom are they exact transcriptions of every syllable from an interview. In many cases, of course, they can’t be. As Leigh Montville tells it in his recent biography of Ted Williams, one of the Red Sox slugger’s terms for the “knights of the keyboard” in the press box began with “gutless … syphilitic” and ended with words for certain unprintable and unusual sexual escapades.
Those frustrated scribes, upset by the Splendid Splinter’s many instances of boorish behavior, yearned to show readers just how profane he was. They would toss their fedoras high if they could have enjoyed the freedom of today’s writers to let athletes hit away with a few mild curses and conversational syntax.
But banishing “f-this” and “f-that” along with “um,” “ah” and that all-star ejaculation “man!” is as much buffing as a quote needs; washing it through “The Elements of Style” makes it too misleading.
Broadcasters have to put what comes out of the mouths of players on the air and on the Internet, although the day is coming when even they might be tempted, through digital wizardry, to remove a few double negatives and turn post-game news conferences into prime minister’s question time. But those wouldn’t be the candid comments caught by a camera or tape recorder or cellphone.
And people would know it because so much material is out there these days.
Fans who can see ungrammatical interviews on TV and then read laundered remarks in the paper can tell something’s wrong with the print version of what an athlete reportedly said. They have to wonder how anyone can use such precise grammar talking to a reporter with a notebook, but seldom manage to do it speaking to one with a microphone.
So, today’s sportswriters and editors just have to cringe and bear it or risk damaging their credibility.
I do think athletes should know the rules of agreement as well as they know the strictures of the 3-4 defense or a zone press. But it’s up to their coaches and professors to improve their public speaking skills; reporters should just cover them, not cover for them.
Maybe along with trainers and bands and cheerleaders, colleges could dispatch platoons of English teachers to their stadiums to help student-athletes speak in phrases as well-rounded as the balls they hit, kick and toss.
Until then, it would better meet the goal of honest storytelling if sticklers for more precise grammar in quotes — as the Rolling Stones might say — fail to obtain satisfaction.
Great piece in today’s New York Times about SNOPES.
Debunkers of Fictions Sift the Net
SNOPES is a great place to get hard-core info about all those rumors and urban legends. (I subscribe to their daily updates. It well worth the read.)
Why is SNOPES so good and why is it needed?
Considering all the crap and lies that come out of Internet postings, e-mails and talk radio it is necessary to have a place to get the straight dope.
Oh. Wait a minute. I thought the news media were supposed to do that.
But how do you deal with the avalanche of crap that comes from multi-media sources?
Along with the freest access to knowledge the world has ever seen comes a staggering amount of untruth, from imagined threats on health care to too-easy-to-be-true ways to earn money by forwarding an e-mail message to 10 friends. “A cesspool,” Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, once called it.
SNOPES was founded by David and Barbara Mikkelsons as a way to pursue their hobby of folklore and urban legends. It became much more.
“Rumors are a great source of comfort for people,” Mrs. Mikkelson said.
Snopes is one of a small handful of sites in the fact-checking business. Brooks Jackson, the director of one of the others, the politically oriented FactCheck.org, believes news organizations should be doing more of it.
“The ‘news’ that is not fit to print gets through to people anyway these days, through 24-hour cable gasbags, partisan talk radio hosts and chain e-mails, blogs and Web sites such as WorldNetDaily or Daily Kos,” he said in an e-mail message. “What readers need now, we find, are honest referees who can help ordinary readers sort out fact from fiction.”
Even the White House now cites fact-checking sites: it has circulated links and explanations by PolitiFact.com, a project of The St. Petersburg Times that won a Pulitzer Prize last year for national reporting.
Note that PolitiFact.com is a project of a newspaper and won a major award.
What this points to — for me — is that the basics of good journalism need not change just because the platform changes. And this issue is even more important now with the sales of the iPad.
So what if reporters today have to worry about print, sound and video. Those are technical skills that anyone can learn.
What is important is the integrity of that reporter. Has he/she told the storyin a fair and honest manner? Has the reporter checked the information to make sure it is accurate?
Too often what is passing for “citizen journalism” is just what the public complains about. One source stories. “Hot” words that indicate a bias. And weak fact-checking.
As I told a class of journalism students at George Mason University last month, the editor is a vital part of the news reporting process. The editor helps calm down the reporter to make sure he/she has all the facts necessary to write a fair and honest accounting of the event being covered.
And it is the lack of the editor (or at least a serious editing process) that most hurts “citizen journalism” as exemplified by many blogs and Tweets.
The iPad will make more stories more easily available to people. But what good is having access to a lot of stuff is damned little of it is accurate or balanced.
Way back in 1996 or so at a DC SPJ professional development program, we talked about the threat the Internet poses to the news media. At the time it was not the fear of free access destroying the newspapers — few newspapers were online and those that were charged for access. It was the “Balkanization” of news access. (If you are under 40 years old, look this term up.)
Many of us believe that good journalism is not presenting the news people want to see/hear, but rather the news they need to have in order to be informed citizens of a democracy. Being able to limit one’s news intake to only one perspective, we argued almost 15 years ago, the political discourse will become shrill and democracy is threatened.
Interesting how a bunch of “old time” journalists could see the future so well on this point. Too bad we could not (can not) figure out how to fix it.
