Blair Hickman

A Search Plus Your World Reading List

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:17:00 -0500

A) I have a new job at ProPublica. I’ll be working with Daniel Victor, formerly of TBD and Philly.com, on their social efforts starting January 23rd.

B) The buzz around Google’s Search Plus Your World launch last week serves as a perfect example of why I’m so excited about the position.

I think a lot of people, both within the industry and outside, often relate the title “Social Media Producer” only with “that Twitter, Facebook, Google+ team.” But that slights the potential of the position. That’s about platforms. Yet our work is about the networks of people using those platforms—what they can achieve, what they need and how they relate to and use our content. The implications of social media are much bigger than the tools. Perhaps the terms “User-Centric Reporter” or “Network Editor” would be more reflective. I’m just thinking out loud here.

Google’s announcement last week reminded us that, in addition to geeking out over the latest tech tools (hands down, a perk), social media teams need to understand people. Daniel said it well in his reaction post:

How do we plan for the inevitability of a platform change, whatever form it may take? The key is creating strategies that don’t depend on specific tools. Don’t plan for more followers and retweets; plan for creating incentives that will gather the most significant contributions possible from non-staffers. Don’t focus on gimmicks to get more likes on Facebook; focus on how to best appeal to the specific communities who deeply care about your content.

You don’t plan for the tools, you plan for the people - and that may mean that we need to look outside our discipline for inspiration and guidance. I’m a huge advocate for interdisciplinary learning and collaboration. My undergrad operates that way; Studio20 operates that way; books from behavioral psychology enormously influenced my work with Solutions Journalism at Dowser (here’s a list.) And I strongly believe, as Stephen Johnson outlined in Where Good Ideas Come From, that the best ideas often derive from the collision of seemingly disparate hunches.

And that’s why I’m so excited for my new job. It sits at the intersection of journalism, psychology and sociology, which I just find fascinating.

I put together a reading list for my new position as Social Media Producer. The hope is that understanding how people behave, relationships develop and effective communities operate might inform our journalism. If you have any suggestions - or if you’ve read some of these books and think they’re not-so-great - please let me know in the comments.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. All about incentives and economic motivations in every day life. I’m a bit late to the game on this book and halfway through now.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely. This sounds like it will expand and complicate the theories proposed in Freakonomics: ”Ariely argues that greater understanding of previously ignored or misunderstood forces (emotions, relativity and social norms) that influence our economic behavior brings a variety of opportunities for reexamining individual motivation and consumer choice, as well as economic and educational policy.”

Nudge: Improving Decisions On Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sustein. This is a re-read from my work with Solutions Journalism, all about how small design cues can alter decisions, actions and motivation.

Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. Another book on motivation: ”In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.”

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Live and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. “Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas?…Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas–and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.”

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan Watts. An introduction to network theory. From 2003, it’s a bit old, but I think it’s important to read a field’s foundational literature.

Too Big To Know: Re thinking Knowledge Now That Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere and The Smartest Person In The Room Is The Room, by David Weinberger (author of the Cluetrain Manifesto). On how networked knowledge is contributing to the formation of smarter institutions (recommended by Jeff Jarvis.)

Mindfulness, by Ellen Langer. On how the psychology of processing information, innovation and change. This is a re-read; I drew heavily from this during my work with Solutions Journalism

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business,Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowieck. “This is, essentially, a thoroughly accessible and readable tome on applied behavioral economics and game theory.”

Community: The Structure of Belonging, by Peter Block. I’m interested in how the most successful offline communities operate - and whether or not we can transfer some of that knowledge into how we build our online communities. Sounds like, in this book, Block explores how communities emerge from fragmentation; a role that journalists are perfectly poised to fill.

The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us, by James Pennebaker. “Both a fascinating slice of human psychology and a practical toolkit for deciphering our everyday email exchanges, tweets, and Facebook statuses, the research looks at what our choice of words like “I,” “she,” “mine,” and “who” reveals about our deeper thoughts, emotions, and motivations — and those of the people with whom we communicate.” - via The Atlantic review

Books that, I think, aren’t related to my job (never know) but I want to read anyway:

A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink. Sounds like a book on how to be smarter…stronger, harder, faster. No? Maybe that was Kanye.
The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker
Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain, by David Eagleman
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Every book on The Atlantic’s 11 Best Psychology Books of 2011. Or at least watch the author’s TED talks.

iPhoneography 2011

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:25:00 -0500

I got an iPhone in 2011. And, as a mediaphile, I will say, with utter confidence, that it’s the single best piece of equipment I own.

Particularly for photography. I’ve taken photos for the New York Daily News and shot in film (!) for my high school paper - and I can’t say enough about the flexibility, creativity and agility provided by the iPhone. I hate lugging around equipment. I love the way you can change the message of a photo with a single Instagram filter. I love that, for such a teeny device, the naked iPhone camera can capture quick, nuanced moments.

The apps I use most are:

Instagram
Cross Process
Photoforge (it’s like Photoshop)
Dermandar (panoramics)

And though I love the product, most of my photos get lost in Twitter or the Instagram app-cage. So here’s a smattering of my favorites from last year, taken in New York, Rhode Island, Nantucket and Tennessee (recently named #25 in the New York Times’ list of 45 places to travel in 2012, hometown gloryy!)

Unless otherwise noted, I used Instagram.

NYC Sunset on July 4th, 2011. Manhattan skyline from Williamsburg waterfront.

Anti-gravity yoga

The real Friday Night Lights in Tennessee

Cropped with Instagram, but no filter. Warrior dash.

App: none. Downtown Chattanooga, TN.

Season opener.

Watching high school football in the rain.

Nantucket

LES Graffiti artist Chico paints his last mural on 6th and Avenue C.

App: none. Post-race euphoria.

NYC Marathon, somewhere in the final three miles

App: none. NYC from the East River.

The subtle menu I found in my front door.

Kingston, RI.

App: Cross Process (this is from Saturday’s Surf in NYC. Go. Great coffee. Patio.)

There’s also an app called Dermandar that I use for panoramic shots, and since I can’t get the shots to embed in Tumblr - here are the links! This one is from the University of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, and this one is Brian Stelter’s talk with Studio20

Update: Designing A Conversational Space for OWS

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 09:33:00 -0400

So. We had some snafus with the first iteration of our project. We created a paper form that asked people:

First Name:

Age:

What Do You Do:

Goal In A Nutshell:

Elaborate:

And we went down to Zuccotti Park with a little clipboard on Sunday afternoon, like door to door salesmen. It wasn’t quite right. Here’s Colin explaining it, while we rigged our new thingy just outside of Zuccotti Park:

We still want to preserve the integrity of the ideas of the people actually there. The physicality of this experiment is really important to us and gives it a certain level of legitimacy. Which also means we need to be out of the equation. So we bought a whiteboard and duct taped it to a tree:

When people finish whatever they want to write, they use one of two disposable cameras attached to the board to take a picture of the sign. We’ll develop the film.

And here’s a voyeuristic peep of it working before we even got out of the park! As we walked up the stairs next to the tree, someone picked up the marker.

I ran down and asked these people what they thought (user feedback, hey hey hey), and they thought we meant to take a picture with their own iPhone. The next two people I asked thought the same, so I cobbled a camera directly under the board, and made the instructions really big and explicit.

We still want to figure out a way to take the content coming from Zuccotti and create a space around it that somehow satisfies the unmet demand for engaged political conversation.

That will live at http://straightouttazuccotti.org and go live later this week, after we develop some pictures.

Designing A Conversational Space For Occupy Wall Street

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:08:00 -0400

So I’m taking a class with Clay Shirky. It’s about how people interact and engage, both online and off, and how to design online conversational spaces that encourage (or discourage) certain activities.

Until now, it’s been lots of theory (think: common pool resources), but now we’re taking the theory into reality, which I’m really excited about. The challenge: design a conversational space around a piece of content. That was about it for our parameters.

So my group of four decided to create a space around the physical voices at Occupy Wall Street.

We’re calling our project OWSVoices. It’s sort of a Reddit for on-the-ground individuals’ goals. Rather than wax poetic about who and what we are, here’s the copy for our About page:

What is OWSvoices?
OWSvoices is a people-powered forum to discuss the Occupy Wall Street movement on an personal level. We aim to find out what’s important to you.

Why?
People outside OWS seem to spend a lot of time wondering about the goals of OWS. We want to create a place for individuals at OWS to voice those goals, and for protesters and observers alike to discuss, debate and weigh in on their priorities. (If that priority is the movement itself, that’s great too.)

How does this work?
Only those actually present at OWS can post their goals for now. We’re hoping this constraint will provide us with interesting responses and minimize spam and flaming.

We’re starting in New York, and passing paper forms around Zucotti Park. If you’re at a protest elsewhere, please blog and/or tweet your goal with the hashtag #OWSVoices. All we need is some sort of verification you’re there - geotag your tweet, send us a picture. Get creative.

Once you submit a goal, it will go onto our homepage. There, anyone can weigh in: hands up, middle, or hands down on a goal, and defend their position.

For the visual amongst you, here’s a slide documenting our user interaction:

In terms of the page design, it will look kind of like Reddit. Each goal will appear as a headline, with a time stamp, number of comments and number of hands up/ hands downs/ hands in the middle. (That’s the voting method they use at General Assembly in Zuccotti Park, so we adopted the language.) You can then click on a goal to be taken to its page - there, more space for conversation will exist.

I’m pretty stoked about this project. It seems to me that OWS, now global, is reaching a tipping point where voices turn to action. Creating a space that personalizes the protests, and also provides a forum to sit down and talk about how we’re going to solve these problems, should be an interesting experiment.

And - grand finale - we could use your help! How?

1. General feedback. What about this is confusing? What makes sense? What would you like to see strengthened or added? Especially if you’ve been involved in the protests - we’d like your feedback on how to make this project resonate with protesters.

2. Tell people. This will only work if we have goals and conversations. Do you know anyone at an OWS protest? Send them this Google Form to fill out. Then all they have to do is tweet it with the hashtag #OWSVoices and some sort of verification that they’ve been at the protests. Photos, geo-tagged tweets, etc.

Slideshow: What To Do In Grenada (The Island)

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:54:00 -0400

The Lost Girls sent me to Grenada (the Caribbean. Not Spain.) back in May, and we’re turning my adventures into a three-part series on what to do, where to stay and how to eat.

This is the first image in the slideshow - locals catching grub for the weekly Fish Friday. The rest is on The Lost Girls! Go take a vacation.

Social Innovation Roundup: Introduction

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:26:05 -0400

This is the first test product for my thesis, creating a digital toolkit to help journalists integrate reporting on social innovation into their workflows.

The mainstream media tends to place a disproportionate amount of its attention on problems. This is not just something we’ve noticed at Dowser. The public has noticed, too:

In 1997, a Public Agenda survey found that close to 80 percent of participants agreed with the statement “A reporter’s job is to cover bad news.”
In the same study, two thirds contended that journalists “unfairly dwell upon conflict and failure.”
Participants in a 2008 AP study overwhelmingly agreed that “all news is negative.”
In the last three decades, the New York Times has referred to the Grameen Bank - the microfinance pioneer—in 84 stories, a third of them since Grameen won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. By contrast, it referred to the Tamil Tigers in eight hundred stories and the Irish Republican Army in 3,600.

This perspective is too narrow.

So, to try to balance the scales a bit, we’ve created a new editorial feature - a social innovation roundup. We’ll pick stories from the mainstream media that we think could have been improved with reporting on social innovation. Then, to highlight how this process might work, we’ll point to existing solution journalism and organizations that we know, through our own contacts or resources, are working on innovative solutions with proven, or highly probable, rates of success.

The goal here is to show how reporting on social innovation can enrich news coverage. People want information that makes them powerful agents in the world. Cursory referrals to solutions, like the ones we’ll map out here, won’t suffice in the long run.

But for now, we can consider this like an outline for the deeper reporting that needs to be done — some of which we’ll start to commission, and some of which will need an analytical, maker reporter to adopt its story.

It’s important to keep in mind that this is a test. One of Dowser’s goals is to provide services and tools to help working journalists integrate solution journalism into their work flows. The best way to do that is to test different iterations, so you can tell us what works - and what doesn’t. Please contact blair@dowser.org with feedback.

Read more on Dowser…

Too Long For Twitter...

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:10:19 -0400

@Chanders and @JonathanStray have taken my post on Solution Journalism and struck up a lively debate on Twitter. Which is excellent!

But my weigh-in to @Chanders’ response is a little too long for Twitter.

He writes:

“By what right, and on what grounds, do journalists claim the authority to offer solutions to any particularly difficult problem? Journalists are neither elected, nor particularly accountable, nor all that expert in anything in particular.”

I never claimed, and never meant to imply, that journalists should offer the solutions. Quite the opposite. A journalist should simply document and curate the solutions that the public is already working on. Like this one. And this one. And this one. And the work of these 2000+ Ashoka fellows.

A journalist’s job is to accurately and fairly portray society. Ignoring this social activity is neither fair, nor balanced. As the Internet and tech scene exploded in the 1990s, the number of publications covering the scene increased along with it. But as activity in the social sector has gone way up, its journalism has stayed flat.

In fact, I’d argue that the preponderance of problems in the media is simply another type of bias. And like David Altheide suggested in The Culture of Fear, maybe that’s why the media is “distrusted by nearly everyone.”

One good point, though: we’ve often wondered if the word “solution” is too strong. We’ve wavered between “reporting on social innovation” and “solution journalism,” and stuck with the latter for now, because it’s short and to the point. But what do you think? Other ideas? Let’s throw them out.

The Next Iteration of Journalism: Shifting From a "Problem Frame" To A "Solution Frame"

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:16:02 -0400

The AP Interactive’s Jonathan Stray just wrote a powerful essay on “Journalism For Makers,” which roughly, give or take a few, correlates with what we at Dowser Media have been calling Solution Journalism.

They’re two different names, tackling the same basic problem: journalism, in its current state, is not designed to help society self-correct. “It’s not,” as Jonathan put it “a journalism for the people who will put together the next generation of civic institutions.”

But our visions of its implementation are a tad different.

For Jonathan, the journalism that will fix tomorrow—or at the very least the financial crisis—deconstructs complex systems for a specialized subset of “makers” —DIY designers, fluent in the intricacies of complex, technical systems and hard-wired to rewire the structures that power society. He calls it a “techno-social investigative journalism for nerds.”

“Its aim,” he writes, “is a deep understanding of the complex systems of the real world, so that plans for a better world may be constructed one piece at a time by people who really know what they’re talking about.”

I appreciate this argument. Deconstructing a broken system is the first step to identifying a problem’s root cause, and, fortunately, a few individuals are already tinkering with this type of work—Kevin Fagan’s reports on homelessness in the San Francisco Chronicle, ProPublica’s explainers on issues like fracking and the economy (which, disclosure, I worked on), The Guardian’s Ultimate Climate Change FAQ, and The Guardian’s new behind-the-scenes banking blog.

But still, overall, it kind of sucks. All of journalism, including Dowser, should improve the coverage that aims to simplify these complex systems. This reporting, this “journalism for makers,” will be a key piece of the media puzzle that ultimately helps society self-correct. You can’t fix anything without understanding the problem.

However, this, alone, is not enough.

To really help society re-route, the press also has to investigate solution strategies that are already in play. Right now, that’s not happening with consistent quality. Participants in a 2008 AP study overwhelmingly agreed that “all news is negative.” In the last three decades, the New York Times has referred to the Grameen Bank - the microfinance pioneer—in 84 stories, a third of them since Grameen won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. By contrast, it referred to the Tamil Tigers in eight hundred stories and the Irish Republican Army in 3,600. If a story does include a referral to a solution, it’s usually cursory.

Yet, studies have shown that people need four pieces of information to innovate and change:

A clear definition of the problem in concrete terms.
An investigation of the solutions attempted so far.
A clear definition of the concrete change to be achieved.
The formulation and implementation of a plan to produce this change (as this happens, the press should document the process.)

Across the board, studies show that you elicit positive behavior change by highlighting what works (a complicated topic, for another post). But unfortunately, most news stops after “the incident,” and quality solution journalism—not the hagiography of CNN Heroes or ABC’s Person of the Week—is a rare gem. Much of it exists in long-form narrative and in books.

Lack of stories is not the problem. Since Bill Drayton founded Ashoka in the 1980s and brought a terminology to the field of social enterprise, the movement has absolutely exploded. Journalist/ social entrepreneur Paul Hawken, who’s been involved in social change for over twenty years, estimates that there are over one- “maybe even two” - million grassroots organizations working toward social change.

The press should be critically investigating this bevy of solution strategies, which boast their own intricacies and complexities. A hospital in Bogota, Colombia, for example, found that a strategy called Kangaroo Care, which uses mothers as human incubators, drastically reduced infant mortality. Is this strategy really effective? And if so, why? Could it be scaled to other regions of the world, or would cultural differences impede its expansion?

I am, in no way, touting a replacement for muckraking. That’s more vital than ever.

Solution journalism is simply the yin to muckraking’s yang. For people and systems to change, people have to know both what’s broken and what’s working. Doing anything less stunts growth. (Good) parents don’t criticize their children every day and cross their fingers that they’ll become better people. They show them all the options available, so the child knows what’s possible. Exposing problems is one half of the story. Exposing solutions is the other half.

In this second iteration of journalism, we also have to recognize that the change movement is composed of grassroots social entrepreneurs, and that highly technical “makers” may not be the only group to devise solutions.

Even the United Nations, the biggest body of solution policy makers, has started to turn to individual citizens within the public. I covered Mashable’s Social Good Summit last week, a four-day conference on social media and social change, and in a pre-summit conference call, organizers repeatedly emphasized that the summit is held during UN Week because change today is “a new conversation, with a new audience.”

“Lots of people can get involved, and then the UN is the way to bring it to scale,” said Kathy Calvin, CEO of the UN Foundation. “It used to be about big government solutions and aid, but now it’s about micro-solutions and micro-aid.”

Not to mention that several scalable solution strategies aren’t built on highly technical, intricate systems. Empathy and behavior change, for example, are emerging as strategies to combat a myriad of issues, including poverty, ethnic conflict, crime, violence and education. Within the financial crisis, strategies like localism—which the residents of Bellingham, Washington have found to be a viable strategy for boosting a city’s economy—don’t rely on incredibly technical systems that only, as Jonathan describes the audience, “policy and tech geeks” could cobble together.

Some strategies, of course, will come from makers. Peer-to-peer lending, which is yet another strategy to combat the financial crisis, rests on highly technical back-end software that, essentially, replaces the job of a bank. And Lending Club, the main peer-to-peer organization in the States, has seen an average 9% return since its inception in 2007. That’s a promising piece.

I also agree that the best kind of Solution Journalist, the actual reporter, will be a maker. A problem-solver. Dowser’s founder, David Bornstein, started his career as a computer programmer, precisely because he liked creating elegant solutions, and only a curious, diagnostic mind will enjoy this investigative work—full of questions like “why?” and “How?” I have a hunch that the muckrakers, the “watchdogs,” may be prime candidates. Simply re-framing some questions could shift them to, as one of Jonathan’s commenters phrased it, “hound dogs.” (Which, for the record, I love.)

But in terms of restricting our target audience to a highly technical group of DIY designers, lawyers and policy wonks? That seems dangerously narrow. Change can come from many sectors in many forms.

A couple caveats before I wrap-up and introduce my thesis:

A) I’m not endorsing any of the solution strategies above. They still need to be investigated and evaluated.

B) I really do believe that quality solution journalism—the right combination of deconstructing broken systems and exploring viable solution strategies—has a big potential market.

Social enterprise is a huge field, one of the most popular disciplines on college campuses, and Dowser’s focus groups from a couple years ago found that young people—whether they want to be doctors, teachers, businessmen or lawyers—want careers of impact. They want to create a professional path aligned with their values. To do that, they need information.

Also, my preliminary research this summer showed that quality solution investigations consistently made the Most Liked and Most E-Mailed lists on The New York Times. Almost every Fixes column made Most-Emailed. And this New York Times article about how medical schools are changing admissions processes to screen for doctors with communication skills—which was a good story, relevant to a wide group and properly placed in the Health section— made the Most Popular list for a good two weeks.

Point being: I think there’s a place for this type of journalism.

And this is why I’ve decided to do my Studio20 Master’s thesis in partnership with Dowser Media. From now until December, I’m researching, developing and prototyping a digital toolkit to help journalists who’d like to integrate reporting on social innovation into their workflows.

Products in the works include:

A solid definition of Solution Journalism. I’m compiling a short explainer video, a manifesto and a casebook of good and not-so-good examples
A usable tips database. Dowser has vetted 700+ quality organizations, that currently live in an Excel spreadsheet. We also have existing Solution Journalism stories, and a constant influx of new tips. (If you have nominations, please tweet them out with the hashtag #SolutionJournalism.)
Solution field maps. These will include a field overview, strategies, key players, major organizations, pros and cons, critical documents and reports. Everything that’s in a reporter’s head when he reports a story.
Reporting recipes, a la ProPublica.
Tutorials that explain how to ask the right questions, interact with social enterprises and keep your story from veering into advocacy.
Back-end support from Dowser.

Under the guidance of agile development, these products will probably change as the project progresses. I don’t want to make something that people won’t use, and I’m currently recruiting interested journalists to serve as guinea pigs (want to learn more? E-mail me at blair@dowser.org).

And in the spirit of open-source, I’m documenting the progress on this blog. All of these products will be built so that the crowd can add to and edit our resources. I’ve read a lot about social enterprise the last year, but I don’t pretend to be an authority. In this field, especially, the experts are on the ground doing the work. Your sources are your experts.

Solution Journalism, or Journalism For Makers or whatever name we have yet to come up with (Ideas? Contact me), is in its alpha version. So assault me with feedback. Keep up the conversation online, offline and in a range of spaces and verticals—and not just in sections called “Impact.” People need to see stories and conversations that expose corruption, next to pieces that deconstruct the system, next to pieces that investigate solutions.

We need to change the way we frame the world. It shouldn’t end at “destruction,” “problem,” “corruption,” “incompetence.” But rather, ask “Why?” Why is this happening? And most, importantly - how can we start to fix it? There probably won’t be just one answer. But asking these questions is the way to start.

I Mean, Really, WaPo

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:44:00 -0400

As part of Dowser’s weekly roundup for tomorrow, I spent the last couple hours reading about green jobs and Solyndra, the solar equipment manufacturer that, with a $528 million government loan.

And I just found this piece in the Washington Post, which took the Solyndra scandal as an opportunity to bash Obama’s green jobs program. The problem is that the program has done exactly what it promised—created or saved jobs. In my book, that’s a success.

But these writers, Carol D. Leonnig and Steven Mufson, framed their article to make it sound like a failure. Here’s the headline:

Obama green-tech program that backed Solyndra struggles to create jobs

Here’s the first paragraph. Italics mine:

“A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.”

Here’s a stat from the eighth paragraph:

“[The Department of Energy] claims credit for saving 33,000 jobs at Ford Motor Co. — about half of the Detroit automaker’s entire hourly and salaried U.S. workforce.”

And a quote from a Ford spokeswoman in the last paragraph, which confirm the Department of Energy and completely contradicts the lede’s implication.

A Ford spokeswoman said the loans helped “transform what were primarily truck/SUV plants into flexible manufacturing plants capable of building more fuel-efficient vehicles.” That flexibility is key to “helping retain the 33,000 jobs by ensuring our employees can build the fuel-efficient cars people want to drive,” said Meghan Keck, who handles government relations for Ford.

The program promised to create or save jobs. That’s it. That’s what it’s doing.

Leonnig and Mufson also left out the fact that, in the last two months, the United States has added 7,000 megawatts of solar projects to our project pipeline. “That’s the equivalent of seven nuclear reactors, which is seven more than we’ve built in the last three decades,” writes TIMES’ Michael Grunwald.

Oh, and, America’s net solar product exports? $1.8 billion. That’s more than China. And remember: I found these two stats above in a little under two hours.

This is a little bit he-said, she-said and a little bit yellow journalism. Gross.

I’m writing a longer post about causation identification...

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:33:50 -0400

I’m writing a longer post about causation identification and solutions to the riots in London, but I had to post this video. Here are the opening lines. Appalling. The rest of the interview follows suit.

BBC: “Are you shocked at what’s happening?”

Howe: “No, not at all. I’ve been living in London for 50 years. There’re so many different moments, but when I was certain about listening to my grandson and my son, is that something very, very serious was going to take place in this country. Our political leaders had no idea. The police had no idea. But if you looked at young blacks and young whites with a discerning eye and careful hearing, they’ve been telling us, and we would not listen…”

BBC: “If I could just stop you Mr. Howe, for a moment, you say you’re not shocked - does this mean you’re condoning what happened in your community last night?”

WHAT?!? That questioning follows no logic. She’s perpetuating the very problem he’s trying to describe to her.

From The Archives: Lyricism and Hurricane Katrina

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 20:51:00 -0400

I’ve been writing scholarly essays all day. Le sigh. I’ve learned more in three months about analysis, critical thinking and careful diction than in all my seven years of training as a writer/ journalist…./six-month hiatus as a headhunter for banking.

And while I acknowledge its importance, I’ve been getting a creative itch. So, to satisfy, I’m re-reading and posting a lyric essay I wrote in 2006 about doing Hurricane Katrina Relief work.

It was originally published in Brown’s College Hill Independent (which I can’t find) and the English Department’s quarterly—Prospect: An Anthology of Creative Nonfiction (which I did find.)

Here’s the text.

Baby, We’re In The Same Boat Now

At the end of January 2006, twenty-six Brown students, myself included, spent a week in the town of Pass Christian at Camp Coast Care (CCC), a Hurricane Katrina relief center run by the Lutheran/ Episcopal Services of Mississippi. Every night before dinner, we said the Episcopalian version of the Lord’s Prayer. Each denomination believes the Prayer to be a little different, a word changed here or there. As a Presbyterian, I remember these words that Jesus taught us to pray:

Our Father, who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy name

According to the relatively modern concept of a shared humanity, the world is one big family. Persecution in the remotest corner of Tanzania hurts us all, and everyone should help fix it. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights put this idea on paper, making it easier for the world to cry out against violations of this social contract-Hitler, Pol Pot, Hutu extremists, Bosnian Serbs. Usually these breaches highlight flaws in governments’ ability to provide protection, as well as humanity’s dismal hesitance to respond.

But Katrina…

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done

Adam and Eve were not perfect. They just couldn’t resist that apple. But supposedly God is perfect. If an allegedly perfect God created imperfect beings, then imperfection must be natural. So how should we deal with it?

A few hours after Katrina hit, Camp Coast School had just a few broken windows and minimal flooding and so evolved into a refugee shelter, protecting employees and victims and victimized employees within its walls. Their first relief supplies arrived in an eighteen-wheeler from Toronto, Canada.

A few days after Katrina hit, Camp Coast Care inhabits the school’s gym, offering its volunteers hot showers, three hot meals a day, cots and, if you were lucky, an air mattress. They have four site directors and seventeen daily jobs, requiring two to eight volunteers each. It’s impossible for the directors to do everything. The camp works because volunteers are willing to fill the holes in the leaderships’ capabilities-to pick up the trash so the site directors can make phone calls garnering donations.

On Earth as it is in Heaven

A map of the United States hung on the wall behind the snack table, and every volunteer was asked to stick a pin into their hometown. Clusters of balls of green, red, blue and yellow covered the map like ants on a piece of forgotten food. So many I couldn’t count them all.

The most important piece of hardware at CCC was the exclusion switch on the showerhead. Get in, get wet, turn off the water, soap up, switch it back on and rinse. Navy showers, we called them, and they worked only if everyone cooperated. The camp had never run out of hot water. Not until our week, when the number of volunteers swelled to exceed capacity and depleted the water pressure. Various volunteers immediately assumed responsibility, tinkered with the plumbing and brought in gallons of water to fill up the toilet tanks. Everything returned to normal in two hours.

Give us this day our daily bread

The FEMA-funded tent city across the street, known as “the village,” served three hot meals a day. It had showers and a post office and looked like a camp from M*A*S*H. Seventy-four brown uniform tents, sixteen feet by thirty-two feet, stood in rows that seemed to stretch all the way into the Mississippi pines, providing transitional housing for those waiting for FEMA trailers. It was volunteers who served them while they waited.

Reverend Joe Robinson, site director, said that we either have time to judge or to serve. “I for one,” he said, “think we should serve.” So if someone takes twenty shirts from the Katrina Boutique, do not condemn them because thousands of others also need twenty. Just help.

And forgive us our debts

As we forgive our debtors

On December 21, 2005, President Bush signed the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act, giving tax credits to businesses affected by Katrina. In late January 2006, we drove by the Wal-Mart on the beach and saw straight through it, from the front to the back. They won’t have any tax problems.

As of January 21, FEMA had given 33,000 trailers to the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, delivered 300-400 daily and expected to give 6,000 more in the weeks to come.

The house leaned off of its foundation, empty, lonely. On its side, in construction orange, someone had written a FEMA claim number. Like so many around it, the house called for help, and I saw not the government but volunteers answer it with direct relief.

And lead us not into temptation

But deliver us from evil

The tiny, gaunt old woman with black-dye hair asked me for help, and I smelled vodka on her breath. She wanted a coat that I would wear, but she called everything I picked up “Grandma clothes” and instead spent an hour and a half, ten minutes past closing time, picking through bins and murmuring to herself. A matronly security guard walked up and hovered behind her. “Ma’am?” She didn’t hear. A little bit louder now, “Ma’am?” She looked up. A little bit softer now, “We’re closed. I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to leave now.” She looked at me, as if pleading for me to let her stay. I just looked back, and on her way out, she stumbled over a piece of plywood.

Science says that it’s natural to be concerned only with the well being of yourself and your family. They attribute this selective altruism to genes’ fervent quest for survival, what my biology class called “the selfish gene.” Sacrificing for someone unrelated to you doesn’t enhance the genes’ chances of survival. But in 1948, we did decide that the world is one big family…

For thine is the kingdom

Some volunteers got to clean out classrooms and storage closets or go off-site to work on a house. I got to use paper napkins and Clorox bleach to wipe layers of Mississippi dirt and grime off the tops of lockers at Camp Coast School, helping to make the building presentable for their open house that Wednesday. The bleach made me gag a little bit.

But then a tiny girl with her hair in a lop-sided ponytail in sixth,

maybe seventh grade, walked by, smiled and said thank you.

It started to rain as we hauled the remnants of a man’s home to a pile across the street so that someone would magically make them disappear. Bricks are a lot heavier than we expected, and we all became filthy and tired and sore.

But during a water break, a woman drove by in an SUV and yelled, “We appreciate you!”

I carried a bag of clothes to someone’s pick-up truck, and an African-American woman I had met earlier sat in the truck parked next to it. “Come here,” she said, “let me show you these pictures.” She talked and I listened for half an hour, and I met almost all of her ten children, thirteen children and thirty-six godchildren. She was so proud; her six year old was going to college and her eldest daughter had published three book of poetry. Turns out, college was just a summer day camp that offered a range of classes from hip hop to zoology to pottery, and the web site she gave me for her daughter’s poetry does not exist.

But it was a great story, and she smiled the whole way through.

I smiled the whole way through.

And the power

A pick-up truck submerged in a swimming pool.

A stop sign, still in the ground, the telling drivers to dOTS. The jagged pile of asphalt covering the road next to it made the message pretty clear.

According to Time Magazine, the (levee) failure breaks down into three stages:

“Overtopping”- Designers failed to anticipate a storm of Katrina’s magnitude, so when water rose above the levees and the pump system failed, disaster was imminent.
“Breaching”- It took a little while for the flood to come, but eventually the cracks expanded under pressure and the levees lost control. What to do…
“Repair”- Workers started fixing the holes, a step in the right direction but still a slow process.

The Mississippi Gulf Coast doesn’t have any levees but you know, potato, potatoe.

Linens, clothes and Mardi Gras beads, drooping with the weight of that afternoon’s rain, decorated the trees. As far as I could see…

In blue spray paint on a sign lying on its side, propped against a house that had floated off its foundation: TRAP DIE

Trees in the ocean and a dolphin on the shore.

And the glory forever

A man and a woman, ages ninety-four and ninety-two, made a suicide pact when Hurricane Katrina hit in late August 2005: if no one came to help in five months, the couple would kill themselves. In January 2006, CCC knocked on their door. It took an entire season of college football for direct relief to arrive, but it would prove to be enough. As volunteers tossed a steady stream of soggy belongings onto the street, the couple gave ceaseless thanks until a volunteer finally said that the excessive praise wasn’t necessary. After all, the couple had filled out a work order. But they hadn’t filled out a work order. Turns out, CCC was supposed to be working at the neighbors’ house. They had just happened to knock on the wrong door.

Shit happens. Imagine, for example, a family who loses half of their house in, oh I don’t know…a hurricane. Maybe they took the necessary steps for protection-boarding up windows and such. Maybe they didn’t. Either way, they now have a mess on their hands that needs to be fixed. The kids could whine and blame the parents for not protecting them. And after everything is back to normal, they should. But nothing and no one is always perfect. So for the time being, until the parents have the space to learn from their natural imperfection, they should function as a family. Cooperate, help, and move on.

Amen.

A Case For Solution Journalism

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:38:53 -0400

Whenever I tell someone that I work for a site that produces Solution Journalism, this is normally their reaction:

I’m talking established journalists, professors, media savants.

So, one of my top priorities at Dowser is to help people understand what we mean by “Solution Journalism.”

The site’s founder, David Bornstein, has been thinking about this for years. He started covering social innovation with The Price of A Dream, a book on the Grameen Bank, and has since written this book and this book, is working on a fourth and writes the New York Times Fixes column, with Tina Rosenberg (who’s also on our board).

The elevator pitch is this: the media doesn’t just reflect society— it shapes it. Exposing problems and critiquing events, which comprises the bulk of today’s news, is only half a job. The other half is to expose solutions. Because people change and innovate when they can see the full system—what’s broken, what’s working and how they can reach their goals

I’m sort of David’s little apprentice - absorbing, translating and expanding upon his theories:

I laid the foundation of our definition in this post
I roped in social and civic media with this post (news nerd alert: Knight News Winners)
And thanks to a TOMS Shoes case study, I expand the definition in this post.

I’m trying to pivot off the news to actually show what I’m talking about - what the media would look like with solution journalism. So far, the closest existing example I’ve found is Kevin Fagan’s “Shame of the City,” a series on homelessness for the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s stunning.

I also started a Twitter list for Solution Journalism, following people and publications who are doing the kind of work we’re talking about. If you have suggestions, let me know in the comments below or on Twitter.

And just so you know - some of these arguments are coming from David’s head. Some from mine and eventually, some from the minds of other solution journalists (Kevin Fagan! I want to talk to you!)

But a ton has come from the thrillingly huge library at Dowser. These four books changed the way I see the relationship between the press and the public:

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of The Wrong Things by Barry Glassner
Mindfulness by Ellen Langer
Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
Journalism of Outrage, by a ton of professors. Listing David Potess ‘cause he’s first.

I’d read them in this order, too. Despite my four-year tenure in Brown’s Nonfiction Writing program and my two semesters of of Master’s work at NYU, I hadn’t heard of any of these books. That’s sad. Because together, they literally changed the way I look at news.

We’ll be rolling out more posts in the future; if you’re interested in learning more or exploring partnerships with Dowser, hit me up: blair@dowser.org

Took some shots for Arts4All’s fundraising event at the...

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:14:00 -0400

Reacting to the puppet. He's like magic.

Still reacting. Magic.

Took some shots for Arts4All’s fundraising event at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble; my friend Liz volunteers her PR services for them.

The organization runs programs to replace the dying arts in NYC schools. I don’t know the nuances of their model, so this is neither an endorsement nor a roast, but I will say: some of the most formative forces in my life were the music programs I was part of from elementary school through college.

Support the arts!

(Photos taken with a Canon T2i.)

New York City via the Williamsburg bridge, and a wedding under...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:09:00 -0400

New York City via the Williamsburg bridge, and a wedding under the bridge that took my breath away. And I’m not even like that.

Taken with the Instagram app and Lomify filter.

I was just in Grenada on behalf of The Lost Girls. (Pronounced...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:17:00 -0400

I was just in Grenada on behalf of The Lost Girls. (Pronounced Gre-NAY-da; Southeastern Caribbean, just above Venezuelal.)

I’m doing a post for them soon, so there will be more info there. For now, a photo tasting - half taken with iPhone and half with a Canon Powershot.

My New Job

Thu, 26 May 2011 14:08:00 -0400

“I saw a photo of a mob in Dhaka, Bangladesh, chanting “Death to America,” and I immediately thought about the 20,000 organizations that had sprung up there in the past two decades to fight poverty, improve education, and advance human rights.”

-from David Bornstein’s, How To Change The World

The press has a responsibility to present this full picture of the world. #SolutionJournalism.

What It Takes To Get An Abortion In South Dakota

Tue, 03 May 2011 09:13:55 -0400

Now on Jezebel...two weeks ago. It’s been a long month, OK? But it was nice to actually write again.

NEW ARTICLE:

As you may know, South Dakota recently passed a law that requires women seeking an abortion to attend counseling at a pregnancy help center (that’s a first) and to wait 72 hours before getting the procedure (and that’s the longest waiting period in the country).

Planned Parenthood is planning to sue, calling the law “an egregious violation of the Constitution.” But for now, the new law goes into effect in July. When that happens, what exactly will it take to get an abortion in South Dakota?

Whilst researching an explainer on NASA, I find this: The first orbiter was originally planned to...

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 23:08:13 -0400

Whilst researching an explainer on NASA, I find this:

The first orbiter was originally planned to be named Constitution, but a massive write-in campaign from fans of the Star Trek television series convinced the White House to change the name to Enterprise.

Every site has something equally amusing. I should have been a science journalist.

Timeline Setter-etter-etter

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:27:00 -0400

This weekend, I was lucky enough to be part of ProPublica’s Beta testing for its open-source Timeline Setter—an interactive timeline that runs off Ruby, Java and HTML/CSS. I built it for Women, War and Peace, the doc I’m working on for PBS Wide Angle, with help from Caitlin Thompson and Lauren Feeney (Boss 1 and Boss 2).

Watching the timeline finally load was like watching my child go out into the world. And now, you can see it here!

Things I learned:

Instructions on how to install are here.
It takes about 10 hours—research to finish—to make one this size.
Google Refine is the most awesome software ever.
Excel’s autocorrect date function can suck it.
Make sure you have all the gems listed in the timeline documentation. I got stuck on this, and spent an hour on the phone with my boss’ husband troubleshooting.

Potential timeline-setters take note: it looks a little funny because our CMS doesn’t give us the full page-width. I recommend leaving a few hours before posting, so you can see how the timeline will interact with your page, and tweak the HTML, if needed.

TIMELINE!

((A special thanks to Al Shaw, Dan Nguyen and Cameron Hickey for laying the coding groundwork.))

A Guide To FAQs

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:52:09 -0400

As part of Explainer.Net, a project that Studio20 is working on with ProPublica and The Australian Broadcasting Company, I lead a team to create this how-to manual. Full title: The FAQ: A Journalist’s Guide To Making One That Doesn’t Suck. I’ll take credit for that part.

As explained here, the guide includes a brief history of the FAQ, how to evaluate demand, tips and tricks, and examples of what works and what doesn’t.The FAQs came from last semester’s roughly 55,000 hours of research on explainers, and some crowdsourced suggestions we gathered with @jayrosen_nyu’s Twitter account.

To turn that into a guide, we analyzed about 40 FAQs, found the best examples of what works and doesn’t, and reported the results into an easy-to-read magazine. We used InDesign to create it, and Issuu for publishing and distribution.

The result looks awesome (props to @binowski and @tomstation for executing the design), but what I’m really excited about is that this project revealed templates for how to create an FAQs and - this is the important bit - in what situations to use which types.

Boom. Mind blown.

I know for an FAQ, the most templatable type of media, this might not seem like a big deal. But templates equal teachability, accessibility and a window into how media organizations can get quality material from civic and inexperienced journalists. Conversations with Jay and other people who have worked on projects that try to harness the crowd or the energy and enthusiasm of students have taught me that it’s a struggle to get good content from these eager, yet ultimately inexperienced participants. One person I spoke with ran a civic journalism project; of their 12,000 respondents, they had probably 100 people who actually made anything they could publish.

Providing portals of participation (coinage tip - @jayrosen_nyu), like templates for how to create FAQs, is part of how we make that work. We touched on the issue on pages 13-17 of this. But, you know, that’s like playing just the tip. Need to go a little further to get the full experience.

Here’s the guide:

Open publication - Free publishing - More faq

And here’s a feed of the conversation about the guide on Twitter. YahooPipes is cramping my style and truncating my results, so if anyone knows a good way to turn that feed into a widget, please let me know in the comments or at @amandablair.