As of 4:30 this Wednesday afternoon, there is still a situation on going at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. Most of the staff were evacuated when earlier this afternoon, an armed gunmen entered the building and reportedly fired shots. I say reportedly very intentionally here, because as the story as developed throughout the afternoon, details were coming from every corner of the media world about of everything from the shooter’s name (James Lee) to his potential motives and the moral crusade on which he is undertaking.
I have been privy to a barrage of e-mails with the team at We Love DC, as we all pass whatever stories, links, or reports we hear from our sources – and one of our writers has been admirably checking each source and posting it in stream on the local blog. I’ve traded IMs with my managing editor at Mediaite with the different details that came in from local media that I can maybe pass along to help further his stories.
Yes, that’s the blog world. I’ve also been staying up with what the others have been doing, not just fellow local blog DCist and Aaron Morrissey, but also the work of TBD, which led me to WUSA’s Kristin Fisher tweeting up a storm and other coverage from folks like the Washingtonian. Then, it hits the major nets, and CNN is writing about it. And then I look closely: it’s all the same reporting going on, across the board. Then I start to notice that a Twitter friend of mine points out to NBC’s Jim Long that his retweet of a Breaking News link to a photo was called out to be an inaccurate snapshot by TBD, and that CNN is getting quotes from DCist:
[Updated at 4:04 p.m.] Aaron Morrissey, the editor in chief of the web publication DCist, said he came across James Lee’s anti-Discovery Channel manifesto in 2008, when Lee was planning to hold a protest against the channel.
Lee has been identified by law enforcement sources as the man holding hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Lee, Morrissey said, “had some kind of off-the-wall ideas in that manifesto.”
The 2008 protest, he said, “was not that well attended.”
A month or so later, Lee was arrested near the building on littering and disorderly conduct charges, Morrissey said. The littering stemmed from Lee’s throwing money in to the air, he said.
Then, we find the magic bullet that shows just how far things have come: the Washington Post grabs the video feed from TBD (obnoxiously overlaying their banner on top of TBD’s logo in the bottom right, as noted by the New York Times David Carr, as caught in the screen cap below. That overlay banner has since been removed) to fill in the news gap.
All of this has been fascinating, it’s just one big mess across different channels, of different size publications, every one trying to get information out there. Some have been doing well (one Twitter user went with the hyperbole that this is TBD’s Gulf War moment), but to me it’s the day the line really disappeared. Not blurred, it’s gone.
There is one more story here, and it ironically proves the point that I hammered Mike Wise for yesterday: the fact that a photo that was unverified, taken to be the gunmen by organizations all the way up to MSNBC’s Breaking News account, does show there are some flaws in how news gets reported. That photo has appeared in some 1,600 tweets, gaining 32,000 views. That’s ridiculous. And it isn’t accurate. Just an interesting consideration in how stories break and what we train ourselves to trust.
Today, we were all bloggers, reporters, journalists and citizens hoping this story ends soon and well. Keep the folks up in Silver Spring in your thoughts, everyone. (UPDATE, 5:07 as I was pressing publish, it did end with the suspect being shot and hostages freed).
This will be everywhere by, I dunno, noon?
“Hey everybody, it’s November! November of this year!”
via Mediaite
Mike Wise, Faking Tweets and Why It’s Not Okay
Cross posted at Sports Grid
Want to make a bunch of sports fans, journalist watch dogs and social media people flip out at the same time? I present to you your new role model: Mike Wise.
Before I launch into a discussion of his antics yesterday, I should say that I actually do appreciate Wise’s writing in my local Washington Post. I read his stuff frequently, and have definitely complimented it within SportsGrid and Mediaite. But I think Wise made a crucial judgment error yesterday when he tried to make Twitter a playground for a inferiority complex display over the way that channel is used surrounding news and rumors.
To catch everyone up, yesterday morning during his radio show on Washington’s FM sports net, The Fan, Wise thought it would be fun to toy with his Twitter followers by posting a few fake rumors. The fake stories were none too salacious (rumors about whether Donovan McNabb would start the Washington Redskins first game, for example), but the one that did take hold and passed around plenty was a claim that Ben Roethlisberger’s suspension would be five games after his meeting with the commissioner later this week.
His motive was to test a theory about what is considered credible and believable on the social status network, that those who have a certain air of authority often are believed fully without further vetting. As he told Dan Levy of Press Coverage yesterday afternoon:
“Bottom line: I picked a lousy way to show we have no credibility in this medium, in the social networking medium, and that nobody checks these things out. It was just not a good way to do it. If i had to do it all over again I would have picked another way.”
That’s the story. And it’s been discussed just about everywhere in the last 24 hours (fellow Post sports writer Dan Steinberg collected most of the responses yesterday evening). Fundamentally, most were upset with Wise for irresponsibly pulling the wool over the eyes of Twitter users, and potentially even using the fake news to drive a growth in new followers. Deadspin got a hold of the “I’m not upset, but I’m disappointed” memo that was passed around the sports staff shortly after the stunt, while others called for Wise’s suspension from the Washington Post.
All of this is well and good, and it looks good for the media organization to try and uphold its pre-set social media guidelines, which are valid. The fundamental benchmark for these guidelines, though, has nothing to do with the channel through which a journalist passes his message. There aren’t different rules for Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare. Regardless of the actual network being used, the Post’s guidelines are about journalism first:
We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism.
There is more than one difference between guys like Mike Wise and writers like those I get to join at a blog like SportsGrid. For example, Dan, Glenn and I have all Twitter accounts, but we established these ourselves and no one will really run to the bank on our predictions, no matter what interviews or stories we get here. But for Wise, he gets immediate credibility by way of that Washington Post label – he’s a good journalist, he earned it. And he uses Twitter as a broadcast – look back at his history and you’ll notice little engagement with followers but lots of story streams, often very informed as well.
Wise’s theory was that people on Twitter will trust anything from a credible source, run it without verifying, and he wanted to be able to say how dangerous that could be. What he failed to factor into his experiment was how credibility was earned, which is exactly what he could have jeopardized with his little stunt. Deep down, I’ve convinced myself that Wise wanted to make the famed “blogger in pajamas” point. Instead, he made the “journalists don’t get social media point,” and the evidence of this to me is his “I’m sorry you feel that way,” apology:
He’s only half right on his first point: Mike, nobody checks *your* facts, because you are a sports writer for one of the three most important newspapers in the country. You better believe they will now.
I want to look back at the idea that Wise should be suspended, because I don’t think he should. I feel like he’s a kid who was told not to go climb in a tree, went and did it anyway, and now has a broken arm to show for it. The broken arm is a lesson enough, don’t ground the guy.
Actually, I have a better idea: Instead of squelching Twitter involvement, the Post should force him to take a lesson from guys like Steinberg and engage his followers and those tweeting at him. Maybe if he learned a little more about what conversation is valued, he wouldn’t have had this ridiculous idea in the first place.
Quote of the Day: Errors in Immediate Media
“The cure, or at least a salve, for this condition is transparency, accountability, humility. If The Times is going to publish more and faster, it will have to react faster to rectify more mistakes. “
~Arthur Brisbane, the new Public Editor of the New York Times, in his debut column.
via Regret the Error
Crowdsourcing Gets An Emmy
I’ve used the example of Star Wars Uncut for a lot of things, both on this blog and in my professional life. To me, it’s one of the coolest examples of what the long tail can do when it works together (plus, I also thought it would have made a really nifty use for the soon to be defunct(er) Google Wave). Well, add one more notch in it’s belt – winning an Emmy:
The finished product, “Star Wars Uncut,” won an Emmy last week in a relatively new category, interactive media, heaping new attention onto a project that its producers call a “user-directed broadcast.”
The award is all the more remarkable because, in a world in which television heavyweights likeHBO and NBC mount big-budget campaigns to win Emmys, “Star Wars Uncut” is just a hobby for its creator, Casey Pugh, a 26-year-old Web developer who lives in Brooklyn.
“I’m just so happy that the Internet is taking this step into the broadcast world,” he said in an interview, adding, “It’s partly because broadcast is letting it in.”
The cool part of the story here is how the Television Academy is embracing the interactive channel – truly blurring the lines between content and channel in terms of defining what is considered produced. The new category is a graduation from the pat-on-back events (which are worthy, by the way) like the Webbys. These are all very valid awards, but just as journalists have been forced to recognize bloggers for their value, it is great to see professional television writers do the same with Web producers.
As the producers mentioned during their acceptance speech at the Creative Arts presentations, held just before the main broadcast, “I guess the force was with us.” That, and hundreds and hundreds of really engaged fans who have the power of content production.
Quote of the Day: As Media Rolls Along
From Dan Shanoff’s excellent piece on the state of sports media, and how things have never been better:
There will always be a “bottom 50 percent” that is lousy — whether you are talking about newspaper sportswriting or blogs or college professors or restaurants or whatever.
But at the top? Things are really really good. Better than they ever have been.
The Art of Fail: The Gold in “0 Views”
I’ve always been a big proponent of the supreme value of content as the best strategy, that is to say, all the techniques, design and Social Media Ninjaing in the world can never make up for crappy guts. That should be scary, in fact, it should be easy to deal with since the costs for creating rough content are bottom of the barrel, which means that even the most harebrained idea, as content, has very little cost for failing.
While thinking about this idea of content fails, and how easy it is to recover from such attempts, I was given a gift via Buzzfeed: a Tumblr dedicated to finding videos on YouTube that have zero views. Zilch. None. And giving them the audience they do (or, more likely, don’t deserve).
For example, let’s take this young fellow who just wanted to rock out some dance moves in his garage with a sketchy neighbor hanging around a pick-up truck across the street:
Loaded and lost forever to the Internet? Maybe. No longer, thanks to 0 Views.
I’m going to watch that a few more times, go ahead if you’d like. While you do it, think about this: for every body wash campaign that blows up with millions of views, there are millions of videos that never see more than a handful. Yet that doesn’t mean the content is crap (ok, in some cases it is). The quality isn’t the idea at stake here, though, it’s the ability. That’s the joy of the digital revolution – creation, not just cultivation – and even in “failure,” it can still have some sort of an impact.
Cross posted at We Love DC
Thinking back to where the last few years have gone, it is at least a little surprising to think that the iconic “HOPE” image of President Obama has been floating around for almost two and a half years. The presence of that image in this city is still very much felt, and the original was purchased by the Smithsonian and now a part of the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery.
In the last few years, there has been more than one law suit involving the artist (Shepard Fairey) and the Associated Press, who argued that Fairey’s reimagination of a photo taken by one its contributors, Mannie Garcia, was not only a crucial piece of the work but in fact infringing on the copyright. Countersuits started to fly, and as resolution is still sought on the copyright side of things between the artist and the AP, there was one other point of conflict.
Garcia, local to the DMV and hailing from Kensington, Maryland, filed a claim against the AP about ownership of the photo. The question at hand: as the photographer, should he be the one who reaps any benefit from the suit with Fairey, at least moreso than the organization? Garcia sued the AP, the AP sued back, and both disputes have been drawn out for some time. No longer: over the weekend, the AP (ironically) reported that Garcia and the AP have each dropped their suits against each other.
The AP and Fairey had yet to settle or head to trial.
Great news: the newest round of “words added to the dictionary” has surfaced. There are some choice additions this time around (are you telling me Chill Pill is only getting added now. We didn’t get it in there in, like, 1997?), and many of the new words that are fully embraced within the English language involve technology, social networking and the Internet. Among those to note are freemium (“a business model, especially on the Internet, whereby basic services are provided free of charge while more advanced features must be paid for”), tweetup (“a meeting organized by means of posts on Twitter”) and Interweb (“the Internet”). Of course, the one that gets me the most is the addition of Paywall. It’s new, official definition:
[A]n arrangement whereby access is restricted to users who have paid to subscribe to a website.
I’m not going to focus too much on syntax here, but within those 15 or so words, there is a lot to be analyzed. The idea of paying to subscribe, for example, and the fact that a paywall, in its definition, is a restrictive property. A paywall is not designed to make things available – its intent is to limit access to information to that smaller population. Not only a questionable business model, but really limiting when you think about the media/information sharing nature of what the Internet allows.
As a geeky aside, among other new words I’m excited about is the official entry for Bromance. As defined by Oxford, “a close but non-sexual relationship between two men.” In honor of such an addition, I now unnecessarily embed the excellent ode to bromances from the Scrubs Musical, “Guy Love.” Happy weekend:
Update: The title originally read “Oxford English Dictionary,” and was corrected as this is actually the Oxford Dictionary of English, slightly different, and thanks to Tiffany for pointing out.
Mapping the Series of Tubes Behind the Internet
The folks at SimplyZesty imagine the Internet as a Subway map. Click to enlarge:
