I was tasked with shooting video of a Memorial Day parade the other week. It’s all part of a push to get more multimedia on our website. A new camera was bought for the event and everything. I tell you, though, I’m getting more and more afraid that the big “website redesign” will not be all that big. Little things are getting tacked to it sort of like attaching a spoiler to a Neon instead of just buying a new, sportier car.

The video was pretty ass. I’m not a cinematographer and the parade was not that big of an event. I’m sure if I was better connected to the community and so could video tape specific people doing things it would have helped too. In the end, we made lemonade. There’s a video of the parade and ceremony up now and I can say it’s done. All we need to do now is think of some actually interesting uses of video.

When you have a certain philosophy towards journalism it can hold you back. Quoting people heavily and letting them dig their own hole doesn’t work when you get a taciturn person as a source. I generally operate with this philosophy because it’s what my boss likes. Thus, I’m often in a situation where I don’t really know where to go next or who to talk to, because my source was not very loose.

One thing that’s always quite funny, though, is when you get a real loose cannon. Someone who just likes talking and will say the darndest things. Honestly, it is often what I would have expected someone to say, and it often comes from people whom I know better than others. So comfort must play a role. It doesn’t stop it from being enjoyable. A quote is worth a million words, and some people just like spreading the weatlh.

I’ve never been to school specifically for this thing called journalism. I thought about it, but I only tolerated my undergraduate education from a formality stand-point. At the time that the decision was made, writing and conducting interviews seemed like something better learned by experience, at least for me.

Despite my lack of a higher-higher degree and my general disinterest in the politics of university life, I am driven to learn. I read whatever I can get my hands on, and especially love trying to get at the heart of things. Education broken in Maine? Why? Tell me, show me, or get out of my way.

The same behavior applies to my job as a journalist. Why do we do things the way they are done? My editor has a philosophy about what is “news.” It has only just occurred to me that his philosophy, if thought about a little bit, could actually be applied as a theory. He subscribes to the “quote, fact, quote,” theory of journalism. Let people say what they will and surround them with just enough narrative glue that you know what they’re talking about.

I enjoy that method, but I don’t believe it is the most effective. Especially given the current shift from paper and tv to Internet, literal journalism will be replaced. Instead, the predominant theory will look something like, “do your best and wait to be corrected.” No one is an expert in everything. I may have been assigned to the school “beat” but that does not make me an expert. Encourage people to correct what you write, and then encourage them to read your corrections. Develop a relationship with the people who you can’t hope to inform with ivory tower journalism. Media is only your enemy if you ignore it until you need it.

Just read a great article here at Howard Owen’s blog discussing the use of free technology and newspapers. His story focuses on using Yahoo’s Pipes service to scrape their own newspaper’s syndication feed for related content. It’s an ingenious idea and one I probably wouldn’t have come up with on my own.

I’ll explain how I found the post. I was searching Google for, “using free tools to improve newspaper website.” Talk about specific. The entry was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, though perhaps a bit too specific. It’s great to see how people are enhancing their site, but I was wondering how much a local paper could get away with co-opting services that are already existent.

One such idea is instead of hosting your own blogs (though the ad revenue is lucrative) simply host a blog directory for the area. Provide tips on how to blog effectively, how to set one up and what privacy issues to be aware of. A similar idea could be done with image gallery sites like Flickr and Picasa.

The idea is to avoid two major problems:

1.  Re-inventing software that already works very well
2. Getting people to sign up for yet another login at yet another site (YALaYAS)

So far I’ve been “scooped” on a story I was supposed to write twice. Considering I work for a weekly and not a daily, that’s not too bad, but it’s also brought up a couple of observations.

• One: Daily newspapers seem to run on nearly the same schedule as weeklies. 

As far as features and researched, well written stories go, they are no different. I get scooped, but it’s a week after I first heard about the story, so it easily could have gotten into our weekly in the same time the story took to hit the daily. Strange.

• Two: Quality of information is relative. 

The two major issues I’ve read about in other papers before I had a chance to print anything were covered poorly. The lesson here, if there is one, is that I put something on the back burner for a reason.  It’s funny to be working in the “news” and to notice some else’s slipshod journalism. 

That’s not meant to be a slam at the other reporters, but just an observation that we all slip up sometimes, and especially when a story is categorized as “breaking.”What it all boils down to is that one can be both burned by competition and burn competition. Both happen on a regular basis in the newspaper business. 

I’m going to an office meeting tomorrow (today) to see a presentation on some sort of web forum feedback software. It’s an interesting concept, but I haven’t heard anything about and so am wary. I try to stay abreast of web goings-on and the creators of this software can’t even keep their own website updated, let along create buzz.

Be that as it may, I also think there are some valid points made in the book which preciptated the software, The Leadership of Civilization Building. If you take it for what it’s worth and not for the title, it’s actually an interesting read. Effectively, the point is to create a new way for people in leadership positions to gather and make sense of feedback from a large group of followers.

On the internet, such a system would be a revolution indeed. The problem is, it’s too preachy and academic. The author fashions himself some sort of modern Thomas Jefferson, complete with period dress which isn’t at all anachronistic (I’m sure Jefferson walked around in John Barth’s clothing).

Despite this, I’m willing to hear these people out. I’m afraid some employees have already built a wall up against whatever they have to say, and they may be right. But they may also have some interesting ideas for things that we can do to generate quality public feedback and communication with a new website. We’ll see.

I am always looking for better/easier ways to organize all the information that gets thrown at me each week. When I discovered Remember The Milk I was very excited, as it presented a really easy way to organize what I had to do. I even flirted with keeping long-term to-dos in the system. Unfortunately, the interface doesn’t lend itself to adding extended notes and keeping track of complicated due dates. For example, I might have an event I have to attend with has a different due date than the writing assignment on the event. RTM was not an elegant solution to such things.

I also have struggled with writing notes on little scraps of paper when people call me out of the blue. Even when I’m not caught off guard I see the notepads pile up with meeting notes and interview questions. What I wanted to be able to do was throw away these pieces of paper. My nightmare is filled with trying to organize these notes into something to which I can refer back.

Enter the wiki. I’ve decided to set up a “digital file cabinet.” It’s powered by Dokuwiki, though it could be any wiki software. The point is, I create a new page for each issues, group, person or place I have to deal with. As I gain information or think of questions to ask, I add them to the wiki. It doesn’t replace the paper, as I still like to just jot things down. But an hour or a day later I can go back to that sheet of paper, add the information it contains to the wiki and be done with it. It’s a wonderful system and I already feel the weight of clutter lifting. Now all I have to do is make sure I keep at it.

I am not good at managing time. This is an absolute truth and one I wish to change. It is especially bad when you work at a job that involves deadlines, writing (creatively) on deadline, hard deadlines and often office-less work. I am always tempted to just pack up my things and say, “I’ll take care of it from home.” That is both a non-winning strategy and a horrible lie.When I first began working for the newspaper I chidded my boss for being so strict about only working out the office.

While I’m not ready to concede my ground completely–reaching people is often best done in the evening–I will admit that his principal is correct. I just don’t get much done from home and I tend to fill the hours I get with work. Thus, a writing assignment that ought to take 3 hours, and will if I’m only in the office for 8 hours a day, will bleed over into 24 hours of thinking, writing snippets, imagning more effective ways of working and ultimately not getting anything finished.

Now, I will admit this may be 99% character flaw, but my bosses philisophical opposition to the “home office” method suggests there is more than 1% of objective truth to the supposition. As someone recently pointed out at a school board meeting where the question was to extend a custodian’s hours to better clean teh school, “certain jobs will not necessarily improve with added time. Instead the job will simply expand to fill more hours.”

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the point is there. Especially when the issue of creativty creeps in, I feel as though hard and fast deadlines set by things like hours in the office are requisite to just getting things done. Unbridaled creativity is a powerful and aimless force. Journalism is both an exercise in creativty and just getting things done. I just need to learn to keep my balance on this line.

Allow me to step into a’nother sphere in my ven diagram of work. Right now I am attempting to get my head around a massive legislative push in the State of Maine to consolidate school districts.

I was called out in an article I wrote last week on a number of details that I just didn’t get right. So now I’ve spent the last hour and a half reading consolidation literature and trying to get at something, anything that can make education, America and the government make sense.

One thing I’ve noticed, and this is just an observation of myself–nothing of import here, of all the hot air and vective that gets bandied about the clearest ideas I find are the positive ones. Almost as though Milton weren’t just “on to something,” he truly understood that evil, hate and anger are easier to muster than constructive thought because it reverberates faster.

Negativity builds the walls that keep us from listening and thinking outside ourselves.

With that said, Maine is in dire straits. But I would argue they are no more trouble than most other States in our Union. When population growth slows down we don’t know what to do. Student numbers begin to diminish and the forumla we used to educate our kids doesn’t fit anymore. So pull out all the support that seems “redudant” and things will surely improve.

What if the government were capable of auditing itself? Municipal, state, federal, any of them. Would we see people with lots of experience expecting large salaries refusing to take pay cuts even as the state budget and the social services programs eat away the confidence of the people who, let’s be honest a moment, are supposed to be liable for what their representative government does?

I can’t blame people for wanting more. I feel I am living inadequately because my spouse and I are having trouble getting by some days, especially in winter. But should we then move to Georgia where we don’t have to heat our house? Should I go get a job in the government because they’ll offer me a good health care package and pension program? Maybe I should be a teacher? In Maine they have better starting salaries and benefits by a long shot. Oh wait, but what to do about consolidation.

See, negativity is so much easier.

I’ve read so many lists of how to be an effective journalist by developing contacts. Indeed, one of my favorite aspects of being a reporter is that it gets me out and doing things. For New Year’s I was at a series of concerts in Blue Hill. I was not on assignment and feeling a little bemused at what was being offered when it occurred to me that if I were on assignment I would be forced to, say, go to the belly dancing demostration. Now, I’m not interested in that at all intrinsically, but when forced I’m sure I would have had a great time.

In response to this, I suppose one could say that all I need to do is recognize when I build a wall in my head against things that I may not like. But I don’t believe it’s that easy, and part of parsing the world involves deciding what you do or do not like. I go to as many things for journlistic reasons that make me want to shoot myself in the head, but it’s the positive ones that I take away from the job.

In any case . . . I began this post because I realized that while culturing contacts and people who can tip you off or provide quotes is a great thing to do, my problem is walking that line between getting good information from them and bothering the hell out of them. I once read a Peace Corp memoir about someone’s travels in China and realized that nearly every “amazing” person he met was probably rolling their eyes as this big white man furiously scribbled in a notebook for “posterity,” read: publishing potential.

Not all people love talking to a reporter. My hope, and I suppose it could be a resolution for 2008 as well, is to be better at recognizing when I’ve pushed to hard on a contact and when I haven’t pushed hard enough.