{"id":10081,"date":"2014-05-17T05:45:26","date_gmt":"2014-05-17T09:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=10081"},"modified":"2014-05-16T16:28:14","modified_gmt":"2014-05-16T20:28:14","slug":"three-obsessions-about-the-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2014\/05\/17\/three-obsessions-about-the-job\/","title":{"rendered":"Three obsessions about the job"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Ankher<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

Like many folks in the internet biz, I get a little obsessive about charting progress, and about the pace of change, and about\u00a0 relations between traditional and new media, and about the ethics of digital journalism, and about the status of the technology, and about the rules of the road. This has been a great week to obsess.<\/p>\n

Here are three “for instances.”<\/p>\n

What will it mean if the FCC adopts proposed rules<\/a> that will allow the really big players on the internet like Netflix and Google to buy preferential service from internet providers–a so-called fast lane? Does that put me and NCPR in the slow lane? Or does it just mean that when I pay for a Netflix subscription, I can rely on it to actually deliver smooth HD video? Will costs go up as a result? A case could be made that they could also go down–but I’ve never seen that happen before. Will it stifle start-ups? Many say yes.<\/p>\n

We can almost certainly do this whole internet thing better. The U.S. in ranked number 31 in the world for speed and reliability of internet services. So, obsession number one–net neutrality.<\/p>\n

Bill Haenel shared an article from American Journalism Review<\/a> about the changing roles of copy editors. No–keep your eyes open! There is a big divide opening up in digital journalism on the importance of, or even the need for, copy editing. I come from a print background originally. As a printer and publication designer, I have personally reprinted 5,000 copies of a color brochure at my own expense over a misplaced comma. And many people, particularly coming from the newspaper side of digital news insist on the importance of having anything written for publication go through at least one editor first. Many digital operations, NCPR included, are doing editing after the fact–that is–getting the story up fast in the interests of news, and sweating the commas and typos later.<\/p>\n

As an old-school English major, it makes me deeply uneasy. Should I now feel better because it is a “thing” and has a name? They’re calling it “back-editing.” Just as long as they aren’t going in for “back-fact-checking,” too. Obsession number two–how good is good enough?<\/p>\n

Another “thing”\u00a0 these days is data-driven journalism. Having data sounds pretty good. One would want that in the toolkit. But an example passed across my desktop this week that made me go “huh.” It was a volunteered article submission titled “Saint Lawrence County Food Stamp Use Increases.” Well-written if a little stiff, informative, with data sources identified. Cool beans–except something seemed a little off. For one thing–who spells out the Saint in St. Lawrence County? Having an idle moment, I Googled the authors and found a huge number of articles all having the same title and identical text in the article, all except for the county names and the actual numbers. It had been published by news outlets all over the country.<\/p>\n

Did the publishers know it wasn’t really “local” and just not care? Does it matter as long as the data is correct? Here is the version for Flathead County in Montana<\/a>. Obsession number three–how can I tell who is a robot?<\/p>\n

Hope you all have an obsession-free weekend–unless you enjoy your obsessions more than I do mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many folks in the internet biz, I get a little obsessive about charting progress, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10081"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10081"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10099,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10081\/revisions\/10099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}