AU Goes Dancing!

The wait is finally over for alumni, students, and friends of American University basketball.

After nearly 41 years in Division I athletics, the American University Eagles are going to the big dance for the first time, after defeating the Colgate Red Raiders 52-46 in the finals of the Patriot League Tournament Friday.

If you were not able to make it to the big game, you can catch up on all the action you missed by clicking on the below links, which not only provide some great details about today's win, but also demonstrate how the media has come to represent AU in a variety of different ways including video highlights of the game, news stories about the team, photos from the game, and blogs detailing players and coaches reactions.

Once again GO EAGLES!

• USA TODAY
• ESPN
• Washington Post
• Fox 5 Story and Video
• ABC 7 Story and Video
• Hoop Time- Blog of Patriot League Basketball
  

CNN.com's primary failure

(Screen shot of my laptop at 8:05pm)

Spot the journalistic faux pas: On the night of four crucial primaries, CNN offered its most prominent right-panel advertisement space to Obama for America, the Illinois Democratic candidate's Web site. And, as expected, clicking on it redirected the reader to BarackObama.com, where he or she could learn more about -- or donate to -- his presidential campaign.

I’m not going to insinuate the existence of a pro-Obama media bias; as much as I believe the media has unfairly covered this election, speculative finger-pointing won’t encourage the likes of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to act more responsibly. Instead, I’m more concerned with CNN’s decision to include political ads on their Web site during such an important night in the primary season. To be sure, the ads rotate – out of sheer curiosity, I refreshed the page at least 10 times and never saw the image again – but the principles CNN violated are obvious: Even if a news organization (or, business) is overwhelmingly cash-strapped, editors ought to avoid ads that disrupt even the notion of objectivity. To do otherwise is to create undue suspicion, the prevalence of which damages any article or publication's credibility or reputation in the long term.

Granted, print media have a history of publishing politically motivated ads; MoveOn.org’s press campaign last year, for example, blatantly attacked Republicans’ Iraq war policy and ignited a firestorm of criticism. Nor was it the exception to the rule: The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007 that political advertisements in print tripled since 2000.

But while it’s difficult to gauge whether these ads affected readers’ votes, it’s easy to understand the reason for their heightened popularity. As seemingly everyone in the industry would agree, funding mass media's news enterprises is by no means an easy task. Newspaper readership seems to be declining as more readers embrace the Web, a medium with so much uncharted territory that advertising is a murky business at best, and the result has been an unpredictable and tumultuous economic climate that many news organizations have struggled to navigate.

In the search to break even, political ads are one way to fill the void. As The Washington Post reported during the 2004 election, some news Web sites were in fact courting political ads “in an attempt to earn a slice of the $1.25 billion expected to be spent on political advertising [in 2004].” And while we're obviously months away from possessing final numbers on 2008 political advertisements, we can say with certainty that newspapers and Web sites coveted every bit of the revenue they've received (or, at the very least, that CNN's does). Where else can they find such a steady source of funding?

Problematically, this perceived breach of objectivity carries with it an ironic twist. The Post article continues:

“Political ads on the Internet are not governed by the same rules that apply to radio and television, leaving news sites free to run ads without having to disclose who paid for them. Sites also are under no obligation to provide equal time to candidates or offer campaigns the lowest available advertising rates.”

Granted, there are a variety of reasons for this double-standard, ones that range from a Web page's space limitations or, coincidentally, the Web's lack of space limitations (to the extent that users can seek alternative viewpoints ad nauseam, in ways that TV and radio pioneers could not have fathomed). But while technology has changed the way that journalists disseminate political information, it has not revised the rules of engagement. The code still reads, "In the war between a publication's editorial and business offices, the prior never loses to the latter." Journalists thus recover lost profits through accurate, fair and balanced reporting -- which, to excuse my flowery prose, is both far less tangible and far more beneficial than any financial motivation.

But therein lies the struggle; it is impossible to encourage investigative reporting without sound financial backing; to that degree, maybe all of this concern over political advertisements is merely an exaggeration, and perhaps the CNN-Obama ad is truly benign. But if print is slowly dying (creating a revenue crisis) and the Web needs advertisers' attention to sufficiently develop (creating a revenue demand), political ads of this kind are probably here to say. The journalistic faux pas is slowly becoming fashionable, and what it means for political journalism largely remains unclear.

Newseum, hear us roar!

PHOTO COURTESY PRANKS.COM and MARGARET ENGEL

So the Washington Post an architectural review of what is sure to be the biggest thing in D.C. this year, save for the 2008 campaign. The Newseum opens here on April 11, but they let Post architectural critic Phillip Kennicot in for a sneak peak, as some Post photographers snapped away.

The resulting slideshow of images gives prospect visitors an inside look at a project that has been highly anticipated (but one that has been many years in the making.) It's not the building itself that has so many of us so excited, however. It's a museum, for all of us media dorks, celebrating the news.

While admission is going to cost a whopping 20 BUCKS (except for opening day April 11, when everyone is welcome for free), it's going to be well worth it. The 7-level structure features, 14 galleries, 15 theaters, two broadcast studios, a 4-d time-travel experience (whatever the heck that means!), one Wolfgang Puck luxury restaurant and a huge new complex of apartments. Just take a look at the Newseum's own virtual tour. It's awesome!

At 250,000 square feet, Newseum is sure to impress. They have 35,000 historic magazines and newspapers in their collection. Famous for their database of daily newspaper front pages online everyday, Newseum will display 35 papers' front pages in sidewalk displays. All of this and whole lot more to the tune of $450 million.

Now, I'm not sure about this $20 admission thing (there is no student rate) but the idea is there. Newseum is a wonderfully interesting and useful online tool, so seeing it in person is bound to something short of euphoric. Don't think for a second that I won't be the first in line for Opening Day on April 11. Besides, some of ABC's Good Morning America will be filming there that day. And I love me my Diane Sawyer.

Making Customized Google Maps

Newspapers have been using Google Maps as one way to do alternative story telling. And now aspiring superjournalists can practice at home with geoXtract.

I found this program through a post in mediabistro or journerdism or something like that, but I have been playing around with it for about a week now, and it is kind of interesting. I just made a map of my spring break road trip, but it was a good way to get a feel for the program.

Basically you input in Excel Spreadsheet with the addresses you want to plot and any additional information that you want to pop up when someone scrolls over the marker on the map. The program uses this information to "geocode" the address, and--bata-bing, bata-boom--it spits out a Google Map at the end with your map points plotted on it.

Ok, it isn't actually that easy. It took me some fiddling to get my spread sheet into the right format that it could read, but it does make a pretty cool map.

The free version does not have a lot of features. For example, as far as I can tell you can only use one type of marker for all the points on the map, so you can't use a gas station marker and a restaurant marker for different locations.

Let me know if you try it out, and you figure out anything cool to do with it.

How does it pay to be a $uperjournalist?

PHOTO COURTESY OF: TRACY OLSON
An informal survey conducted by Will Sullivan of Journerdism in October 2007 examined the pay rates of online journalists. Sullivan’s survey produced 72 responses from online editors, directors and photographers/videographers in the U.S., and even in Asia, the United Kingdom and South America.

While I am generally not interested in the money aspect of my career, three years as a meager college student has opened up many adult realities, mostly involving the importance of a steady income. Moreover, I know we all desire to be successful and aspire to be someone important. There will most likely be times when we turn to our given salary as a convenient measure of our worth.

Sullivan believes online journalists earn a mode salary of about $45,000, about $3,000-$5,000 more in salary compared to those in print, all depending on the cost of living. That’s somewhat comforting, and may or may not be surprising for some of us.

What’s most interesting about Sullivan’s survey, however, is that online producers (those who program and design online multimedia) can often make $5,000-$15,000 less than online editors (those who oversee web teams and the market).

It seems the journalism industry (like all others, I suppose), is more about those in executive positions than it is about those who work just as hard, if not harder. The convergent online news industry is still evolving with more skills required of journalists, but their salaries don’t seem to be following along the same lines. In the case of Sullivan’s survey, salaries may prove to be an inadequate and quite arbitrary indicator of some journalists’ efforts.

That’s trifling. Online producers, who have skills in HTML/CSS, Flash, video, audio, photography, graphic design and everything else interactive, seem like they should earn more for their relatively rare skills. It certainly takes a lot more than “wearing a tie,” as Sullivan wrote, to do the things they do. (I have learned to appreciate really impressive interactive packages now, such as this one from The Dallas Morning News. How many of us can design and program something like that? I guess, in the future, maybe all of us).

Online editors no doubt have a demanding and important role in presenting news, and seriously, more power to them. But I hope that the Journerdism survey is somewhat misrepresented and that producers really do earn what they deserve for whatever skills they bring to their organization.

Does anyone currently know people in the industry who might be able to add more to this? What are your thoughts?

For those of us who will have some job in online news media, it shouldn’t matter how much you ultimately make, of course. Money isn’t as important to me as the creative value of the job itself. Still, Sullivan’s survey has taught me, at the very least, to find a job in the industry where we can be appreciated for what we can bring to the table (and quite frankly, our computer).

Was The New York Times ready to run McCain story?

All: This should get your journalistic hearts racing ... Read this New Republic piece on behind-the-scenes at the Times as the McCain story was reported, held, and published. Share your thoughts below ... (It isn't exactly a Web discussion, but the article did show up on the Web the night before ...) Here it is. Professor Eisman

Should journalists have personal blogs?

Here's a hot topic we've been debating in class. What do you think? Professor Eisman