Fountain and Kennedy on Cronkite

My Northeastern University colleague Chuck Fountain and I discuss the legacy of Walter Cronkite in a webcast posted on the university's Web site.

George Merry's local legacy

George Merry, a longtime political reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, who died on July 1, is someone I knew slightly. We were both graduates of Northeastern University, and George often attended events organized by our journalism alumni group in the 1980s.

He was a proper gentleman, and though I can't say I was intimately familiar with his coverage of Massachusetts politics, I could tell from talking with him that he was a fine journalist, fair-minded and curious about the world around him.

Gloria Negri has a lengthy obit in today's Boston Globe. The Monitor ran a tribute on July 7.

Last fall I was reporting a story on the Monitor for CommonWealth Magazine. Monitor executives had just announced they were going to eliminate the daily print edition, going instead with their already-excellent Web site and a new weekly magazine.

Among the angles I wanted to explore was whether it might make sense for the Monitor — which is, after all, based in Boston — to re-establish its local presence at a time when the Globe and the Boston Herald were getting smaller and smaller.

The angle didn't pan out. But I did have a chance to interview Merry, reaching him by phone at his home in Hyde Park. He clearly wasn't well, and he labored to speak. Yet he was as courteous and helpful as he could be.

The Monitor, of course, is known for its national and especially its international reporting. Merry, though, told me that the Monitor took its local coverage very seriously at one time, and that it was an ideal training ground for the paper's stars of the future.

"When I first went on the New England bureau staff, there were at least a dozen reporters," he said. "I think we brought a different viewpoint. It was a different voice. It wasn’t so commercially oriented." He added, though, that "it got very expensive to maintain."

Merry was also skeptical of the Monitor's plan to eliminate the daily print edition. "The Internet's a wonderful thing, but I think it's somewhat of a risk," he said.

George Merry was not well-known outside of local media and political circles. But he was a good guy and a pro, and he'll be missed.

Social-networking that cornice collapse

The student-run Huntington News is taking the social-media route to covering the collapse of a cornice on a Northeastern University-owned residence hall on Huntington Avenue.

Editor Maggie Cassidy used her Twitter account to get out the word that the News had posted a story online. And the photos were posted to the paper's Flickr account.

Breaking news, from a paper that only comes out every other week during the summer. Good job, although the Flickr link from Twitter doesn't work [note: now fixed]; pick it up from the story (or from here) instead.

NU students report on Egyptian dissident

Northeastern journalism students touring the Middle East have broken some important news.

Kate Augusto, Danielle Capalbo and Nick Mendez report that Ayman Nour, a leading political dissident in Egypt, has decided to return to prison and finish his sentence in order to dramatize what he calls the Egyptian government's ongoing lack of respect for democratic values.

The Boston Globe's Worldly Boston blog has picked up on the news.

Nour was released earlier this year, with the government announcing that it was responding to Nour's poor health.

Our students are traveling with journalism professor Carlene Hempel and political-science professor Denis Sullivan, who directs both the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development and the International Affairs Program.

Please check out the group blog, as well as the individual student and faculty blogs that are linked from the main page.

Photo of Nour by Nick Mendez.

Don't touch me there

Or anywhere else. As usual, I'll be volunteering as a marshal at Northeastern's commencement tomorrow. Handshaking has been banned, but coughing is fine.

Gmail and its discontents (II)

Problem solved, although not the way I would have liked. I'm now using Apple Mail to pull in my Northeastern mail (via POP) and Gmail (via IMAP) separately. I'm able to use Northeastern's SMTP server off-campus as well as on. So all of my outgoing NU mail contains official-looking header information, and will thus not be intercepted by anyone's spam filter.

Oh, well. Apple Mail's not so bad, I suppose.

Gmail and its discontents

It must be the season of technical difficulties.

I use Gmail for everything. I've set it up to pull in my Northeastern e-mail, and I have an alias that allows me to send mail via Gmail as if it were coming from my Northeastern address. Gmail isn't perfect, but it's better than anything else.

Today, though, I sent an e-mail to a colleague at Northeastern. It never arrived. I tried again. No luck. Finally, I sent the same message using my Gmail address. Bingo — she got it immediately.

What I had run into, I strongly suspect, was a hyperactive spam filter at her end. The filter saw that my incoming e-mail address did not match the underlying Gmail information in the header and flagged it as spam. (The theory is that I must have been faking my outgoing e-mail address, and so therefore was up to no good.) I've run into this very occasionally before, but not quite so directly.

Now, of course, I'm wondering how many other e-mails I've sent to people at Northeastern that never arrived. I've contacted the IT folks to see if there might be a solution that doesn't force me either to stop using my NU address (unprofessional) or abandon Gmail for NU business (undesirable). But I'm not holding out a whole lot of hope.

Any thoughts?

Blowing the whistle on handicapped parking

Miss Media Nation and I visited Harvard Square yesterday. I dropped her off at a bookstore, then went look for a handicapped parking space. I found one not far from Brattle Square.

As I was backing in, it occurred to me that I might be causing myself some hassle. Our handicapped placard obviously wasn't for me. My daughter was a couple of blocks away. If a police officer questioned me, I'd have to ask him to walk back to the bookstore with me so he could see that my daughter was, in fact, there.

I did it anyway — no problems. But it would have been a whole lot easier if I were one of the chosen few who use the handicapped parking spaces in front of Boston police headquarters, wouldn't it? Another great job by students in Walter Robinson's investigative-reporting class at Northeastern University.

The last time the Huskies won the Beanpot

I've been meaning to give a plug to Outta the Pahk, a new sports blog by Jeff Goldberg, the former Hartford Courant sportswriter who wrote the terrific Jim Rice story I mentioned on Jan. 13, the day Rice made the Hall of Fame.

Today Goldberg offers a bit of Northeastern trivia: he was the last reporter for the Northeastern News to cover a Beanpot championship. Goldberg writes:

Led by Kevin Heffernan and goalie Bruce Racine, who later had a cup of coffee with the St. Louis Blues, the Huskies not only won the Beanpot by beating BU, they also took the Hockey East title at the Boston Garden, knocking off New England powerhouse Maine. Those three games proved the only three I ever got to cover at the old Garden, a thrill for a sportswriter of any age, let alone an 18-year-old.

The Huskies can do it again tonight. And, just as it was 21 years ago, it's Boston University that's standing in their way. Huntington News sports editor Nate Owen will be live-blogging the game here.

Northeastern student on the scene

Jared Molton, a student in my Reinventing the News course at Northeastern this past fall, was on the scene today following that fatal fire-truck crash on Huntington Avenue. He wrote it up for his blog and posted a slideshow to Flickr. His work then got picked up by Universal Hub.

Photo copyright (c) 2009 by Jared Molton.

Student projects now online

I'd like to invite you to take a look at the final projects turned in by my students in Reinventing the News — not just blogs posts, but videos, photos and Google maps as well. There's some very good work here, if I do say so myself.

Northeastern students nail parking deal

Northeastern students Kate Augusto and Matt Collette report in today's Boston Globe on a suspiciously sweet parking deal in the North End.

Northeastern students on NewsTrust

Click on photo for Flickr slideshow

Earlier this week, I said I would post on my students' experience in using NewsTrust, a social-networking tool that lets you share and rate news stories on qualities such as accuracy, sourcing and bias.

Well, I did — but not here. My oversight. Instead, I posted a roundup on the class Web site. And here, in a bit of post-post-modernism, is what NewsTrust had to say about what my students had to say.

A NewsTrust news hunt on the global economy

Following a presentation on NewsTrust by editor and frequent reviewer Mike LaBonte, my students in Reinventing the News have been finding, submitting and analyzing stories on the global economy. NewsTrust is a social-networking tool aimed at identifying and promoting quality journalism.

I asked each of my students to submit, rate and write a short critique of three different stories on the global economy — part of a "news hunt" that NewsTrust is conducting this week. I thought I'd do the assignment, too, so here are my choices.

The first, from the Christian Science Monitor, is something of a disappointment: an article about pressures on the International Monetary Fund that is so bureaucratic and top-down in its orientation that it's impossible to understand the effect of those pressures on ordinary people. Even if you grant that we shouldn't expect much from a brief overview, it's hard to know what we are supposed to take away from this story.

Moving right along, we come to a roundup in the Guardian on how plummeting oil prices are affecting four major oil-producing states — Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. As with the Monitor story, there is a top-down quality to this that leaves me a little cold. Nevertheless, it is well-executed, and provides some interesting insights into the changing fortunes of regimes that were riding high just a few months ago.

Finally, CNN offers a story on world hunger that, like the Monitor and the Guardian, is too short to get much beyond the superficial but which, unlike the Monitor and the Guardian, grabs us with the riveting, heartbreaking testimony of an aid worker who frequently travels to Haiti.

"It's horrible. They have to choose among their children," Patricia Wolff tells CNN. "They try to keep them alive by feeding them, but sometimes they make the decision that this one has to go." The story demonstrates a key point about good journalism: even a brief report about global developments can be conveyed in human terms.

NewsTrust, which I've been following since its founding a couple of years ago (disclosure: I'm a volunteer editor), is one of the more interesting experiments in building a community around the news. If you haven't checked it out before, you should give it a look.

I'll post on what my students have been up to later this week.

Serving coffee with Google Maps

I've asked my students in Reinventing the News to file brief reports on coffee shops on and near (and in some cases not so near) the Northeastern University campus so that we can compile them all into a Google Maps presentation. I figured it was only fair that I do it, too. So here is my report on Cappy's II, a small, storefront-style eatery located at 309 Huntington Ave.

When you think of Cappy's II, you think of pizza, subs and big salads. My only previous visit had been to pick up a Caesar salad to go. It was quite good. But I'd never thought about Cappy's for my morning coffee run. It's a bit too far up Huntington, and I've become accustomed to Au Bon Pain, which is closer to my office.

I arrived at Cappy's at about 8:45 a.m. Before walking inside, I took some photos. That elicited a few suspicious questions when I approached the counter. But once I explained what I was doing, I was greeted in a friendly manner.

It was after the breakfast rush but long before lunch, so I had the place pretty much to myself. A medium coffee set me back a reasonable $1.50 plus tax. I asked for half-and-half, and my server, Eleni Athanasiou (in photo), added it for me before handing it to me. Though I prefer self-serve (it's why I like Starbucks better than Dunkin' Donuts, even though the coffee at Dunks is pretty good), she got the mix just about right.

Though Cappy's mainly caters to the takeout crowd, there are some tables, including a few that are out of the way enough to enjoy a relaxing meal. It's got a full breakfast menu, which would make it a pretty good spot for a morning meeting. All in all, it was an enjoyable experience.

Cappy's II is open seven days from 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m.

Student videoblogging at Northeastern

I just finished watching videos made by my students in Reinventing the News. All of them have good points; some are quite strong from beginning to end.

A few technical notes:

• The videos were shot with low-end digital cameras, several of which created file compatibility problems. Two students who used Flip cameras had to edit their work on their Windows laptops using Windows Movie Maker, as iMovie '08 for Macintosh wouldn't accept their clips. I'm sure there's a converter, but I'd have to track it down.
• Another student tried two different cameras — a Sony and a Casio, if I'm not mistaken — and couldn't pull either into iMovie. She ended up having to skip the assignment.
• I have mixed feelings about iMovie '08 (also known, weirdly enough, as iMovie 7). Although it's easy to use in some respects, and I figured out how to do B-roll despite a lack of documentation, it's not as precise as iMovie 6. One student used iMovie 6 on her own Mac laptop. She and those using Windows Movie Maker seemed to have an easier time.

Video for the Web is a skill well worth teaching journalism students today. I'm glad we tried it, and I've got some ideas for how to do a better job of teaching it the next time.

Students document the vote (II)

More from my Reinventing the News students:

• Firuzeh Shokooh-Valle: LBJ Apartments, Cambridge
• Michaela Stanelun: Morville House, Boston
• Marc Larocque: Kennedy School, Boston

That will be it for tonight, as I need to file with the Guardian soon. Sooner than I can manage, probably.

Students document the vote

My Reinventing the News students are hitting the polls today. Some early returns:

• Chaz Miller checks in at Wentworth Institute, where he finds a multilingual welcome sign.
• Liz Stitt asks New Hampshire residents what they think of negative campaigning.
• Matt Collette interviews two opponents of Question One outside a Boston polling place.

I'll try to link to more student posts as I find them.

The next president's first priorities

Click here for higher-quality version

Thought you might get a kick out of a news video I put together as a demonstration for my Reinventing the News class at Northeastern. Not gripping journalism, but evidence that modern media tools make it possible even for an old guy like me to make credible-looking video.

The breakthrough here is that I figured out how to add B-roll with iMovie 7 (also known as iMovie '08 under Apple's bizarre naming conventions). I used stills for the B-roll in this example, but the principle would be the same if I had used video instead.

First Amendment Center at Northeastern

The Associated Press reports on the launch of the New England First Amendment Center, founded by the New England First Amendment Coalition, Northeastern's School of Journalism and the Center for Urban and Regional Policy.

Northeastern's coordinator, Walter Robinson, explains that the center will focus on ensuring access to public records, telling the AP: "Most of the people that reporters and citizens deal with who have the information — they are not up on the law — and if people understood the law better, if we had better public education on this, then we would have better compliance."

Adds Steve Burgard, director of the J-school: "We hope a center like this for many people will be place where they can go to learn what the law is and how they can use it."

The center's Web site includes a blog, to which I'll contribute occasionally.

Here is the official announcement.