Message from Michael - Haiti - January 18,2010

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        January 18, 2010                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

      HAITI AND NEWS MEDIA

      SLACKTAVISM AND FICLETS

      WASHING THE DIRTY LAUNDRY

      BEECHWOOD 4-5-7-8-9

      COCKTAIL CHATTER

 

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      HAITI AND NEWS MEDIA:  In the Haitian Vodou religion there is a phrase – Sa Nou Pa We Yo.  It translates to – Those We Don’t See, or The Invisible Ones.  A belief, according to Goucher College professor and writer Madison Smartt Bell writing in The New York Times, that those who die inhabit a parallel universe close to the living.  With a history of poverty and neglect, that phrase could probably be applied to all Haitians.  Now though with the media coverage of the devastating earthquake, we are getting to see them in all their misery and hurt.  The question being asked by some is whether that attention will continue.  The answer to that may come in the form of social media and social networking.    

As usual, there is the ‘standard’ coverage, with the networks scrambling to get their anchors and A-team correspondents there.  The TVNewsers section of the Mediabistro.com website has a running tally of some 30 reporters and anchors sent to Port au Prince.  Interestingly, just about every on-air person has said the same thing, it seems to me, that the cameras can’t catch the feeling or the magnitude of the devastation.  Major newspapers were also scrambling, especially since The Columbia Journalism Review reports that only the Associated Press had a foreign correspondent in Haiti.  Both Reuters and Agence France Presse employ Haitian-born reporters.  There are several Caribbean news sites, including website Radio Station World which lists 78 radio stations in Haiti broadcasting on the web.  Again, in what appears to be common place with such events, Twitter and most particularly Twitpic led the mainstream media coverage, according to an analysis by the Sydney Morning Herald with some of the first pictures and stories out.  In addition, less than five days since being created, Facebook site Earthquake Haiti has more than 264,000 members.  PC World cites a wordpress blog, Haitifeed, as one of the best sources for its steady stream of first hand accounts, mixed in with mainstream media accounts.  One of the better sites for getting an overview look at the media coverage of the Haitian tragedy is webjournalist.org, created by Professor Robert Hernandez of the University Of Southern California – Annenberg which shows a variety of multi-media displays of the earthquake, including before and after aerials of the area.  The website shows what some of the creative “mainstream media” can do, including CNN’s iReport section which Hernandez rightfully notes, “was made for a story like this.”            

      SLACKTAVISM AND FICLETS:  As much as the new media and social networking tools have played a big part in the media coverage, they may play an even bigger part in the thing they are named for – new and social – as in helping people in new ways.  For example, more than $7 Million has been raised by the Mobile Giving Foundation just over the weekend.  By simply texting the word “Haiti” to one of several different numbers, you could donate $5 or $10 to groups ranging from the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, to The Salvation Army, UNICEF, American Red Cross – any one of 20 groups.  The amount is added to your monthly cell phone bill, meaning you don’t have to use your credit card.  The beauty of this, is that it is so easy that it overcomes people’s inertia in giving – what the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association called “slacktavism” – a term that refers to people with good intentions but closed wallets.  Also on Facebook, a guy named Stephen D. Chowrono has started a group called “for every person who joins I will donate $0.05” to the earthquake victims.  More than 260,000 people have joined and he has donated $3,200.  On community website, Live Journal, they’re holding an auction of items donated by members with the proceeds going to Haiti relief.  One of them is a Ficlet, which refers to really, really short, short stories and which, apparently, lots of people know about (no, not me.)     

      WASHING THE DIRTY LAUNDRY:  All right, I will admit I use the Don Henley song too often when talking about journalism, but there is one line in the song that really applies to a study released by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism:  “When It’s Said and Done, We Haven’t Told You A Thing.”  Apparently that’s true, especially of so-called new media.  In a study of the ‘news ecosystem’ in Baltimore, designed to find out who really produces what in news, the authors say eight out of the ten stories (83%) were simply repeats or re-packaged versions of previous stories.  And of those stories that were actually and truly new enterprise stories, nearly every one (95%) came from so-called ‘traditional media’ – either newspapers or local TV, with newspapers (roughly 48%) outweighing local TV (28%) by a significant margin, followed by specialty newspapers (13%) and radio (7%).  At the same time, the report found that local TV produced more content than newspapers and that local TV was ‘more local’ with two thirds of its stories (64%) local compared to about half (53%) for newspapers.

Not that the traditional media have anything to be particularly proud of, according to the study.  The study found, for example, that The Sun newspaper produced a third less (32%) stories last year than it did in 1999 and three quarters (72%) less than in 1991.   Even less to be proud of, and running counter to everything we broadcast teachers teach and we consultants advise, the report found ‘official news’ dominates what it called the news ‘echo chamber’ with nearly two-thirds (62%) of all the news coming from government officials.  It was to the point that the official news releases were being ‘reported’ word for word.  In part the study says that was because of the emphasis on using the new technology to break news. 

The report focused on Baltimore as a microcosm of what is happening in the news business, and although the authors were careful to say it is only one example, the implication was that what they found there was indicative of what is happening everywhere.  Interestingly, the study authors found 53 different news outlets in the city, ranging from the daily newspaper, weeklies, local television, news/ talk radio, blogs, websites by former journalists and even some news twittering.  Most of those new media efforts were more of an “alert system,” according to the study, with the Web in particular, clearly the first place of publication for all the media.  But those same websites also had some of the oldest news, including ‘numerous examples’ of other people’s work being carried without attribution and even old stories that were obsolete being carried well after events had changed and the original website having updated them.               

      BEECHWOOD 4-5-7-8-9:  More than one in five (22.7%) of American homes use ONLY wireless phones and have NO landline phones, according to a national health survey by the Centers  for Disease Control.  That survey took a snapshot of the first half of last year, and the percentage has been rising a steady five points each year, according to the authors.  The one in five figure is double what it was in 2006 when one in ten homes had only wireless phones.  What the study called ‘wireless-mostly households’ in which there are wireless and landline phones but almost all the calls are made wirelessly make up a seventh (14.7%) of all households.  Not too surprisingly, younger people are more likely to go wireless, with, for example, nearly half (45.8%) of those adults aged 25 – 29 living in households with only wireless telephones.  It’s roughly a third (33.5%) for those aged 30 – 34, but more than that (37.6%) for those even younger – 18 – 24.  Men (22.5%) and women (19.8%) are about equally likely to live in a household with only wireless telephones.  People living in poverty are nearly twice as likely (33%) to be wireless only than higher income adults (18.9%).  In keeping with that, and the study’s focus on health, the report found that wireless-only adults are more likely (35.3%) to binge drink than landline households (19.3%); more likely to be current smokers; more likely to have been tested for HIV, and twice as likely (29.4%) to have no health insurance than landline households (13.7%).  Finally, a question, does anybody out there know what the headline refers to, and do any of you remember when phone numbers had word prefixes?        

      COCKTAIL CHATTER:  A 12-ounce cup of Starbucks coffee has nearly double the caffeine of a 16-ounce cup of coffee from either McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts.  That’s about 260 mg’s of caffeine versus the other’s 140 mg’s.  According to the article from Fast Company from which this is drawn, the Starbucks injection is only slightly short of that from a 12-ounce can of Jolt, at roughly 280mg’s which, in turn, is only slightly short of the 300 mg’s which is labeled “caffeine intoxication” or “the jitters.”   Just so you know, Coke, Mountain Dew and Diet Coke hover around the 50mg mark.  If you want to see the numbers for yourself, the link is http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ben-paynter/ben-paynter/caffeine-charting-your-morning-buzz.  In the category of whose-ox-is-being-gored decision making, when Americans were asked specifically which of 14 federal programs to cut, only two programs would be cut and, even then, only one in five would agree to those being cut.  Nine of the programs would actually get increases, according to the survey on the Pew Center’s Databank, and three would remain the same.  Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the programs Americans would cut are assistance to needy people around the world (ironic, considering the Haiti situation) and the State Department.  If you want to see the specifics, go to  http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=906 .  And, finally, in the category of OMG-I-wished-I-could-do-that, a one-time surfing bum has started a time share with a difference.  After sailing around the world in a 52-foot catamaran, Gavin McClurg put together a package of investors who bought shares in a much larger sailing vessel at $20,000 a share for the right to spend a week or two aboard the sailing ship.  According to the article in Forbes magazine, you can go to an archipelago, the South Seas, the tropics… you name it.  If you want to dream a little, here’s the link:  http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0118/entrepreneurs-offshore-odysseys-timeshare-share-float.html .   

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