This past Saturday, along with Jimmy the Uke and Steve McNie, I was once again on GO to pimp the ukulele. It was a lot of fun, as always. Here’s an mp3 of the segment:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I just watched this video interview with Jay Rosen from The Economist’s Tea with The Economist series. The interviewer asks Jay, “What would be the job description of a journalist in the future?”
I think there are different jobs that make up a twenty-first century journalist. One is to be a highly intelligent filter of information coming in. Another is to be an expert in reputation and reliability systems so that you are able to know who a reliable source is because there are so many sources, right? Another is community manager. Managing a community of people who have knowledge and interact with you as a journalist. Knowing how to have not just several dozen sources in your little black telephone book that you use to do your beat, but thousands of sources. Tens of thousands. And how to work efficiently with large groups of people to synthesize information is important. And also important is how to take the greater knowledge we have coming from how people use the internet. Because everything people do online is recorded. How to take this information about what people are clicking, what they’re interested in, where they’re going on the web, what they’re doing now. And treating it as clues to demand. Produce into that demand, without reducing yourself to simply a ratings-driven, click-driven reflex machine.
I think the most successful journalists are going to excel at various hybrid forms of traditional reporting, editing, checking, verifying and new forms of gathering, managing, interacting with people.
Just north of our apartment in Corktown, the development at the corner of Dundas and Parliament continues. Yesterday, I noticed these harbingers of gentrification:
While this _is_ pretty slick (and Google’s service generates many, many types of charts), I think this is as good a time as any to remember that pie charts are terrible. SEED magazine summarizes findings from Bill Cleveland (emphasis mine):
although we’re good at comparing linear distances along a scale — judging which of two lines is longer, a task used in bar graphs — and we’re even better at judging the position of points along a scale, pie charts don’t bring those skills to bear. They do ask us compare angles, but we tend to underestimate acute angles, overestimate obtuse angles, and take horizontally bisected angles as much larger than their vertical counterparts. The problems worsen when we’re asked to judge area and volume: Regular as clockwork, we overestimate the size of smaller objects and underestimate the size of larger ones, to a much greater degree with volume than with area.
I noticed something strange earlier this week. Peter’s Cajun Creole Pizza, our favourite pizza place, was dark before midnight. Then, Tina left a comment at this blog suggesting that Pete’s has been “shut down by the landlord.”
Tonight, upon closer inspection, I confirmed that Pete’s (and Peter’s Corner) are indeed closed, and there are notes on both doors from the landlord.
You know the kind of site I’m talking about? It’s just like you can imagine it printed on glossy paper and being given to you by hand. And it just doesn’t look like a web page.
But it’s the next line that’s the kicker:
It’s on the web. But it’s not of the web.
And right there, Joel put his finger on exactly what bugs me about so much of what CBC does online, particularly with radio show websites. Yes, it’s on the web. But it’s not of the web.
Over the past little while, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about a new type of media job: a hybrid position that some people are calling “programmer-journalist.” Witness, for example:
Up until now, as a journalist you worked with information, researching facts and figures which then you passed on to the reader. However, in a digital world there are more platforms you can use to convey that information – think of maps or mobile applications, augmented reality. And to be able to do that you will have know how to code.
Now, I’m no programmer. Not a real one, anyway. Sure, I know enough HTML and CSS to tweak WordPress themes. I know a tiny little bit of PHP. Through school, I worked summers at a software company. And once upon a time, in the summer of 1998, I wrote a reasonably popular piece of (now-useless) Windows shareware in Visual Basic.
But really, I’m no programmer. Though I intend to become one.
Companies like the CBC (my employer) need people who can build this kind of stuff. They need storytellers with programming chops, and programmers with storytelling chops.
I want to be one of those people.
So then, starting today, I’m embarking on a course of self-directed study. It’s my intention to become a sort of programmer-journalist, and I plan to blog about what I find here in this space. First step: learn Python.
I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions about where I should take this. Comments are most welcome.
