LJWorld.com

Newspapers’ move to the Internet has made articles and their information constantly available, for years after their initial publication.

This has led to people requesting that newspapers “unpublish” certain pieces of information in the article, as Kathy English, public editor of the Toronto Star, has researched in "The Longtail of News: To Unpublish or Not to Unpublish.”

English has discovered that when people request a newspaper to rewrite a past story it may be for something such as charges dropped that they no longer want linked to them. An understandable request.

Other times, sources want to have their quotes removed after rethinking what they want readers to know about them. Too bad, so sad, I say.

Regardless of the reason, should a newspaper comply with unpublishing? Should a newspaper be responsible for constantly updating its online information?

It brings to mind the history-changing that goes on in Orson Welles’ “1984.” If some information can be changed, where do editors draw the line?

An article is a snapshot of history. Even if some years later its information no longer represents the contemporary, at one time it was factual. The snapshot that it embodies has relevance for future generations to reflect on.

Unpublishing means censoring or rewriting history, one editor said to English in her research. I agree with this; granting an edit to one unhappy reader means opening the floodgates to multitude of rewrites (and headaches) for editors.

Another editor said “If we err, or if new relevant facts emerge, we should correct and update online articles.” But where does this end?

Newsrooms today have limited resources as it is, without having to go back and reword the countless articles that contain information that has changed over time. And really, isn’t that nearly every article?

My involvement in the class which has me writing this blog has coincided with my enrollment in an Ethics and the Media class.

It has made for quite an experience in synergistic learning.

The recent shooting at Ft. Hood provided a topic of discussion in my ethics class. Eager to report the event and inform the public, as the media should be, much of the information was quickly compiled. This caused the information to be misreported and incorrect as well as racist and from questionable sources, as it should not be.

After working in the field for this class, I now understand the pressure for quick news. Okay, so I'm only an intern and I don't know the HALF of it, but just play along.

With the Internet and cable news available for continuous news updates, the pressure on journalists is ominous. But losing sight of our ethics cannot be compromised.

As tempting as using questionable but quick sources (Twitter) can be, the value of the hard-earned source cannot be forgotten.

I have seen many classmates (none in this class, just to clarify) go to friends for an easy source or simply invent sources for reporting assignments. This worries me greatly. In an industry that is already faltering, media workers with with that kind of ethic can only cause more damage.

For this class, I was assigned a neighborhood in Lawrence and expected to report on what went on inside its specified boundaries.

This is known as hyper local journalism, and it is a trend that has been growing in the industry for some time now.

The neighborhood I was assigned to cover was Old West Lawrence. Old West Lawrence has a character, history and active residents that some of the neighborhoods in town may lack.

But it still wasn’t all smooth sailing.

One thought that crossed my mind before and during the assignment was “Lawrence isn’t a huge town and already has the Lawrence Journal-World. How much more coverage does each individual neighborhood need? Does local really need a ‘hyper’ in front of it?”

In his blog, Mark Coddington addresses this issue and discusses the contrast between hyperlocal journalism for a rural town and for an area of a large city. I’d say that attempting to cover Old West Lawrence falls somewhere in between.

For a smaller community, or neighborhood, news doesn’t always mean crime, political issues, and the like usually covered on a newspaper front page. As Coddington points out, it can be small-town gossip shared after church on Sunday.

When I spoke with residents in Old West Lawrence, I did get gossip from the residents. But because all of my reporting was going to feed into the LJW, I didn’t feel like this was relevant and lost one of the factions of hyperlocal journalism.

If I did find something newsworthy, chances were the LJW had already gotten to it. My foray into hyperlocal journalism was hitting all kinds of road blocks. I was frustrated. Why couldn’t a meteor just fall into the neighborhood, unbeknownst to the LJW? Then I was sure to get an A, I thought to myself.

One aspect of the assignment was a video package portraying the neighborhood’s personality. Finally, I saw the validity of hyperlocal journalism.

If something similar had been done for the city of Lawrence as a whole, certainly each neighborhood wouldn’t have been given its due. Because I was only covering the area between 6th and 9th, from Kentucky to Michigan, I was able to share perspectives that may have gone unnoticed.

Hyperlocal journalism may mean changing your idea of news. I had to. What is important in a smaller community might not hold on the front page of the New York Times, but to the inhabitants of that community it’s going to be the first thing brought up when they run into their neighbor buying milk at the store.

That’s something like a chat room, to you bloggers.

“Other businesses have been able to figure out how to make [technology] work, such as the finance business. You can get money wherever you go,” said Helen Connors, executive director for Kansas University Center for Health Informatics.

This quote from today’s Journal-World concerns the nation’s struggle with health care. But it echoes a discussion that continues in the journalism industry.

Not only seeking the balance of convenience, accessibility and profit, which the finance business has certainly conquered with ATMs, but also of location. Wherever you go, your bank account is there.

But location and journalism, specifically citizen journalism like Twitter and blogs, does not always happen as easily as slipping your debit card into the nearest ATM.

In an Op-Ed column for the New York Times, Roger Cohen opined Sept. 10 of this year on the way in which Twitter has affected how information comes out of Iran during its current turbulent political atmosphere, caused by the election. Newspapers and broadcast news have been outlawed and so tweets and blogs are the main source of information coming from inside Iran.

“To be a journalist is to bear witness” and that “To bear witness means being there,” Cohen said. But Cohen does not believe that using Twitter makes you a journalist. He said that “journalism is distillation,” which would be needed for the “deluge of raw material that new social media deliver,” which Twitter is part of.

Certainly not all tweets are news, such as when Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, tweets about his wife’s vegan lasagna.

But tweeters and bloggers in Iran might disagree with Cohen. Especially Mojtaba Saminejad, who blogs and tweets about the conflict in Iran where he lives. On Oct. 14, The Lede, The New York Times News Blog, published an interviewwith Saminejad.

Saminejad has been jailed several times for his blogging and its criticism of the Iranian government, but he persists because of his love for blogging and because he feels that “defending human rights is a duty for me.”

Hmm. Government watch dog? Check.

Desire to provide the people with pertinent information? Check.

Even I, who has been wary of Twitter and blogs like Cohen, can admit that Saminejad sounds an awful lot like a journalist. His blogs and Tweets might not go through the same distilling process that a story for the Times does, but things in Iran are messy and happen fast. The journalism is going to be the same way.

So the ATM of journalism doesn’t quite exist yet, providing a precise amount of necessary journalism funds with the scan of a card. Sometimes you’re going to have to sift through the news, online as well as print, to get a story you read all the way to the end. Location and first-hand observations are still important to journalism, but the medium used to relay these observations is less relevant. A 14 year-olds tweets about what happened at the mall are far less news worthy than Saminejad’s provisions on Iran. With all information, you the consumer still has to question the source.

Because you’re not just going to stick that debit card anywhere, are you?

In the ongoing, perhaps never ending, transition the media industry is making the territory of the Internet is typically the focus.

As Matt Pressman pointed out in the June 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, much of the public believes that the industry was too slow to jump on the digital bandwagon (http://www.vanityfair.com/online/culture/2009/06/23/a-media-guy-asks-why-do-they-hate-us.html). Because of this the media is still suffering from its inability to utilize the Internet effectively and use it to make money.

Rupert Murdoch hopes to change that. As Vanity Fair reported this month, Murdoch will begin making readers pay for the online version of the London Sunday Times (http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2009/11/michael-wolff-200911).

Payment for online journalism has shown almost zero success in the past, but Murdoch's business zeal might be the factor needed to make it work. Only time will tell on that front.

What the Murdoch situation illustrates however is a man who is certainly not Internet savvy, if the article portrays him accurately, attempting to do something with the Internet that much more capable people have failed to accomplish.

But will my generation (I'm a junior at KU) be able to do anything better? I don't think there's any doubt that the days of the printed newspaper are numbered. There are countless statistics saying that only the older generation reads the paper with the morning coffee anymore, and that generation won't be around forever (Sorry, Mom and Dad).

One member of this older generation (how much of a pretentious young twerp do I sound like when I say "older generation?") does wax on the troubles of the media industry, the blogger Newsosaur. One recent post of his gave his feedback on the recent Columbia University study titled "The Reconstruction of American Journalism." (http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/10/text-of-columbia-report-on-msm.html)

The study is 98 pages long, so Newsosaur's thoughts will have to serve as my source. What he focused on did not concern online journalism, ironic since he is a blogger. The popularity (I don't have any numbers on this, only the focus and media attention given to some as my back up) of blogs is interesting.

Pressman mentions in his article that a common complaint from readers is that journalists screw up facts, stories, all of that. And yet blogs, without the ethics and editing of print, are read widely and the information repeated by readers. Just look at what Perez Hilton has done with a blog.

But here I am, writing a blog for a journalism class so maybe blogs will begin to move into a legitimate area for journalism.

I mean, you are reading this, right?

This map shows the path we took around Lawrence. Our trip took around four hours but we saw parts of Lawrence we had never seen before.
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J691_Landmarks_001__.jpg

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Something tells me a farmer didn't do the graffiti art on this abandoned plow at the intersection of 27th & Inverness.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Things got stoic at the Clinton Lake Dam.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... The water tower at the western edge of Lawrence can sleep easy. The chain link fence hurt my hands too much to climb the whole way over.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... I have driven by this countless times and had always assumed it was just public park decoration. After doing a little research on Lawrence web site I found out that it was constructed during the Cold War. Nothing says family fun like relics from our nuclear tension with the U.S.S.R.

http://lawrenceks.org/lprd/parks/centennialpark

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... The University of Kansas Boathouse just opened the spring of this year. Just be sure to dodge the road maintenance in front of Burcham Park if you want to visit it.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Is she afraid of the rushing waters or Abe & Jake's Landing across the way?

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... The Lawrence Visitors Center aims to help people become acquainted with the city of Lawrence. Amanda became acquainted with the jayhawk in the front.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Things got spicy at El Matador Restaurant, the oldest still-standing building in Lawrence. We took a pit stop to fuel up before tackling the rest of the landmarks.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... We wandered up and down Rhode Island before finding the metal sphere behind some trees only to discover that there's no plaque with historical context. Downgrade.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Adam waiting impatiently at the Amtrak station...

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... ...but perhaps Adam's wait would no longer be in vain if this locomotion left the park and took to the streets. We're not holding our breath, though.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... The Eldridge Hotel: the quintessential historical landmark of Downtown Lawrence.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Not everyone understands the landmarks assignment.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Adam strikes a triumphant pose at the former Watkins Bank.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... The day was heating up at this point; had the wading pool been open, I have no doubt that we would have taken advantage of it. But pretending was almost as fun.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Adam perched on the railing of the bandstand in South Park.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Amanda stands in front of the color and commotion of the mural at the softball diamond on 11th and Douglas.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Adam sits atop a parking meter against a backdrop of the Aaron Douglas mural; we didn't actually put any coins into the meter, we figured he was payment enough.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... Amanda looks a little camera shy in front of Central Junior High.

http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... The elusive KU student...