Questions about the Congo

Our task is to put together a story, a blog, a website on the Congo. We are inspired by Nicholas Kristoff’s horrific column on the brutality in the Congo and the deaths of an estimated six million people.

We’ll be researching and writing about the DR, the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly the Belgian Congo. We will be answering fundamental questions.Social Issues in Journalism Visit Site

Questions about the Congo been raised for more than a hundred years. Here is a link to Mark Twain’s famous satire King Leopold’s Soliloquy. There are some harrowing pictures of Congolese workers whose hands were cut off by Leopold’s vicious regime. He of course, denied any involvement, while profiting immensely.

Make your posts short, pointed and informational. Use illustrations, maps,graphs, photos where possible. Exploit a variety of sources.

Have you formulated some questions?

Questions are the foundation of journalism. I was listening to a BBC interview the other day and I doubt the reporter made more than one or two statements. Everything else he said was a question.

It takes quite a bit of discipline to confine yourself to questions. Most of us want to write about what we already know. We want to state our opinions, which are conveniently accessible, even though they may be totally misinformed. 

So the assignment was to write some questions about some aspect of the disaster in Hatai, and answer them. 

If you notice, “Planning and Execution,” the handout I send you from Bill Blundell, is entirely phrased in the interrogative mode. It consists of a series of questions. If you can’t come up with a question on your own, lean on Blundell’s questions.

The informational nature of blogs

One of the goals of this class is explore the vast resources of the Internet. Just writing Haiti in Google and clicking won’t get you a decent understanding of the story. It will get you 195 million hits in 1.4 seconds, but it won’t get you a helpful vision of what’s going on in Haiti.

Our goal in blogging is to find useful sources of information.

We can look at four sources at least:

Mainstream media sources, the newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets that we depend on.

Government websites. 

NGOs (non-governmental organizations) such as the Red Cross, Partners in Health.

Blogs. Technorati might be a good source, but it seems to be dominated by a few major sources such as Huffington Post. Maybe I would check the Daily Dish and see what Andrew Sullivan has to say.

How do you follow the network of sources to find original important work? And how would you know if it was original and important? That leads me to the next question: what is a story, anyway, and what do you look for in a story? Can a blog set about to tell a story that might go on for pages in print? 

Blogging is above all, about finding and sharing good sources.

Welcome to Social Issues in Journalism (Comm. 4314)

In this class we will be blogging about social issues for the entire semester. This is a lot of fun and a challenge at times. On Monday night the communications librarian, Christina Gola, will help us set up the blogs. If you want you can go ahead and set one up at wordpress.com. Please use this free service rather than another. 

Meanwhile, take a tour of the blogs that were produced in the spring semester 2009.

Here’s the link to the syllabus.

–Michael Berryhill

The best blogs of the semester

See if you agree with me, but I think the two best blogs were those of Mildred Scott and Alex Alvarez. Each had a strong title: “Economy, Interrupted,” and “Our ‘Unjust’ Justice System.” Each blogger offered a steady volume of posts with strong graphics and headlines, and succinct, well written stories. Each posted a series of helpful links. 

Other blogs I thought were strong were Job Tennant’s recent posts on “green” technology and UH, and Marylu Rodriguez’s coverage of a talk by Rice sociologists about whether  immigrants are good Americans. Danny Mata finally delivered on the data about teenage homeless that created a vital dimension to his interviews with homeless teenagers.

Thank you again for a great semester and for your work and conversation. I was a pleasure to get to know you.

Again, I urge you to keep you blogs going, or start another. Change the look. But keep your work out there in public. Blogs aren’t a passing fancy. They’re here to stay. I firmly believe they’ll be an essential part of business and government.

Building a bank of resources

Alex has nailed the resources section of her blog better than anyone. Notice the variety and depth of the links: columnists, publications, government sites.

This is an important part of building a blog. One of the sayings I heard at the Knight Conference on Online Journalism is that blogs are not just about what you say. They are about what you read.

We typically think of blogs as a way of sharing opinion, and the stereotypical view of bloggers is of caffeinated, angry people typing snarky things while wearing their pajamas. 

But what if blogs are a way of sharing information, not opinions? Then blogs can be incredibly useful in business, not to mention the news media. 

So work on that bank of resources. Polish it up.

On copyrights and blogs

We need a short lesson on copyrights and blogs. I wish I had the perfect short answer on what you can and cannot put up on the web and how to think about it.  But here is a complex website at the University of Texas.  

It’s called a “crash course” but it contains a lot of information. Maybe too much.

If anyone has found a site   that explains the fundamentals of copyrights and blogs in a simple and straightforward manner, please send me the link.

Tips on writing

As you’re finishing your blogs and improving them, you may be looking for advice. Maybe you’re just warming up to the idea of how to handle language and the like. Some good advice can be found on the Writer’s Craft website, especially in David McHam’s handouts for feature writing. That’s still a lot of information. So if you had to consult one handout it would be the one on how to write.    

Those of you who are confident might turn to it anyway. Lots of good material to review there.

A great immigration story in Sunday NY Times

When I read this story I thought of UH students. It’s about a brother and a sister, one legal, one illegal.

Of all the social issues we face, immigration is one of the most profound and difficult. It appears that President Obama is determined to do something about making it possible for millions of people to get citizen. That may unleash a torrent of fear and resentment. But it may also unleash a great deal of empathy. Americans are basically a generous people, I think.

And business leaders want those immigrant workers.

When generosity meets economics, there may be a way through.

The decline of newspapers

Newspapers are in trouble. We all know this. There’s even a blog called Newspaper Deathwatch, which is not as morbid as it sounds. It offers thoughtful pieces about the financial earthquakes that are going on in journalism, as well as a funny musical video about the problems. Another useful source is “ Reflections of a Newsosaur: Musings (and occasional urgent warnings) of a veteran media executive, who fears our news-gathering companies are stumbling to extinction.” These blogs will take you to a lot of useful sources.

The recent layoffs at the Houston Chronicle led to my appearing on Fox 26  news last Friday for three minutes of fame at 7:30 in the morning.  I searched for the most pertinent facts about the newspaper business. The Pew Center for People and the Press just last month issued a sweeping report. The basic facts are these.

Newspaper advertising fell from $49.3 billion in 2006 to $38 billion in 2008. This is an $11 billion drop. Newspapers are still big businesses. But clearly they are shrinking. And advertising is still declining as the recession deepens. The Houston Chronicle suffered when two big Chevrolet dealerships closed. 

Newspapers used to get 30 percent of their revenue from classified ads, but Monster and Craig’s List changed all that. The internet is ideally suited for classified ads, and what’s worse (for newspapers) it can provide them for virtually no cost. Classifed advertising has dropped from $20 billion in 2000 to $10 billion in 2008.

But keep in mind that while newspapers are in trouble, journalism isn’t necessarily in trouble. The business model for newspapers is broken. But journalism will still be needed. The problem is how to pay for it.