AMY O'LEARY

"...someone mounting a challenge... saying, for example, that Philip Roth just doesn’t speak to your experience can inspire... disproportionate surprise and consternation."

An interesting look at the business models, readership, staff size and revenue of top online media startups.

"Sauter was highly critical of journalists who write inaccurately about online activism. She argued that journalists focus on the tactics of interrupted service rather than the injustices that motivate them, leading to a characterization of those actors as “hacker troll clowns.” In this way, Sauter argues, the media is propagating a narrative of “scary cyber terrorism” that is very different from how in-the-street activism is understood."

"I see something unusual in the structure of this story, but I don’t have a name for it. We can say what it is not. It is not a pure linear narrative. It is not a pyramid of information. It is not a broken line of narrative and explanation. It is not anecdote/nut graph/analysis. It is not what I described years ago as an hourglass, which has a news top and a narrative bottom. So what is it?"

"Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long-haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, ups, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy. Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food."

"Memorization is no longer an efficient technology."

"Analytics isn't about reporting for the sake of reporting, it's about tracking progress. And not just aimless progress, but progress towards something you're trying to accomplish. If you don't know where you're going, metrics aren't going to be particularly helpful."

Similar to a "close the exits" mentality for digital storytelling: "Why do we call it casino-driven design? Casinos are notorious for adopting an interior design that keeps people gambling. There are no windows and no clocks so it’s easy to lose track of how long one has been gambling."

Vocabulary Events!

"DARPA even looks at finding ways to generate versions of events that could be used in attempts to persuade people not to support the enemy. Known as Narrative Networks, it seeks to "understand how narratives influence human thoughts and behaviour, then apply those findings to a security context in order to address security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution,” says William Casebeer, the Darpa official leading the work."

"You can use techniques that can’t be used in print, or at least not replicated easily,” says Mark Waid, longtime author for DC and Marvel comics and publisher of Thrillbent digital comics. “In a digital comic, you can do ‘rack focus’—shifting focus between foreground and background—in the same panel, versus having the reader's eyes move to another panel that shows the altered focus. And you can have dialogue popping up in the same panel.”"

"Mingus composed—as he did most things—his own way. He was well versed in theory and composition, yet he used notation sparingly, working out ideas at the piano and playing or singing them to his musicians, who would learn their parts by ear, a few bars at a time. He sketched out just enough to give each band member a sense of what he was meant to do, often providing pedal points or snatches of scales, or even simply suggesting moods."

"Nobody that term recorded Max’s words systematically. However, in the wake of his death, David and I found ourselves returning to our notes, where we’d written down many of Max’s remarks. These we gleaned and shared with our classmates. Still, I wish we’d been more diligent, more complete. The comments recorded here represent only a small portion of Max’s contribution to the class."

A smart take on metrics, how not to drown in them, and how to focus on what really counts. —AO

An interactive documentary from the point of view of a bear.

"Sometimes the Google Bus just seems like one face of Janus-headed capitalism; it contains the people too valuable even to use public transport or drive themselves. In the same spaces wander homeless people undeserving of private space, or the minimum comfort and security; right by the Google bus stop on Cesar Chavez Street immigrant men from Latin America stand waiting for employers in the building trade to scoop them up, or to be arrested and deported by the government. Both sides of the divide are bleak, and the middle way is hard to find."

Film editor Walter Murch, discusses translating the work of Curzio Malaparte, an Italian of German heritage who was a journalist, dramatic, novelist and diplomat whose writing attacked totalitarianism and Hitler’s reign.

"Local journalism’s vision of itself — as an institutionally grounded profession that empirically informs (and even, perhaps, “assembles”) the public — is a noble vision of tremendous democratic importance. But the unreflexive commitment to a particular and historically contingent version of this self-image now undermines these larger democratic aspirations. The story of how journalism’s vision of its unified public unraveled, how long taken-for-granted practices of news reporting were suddenly rendered problematic, and how news organizations struggled to rebuild local journalism — to network the news — is the story of this book."

"3D is antithetical to storytelling, where immersion in character is the goal."

On note-taking throughout history.

"Maybe it's just as natural for us to be generous. Maybe the frog on a tortoise with a spider on its head is not an outlier, but proof, dripping in chlorine, of our quite natural tendency to help one another out."

"Can anything be poetic? Well maybe the same way nearly anything can be spray-painted. But honestly, only the human tongue nailed to the sky with tiny golden nails is poetry. Okay, we also have to include the heart inside a burning tree of thorns. And something jellyfish-like that I’m still trying to get my hands on."

"Like most autodidacts, I’m a spotty reader, subject to vagrant whims, led by meandering interests. “Palimpsest” is one of many personal guides for me. It can lead to the study of memory, to historical ideas about architecture, to geology, to art history. Stay with it long enough and you may find yourself nudging the notion that civilization was created by extraterrestrial visitors."

"Everyone's unwritten work is brilliant. And the more unwritten it is, the more brilliant it is. We have all met those glib, intimidating graduate students or faculty members. They are at their most dangerous holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, in some bar or at an office party. They have all the answers. They can tell you just what they will write about, and how great it will be. Years pass, and they still have the same pat, 200-word answer to "What are you working on?" It never changes, because they are not actually working on anything, except that one little act."

"Rule 6: What isn’t said is as important as what is said. In many classic short stories, the real action occurs in the silences. Try to keep all the good stuff off the page. Some “real world” practice might help. The next time your partner comes home, ignore his or her existence for 30 minutes, and then blurt out “That’s it!” and drive the car onto the neighbor’s lawn. When your children approach at bedtime, squeeze their shoulders meaningfully and, if you’re a woman, smear your lipstick across your face with the back of your wrist, or, if you’re a man, weep violently until they say, “It’s O.K., Dad.” Drink out of a chipped mug, a souvenir from a family vacation or weekend getaway in better times, one that can trigger a two-paragraph compare/contrast description later on. It’s a bit like Method acting. Simply let this thought guide your every word and gesture: “Something is wrong — can you guess what it is?” If you’re going for something a little more postmodern, repeat the above, but with fish."

"When an unsuspecting researcher followed a mysterious command on a 4chan board, he found himself drawn into a scavenger hunt that led him down the darkest corridors of the internet and stretched across the globe. But in a place where no one shows his face and no one plays by the rules, how do you tell where the game ends and reality begins?"

"Like every other era, the internet age has its own class of booster gurus. They are the “cybertheorists”, embedded reporters of the social network, dreaming of a perfectible electronic future and handing down oracular commandments about how the world must be remade."

Basic, practical advice that is so easy to forget.

"When you’re reporting and writing that, you’re in the bubble and you have no perspective. You might have vehement arguments with someone at the time and it might take three months before you realize, “Oh, he was right.”"

"The truth is that many future poets, novelists, and screenwriters are not likely to be straight-A students, either in high school or in college. The arts through which they will discover themselves prize creativity, originality, and intensity above academic performance; they value introspection above extroversion, insight above rote learning. Such unusual students may be, in the long run, the graduates of whom we will be most proud. Do we have room for the reflective introvert as well as for the future leader? Will we enjoy the student who manages to do respectably but not brilliantly in all her subjects but one—but at that one surpasses all her companions? Will we welcome eagerly the person who has in high school been completely uninterested in public service or sports—but who may be the next Wallace Stevens? Can we preach the doctrine of excellence in an art; the doctrine of intellectual absorption in a single field of study; even the doctrine of unsociability; even the doctrine of indifference to money?"

Place explainers, crowd pleasers, curiosity stimulators, news explainers, major breaking news, feel-good smilers, topical buzzers, provocative controversies and awe-inspiring visuals. Sounds a lot like a healthy news mix.

Now that Facebook is starting to make people feel bad, it's all over for them. -AO

"Almost one in every five tweets generates more retweets than clicks. This suggests many people pass on a link without looking at it, and perhaps even worse, vetting it."

Bob is exactly right here about what makes a good multimedia story, and what makes a terribly, terribly mediocre one.

"Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies. Reading is an integral part of our lived experience, our sense of being in the world, even if at times this can mean feeling intensely apart from it. How we hold our reading materials, how we look at them, navigate them, take notes on them, share them, play with them, even where we read them—these are the categories that have mattered most to us as readers throughout the long and varied history of reading."

A handy list of embeddable tools. I am hanging onto this as a resource for people who want to add contextual multimedia to blog posts and stories without having a development team available. -AO

"Perhaps there is a wider lesson here: you cannot have it all, you cannot reconcile all possible sources of pleasure."

Lots of relevant studies, including some on print vs. digital newspaper reading/scanning referenced in this powerpoint.

"Books as physical objects matter to me, because they evoke the past. A Métro ticket falls out of a book I bought 40 years ago, and I am transported back to the Rue Saint-Jacques on Sept. 12, 1972, where I am waiting for someone named Annie LeCombe. A telephone message from a friend who died too young falls out of a book, and I find myself back in the Chateau Marmont on a balmy September day in 1995. A note I scribbled to myself in "Homage to Catalonia" in 1973 when I was in Granada reminds me to learn Spanish, which I have not yet done, and to go back to Granada. None of this will work with a Kindle. People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, not merely an electronic version, believe that the objects themselves are sacred. Some people may find this attitude baffling, arguing that books are merely objects that take up space. This is true, but so are Prague and your kids and the Sistine Chapel. Think it through, bozos."

"Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story is a portrait gallery of leading modern philosophers. He visited each of them in turn, warning them in advance that he was coming to discuss with them a single question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

"Circa believes news consumption on phones is all wrong. So it breaks down stories into minimalist morsels that fit on a mobile phone screen, with one to three sentences on each point, often with an image or a map."

"Dispirited by the humdrum state of e-books, Horowitz committed himself to creating the page turner of the future, devoting a year to developing an app/serial novel that would push beyond what anyone had seen before. "E-books were unmistakably a lesser form," he says. "There was not a spirit of excitement about them, among writers or readers." After making a list of what iPhones can do, Horowitz developed a story that would suit them. It would need to be delivered in bursts short enough to be read in about 15 minutes, standing in line or waiting for the subway. And it would take advantage of GPS, creating location-specific features."

"Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date. But at what rate do former facts disappear?"

"People wanted to read things and experience things and learn things. The Internet isn’t just for those of us who are bored at work in the afternoon and shuffling through things.”

Wonderful summary of some issues surrounding attention, the internet, and what we choose to do with our time. Note the author speaks about how beginning at The New York Times site, they were led down a rabbit hole of inattention! Lots to think about here. -ao

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect," Teller says.

It’s a really useful list, and worth taking a look at the whole thing, but here are the first ten questions: What does it say? What does it mean? Is what it says and what it means the same thing? Do we want that? Why do we need to say that here? If you stopped reading here, what’s the message? What’s the take away after 8 seconds? How does this make you feel? What’s down below? How else can we say this?

"Writing has always seemed to me a fight against loss, an instinct for replay; a resistance to the attrition of memory. To translate lived experience into a pattern of words that preserves its vitality without fixing it in literary embalming fluid; that for me has been the main thing."

"When news came in a sheaf of pages it made sense to divide them into sections—domestic, foreign, business, and so on—with an editor and a team of writers for each one, and make each writer responsible for a slice of that section: a beat. Matching people to pages made managing the newspaper easier, and covering all the news in each beat allowed it to be comprehensive—which was how it could appeal to the most readers and get the most sales. Online, however, trying to be the one comprehensive publication makes no sense. Readers can browse hundreds of news sites at no extra cost. That drives the sites to specialise. Yet most still structure themselves around fixed sections and beats. Slide your mouse across the navigation bar at the top of almost any news site, and there they are, the phantom limbs of the newspaper creatures of old. It hasn’t occurred to them that when there are no pages and sections to constrain you, you are free to reframe your description of reality too."

"By the time Kaplan sat down to write the profile, he was feeling overwhelmed and worried he would freeze—Harper’s all over again. So he looked to his Old Masters. Taking out Gay Talese’s Fame and Obscurity, he opened to the legendary write-around profile “Frank Sinatra has a cold” and studied its form as one might study a sonnet. He noted where Talese had live action, flashbacks, biographical exposition, and the way these pieces fit together. He took his Letterman notes and arranged them according to Talese’s schema, and then ran the whole thing through the typewriter—and again, and again, and then once more. “I could see what he was doing, finally, after like twenty drafts,” Kaplan says."

"we make the mistake of assuming that some people just have the knack. Some people do have the knack, but much of artful journalism, whether or not it is for ordinary people, is simply hard work — craft."

"The fact that there is no such thing as a true or a false photograph. Truth and falsity properly considered are properties of language, not of images. I believe that we’ve gotten into all kinds of trouble by talking about images as though they were true or false."

Intriguing, practical look at how product designers embed emotional personality traits in their work.

"Exactly mimic having written a story, an ageing science fiction hack once advised me: then learn to write a story in a way that exactly mimics having written a different one. Write each separate sentence, paragraph and chapter of every book as if they’re mimicking some other sentence, paragraph or chapter. Soon there’s this odd, constant sense of implication in the text. It seems loaded. It seems like the alienated echo of something else. That something else is your gift to the reader. Your gift to the reader isn’t a lot of words. It’s to have a grasp of syntax & inflexion that lets you load more into the text than it seems to be able to accomodate. He’s dead now of course, his books passed over as ragtime & illiterate, but I’ve taken up where he left off."

On academic writing and its true audience: "no normal person can read that once and feel he knows what Klancher means."

"the contemporary binary of print vs. digital is a false dichotomy, one which pushes us towards asking the wrong questions and creating all-too-simple answers. As Price ventures, the most interesting question to ask may be not “what the Victorians felt about the book but why they felt so much.” The same might be said of our feelings towards books – both print and digital – today. Books matter in every sense of the word."

This is why, when I joined my college paper, I inaugurated the position of layout editor. Journalists should be thinking about reader comprehension holistically, as much as possible. -AO

"These three things—a biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation—are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century."

"Instead of dopamine causing us to experience pleasure, the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search."

A fascinating look at how narrative is used as a feedback mechanism in game mechanics. -AO

Fascinating piece about a debate in video gaming, about different lengths of games designed for different audiences in mind — what are the applications to journalism?

"At NPR, we have no end of nuanced, complicated matters to unravel, and I’m convinced that the transition to digital will end up being a huge asset in this task, not a hindrance. But we need to advance in our understanding of how narrative can work online."

Great advice from Ann Friedman for aspiring journalists.

"All pop-science these days must be translated into stories, as if readers, like children, cannot absorb the material any other way;"

"Steadiness -- compelling news expressed in straightforward, not hyperbolic, language -- is actually a component of maximally shareable content, the algorithm suggests."