Tweeting from a funeral? Is it OK or is it in bad taste?

When I worked as a reporter, I covered more than my share of funerals. One was for a 7-year-old who had his head cut off with a box cutter after a home invasion. Another was for a family of two young sisters and their grandmother who all died in a fire while the mother/daughter was in prison on drug charges. The mother recieved special dispensation from Gov. Rowland to attend the funeral.

Both were high profile stories that appeared on the front page of the newspaper. Both were heartbreaking.
The funerals were heartbreaking, too. I remember staying way in the back, watching scenes play themselves out, and taking notes as discreetly as possible with my pen and my notebook.

Would punching out my notes on my mobile phone in 140-character sentences and sending them out to the public live on my Twitter feed during the service be essentially the same thing in this day and age?

I don’t know.

I remember taking the time after both of these funerals to be very thoughful and respectful with the words and information I delivered to the public in my story.

Maybe that’s my problem: Can you be thoughtful and meaningful on Twitter?

Maybe you can. But such immediacy leaves lots of room for thoughtlessness, too.

Twittering for a news organization during the funeral service of a private citizen is not necessarily unethical, but it feels disrespectful. Aren’t the deceased and their grieving family entitled to the full attention of everyone attending funeral services, including the press? Even the PGA forces spectators to turn off their cell phones at golf tournaments.

If you are constantly connected and communicating, you are only giving partial attention to the event at hand.

Has the public’s appetite for information become so insatiable that we’ve come to require play-by-play commentary during funeral services? Can’t the public wait until it’s over?

Or does the intense pressure on media outlets to be “first” in today’s highly competitive information climate mean that funerals are fair game for tweets too?

Writing for the web demands writing short. You are crafting content for an audience with a very limited attention span. And most people don’t read online. They scan.

So here are 25 tips for writing short by Roy Peter Clarke, the writing coach at Poynter Institute.

My short list of Clarke’s best tips:

• #6. Beware: The infinite space on the Internet creates aerated prose.
• #7. The shorter the passage, the greater the value of each word.
• #12. Imagine a short piece from the get-go. Conceive a sonnet, not an epic.
• #17. Read, study, and collect great examples of short writing, everything from the diaries of Samuel Pepys to the Tweets of your favorite Twits.
• #18. The best place for an important word in a short passage is at the END.
• #22. Obey Mark Twain: You may need more time, not less, to write something good and short.
• #25. Treat all short forms of journalism – headline, caption, blurb, blog post – as literary genres.

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”
— Gen. Eric Shinseki

“The future belongs to people who see possibilities before they become obvious.”
— Ted Levitt

- What Should Journalism Professors Tell Their Students?

- Technology Is Newspapers Undoing

“Everyone’s composing their own flow. And once you start becoming the composer of your own flow, you can’t go back.”

- Lars Bastholm, Executive Creative Director at AKQA New York.

Advances in mobile technology and the continued proliferation of mobile devices will mean a greater boon for citizen journalism. The idea behind citizen journalism, also known participatory journalism, is that individuals with no professional journalism training play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. Mobile technology is opening up more channels of participation for people (aka citizens) who have been marginalized for lack of access to a public media sphere.  

Mobile phone subscriptions in the world are estimated to reach four billion by the end of 2008. Mobile communication hardware is growing cheaper, smaller, and more portable. Mobile technology is offering users hand-held technological convergence. The masses now have access to communication devices that can record a live broadcast, photograph or videotape an event, conduct interviews, write articles or conduct a survey or poll, all of which can immediately published to a global audience. .

The power to collect and distribute information used to belong only to media companies – a rigid, expensive and profitable information system of “one-to-many.” Mobile technology has broken down those barriers, giving all users read/write access to the larger information world – an affordable, open information system of “many-to-many.” 

So if “many to many” is the new model, citizen journalism backed by the power of mobile technology will continue to challenge the traditional structure and function of news organizations. The type of news being published by citizens ranges from highly personalized content, to groundbreaking news stories or pictures and video, as well as information neglected by mainstream media. Individuals with mobile devices are capturing ‘news’ in real or close-to-real time, often faster than professional journalists. This will continue to happen with greater frequency. For many people in the world, short message service (SMS) is their main news delivery channel, both for receiving information as well as live reporting of information.

Mobile phones are also being used by activists as tools to engage, organize, mobilize, and inform people in advocacy and social action campaigns. For example in 2001, when Philippine President Joseph Estrada was forced from office, he bitterly complained that the popular uprising against him was a “coup de text.” Protests once publicized on coffeehouse bulletin boards can now be organized entirely through text-messaging networks that can reach vast numbers of people in a matter of minutes.

Increased collaboration between traditional news companies and mobile citizen news gatherers can lead to better news coverage overall and ideally, a more informed public. Successful companies will learn to be inclusive. For example, the news content of the successful Northwest Voice newspaper and website in Bakersfield, California comes from its citizens. “We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the Voice, rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors,” said Mary Lou Fulton, the publisher.

Serious competition from anyone armed with a decent cell phone and an Internet connection will also force also professional journalists to make better use of mobile technology. The “mobile journalism toolkit” that Reuters and Nokia tested in 2007 should not be a one-time experiment. Mobile phones with cameras, keyboards, small tripods and solar chargers should be required for every professional journalist. If not, how can today’s journalists expect to remain relevant in this new mobile news environment?

SOURCES

Bowman, S. and Willis, C. “We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information.” The Media Center at the American Press Institute: 2003. http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php

Jordan, Mary. “Going Mobile: Text Messages Guide Filipino Protesters.” Washington Post: August 25, 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/24/AR2006082401379.html

Verclas, Katrin. “A Mobile Voice: The Use of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media.” MobileActive.org: November 2008. http://mobileactive.org/mobile-voice-use-mobile-phones-citizen-media

Wikipedia: Citizen Journalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism

September 11, 2001. According to the Pew Internet Project, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, generated the most traffic to traditional news sites in the history of the Web. The immense demand for immediate news had people turning  to e-mail, weblogs and forums “as conduits for information, commentary, and action related to 9/11 events.” The response on the Internet gave rise to a new proliferation of “do-it-yourself journalism” including eyewitness accounts, photo galleries, commentary and personal storytelling.

February 2, 2003. Following the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, news and government organizations, including NASA and the Dallas Morning News, called upon the public to submit eyewitness accounts and photographs that might lead to clues to the cause of the spacecraft’s disintegration.

February 18, 2003. In response to the massive worldwide demonstration organized to protest the start of the Iraq war, BBC News asked readers to send in images of the anti-war demonstrations around the world. The news organization asked specifically for images taken with digital cameras and cell phones with built-in cameras. It published the best photos on its Web site.

Sunday, December 26, 2004. A 9.1-magnitude underwater earthquake caused a huge tsunami in Banda Aceh Indonesia. More than 225,000 people in 11 countries died as a result. News footage taken by witnesses with mobile recording devices was widely disseminated, stirring a worldwide humanitarian effort.

May 27, 2005. ‘American Idol’ TV watchers sent 41 million text messages. Americans are getting more comfortable sending SMS.

July 7, 2005.  Terrorists blew up three underground trains and a double-decker bus in London, killing scores and injuring hundreds. The use of camera and video phones by passengers provided the only on-scene news photos of the events.

May 2006. ‘American Idol’ sets another SMS record, generating 64.5 million SMS messages on Cingular and breaking the previous record of 41.5 million messages.

March 9-18, 2007. Twitter gets attention from news organizations during the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. The service was named the best blogging tool by attendees to share news and opinion, and to arrange meet ups at parties. 

April 16, 2007. The Virginia Tech massacre. The perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people and wounded many others before committing suicide. A student named Jamal Albarghouti shot video on his cell phone camera of the shootings in progress and sent them to CNN’s iReport citizen journalism website. The video clips were then broadcast widely by CNN and other media.

August 1, 2007. Minneapolis Bridge Collapse. Citizen journalists using mobile devices captured some of the first images of the devastation and posted them to CNN’s iReport website, which were then broadcast widely. These citizen journalist witnesses also helped to describe the disaster to CNN anchors on air.

September 2007. Citizen protests in Burma were largely reported to the world through photos and video captured on mobile phones. Images of monks marching peacefully in protest and being attacked in Burma reached a global online public in a matter of hours, rather than days, quickly moving the world to action.

October 2007. California wildfires. News outlets solicited, and subsequently used, submissions from people capturing news with cell phone cameras and posting them on blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.. Multimedia platform Veeker, which signed a deal with NBC to handle viewer uploads in 10 major cities, said that NBC San Diego recieved over 2000 submissions of pictures and video related to the wildfires.

October 2007. Nokia and Reuters announced that they had partnered to create the ‘Mobile Journalism Toolkit,’ which teams a Nokia N95 cell phone with a keyboard, small tripod, and solar charger — technologies often used by amateurs to capture local news. The toolkit was deployed to select Reuters journalists to help them file stories from the field and use the cell phone’s camera to take photos and videos of news events. “By running on handheld devices, rather than on bulkier laptop computers, the mobile journalism application enables us to create complete stories and file them for distribution, without leaving the scene,” said Nic Fulton, Chief Scientist at Reuters.

May 2008. AT&T announced the company has shattered its text messaging record of 64.5 million by generating more than 78 million messages for the latest season of ‘American Idol’ — the most popular show on television. Some argue that the ”American Idol” voting has significantly helped the adoption of SMS among the masses in the United States.

September 2008 – The Associated Press broke a story videos taken by mobile phones about Afghan children killed by US military forces. Similar stories were reported from Kashmir where hundreds of people, touted by the BBC as “Kashmir’s mobile phone chroniclers’, used their mobile phones to document atrocities during recent demonstrations that were then posted on YouTube.

U.S. Presidential Election | 2008 – Thousands of individuals, as well as major news organizations, post 160-character news updates and opinion using the social networking service Twitter. Journalists and others use their mobile devices and Twitter to “microblog.”

Where we are now:  The idea behind citizen journalism or “participatory journalism” is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution capabilities of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others.  Mobile phones are transforming the process of reporting, putting power in the hands of the public. Individuals with mobile devices are able to capture ‘news’ in real or close-to-real time, often faster than professional journalists. Knowing this, it has become commonplace for mainstream news organizations to soliticit audience participation, specifically photos or video footage captured from personal mobile cameras. 

—————

SOURCES:

Anti-war protest photo gallery. BBC News: February 18,  2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/2763101.stm

AT&T Announces FOX’s ‘American Idol’ Seventh Season Breaks All-Time Record for Text Messaging. May 22, 2008. http://www.fiercewireless.com/press-releases/t-announces-foxs-american-idol-seventh-season-breaks-all-time-record-text-messaging?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal&cmp-id=EMC-NL-upda&dest=FW

Bowman, S. and Willis, C. “We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information.” 2003, The Media Center at the American Press Institute.

Catone, Josh. Online Citizen Journalism Now Undeniably Mainstream. Oct. 26, 2007. Read Write Web. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/online_citizen_journalism_mainstream.php

Douglas, Torin. Shaping the media with mobiles. BBC News: August 4, 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4745767.stm

Hamilton, Anita. “Why Everyone’s Talking about Twitter.” Time – Business & Tech: March 27, 2007. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1603637,00.html

Outing, Steve. “Stop the Presses: Photo Phones Portend Visual Revolution. Editor&Publisher.com: March 12, 2003.

Rainie, Lee. One Year Later: September 11 and the Internet. Pew Intenret & American Life Project: September 5, 2002.  http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=69

Schwartz, John. “With Aid of Amateurs, NASA Builds Mosaic of a Disaster.” The New York Times: April 22, 2003. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E7DF103AF931A15757C0A9659C8B63

Tragedy Over Texas. The Dallas Morning News: Feb. 2, 2003. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spe/2008/columbia/

Verclas, Katrin. A Mobile Voice: The Use of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media. MobileActive.org: November 2008. http://mobileactive.org/mobile-voice-use-mobile-phones-citizen-media

Videos Show Afghan Children Casualties. Associated Press: September 8, 2008. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/07/terror/main4423942.shtml

Wagner, Mitch. “CNN Creates Citizen Journalism Channels On Web, In Second Life.” The Information Week Blog: March 24, 2008.
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/03/cnn_creates_cit.html

I’ve never watch Mobile TV on my outdated phone, but I have spent an hour or so watching YouTube clips with my cousin on her iPhone.

One of my co-workers regularly downloads TV shows to her iPod and watches them while traveling. I can  see the appeal of that, if I was on a long flight or train ride and I didn’t want to cart around a bulky portable DVD player or laptop computer and I wanted to keep my 7-year-old occupied.

I have watched TV shows online, like the whole first season of “Lost.” I’ve also watched entire movies online through Netflix. But I only do that on my laptop or desktop computer.

If I had cheap, easy access to watch these same programs through my tiny screened cell phone, would I? I probably would, occasionally.   

But mobile TV is way behind in the United States. Look at what happened to Mobile ESPN back in 2006. The sports network – backed by the big dollars of Disney – offered potiential users access to awesome live TV content and an engaging interface. But it wasn’t enough. ESPN’s Mobile Virtual Network Operator business failed after only garnering about 30,000 subscribers in about 9 months. The company’s goal was 250,000 subscribers. Scaling back, ESPN Mobile is now offered as an application through other mobile providers such as Verizon.

So why didn’t ESPN’s MVNO get more traction? I think it is the cost has a lot to do with it. The value of such a portable service, no matter what the content, isn’t worth the money in the US market. You need the right phone ($$), the monthly service contract ($$), great bandwidth, lots of battery power and have a such a mobile lifestyle that you rarely get to watch or record a more traditional TV broadcasts. That formula is quite the niche.

TV viewership is declining. Audiences are shifting to online interactive media. And yes, for any TV brand to survive in the future, it has to start migrating to mobile. But consumer information consumption habits of TV content in the US haven’t shifted enough yet. Broadband cable TV, HDTV, TIVO, on-demand, premium channels – we are already paying a lot for these services. I know I don’t have enough money left to pay for TV on my phone.

An October 2008 report from Juniper Research, says that although more than 330 million mobile users worldwide will own broadcast TV-enabled handsets by 2013, less than 14% will opt for mobile pay TV services. It’s not necessary.

If anything, it will probably be the porn industry that  figures out how to make mobile TV profitable. Supposedly, the mobile porn market is projected to reach $3.3 billion by 2011 – mostly in Europe and Asia.

“Adult content business models have succeeded in other major delivery media: print, cinema, DVD, pay-per-view TV, etc. There is no reason why the mobile channel should not be equally profitable for adult content industry players,” said Bruce Gibson of Juniper Research.

Mobile is about utility, fun and instant gratification. Mobile is about connecting people with other people.

“They aren’t entertainment boxes waiting to receive content to display to a passive user,” wrote Regina Lynn, a columnist at Wired.com.

So unless mobile TV providers find a way to make mobile TV more than just a mini-sized broadcast, it is not going to become a regular part of everyday life that people will shell out their hard-earned money to have.

My first attempt at a podcast and posting it on iTunes.

Creative Cooking With Kids

Got a young picky eater at home? Make mealtime less stressful and more fun with creative recipes you and your child can make together. In this episode, we offer a quick, delicious recipe for Snake Pizza.