This enterprise piece, written in December 2000 and published in the May 2001 issue of The Burr magazine at Kent State University, placed in the 2001 Hearst Awards.
It’s sort of funny looking back, as this was written back before the books were super big – back before the movies were even in production. Now, there’s about a million stories to be found on this subject of adults getting into Harry Potter. I guess it isn’t all that innovative now.
This feature was so much fun to write and research. I pitched this to my editors at the Enquirer when I was an intern – it was pretty much right in the thick of the Dance Dance Revolution craze. I spent a lot of time with my sources, but I’m still pretty terrible at DDR.
The story was published as a Weekend magazine cover story Aug. 22, 2003.
Let’s get this out of the way: I don’t like it when anyone steals anyone else’s content. And by “stealing” I mean wholesale copying and pasting all of an original work or using any part of someone’s work without credit and a link back to the original content. Period.
Not that I’ve ever said otherwise. With all of my railing against the Marburger plan and the AP, a few detractors have jumped to the conclusion that I don’t support any kind of copyright protection – which is just absurd.
What I have been railing against for weeks now isn’t an opposition to tough copyright law, it’s big news media trying to legally change the online marketplace to benefit themselves (and not content providers as a whole).
Facts should not be owned, but one person’s word-for-word summation of those facts should be. If a reporter took the time to investigate and write an enterprise story – other content entities should give him or her credit and link to their piece prominently when they choose to write from the original work.
Could copyright law use an update to account for the digital sphere? Absolutely – but not at the expense of the free exchange of ideas and analysis online. We in the news business are supposed to be all about that, remember?
As someone who runs a newspaper’s branded Twitter account, I sympathize with Sam Shepard at Subbed Out when he details why it’s not always ideal to have a manned Twitter feed.
The one that most hits home is #1 – the account is not manned without the responsible editor on duty. Short of working 24/7/365, one person cannot be the voice for a news organization. We all know news happens around the clock, not to mention all the @ replies and questions that come in at all hours, so how can it all be done in a timely fashion?
There are a few potential answers out there:
1. Have more than one person responsible for manning the feed. Have your day guy, night guy, weekend guy and holiday guy update as respond as needed. While it is unfortunate that there would be several voices coming through depending on the time of day, I think that’s preferable to simply missing the boat altogether. Others may disagree.
2. Have a partially automated feed. You can set up Twitterfeed to automatically post your site’s breaking news from an RSS feed. You can man the account with a live person by day and let the automation handle it by night. Official feeds do this all of the time and your readers will understand if it has to be done. At least they got the news, right?
3. Go with option #2’s automated feed solution. When news breaks in the off-hours, have Twittermail set up so a host of reporters and editors can post to your account from wherever they are without even owning a Twitter account (or holding onto your password). You may even want to tap a trusted outside source to do this as well.
I’m sure there are other solutions out there. I’d love to hear some if anyone’s got ’em.
Before we even get started on developing this site, I want anyone who stumbles through here to know that this is and always will be a work in progress. I started this site not only as a place to host my work and research in new journalism, but also to serve as a tool to help me learn more development skills.
I’m not a developer – or even a web designer, really. I work in the online news department for the Cincinnati Enquirer. While I do build web pages within our existing servers and content management systems, this is my first crack at developing something in a new language. I have built several websites over the years (most defunct now), but this is an exciting new chance to learn PHP, WordPress, content management and SEO.
Because of that afore-mentioned job, I might not post as often as those who do this sort of thing for a living (see the blogroll), but I hope to be a good resource for those looking for new ideas to save journalism.
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