Meghan McCarty

Picking up the pieces after the Sayre fire

2008-11-25T07:18:29Z

Sights and Sounds from Oakridge Mobile Home Park

I visited Sylmar, the north San Fernando Valley community devastated by the Sayre fire, twice last week.

On Monday, nerves still raw and exposed, residents of the Oakridge Mobile Home Park were allowed to return to their homes - escorted by police in vanpools, looking out upon the catastrophic scene like tourists on a somber bus tour.
]]>
Vans filed in one after another, driving through the grounds like a funeral motorcade, while the media stood by in the 90 degree heat, some wearing masks to protect themselves from the smoke and ash which still filled the air.

The returning residents didn't get out of the vehicles to speak to the press. They filed by silently, holding cameras up and peering through tinted windows.

They weren't allowed to walk through the park. The LAPD was still classifying the site as a crime scene - not because of suspicion of foul play but because they wanted to finish a thorough investigation of the ruins and make sure everyone was accounted for to prevent civilians from discovering any human remains that may have been buried among the ash.

Amazingly, no one perished in that fire. Police dogs had covered the site two times in the previous days with only a single hit at a home where it turned out a woman had kept the cremains of her husband.

The news brought small relief to a couple of residents gathered under the 210 overpass who looked on as neighbors drove through the park.

They declined to give their names, saying they lived and worked at Oakridge and had already gotten into trouble for talking to the media. They were tired and dazed. They had been sitting under the overpass every day since the fire chased them from their home - watching, and waiting, trying to wrap their minds around the loss that was staring them in the face.

On Thursday I returned to Sylmar to the Sayre Fire Assistance Center. The mood among many victims I met was upbeat and optimistic. Less than a week after losing everything, people were starting to rebuild their lives.

California on Fire

2008-11-16T06:42:22Z

This weekend, fires are again devastating parts of Southern California. I wrote the following about October's Marek fire - also in Sylmar. Once again some of the most vulnerable have lost everything as fires decimated yet another mobile home park where many elderly and disadvantaged people once lived.

Video of The Marek Fire in Lopez Canyon near Skyview Mobile Home Park:
(Blue Star Mobile Home Park, mentioned in the following, is at the bottom of Lopez Canyon)

When Linda Sneddon speaks of the chaotic evacuation from the Blue Star Mobile Home Park in Sylmar on the early morning of October 13, she chokes up with anger.

"If they only would have evacuated us a little sooner, we would have been able to get our pets and everything out OK."

But they didn't have that chance. Her dog and two cats were lost in the fire that consumed her mobile home and all of her belongings. By the time police drove through the park and bellowed immediate evacuation orders from a PA system at 5 a.m., flames from the Marek fire could be seen on the hill with heavy winds carrying them toward Sneddon's home. Her pets had scattered and hid during the commotion and she had no time to find them. ]]>

Sneddon, 72, takes slow deliberate steps and leans on the arm of her nephew,

Rick Sneddon, who shared her home. The two showed up at the Marek Fire Assistance Center in Dexter Park, which was set up Tuesday by Los Angeles County Emergency Services to offer help to victims of the Marek fire. City, county, and state agencies, along with nonprofit groups had stations set up to provide relief and advice.

On the morning of the fire, there were no evacuation teams to help residents to safety. To make matters worse, the management of the Blue Star Park locked all but one exit causing a massive traffic jam that trapped more than 150 residents inside while the fire drew closer. ""It was close enough that I felt it burning on my face," said Rick. "The air was full of smoke and ash."

Neighbor Myrna Geick also expressed frustration with the disorganized evacuation. She was caught in the car with her 5-year-old granddaughter for over two hours trying to get out of the Blue Star Park. "I figured we were gonna die there. We couldn't breathe. I just wanted to run, but where?"

Her mobile home sustained only minor damage but much of her furniture, clothing, and food was ruined by the thick smoke and soot that filled the complex as they waited to escape. Now she can't get rid of the smell.

Susan Friend, who runs 3-acre Goldspirit Farm in Kagel Canyon, said, "The fire department is great at fighting fires, the evacuation was another story." Friend, who is still fighting to extinguish embers in her hay pile, had to evacuate 25 horses from her ranch as the fire swept around her property, burning her next-door neighbor's home and scorching the surrounding hillsides.

At the time, emergency personnel had cut off access into Kagel Canyon so horse trailers could not get in to evacuate horses. Friend loaded nine horses into her personal trailer and sent them out but there were 16 remaining. "There were flames licking at the horses' butts," said Friend, who eventually convinced the CHP to let an Animal Control trailer through to get them out.

(video taken with my still camera showing burned house on opposite side of ridge from Friend's property)

The metal stables were unharmed by the fire and the wide swath of bare dirt horse track around her home kept the fire at bay. Friend doesn't take chances living in fire country. She clears brush around the perimeter and has an evacuation plan of her own posted next to the phone with important numbers and a checklist of procedures.

Representatives with the state Office of Emergency Services distributed preparedness guides at the Marek Fire Assistance Center and encouraged area residents to work with their local Fire Station on developing a community evacuation plan.

With one disaster behind her, Susan Friend is already looking ahead to the next. She's lining the burn areas on her property with burlap. The barren hillsides provide the perfect environment for mudslides and erosion when the winter rains come.

The Fight Over Prop 8

2008-11-09T09:32:55Z

The passage of Proposition 8 on election night by a margin of 4 percent didn't end the struggle for marriage rights in California. Law suits are already in the works to overturn the constitutional amendment that would eliminate the right of same sex marriage.

Every day since November 4, concerned citizens have taken to the streets in West Hollywood, Westwood, Long Beach, and here in Silverlake to protest what they see as a civil rights violation in the midst of this historic election.

De-what?: Injecting actual debate into the "debates"

2008-10-15T05:59:28Z

Never before has a moment of walking in front of a teleprompter lit up the television screen as it did Tuesday night. In an awe-inspiring moment of unscripted maverickness, John McCain wandered into the path of Tom Brokaw's teleprompter and ... well ... perhaps it wasn't that exciting, but it was still the most exciting thing that happened during the second of the three presidential debates. ]]>

The hour and a half would have been more notable if each candidate had taken turns simply reading phone book entries off the teleprompter while the other walked in front of it.

But boringness was not its greatest crime. During a week in which the global financial crisis has gotten more crisis-y by the second and campaigning on at least one side has reached a fever pitch of demagogy, Americans needed to hear about the issues. Instead we heard what amounted to 90 minutes of watered down and declawed campaign ads.

The candidates themselves can't be blamed for sticking to safely prepared talking points. Isn't that what follow up questions are for? Rebuttals? You know, like in a ... what's it called ... debate!

The debates should be a chance to corner the candidates, to cut through the campaign crap, let them at each other, and let the public (via the moderator or questioners) at them. The format of this debate fundamentally failed to do that. The stringent time restrictions and lack of follow-up questioning led to no accountability for the candidates to address the questions or each other. The result was complete irrelevancy.

Saturday Night Live's satire of the debate gets to the essence of the problem.

On slate.com, Jack Shafer decried the phoniness of this presidential incarnation of the town hall debate, saying it fails to maintain either half of its hybrid identity:

"In a genuine town-hall discussion, anybody can ask a real, unvetted question to inject sonic chaos into the proceedings. The crazy questions, the impolite questions, and even the left-field questions about such things as the price of a gallon of milk push candidates out of their comfort zones, away from their talking points, and to some uncultivated acre of their psyches where voters can observe their thinking processes ... Likewise, an authentic debate demands more rigor from its participants than the Q and As the Commission on Presidential Debates like to stage. In our presidential "debates," candidates decant their two-minute sound bites, dodge the tough questions, and tell the best lies they can get away with. But real debaters observe rules of logic and persuasion. They stick to the topic, they answer the questions, and they talk to one another."

Politico reports that a bi-partisan coalition of activists is suggesting some antidotes "to avoid the stiff and scripted answers that many critics said deadened their earlier exchanges."

The Open Debate Coalition, made up of diverse members from across the political spectrum, has written to the candidates asking them to agree to the following improvements to facilitate, as Politico put it "improvisation, intellectual engagement, and truth-telling":

1) That the debate moderator has broad discretion to ask follow-up questions after a candidate's answer, so the public can be fully informed about specific positions.

2) That after a "town hall" debate full of questions handpicked by the moderator, none of which were outside-the-box, you will allow Bob Schieffer to ask some Internet questions voted on by the public in the fashion outlined in our previous letter - which you agreed to. Existing technology will make this easy.

3) That, as a stipulation of the next debate, the media pool must release all 2008 debate footage into the public domain - as you agreed would be in the public interest. CNN, ABC, and NBC agreed to release video rights during the primary, and CBS agreed more recently. But Fox threatened Senator McCain for using a debate clip during the primary, and NBC invoked copyright law against Senator Obama to stifle political speech recently. The public deserves to know debate video can be reused without fear of breaking the law.

4) That you agree to work with the Open Debate Coalition after the election to reform or create an alternative to the Commission on Presidential Debates, so that the debate process is transparent and accountable to the public. Despite both of your agreement with the open debate principles, the Commission did nothing to implement them - or even to engage in dialogue about potential implementation. Also, the "31-page memo of understanding" with debate rules is nowhere on the Commission's website, and has not been turned over despite requests.

With less than a month until the election, and oh yeah, some pretty pressing problems to deal with, let's hope that the third and final debate cuts a little deeper than the previous two.

Part of that responsibility falls to the Commission on Presidential Debates and the two campaigns to negotiate a format and set of rules that will not facilitate uninterrupted recitation of talking points. Some of that responsibility also falls on the moderator, Bob Schieffer.

The media have had a tough time in this election, struggling to combat charges of liberal bias, sexism, and elitism. In the debates so far the moderators have steered clear of aggressive follow up questioning but in this final debate, it would best serve the intention of debate for Schieffer to keep his eye less on the clock, and more on the hardball.

Down By the River

2008-10-15T05:35:59Z

Down by the LA River - crossing Fletcher Drive into Elysian Valley.

="" height="360" width="480">

"In a city of stars, it is a has-been.

In a city of bone-shaking earthquakes and blowtorch winds, it has been tamed into a toothless creature of unnatural nature.

In its latter days, its banks and beds have been plastered over with cement. It has been befouled by oil and DDT and cyanide and human sewage. It has had more value as a movie set, more usefulness as a punch line, more potential as a freeway, than regard as a waterway ...

Los Angeles brags about its beaches and its mountains. On the subject of its river, however, it is silent. Within the river's banks lies more acreage than Central Park -- walled up, fenced off, locked away from human eyes, like a loony aunt hidden in the attic, not to be discussed in front of company ...

In other cities, great rivers are fringed by great houses and grand legends. St. Petersburg's palaces edge the canals of the Neva, where Rasputin drowned, full of cyanide and bullets. Slave-built plantation mansions front the reaches of the Mississippi, where young Mark Twain learned his river pilot's trade and his storytelling one.

Not so here."

(Morrison, Patt and Lamonica, Mark. Rio L.A. Los Angeles, CA: Angel City Press, 2001)

CNN - Taking the Pulse of the Debate

2008-09-28T08:00:18Z

Watching CNN's debate coverage Friday night the eye couldn't help but turn to the "Audience Reaction Meter" that rose, fell, and flat-lined like a disconcerting heart monitor in an intensive care unit at every turn of rhetoric from the two candidates. Three lines - a blue one for Democrats, red for Republicans, and greenish white for independents bumped along on their various trajectories, instantaneously measuring voters' reactions to the candidates' performances as they unfolded in real time.

Confused viewers posted on Yahoo Answers and personal blogs, speculating about the science behind the reaction meter - was it really measuring audience heart response? A survey taken ahead of time? A remote clicker?

]]> blogger poetically described it as the "Boner Meter," noting, "It flat lined for most of the debate, except when McCain got pissy, Obama agreed, or either one of them wiffed, even a little."

In reality the reactions were measured in a focus group in Ohio with an equal number representing each party. Dials operated by the viewers measured positive, negative, or neutral reactions and were graphed along a moving continuum according to responses.

It was the green independent line that stood out the most. It pulsed between bright electric green and white, searing across the muted red and blue. It was the most volatile and most concerning. As the green line goes, so goes the election.

So what exactly was the green line doing Friday night? According to a Media Curve poll conducted at the conclusion of the debate, Obama came out ahead among Independents in each of 9 categories, including overall winner. But whether or not you could have deduced that from watching the mesmerizing green line is, er ... debatable.

Those magical "undecided" and Independent voters were paid a lot of attention by all the major MSM outlets. CBS held their own voter response group of 100 uncommitted voters who dialed in their responses as the debates went on. The network also conducted a scientific poll of 500 uncommitted voters after the debate was over. The poll results favored Obama for the most part, with 39 percent saying Obama had won the debate, 25 percent saying McCain had won, and 36 percent seeing it as a tie.

A Fox News focus group of undecided voters came back with a surprising tilt towards Obama.

Whether the CNN seismograph running along the lower third measured any real shake-ups was a little harder to tell. For the most part the device seemed an inscrutable distraction, sloping up and down along basically thematic partisan lines but dipping and peaking steeply at random and inexplicable times.

CNN seems to be determined to fill all available space with graphics and diversions, supplying useless factoid banners and unreadable gauges until the screen resembles the cockpit of the Starship Enterprise. On HD CNN, which I was spared in my cheapskate loyalty to tube TV, the horizontal margins were filled with "Analyst Scorecards" which measured plus and minus points for each candidate by a panel of six pundits. For those watching TV with an abacus at hand, I'm sure this feature was very effective.

CNN, as the first all-news-all-the-time cable channel has become a parody of itself. The 24-hour news cycle is now getting broken down into seconds. Do we really need viewer and pundit reaction to every word, every smirk, every breath, and every phoneme uttered by a political candidate? With units of meaning in news getting smaller and smaller, we may be missing the forest for the green lines.

Photos from Source and Source.

Spinspotter: A Balanced Equation for Objectivity?

2008-09-21T13:11:32Z

Spinspotter.com and NewsTrust.net attempt a similar mission of assisting web information gatherers in making judgments on a news source's reliability and objectivity. With the increasing amount of information available from sources outside legacy media, such devices provide an important tool to sift through the fat of the internet. They also give readers an opportunity to make their own assessments of media bias. The user-generated nature of these sites creates some pitfalls and inconsistencies but, far from letting readers off the hook by providing judgment for them, sites like these engage the readers' critical judgment, making them more shrewd information consumers.

]]> yelp. Users rate news based on accuracy, balance, context, evidence, fairness, importance, information, sources, style, and trust. Users are very familiar with formats like this. It provides a good venue for finding articles with potential problems and sharing opinions on them. As in restaurant reviews on yelp, the star rating system is not hard and fast. Some reviews must be taken with a grain of salt based on each person's own fairness and bias.

Spinspotter attempts something a little more ambitious, though the usefulness of the features that diverge from the more traditional model is somewhat dubious. Now in its early beta phase, spinspotter installs a toolbar onto web browsers that "spots spin," highlights it in red with markers that open as popups to explain the journalistic violation. At present these markers all seem to be created by individual users but as the system of markers becomes more dense, algorithms based off of these user-generated markers will identify and mark spin on any website visited automatically. That is where the project goes awry.

The sparsely placed markers that I was able to find on nytimes.com and foxnews.com, two sites suggested by the spinspotter home page as good bets for finding spin alarms, illustrated the problem with turning user-generated commentary into an anonymous mathematical system. The tool is pretty neat, scanning each new page and letting users write their comments on markers right on top of the text, rather than having to go to an outside website. It provides an innovative and effective way to give and assess feedback on news articles while you're reading them. The spin markers are based on a system of rules adapted from various journalistic ethics codes, but much like restaurant reviews on yelp, ratings are personal, and can be unfair.

Unsurprisingly, flags on The New York Times decried its liberal bias, while those on Fox News revealed its conservative bias. Some comments sounded like the opinions you would read on a forum or in the comments section below the article but were held up by a specific ethics violation.
In an article in The NY Times about the upcoming debates, user "bcaro" flags the use of the word "loquacious" to describe Joe Biden as spin, citing the "Reporter's Voice" violation. But the description given seems to suggest that it is not the use of the adjective that upset the user, but the choice of the adjective he objects to. Bcaro gives a list of more negative sounding synonyms and concludes "I gues [sic] it was the 'prettiest' sounding word for what he is." As if the description would have been valid if it had fit the user's opinion of Biden.

In the same article, bcaro flags the use of "Mr. McCain" as it appears right next to Barack Obama's introduction as "Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic nominee for president, and Mr. McCain ... " The violation cited in this instance is Disregarded Context because the author failed to refer to McCain as Senator McCain even though Obama is referred to in such a way. The description on this one is highly personal: "umm...the Republican candidate is SENATOR McCain, just like the Democrat candidate is SENATOR Obama. (This was an easy one, folks. Jump in, the water's fine!)" What the user fails to realize is that John McCain was already introduced in the article in the exact same phrase four paragraphs up from the reference flagged. In accordance with New York Times style conventions, the candidate is referred to in full at first mention, and thereafter referred to as Mr. McCain or Obama. Because this was Obama's first introductory mention, he is referred to in full, while McCain gets the shortened referral since he was introduced earlier in the article.

Idiosyncrasies in user flags like these two demonstrate what a farce an algorithm spin identifier would be. If comments like these contribute to the algorithm such that every time McCain is referred to as "Mr. McCain" it is considered spin, the spinoculars are not only useless but unaccountable. At least these flags are attributed to bcaro and readers can see the personal description and make up their own mind. But if an algorithm based on attributable opinions is making decisions without linking to the opinions that informed it, what context do users have to judge the legitimacy of the flags?

An algorithm set to simply identify a pre-established set of charged words within articles might be a useful tool, but an algorithm based on user interpretation of complicated and debated concepts of ethics equals something lesser than the parts of the whole.

Reffing the Refs

2008-09-14T09:20:04Z

Playing the ref is nothing new in politics. The Republicans have been hurling the "liberal media bias" accusation for decades but in this election cycle the jabs are particularly sharp and the fodder particularly rich.

The role of the press in lionizing Obama at the expense of Hillary Clinton during the primaries was hotly debated. Now critics have a new target in Sarah Palin. Questions over the media's unfair treatment of Palin began almost immediately as organizations scurried to dig up all and any information on a relative political cipher. The teen pregnancy frenzy entrenched that debate even further, driving the level of scrutiny of the media coverage to an all time high.
]]>
Is it the media's place to show deference? Los Angeles Times Columnist James Rainey noted, "The dictionary definitions I find begin with 'respectful submission' and 'yielding'."

Politico.com responded to the controversy with a mock apology lambasting the partisan logic of criticizing the media for performing its given function:

"It is not our job to ask questions. Or it shouldn't be. To hear from the pols at the Republican National Convention this week, our job is to endorse and support the decisions of the pols."

But despite Politico's strong assessment of the ethos of journalism, reaction to coverage by the public and the campaign has sent the press into a meta-journalistic tailspin. Newt Gingrich told Newsbusters.com the Republican Convention, "I think no one on the right should underestimate the level of threat [Palin] poses to the elite media, and therefore, the level of frenzy you're going to get."

Whether it is Sarah Palin herself that represents the threat to "elite media" or rather the thorniness of her personal narrative as the press attempts to flesh it out, the media has been in rare self-reflexive form. And no media coverage has been more closely anticipated than Charlie Gibson's series of interviews with Palin for ABC - not only to weigh in on the nominee's performance, but Gibson's.

While critics on the right drew their claws, ready to eviscerate Gibson and ABC for media bias, critics on the left held out for hardballs. After all was said and done the dust settled on a pretty bloodless scene. The interview either revealed Palin's flaws or strengths to the appropriate degree depending which side of the fence you're already on.

Of course some, like conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, took issue with Gibson's interview, headlining "ABC News Blows It," and enumerating their sins: "Taking quotes out of context. Getting basic facts wrong. Engaging in distortionary hype."

Most criticism revolved around the squirm-inducing question about the so-called Bush Doctrine, in which Gibson quizzed Palin in the "gotcha" style that brought criticism of his moderation of a Democratic primary debate earlier this year. Palin equivocated uncomfortably before Gibson called her out for her ignorance of the Bush Doctrine "as he understood it" of the right to unilateral preemptive strikes.

A convoluted whirlwind of definitions has since sprung up as to the precise meaning of the Bush Doctrine, in order to vindicate Palin. On conservative blog TownHall.com, Charles Krauthammer defends Palin as the man credited (by Wikipedia at least) as the first to use the term Bush Doctrine.

"There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today."

Whether or not Palin escapes unscathed from the Bush Doctrine confusion remains to be seen, but the uproar over Gibson, and by turns the media, seems to be largely muted, paving the way for the media to get back to the business of the 24 hour spin cycle of cosmetics and barnyard animals.

Kilkenny Virus - Anarchy or Democracy?

2008-09-07T08:10:07Z

Michael Tomasky condemns the lawlessness of citizen journalism in his Guardian blog, Comment is Free, claiming, "There can't just be anarchy." Well ... actually there can, and more importantly there is. So despite Tomasky explicitly decrying the pithy rejoinder, it just has to be said: deal with it.

And deal with it we shall. With no one to enforce rules on "witnesses" that are simply bearing witness to events with technologies like cameras, keyboards, and the internet, the shift in rules will have to occur in the audience that consumes the information, and in the players that are being witnessed, or "citizen reported" on. Thus in the example given of Obama's "closed-door" fundraising speech, Obama and his aides learned a very valuable new rule: everything he says and does that is witnessed can be reported and scrutinized.
]]> that information simply because of some artificial, mutually exclusive designation of "citizen" or "journalist" is ridiculous and dishonest. The public and journalists should rejoice that information dissemination has been freed from the constraints of Brand Name Media with its limited access and greater dependence on source friendliness, premeditated on-the-record comments, and secondhand accounts.

That's not to say that "neutral" mainstream media does not provide an important function in news reportage. Obama is not the only one that has to learn a new rule, the information consumers must also change their assumptions and neutral reporting provides an important touchstone and context for evaluating more personal, albeit transparent accounts. Neutral media should report (as Tim Russert did not), and consumers should understand that Obama's comments were not intended for the media or the public. He spoke to donors while trying to fundraise for his cause. It was a private event insomuch as members of the media were not invited, but neither were attendees discouraged from recording it.

In this instance, Mayhill Fowler's account is indisputable. The recording exists. Obama made those comments. For those offended by the comments, Mayhill Fowler's identity and whether or not she reported transparently as a citizen or a journalist is kind of irrelevant. There are other examples of citizen journalism in which the interplay between transparency and neutrality is more important.

Anne Kilkenny does not have a blog. In fact, she doesn't even have a broadband connection. She has a dial-up connection at her Wasilla, Alaska home and recently authored an email critical of former Wasilla mayor, Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin. In an interview with NPR's Martin Kaste, Kilkenny claims she wrote the email for her friends and didn't want it to "leak out onto the web." Well, suffice it to say it has. The content is now all over the web, published in part on The Nation, and in full on the blog, The Presidential Candidates.

In the letter, Kilkenny identifies herself as a housewife, a regular attendee at City Council meetings, a voter registrar, and someone who has publicly clashed with Palin over a library censorship controversy early in Palin's mayoral career. She gives her personal impressions of the small town mayor with whom she was on a first name basis, mixing criticisms with acknowledgments of hard work, intelligence, and savvy. She narrates Palin's political ascent, analyzes her decisions, and systematically debunks and confirms various claims made either by or about Sarah Palin in a section called "Claim vs Fact". With remarkable clarity, Kilkenny discloses her personal involvement in a section called "Why am I Writing This", and even attributes her facts and statistics in a final section, "Caveats".

This account contains a lot of information that is a great jumping off point for further research. We don't know for certain, and Kilkenny makes no pretense that the facts are held to the same level of accuracy as a respected news organization, like the New York Times. Kilkenny is also quoted in a Times article about Palin's early political career that ran September 2, a day before her letter was published on the blog. The article contains a similar narrative of Palin's career as mayor, this time under the trustworthy banner of The New York Times and the presumption that all reported facts are professionally checked and cross-referenced.

But Kilkenny is one of only two non-politicians quoted in the story. The embattled librarian that Palin threatened to fire declined comment, as did a former police chief who lost a wrongful termination lawsuit against her after she took office and cleansed it of the former mayor's employees. Palin's former deputy mayor, Dave Chappel is quoted as saying that he can't really talk about a controversy involving Palin's stepmother in-law because she "lives up the street from me." An important element is missing in the Times story that Kilkenny's letter delivers. It is an insider's portrait of how the residents see their former mayor. It is impressionistic and authentic where the Times story is removed and (hopefully) factually accurate.

The process of dealing with the anarchy of citizen journalism promises to redefine the way the citizen, the journalist, and the newsmaker regard coverage of the world's unfolding events, increasing the breadth of information that citizens have access to. This demands more critical judgment than ever of information consumers, but ultimately makes our country and our world a more democratic place than ever. "News" - or maybe we should just call it "life" in the new model - is no longer filtered through some entitled institution with rules and conventions. It freely permeates through the internet from the consciousness (or video/audio recorder) of one person to another, out there for all to judge and interpret. Yet we still need the context of those professionals who make it their full-time job to be accurate and objective to help us in those judgments.

Photos from Source, Source, and Source

Revisionist Wikihistory weighs in on Sarah Palin

2008-08-31T13:43:28Z

Jokes circulated last week in the wake of the Obama VP text message announcement that McCain's internet-challenged campaign would be releasing their news via pony express. But as speculation and eventual confirmation of his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin trickled in early Friday morning, some evidence surfaced that perhaps someone in his camp is savvier than they're getting credit for.

The whirlwind of predictions favoring Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty or former primary opponent Mitt Romney for the VP nomination came to a swift halt as a dark horse candidate who had been all but ruled off the shorter of the short list of probable nominees was announced as McCain's choice. If there's anything the media hates in an early morning breaking news story it's a dark horse. Who is this woman Sarah Palin? What about all that research and analysis we did on Pawlenty and Tom Ridge? For the American public, Palin is an even greater unknown. Politico.com reported from the scene of McCain's announcement rally what was probably a common first response:

Jay Schuermann, who rode up to Dayton from Cincinnati in a bus full of Republicans, admitted that he was quickly looking up Palin on Wikipedia on his BlackBerry as she was introduced.

]]>
Upon typing "Sarah Palin" into a Google search today, the first result that appears (below the list of Google news links) is her entry on Wikipedia. My own 8 am class gathered around a laptop to read about her moose hunting and ice fishing habits on Wikipedia as soon as the story broke. But her wiki entry not only became a go to source of information after the announcement, it played an interesting role in that announcement as it came out in mainstream media. After Romney and Pawlenty had been ruled out and rumors of a chartered Gulfstream jet arriving in Dayton, Ohio from Alaska the night before set the Palin speculation afire, the media reported that her Wikipedia entry had been revised to list her as the vice presidential nominee until editors had pulled the revision shortly thereafter. The personal blog of business writer, Dr. Paul Kedrosky, shows screen shots of the article history revisions:

Whether this was an intentional leak by the campaign or a lucky guess by a random contributor there's no way to know at this time. In either case it forged a new function for Wikipedia as an especially problematic news source. Major media outlets reported this revision on the Wikipedia page, albeit with some qualification, but this was a source and a story. This goes beyond the amateur citizen journalism posited by Shirky. Unlike a blog, Wikipedia is a collective, largely anonymous effort without even the marginal attribution of blog writer and blog commenter. In this particular instance, the information reported as fact did turn out to be fact, but as the plot thickens, the role of a model like Wikipedia in the information age becomes even more controversial yet.

As reported in an article in the Washington Post, Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry saw uncannily high numbers of revisions submitted in the hours before the announcement of her candidacy. The article focuses more on the tracking of Wikipedia edits as a way to predict stories like this one, citing the similar heavy editing and accuracy checks performed on Joe Biden and Barack Obama's pages in recent weeks.

But a story on NPR seems to challenge the revisions made by a single user known as "YoungTrig" as enhancing the substance of Sarah Palin's biography. Changes made seem to create a more flattering picture of the barely known politician, downplaying her ongoing corruption investigation and beauty queen connections, while adding glowing quotes and intimate details of her daily life. The same user simultaneously made changes to the McCain entry, raising questions as to whether the McCain campaign could be responsible for scrubbing their profiles on Wikipedia. In the NPR piece, Wikipedia editor Justin Deal cautions, "you should not edit an article if you potentially have a conflict of interest." Notice the "should" and "potentially". The nature of Wikipedia, and perhaps the web, precludes hard and fast rules, though certain entries, particularly politically charged ones like George W. Bush, have been blocked for revisions by all users except high-level editors.

So Wikipedia is encyclopedic ... up to a point. Or it is a collective forum ... up to a point. The fluidity of information, and especially information in the news in the new media necessitates and contributes to higher levels of transparency and vigilance than ever. At present writing, the Sarah Palin Wikipedia entry mentions nothing about the role of Wikipedia and the mystery of the mass revisions in its pages at all. Maybe I'll go correct that right now. Unless of course my access has been cut off.

Imagining, and Re-imagining the San Fernando Valley

2008-08-26T06:54:15Z

Southern California, more than any other place in the world, is not just a landscape but a dreamscape. Built on the celluloid dreams of cinema, it's a mirage of glamour, prosperity, and new beginnings blooming out of the desert. No area has come to represent the hopes and dreams of the classic suburbanite more than the San Fernando Valley.

Sprouting from the minds of clever real estate developers who schemed to turn sleepy orange groves into hot property by buying up cheap agricultural land that would then be annexed to the city of Los Angeles (and able to drink up its new water supply), the Valley quickly blossomed into tidy streets of single-family homes with shiny new cars in the driveways: the American Dream.

But even in those boom times that tidy dream was not so spick and span. De facto segregation excluded African Americans and other minorities from all but a sliver of Valley developments. Today the dividing line of the 405 freeway separates the prosperous West Valley communities from the largely down-market and predominantly immigrant communities of the East Valley. But despite these realities, the imaginative construction of spacial identity is as strong as ever.
]]>
We interviewed Chief of Staff Mitchell Englander in the west's District 12, and District Director Ackley Padilla in the east's District 7, and both told the same anecdote as illustrative of the conception of the Valley's various identities. The essential disappearance of the community of Sepulveda and the reemergence of two distinct communities that then by default became one again, is a classic tale of how the valley has been imagined and re-imagined throughout its history.

The Sepulveda community once straddled the 405 freeway between Northridge and Panorama City. As the eastern part of the community became predominantly Latino, lower income, and higher crime in the early 1990s, homeowners to the west of the 405 sought to distinguish their community - and home values - from their more down-market neighbors to the east, and renamed the western community "North Hills". Shortly after, the remaining Sepulveda community to the east of the 405 sought to do away with the negative associations attached to the name Sepulveda and followed suit by changing its own name to North Hills.

Thus, two distinct Valley communities that were once one adopted the same misnomer of a title purely for the sake of real estate, hoping to reformulate their community's identity, only to end up in the same boat.

Following my bliss ... and grief, and humor, and anger as a journalist

2008-08-26T06:28:44Z

I have a kind of greed for journalistic experiences - not the writing or the byline, but just the process of finding out the story, of adding a new story onto myself. Maybe that's anathema to journalism with a sober capital "J" - to hope to somehow suck up these experiences and incorporate them into my person rather than stand by observing on the sidelines, but it's a big part of my motivation. I don't need for it to be the biggest story, to be first on the scene, to bear witness to history unfolding on some giant world stage. It's those small stories, the ones stuffed down in the cracks that you would have stepped right over without a second thought that attract me. It's finding the monumental in the minute.

As a citizen, I'm interested in health care reform, following the election, and figuring out how speculation and hedge funds affect the economy. But as a journalist I just want to talk to interesting people, go to interesting places, and have conversations and experiences that shake me up a little. ]]>
My ideas of good journalism haven't been shaped by long investigative series full of indisputable facts and tireless research, they have been moments of emotion or life unfolding on film or tape that have struck me like a lightning bolt and confronted me with the reality of another person's humanity. When I was in high school, I found a picture in a history textbook of a brother sister being reunited after internment in Nazi concentration camps. Something in the photo shook me to my core and I burst out crying as if feeling empathy for the first real time in my life. I cut that picture out and put it in my wallet, always hoping to reconnect with that moment of being lifted out of the limitations of myself and my perceptions. It's that feeling, and the desire to share that feeling that drives me to the story-learning and storytelling of journalism today.