Bloggin' Under the Boardwalk

By Michael O’Connell

The ScraperWiki conference was a bit of a mixed bag for me. The bottom line — I didn’t really learn anything that I could apply directly to what I do in my online job.

This is not to say the event wasn’t interesting and it didn’t make me think.

Sometimes thinking is enough.

ScraperWiki/AUSOC Journalism Data Camp DC brought together code users and journalists of varying skill levels on March 30 and 31, at The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. The goal was to learn how data scraping could add a new level of source material for journalists.

Data scrapers use computer code like Python, PHP or Ruby to liberate data from websites. This data may already be public, such as census information or other government statistics, but it may not be easy to access or it may be in a form that makes it difficult to see its value.

Practical application

As a journalist who covers the federal government, I recognize how important it is to place information in context in order for readers to understand its significance. I’m working on a story about retirement trends in civil service, for example, and I just received a report about retirement benefit requests for March 2012.

The data is good as far as it goes, giving me a comparison of requests for January and February and projecting what the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) predicts will be the levels of requests through 2013. These projections are based on trends seen in previous years — January sees a spike in requests because that’s when civil servants are first eligible for certain benefits.

I’m aware of those trends because that’s knowledge I have from my job, but a citizen seeing this report won’t have that knowledge. He or she would need to see figures from previous years to see the trends. More importantly, if there’s an unexpected spike in requests, he or she won’t see the significance of that without this other data.

OPM did its minimum requirement by releasing the report, but it didn’t place that information in context. That’s where data scraping and journalists come in.

Having just gotten the retirement assignment a couple of days before, I saw an opportunity to scrape some information to help flesh out my story. I found a willing scraper and he worked for a bit on finding that information for me.

Unfortunately, he was unable to find much information beyond what I could get through using Google. I did find earlier reports online and later contacted OPM directly for more.

Context is key

Despite the failure of data scraping on my particular assignment, I spoke to a couple of scrapers about the ways scraping could be useful in gathering government data.

One of the scrapers described how the federal government is required to post information online when the President will be traveling somewhere. That information stays up for a very short time. That makes it difficult for me to write a story about trends in the President’s travel schedule and the possible impact on local traffic.

Once the scraper locates where that data is posted, he or she can set up a program to visit the source regularly to check for updates or to download the data when updates are posted. After a period of time, I’ll have a pile of data that taken together will provide context to my story.

Another scraper I spoke to told me about work he was doing finding data about violent crime rates in Washington, D.C. He wanted to present that data against data he’d gathered about vacant properties in the District.

While it made for an interesting presentation, I wondered about whether he had the right interpretation. Just because you have two sets of linked data doesn’t mean you automatically establish causality. Many other factors besides locality figure into crime statistics — socio-economic makeup, population density, distribution of law enforcement, etc. — you need more data to reach a conclusion.

Learning more

Like I said, I came away from the data camp thinking.

I wish I had learned more about how to data scrape. It would’ve been helpful to have had more structure for the American University students coming in on the second day of the conference.

Also, I would’ve like to have had the opportunity to take one of the coding classes on Friday, when there was a chance for people with no experience in data scraping to pick up some skills. Hopefully, that’s something that the planners at AUSOC will think about next year.

By Michael O’Connell

As the final assignment for my Multimedia Journalism class, we had to build a tutorial explaining how to use a multimedia element and post it online. For my tutorial, I built a website on how to put together a photo gallery with audio using Soundslides Plus. I’ll let you judge whether I succeeded or not.

The other part of this assignment was to evaluate one of my classmates’ tutorials. I chose to evaluate Megan Clorherty’s tutorial How to Wireframe…because it just makes good design sense.

Wireframing is a way to rough out a design for a website. Megan’s tutorial uses a combination of video and text to walk you through the process of putting together a wireframe using Photoshop.

If you haven’t used Photoshop to do a design work before, it can be a bear to master. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful program, but there are depths to it that aren’t always obvious and it’s easy to get overwhelmed once you get started.

Megan, who happens to be a broadcast journalist, uses her professional skills to explain the step-by-step process of using Photoshop in a very conversational manner. It’s clear and concise, and she breaks down the steps so that they’re easy to understand.

I particularly liked her use of pop-up word balloons to highlight important information in her presentation. It re-enforces the information and simplifies the process for those who are following along. Another aspect of the presentation that adds to this is the text that follows the video. It’s the same information that she presents in the video, so, if the viewer can’t get the video to work or wants to check on one aspect of the presentation, he or she can just check the text for the answer.

The one aspect of the tutorial that did not work well is the lead paragraph and the title itself. Both may set up the expectation that the tutorial is going to be more about design than it is. It’s really about wireframing as an aspect of design. Outside of Megan saying that it’s a useful thing to do, it doesn’t offer any other options or explain why it’s better than any other way to design a good website. Perhaps a paragraph talking about the benefits of wireframing over other design tools or elaborating on its roll in the overall process would be useful.

But this is a minor criticism. The overall tutorial achieves what it sets out to do. It teaches you how to use Photoshop in a clear, concise way to build a wireframe layout for a website. It you’re looking to do that, I can’t imagine a better way to learn how to do it.

By Michael O’Connell

On Tuesday, Oct. 25, I start my new job at Federal News Radio. I’ll be a full-time digital journalist once again.

This isn’t my first full-time online job. I was a content editor at AnotherUniverse.com/Fandom.com from 1999-2001. Aside from all the ups-and-downs of working at an eventual dot.bomb, I enjoyed the job and the people I worked with there.

It took me 10 years to find my way back to working at a website. They were a good 10 years and I grew a lot professionally. Believe it or not, Another Universe was my first “grown-up” job and I got it when I was about 38-years old. I was a freelancer before that and had a lot of part-time jobs. Of course, I was also a “Mr. Mom” for about 12 years too, taking care of my children.

So, finally, I start a new job on Tuesday.

When I began this blog as a digital journalist, I offered up observations and lessons about what I learned as I took charge of the Connection website and instituted changes there. I was fortunate in having a publisher who was open to letting me make changes and learn as I went along.

We had a lot of successes at The Connection in a very short time. Though my path is taking me in a different direction, I’m sure I’ll be able to use those lessons and I think the Connection staff will be able to use them too.

I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that this blog and the efforts I adopted at The Connection were part of an overall plan to find a new job as a digital journalist. I don’t think this invalidates the lessons I learned while planning social media strategies and shifting my workload over to a digital first stance. I was taking the skills and ideas that were being presented in my classes at American University and putting them to a real-world use. Part of the benefit was me getting a new job, but the rewards came in many other ways too.

On a personal level, the new direction allowed me to interact more with fellow staffers Michael Lee Pope, Jeanne Theismann, Alex McVeigh, Jon Roetman, Deb Cobb, Victoria Ross and my boss Mary Kimm.

When I started, the paper did not have an active Twitter presence or plan. When I left, all of us were active posters and users in the Twitterverse. It was not only a useful tool for us to communicate and disseminate news, but it clued us in to many valuable stories that were out there to cover.

In addition, we live blogged events, which generated excitement in the newsroom. The success of each blog varied, but what it engendered in those involved was priceless. Our coverage of primary night and flooding in Northern Virginia as it was happening instilled excitement in our staff. It made us feel, even as journalists at a weekly paper, that what we were doing vital work which could be presented in a timely fashion.

Sometimes you do things for fun and then discover that they bring so much more to the experience than you anticipated. That’s what the expanded social media and blogging work at The Connection did. At least, that’s what I felt and I think others felt that way too.

I could go on about the successes of multimedia and digital first, but I’ve written about that already in this blog. I plan to continue writing about the challenges of being a digital journalist. I’ll just be doing it from a different place. I’m psyched and excited and can’t wait to get started.

By Michael O’Connell

I’ve been spending the week channelling my angry avian self, hatin’ pigs, slammin’ against walls, explodin’ boxes of dynamite and reapin’ a steady stream of cartoony violence. It’s been a blast, but I’m not sure what it all means.

My daughter turned me on to Angry Birds for the iPad, a very mindless though thoroughly enjoyable video game set in a two-dimensional world in which pigs — or, at least, their disembodied heads — are the bad guys and the heroes are a bunch of squat birds bent on rescuing their stolen eggs.

The game begins with a short set-up, in which the nasty pigs, for no apparent reason, hijack a lot of birds’ eggs, and hide them in a series of creaky castles made of wood, stone, glass and explosives.

The birds are justifiably pissed, hence the game’s name — Angry Birds. Rescuing their kidnapped ova proves to be problem, though, because all these ferocious fowls are flightless.

That’s where the game player comes in. Adjacent to each pig fortress is a large slingshot. The object of the game is to use the slingshot to hurl the birds at the forts, trying to knock them down. A player does this by using the iPad’s touchscreen to aim and pull back the black rubber of the slingshot. Once you let go, you get the joy of watching the bird arc through the air and crash into the fortress, tumbling through walls and dropping stones on the porcine kidnappers.

If you’re lucky, the fortress will implode and crumble onto the captors and you’ll win the level. If you win enough levels and beat the game, the bruised and battered pigs will return the eggs and, one hopes, the birds’ anger subsides.

It’s easy to grasp what’s required in the game and the one touch play can be quickly mastered. That’s one of the reasons it’s become so popular on portable devices like iPads and iPhones. Each game level is short and you don’t have to do a lot of button pushing. You can play it while you’re standing in line at Starbucks.

The simple mechanics of the game are deceptive, though. Like any good puzzle game, if the designer just moves a few pieces around and changes up the player’s options, any game can become more challenging and addictive.

Trust me, Angry Birds is addictive. You can start playing and suddenly realize that hours have passed and you still haven’t beaten those damn pigs.

Each level presents a new challenge. The pigs may have formed a pyramid out of stone and you only have four birds to knock the pyramid down.

As the fortresses change, so does the makeup of the birds you can use to mount your assault. You start out with a red bird, which acts as a simple projectile. You slingshot him into the air and he flies in a fairly predicable arc. Soon, you can use other birds — a yellow one that you can alter its trajectory with a tap, a black on that acts as a bomb, a white bird that drops explosive eggs and a tiny blue bird that breaks up into three tiny blue birds.

If you pay an extra 99 cents, you can download a giant eagle that swoops down like a jumbo jet and razes the fortress, vaporizing all the pigs. It’s a good device to reach for when you get frustrated with a particularly hard level, but you don’t score as many points if you use it. Also, you can only use the eagle once an hour. But, an hour passes pretty quickly when you’re playing Angry Birds.

The beauty of Angry Birds is its across-the-board simplicity. From the gameplay to its world and character design, everything is the opposite of complex. The sounds that accompany your actions — jaunty music, squawks and oinks — are cartoony, like the characters themselves. Even the rationale behind the game — pigs steal eggs, what? — you just believe it. Good guys versus bad guys. You’re helping the wronged heroes defeat a bunch of egg-stealing jerks.

Probably the most complex thing about the game is understanding the physics of how projectiles move. But even that’s too much thinking for this. Figure out a way to knock things down. That’s all you need to know.

Come on and get angry.

Try out Angry Birds online for free.

By Michael O’Connell

Outside of some class-related postings, I haven’t had a chance to blog about digital media for a while. The big reason is that my life has been in flux as I prepare to leave my current job and start anew elsewhere.

My last day at the Connection Newspapers will be Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. I’ll be starting my new job at Federal News Radio on the following Tuesday.

I’m really excited about my new position as web editor/writer. The position will offer many opportunities for me to work as a digital journalist.

Here’s the announcement about me in the Federal News Radio’s internal newsletter:

New Hire

“Yes, we have hired a new digital news writer/editor. Mike O’Connell will be working the early mornings replacing the shift held currently by Jack Moore.

“Mike spent most of his career at the Connection Newspapers and leaves his current role of Managing Editor. Mike’s commitment to digital journalism is one of the many reasons we thought he’d be a great addition to the team. Mike instituted a “publish on the web first” policy and is also enrolled in the Interactive Journalism program at American University working towards his Masters Degree. He also has a really good sense of humor, or at least I think he does, so take that for what it’s worth! ”

— Lisa Wolfe, Program Director, Federal News Radio

New job, new experiences, new opportunities await. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to blog about once I go digital full-time. Stay tuned.

By Michael O’Connell

I had the pleasure recently of revisiting the Historic Blenheim property in the City of Fairfax. Built around 1855, the building’s attic contains one of the largest collections of Civil War-era graffiti in the country.

During the Civil War, the occupying Union Army used the building as a hospital. While they were recovering there, Union soldiers signed their names and drew pictures on all of the walls of the house.

When the home’s owners returned after the war, they painted over most of the graffiti, but they left the drawings and signatures in the attic untouched. The attic walls offer an informal glimpse into the mind of the average Union soldier during the Civil War. It’s a very humanizing glimpse, which is invaluable for understanding that period of American history.

The challenge for Fairfax historians and preservationists is how to tell the story of the attic when they were faced with certain limitations. The attic was not handicap accessible and there were concerns that too much traffic might damage the walls.

To get around these limitations, the City of Fairfax constructed an Interpretive Center that includes artifacts, text panels and timelines to tell the history of Blenheim. In the auditorium, visitors can watch videos about local Civil War history.

The centerpiece of the interpretive center is a life-sized reproduction of the Blenheim attic, which allows people to examine the graffiti closely and actually touch the “walls.”

The various methods that the historians used to tell the story of Blenheim — the reproduction of the walls, photographs, timelines and video — are elements that any multimedia website might use to tell its story. In the bookstore, visitors can purchase books, which is like a website user who clicks a link or downloads a document for more information. The Interpretive Center even has an interactive feature — a book where people can sign their names and leave comments.

By Michael O’Connell

It’s 9/11/11, 10 years after the eternal 9/11, and the American press is all dressed up and serving up solemnity across its collective front pages. Everyone’s got special sections, providing perspective for some and a mass cathartic moment for others. It’s America’s new Memorial Day. Hopefully, one day, we won’t be so far away from 9/11′s meaning that we celebrate it with picnics and car races, but you never know.

I spent some time today looking at how the Huffington Post — America’s web news buffet — packaged its multimedia coverage of the 9/11 remembrance and came away with mixed feelings.

Divide and Conquer

The website divided up its coverage throughout its sections. In the Business Section, there’s a feature about how former workers from the Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center are now advocating for fair treatment for restaurant workers. In Entertainment, writer David Wild tells about Stevie Wonder composing a song about the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks 10 years ago. The Tech Section offers Washington Post writer Bianca Bosker’s review of a 9/11 memorial App.

The Politics Section provides a jumping off point to the Huffington Post’s full coverage, which is set up as a live blog, with the latest posts toward the top and the older ones rolling down in reverse-time order. Interspersed are video clips, links to news stories from the Huffington Post, AP, the New York Daily News and other news outlets, and Tweets from news professionals.

The Good and the Bad

The Tweets are a mixed bag. Some are dry and newsy. “Pres. Obama has departed the Memorial site. Next stop: a wreath-laying ceremony at the Flight 93 National Memorial at Shanksville, PA,” writes Mark Knoller, CBS’ White House correspondent.

Others actually succeed in conveying an emotional perspective about the event, albeit in a professional voice. “Sitting here listening to names, you really understand the scope of 9/11. 2.5 hours after names started being read, we’re only up to ‘K,’” tweets Stephen Stirling of the Trenton News Ledger.

What works well is the variety that the Huffington Post is able to hang off of this framework. You’ll find links to the expected stories about memorial services from around the country, but also you have some links to excellent reporting, such as The New York Times piece “Bush and Obama: Side by Side at Ground Zero.”

Plenty To Do

From a design perspective, The Huffington Post’s main page isn’t very pretty, but it does package its content, i.e. links, together in an easy to understand structure. While photos and videos break up the site’s sparseness, they’re not particularly spectacular and do not impart any real understanding or perspective, they just illustrate what’s happening in the timeline.

A reader has to wander a bit off of the main framework to find links to the site’s bells and whistles. For example, the site has a nice slideshow of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and an excellent video called “Boatlift,” about the evacuation of New York commuters on Sept. 11, 2001.

Another strong aspect of the entire Huffington Post page is the integration of its social media. Readers can share stories by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and other services. On top of that, they can leave comments about stories on the site and comment on other people’s postings.

All Together

If I had to give the Huffington Post a grade for its 9/11-memorial coverage, it would probably be a B. The site packs a lot of scope in its bare framework and links to some strong stories by outside journalists. I would’ve liked to have seen some of the stronger features such as the video and the slideshow displayed more prominently. It also would’ve been nice to have had some of the Tweets from “non-professionals” integrated into the main coverage. All in all, though, there was plenty of content — or at least sufficient links to outside content — to give some weight to the Huffington Post’s coverage.

By Michael O’Connell

I spent Tuesday night, Aug. 23, live-blogging our coverage of the primary races in Northern Virginia. It was a very fulfilling experience.

I learned a few things, the most important being that you have to be prepared ahead of time and you have to type quickly.

The toughest part was transposing numbers from the State Board of Elections site and keeping track of the multiple races going on.

I’ve live-blogged before, but not something so newsy, so things happened pretty quickly. If you look at the replay, you’ll see spelling mistakes, extra words and several corrections. My biggest concern was getting out accurate information. I probably should’ve slowed down a bit and organized my thoughts before making some of the posts live.

These are all learning experiences. Come the November election, I’ll do better.

This week, my staff and I published a major project for the Connection Newspapers: “10-Year Mission: Ending Homelessness.” The project presented an overview of Fairfax County, Va.’s plan to end and prevent homelessness by 2018.

The plan was implemented in 2008 by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. At a conference on homelessness last May, the county released new information showing that the plan was beginning to achieve some success.

The timing couldn’t have been better.

Connection Reporter Victoria Ross and I had been kicking around the idea of doing a special project for our four papers. The positive news from the county gave us an opportunity to examine what was working in the plan, and also, what still needed to be done.

I was eager to incorporate some of the multi-platform skills that I had been learning in the Interactive Journalism Program at American University. Wherever possible, I wanted to use video, audio and graphics to tell the story on the web.

I knew that because of the scope of the project, it could have a very long life on the web, so features needed to be in place that kept people’s interest and provided ready information for readers to use.

In addition, Fairfax County and many of the homelessness advocacy organizations had websites with information that we could link to. Our project could serve as a conduit to those websites, raising awareness of the problem to a larger audience, offering people options on how to help and then pointing them to the organizations that dealt with the homeless.

On one level, we were reporting about the problem, but on the other we were helping the advocacy groups get their message out, recruit volunteers and raise funds if necessary. In this capacity, we were fulfilling the press role of public service.

Planning

The first “theme” for the project was “A Day in the Life of the Homeless.” I came up with that theme as a way to highlight the many services that were being provided in an average day by county employees, volunteers and advocates.

I was inspired by a project that Connection photographer Deb Cobb did for the Centre View papers in 2010: “A Day in the Life of Chantilly.” Starting at 6 a.m., Cobb photographed things happening in and around Chantilly, Va., as a sort of visual diary of the day. Each photo, whether at a fire station, gas station or school, had a caption and the time the photo was taken. The only thing linking the photos was that they were shot in Chantilly on a single day. It was a very effective way of showing how many different things were going on in one place.

For me, this seemed like an ideal strategy for the project. It would show varying services being offered and provide strong visuals to illustrate the stories we were going to write. I could imagine photo galleries on the website that readers could flip through, transporting them to various sites around Fairfax County. We would use Cobb and fellow freelancer Robbie Hammer to travel from site to site on single day.

The further that we got into the project, though, the more we realized that the logistics of pulling this off would be problematic. We worked closely Dean Klein, the director of the Fairfax County Office to Prevent and End Homelessness, and other county agencies to try to figure out a way to arrange a “Day in the Life” shoot. While opportunities existed, it was clear that we would be forcing these volunteers and advocates, though willing, into an artificial construct that we had created.

Was one story or photo shoot less valid than another because it took place on a different day? It didn’t seem so. Also, trying to pull it off would be stretching our thin resources. It would be better to concentrate on telling the story at hand and not over-orchestrate the situation.

A New Direction

At about the same time that we came to this conclusion, we were developing a second theme: “The Changing Face of Homelessness.”

Ross and Cobb attended the Fairfax County conference on homelessness in May. They conducted sit-down video interviews with some of the speakers at the conference. As we were reporting that and doing our initial research on the project, we discovered that the definition of a homeless person was changing. Younger people were living on the streets. Middle class people who lost their homes in the mortgage crisis were being classified as homeless, as well as people who lost their jobs in the economic downturn. It was clear that our project needed to reflect these new realities.

In the final project, this theme is addressed in three stories.

1. The Face of Homelessness by Bonnie Hobbs
2. Teens Find Safe Haven by Victoria Ross
3. Hiding in Plain Sight by Victoria Ross

Each story is built around a single homeless person and the support system that they encountered within Fairfax County. The first concerns a woman and her children finding help at the Katherine K. Hanley Family Shelter. The second tells the story of a teenage girl who found herself without a home and receiving help from Alternative House. The last story is about a laborer living in a tent in Reston. Reston Interfaith comes to his aid. The stories provide powerful one-on-one encounters with people facing homelessness.

Other Voices

In the planning stages, we considered having Publisher Mary Kimm or I write an editorial about homelessness to anchor our editorial page. Due to the scope of the subject we were covering, it seemed more appropriate to let some of our sources to speak for themselves. We had already decided to use all sections of the paper for the project, including the editorial page.

Rather than take the words away from the subjects, it seemed more appropriate to invite members of some of the advocacy groups to write guest editorials, explaining their personal experiences with serving the homeless.

1. Giving Back to a Community Benefits All by Kathy Albarado of Helios HR
2. Road to Advocacy by Greg White of Reston Interfaith
3. Helping the Homeless by Amanda Andere of FACETS
4. An Alternative to Homelessness by Judith Dittman of The Alternative House
5. Partners in Ending Homelessness by U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-11)

This turned out to be a boon for the project. Several of the subjects not only wrote about their work, but their own experiences of being homeless. It was a powerful contrast to the stories about those receiving services and the news stories that made up the rest of the project.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Photographers Deb Cobb and Robbie Hammer provided photos. Centre View reporter Bonnie Hobbs and freelancer Amber Healy each wrote a story. Interns Meredith Zettlemoyer and Noah Yoo contributed stories and some research for the project as well.

Aside from planning and laying out the papers, I handled the web strategy (more on that below), wrote the introduction and “drove the bus” of the project. I also edited together the video from the interviews that Cobb and Ross had conducted, illustrating it with photos from Cobb, Ross and Hammer.

The lion’s share of the credit for the success of the project goes to reporter Victoria Ross, who set up meetings with sources, reported stories, generated most of the story ideas and followed up with the guest editorialists. She also wrote, wrote, wrote and wrote. The long main story (“Can Fairfax County End Homelessness?”) anchors the entire project and provides a history of Fairfax County’s strategy to end homelessness.

On the Web and Beyond

From our earliest planning, I always envisioned a strong web package to go with the project. I am very pleased with the end result, but recognize that we could have done more.

The project’s webpage has a video component, a photo gallery, an introductory story and links to the component stories.

The last set of links on the page, “Community Service Groups Guide” and “10+ Ways To Help the Homeless,” provide ways for readers to secure services or help those in need. Hopefully, our project will inspire some people to do just that.

After I finished laying out the paper, I adapted the pages that I had designed for the print edition and created a “10-Year Mission” insert with all of the material that we wrote. Our production department loaded it onto the web as a pdf for people to download.

A would have liked to have included more photos, video and interactive features. The Office to Prevent and End Homelessness also provided us with graphs that didn’t make it into the print or pdf editions, but will be added to the website later on.

As an example of an interactive feature that would shine on the website would be a quiz, testing people on their knowledge of homelessness in Fairfax County built off the reporting that we did. I hope to build that in the next week and add it to the website.

One area that I’m very pleased with has been the social media aspect of the project. As the stories were edited, they were loaded onto the website. I teased stories heavily on the five Twitter accounts that I oversee. This generated a tremendous response. Many people in the advocacy community retweeted my tweets, passing along links to the stories and the entire project. We also received wonderful compliments and thanks for taking on the project.

Every time I updated the 10-Year Mission webpage, I sent out a new round of tweets. I also posted links, photos and the video to our Facebook page. I did my Digital First/Social Media duty on this project.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience and one of the most rewarding of my professional career. We’re already planning a follow up and trying to think of other subjects to tackle.

Stay tuned …

— Michael O’Connell, Managing Editor, Aug. 21, 2011