Text is not Dead

Have you ever found out that your friends are broken up over Facebook? I have. No longer are the days of long tearful phone calls, whispers around the office, or discussing who’s going to tell whom and how. And, it’s not just coming from Jon & Kate, who somehow feel that divorce and pain are entertainment; people of celebrity status and those of not-so-celebrity status are using Facebook as a sounding board of all things private. Samantha Henig points out that people have nearly an equal fascination with watching the personal pain of someone, regardless of that person’s celebrity status.

If we can’t bump into the former homecoming queen at the grocery store (OMG she works at the grocery store now? And did you hear she got dumped by her high school sweetheart who we were all sure she’d marry, like, the day after graduation?), we can at least follow her fall from grace remotely.

As some would say in our class, this development is another example of how social media has actually de-socialized us as a culture. The private becomes public, and the awkward becomes as easy as typing a 140 character update. I am not at all surprised at this change. However, I didn’t expect the trend to become story-worthy.

However, the activity is not what bred the story; it was the repercussions. Increasingly people are learning to utilize these social media tools to better their business, network, and do their job more effectively. And, lawyers found Facebook during a divorce to be a treasure trove- or cesspool depending on one’s perception- of information about their own clients, and most importantly, the other side.

Belinda Luscombe wrote about this issue in Time Magazine :

Lawyers, however, love these sites, which can be evidentiary gold mines. Did your husband’s new girlfriend Twitter about getting a piece of jewelry? The court might regard that as marital assets being disbursed to a third party. Did your wife tell the court she’s incapable of getting a job? Then your lawyer should ask why she’s pursuing job interviews through LinkedIn.

The video below shows that lawyers are actually getting training in this arena.

Because Facebook has become a medium used for publicizing information (journalistic or otherwise), divorce becomes a part of the medium. All those tragic details will sit one someone’s hard drive forever.

Amanda Fortini compared it to a theater:

Unfortunately… it may be unavoidable, as Facebook is the theater where some of life’s most chaotic, catastrophic and bewildering moments are now being played out. Not even the rich or famous are immune: Chelsea Davy, ex-girlfriend of Prince Harry, made the demise of their five-year relationship official (and officially public) by changing her status to “single.” The quick, unceremonious execution of the Facebook breakup — it’s like ripping off a bandage.

I find this video really interesting. Just how important is advertising to the Courant?

Many have chimed in over the stance the Hartford Courant took in the hostage situation July 7, 2009. A former advertising executive kidnapped his ex-wife shortly after their divorce was final. He held her hostage in their home for many hours and made several demands. Among them was that all media outlets remove coverage of him, no pictures, no articles, no updates. The Police carried this message to WFSB , The Day of New London, and The Hartford Courant, an outlet that had already posted the story. The message was remove the story or he would blow up the house. The Hartford Courant did not comply.

The wife eventually escaped, and the only casualty in the situation was the house, which he set on fire. However, the debate over the Courant’s actions carries on. To better understand the nature of negotiating in a hostage situation, I went to Dominick Misino’s book, Negotiate and Win: proven strategies from NYPD’s top hostage negotiator. Essentially, he explains the careful development of trust. The kidnapper must trust the authorities because, after all, he is as concerned over his life as the Police are for the hostage. The negotiator is starting from a trust level of 0%. A successful negotiation requires that small requests be met to grow the trust. The process is arduous and requires judgment in how to comply with the kidnapper, but the trust level must be at least 51% to ensure the safety of the hostage.

Following this logic, one may conclude that the safest decision would be to remove the article. However, another side could argue that giving a kidnaper what he asks does not necessarily guarantee the hostage’s life but the likelihood that the demands will increase. In a statement the following day, the paper responded that “The information given to us was incomplete and the level of imminent danger unclear.” The Hartford Courant letting the article stand calls into question the ethics of this particular publication. If they had done what the Police asked, given into this specific demand, would the kidnaper have turned over his hostage? Did he ever intend to kill her? What would have happened if hadn’t escaped? And, would the decision of the Courant have had a much different impact? CJR rises above the “what if” and brings to light the central issue of the responsibility of the media.

There is disagreement on all these points, but we believe that journalists do bear some responsibility for the consequences of the stories they publish. Freedom of the press comes with obligations. Adopting an absolutist perspective, in which the right to publish factual material renders other concerns immaterial, is simply a way to avoid grappling with the hard choices those obligations give rise to.

I completely agree. I understand and admire the integrity of journalism, when it exists; however, when a life is at stake, the importance of informing the public and pushing that story pales in comparison. Putting these types of priorities in order is what helps to maintain the media’s integrity, not demonstrating that the story trumps the people involved in it.

“It’s what’s inside that counts,” and “Looks don’t matter.” Those words are wise, but completely irrelevant to websites. The age-old argument of form versus content has been brought back to life by websites, especially news websites because of the abundance of content and the need to make it easily accessible. The design of news websites is especially key because people become familiar with their preferred sites. And, that familiarity becomes more and more necessary when people need to find a specific article. People return to them morning after morning sometimes looking for something specific or routinely reading their favorite sections. If the layout is illogical or too busy and the person has to click around to no avail, another website is not far from reach. Personally, I have little patience for designs that make specific sections difficult to navigate.

To get an idea of where The Hartford Courant falls between form and content, I compared the content of the Middletown section to the Middletown Press. Being that I live and work in Middletown, I have a solid sense of the events going on and the kinds of stories about which I want to read. I find the website for the Courant organized to push forward the stories created by the citizen journalist, the individual voice. The section on Middletown features headlines along the left side and at the bottom part of the page, but in the center, in a highlighted box, is a list of reader-submitted headlines. Strangely, The Huffington Post, a much different news source, putting it mildly, places the blogs along the side and the news stories, regardless if topic in the center, with the biggest story of the moment glaringly placed at the top of the page. I wonder if in the interest of profit and maintaining readership, the Courant has aimed to emphasize the independent voice.

Steven Snell wrote about the design and layout of news websites in November of 2008. According to him, the Courant initially looks typical for a news site:

Color Schemes
Most news websites use dark text on a white background. Obviously, these websites contain a huge volume of content, and readability is important. A few of the websites mentioned later in this article use darker colors for headers or for the body of the page outside the content.

A large percentage of news websites also use blue and red in addition to a dark gray or black for text. Blue is extremely common for headlines, article titles and links. Red is often used sparingly as an accent color. Some news websites also mix in more colors in other places, such as in the navigation.

While the basic layout looks like that of a traditional news source, the advertising is too distracting, and the element I truly dislike is the ad that looks like the upper right-hand corner of the “page” has been turned down. When hovering the mouse over the, the viewer has to endure the truly cheesy animation that shows the image of a partial page turn, revealing the advertisement on the other side. When reading a site, I can think of few things more irritating than having to pay attention to the position of my curser.

However, as far as content is concerned, the Courant’s Middletown section has far superior and more relevant articles about the town. As a resident of the city, I know that the story of the Food not Bombs issue is key. The Middletown Press, however, did not cover it on this day. Additionally, The Hartford Courant has an article covering the event, Bikers for Babies. The Middletown Press has an article with a rather unclear relation to Middletown about a car chase through three towns (none of them Middletown), and the driver of the car was from Deep River. Suffice to say, The Hartford Courant, in this quick comparison has relevant and important content, and as a side note, the design of The Middletown press is far from impressive.

So, what trumps the other- form or content? Should they be equal? Does the poor quality of either individually affect the site as a whole? As a writer and not a designer, I am on the side of content in the debate, and I am far more willing to put up with the oversized ads and the fact that I have to hunt around a bit for a story than I am to read poor or irrelevant writing.

The Onion is of course just for fun, mostly. To me, it has a an element of truth mixed in with the ridiculous. I think this video on Facebook is hilarious, but it also brings up some serious issues of privacy and just how much we should be willing to share in pictures and status updates.

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Is Facebook becoming too powerful? Now able to financially support itself and cash-flow positive, Facebook is clearly not following in the path of the less fortunate predecessor, MySpace.  Not surprisingly, reactions to Facebook’s continuing success range between anticipation of future investment opportunities and anxiety over a monster gaining momentum.  I never joined MySpace, so I, unfortunately, don’t know what makes their models so different and left only one to survive the competition.  I do, however, wonder if the same will happen in the Twitter Facebook competition.  One of Facebook’s strategies is to take on the features of Twitter, leading people to prefer one platform and creating an environment that seems a bit like that of the Highlander: in the end, there can be only one.

I wonder if it’s the must-collect-subscribers nature of both that raises worries over addiction to these powerhouse social sites.  One site actually provides a guide for weaning oneself off of Facebook. The steps begin with admitting you have a problem to finding a suitable substitute.

The question I have upon reading these articles is what happens to the hapless consumers in this cutthroat competition?  Are we given the benefit of watching the best possible platform emerge or are we falling victim to the commercialism of them both and becoming addicted?

In exploring the State of the Media website, I was immediately drawn to the section on developing trends. The nature of new media begs an avid watcher of growing trends because getting even a little out of date is unacceptable in the industry. Journalists, bloggers, and writers who are on top of Facebook, Twitter, and Digg will bulldoze over those who haven’t adopted the networks. What immediately interested me was the notion of the individual voice becoming as valuable and legitimate as that of a vetted journalist. I think of this movement as the quintessential double-edged sword. Every writer having an equal voice and space to speak allows those who would otherwise be locked out of the industry to have a fighting chance at gaining an audience. It also provides readers a widespread selection of viewpoints and opinions. But readers must immediately acquire an advanced filter; otherwise, significant writing can get lost in the murky collection of everyone else’s text. Then again, who is the judge of what is significant and important? Should a judge exist when the Internet has no gatekeeper for contributors of text, or is that the beauty of it?

This section of The State of the Media on trends describes the issue clearly:

But for a few journalists at least, there are signs of a new prospect: individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places. The movement offers the possibility of more skilled reporting from the field. Yet it would also require consumers to be discriminating and raises questions about how news organizations would ensure quality and reliability.

An article I found is stunningly relative considering it was written well over a year ago. Lisa Williams terms herself as a citizen journalist who watched fellow journalist experience what she describes as the print media career equivalent to The Titanic. In her point of view, those locked into the dying aspect of the industry could only await their inevitable demise while those who understood the fatality of the iceberg boarded lifeboats they had to steer themselves.

As the web, software, and news become a single industry, the stability and security we knew when our founding institutions were big and strong are gone and will never return. Gone with them are the sclerotic bureaucracy. Gone with them is the feeling of giving up changing anything because you can’t even figure out how many people to ask for permission. All of these and more are as dead as IBM’s dress code of blue blazer, red tie, white shirt.

One of the most encouraging aspects of her piece is that in spite of the trend of everyone with a connection to the Internet having equal weight and an equal chance to acquire an audience, those who jumped from the sinking ship at least have experience in the waters.