Online Journalism

Memo for Final Project J415: Ohio University Student Eating Habits

Team Members:
Jen Evans – 440-915-7452
Chris Griswold – 917-720-7291

Overview:

Ohio University students say they are maintaining a healthy diet, but what are they REALLY eating? Using academic studies, an informal poll of 100 OHIO students, as well as interviews with students, a dietitian and the university’s executive chef, we explored the notion that while students believe they eat healthily (according to our survey), in fact, they are doing the opposite.

We examined students’ eating habits – what they eat, how many times they eat out/cook at home, how healthily they think they are) We also used national health statistics that found the obesity/overweight levels of college students and what health ailments that puts them at risk for. We also examined what options students have here at OHIO have (both on campus and off campus) for eating and if students feel the university is doing enough.

Research Process:

Interviews: 10 students (male/female) on camera about what they eat, their perceptions of their eating habits, their feelings on options here at OHIO, how much money they spend eating out, what food they think is healthy but may not be, portion sizes, family influences, if they care about eating healthily, their motivations for eating healthily, if they feel OU is offering enough healthy options etc..

Main interview contact information is included in e-mail version of this note.

Documents:
-Self-created online survey of 100 Ohio University students.
-Journal articles (found via Ebsco Research Databases)
-Journal of American College Health “Selected Health Behaviors That Influence College Freshman Weight Change”
-Science Daily Article “College Students Face Obesity, High Blood Pressure, metabolic Syndrome”
-Chronicle of Higher Education “The Obesity Epidemic Comes to Campuses”
-Journal of American College Health “Differences in Dietary Patterns Among College Students According to body Mass Index”

Obstacles:
We spent more than 40 hours researching, interviewing and editing video. Editing the video was VERY time consuming. It would have helped to have more instruction in video techniques. Also, the cameras we had took poor audio quality (a better camera would help). We had some difficulty in trying to work around people’s busy schedules with it being near the end of the quarter. I think, however, that we worked really hard and it paid off in how our final product turned out. We tried to present the material in an interesting and entertaining way and I hope that we accomplished that.

Fulfilling public service/investigative:
This video project shows that students not only need to think about how they eat, they need to address their diets actively and seek out the information necessary to their dietary health. It’s easy to go into McDonald’s and think you are having a healthy meal when it’s called a salad; but is it really a good idea? Our interview subjects are entertaining, which makes a persuasive health message easier to digest, and we support those informal takes on the topic with our survey research and input from a dietitian and a relevant university staff member.

Team Contributions:
At the start of the project, we both brainstormed and came up with numerous story ideas after doing the initial research. Once we had a viable idea, we figured out what footage we would need and split up the interviews evenly between the two of us, as well as collecting b-roll photos and video footage. We both went to the lab together and spent 20 hours editing our footage and recording our voiceovers together. We also wrote out a script and storyboard that we used to organize our video. Every photo, every piece of video was shot by us.

In my previous post, I mentioned my use of the word “cute,” which to mean “clever,” but to semi-butch chicks with poor baking skills, it might be diminutive and dismissive.

The point I want to make about this cute little anecdote is that there is no such thing as commonality on the Internet.

On the Internet, there is no common sense.

That’s not a condemnation; it is PURE FOLLY to assume that everyone on the planet earth with Internet access had the same upbringing, and the same sense of social graces and a behaviors. That’s where you run into problems. I previously mentioned Eternal September, which began when AOL unleashed its unwashed masses on Usenet, bringing about an endless period of incivility that is said to end October 1, 1993. It’s called Eternal September because every September, when colleges would unleash their unwashed students on Usenet, there would be a month-long period of douchebaggery which ended when regular Usenet users would prevail in teaching the new jerks the existing set of social norms.

And just like there is no common sense, there is no common language. Writers have to be careful with regionalisms. Serious broadcast news readers should eliminate regionalisms from their speech if they want to achieve success, and print journalists should consider the same with regard to their writing.

I just caught a story in the Drexel Triangle about an online journalism class blog that veered away from what was on the syllabus to become a blog about and by overworked students. The article’s not the best - the writer emphasized that not all of the students feel overworked and that the teacher who gives too much homework isn’t too bad, and I’m still unclear whether they want external submissions.

Regardless, I checked out the blog, and it’s cute. [Incidentally, that means "clever" or "interesting" where I am from - the other day, I made the mistake of using this term while buying from a cleverly themed bake sale run by some womyn from a gay student organization (Men had to pay a dollar for a brownie, whereas women only had to pay $.75, reflecting the average pay for the sexes.) You know, this digression is actually relevant in addition to being excessive, so it may as well be a blog entry. Oh, look: Here it is.]

The blog is an interesting mix of personal stories about being overworked, as well as thoughts (or “musings,” as middle-aged journalers like to call them.)

I was going to offer to write something, but I’d rather put that small effort toward establishing a web site by and for journalism students. That sort of thing really won’t take much effort, and it could be a good test run for my thesis project.

Gillmor, Dan. (2004). We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gillmor. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.
Pp. 334 ISBN:0596102275

In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, author Dan Gillmor promoted the idea of the “former audience” becoming involved in the audience, not just as an inevitable step forward with Internet technology, but as an evolution in media. Gillmor believed that content providers needed to adapt to the new media frontier in which everyone has a voice, or they can become obsolete.
Chapter 1, “From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond,” is a good overview of the advancements of the media industry, focusing on the influences of modern communications technology and the Internet. Gillmore presented a logical progression of advancing technology and its correlation both with increasingly sophisticated media tools and presentation mechanisms, and an increasingly sophisticated audience.
In Chapter 2, “The Read-Write Web,” Gillmor detailed the introduction and influence of an editable Web medium. The advent of Web-based editing tools and customizable sites that users could not just read but also write to was a seachange in the way a user could approach the Web. The barrier to mass media content creation was lowered to within the reach of someone with the desire to create content but without the technical skill and experience to craft HTML Web sites. Now the Internet was something to be manipulated rather than only viewed, and that affected how people perceived content. The shifting, malleable nature of the Internet was clearer than ever, and it became a truly interactive medium.
Gillmor, in Chapter 3, “The Gates Come Down,” discussed the dissolution of traditional barriers to publication – costs, production equipment, editorial control, etc. – and the benefits their elimination lends itself to. One benefit is the wisdom of crowds that the Internet’s information-sharing function can engage. When information is scrutinized cooperatively by a large number of people, discoveries like that of Microsoft’s use of stock photography in a supposed customer endorsement are made, and the strength in numbers can empower consumers against corporate culture and shenanigans. Gillmor only touched on negative aspects of broadly available information when discussing the scrutinizing of journalism. Unfortunately, Gillmor mostly focused on journalism critics as being prejudiced antagonists.
In chapter 4, “Newsmakers Turn the Tables,” Gillmor detailed ways in which newsmakers were using new media to respond, using such items as corporate blogs. Gillmor lists ten rules for “New-World PR and Marketing,” which focus mainly on creating and maintaining open two-way channels of communication. Gillmore furthered this discussion in chapter 6, “Professional Journalists Join the Conversation,” discussing ways that journalists and news organizations can engage their audiences. Gillmor notes the importance of online contact information, specifically e-mail addresses, and correctly dismisses message boards and organized chats as the best formats for this, arriving at blogging as the best tool for the job. Blogging is a great way to engage readers, and of all of the formats mentioned, provides the best opportunity for interesting content and professional presentation while also providing a space for audience response.
Gillmor raised some criticisms of Google News in chapter 8, “Next Steps,” some of which have been addressed by now, including the use of RSS feeds for Google Alerts. Google News’ selection of news sources, however, will always be worth examining. Gillmor argued for the inclusion of blogs, but the selection process for blogs would be even more difficult than more established news sources with editors, which was the one requirement Google News had for a source.
We the Media is a thorough, well-rounded text about new media. Unfortunately, Gillmor’s prejudices as a journalist seem to have restricted his judgment in some situations, for instance, in his discussion of bloggers’ keeping tabs on journalists mentioned above. Journalism criticism is a valid subject for blogging, and while the fourth estate is supposed to be the watchdog, it also should have someone watching and evaluating it.
On the other hand, Gillmor very smartly recognized his past surprise by many new media developments such as Google and blogs and sites like Kuro5hin, and he drew on the experience of discovering these things to examine how technology and media ethics and practices shaped them when speculating about what the future might bring to new media. Gillmor claimed that his assumptions were based on a belief in basic journalistic principles, such as accuracy, fairness, and ethical standards, as well as a belief in the unstoppable nature of technology. Gillmor might have been a little too optimistic with regard to the journalistic principles. One need look no farther than the major news networks to see that the ratings, and therefore money, are in opinion. Fox News made itself as a purveyor of narrowcasting to a specific group of viewers with a shared political agenda. Seeing the success of Fox, CNN and MSNBC developed programming that mimicked that network’s punditry.
Additionally, the rise of blogs brought with it an increased culture of opinion and gossip. Perez Hilton and TMZ.com quickly rose from obscurity to being pop culture gossip icons. While ethical standards and accuracy cost money to produce, they can be legal issues and so will continue to be taken seriously by mass media. But fairness in the media is mostly unregulated. Subjective, opinionated, affective media is cheaper and easier to produce, and it brings in more money. It is for this reason that shallow news specials like “To Catch a Predator” and “What Would You Do?” proliferate. Corporate media will probably continue in the direction it is headed unless some major change is made in the way the corporations make money from the media they produce.
Independent media might not be beholden to shareholders and financial as much as major media outlets, but while many of the barriers to producing online media have been reduced, time and money are still factors. To produce quality material, a content creator needs manpower, and people have financial needs. Additionally, journalism needs opportunity, and that’s something money buys.

Before blogs, there were journals.

It’s easy to include journals among the many genres of blogging, but about six years ago, this was a MAJOR point of contention among the Old Gods of blogging, Those Who Came Before.

In the Before Time, I dated a girl named Emily, who happened to maintain what would now be considered the third oldest blog on the Internet. There weren’t that many then, so it was actually easy to keep track of them. Somewhere, out of the primordial ooze of Geocities “personal homepages,” a collection of links to “Things I Like” and “Pictures of my Friends and Family” grew legs and hauled itself onto the beach, trailing behind it .midi files of Rocky Horror Picture Show music. It gained the aspect of time and periodic development, and occasionally, it sprouted a story - of work, of school, of family - and eventually these stories had their own photos, scanned on a borrowed flatbed.

Thus, the first journal was born. Two sandy splashes later, that’s Emily’s journal, Mildew. Why the name? I don’t know. Maybe there was a reason, maybe not. It didn’t matter, really; it was a collection of the gripes and confessions of a 15-year-old girl.

Emily developed a following, albeit partially in the way that the Colgate Comedy Hour gathered a following. As endearing as Emily’s stories might have been, there were only two other channels.

This was before authors like Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis commanded armies of readers who would linger on every last character displayed on the screen in some of the first major blogs. Not much before, mind you; these journals were their parents. Look at Neil Gaiman’s early entries, and compare them to recent ones, and you can see the difference between a journal and blog. Better yet, compare it to a newer blog.

Emily told me about the entire journal subculture, built largely around burgeoning sites like Diarist, Movable Type, and diary-x. In addition, these communities congregated in message board sites run by some of the “journalers,” following loose rules based around the administrator’s eccentricities. Some journalers, like Pamie, actually got books published, based on their journals.

Pamie’s site collapsed under the weight of her popularity, and so did Pamie. She resurfaced again, and now her blog is strictly blog - she writes about being a screenwriter and actress, one of those early Internerd crossover success stories.

Like many subcultures, the journalers had conventions, and they had awards. I think Emily won at least one, but I can’t recall the category. (Theme blog? Best personal story?)

But more importantly, they had the conventions in exotic locales such as Austin, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh. Conventions - and I mean ALL conventions - beneath all the presentations and roundtable discussions and freebies, are just about providing a place for awkward people to have awkward alcohol-fueled sex. But between the uncomfortable one-night stands between people who may or may not know each other’s actual name or marital status, they held discussions, about how to install Movable Type, how much to share, and at some point, what’s up with all livejournals, and more importantly, these blogs?

Livejournal was the first blow against this subculture. It’s like the Eternal September, the September when legions of brand-new AOL subscribers beset upon Usenet to act like dicks until the end of time; except this was subtler: a dilution of the culture among newer, more hopeful teenagers, and older, more regretful middle-agers. What happens when MTV runs grunge music 24-7? The core scene dissolves. Same thing happened here.

And with the addition of not only web logs like Neil Gaiman’s, but the term’s being applied to all personal online periodicals, not only were preschool Internet (AOL) users on Livejournal altering the journalers’ identity, the media was appropriating it and conflating it with something very different - back then, at least.

At the time, the big differences I could see were that journals tended toward personal narrative and entries were featured on a single page, whereas blogs commented on kewl stuf on the web!!!(!!!) and were on a feed that ran backwards to the bottom of the screen. Basically, one got more of the “Vacation Photos” gene, and the other got more of the “Links to Stuff I Like” gene. bA 2001 essay by Diarist founder Ryan Kawailani Ozawa says pretty much the same thing, albeit with more words and distress. Here’s his, and Newsweek’s, take on what “blogging” is:

The Nebulous ‘Blog

Since you probably know what an online journal is, let’s focus on the original, basic definition of weblog:

“A weblog (sometimes called a blog or a newspage or a filter) is a webpage where a weblogger (sometimes called a blogger, or a pre-surfer) ‘logs’ all the other webpages she finds interesting.” — Jorn Barger, Weblog Guru

The alternative definitions — notably ‘pre-surfer’ — helps clear things up a bit. Originally, weblogs were basically richer (and often automated) link lists. “Click here to see an article on human cloning, here’s what I think about cloning, click here to post what you think about cloning.”

Instead of forwarding “check this out!” URLs to your friends, you could post them on the web for anyone to see. A weblog’s popularity would grow depending on the uniqueness and novelty of the sites you linked, and the commentary you’d provide about them. And the appeal for readers was simple: why waste hours trying to be entertained, educated or disgusted on the web when someone else is happy to do all the surfing for you?

Evolution

Automation is a central reason why weblogs exploded. People created a variety of ways for people to start and maintain a weblog. Scripts like Noah Grey’s Greymatter made linking, reviewing and commenting a point-and-click affair. And web-based services like Blogger minimized the need for extensive HTML tweaking (and partner site Blogspot provided free, weblog-friendly hosting). Five minutes and a few forms later, and anyone could be a blogger.

It should be no surprise, then, that people enjoyed simply speaking their minds, and started dropping the “link” root of weblogs, instead taking advantage of weblog tools as an easy path to online publishing. Or, more specifically, to simple and irresistable expression. “Here’s what I think about cloning… and here’s what I had for lunch.”

Journals now are considered a genre of blog - when people take a moment to realize that blogging is a format, not a genre, that it’s medium, not content. And the blog’s original functions are now taken up by things like del.icio.us and Twitter and Tumblr.

This article by Noah Barron on Online Journalism Review is pretty helpful, once you get past the silliness at the top.

Among Barron’s tips:

1. Register your own name as a domain.

I have owned mine for more than a year now. I circled it, waiting for the previous owner’s registration to expire, for at least as long.

2. “Get a free blog at Blogger or WordPress.”

Done. Several times over.

3. Put the WordPress platform on your site.

This does appear to be the best blogging software, and I happily graduated to it from Blogger about a year and a half ago. I am not super thrilled about the free version, although it is still better than Blogger. There’s something a little wonky with the posting times, for instance.

4. “Or, just use GoogleAps and Google Page Creator to easily create a clean, simple site with 100 MB of free storage.”

Eh. Not a very good option, at least time I checked. When I last used this method, users were restricted to pretty bare-bones templates.

5. “Slide and Picasa offer great free image hosting and cool slideshows for your multimedia journalism projects.”

I am not sold on Slide for slideshows. I looked at it as a way to put together assignment #3, but if the site offers basic, non-spasmodic deliveries for images, it wasn’t easy to find them. There’s too much shininess on the Slide site for me to be able to use it; my ADHD pretty much necessitates my use of sites with good, straightforward design schemes. They make great Facebook apps, though. I am too stuck on my copy of Photoshop (Middle Eastern edition) to really get into Picasa, although I am going to open an account soon so my sister and I can share photos with our parents over Tivo. For image sharing, I still like Flickr best, despite Yahoo’s taint.

6. “OpenOffice is the free solution to not having the money to get the MS suite.”

I wholeheartedly support people downloading and using free Microsoft alternatives, particularly Firefox and Thunderbird. I don’t even understand why people use MS stuff anymore; it’s buggy, and it looks pretty basic next to the free software available. Google is a big proponent of this as well, and the Google site offers a variety of free MS alternatives.

7. “VistaPrint is a great place to create business cards, stationery and other stuff for almost free (usually the cost of shipping)”

Good tip, although avoid the free printing option if you are actually serious about doing anything with the cards. Seeing the VistaPrint logo on the back of a chintzy card immediately conveys upon you the look of an amateur, someone not to be taken seriously. And with bad online journalism as easy to do as bad poetry and bad folk guitar, you need to be taken seriously.

I have been to MediaBistro, but I hadn’t heard of JournalismJobs, MediaPost, Ed (2010), or New Assignment. Will add that media professionals should avoid Monster and other mainstream job sites, and also try the employment sections of sites they want to work for.

All in all, a great set of tips, and with Barron asking for others to add to the list, I am excited to see what else turns up.

Scheduled to last 130 days, the 2008 Olympic Torch Relay relay will carry the torch 85,000 miles, the longest distance of any Olympic torch relay. The relay has met with protests in cities worldwide in response to a variety of political issues, primarily focusing on China’s human rights record and recent unrest in Tibet.

Torchy

I have read recently about the long tail, the idea that successful blogs or online content either have a large number of fans or a small number of really enthusiastic fans. The content in the middle, however, is where the really interesting stuff takes place.Kevin Kelly wrote something I thought was interesting about artists working at the long tail’s low end, suggesting the cultivation of 1000 “True Fans”

One of the artists I contacted was musician Robert Rich (above), whom I knew only as a fan (but not a True Fan). Rich was an early pioneer in ambient music, and a force in the Bay Area new age music scene in the early 1980s. He’s prolific, issuing about 40 albums in the past 20 years, many in collaboration with other ambient musicians. Among his earliest albums was “Numena”, which made his reputation, and among his latest is “Eleven Questions”, which was recorded with colleagues in a seven day burst at his home studio.

Robert Rich was one of the first professional musicians to start dealing directly with his fans via his own website, which is why I contacted him. He wrote an extremely candid, insightful and thorough reply to my query. He tempers my enthusiasm for 1000 True Fans with a cautionary realism borne from actually trying the idea. The summary of his experience is so pertinent and detailed that I felt was worth posting in full. With his permission, it follows, slightly edited.

“I agree strongly with your basic thesis [of a thousand True Fans], that artists can survive on the cusp of the long tail by nurturing the help of dedicated fans; but perhaps I can modulate your welcome optimism with a light dose of realism, tempered by some personal reflections.”

In a recent class, the idea was put forth that video would not only completely replace text on the Web, but do so in a handful of years. I found the idea to be strange, but at the same time, strangely familiar.

I realized that the position was similar to articles I have read in magazines from the 1970s whose writers claimed that there would be an aeroplane in every garage by the end of the 1980s. Someday, they said, we would be free of the ground, and be able to get from place to place faster than in an automobile. This is a bit of a realistic step back from the rocket cars that 1950s writers imagined would be in use by the turn of the century, but so is video-only Internet a step back from the 1990s position that all of entertainment would be virtual reality within a decade.

When you consider a part of a culture, you need to understand what role it serves in the lives of the people, rather than just what it is at face value. Text is not just a semi-basic means of communication, it is one that has existed despite the threat of record albums and radio and television. It exists and will continue to do so because it gives the reader a stronger sense of control over the media being consumed.

The need to control is one of the strongest of humans’ basic desires, and to ignore this is to ignore the actual direction the Internet – and media in general – is headed. Audiences continue to seek and gain control over the media they consume. This can easily be seen in premium cable services like HBO or OnDemand, or in DVRs like Tivo; in the advent of the compact disc and then the MP3, as well as satellite radio; and in the rise of online aggregators, whether they be for RSS and XML text feeds or for audio or video podcasts.

As I said, this need for control is basic, innate in us. As an undergrad, I had a class in which we discussed ethical issues, and one week was about racism. At the time, I suggested that racism would eventually go away, once all those who believed in it had died off. Every class after that, one student or another would suggest that course as the answer to whatever problem was before us. It’s nice to think that racism and prejudice will go away some day, but it’s highly unlikely they never will because they engender a sense of control - over other people and cultures with strange ideas and behavior, and over events in their lives that make them feel helpless. The difference in prejudice against, and hatred toward, Arabs and Muslims before and after September 11, 2001 is that more American people actually thought about these groups and they now felt helpless against all of them. The amount and intensity of the racism had increased, but the basic sentiment was still the same: Muslisms and Arabs are different, and so they are inferior. It’s really helpful when it comes to killing them, whether they have a gun in their hands, or they’re just nursing a baby.

To bring this discussion back to the subject at hand: A reader can scan text much more easily than audio or video and can easily jump from section to section to read it as they see fit. Too much emphasis can be placed on what the content provider intends, rather than how the audience will use and experience the content, and to do so is to assume that media is a one-way proposition. I believe that is often a position of arrogance and possibly of elitism on the part of content providers, and they need to remember whose money they are trying to earn.

About ten years ago when I was buying a DVD player (I’m a fairly early adopter), the salesman kept pushing a DiVX player on me. In addition to DVDs, a DiVX player played discs that were basically the same thing, except they cost only $4, as opposed to the $25 DVDs. The trick, though, was that a DiVX player had to be plugged into a phone line because after the first viewing, the “owner” had to pay another $4 every time he wanted to watch the disc. After the salesman explained this to me and persisted in trying to sell it to me, I laughed at him outright. Who wants to turn that much media control over to a corporation?

Companies simply have trouble relinquishing any control, and those that don’t understand that people now assume they will have that control and adapt to address that need will have a hard time earning their money. CD sales have been found to have a correlation to music downloads, with heavy downloaders buying the most CDs. Despite this, companies continue to try to implement DRM, further alienating consumers, when something happens like Microsoft discontinuing its music server, stranding all of its customers who legally purchased (licensed) music from the company without the ability to play the music they paid for.

Text is not dead. It probably never will be. We will not live in virtual reality, nor will we drive flying cars or airplanes anytime soon.

When discussing the future of media, people should look to the trends in its use, rather then simply advancements in technology.