Media and publishing

http://www.everydaypeopleproject.blogspot.com

San Jose, Calif., -- Enter Music Publishing, publishers of diverse, hip drum/percussion magazine worldwide, has made available its January 2008 Issue of DRUM! In its interactive edition at www.drumdigital.com. The January Issue features the second-line strut of New Orleans drummer, Stanton Moore, hot licks of Mitch Mitchell and four emerging Cowboy drummers, Myron Howell of Jake Owen's band; Tommy Bales of Flynnville Train, Steve Sinatra of Halfway to Hazard, and Jared Pope of Whiskey Falls.

Stanton Moore could be, as the old adage goes, the hardest-working drummer in the industry these days. As DRUM! Interactive thoroughly investigates, Moore has a rare ability to make virtually any kind of groove "strut." He has a strong command of the traditional New Orleans style and can acclimate it to any style, from the steady grooves that propel Galactic to his solo albums where he swings poetic. As he says succintly, "Music is a conversation. It just is."

Moving the meter back in time in "Hot Licks," Mitch Mitchell, like Moore, has that rare ability to fuse virtually any kind of drum style and make it swing. Perhaps the first drummer to play jazz style in a rock context, DRUM! Interactive focuses on some of his trademark tracks with Hendrix, such as "Voodoo Chile" and "Fire". Writer, Brad Schlueter, notes that Mitchell's contributions were essential to the drum vocabulary. Indeed.

"This issue of DRUM! Interactive may be our most diverse to date," said Phil Hood, publisher of Enter Music Publishing. "While we always try to provide editorial for drummers of all styles, I think we've really accomplished that in this issue. Of course, there's one factor that unites all of these drummers: they have a true command of their respective style."

Additional features in this issue include: "Experiment In Extemporization," which describes how an impromptu jazz session led by studio star Luis Conte became his latest greatest. And several others that are really hip, such as "Cowboys Without Hats". Check out The "Features" section of DRUM! Interactive for additional drumming edge editorial.

Other sections of this issue of DRUM! Interactive include SoundLab, which reviews DW's Accent CS Custom Elite Drums. The review is highly positive considering the high quality of these drums for a mid-priced kit, according to Schlueter. Meinl's Roped Tuned Djembes and Dream Cymbals are reviewed as well. (Pages 122-126).

The issue ends as strongly as it opens with Practice Pad, highlighted by great lessons and tips, focusing on the innovative use of the paraddidle. Read on for more classic instruction.

About Enter Music Publishing
Founded in San Jose, CA in 1992, Enter Music Publishing, Inc. is a leading publisher of drum/percussion magazines, with distribution in 40 countries. DRUM! is the flagship publication of Enter Music Publishing, Inc. and continues to set the industry standard for editorial quality and innovation. In addition to DRUM! and DRUM! Interactive, the company publishes TRAPS and HOW TO PLAY DRUMS. Additional information about the company can be found at: drummagazine.com, and drumdigital.com.

India has numerous News Channels but very few of them have invested heavily into recruiting and training Journalists.Generally one journalist is stationed in the capital of any state.Some of India's states are bigger than many countries of the world, so the journalist stationed in the state capital can just cover the Press briefings and any major incident that occurs around the state capital.Recently,news from far flung areas are also being shown as they happen.These have had major impact on the government and action has started in the right earnest on their account.Those channels which have broken most stories have garnered massive viewership and suddenly advertisers are rushing to them and distribution networks are competing with each other to bring them on their platform.This has all happened due to the phenomenon called "Citizen Journalism",that has swept India lately.The right to information and citizen journalism have given power to the people in the true sense.
Bhagalpur is a small town of the state of Bihar.A citizen Journalist captured in his camera how a man accused of snatching a chain was being beaten brutally first by the mob and then by the police, who even tied him to their motorcycle and dragged him for a distance.The visuals caught the attention of the nation and media pressure coupled with widespread condemnation of the open abuse of human rights forced Bihar government to act against the policemen involved .Another story by a Citizen Journalist was the headline of all the news network.The story about the stripping of over 1000 men in the village of Boraj,near Ajmer shook the conscience of the whole nation.The local elected body at the grassroot level,the village Panchayat had asked the men to strip to establish whether any of them was involved in the rape of a 35 -year -old woman from the village.
Another story of a punjab based citizen journalist exposed theft from trains that ferried oil.Many Children,men and women filling their buckets with oil was shown and as a result many guilty officials lost their jobs.
The story of how the forest department people looted and burnt down a tribal settlement for encroaching on forestland was picked up by the National and International Media.Based in the remote corner of the country ,Betul,this citizen reporter has broken many stories till now.
When a woman stripped and walked on to draw attention to the harassment she faced from her in-laws, a citizen journalist quickly broke the story to mainstream media.Similar was the case of Gudia and Imrana.
Gudia,the wife of a prisoner of war who married another man after her husband didn't return from the war front.Imrana,a Muslim woman who accused her own father-in-law of rape.
As of now only television News Channels are benefitting because broadband networks have yet to reach the remote corners of the country.Once the Internet is available everywhere,stories would be broken online first.

Every month, in the U.S, about 5 billion text messages are sent.

Most of these messages are personal. Many of them are mundane.

But we're going to start seeing them used for everything from updating your location on a map, to reporting on breaking news.

These new possibilities have arisen because of new services that break up our messages into archivable, exportable, searchable micro-chunks. These services have names like Jaiku, Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce, Hictu, and Moodmill. And while you can use them over any computer, they really come in handy when you can use them on a mobile device.

Soon there will be many more services like these. And people will prefer using a web-based message service of their choice to send messages over the canned text-message software that is pre-installed on these phones.

Why? Because these services let your messages be a lot more than just a one-way, direct message. By implementing API platforms, the services allow web developers to do useful things with your messages, like plot them on a map or a timeline, send them out to the social sites you use, or even help you report news.

Well, the reporting news thing is what I'm working on.

I've been inspired by pro-am projects like Assignment Zero and CNN's I-Reports to create a service that looks through all messaging services for items that look like breaking news, adding new data about what kind of news they are, and then making those breaking news items available to anyone that would like to use them - like CNN, and the AP, and Assignment Zero.

But I've ran into a problem. There are way too many messages. We're talking in the millions, and soon, in the billions.

Even if I could afford the hefty processing power needed to manually perform content analysis on each incoming message, there would still be many false-positives.

And for a breaking news wire service, false-positives are not an option.

That's why we should be talking about best practices for breaking news.

These best practices are standardized tags that you can use to describe your reporting.

Remember 30-30? You learned it in school, and you probably don't use it. It's a tag that is supposed to help people know when your story is finished.

The best practices I'm referring to are sort of like 30-30, although they can be a lot more useful.

By including recognizable tags in your message content, automated bots sitting at the API switchboard can figure out the best way to route your message.

For any messages that are likely being sent over mobile devices, these best practices should probably be short (2-4 characters) and in plain-text characters.

For breaking news, I'm suggesting that the 2-character br tag be written at the start of the message.

And if you're writing about a location in your news item, I'm suggesting the three-character loc tag.

I like those tags because they seem to be easy, and easy to remember. Exactly what we're looking for in best practices.

But breaking news is just the beginning of how pro-am journalism can bridge the gap between reporters and API developers. If you add recognizable tags to your reporting, web programmers like myself can then design services that make supplementary infographics for your story, or add related information as it arrives.

The end result is that your reporting work gains richness, depth, and distribution.

As both a journalist and a developer, I'm confident that we can create a distributed pro-am system that rivals the largest news organizations in the world for breadth and scope of content.

We, the programmers, will try to keep it simple.

Maybe you can help make sure of it.

Now that another publication date is nearing, I must ask myself--what were my lessons learned?

- For one, make sure that your interview notes are more clearly detailed and defined.

Unfortunately I didn't have a recording device, so I couldn't pour over my interview after the fact. In the future, I will probably invest in some type of recording device.

- Secondly, don't be vague.

When I created my original write-up, I made too many assumptions about the tone and the facts, which almost caused me to be in absolute horror after seeing the edit. I immediately emailed David about it, and in retrospect if I had made things clearer or provided a basis for the story it may have helped cleared things up a little bit. Additionally, I should have followed a specific format, such as the popular Q&A style that other interviews have conformed to.

Lastly, make sure the facts are correct and consistent. To help understand that process more, I actually volunteered to help fact-check other articles. I have no doubt that I will gain additional insight as a result of my efforts.

Being that this is the first real effort in contributing to a project of this scale, I'd have to say that the initial ad-hoc structure of it kind of threw me for a loop. But as things developed over time, and I saw examples of other submitted works, it gave me a greater chance to understand what the style consensus was for this particular segment.

But you know, this kind of thing is still pretty fresh. From inception to conclusion, there will no doubt be changes and standards that develop over time. I'll take in that which I learned and apply it to all future efforts.

I look forward to the next release.

I really enjoyed my gratis editing work for Assignment Zero. I'm just working a bit of freelance right now, so it gave me something to do between writing jobs.

Taking a step back after a few days, I have a few comparative thoughts on this versus other work I've done.

• Even if I only had to contact one of three reporters, I still found it interesting to work with reporters in three different areas (New Mexico, New York and the UK). This, more than anything, illustrated for me the distributed nature of the AZ concept.

• Like the reporters, the Q&A subjects also hailed from far and wide: Glasgow, Scotland; New Orleans, La.; and Champagne-Urbana, Ill. Again, the number of moving parts illustrates a growing flexibility in how media needs to operate.
• I suspect that working in a distributed medium like AZ isn't any different than working in a progressive, high-end news organization, like Slate or Salon or The New York Times. But, it does remind me that not all news organizations are forward thinking. That's a shame. Good journalism is something that needs to be encouraged.

As an Assignment Zero editor, my first tasks are revisions and cleanup on two interviews: one with Kyle MacRae of Scoopt, and another with Jon Donley of NOLA.com. This is as much as experiment for me as it is for my assigning editors.

So far, I've completed the MacRae interview. I've been a copy editor for years. Editing this first interview felt different — more like blogging. Part of it was thinking about linking out. As a print journalist, I think more about sidebars or information that can be pulled out and highlighted for the reader. As a blogger, I think about hyperlinks to add context to what I write on my blog.

Next, I'm on to the Donley interview. That one's shorter and, now that I have the hang of it, should go much quicker.

A long while ago I asked folks at a design blog called DesignBoom if they wanted to participate. They sent a long letter saying no and saying why not. They also have this open letter to journalists (takers, not sharers) here: http://www.designboom.com/openletter.html

I'm pasting in the text of their email to me (which I hope is not a violation, but it's very interesting)

international design newsstand
when designboom started its publishing activity in 1999,
we had no experience in the field of communication
but a 20-year-background as designers and design-consultants
(and long collaborations with famed designers as
achille castiglioni, vico magistretti, enzo mari, renzo piano,
konstantin grcic, campana brothers etc).
we simply wanted to share our knowledge,
and we were attracted by a 'tool' (internet publishing)
that could avoid most financial, national and cultural barriers.

at that time 'only' journalists (print press) were distributing information
on the design culture, but from our point of view, they did it on a
very naive basis, talking about forms without really understanding the
cultural aim of its creators and the technical development of production.
they had a poor 'corporate' approach (interpretation of press releases)
which brought a lot of mystification into to the field of design.

we also wanted to connect with other websites and create an international
channel of more in-depth-information. designboom created the
'international design newsstand' with contributions from websites from usa,
australia, china, japan, colombia, equador, spain, belgium, germany,
sweden, UK, ... and had monthly issues of local design news.
each contributor was asked to send in articles and all articles were edited
into a feature that was then available to be published on all contributors
websites. after more than two years organizing these issues, educating
other to respect, collaboration and timely delivery, we lost the interest in such
a project.

on the concept of collaboration
in the meantime, after 7 years, designboom advanced to the web's most popular
international design publication, with much more than 1 million of readers monthly
from 156 countries. I'm not sure if what I am now going to say is for interest for your article.
maybe you prefer to write about the immense potential of crowdsourcing,
and there is for sure.
but would you include it in your concept of 'culture'?
that's why I guess a critical point of view would also fit into your article, right?

With crowdsourcing, journalism is becoming much more collaborative, more egalitarian.
crowdsourcing = a job, outsources to an undefined, generally large group of people in
the form of an open call over the Internet.

as you for sure know, journalism has been outsourced since many years to undefined
'freelance' writers for a very low salary and consequentially their quality of work
could not be always sufficient. that is why EACH DAY we receive more than 20 requests
from journalists (and pretenders) asking for help -
here are 4 examples of friday june 18th (just to give you an idea...)
...
I am contacting you from a German magazine called ART. To illustrate an
article in our next issue I am looking for a high resolution version of the
attached image. Would you be able to help me to get in the possession of
that picture? I would highly appreciate any hint.
Kind regards,
...
I am the photoeditor of a greek weekly supplement 'Tachydromos'.
We are preparing our deco issue and one of our editors is interested
in doing a story on the monobloc plastic chair by Colombo that you
published in your last newsletter. Would it be pssible to send us high
resolution images with the photos of the chairs around the world to
include in our story?
...
WWE would like to do a short telephone or email interview about
the history of the folding chair. It's for an article on props used
in the wrestling ring.
Thank you in advance for your help,
...
We would like to use this photo in a web article about influential
architects and designers. May we have your permission to go ahead?
Our deadline is tonight.
I would need to hear back from you in the next few hours.
Best regards,
(name)
Picture Editor
Forbes.com

on the concept of culture transmission
yes. a few years ago we had two people in the office only for
answering all those emails of journalists, all questions,
sending out images for free, ...
in the hope of a cultural exchange, some sort of mutual relationship,
whatever keeps us awake.
instead we rarely received a thank you or a mention for collaboration!
not to mention all our photos and texts of articles, which print press
(from 'important' daily newspapers to glossy magazines and
internet blogs) regularly use without permission and credits
or false credits.
I am also a design historian, who has worked closely with the
masters of last centuries design production.
we have a huge archive of facts, images, related info, which are just known to us.
we
very famous american museums curate design history exhibitions
with 80% info from designboom, from our own historical researches,
using entire exerts and scientific without a single credit ...

it culminated in an open letter to a few curators and many journalists
- may 2006
http://www.designboom.com/openletter.html
of course, things have not changed at all, but we have learnt to live with it.

on the concept of dignity of work
designboom is one of the few companies in our field, which pays a
regular salary to ALL our collaborators, for our researches, photos etc
and offers financial help to all internship applicants.
from a business point of view, it is just crazy to continue to implement
this free collaboration service, and never receiving any credits, feedback, contacts.
this evolution seems not to be a 'cultural' transformation, but a clever form of
manipulation, egocentrism and business oriented marketing.

A recent report on "The rise and prospects of hyperlocal journalism."

http://www.kcnn.org/research/citizen_media_report/

Here's a disturbing one for you. Sometime after publication of the Citizendium article, the following grafs were inserted into the story right after the graf noting that Wales refused comment:

(Editor's note: Following publication of this article, Wales offered the following on-the-record comment in an e-mail to NewAssignment.net editor Jay Rosen:

"'Instigator' does not mean 'founder' is the main other comment I would make. My claim in this matter is quite simple, and this is on the record:

"Larry Sanger was my employee working under my direct supervision during the entire process of launching Wikipedia. He was not the originator of the proposal to use a Wiki for the encyclopedia project -- that was Jeremy Rosenfeld. And Larry has himself publicly stated, 'To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine.'

"His role in the early days of Wikipedia was important -- he was considered the 'editor-in-chief' -- but it was not the role of founder. Larry was never comfortable with the open wiki process, and he has been critical of it from the beginning and to this day.")

I commented before about the inherent conflict of interest in our taking on a Citizendium story. I believe that the original story was as even-handed as you could get it, and thankfully, we were blissfully ignorant of Jay's involvement on the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board (remember, for emphasis, that this board is advisory in nature only, not involved in the day-to-day running of Wikipedia). But now, post-publication, we've got changes being made to the story based on an e-mail from Wales to Rosen.

I have serious issues with the modification of any story after its publication, particularly when the modifications involve allegations that are central to the story itself.

It's a fact that Wales refused comment on the story pre-publication. Now re-read this sentence from the inserted copy:

"'Instigator' does not mean 'founder' is the main other comment I would make. My claim in this matter is quite simple, and this is on the record:

This is quite simply a smoking gun; by saying that he has an "other comment" that is "on the record," it is quite clear that there's more to this e-mail, and that what appeared above it was "off the record." This makes it even more obvious that there's some kind of communication going on behind the scenes.

I believe that if you don't vote, you lose your right to bitch about the government. And if you refuse to be interviewed for a story, you lose your right to have the story reflect your views. Them's my guns and I'm sticking to them.

A person involved on the project commented to me, privately, that knowing about the conflict of interest left a lingering "dirty" feeling. At the time, I knew that our team had done its due diligence. I didn't share this feeling, and replied as much. Until now. Now I feel dirty too.