When I was a student journalist at Oklahoma State University, we had nothing but difficulties trying to pry information from the bureaucrats running the show at the school. They would obsfucate, delay, do whatever it took to block public access to their records. The only place I’ve ever seen such an institutionalized “screw you” toward public records law is throughout the city government of Norman.
Sidenote: Norman should definitely be on the list for this award.
These clowns at OSU — and I am a proud graduate — always thought the records belonged to them and how dare anyone question what they do with student tuition or taxpayer dollars. But before you think I’m just picking on OSU, the situation is also bad at OU. Throughout my years working at a newspaper in Oklahoma, the situation at the universities never improved.
Needless to say, someone needs to shine some sunlight on the people running these institutions. Someone needs to start filing lawsuits for the blatant disregard these universities have toward the public’s right to know. They need to start dragging the institutions through court and then collect attorney fees. Then write a story about how taxpayer/tuition dollars were doled out to the *insert media outlet here* because the idiots running the institution couldn’t/wouldn’t follow the law.
And the good people at FOI Oklahoma are taking a big-time step toward shining some light on the problems at OSU. Take a chance to read this.
The highlights:
— The award was given to OSU for “routinely conducting the public’s business outside the public’s view. Regents secretly discuss proposals among themselves and with college officials prior to public meetings.”
— The group also faulted administrators for claiming public business conducted on personal smart phones is secret, in contradiction to interpretations by attorneys general in several states.
You’ve got to be kidding me, OSU. As one employee of the Texas Attorney General’s office once told a conference of bureaucrats trying to figure out how they could get OUT of following sunshine laws (and I’m paraphrasing here): “What part of public service do you not understand?”
Posted in Journalism, Journalism ramblings.
Tagged with foi, Journalism, oklahoma, Oklahoma State, oklahoma state university, ou, right to know, sunshine, university of oklahoma.
OK, I feel like a kid on the night before Christmas. The wife and I head to Durango, Colo. tomorrow for a much-needed vacation. We’re celebrating a year of marriage and it’s a chance to catch our breath after quite a bit of change. While doing our taxes, I realized my wife of one year (as of March 1) had lived in Oklahoma, Florida and Texas in less than a year. For me, last year included Florida and Texas.
After that, a couple weeks later and I’ll be able to get my NICAR on, where hopefully I’ll pick up some sweet skillz. I’m most excited about seeing some sessions on text mining and the other unstructured data stuff being discussed by Chase Davis here, here and here. Combining that with what Aron Pilhofer and his crew at The Times are doing with ProPublica to make DocumentCloud, I think there’s a ton of new possibilities out there.
I look around our newsroom and see box after box of documents collected through the years. I can’t help but thank there’s limitless potential in those boxes.
I’m also heading to Django boot camp. Hopefully that’ll help me put together some of the ideas floating around in my head re: the previous couple paragraphs. As you know, I’ve tinkered with both the frameworks, but have not done anything of substantial value. I’ve just never had the time to REALLY dive into either. It’s been way too casual. Hopefully this camp will indoctrinate me.
So, as of tomorrow, I’ll spend nearly a week in the mountains, take some deep breaths, clear my head and be ready for some new challenges.
Posted in Frameworks, Journalism ramblings, Random, Work.
Tagged with data, django, durango, florida, mining, mountains, oklahoma, rails, ruby, ski, texas, wife.
I may not have the pedigree of this cat — no Pulitzer nominations or sheepskin from Columbia U. — but we do have a newspaper company in common. So, I guess if public service journalism goes away, there’s always naked women.
Actually, my wife might have a serious problem with that. Looks like I’m back to Wal-Mart greeter.
Click here for story goodness.
Posted in Journalism, Random.
Tagged with News, newspapers, strippers.
I have to admit — I was skeptical when Rupert Murdoch took over The Wall Street Journal. Not so much because I was afraid he’d turn the WSJ into another bully pulpit, but rather he’d abandon what made it such a pleasure to read. I wasn’t really that interested in seeing it full of national news. I wanted biz news.
Never have I been a business reporter. I still have to get out a book to know which SEC report is which. That’s probably why I read the WSJ so much — because it’s mostly topics I know so little about.
But I realized something the other day while catching up on my newspaper readings: The WSJ’s reporting on the financial crisis and executive pay has been stunning. I was reading this gem:
“Some companies have been basing their calculations on an obsolete federal interest-rate formula that many experts say tends to produce an inflated payout. “It’s a sneaky way to give executives larger pay,” says Ron Gebhardtsbauer, a former U.S. Senate pension expert, now head of the actuarial-science program at Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal College of Business.”
I hope they keep it up.
Posted in Journalism, Journalism ramblings, Links.
Tagged with business, executive, Journalism, pay, reporting, wall street journal, wsj.
“The average front page of a major news site looks like the HTML fairies threw up on it…”
Click here for a good read on why our sites suck.
This begs the question — how can we possibly explain away what we’re doing with our sites?
Posted in Journalism, Links.
Tagged with html, newspaper, sites, suck, web.
OK, so I bought myself a tiny little slice on Slicehost. I’ve never messed with a slice before, but I figure I might as well jump into the water.
The first part is just getting set up. I installed Ubuntu and am slowly working through the documentation from Slicehost, which seems to be fairly robust (so far).
I got myself Putty and logged right in. I’ve been following the directions on changing the configuration, which so far has gone off without a hitch. Except for figuring out VI.
But I did a little searching around the net and found this quick little down and dirty on VI. First crisis averted.
So I’ll try and keep you updated on my little tales of slice adventures. I’m sure I’ll have quite a few screwups.
Posted in Frameworks, Work.
Tagged with car, Frameworks, oklahoma state university, slicehost.
I’ve starred a few things in my Google Reader over the last couple months, fully intending to get of my tail and post them here. But as you can see, I’ve been a little busy and haven’t been interested in spending free time in front of a computer, too.
So now’s a good time to start.
1) Over at 10,000 Words, they had a post about maximizing multimedia opportunities on the Innertubes. But I starred it because it provided a link to the absolutely sweet NY Times interactive tour of a famous downhill ski course.
2) The Golden Concorde Award is a classic. WTF are so many newspapers doing spending hard-to-find dollars sending staff to cover the inauguration?
3) And my friend Re-Re is blogging. Check it out. You won’t be disappointed. Click here for one of my favorite posts.
4) Oh. And check out Stuff Journalists Like.
More later.
Posted in Journalism, Links, Random.
Tagged with blog, journalists, Links, re-re, ski.
So today we began publishing what’s been taking up a lot of my time lately.
State of Neglect is about a year’s worth of work for my collegues and a project I’ve worked on since I arrived at the newspaper in August.
Please take a look if you have a little extra time. It will run over Sunday-Monday for the next month.
And send me a criticism or two of my first venture into a social network analysis. It’s actually way short on the analysis (OK, no analysis) and pretty much a lot of mind-numbing connections. And it was our our art folks who made it look great.
Posted in Journalism, Texas, dallas.
Tagged with dallas morning news, Journalism, my work, state of neglect.
I once worked at a newspaper where a member of management called CAR skills “that computer stuff.” He didn’t understand it, didn’t want to understand it and was a major part of the cultural problems that put his reporters at a distinct disadvantage against the competition.
That can make for a pretty frustrating work environment, as you can imagine. That’s why I had culture shock after arriving at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and reporters across the newsroom had not only basic CAR skills, but advanced ones as well. Reporter after reporter could handle advanced tasks. And all that, I believe, came from a culture created by management that trickled down.
At one place, CAR people were called “egghead” and mocked by management. At another, the skills thrived throughout the newsroom.
Anyways — I saw this post and thought of Mr. That Computer Stuff. It’s the top ten reasons not to learn multimedia skills.
6. Interactivity is just a fancy word for communism.
Posted in Journalism.
Tagged with car, Journalism, multimedia.
So I finally got around to upgrading WordPress to v2.7. Hopefully that will clean up some of the spam here.
I’m also toying with the idea of requiring registration before commenting, at least until the spam dies down. I’ll give 2.7 a few days and see if I’m still being covered with spam, to the tune of 100s a day.
Posted in Random.
Tagged with blog, blogging, blogs, spam.