Sports photojournalism: Change your perspective

One thing many beginning shutterbugs have heard, including editors of community newspapers, is "change your angle."

They hear that, and they only think horizontal angle. Or, if they do think of vertical angle, they forget it again, often because it requires more work.

Well, I was at a recent sports photojournalism seminar at TCU, and one of the presenters talked abut changing vertical angles.

For football, he said he shot on his knees on kneepads. Especially on fields with a high crown, he said he got a great perspective.

I've shot on my butt in basketball, but basketball players are smaller, and don't have the weight of pads. I'll pass on not being on my feet for football shots.

But, said presenter, having mentioned going into the stands for hoops and volleyball to change the vertical the other way, didn't mention, when possible, doing the same for football.

I was shooting Whitesboro vs Bushland last week.

They played in Iowa Park, which is a semi-sunken stadium. (It's a slight climb uphill from the ticket gate to the stands, and you come in at the top of them, so semi-sunken would be 80 percent or so sunken.)

Having gone to the press box for first, coffee, then food at halftime of a cold-for-Texas 40-degree game, at the start of the second half, I thought, "I'm going to stay at the top for a while."

And, I got the picture you see at left, as well as others that are available for use in the Whitesboro paper.

This one is just a throwaway on quality, but you can see that if I were shooting it at ground level, it just wouldn't have worked.

So?

Change your angle.

Change your perspective.

Journalists "less morally developed" than 13 years ago: Is it wingnuts, Gnu Media, some of both?

A new piece at Psy Post says that, compared with 13 years ago, journalists are less moral today.

Background:
1. Priming, namely by reminding them they are journalists, was used to see if that induced more morality. The results were compared to a study 13 years ago.
2. The priming was found to make NO morality inducement this time.
3. It's a fairly small sample size, just 171.
4. Interestingly, all subjects self-identified as digital journalists.

That, in turn, leads me back to a post just a few days ago about how having a YouTube channel and a couple of social media feeds may make you — MAY make you, they don't guarantee you to be — a journalist in the eye of the court system sub specie Primo Amendmento, but they DON'T AT ALL guarantee you're a journalist, let alone a "publisher" in the media world sub specie scribendo atrimento.

I wonder how much of this is winger media. The Project Veritas type stuff is basically all winger-side stuff. No liberals let alone lefties do that.

Gnu Media, political writing, 1st Amendment and Monty Python

Trust me. As usual, mainly where I blog elsewhere, everything in that header will come together.

"Strange women lying in ponds distributing social media accounts is no way to establish a media company. Just because some watery tart in a lake handed you a YouTube channel, that doesn't make you a publishing or media company." —
Monty Python, The Holy Grail and the Gnu Media (2019)



True, the free speech clause says you can call yourself whatever you want. Per Monty, you could call yourself the "Arthur, King of the Britons Publishing House." And, the freedom the press clause, also following the "no law," means that the government cannot define what a media or publishing company is or is not.

In other words, especially on judges ruling whether a blogger or whomever is a media company? Even there, there has to be a certain amount of actions. That said, judges can't rule on whether the falsity of reporting, rather than its truth, disqualifies someone from being a media company.

But, the general public, including yours truly, can proffer exactly such definitions.

Critical reporting (at least on occasion), not using leading questions to fuel conspiracy theories, and other things, can be used as reasonable "tags."

So, if you're a winger (and on some issues, per "horseshoe theory," it doesn't matter WHICH wing, you're just a winger) thrusting a mike in front of minor party political candidates, or interviewing each other?

You're not a media company.

Update, Nov. 18: Maybe some of this is related to journalists (fairly small sample size, but all digital or digital first) being less morally developed than 13 years ago?

No, digital advertisers can't guarantee magic versus old-fashioned print or TV

It may seem that way, but much of the digital advertising world's top sellers appear to throw around economic jargon in a form of hand-waving as much as Mark Carrier throws around Bayesian probability claims in an effort to prove Jesus never existed.

The reality is something QUITE different, as this long piece shows.

It's snark-heavy, with a headline of "The new dot-com bubble is here: It's called online advertising."

A key early point of Jesse Frederick and Maurits Martijn is that here, in the most dismal of the social sciences (advertising as part of economics), as in other sciences, correlation is not causation.

From there, we dive into some actual research, which the hand-wavers didn't.

Finding one? Paid company brand name keyword links? Bupkis.

We then move beyond that to:

The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

Interesting.

Now, that's all true of old-fashioned ads as well.

From the newspaper biz, I know that. I've not sold a lot of ads, but I've sold a few, and working primarily in the community papers biz, I've heard people ask about ads even if I've not been the seller of record.

Can't tell you how many times someone would ask to make a coupon a part of their ad to test ad effectiveness. That ignores whether people remember to clip the ad or not, remember to have the clipped ad with them, etc., and finally, whether the ad, coupon included, is that much of an enticement for a product or service they might not otherwise need.

Per neuroscience, advertising is just a general "primer." And, whether in a newspaper or magazine's print version, a TV station, or on Facebook, it's only going to attract people already interested in the product or service, or in an individual company. In that sense (and god, I hate to give him credit for anything) it's like a Cass Sunstein nudge.

From there, the authors talk further about "selection effects" (i.e., selection bias) vs "advertising effects." And they apply this to the Hucksterman Empire.

In seven of the 15 Facebook experiments, advertising effects without selection effects were so small as to be statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Well, that's pretty serious.

Because the target audience for a lot of ad sales is small, you have to run large sample sizes on testing before you can figure out if you've got something real. The audience for some new Max Factor lipstick is nothing like presidential polling. Rather, going the other way, the authors compare the rarity of many product needs to that of cystic fibrosis.

From here, the authors note that this also shows advertising can't manipulate people as much as digital advertisers claim.

The information above is as true on affiliate marketing as on search.

The biggie behind all of that is this:

It might sound crazy, but companies are not equipped to assess whether their ad spending actually makes money. It is in the best interest of a firm like eBay to know whether its campaigns are profitable, but not so for eBay’s marketing department.

And, per the authors, many of the marketing staff at many of these companies — we're talking buyers of ads, not the sales staff at Google and Facebook — don't WANT to know. 

Per an anecdote about Mel Karmazin, president of Viacom, talking to Google's Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin in 2003, and complaining they were removing the "magic" from advertising, these marketers want to keep the magic, so that they continue to look like Wizards of Oz.

This all means that programmatic advertising is smoke and mirrors, too. So my potential nightmare of the post Gannett merger Craphouse creating an in-house programmatic ad network? Could still happen. In a sense, would be an even bigger fuck-up than I dreamed before.

The Texas Tribune turns 10: A success story, right? Err ...

Well, maybe. It depends on what metrics and how you analyze them, as we look at Evan Smith's hoorah piece.

OK, first, financials.

$10 million intake and $9.7 million expenses. Yes, you're in the black.

At 3 percent.

A total haul of $76 million over that decade?

How much of that haul is from your "sponsors" in what Jim Moore five years ago called pay-to-play journalism, as I blogged here? Care to open your books all the way, Evan? I didn't think so. Remember, at the same time, Moore called you out for lack of transparency, as well.

And, how much of your haul over the years is from advertorial pieces? Easier to do that, maybe, when you have "sponsors."

Ten years in, we still consult at no cost with any wide-eyed, big-hearted social entrepreneurs who want advice and insight on how to create an operation like ours from scratch.

I can consult like that, too, also for free.

"Dear Salt Lake City Tribune, as you now enter the nonprofit world, getcha a bunch of fucking money from big corporations. List them by name to be ethical, but ... don't let that actually bother if you shade your writing their way."

There ya go!

What Evan won't tell you, in addition, is that if that money comes from a foundation, attached to it are foundation terms of use and other strings.

Does that have an effect?

Arguably yes.

Especially when it comes to talking Earl, which the Trib don't have much of in Utah, compared to the Black Gold, the Texas Tea, and the refining thereof in Texas. The Trib has always been light in the loafers about calling Big Oil to account, let alone following fellow light-in-the-loafers Politico to write something about climate change legal liabilities. I noted that at its 3-year mark, with this piece.

Reaching more than 2 million per month on various platforms? Does that include, or not, the New York Times website on cross-produced stories carried at both places?

Speaking of separate platforms and sponsored journalism, running Trib Talk pieces separately is now being killed. That would, therefore, not be a success. How clearly they'll be distinguished in the future, who knows?

About 80 full time and part time employees? Sounds good, as others still gut. But how many are FT and how many PT?

Oh, and per that same environmental piece link, Evan, you were making more than $300 large 7 years ago. Care to tell us what the current haul is? Also within that link, Editor and Publisher had other issues to raise, like Ross Ramsey's cozy past relationship with John Sharp when comptroller, especially since the Aggies that Sharp now runs are an official "partner."

I'm surprised that Evan hasn't branched Trib Talk into a TED Trib Talk channel. He must be slipping.

Finally, given ProPublica's recently announced partnership with the Trib on investigative journalism, what happens when serious dirt gets found on a Trib sponsor?

At least Smith, in an interview with Texas Monthly, admits he got lucky. He refers to livestreaming Wendy Davis and her pink shoes inside the pink dome in 2013.

Sadly, Poynter can only see fit to write a puff piece.

I shouldn't totally bitch on Poynter. It does tell us what Evan didn't — where the money comes from:

Its diverse revenue stream, according to a 2018 financial report, is 25% from foundations, 24% from individuals, 19% from website sponsorship, 18% from events, 10% from membership. 5% is “earned.”

OK. So Poynter doesn't have a breakout of income level of the individuals. Nor $$$ amounts to attend events. Nor does it tell us that at places like The Atlantic, Washington Post and elsewhere, "events" have led to ethical conundrums — conundrums enough for said places to generally drop the "events."

Well, it SHOULD have led to ethical conundrums. In reality, Atlantic tut-tutted the people who were tut-tutting the WaPost's soirees, and this was all so it could turd-polish its own such events. This was a full decade ago, meaning that Atlantic gave Evan cover to do this at the Trib.

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Update: This year's TribFest is going virtual. How much will that eat into the 18 percent revenue share.

SLC Tribune a nonprofit? Nice, or "nice," but a game-changer? Not by itself

Media analyst pundits like Jay Rosen and many others are raving about the Salt Lake City Tribune getting IRS approval — and quickly — to reconstitute itself as a 501(c)3 nonprofit.

If this is part of a broader package of change issues on the business side, it might mean something. As of right now? No.

Click the link above. You'll likely see a Javascript screen tut-tutting you to turn off whatever ad-blocking program you run.

You WON'T see a hard or even semi-hard paywall. You'll only see a note with something to the effect that only subscribers can read while still running ad-blocking extensions.

This is the latest move by many newspapers and other news websites to avoid an actual paywall of any substance.

We in the business know that digital dimes of ad revenue continue to lose value, especially as they're undercut by mobile nickels.

If you're not going to address that revenue loss in other ways (beyond seeking donations to you as a nonprofit), you're still not facing the revenue issue head on.

So, nice at best to be a nonprofit, and that's only with other steps. If this is the Trib's main move, then "nice" is more like it.

As for those nonprofit partnerships? ProPublica and the Texas Tribune have had some success with them. The Trib, though, has had its reporting questioned at times in the past, over whether any oil-industry partnerships had bad influence, among other things, and I have been a past questioner.

Plus, neither of them is a legacy newspaper still focusing on print operations. Also, neither is in a two newspaper town — the Trib has the larger weekday circ but Deseret News is larger on Sunday. And, the Deseret News, though itself constituted as a for-profit, is of course owned by a massive nonprofit — the Mormons.

Where it's already been done, as a couple of years ago with the two Philly papers, per AP reporting this spring on the Trib's plans? It's helped. But it is not a lifesaver. (Philly had another buyout offer round this spring as well.) And eventually, as more papers consider this, existing journalism foundations, like Knight, which gave the Philly papers a bunch of money, will have less and less to give.

RIP Deadspin, so to speak

Of course, even though the last of the current-until-Thursday editorial staff at the sports (and fairly often, not-sports) blog Deadspin has now quit, as the mounting fallout from new owner G/O Media's "stick to sports" mantra that was enunciated just a few days ago erupted into Vesuvius, the website isn't going away. CEO Jim Spanfeller and the other hacks, including new Deadspin editorial director Paul Maidment, who turned Forbes into 50 percent "contributor" material will probably do what was their ultimate goal anyway — make it another Bleacher Report, or even worse, Barstool Sports.

Neiman Lab offers a roundup of hot takes and Tweets about Deadspin's demise and what it might portend.

As for yours truly?

As I said on Twitter more than once this last week, I visited Deadspin for four reasons:
1. To see ESPN pwned
2. To see Bill Simmons pwned
3. To read some often-wrong sports hot takes, sometimes almost as wrong as Bleacher Report, Barstool Sports or Fansided sites (along with seeing them pwned)
4. To read some of that non-sports writing that Spanfeller wanted to gut and that on Nieman's roundup, contra his claims, got more views than sports stuff.

A lot of the stuff under No. 4 had political overtones, usually at least mildly left of center. And THAT was the problem for the G/O vulture capitalists. That's why they simply closed down Deadspin's sister, Splinter, shortly after they bought the former Gawker carcass from Univision. To riff on what Ben Mathis-Lilley notes at Slate in talking about zombie websites, much of what remains at a place like Forbes is not just clickbait, but in the hands of these vulture capitalists, it's wingnut clickbait.

New Republic salutes Deadspin staff's courage in walking out, while noting they were in a rare situation — apparently profitable.

And that gets me back to bullet points 1-3, and those other sports sites.

Deadspin didn't really do sports reporting. It did, on its sports work, oh, 20 percent analysis, and 80 percent in the categories 1-3 plus other hot take type opinion, and an occasional cold take.

Sure, it was fun.

But, it was also, for me, like the stereotypical Chinese dinner. Digested and gone from an empty stomach half an hour later.

I'd read it little in the past 3-4 months, I confess. So, I'll kind of miss it. But not really miss it. The non-sports hot takes will find new homes. And people will follow the hot takers on Twitter if they need to. (That said, it's easier when they're all on one site, just like when much of the best basketball, and I think football, reporting is at ESPN. ESPN, with the exception of the relatively recent add of Jeff Passan, largely sux on baseball, and The Athletic is behind a paywall.)

And, to riff on New Republic, there's probably more "reckoning" like this. We've seen on the news website site, "readjustments" at places like Vice. Look how ESPN poached from and crowded out Yahoo on the sports news side, then The Athletic went paywall with premium sports news. NBC Sports went with a mix of bloggers and the occasional actual writer. There's only so many sports teams, and just so much, or so little, in the way of breaking news, and insightful analysis, and ever-shrinking online ad dollars at the same time.

And the "Mavening of sportswriting" that Bryan Curtis decries? Maven itself has already moved it beyond sports in the narrow sense to broader "leisure" writing. (It owns Backpacker, for example.)

The final lesson? Back to New Republic. If your company, especially but not only if you're in the media, is taken over by the vulture capitalists of private equity, start updating your escape plans immediately.