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Buy Nothing or Seek Bargains: Ready for Black Friday

Tips for editors, short url's included to promote sharing.

The group that provided the idea for the Occupy Wall Street movement is also taking aim at shopping with an annual promotion for what it calls Buy Nothing Day:  | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters http://bit.ly/tTxB7w. This will be the 20th year that the Adbusters group has run its Buy Nothing campaign on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and an annual festival of sales kicking off the holiday shopping season.

Background on the editors of the Canadian magazine Adbusters: Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the Creators of Occupy Wall Street: The New Yorker http://nyr.kr/tycsF9

Another group of people is also protesting the extraordinary overnight shopping hours and the sales that in some cases will start at 10 PM on Thanksgiving Day. A petition started by one Target worker in Omaha, Neb., now has 130,000 names on it. Many retail workers and their families don't want their holiday interrupted: Retail backlash over Thanksgiving night openings http://bit.ly/uhqeVt

A recent consumer survey found that most people interviewed said they would think more highly of retailers that give employees the day off on Thursday:  | Mainstreet http://bit.ly/szLkT6. Other surveys show that more than 60% of shoppers are already planning a store trip on Black Friday.

Are they remembering the 2008 Long Island crowd that trampled a worker? Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death - NYTimes.com http://nyti.ms/vLvR6u What have stores in your area done to avoid a repeat?

Prompts of the day: 

*Is someone in your family working on Thanksgiving?

*Should retail employees have Thursday off?

*What is on your Black Friday shopping list?

*How much do you expect to spend on gifts this year? How does that compare to last year?

*How many gifts do you plan to buy online?

Full stats on holiday shopping: Black Friday 2011 - Deals, Tips and Statistics - TheStreet http://bit.ly/uTbmc8

Praising Newspapers, Praising the Newsroom's Next Generation: Meet Sara Ganim

Sara Ganim has a police scanner on her nightstand. She is one of those hard-working Millenials who caught the reporting bug in high school, worked for her college paper, wrote freelance pieces for her hometown paper and was an AP intern. Then she joined a newspaper with a reporting staff that might have reached 10 in the glory days but now numbers about six, the Centre Daily Times. One of the smallest McClatchy newspapers, it is edited by Bob Heisse, a skilled veteran with deep local roots and a side passion for rodeos.

While covering crime for the CDT, Ganim first heard about child sex abuse investigation touching Penn State. Early this year, she moved to the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, a Newhouse paper edited by David Newhouse. She continued to chase down leads, interviewing dozens of sources.In March, Ganim and the Patriot-News broke the story. Her lede: Penn State football legend Jerry Sandusky is the subject of a grand jury investigation into allegations that he indecently assaulted a teenage boy. The national media may not have noticed the developments then, but they certainly would in November, when the charges were filed. By then Ganim's work showed she knew every detail and had access to family members and others that would keep her readers on top of fast-moving developments. 

This morning, Ganim published a step-back piece that went through the entire timeline: Who knew what about Jerry Sandusky?

This is not, however, just the story of a young reporter who worked hard and shifted the axis of power in Pennsylvania, in college football and at a great university. It is also the story of a family-owned media company, Advance, of a second-generation newspaper editor, David Newhouse, of a publisher, John Kirkpatrick, who understands what a newspaper means to a community, and of a newsroom that has the deep local connections and also the courage to keep going no matter what the potential cost to its own reputation.  In Manhattan, Advance is Conde Nast -- glittery titles, glossy paper, gleaming office tower. To much of the country -- in Springfield MA, in Cleveland OH, in New Orleans LA, and in Harrisburg PA, Advance is the local Newhouse paper. This is their moment, a time when that side of the house is in the spotlight.

Penn State had Paterno, Sandusky, Spanier, Curley and Shultz. Penn State also had Sara Ganim. She learned to be a reporter there. Ganim graduated in 2008 with a journalism degree. Follow Ganim on Twitter. Look at her personal website:

http://saraganim.com/

The first image is about a charity honoring a former colleague. Look at her "about me" page:

Everything I do, every story I report, is on multiple platforms.

It’s not unusual for me – in a single day – to take photos, shoot and edit video, write copy, update the web, post to Twitter, and package radio stories.

I can tell stories in many ways, but at my core I am simply a reporter.

I have a police scanner on my nightstand. I fall to sleep and wake up to the morning news. I work 60-hour weeks digging and investigating, chatting up sources, and peeling back layers until I find amazing stories.

She has talked to the mothers of Sandusky victims, to a sister. She is everywhere. In my book, she's earned every journalism accolade we can give her. The cool part is that she did it through hard work, against a hometown mindset that would put many reporters off the trail . Ganim combines old-fashioned dogged reporter the tools of the modern Swiss-Army-knife do-everything reporter.

Oh, if you have a chance, notice the dates on her resume. Last day at Centre Daily Times, Jan. 18. First day at Patriot News, Jan. 20. 

There aren't many heroes in the Penn State story. Sara is my hero.

Is there a Sara Ganim in your newsroom? Send a note about your hero to [email protected]

 or add a comment below.

Readers find our work across the disaggregated web. Those who want to learn more about the newsroom that produced the content or the reporter who wrote it have a hard time. That is often true on a newspaper's website. It's more true across the web, but Google is doing something about it. So are two very different aggregation sites: newstransparency.com and muckrack.com.

Example: Alan Rusbridger (Guardian editor) on News Transparency.

Example: Alan Rusbridger on MuckRack.

MuckRack will be launching a new pro version with even more information about individual journalists, information intended to have enough value that PR people will pay a premium for access.

The Google News information will continue to be free. A tiny mug shot with your name can now run with all your articles on Google News. It will link directly to your Google + feed:

Google will begin integrating journalists’ Google-ized identities into Google News » Nieman Journalism Lab http://bit.ly/t2Mhe5

When your staff distributes an article across Twitter, do they use the Twitter handle of the reporter and

of the publication? When you post an article on Facebook, do you link to the Facebook ID of the reporter?

Some journalists raise concerns: how do I keep my private life private? It's tempting to be blunt in response: you don't. We do our dance on a public stage, and anything that might be made public someday, will be. It might be a video ambush. Information about you may become the value a digital entrepreneur presents to customers. In any case, newsrooms can either wait for this to happen to us or take the lead and turn the audience's appetite for more information into a value we provide.

Mallary Jean Tenore studied the way newsrooms present info about individual journalists:

How accessible do journalists really want to be? | Poynter.http://bit.ly/uoGf4O

She identified the elements of an ideal "contact us" page:

A list of staffers’ names, broken down by department.
All staffers’ names would link to a bio that includes their most recent work, email address, phone number and Twitter handle.
Staffers’ bylines on article pages would also link to this bio. (If the bylines don’t link to a bio, then ideally all article pages would include the writer’s email address, phone number and Twitter handle.)

Do a quick audit of your website and of how you present your work across other platforms. Can your audience learn more about you? What else can your newsroom do to make that easier?

Here are some contact pages, from selecteed newsrooms (note: many are not easy to find on the newspaper websites):

York Daily Record

Greensboro News & Record

(N.J) The Record

Cleveland Plain Dealer

(adding more as I get them -- send samples to [email protected])

 

Finding Value in Identity: Your Identity

Readers find our work across the disaggregated web. Those who want to learn more about the newsroom that produced the content or the reporter who wrote it have a hard time. That is often true on a newspaper's website. It's more true across the web, but Google is doing something about it. So are two very different aggregation sites: newstransparency.com and muckrack.com.

Example: Alan Rusbridger (Guardian editor) on News Transparency.

Example: Alan Rusbridger on MuckRack.

MuckRack will be launching a new pro version with even more information about individual journalists, information intended to have enough value that PR people will pay a premium for access.

The Google News information will continue to be free. A tiny mug shot with your name can now run with all your articles on Google News. It will link directly to your Google + feed:

Google will begin integrating journalists’ Google-ized identities into Google News » Nieman Journalism Lab http://bit.ly/t2Mhe5

When your staff distributes an article across Twitter, do they use the Twitter handle of the reporter and

of the publication? When you post an article on Facebook, do you link to the Facebook ID of the reporter?

Some journalists raise concerns: how do I keep my private life private? It's tempting to be blunt in response: you don't. We do our dance on a public stage, and anything that might be made public someday, will be. It might be a video ambush. Information about you may become the value a digital entrepreneur presents to customers. In any case, newsrooms can either wait for this to happen to us or take the lead and turn the audience's appetite for more information into a value we provide.

Mallary Jean Tenore studied the way newsrooms present info about individual journalists:

How accessible do journalists really want to be? | Poynter.http://bit.ly/uoGf4O

She identified the elements of an ideal "contact us" page:

A list of staffers’ names, broken down by department.
All staffers’ names would link to a bio that includes their most recent work, email address, phone number and Twitter handle.
Staffers’ bylines on article pages would also link to this bio. (If the bylines don’t link to a bio, then ideally all article pages would include the writer’s email address, phone number and Twitter handle.)

Do a quick audit of your website and of how you present your work across other platforms. Can your audience learn more about you? What else can your newsroom do to make that easier?

Here are some contact pages, from selecteed newsrooms (note: many are not easy to find on the newspaper websites):

York Daily Record

Greensboro News & Record

(N.J) The Record

Cleveland Plain Dealer

(adding more as I get them -- send samples to [email protected])