Have you seen the phone commercials lately where someone is stuck doing something “boring” so they check their phone?

These commercials bug me a great deal because what about what’s happening in front of you? We’re so connected via social media and our phones that we may be missing something important right here. We could be missing life.

If you’ve read this blog for any sort of time, you know this is an issue near and dear to my heart. I want to explore it again, so tell me: How do you disconnect? How do you ensure you’re not missing something right in front of you? Or do you keep yourself connected all the time?

Share your thoughts in the comments or send me a tweet @jenconnic. I may use it in an upcoming post.

It wasn’t just the misinformation spread by more than one news organization and journalist. It was how trained journalists pursued the story. Did everyone forget Journalism 101 while covering the story?

It also makes me wonder if we as journalists have learned anything because I feel like I’ve been repeating the points I’m about to make for quite some time, including after the Newtown shooting.

To tweet or not to tweet the scanner

Never have I seen so many people listening to (and tweeting) the scanner for a police operation.

I’m a big fan of the police scanner. If I’m covering something at the scene, the scanner helps me understand what I’m seeing better. But I also have been around enough cops and firefighters to understand the lingo and the codes you’re going to hear on the scanner.

I also know that it’s the heat of the moment and there are going to be things on the scanner that are exaggerations. Some things also are flat out wrong. It’s why you don’t report from the scanner from an active scene and confirm things.

We have a service in New Jersey called the BNN where people send messages of what they’re hearing on the BNN. I cannot count on two hands the number of alerts have turned out to be exaggerations or flat out nothing.

Should you live tweet the scanner? Of course not. A million times no! Especially if you are not at the scene and cannot see what is happening. I always thought of the scanner as something that gives me leads and supplements what I see with my own eyes. But we need to remember that it’s investigation in process, which means things discussed could turn out to be false.

Misinformation travels at a million miles per hour

Tweeting from the scanner means that misinformation was out there, including the names of suspects who were not really suspects at all. It’s all over Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and everywhere in between. That share and retweet button is pretty easy to use, but it doesn’t take long to think before you hit it.

Ask yourself who this person is who is posting information and how much you trust them. Are they sourcing their information? Because there was lots of information without clear sources throughout the week.

The Atlantic has an excellent article about the anatomy of one of these misinformation disasters from the week.

If your mother says she loves you…

Too often I saw posts on Twitter attributed to Reddit or as crowdsourced. That’s fine. I’m a big fan of Reddit and of crowdsourcing and both have helped me as a journalist and as a social media producer.

But what happened to confirming those sources? They’re not official police sources. They’re just random people and we don’t know their background. In some cases we don’t even know who the people are because of the anonymity of the Internet.

If I had a photo from someone that says it’s of a suspect, I’d want to confirm with an actual investigator or official. I’d want someone I trust to tell me it’s true. It seems some sources were not doing that, and that just helped create more misinformation and some news organizations to be just wrong.

So we’re wrong, now what

Of course people are going to be wrong at some point. Even Woodward and Bernstein were wrong at least once. I’ve been wrong. There can be miscommunication between us and our sources. Our sources just have the wrong information or it changes between when we talk to them and the story is published. It happens, though the severity of it the last week was at a pretty bad level.

How journalists react to being wrong, to me, is important. Do we say “our bad” or do we “stand by our story”? I think it says more to admit you were wrong than to defend your stories and reporting when you know it was bad. We’re human and make mistakes. Own up to them and it will earn you more credit with the public.

That doesn’t mean anyone should make a habit of being wrong. Just own up to your mistakes.

Will we ever learn?

It seems after big news stories like the Marathon bombing, we’re dissecting what went wrong and how we can do better. But then lots of people fall into the same habits and we repeat mistakes.

I had an editor at The Hour who once told us that the public trust is like virginity. Once you lose it, you can never get it back.

If we keep making the same mistakes, we’re going to lose the public’s trust. What are we as journalists and as an industry if we don’t have the public’s trust?

Related articles

• Crowdsourced manhunt shows promise, problems (usatoday.com)
• Breaking News Is Broken (slate.com)
• When Following Breaking News, Why it Helps to Think Like a Journalist (pbs.org)

Today is the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and several years ago my colleague at the Herald News Heather Appel and I worked together on a package about his visit to Paterson days before he died. The package was for the 40th anniversary of King’s death and included Heather’s story on his visit and a video I shot and edited with one of the people influential in bringing King to Paterson. It was a rewarding experience getting to meet and listen to one of the people who helped bring King to Paterson. It’s living history to me.

After I left my position at the Herald News, though, there were lots of website changes. I thought my video was lost forever. I didn’t burn a copy of it for myself (I still kick myself). Today, though, Heather posted the YouTube version of the video on Facebook. I was amazed to see the video was still out there.

It’s been a very blah couple of months for me. My energy is zapped, and it’s hard to build yourself up and do something creative when you feel down. That’s funny to me since my creative outlets often have helped my energy and depressed moods.

But I’ve also come to realize how hard it is to be creative in today’s technology age.

I sit down to write and get nothing done because there are too many distractions. New e-mail pops up. There are Twitter and Facebook notifications. And there are far too many other distractions online to cause someone to procrastinate. The distractions keep piling on each day.

I could just turn off the Internet while I work. I’m sure lots of people do this. But there’s just something about the keyboard and the laptop that doesn’t do it for me when I want to write something more than an article or a blog post, when I want to write a fiction piece. And I’ve had a story floating in my head for months.

I recently finished “The Paris Wife,” which is a fictionalization of the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and his first wife. I had one of those eureka moments as I read about how Hemingway would go off and write — he was just doing it in notebooks by hand.

Lately I’ve found it’s easier to work when I have just a journal and pen in front of me. There are no distractions, just the paper and the pen. I don’t like to do this except to scratch down a scene or an idea too often because then I’d have to retype the whole thing. It seems like more work.

But isn’t that what great authors like Hemingway did many moons ago? If they can do it, so can I.

My thinking is it’s the first draft. The first draft is never the final draft. If I write it down, I can’t go back and edit right away. And when I do type it, it’s a chance for me to edit the story too.

I’m just hoping my hand doesn’t fall off.

And John’s post also talks about listening to the community.

Talk with people in the community. They’re the ones who you are trying to serve. Don’t survey them. We have enough surveys. Talk to them about what they need and how you can serve them. When was the last time you — a newsroom journalist — asked someone what you could do for them? Not a source. Not a relative. But a regular person who might or might not bother to read your prose. If you haven’t, how will you know if what you’re doing is what is helping them?

Make sure you read his entire post. It’s a good read.

Perhaps 2013 for journalists, especially those on the local beat, is the year we devote to listening.

It pains me to see that so many local journalists don’t really listen to what their communities want, what issues are most important to them. Certainly there are things that we should always cover, but, as Steve points out, perhaps we should rethink how we do it.

But listening to your community isn’t just about talking to your sources or even talking to people at meetings. The people who are at those meetings have agendas and I’ve always believed to never fully trust a politician, even a local politician. They have to earn your trust, but at the same time you always need to check out what they’re saying.

Listening to your community is meaning you need to be in the community, talking to people. Go where those people are. Let them know where you are. But also eavesdrop, something we all need to be good at in journalism. Read comments on articles, and really read them. Don’t be dismissive of questions or comments and be open-minded. Be involved by asking your own questions of your audience and people in the community. Ask them about what’s the biggest issues on their mind, what they’re most curious about. Use social media, monitoring what people are saying in the community that way too.

And walk around. Always walk around. You see so much more walking around a community than you do driving through it. You’re not going to see much if you parachute into a community, as so many do (and I admit I have done in the past too). I used to be accused of being handed stories in Westport and Millburn-Short Hills, but I never was. I observed a lot and then asked questions. I’m thankful I always received answers rather than “I can’t talk about that.”

But never be dismissive, especially if you think something is “boring.” Traffic issues, including pedestrian problems, have always been a problem in every community I’ve covered. But who wants to write about crosswalks and speed humps and stop signs? But it’s what people care about because it affects their every day life. Think outside the box in how to cover it, too. One of my favorite projects I ever did was a video on what it was like to drive over a speed hump in Millburn-Short Hills. Everyone talked about speed humps both positively and negatively, but it’s another thing to show people what the experience is like.

If one thing is universal in journalism is that everyone hates to cover planning and zoning. Who wants to sit through those meetings? But development issues always are of major interest to people. It’s how their neighborhoods are changing and therefore their lives. It’s beyond NIMBY, and it’s certainly beyond covering those planning and zoning meetings. Knowing how to read an application and break it down and explain it to people is a great skill. I actually always have been interested in covering these issues because I know how important they are, even if it could be boring. Plus covering it enough means you can spot trends — like people designating their homes as “historic” to curb the mcmansion trend, which is something I wrote about in Westport.

As far as meeting coverage, which Steve addresses in his post, I do think you can’t completely escape it. Something always happens at a meeting, and you can’t make up for it if you miss it. I skipped a Board of Finance meeting back in Westport because there was nothing of note on the agenda. Instead, the board decided to discuss school funding matters after the meeting had been adjourned. In other words, no one from me to school officials to parents knew this was happening, which was its own drama in its own right because it violated freedom of information.

There are lots of ways to cover meetings other than your straight stenographer process and giving us the score. What are the issues beyond the meeting? How does the meeting work? Why should people care enough to go to those meetings? Who is at those meetings constantly and why are they there? Is the meeting process broken and how can it be fixed?

I could write so much more about how to better cover local news as someone who has both done it (and I like to say quite successfully — my sites have always been called “the gold standard”) and as someone who consumes it (frustratingly so, since I never know what’s happening in my city). But the key here is to listen. It’s good to have a plan on what to cover, but it’s also good to be flexible and change your plans based on what you see and hear.

Quick update: I realized after I hit publish that there are many news organizations that have established community newsrooms in a variety of forms. I want to applaud those efforts because those kinds of things will help any journalist understand how best to serve their community.

But this post is about the power of social media and how it has changed the world, especially in sports and its coverage. The lockout is a prime example to show how things have changed.

I’ve been through three lockouts as a fan — the one that erased half of the 1994-95 season, the one that canceled the 2004-05 season and the current lockout. The 2004 lockout doesn’t seem that long ago, but in the world of journalism and social media it was.

I was still a reporter at a daily newspaper that barely had a website in 2004. Facebook was around, but I didn’t have an account. You still needed a school e-mail address to be part of Facebook then. MySpace was the rage. Never mind Twitter. News could be covered on a 24-7, but it was more for the top national brands and cable news networks.

In other words: We didn’t have the access to news quite that we have today.

So the news of the lockout came slower than it does today. There was no one live tweeting a press conference with the NHL or NHLPA. There weren’t people posting constant observations from outside the negotiating rooms.

I went to a lot of AHL games back then, but that’s how you knew what was happening with the team’s prospects. Fans didn’t have the access quite like they do today to the information and news about those teams. You had to rely on what people who went to games thought, and many times you were relying on people who weren’t watching hockey for a living.

Of course fans came back after the lockout. We didn’t have reason to be angry about things that were said or done because we didn’t have the access to what was being said like we do now. There was no social media campaign by the players or owners to make the other side look evil.

Fast forward to today. Now fans have unbelievable access to news, information and even people because of social media and the way news is published. Video of games and players is everywhere and quickly. We know what is being said by the commissioner and the head of the players union as soon as they’re saying it, even if we’re not next to a TV carrying Canadian sports channels. Someone tweets what’s being said and that’s retweeted and then retweeted again and again. On top of that players are on social media expressing their feelings about the lockout and, in some cases, engaging with fans about the lockout.

It shouldn’t be a shock the level of frustration and anger from anyone who loves the NHL is much higher than it was in 2004-05. Social media connects fans. They have started protests and expressed their anger. People frequently will respond to the NHL’s Twitter and Facebook account about the lockout, saying they need to fix it now. And with the number of fan blogs today, there are plenty of places for fans to express their opinions on the lockout.

The result? A study found the damage to the NHL’s brand because of the lockout is at an alarming level. From the article:

A disastrous map would be the one Level5 created following the BP PLC oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. It was the worst the company had seen – until it got around to the NHL this month.

But I wonder if the NHL and the NHLPA is listening or even realizing how the world has changed in the years since the last lockout. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, the owners, NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr and the players are taking a gamble on the fans returning. ”We recovered last time because we have the world’s greatest fans,” Bettman said last summer.

But that gamble is a losing bet. It’s always been a losing bet. It’s worse than spending $50 on Megamillions tickets expecting to win. All they had to do is look at the reaction on social media and compare the climate from 2004-05 and today. But it appears all involved had, and still have, their heads in the sand, not listening to the fans (aka the customers) and even the experts who say the lockout is killing the brand.

I can’t say I won’t be back as a fan. I know I will be even as I’m frustrated and angry with the current situation. One friend professed to me the other day he’d immediately buy tickets. But there are plenty of other people I know, passionate fans, who are angry or are disinterested. It’s going to be a hard sell to get them back and it’s going to be an even harder sell to get back the fans the league has gained in the last couple years.It’s not unreasonable to think the NHL will go from record highs in attendance and revenues to record lows. It could hurt some teams significantly, some of the same teams who are endorsing the lockout.It’s easy to say the lockout ending and saving some of the season would fix some of the damage, but I don’t know how much it would help now. So much damage has been done.The lesson here for everyone — whether you’re in journalism or you’re a brand — is that you cannot ignore the outside world. You have to adapt to changing technologies and news cycles. If you don’t, you are doomed to failure.

The spread of misinformation

It would take a lot of space to list all the piece of misinformation that spread far too quickly during Friday’s coverage. There were reports the father of the shooter was dead in New Jersey (he’s alive and in Connecticut) to how his mother was a teacher at the school (she was not and was killed at home). I’m still trying to understand how some of this information was reported as fact.

One of the biggest mistakes was the release of the name of the killer as Ryan Lanza, who lives in New Jersey. We knew fairly quickly it wasn’t him because of the Jersey Journal’s connections (and we were led to believe early it was his brother too). Ryan Lanza was alive and wasn’t a part of the shooting, and he was posting it wasn’t him on Facebook.

The Associated Press reported Ryan Lanza as the killer, even after other news organizations reported it was his brother. An anonymous law enforcement agent told the AP he had mixed up the names of the brothers later, which leads to an argument to be made about anonymous sources (I have been asking how national news outlets with no ties to the area have reliable anonymous sources to quote).

Meanwhile, reporters were digging through the Internet looking for every tidbit they could on Ryan Lanza, sharing his Facebook page and videos. The problem was no one was sure it was him. A Slate post asked if Ryan Lanza’s Facebook page was him, and they later had to write why they rushed to say why they searched through social media for the brothers.

It feels like to me, though, there was a lot of half reporting happening as the story developed. People were playing detective and not journalist in some ways too. Yes, we need to report what we know, but we need to be sure what we know is true.

I often tell reporters and editors that they don’t stop being journalists because it’s social media. They need to report things thoroughly and ask lots of questions. They need to confirm things before they write about them as fact.

Everyone wants to rush to be first rather than being right in today’s 24-7 news cycle (even though several studies show no one ever remembers who broke the story nor do they care). It’s easy to point fingers in hindsight, but it’s a lesson that everyone needs to take a breath before hitting post and making sure everything is right and complete.

But there’s lots of blaming of Twitter and social media in general for the rush and the failure to get things right. I refuse to accept that as an excuse. Don’t blame the platform for poor reporting. We all have a duty to get it right and get it right the first time, especially on stories like this.

Everyone needs to take a breath and think before they hit post, no matter the story.

The media crush

I drove through Newtown on Saturday. I wasn’t there because of curiosity; I was there because I was driving through to get to dinner with my friends in Danbury. But in my efforts to get to the highway, I got to see the media crush first hand.

On one side of the road was the church where there was a vigil being held. There was a giant sign that said “no press.” On the other side of the road, though, was a large group of media with cameras and their satellite trucks. It was surreal enough to see “home” on national television, but it was even more surreal to see all those people first hand.

And then I read Debbie Galant’s post for the NJ News Commons where she advocates for more combined forces for large news stories like this one. It’s an interesting concept.

First off, isn’t this why wire services exist in the first place? So the local coverage by one news organization can be spread to those who cannot be there. Plus wouldn’t you rather hear or see what the local news is doing with the story than a giant national outlet? They’re more likely to know the people and players in the story.

But how does it work? That’s a debate I’m sure we’ll all have to have if we wanted to calm the crush on a small town like this.

Naming the killer

After mass shootings there seems to be a debate on if the media should be naming the killer. It happened after the Aurora movie theater shooting and it happened again after Friday’s events. Steve Buttry had a blog post about the issue.

I disagree with doing it for a lot of reasons, but I also need to state my bias here. I suffer from depression and think the country needs to be discussing mental health on a larger scale.

That being said, I disagree with Steve and others about omitting the who from the story. It’s just as much an important part of the story as anything else. People are going to want to know why, and we should be reporting and trying to tell them why, and you can’t do that without reporting about the killer. Reporting about the Virginia Tech massacre and the killer there led to uncovering the holes in the system that left him untreated for mental illness. These are the kinds of issues journalists need to be uncovering, especially as people are reeling from the number of incidents this year.

You also have to determine where the line is drawn. Do we not report the name of anyone who is charged with murder? What crimes is it OK to report a name and not OK to do it?

The talk quickly turned to people professing they will delete their Instagram account. Flickr recently pushed an update to its iPhone app, which has gotten rave reviews, so people are saying they’re going to use that instead. I’m hoping the update comes to Android soon, though I like the current version too.

But it’s all anecdotal, so I thought I’d ask the question: Are you planning to quit Instagram?

I’m in wait and see mode. I want to see what actually happens before I decide what platform to use. I did, however, promise myself recently to use Flickr more. I’ve neglected Flickr the last few months and didn’t even renew my pro account. I haven’t decided if I will renew my pro account, but I do want to give Flickr a chance.

If you want to delete your Instagram account, Wired has a rundown on how to do it, including how to download your photos.

But what I learned also is social media, especially Twitter, became a lifeline for so many people before, during and after Hurricane Sandy, especially after the power was out for so many people. There may still be a few people without power in New Jersey.

If people had questions, they came to us on Twitter. “Can you tell me what’s open?” “Where can I find open gas stations?” “Where can I volunteer?” “Do you know when my power will come back on?” “What does it look like in Seaside?”

I spent hours answering questions where I could. The night Gov. Chris Christie introduced gas rationing, I spent two hours answering questions because people were confused. We pointed people to photo galleries of places down the Shore when they asked what things were like there. It was frustrating to tell people “I don’t know specifics” about the power being restored, but I tried to direct them places to get the information, including on our site.

But often there was no way I knew all of the answers. This is when crowdsourcing and hashtagging became important to us. When people asked us where they could help and donate, we would direct them to the general volunteer hotline and the charities on the ground. But we also retweeted those questions so if there were other, local efforts people could be in touch with the people who wanted to help.

But people more often wanted to know where they could find open businesses that had heat, charging stations, Internet access, hot meals and supplies like water and ice. Quickly people wanted to know where open gas stations were so they could fill their generator tanks. Many stations were without power.

We answered this task by creating hashtags — #njopen was for businesses that were open and #njgas was for gas station reports. In fact, #njopen came at the suggestion of a follower. Both took off quickly to the point lots of other news agencies, businesses and even the government agencies were using the hashtags.

But we didn’t just let the information stay on social media. We integrated it where we could onto the website with Twitter widgets. Gas stories had a #njgas widget at the bottom of it. We had standing articles with the widgets so people could find the information if they weren’t on Twitter. It was something we also did after Hurricane Irene when lots of roads were closed and blocked. We created and embedded widgets with our standing #njcommute hashtag.

One of the biggest lessons from Hurricane Sandy is to listen to your followers. If you’re just pushing links, you’re not going to see their news reports, their questions and the information they share. If you listen to them, you can make sure you’re sharing the right information with them. Our followers wanted information gas and power outages, and I knew that based on the questions we received. Whenever we had updates, they immediately went onto our social media accounts (with many retweets and clicks to follow). Plus listening to questions and comments helped us determine what hashtags we needed to create and lead.

Listening to your followers, though, is a good practice even when there isn’t a major disaster. If you listen to the questions and reaction (in addition to looking at the retweets and clicks), you know what information your followers want most.

The work we did during Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath was some of the most fulfilling I’ve done in social media. It’s not often you hear thank you or get told you’re doing a great job, but we heard it at least once per day. People told us without the work we were doing on social media and on NJ.com they’d be lost. To know we helped in some small way for people makes all of the work worth it.