Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Back in December, Wayne Garcia said "Tampa Bay has jumped the shark."  At the time, he offered his views on Tampa Bay’s top 10 civic problems.  Garcia writes for Creative Loafing, and this week’s cover story is a follow-up to that column, saying we have to fix these things now.  This time, the entire CL staff was involved, and they offered helpful hints on what YOU can do to help.

In fact, they created an entire new blog devoted to FIX IT NOW: 

… each week from now on, in print and online, we’ll follow up with information, interviews and ideas aimed at making headway in the 10 problem areas. At the same time, we are launching a new blog, Fix It Now Tampa Bay, which will feature activists intimately familiar with the 10 issues we outlined, as well as information from Loaf staff.

It’s all part of an experiment in civic and citizen journalism, one aimed at providing solutions — and getting our government officials to take action.

And here are Tampa Bay’s top ten problems, according to Wayne:

1. Suburban sprawl
2. Urban density (lacking)
3. Transportation
4. Environment (weak protections)
5. Living green
6. Diversity (racial, ethnic, class)
7. Professional sports (over-subsidized and over-idolized)
8. Media consolidation (lack of independent voices)
9. GLBT Rights
10. Save our young (with economic opportunity)

Boy, if we just had some leadership within local government, you’d think some of these would have been addressed by now.  But we don’t, and they are not.

But are they the only problems here in Tampa Bay?  Are they even the most pressing problems in the area?  Which of the above ten issues would you say is most important, and what problems would you add to the list?

I don’t care if this is the first season ever the Rays are expected to break .500. I don’t care that they finally have a decent bullpen. And I don’t care that they got rid of Elijah Dukes and Delmon Young (although who’s gonna throw bats at their baby mommas now?). What I REALLY care about is the great unanswered question going into the season, are the Rays supposed to be fish or sunshine? Maybe one of these fine Rays blogs has the answer…

RAYS INDEX

RI has set the bar for excellence among Tampa Bay sports blogs (admittedly a bit of a niche market). From the Cork Board, to the Rays Index Confidence Graph, to the almost daily Devil Rays Webtopia, to the schwarmy know-it-allness projected by its writer Rays Index is worth five minutes of your day. It’s only a matter of time before Cork Gaines is picked up by a bigger outlet.

DRAYS BAY

The grandaddy of Rays blogs, no other Rays site is updated as frequently as the misnamed DRays Bay. The guys at DRays Bay have more access to Rays management than any other site, a fact they have little trouble flaunting in your face. So packed full of information it almost hurts to read the blog.

RAYS OF LIGHT

For whatever reason the MLB blogs are light years ahead of any other sports blogs and consistently provide some of the best reading out there. Rays of Light, the red-headed step child of Rays blogs, is no exception. Of interest are the player spotlights that are running now.

Other Sites Worth Checking Out

Rays Anatomy - Rays Anatomy didn’t make it into the top grouping but not because of lack of quality (the answer we’re looking for is lack of posting).

Rays UltraMega Preview - We’re still waiting on Part 3 of Manny Stiles’ 3 Part Preview of the Rays but in the interim there is more to digest here than any other Rays preview. For those that remember him, Manny Stiles ran a Rays blog last year after Rays prez Matthew Silverman donated $1,535 to AIDS research.

RaysBB.com - The Rays message board for all your messaging board needs.

The Heater and The Rays Report - The official Rays blogs from the St Pete Times and Tampa Trib respectively. The place to go for the access most other Rays blogs don’t have.

Here’s what I accomplished during my public office hours yesterday:

1. I cemented my plans for FX 2008, a convention I’m going to Jan. 25-27.

2. I read the Sunday St. Pete Times.

I think it was a success.

I also discovered that talking to publicists to grant access to some pretty big Sci-fi TV and movie stars wasn’t enough. The number one request (from the one person I talked to at Panera) for a star interview was Fat Momma from Who Wants to be a Superhero.

If anyone else has suggestions for attempted interviews with film folks or comic book creators, authors, or artists, leave a comment.

Thanks to an idea some modern journalists are kicking around, I’m going to start keeping office hours at local eateries. So, on Sunday, Tampans can find me at the Panera Bread on the corner of Fowler and Bruce B. Downs.

I will be at the location from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m.; anyone with a story they’d like to tell is welcome to join me in breaking bread (literally). Eventually I’ll have cards printed up to bring with me, but in this initial meetup / office hours experiment, I’m only going to have my notebook with me.

In the next few weeks, I plan to have more meetups / office hours at different locations and times. If anyone has a story they’d like to tell but can’t make it on Sunday, please let me know through my email, wendylbolm (at) gmail.com.

Everyone is welcome. If any other bloggers / journalists in the area would like to join me, please come and enjoy. I will be wearing a very bright, yellow, patterned satin shirt.

Here’s a small list of blogs that we have recently been made aware of. Go give them a visit!

Lyndon and the Ladybirds Speaks Clearly - I talk about things. I love things. Sometimes I talk about the things I love.

Council of Neighborhood Associations - wants to unite existing neighborhood organizations, and to foster the formation of such organizations.

Dateline Tampa - A citizen journalism website for and by high school students in Tampa Bay

Bruce B. Blog - a St. Pete Times New Tampa Blog.

Gulf Beaches Public Library blog - The Gulf Beaches Public Library serves the citizens of Madeira Beach, Redington Beach, North Redington Beach, Redington Shores and Treasure Island.

Teens @ the Library - What’s new and now for teens at the Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative.

While reading about Cato June’s run-in with the local cops, I found this on the St. Pete Times Bucs Beat Blog:

Bucs coach Jon Gruden didn’t seem to appreciate the tone of questions from a local television reporter about linebacker Cato June’s arrest and the coaching opening at Michigan during Gruden’s news conference Monday at One Buc Place.

Asked “Does Cato June have a drinking problem?” at the start of the news conference, Gruden gave the reporter a hard stare before responding, “I don’t have any comment on that right now other than we’re very concerned. We’re getting all the facts. It’s a serious matter.”

… The same reporter followed with a question about whether Gruden allows his players to drink on the team plane.

“I’m not going to comment,” Gruden said. “I have a strong opinion on Cato June. He’s a great young man and as we gather all the information, we’ll make an announcement.”

Later in the news conference, the reporter asked Gruden about a report linking him to the head coaching job at Michigan following Lloyd Carr’s retirement.

“I really don’t know who you are, man,” a perturbed Gruden responded, “but you’re throwing me some fastballs.”

Now why would this writer use the phrase “a local television reporter.” If the television reporter is part of the story, IDENTIFY THEM (yes, even if they are not your official partner!). Your readers want to know.

Furthermore, if you are going to have a “blog,” you should answer your customers’ questions. Like the unnamed television reporter, the first commenter, Clad also wants to know about drinking on the plane:

Stephen,
Since you and Rick are on the team plane, what is the answer to the question of whether the Bucs allow players to drink on the plane on the flight home after a victory? Gruden deflected the question but I was wondering if you could answer. tks

But then again, it may not have been Stephen Holder that wrote the article. It’s signed by “Times Editor.” But it doesn’t really matter. The “drinking on the plane” question is valid, and should be answered by the writer.

So come on, Times Editor. Answer the questions. Or are you worried about maintaining access to the Bucs. Maybe you are making sure you get to continue those plane rides with the players? Maybe you’d sell out for less?

When Tommy Duncan wrote about the panel I attended Monday night at USF, he vented his frustration at what he saw as David Harris’s attempt to advertise the event on this blog.

Duncan asked bloggers to attend the event, which I did, but for motives other than Duncan’s suggestion. I (1) am a blogger; therefore, I am interested in topics related to blogging. I (2) am quite odd in that the topic of ethics interests me; I try to read up on ethics and philosophy whenever I have the time (which isn’t that often these days). I (3) am in Gil Thelen’s class, and the panel was timed just right for me to eat between classes, catch the first half of the panel, and leave in time for Thelen’s class. And, I (4) respect Lucas Grindley and tend to try to catch what he has to say in his blog and at speaking engagements.

Unfortunately, I had to leave 45 minutes into the event, so I missed the (theoretically) best part of the evening. The part where attendees opened up and started shooting their best questions at the panel.

The room for the panel was set up in round table form, with chairs circling tables set up so everyone could see everyone else. Thelen, Grindley, and Aidrian Uribarri sat together under USF’s seal while David Harris sat at the other end of the room, leading the discussion. There were about 25-30 people in attendance at any given time, made up mostly of USF’s Society of Professional Journalists members, USF mass communications staff, and mass comm students trying to get extra credit in other classes. A number of students also had cameras; I believe their flashbulbs were popping for a class assignment. There were no such incentives from my classes to go, so only three or four others from Thelen’s class made the trip across campus from the mass comm building to USF’s student union, the Marshall Center.

The question of whether or not bloggers are journalists was answered right off the bat. The consensus between the panel members was this: bloggers are journalists when they’re reporting news. Not all bloggers are committing journalism all the time, even if they’re journalists in real life. Blogs come down to conversation; sometimes the conversation strays from reporting.

Harris brought up the ethical standards of the SPJ: seek and report the truth, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable.

These are standards many organizations apply to news reporting; the panel then worked to apply them to blogging as journalism. The top ethical problem they covered, in my opinion, was comments and what to do with them.

According to Grindley, bloggers shouldn’t screen, edit, or delete comments at all if they want to be seen as reliable sources of information; it also brings up libel and other legal issues for the producer of the blog. Once a blogger starts playing with comment content, they become responsible for it.

According to Uribarri, comments on news sites are an innovation.

Comments are one of those things that we look at and say, ‘Wow, journalists could learn from bloggers.’

Harris cited “loose cannon” bloggers and angry commenters as reasons to screen comments, but Uribarri countered with the argument that thoughtful readers will ignore the crazies out there and add value to the blog as conversation through their own comments.

When it came to blog and comment content from bloggers, Thelen said the entity paying the blogger’s checks (i.e. news organizations for news bloggers) should be controlling their brand through what the blogger writes. So, if the paper a blogger writes for wants them to suppress opinions, that’s what they should do. It gives independent bloggers more freedom to say what they want; the brand they’re trying to sell is their own.

Grindley’s advice for bloggers was to pretend they’re talking to a room of strangers instead of a bunch of anonymous readers on the internet. He mentioned as a news professional who has managed to write a blog without giving up his credibility.

Soon after this, I had to leave, which was unfortunate. I think journalism and blogging summits, where attendees can discuss topics for hours, are preferable to a discussion of one to two hours with a set agenda. While I applaud USF’s SPJ for getting the topic out there, I think trying to tie down the topic of the ethics of blogging, future of journalism, and how the two intersect is futile for such a short conversation.

David Harris seems like a good guy, and I’m sure he means well.

A couple months ago, I ran across a site I had never seen before, Dateline Tampa. The effort will soon be a “citizen journalism website for and by high school students in Tampa Bay.” What a great idea! So I contacted David, DT’s New Media Coordinator, and asked him to keep me apprised of the progress, and to let me know if there is anything Sticks of Fire could do to help.

I heard back from David this week. He says Dateline Tampa is mostly built, and simply awaiting the final go ahead from SDHC to get students and teachers directly involved. I expect this to be a great resource for local news from the students’ perspective.

And then the real reason he contacted me: David is also the president of the Society of Professional Journalists at USF. SPJ/USF serves journalism students of the University of South Florida, and they have scheduled an ethics panel entitled “Are Bloggers Journalists?” He wants to know if I could come by on Monday, November 5.

I want to invite you to our ethics panel: “Are bloggers journalists?” Your presence would be great. We have a few panelists, but we want a dialog from the audience, and you are a natural.

The more the merrier, so please forward this information to the Tampa blog-o-sphere.

Heh… “a natural what?” was my first thought. But I read it again, and was uncertain if I was to be on the panel, or just in the audience. So I asked him to clarify, and he told me

I want you in the audience, but this is a conversation. The panelists are “pros”, but we need bloggers who are also professional to balance the conversation. This is a dialog, and I hope you can be there.

I checked the press release and the pdf announcement on the website, and sure enough, the panelists are “pros.” Pro Journalists.

Featuring:
Gil Thelen, Executive Director of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors
Lucas Grindley, Content Manager for the Sarasota News Network
Adrian G. Uribarri, Staff Writer for the Orlando Sentinel

I responded back: “Interesting that an ethics panel about bloggers doesn’t include any bloggers on the panel.” Au contraire, says David:

Lucas Grindley has a popular blog about the journalism business @ http://lucasgrindley.com

Adrian Uribarri has several blogs he posts to including the SPJ ethics committee blog Code Words http://www.spj.org/blog/blogs/ethics/

and Gil Thelen was most recently the Executive Editor for the Tampa Tribune, real old school, but teaches an editorial class using blogs as the medium at USF, and started a blog for the FSNE sunshine project.

It is too bad you can’t make it. Please send out a heads up to anyone you think may be interested.

Turns out that rather than my opinion, he just wants me to publicize his class. He contacted other local bloggers, too:

… we want a dialog with bloggers in the audience. Please be there if you can make it and promote the event on your blog so we can have a serious Tampa blog-o-sphere represented.

SarahInTampa also thought it funny that the panel failed to include bloggers, and let him know.

My 2 cents…I think you should have included some bloggers on the panel to balance out the discussion…hosting a panel with the “real” journalists on one side, bloggers “in the audience” sets the stage in advance to promote the mindset that the two are not on par with each other.

And David (who is a very likely candidate for a job with a PR firm): “I hope you are able to make it and tell others to come too.”

Both Sarah and I indicated to him that we would be happy to arrange our work schedules if asked to be on the panel. We have both done this thing before a number of times, and really enjoy speaking about the ins and outs of this blogging thingy. (OK, we’re bloggers - we love to have our opinions heard!)

But last minute invitations to bloggers to show up at a panel about blogging seems like an afterthought, and then suggesting they belong only in the audience, suggests that the question in their minds (Are bloggers journalists?) is already answered by the layout of the panel alone.

Of course, I am positive that the panel will be very informative, and they certainly don’t need my (or any blogger’s) opinion to discuss the issue. In fact, I do hope some bloggers can show up to offer those students an additional viewpoint, so if any of you bloggers are not busy, consider attending for the USF Journalism students. The event is on Monday, November 5, and begins at 5pm. It should last a couple hours.

SIDE NOTE: Bloggers can indeed be journalists. The courts recently ruled in favor of a blogger who was sued by a company for reporting on their bad practices:

Smith [the blogger] was immune from trademark claims because his reference to BidZirk was in the context of news reporting or news commentary. Though the court doesn’t equate bloggers and journalists generally, it gives Smith the same protection given to journalists.