New York Times staffers present "A Year at War"

I enjoyed the great fortune of attending Spring Semester Prep Day 2012 today at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism as a guest of Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs. This annual mini-conference of academic, career, writing and reporting tips and advice is one of “Dean Sree’s” innovations and welcomes students back from the holiday break before the semester formally begins.

Concurrent events and aggressive students networkers kept me from attending every event, and after the first panel I noted that the busy social media backchannel had already burned halfway through my iPhone battery.

The program opened with a panel featuring the New York Times staffers who produced “A Year at War,” a dynamic interactive story about the ongoing deployment of troops to Afghanistan — and winner of the 2012 duPont-Columbia Award for Digital Reporting.

After lunch, “Rock Center” executive producer Rome Hartman talked about what it’s like to launch a new primetime newscast.

Students in my Peace and Conflict Journalism course at Swarthmore — and journalism students everywhere — are now preparing pitches for stories to cover this semester and Hartman was full of actionable advice.

Hartman says 100 stories or more are pitched for each one that you see on “Rock Center” and that there “are a million reasons to say no.” He looks for “brevity and clarity” in a pitch “in two paragraphs that get me interested.” He also looks for passion and says it should “come through that you’re jazzed.”

Hartman avoids the familiar and likes stories “that take people places they wouldn’t otherwise go” or stories that deliver a “snapshot that illuminates a larger truth.”

I also dropped in on an expert panel called ‘Everything you need to know about business reporting if you aren’t taking a Spring business reporting course” and “Writing – and Publishing – Your First Book” with Prof. Sam Freedman, who runs Columbia’s legendary Book Writing Seminar.

I am rushing back to Philly for our 10th annual Philadelphia Conference ”Year in Pictures” event but NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was scheduled to speak at Columbia this evening and students are planning gather again for a conversation with Lara Logan of CBS news on Friday night.

Above all, it’s hard to ignore the energy, optimism and enthusiasm among the students at Columbia, absolutely undeterred but the economic impediments confronting most traditional media companies. The place just rocks.

If you would like to get a glance at this vibrant community, it’s still not too late to register for the Columbia School of Journalism’s Social Media Weekend on January 27th through 29th: http://bit.ly/smwknd

I marked another online community milestone today: 10,000 Facebook subscribers. And I am pretty excited about it.

Next if not already, social media editors — with conspicuously smaller communities — will be droning on about how Facebook subscriber totals, like Twitter followers, don’t mean a thing. They will be right and they will be wrong.

For example, studies over the last couple of years have proven that many Twitter followers represent either spam accounts — or more likely — visitors who tried Twitter for a day and never came back. And we have all seen the stories about politicians and others buying followers.

So true, but equally incomplete. I don’t put much faith in the numbers, but trends, proportions and perception also come into play.

While many other facets of social media identity can work for journalists, will a source be more likely to respond to a tweet if you have thousands of followers or just dozens? Can’t we infer a little about Twitter accounts which grow, stagnate or contract?

I had a great deal of success as an early adopter with Twitter – with over 80,000 followers — but my tweets rarely resulted in over 250 clicks. Sticky content meant more, and it was fun when that happened, but not incredibly rewarding.

The real benefits come with the countless personal relationships that have emerged. “I follow you” has been a priceless ice breaker at professional events because it proves and reminds us of out mutual interests. Of course, this happens as well without great followers counts.

More recently, I have shifted my online reporting efforts — with a combination of original, crowd-sourced and curated content — to my personal Facebook profile. The Facebook subscription function made this platform more expansive than my previous journalist page — about four times over during the first few months.

Curiously, I get many more new subscriber notices than the total seems to represent, and more than a few names look like random keystrokes — as if the spam follower process is repeating itself. Many of the comments would seem to endorse this perception as well. Perhaps others unsubscribe because I post too often or because they don’t like the content.

Beats me, but amid the churn and spam I am finding more community — with real discussions — happening on Facebook than I have ever experienced as an individual user. Of course there is little opportunity for direct monetization via Facebook — but what I learn about community development, content consumption, and myself — is no less than priceless.

I missed the early wave of blogging but every social media experience since then has proven that early adoption is the key. The good news, I think, is that it’s still pretty early in the subscription process. Get started today!

Evangelists tell me that Google+ plus will next open the social space — thanks to their integration with search, YouTube, Blogger and more — but for the moment, I’m hitching my wagon right here. Subscribers matter to me.

I checked in on #OccupyPhilly this morning and found it smaller yet still present after yesterday’s eviction deadline. I counted roughly 40 active demonstrators, possibly a similar number of other residents, and slightly more police and old media than usual, but there wasn’t much going on. The veterans section appeared unchanged.

Photos by Jim MacMillan ©2011

Photo by Jim MacMillan ©1981

I could feel my face burning from a block away, and now 30 years later, the Great Lynn Fire of 1981 still stands out as the biggest I have ever seen. I have since covered the 9/11 attacks, the War in Iraq and many great human disasters, but few experiences are etched more clearly in my memory than watching the firestorm as flames leapt from building to building in downtown Lynn that night.

It was very early in my freelance career and I had my new portable crystal radio scanner running while up late at my parents’ house on the southwest corner of Boston, and playing chess with my brother Jack. We listened to the “intercity” mutual aid frequency as the fire spread quickly from two alarms to five – and we joked about taking a ride to the old mill city up north if the fire reached ten alarms. A few minutes later that mark was met and we were in my car.

We first spotted the glow of the firestorm from the Tobin Bridge as we crossed the Mystic River heading north from downtown Boston. As I recall, authorities stopped counting at ten alarms but called for all possible mutual aid. I saw one fire truck from New Hampshire and heard stories about others coming from as far as Connecticut and Maine.

Few sounds compare with the collapse of an old brick factory building — and I witnessed several that night. Every time I tried to circler the perimeter, more buildings were burning and the walk took longer. I have never seen another firestorm and I will be OK if I don’t.

I took the photo posted above but when we turned up at the Associated Press in Boston later that morning, they bought photos from Jack instead. At least we both left with some great lessons in news photography but I really wish I could have covered this catastrophe with the skill set I had just a few years later.

As I recall, there were suspicions of arson but no arrests, although I can’t find many news reports online today. I am pretty sure there were no fatalities and a community college campus eventually sprung up on the site.

The events are captured very clearly in a video I found on YouTube, pasted below. In a strange way, it’s good to see it again, if only to prove my memories to myself.