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Breaking news guidance for BBC journalists

Damien — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:46:58 +0000

With the rapid pace of change in digital technology, we’re constantly reviewing the processes and guidance our journalists use in their jobs.

As part of that, we have just distributed some refreshed breaking news guidance to our correspondents, reporters and producers.

It says that, when they have some breaking news, an exclusive or any kind of urgent update on a story, they must get written copy into our newsroom system as quickly as possible, so that it can be seen and shared by everyone – both the news desks which deploy our staff and resources (like TV trucks) as well as television, radio and online production teams.

So what about Twitter, the micro-blogging site where millions of people, including many of our journalists, communicate via short bursts of text?

We prize the increasing value of Twitter, and other social networks, to us (and our audiences) as a platform for our content, a newsgathering tool and a new way of engaging with people. Being quick off the mark with breaking news is essential to that mission.

We’re fortunate to have a technology that allows our journalists to transmit text simultaneously to our newsroom systems and to their own Twitter accounts.

But we’ve been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.

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Coming up on CNN

Damien — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:46:49 +0000

Editor’s Note: Jeff Yang writes the column Tao Jones for the Wall Street Journal Online, is a regular contributor to WNYC radio, blogging for “The Brian Lehrer Show”, and appears weekly on “The Takeaway”. He formerly wrote the ”Asian Pop” column for the San Francisco Chronicle and was founder and publisher of A magazine. He tweets @originalspin.

By Jeff Yang, Special to CNN

“Sir: I am a Chinaman, a republican, and a lover of free institutions; am much attached to the principles of the government of the United States … The effect of your late message has been … to prejudice the public mind against my people, to enable those who wait the opportunity to hunt them down.”

These were the opening lines of an open letter written by Chinese restaurant owner Norman Asing to California Governor John Bigler, who, in 1852, had demonstrated his intention to ride nativist sentiment to re-election by delivering a scabrous, xenophobic speech before the state legislature.

In his “special message,” he called the Chinese a “peculiar people” who were stealing the nation’s treasure and shipping it back to China, while taking jobs and livelihood away from white Americans, and demanded the legislature enact “extraordinary measures” to address their threat.

Fearing that the speech would tip anti-Chinese tensions over into violence, Asing, one of San Francisco Chinatown’s most prominent leaders, sent his letter to The Daily Alta California newspaper, which published it without comment.

Bigler ignored it.

But Asing proved all too right: encouraged by the continued drumbeating of Governor Bigler and other nativists, the next two decades would see fear and anxiety over the “Asiatic hordes” rise to a deadly pitch, culminating in one of the most horrifying incidents of mass violence in California history.

On October 24, 1871, Los Angeles’s Chinatown was stormed by a mob of over 500 whites, who beat, robbed and murdered its residents in a night-long orgy of hatred.

Not a single Chinatown building escaped being looted and trashed, and nearly every resident was assaulted, robbed or worse.

Despite that tragedy, a 160 years later, politicians of both parties have chosen to embrace the “Bigler” formula, framing their campaigns for office not as a race between parties or leaders, but as a clash of civilizations, suggesting that their opponents are the willing or unwitting tools of nefarious interests in the Far East.

Super Bowl ads offer two views of national anxieties

Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican running for U.S. Senate against incumbent Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, is the latest and most egregious of the Modern Day Biglers, having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ad casting Stabenow as an enabler of China’s creeping domination over the United States

The advertisement, which aired across all of Michigan during Sunday’s Super Bowl, features an Asian-American actress in a yellow outfit and conical straw hat, bicycling through a rice paddy.

In broken English, she proceeds to praise Debbie “SpendItNow” for her splurging ways: “Thank you Michigan Senator Debbie Spenditnow! Debbie spend so much American money. You borrow more and more – from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs. Thank you Debbie Spenditnow!”

The ad’s cartoon caricature has been broadly condemned as racially offensive, even by some of Hoekstra’s Republican colleagues.

But relatively few people are questioning the ad’s bigger context: That China is a zero-sum threat to the U.S., rubbing its hands with diabolical glee at the thought of American collapse.

As David Catanese wrote in Politico, “The message of the ad — that China is a continuing threat … isn’t as much of an issue as the fact that Hoekstra’s camp seized on stereotypes to drive home its point.”

In fact, the casual invocation of China as America’s zero-sum nemesis and existential rival has become increasingly common in today’s political conversation.

In 2010 and 2011, dozens of advertisements from politicians and special interest groups have framed China as a looming, leering enemy.

Hoekstra’s Republican colleague of Nevada, Rep. Mark Amodei, ran ads in which a Chinese news anchor recounted a chain of future events that began with the vote to raise the debt ceiling and ended with Chinese tanks rolling through Washington.

Running for congress in West Virginia, Republican Spike Maynard accused his opponent, Nick Rahall, of voting to send money to Chinese wind turbine manufacturers, with the flag of China flashing in the foreground.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ran ads slamming Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, as “fighting for jobs…in China!”

Beating back a challenge from former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer aired commercials accusing her of outsourcing thousands of jobs to “Shanghai instead of San Jose,” and “proudly stamping her products ‘Made in China.’”

And the anti-spending group Citizens Against Government Waste ran a notorious ad that featured an oily Beijing academic from the year 2030 spurring his class to a malicious fit of laughter over America’s downfall.

All of these ads used horror-movie audio cues and triumphant Red Communist imagery to play up the China threat.

But many of them – like Hoekstra’s ad – blurred the line between Chinese and Asian-Americans, by casting actors or extras who are obviously U.S.-born or raised to play the parts of nefarious Chinese nationals.

Former Rep. Zack Space went one step further, running ads attacking his GOP rival Robert Gibbs for supporting free trade with China that climaxed on an image apparently shot during the San Francisco Chinatown Lunar New Year parade: As dragons are dancing in the foreground, English-language signs are clearly visible in the rear.

The sloppy (or in some cases, perhaps intentional) conflation of “China” and “Chinese Americans” is tremendously dangerous, redirecting these Yellow Peril messages at a target that’s decidedly closer to home.

Nor is it just Americans of Chinese ancestry who are at risk: History is full of examples of ethnic misidentifications that have produced fatal consequences. The most famous case is that of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American murdered 30 years ago this year in Hoekstra’s home state of Michigan, by unemployed autoworkers seeking revenge against “the Japanese.”

Based on evidence from Republican debates, the use of China as a convenient enemy is likely to intensify as the field thins.

At the Bloomberg/Washington Post debate before his New Hampshire primary victory, Mitt Romney – the GOP’s probable standard-bearer– thundered that President Obama and other American leaders were being “played like a fiddle by the Chinese. And the Chinese are smiling all the way to the bank, taking our currency and taking our jobs and taking a lot of our future.”

If that sounds oddly similar to John Bigler’s message to the 1852 legislature, that is because it is essentially the same.

And for the ethically bankrupt but politically ambitious, Bigler’s success might well serve as a role model. His stance toward the Chinese caused his popularity to skyrocket, winning him a second term by a large margin, and even triggering a campaign to name what we now call Lake Tahoe “Lake Bigler.”

Later, he was named U.S. ambassador to Chile, and then U.S. commissioner for the Central Pacific Railroad (ironically, overseeing the greatest achievement of the so-called “coolies” he so despised.)

But as we now know, the short-term political gain Bigler experienced came at an awful price.

A century and a half after one of the darkest stains on the great American tapestry, Rep. Pete Hoekstra and others who have proven so eager to play the “China card” might want to read a little history, and heed the long-lost warnings of Norman Asing.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jeff Yang.

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Spend Time on Facebook — and Earn a Paycheck

Damien — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:45:57 +0000

Do you spend half of your day job hunting and the other half posting on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites? Do you feel guilty every time you post a photo of your dog instead of sending out your résumé?

Well stop the guilt trip because your time wasting social media skills might just earn you a job.

One of the newest and coolest gigs in corporate America is the position of Social Media Manager and the job description of marketing a company’s name and products on social network sites — such as Facebook, Twitter, and special interest forums — are in demand.

If you check out job recruitment sites you may see hundreds of new social media jobs posted.

For instance, the number of social media-related jobs on Monster has surged 75 percent over the last year with about 155 positions are available a month, up from an average of 88 a month a year ago according to the job recruiting company.

Even though the job title seems pretty solid, the job is still so new that many people don’t quite know what to do once they get to the office.

Jennifer Palmer of San Diego works as an online communities manager for a company that sells upscale beauty products. Each day she scans Facebook, Twitter, and Google alerts for any mention of her company’s products. She’ll most likely find them among people who have signed on to affinity groups — for example, Facebook users who “like” the product, and therefore get updates, special offers, and other messages that she sends out about events and promotions.

If she finds a favorable message on Twitter about a product, she might re-tweet it to all her followers on that social network.

Palmer also looks for comments that might indicate dissension among consumers, and if it looks like the situation could turn damaging, she’ll try to intervene before the complaint spreads.

But, the fact that you have 1000 followers on Facebook, doesn’t mean you have what it takes to be a Social Media Manager.

Being an effective social media manager is both an art and a skill. Some personalities are more inclined to be successful at managing and inspiring online communities, but most practitioners will need months, if not years, to learn to produce social media success through a process of trial and error.

A good social media manager has passion for his or her cause(s) and enjoys participating in social media. The best social media practitioners express their personalities with a dash of attitude and a bit of flair, and are comfortable articulating their opinions online. You don’t need to be brash or controversial in your opinions, but you do not shy away from asserting your viewpoints on behalf of the company.

Effective social media managers enjoy engaging with and responding to comments on social media sites. They relish discussing ideas and issues online, and they do it with patience and kindness. They are attentive to their communities on an almost daily basis. They express gratitude for support, and they acknowledge questions and concerns. They have the unique ability to defuse troublesome (and sometimes obnoxious and rude) personalities with kind, but firm commentary. It’s a real skill to navigate and guide the online commons and know how and when to react.

People interested in this career need to think- or be- a journalist. Well-written, timely content is what drives the Social Web. Old news is not share-, like-, or retweet-worthy. Increasingly, nonprofit communicators and social media practitioners need to consider themselves reporters for their causes and employers — always listening, responding rapidly, and sometimes even “Live! On location!” This is why blogging has become so central to a successful social media strategy. It allows social media managers to respond to breaking news by quickly and easily creating content that can be posted and shared by others on the Social Web.

The salary for this gig starts at around the $35-50K mark, which isn’t bad, though you won’t be able to waste time at work on Facebook anymore…because it will be work!

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Live blog of Bernanke hearing on budget

Damien — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:45:54 +0000

Is Bernanke behind the stock market turning higher today? David Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG LLC, says maybe so. Bernanke has been “pretty dovish” even in light of Friday’s jobs report, he said. “If you believe that Bernanke, and by extension the Fed, is continuing its easing bias, well then you’ve got an improved economic backdrop and a super accommodative Fed. All else equal, that supports higher prices and that’s what we’re seeing,” Greenhaus said in a note to clients.

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Preparing Yourself for the Analytics Job Tsunami – B-EYE

Damien — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:42:11 +0000

McKinsey Global Institute’s report on big data predicts that by 2018, there will be a shortage of 1.5 million business analytics professionals/managers who can make data driven decisions, and that prediction is just for the United States. In addition to McKinsey’s report, technologists today are blogging about the “the worsening dearth of qualified talent in the analytics field” in articles such as Big Data Explosion Evident in Analytics Workshops.

This oncoming tsunami of positions requiring analytical skills presents a solid opportunity for business intelligence (BI) professionals. Are you ready for the vast opportunities it will bring? To be able to take advantage of an opportunity, one has to be prepared.

But first, let’s start with clarifying what is involved in analytics. Is it just gathering data using software tool and creating dashboards and reports? Not really. Analytics goes well beyond data to fundamentally enable business decisions based on data. This involves working with stakeholders to understand the gaps in business, and using that as a guide to manipulate data, derive actionable insights and make recommendations.

Given that analytics is data++, it is indeed the data management, data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) professionals who are most well positioned to morph into more impactful analytics careers with a wider range of job choices. But like everything else, this transition needs preparation because the skills needed for analytics go beyond the current skills sets of most BI professional.

Best analytics is delivered when good technical skills are married to good soft skills. Most BI professionals can easily pick the technical skills of business analytics if well trained. The technical skills training should include not only frequently used data analysis methods like correlation analysis, trend analysis, profiling, and estimation, to name a few, but also the framework of how to bridge the gap from business to data. The soft skills training should include communication and presentation skills to effectively engage stakeholders including how to present information. Often these analyses can be done in Excel without the need for advanced statistical tools.

The McKinsey report on big data also predicts U. S. shortage of approximately 160,000 data scientists/advance analytics professionals. Note that this gap is 1/10th of the business analytics professional gap. But there are currently more options for data scientist training from universities such as North Carolina State University and Northwestern University, both of which offer Master’s programs in analytics. Stanford and many other universities offer professional development courses through their statistics and data mining department, targeted again at data scientist roles.

Historically there has not been any formal business analytics training offered, and most people have acquired their analytic skills on the job. Even today there isn’t much in the marketplace, so how does one go about acquiring these skills? One option developed and tested is Aryng’s Business and Predictive Analytics Training, which marries years of practical business operations experience with technical data analysis techniques to deliver a short course to quickly ramp-up data-driven decision-making skills. It provides all-encompassing training that can give any BI professional the skill and confidence needed to transition to an impactful analytics role.

Once you have the necessary analytics skills, the next step in the process is to find the right job, apply, interview and land it. If you are currently employed and have received the right training, there is nothing better than an internal job application. For external application, I recommend networking via LinkedIn groups, highlighting your newly acquired analytics skills using “business analytics” and “data analysis” tags. For job portals, LinkedIn Jobs, Craigslist, Indeed.com, Monster, icrunchdata and Dice are my top picks. So prep up and grab the opportunities this analytics job tsunami brings.

_{Author’s note: Use special coupon code “Feb-SPCL-TDWI-10” for 10% OFF Aryng’s Business and Predictive Analytics Workshop, in San Francisco, February 22-24, 2012. Offer expires February 17, 2012.}

Piyanka Jain, CEO of Aryng

Piyanka Jain, CEO of Aryng, former head of business analytics at PayPal NA, is an established analytics thought leader and acclaimed keynote speaker at business and analytics conferences. She has 10+ years of analytics and entrepreneurial experience with cumulative business impact of $120m+. For more information about Aryng, click here.
Twitter: Follow @AnalyticsQueen
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/piyanka
Newsletter: Sign up for Aryng’s Analytics Newsletter
Blog: www.Aryng.com/blog

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