Poynter Online
Go


Top Story

Public TV, Radio Stations to Increase Local Investigative Coverage
Most Recent Articles
Most E-mailed
Recent Comments
Recent Tags
Community Activity

Poynter Training
Poynter Seminars
Small, in-person training experiences.
News University
Today's most popular courses on NewsU, Poynter's e-learning site for journalists.
Webinars
Our online classroom is just a click away. Learn more.
All Webinars

Al's Morning Meeting

Home > Al's Morning Meeting
Tools: Text Sizeor, Print, RSSRSS, Subscribe via e-mail
Al Tompkins
Story ideas that you can localize and enterprise. Posted by 7:30 a.m. Mon-Fri.
POYNTER GROUPS
Find and join conversations about Reporting, Writing & Editing and Online & Multimedia.

CHECK AL's
TWITTER FEED for nonstop story ideas throughout the day.

UPDATED: JOIN AL ON THE ROAD AND LIVE ONLINE

APPLY FOR BROADCAST AND ONLINE SEMINARS

SEND AL YOUR STORY IDEAS

A dozen sites
I'm diggin'


*1. "Wired" explains how to figure out who is behind a Twitter page.

2. Check out FarmVille, Facebook's fastest growing application.

3. Before any health care reform vote, watch Steve Kroft's "60 Minutes Story" on the $60 billion in Medicare fraud that poisons the system each year.

4. Slate reported that some companies under criminal investigation still received stimulus money.

*5. USA Today reporters Brad Heath and Blake Morrison, WNYC's Radio Rookies and others won Casey Medals for their coverage of children. Watch this video of Heath and Morrison talking about their 8-month investigation of toxic air outside America's schools.

6. The Washington Post reveals how Washington, D.C., which has the nation's highest rate of AIDS cases, wasted millions of dollars on AIDS care.

7. The Association of Independents in Radio has provided a one-stop shopping page for people trying to sell freelance radio stories.

8. Sidewalks are in such bad shape in some cash-strapped towns that people who use wheelchairs are having to ride along the street instead.

*9. There's a new wearable HD camera for sports and action video that costs less than $350. Watch this sample video.

*10. The Tennessean's "Life on Hold" project looks at the lives of 20-year-olds trying to "figure it all out." The project features some really nice multimedia.

11. What words do you use that your readers don't understand? The New York Times tracks the words that its readers look up.

12. Read Beth Macy's first-person account about her Roanoke Times' project, "Age of Uncertainty." The series is about her community's aging senior citizens and the people who care for them.

All of my Diggin' sites are saved on Poynter's del.icio.us page.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but relies on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. We will correct errors and inaccuracies when we become aware of them.


Journalists at Work Covering Floods
Journalists in Iowa have been providing non-stop coverage of the floods, looking at different angles of the story from one end of the state to the other. They're reporting on flooding at the University of Iowa, where water has seeped into buildings on campus, on the levee breach in Des Moines and on the raw sewage that is reported to have flowed into rivers around Iowa as water plants fail.

Bloggers are doing a great job of covering the floods, too. IowaFlood.com is the biggest aggregation site I have found. The site pulls together newspaper, TV station and citizen resources. (I often wonder why media companies don't follow suit and string together various media resources rather than leaving it up to the non-journalism world to do.)

LavaRow has a very useful background on how IowaFlood came to be and how it was built using Yahoo!Pipes and Wordpress. Learn how to build your own pipe by clicking here.

It would be particularly wise for news organizations to remind the public to register with the Red Cross' Safe and Well system, which allows people to post online updates about where they are and what their situation is during an emergency.

Many newsrooms have enriched their sites with photos from viewers, readers and listeners. The Des Moines Register's homepage features photo galleries with photos from around the state. The Register also has a frequently-updated Twitter page and Facebook page.

Click on the following links to see how other news organizations in the Des Moines are covering the floods:

WHO-TV
KCCI-TV
WOI-TV
KDSM-TV
WHO Radio

Here are links to coverage in the Cedar Rapids area:

The (Cedar Rapids) Gazette
KCRG-TV
KCRG's Facebook page
KGAN-TV
KWWL-TV

Iowa Public Television has tips on how to talk to children about disasters.

There are more than 7,400 Iowa flood photos on Flickr. Additionally, there are hundreds of YouTube videos of the floods in Cedar Rapids, as well as Flickr photos and Facebook pages specific to flooding in this area.

Here is raw video from the Weather Channel.

Live Cameras

Live cameras of the river in downtown Des Moines
Wider shot of Des Moines
KGAN's live shot of Cedar Rapids
Other live cameras in Iowa
Posted by Al Tompkins at 3:52 PM on Jun. 15, 2008
Tools:
Comment, e-mail, Permalink, Share
Username
Password
New User? Signup Now
Poynter Careers
More media jobs