Mashable reports:

The AP Stylebook has released its new social media guidelines, including the official change from “Web site” to “website” (a move first reported back in April) and 41 other definitions, use cases and rules that journalists should follow.

Among the more interesting changes –- at least from a grammar and style standpoint –- are separating out “smart phone” as two words, hyphenating “e-reader,” and allowing fan, friend and follow to be used both as nouns and verbs.

via Mashable: AP Stylebook Adds 42 New Guidelines for Social Media.

The piece might have written itself, based on the subject’s life story. But Rodewig used pace and variety to drive the reader from lede to conclusion. She found a quote strong enough to capture the reader’s interest at the top:

FORT BENNING, Ga. — “It was one of the coldest Decembers on record for Cincinnati in 1943. Money was tight, we were at war, and I was needed at home,” said Dorothy Hunter Davis, one of the first African-American women to enlist in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

She had just finished her freshman year at Wilberforce University when she applied for a position in the secretarial pool at The Kroger Company headquarters.

It’s a story her daughter, Army Community Service marketing manager Carmen Davis, has heard more than once.

Interaction with the daughter is one of the strong points of the piece.

“She took the examination for the secretarial pool, and she got a 100,” Carmen said. “The test giver at the time came out and said, ‘Well, Miss Hunter you did excellent on the test … however, you may want to look for a job elsewhere because you will be the only colored girl here.’ And she was crushed, absolutely devastated.”

Leaving the building to catch a streetcar home, Dorothy passed the window of a local post office, and everything changed for her.

“They had a poster of a woman in a uniform inviting women to join the military service – ‘We need you.’ And my mother said she stopped and dried her eyes, and she walked in,” Carmen said.

Note how each paragraph answers the previous one’s question, then raises an issue for the next graf to answer?

Click here to read on (betcha can’t help it) …

In the last two competitions, however, the judges toiled over keyboards and screens, squinting and crunching numbers, silently, alone – but not really alone, at least this year.

For the 2009 competition, the entire world is looking over their shoulders. No sweaty, chapel-like boardroom, no launching cardboard-mounted entries at one another with a “Can you believe this?” and no gentlemen’s agreement to leave everything said in the room. The room is as wide as the Internet.

The coordinator at the Army level, rather than making a weak attempt a password-protected virtual boardroom (as in the IMCOM case), posted everything in public HERE. All competitors can see each other’s stuff, opening the field for endless, helpless comparison. On one hand, the judges could make themselves as popular as baseball umpires. On the other, the openness also shows how good all the entries are. Open is better, in the end. Open means more exposure for the best the Army has to offer, and the product’s generally very, very good.

As in the IMCOM competition (coordinated by this writer), a few entries stand out on either end of the bell curve, but only in a few categories. The curve skews toward excellence, as should be expected, and in the fine distinctions within this crowd of entries the judges will find their real work.

Take a look at the competition page. Should next year’s competition be as open?

Capt. Emily Stehr enjoys a little downtime during her deployment to Iraq with the 2nd Stryker Calvary Regiment in Vilseck, Germany. Stehr battled with suicidal thoughts, but was able to cope after seeking assistance at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

In researching “Breaking the silence: Soldier conquers suicidal thoughts,”  Rolle did more than get her subject to talk about her feelings – Capt. Stehr was looking for a platform – she told the story of the story. 

We meet two characters, Stehr and Armed Forces Network reporter Michelle Michael. We follow (in a well-constructed narrative) the development, the obstacles, the reactions – what affected subject, reporter and audience before and after Michael helped Stehr make her story known.

The chief weakness to this strong story is, oddly, point of view. We only hear from the two subjects. It would have been interesting to hear from someone else affected by Michael’s broadcasts or Stehr’s other outreach efforts. I’d like to see quotes from a supervisor in AFN Europe describing the decision to go ahead, or someone in the medical or counseling fields commenting on the effects of Stehr’s brave act. 

But overall, the piece stands high for craft, readability, relevancy and honesty. It doesn’t sugarcoat the queasy feeling some in the military still feel about covering suicide within the ranks. It might beat the suicide prevention drum again (should we stop?), but the new point of view makes it fresh, freshness catches attention and catching attention could save lives.

BTW: this story is available on IMCOM’s new IReport page as well as Army.mil

Poewar.com: Solutions For Writers.

Tip of the hat to past colleague Gary St.Lawrence. Link found on his site.

Yesterday, Nielsen Business Media reported that Editor & Publisher was shutting down.Clearly, Nielsen concluded that the supplier community serving the newspaper industry can no longer sustain a media business that reports on the newspaper industry. When you get to the point where the suppliers have dwindled—or not enough of them believe in the value of using a third-party media source for the marketing—you’ve got a problem.And that tells us a lot about the state of the newspaper industry.

via A Death Knell for the Newspaper Business? – Tony Silber – Blogs B2B @ FolioMag.com.

The Citizen’s Guide series is a set of 21 fact sheets that describe, in general terms, cleanup methods used at Superfund and other sites. Each fact sheet is two pages long and answers five questions about the cleanup method: 1) What is it? 2) How does it work? 3) Is it safe? 4) How long will it take? and 5) Why use it? These guides are also available in Spanish.

Keep in mind, there is some useful and important work going on. Even if it seems far removed, by cleaning up the contamination of the past, these programs on your installations make certain the Army can continue to train Soldiers, and train them safely. Now that you can understand how they are doing it, I highly recommend finding out what they are doing.

See CLU-IN.ORG | Citizen’s Guides to Cleanup Methods.

*I am the editor of the Army’s quarterly Environmental Update.

In portability – the ability to engage media anywhere – books, newspapers and magazines are giving way to electronic readers and smart phones. But in that, electronics has a way to go before people habitually stick a Kindle 2 under their arms on the way to the washroom or risk their iPhones on a sunny, sandy beach. And print — good quality, not newsprint or Newsweek– still can’t be beat in resolution or reading comfort, even by a 22-inch top-of-the-line display.

But the surprise challenge is in browsability. By browsability, I mean the ability to stumble across information on a similar subject when you’re looking for something else, or nothing at all. For example, you might pick up a magazine with a car you like on the cover, and end up reading an article on biofuels. The Web, as it is in 2009, is still a search-oriented medium: you need to know what you want to find. Web portals like MSN, MyWay or Yahoo offer something similar, but despite personalization, they still seem locked in some television newsmagazine mode – the same top 10 stories, the same set of interests for the common denominator.

Enter, of all things, Twitter. In an excellent tutorial on the value of Twitter (yep, uppercase that for the headline), Lee Aase, chancellor of Social Media University, Global, points out:

So while Google’s search engine is great when you’re looking for particular information that you know must be out there somewhere, one of Twitter’s values is that it helps you get notified about things for which you wouldn’t think to search.

In other words, your Twitter stream becomes a table of contents for your own, personal magazine. As well as a way to keep up with friends.

Print will survive – but its role in society will be quite different from what it is now.

Read Lee’s more positive take: The Value of Twitter, Part I: Recommendation Engine | SMUG – Social Media University, Global.

Two days of hell, nine men of valor, originally uploaded by Army.mil.

This looked like a weak photo to include in a photo set — then I realized the photo was not the point.
Technically, it’s almost perfect – pleasing outdoor sun, well-exposed shadows*, no one caught with a goofy expression, nice telephoto compression. I would have liked to see more of the Soldier on the left. And the caption, “Two days of hell, nine men of valor,” leaves you scratching your head until you study the cutline. Things add up to nine in the last sentence, and it’s not explicit. And, since it is a ceremony shot, you really don’t know what the guys did unless you read the cutline.
And then you realize the point is not the photo, but the story behind it. No action shot exists (as far as I know). Everyone involved was far too busy with a trigger (or a radio) to worry about a shutter button.
So we’re left with a photo of the award ceremony – one missing a third of the honorees. So to do them honor one takes the best picture one can, because to let a story go without some kind of illustration would consign it to the back page.
An editor would rather see action than a ceremony, but in the end the photographer and editor made the right choice – to call attention to nine heroes through the best photo one could take. I like it better every minute.

Soldiers of Company B, 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), stand in formation following a valor award ceremony in which two received the Bronze Star Medal with “V” device and four received the Army Commendation Medal with “V” device. Three other Soldiers also earned the Bronze Star for valor.

Story here: Two days of hell, nine men of valor”

*updated with the correct term.

Don’t worry, though. Media consultant, blogger, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis has a few ideas for how to replace the local newspaper with new business models for news at the hyperlocal level. He just gave a presentation at an Aspen Institute forum on journalism today (live stream).

His answer is to organize local bloggers and citizens into a metro-wide network in each of the top 25 markets, and sell local ads across their sites. Each hyperlocal site would remain independent but join a loose federation for ad sales, distribution, and shared costs. Jarvis sketches out what a new news organization might look like at the local level, and goes out on a limb by offering actual spreadsheets showing some assumptions about audience size and how the business model would work. There is also a spreadsheet for doing this through a non-profit.

The comments (and emperical evidence) suggests people now use “hyperlocal” blogs as a source of community news. Perhaps this is the new model for on-post journalism as well. Our larger installations, already divided into communities with “mayors,” might set up a network as Dr. Jarvis describes. The role of the command (internal) information officer would be trainer, reviewer, advocate and enabler of these community blogs. There’s possibly room for a Civilian Enterprise model here.

Read the whole post and comments at Jeff Jarvis Tries To Save Local News (With Spreadsheets!)