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Aim for the Heart: Writing, Reporting, Photojournalism, Producing, Ethics and Resources for journalists

Aim for the Heart: Writing, Reporting, Photojournalism, Producing, Ethics and Resources for journalists

tompkins@poynter.org

  • About Al
    • Al in the News
    • The Poynter Institute
  • Aim for the Heart-Third Edition
  • Al in Your Newsroom
  • Cool Tools
  • Covering Guns and Gun Control
  • Drones and Journalism
  • Editing and Writing
  • Ethics by Al
    • Al Teaches About Covering Suicides
    • Daredevil Urban Explorers
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    • Storm Tools for Journalists
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    • Why the Meth Registry Doesn’t Work
  • Sports Multimedia
    • How the NYT Produced “The Jockey”
  • Story Samples
    • Audio Only Teaching Samples
      • 60 Words That Lead to America’s Longest War
    • Teaching Samples
      • Interactive Graphic Tells America’s Gun Story
    • The Greeter
    • The Work of Darrell Barton
  • The tools you need to become a Story-Idea machine

Month: December 2018

This anchor created a simple system that resulted in more women experts getting on TV. No bosses or consultants were involved.

December 7, 2018 al

18 months ago, fewer than 40% of the people who showed up on Ros Atkins’ BBC program were women.  Throughout the BBC, male guests outnumbered

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Behind the Scenes: how three reporters in three cities worked together on one daily turn story

December 7, 2018 al

Tegna sent some of its best local reporters to assist KHOU in Houston to cover the big story of former President Bush’s casket being returned

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Why a TV station didn’t air a Nazi protest

December 1, 2018 al

Little Rock, Arkansas TV stations got twice a day press releases from a Nazi sympathizer group that had gotten a permit to hold a rally/protest

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Alaska media show how to use social media to cover the 7.0 quake

December 1, 2018 al

Anchorage TV stations kept reporting even when a 7.0 earthquake knocked them all off the air and trashed the CBS affiliate KTVA.  Journalists who had

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Recent Posts

  • Download our “Managing Newsroom Stress and Trauma” handout
  • A new edition of Al’s Cool Tools to download
  • A story full of visual surprises
  • A Local TV Station Dedicates 3-Years to Investigating Hospital Billing
  • This anchor created a simple system that resulted in more women experts getting on TV. No bosses or consultants were involved.
  • Behind the Scenes: how three reporters in three cities worked together on one daily turn story
  • Why a TV station didn’t air a Nazi protest
  • Alaska media show how to use social media to cover the 7.0 quake
  • A Thanksgiving Story
  • Some of the Cool Tools I showed at EIJ 2018

RSS Nieman Lab

  • Here’s what ProPublica learned about managing a collaboration across hundreds of news organizations
  • Here is a step-by-step guide for news outlets to share power with underserved communities
  • People who are given correct information still misremember it to fit their own beliefs
  • Four ways Mother Jones became profitable in this turbulent industry
  • This is how Report for America ended up funding a community Wikipedia editor (!) at a library (!!)
  • What do authority and curiosity sound like on the radio? NPR has been expanding that palette from its founding
  • Small experiments beat big ones, and other takeaways from BizLab’s public radio innovation summit

RSS InteractiveNarratives.org

  • Junko’s Story: Surviving Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb
    An intimate account of one young girl’s harrowing experience and miraculous survival.
  • The Boat
    ‘The Boat’, an interactive graphic novel about escape after the Vietnam War. Based on the story by Nam Le, adapted by Matt Huynh.
  • Which Direction Do You Sleep?
    A kinetic type story illustrating a common understanding within Ayurvedic practice. Created for my motion graphics class this semester at Ohio University.
  • Cronulla Riots - The Day That Shocked the Nation
    Investigate the simmering tensions between groups of Australians that led to racially motivated violence at Sydney’s Cronulla Beach in December 2005.
  • Rebuilding Haiti
    Four years after the earthquake, how is Haiti rebuilding itself? If you were part of the process, would you be able to make the right choices? “Rebuilding Haïti" is an interactive piece of journalism. The form mixes newsgame and longform journalism. The story is about development issues (like rural exodus, land reform and brain drain). […]
  • Blind Wrestler
    Shot and Produced by Jose F. Moreno/Courier-Post

RSS Unknown Feed

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RSS Columbia Journalism Review

  • Podcast: Carole Cadwalladr and disinformation at the ballot box
  • The journalistic newsfeed: editorial values and algorithms
  • Boris Johnson and Brexit come out of cold storage
  • Who didn’t kill Jimmy Hoffa
  • MSNBC public editor: What if Rachel Maddow is right?
  • Whose responsibility is the right to be forgotten?

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