New York Times story
Mixed and Happy
Interracial Family
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Media Ride Along Report
Lily: Niche Market and Worldwide Community
Oddly enough, it all started with a Facebook status.
Actually, it went back a little farther than that.
Keith Bardwell really started all of this. Long story short, this Louisiana judge refused to grant a marriage license in October 2009 to a mixed-race couple because he was concerned for their future children. Bardwell thought that if their children were of mixed races, they would be excluded from both groups.
Suzy Richardson thought this was uncalled for, so she uploaded a portrait of her own happy mixed-race family to Facebook, saying she planned to send it to Bardwell in a Christmas card. Almost immediately, her friends who were also in mixed-race families jumped on board. The niche community, and mixedandhappy.com, was born.
The idea went international, and what started out as one mother sticking up for the happiness of her children became a worldwide phenomenon.
“And so it turns out that a bad decision sparked a Facebook status that sparked a movement,” Richardson says on her website.
Bardwell received 130 photos of mixed-racial families from around the world that Christmas.
Richardson said in an interview that she is still defining the role of mixedandhappy.com.
“We talk about anything and everything mixed-race families would want to talk about,” she said. She wants mixedandhappy.com to be a community and a news site.
“People need to connect,” she said.
Mixedandhappy.com attracts traffic through its content, according to Richardson. While she uses social networking to spread the word about new stories, many times people find her website by entering phrases like “products for mixed hair” and “mixed relationships” into search engines like Google.
Richardson said she knows of a website called interracialfamily.org and sites this as the only real competitor of mixedandhappy.com. To compare, Mixed and Happy defines itself as “…the first news site dedicated to the mixed-race community.” Interracialfamily.org says its mission is to “facilitate the culture recognition of interracial/multicultural families and disassociate this culture from longstanding stigma by exposing and discrediting stereotypes.”
Richardson said that “interracial” was used more in the 1990s, and people seem to be getting away from that term.
“I decided to use the word ‘mixed’ even though people have bounced around it for so long because they thought it was a bad word,” she said. Her little sister was mixed, so she wanted to embrace the term.
“It makes people want to be a part of it,” Richardson said.
She is currently working with the City of Gainesville to hold the first Loving Day in the city the weekend of June 12, the anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case in 1967. This decision made anti-miscegenation laws illegal. The celebration would bring together a local group of people who are members of the niche market mixedandhappy.com appeals to. In addition, mixed-race families in Australia want to start a Mixed and Happy chapter there.
“As I was writing (the card to Bardwell), I realized that this project was all about love,” Richardson said. “Because, when all is said and done, that’s what changes hearts and lives.”
Shannon: Using Social Media and Balancing the News with User-generated Content
Mixed and Happy, while it does focus on the news, is also meant to serve as a virtual community center. One way the site does this is through social media, like Facebook and Twitter. During our interview, Suzy Richardson, the founder and editor of Mixed Happy, talked about the various roles the social media sites have played in throughout the site’s history. In fact, it was a Facebook post that moved her to create a blog dedicated to covering issue related to mixed-race people and families. The post received so much attention from friends that created a Blogspot, which eventually became a full-fledged website.
The Facebook page also allows readers to connect with one another by sharing family photos, posting on the discussion board and generally showing support and love for Mixed and Happy. In this way, the Facebook page is an extension of the website in that it offers readers a place to not only discuss Mixed and Happy stories, but also to bring in outside influences which could possibly serves as story ideas.
Richardson went on to describe how she and the site’s reporters use the Facebook page to attract traffic to the site. She says she understands it would be ridiculous to expect people to be able to extensively connect socially on the site when most people already use Facebook to do so. Therefore, she uses the Facebook page to promote stories on the website.
Balance User Generated Content & the News
Mixed and Happy is unique in that it is dealing with issues that deeply affect people. The story about the mixed-race couple being denied a marriage license, a cross burning at a mixed family’s home, how a family is dealing with a transracial adoption: these are all very emotional stories to the authors and the readers. When I asked Richardson about how she tries to balance the site’s news stories with content contributed by users (like photos and personal stories), she said it can be difficult. As one of the few websites dedicated to mixed-race families and issues, many users expect it to do and be everything. Richardson said, as an alumna of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, she has a passion for journalism and wants her site to reflect that commitment.
Part of what Richardson is doing to make sure the site maintains a strong news presence, is to bring in outsiders to help revamp the site. For example, she recently found two interns through the College’s Job and Internship Fair. Bringing in communications students, who are familiar with writing news stories and would do the internship for academic credit, allows her to have contributers who are committed to helping the site grow. One issue Richardson discussed was the inability of finding reporters and contributors who would stick around after expressing initial interest. “I have to be careful on screening people. In the beginning, I let people write if they wanted to. What I found is that if there’s no exchange, financial or credit, people will stay with you briefly and kind of disappear.” Richardson’s commitment to keeping her site a news site is very apparent in the carefulness she uses when choosing whom to bring into Mixed and Happy.
Johnelle: A website with no advertisements?
Usually, free websites and newspaper sites use advertisements as a way to generate profit. While news sites and websites in general usually have ads to the top or sides of their web pages, Mixed and Happy displays no ads whatsoever, in turn, generating no income. This is one of the first things our group realized when analyzing the site, and we found it to be unique. But while other sites are concerned with getting loads of web hits, in turn gaining money from advertisers, the motive of Mixed and Happy is just to dedicate itself to news and the community for mixed-race families and allow this sometimes overlooked group of people to connect with one another. The founder, Suzy Richardson, has a passion for journalism, which helps keep her motivated to run the site.
Though it seems as if there are purposely no ads on the site, Richardson says it’s actually this way because she needs help making it happen. She says she is not the most tech-savvy person and is a one man band, basically doing everything on her own when it comes to supervising the site. However, she says she, along with the contributors, is in the process of reconstructing the whole face of the website, which will include ad space and ad campaigns in the future. With the new interns hired, there may be a sooner change with advertisements being placed on the site.
Between now and last week, actually, our group has observed this revamping taking place. Before, there were multiple links that would link to the same destination, and the links were a little disorganized. Now, instead of having multiple links at the top of the screen with drop box menus leading to the same page, there are now only designated links entitled “Home,” “About Us,” “Submissions” and “MH Around the World.” A lot of times we may notice that advertisements in newspapers and websites reflect the given content. Richardson says part of the revamping process will allow people to advertise what they want on the site.
But just because there are no ads doesn’t mean there is no traffic. Richardson says the site actually gets a pretty decent amount of traffic, and the social media outlets are key factors in attracting people. Surprisingly, the site attracts many viewers just through simple Google searches, such as “products for mixed hair” or “mixed relationships.” Including advertisements on the site will definitely be a positive change and would probably help to generate some sort of profit in the future.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
URLFAN
The two sites that I ranked in URLFAN were The New York Times and Twitter.
The New York Times website ranked eighth out of 3,783,534 websites followed by the site. It has been mentioned in 51,877 unique feeds and 337,604 blog posts. Mentioned by bloggers every two hours, it was also the top news site on the list. I believe these numbers reflect just how trusted this publication is by our society. Everyone uses it as a source.
Twitter actually ranked higher than The New York Times. Twitter ranks fourth our of the three million websites URLFAN follows. The website has been mentioned in 111,981 unique feeds and 2,047,600 blog posts. Bloggers mention this website every 18 minutes. This again shows how popular and utilized social media is becoming in our culture.
The New York Times website ranked eighth out of 3,783,534 websites followed by the site. It has been mentioned in 51,877 unique feeds and 337,604 blog posts. Mentioned by bloggers every two hours, it was also the top news site on the list. I believe these numbers reflect just how trusted this publication is by our society. Everyone uses it as a source.
Twitter actually ranked higher than The New York Times. Twitter ranks fourth our of the three million websites URLFAN follows. The website has been mentioned in 111,981 unique feeds and 2,047,600 blog posts. Bloggers mention this website every 18 minutes. This again shows how popular and utilized social media is becoming in our culture.
Read and Blog No. 7
Even though many of the readings and videos for this week's assignment were somewhat depressing due to the realities of the journalism job market, I was satisfied when so many of them supported and expanded on what I have been writing about in these blog posts all semester: The Internet has developed journalism into a community effort.
Jack Shafer discussed in his article "Keeping the Fizz in the Journalism Biz" that Mark Sullivan, a journalist at the turn of the 20th century, saw value in technology in journalism. Shafer began his argument by observing that young journalists are like happy drunks while older journalists are sad or mean drunks. He then highlighted Sullivan's belief that journalists should always know how to do two tasks well: write and use new technology effectively. "It's the difference between digging ditches with a spade and excavating a canal with dynamite," Shafer said. Especially after taking Reporting and Fact Finding, I completely support this statement. Technology, though changing the world of journalism right now, has made it increasingly easier for journalists to consume and manipulate information. This same technology has also allowed for local publications and news media organizations to pop around around the country and globe, teaming up with each other through the Web. Shafer argues that this phenomenon has increased the competition in the journalism business, a phenomenon that, in the end, has always helped the business.
Since the conversation and community of journalism I've been thinking about all semester really does create a competition, I agree with Shafer that some healthy competition will at least keep the business afloat. This competition will most certainly help in the pursuit of truth, which is the goal of the field at its simplest anyway, says Kurt Anderson. And, as Sullivan said, two skills will help writers compete in this market: writing and technology skills.
By this same token, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post encouraged universities to start fostering professional journalism outlets for students to gain experience in writing and technology. As a student in a journalism school that does this, I can speak from experience that the most learning I have done has been through these professional experiences.
John Nichols offered the strongest view in my opinion."Information cannot be paid," he said. "Information cannot be stopped." He also argued that journalism is dead without future intervention from the government. While I thought these views extreme, Nichols seemed very confident in them. They were kind of scary to think about, but at the same time it seemed as though he was simply trying to be honest. He argued that the Founding Fathers decided that the government could foster newspapers in order to foster democracy. While that did work in 1775, I don't think that system would be as successful today. The role of journalism is to search for truth, not be a proponent of what the government is doing.
Most of these journalists who are looking toward the future see local and even hyper-local journalism as the future of the institution. Mark Briggs believes that the future of news media and its interaction with readers is through the iPad. Vadim Lavrusik, however, believes it is through social media that journalism will continue.
In order to continue strongly through social media, journalism must undergo a paradigm shift, in my opinion.
"The future journalist will be more embedded with the community than ever," Lavrusik said, "and news outlets will build their newsrooms to focus on utilizing the community and enabling its members to be enrolled as correspondents." Journalists must be prepared to give up the editorial power to the community a little bit, or even a lot. The heavy use of social media even today has begun to inspire much more user-generated content than ever before. Individuals from different communities are coming together on the Internet and seeing what each other are doing. News media organizations in general are becoming more collaborative, which creates community within the physical area of where newspapers are located. "...journalists would be better suited by developing skills to fill the information gaps, offering broader perspective and context on the information, and fostering conversation around it," Lavrusik said. The news is now a conversation rather than a report. The Internet has enabled readers to respond immediately to news stories, and they do not want their voices ignored.
Other sites users can generate content on are Tumblr and Intersect. I have used Tumblr before both to write and to read, and I really enjoy it because of its usability. I didn't know what Intersect was until I read this article, and I immediately typed in my location to find stories near me. I was surprised when only two showed up, since Gainesville is such a community of journalists because of the college. Mobile phones are also making the consumption of news a social experience because of the cornucopia of applications available for smart phones. People can now walk and engage with the news at the same time.
In conclusion, after a long and laborious semester, Lavrusik said it best: "More newsrooms are hiring community engagers and social media producers."
Maybe now we can tell our professors that being on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr during class really is paying attention.
Jack Shafer discussed in his article "Keeping the Fizz in the Journalism Biz" that Mark Sullivan, a journalist at the turn of the 20th century, saw value in technology in journalism. Shafer began his argument by observing that young journalists are like happy drunks while older journalists are sad or mean drunks. He then highlighted Sullivan's belief that journalists should always know how to do two tasks well: write and use new technology effectively. "It's the difference between digging ditches with a spade and excavating a canal with dynamite," Shafer said. Especially after taking Reporting and Fact Finding, I completely support this statement. Technology, though changing the world of journalism right now, has made it increasingly easier for journalists to consume and manipulate information. This same technology has also allowed for local publications and news media organizations to pop around around the country and globe, teaming up with each other through the Web. Shafer argues that this phenomenon has increased the competition in the journalism business, a phenomenon that, in the end, has always helped the business.
Since the conversation and community of journalism I've been thinking about all semester really does create a competition, I agree with Shafer that some healthy competition will at least keep the business afloat. This competition will most certainly help in the pursuit of truth, which is the goal of the field at its simplest anyway, says Kurt Anderson. And, as Sullivan said, two skills will help writers compete in this market: writing and technology skills.
By this same token, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post encouraged universities to start fostering professional journalism outlets for students to gain experience in writing and technology. As a student in a journalism school that does this, I can speak from experience that the most learning I have done has been through these professional experiences.
John Nichols offered the strongest view in my opinion."Information cannot be paid," he said. "Information cannot be stopped." He also argued that journalism is dead without future intervention from the government. While I thought these views extreme, Nichols seemed very confident in them. They were kind of scary to think about, but at the same time it seemed as though he was simply trying to be honest. He argued that the Founding Fathers decided that the government could foster newspapers in order to foster democracy. While that did work in 1775, I don't think that system would be as successful today. The role of journalism is to search for truth, not be a proponent of what the government is doing.
Most of these journalists who are looking toward the future see local and even hyper-local journalism as the future of the institution. Mark Briggs believes that the future of news media and its interaction with readers is through the iPad. Vadim Lavrusik, however, believes it is through social media that journalism will continue.
In order to continue strongly through social media, journalism must undergo a paradigm shift, in my opinion.
"The future journalist will be more embedded with the community than ever," Lavrusik said, "and news outlets will build their newsrooms to focus on utilizing the community and enabling its members to be enrolled as correspondents." Journalists must be prepared to give up the editorial power to the community a little bit, or even a lot. The heavy use of social media even today has begun to inspire much more user-generated content than ever before. Individuals from different communities are coming together on the Internet and seeing what each other are doing. News media organizations in general are becoming more collaborative, which creates community within the physical area of where newspapers are located. "...journalists would be better suited by developing skills to fill the information gaps, offering broader perspective and context on the information, and fostering conversation around it," Lavrusik said. The news is now a conversation rather than a report. The Internet has enabled readers to respond immediately to news stories, and they do not want their voices ignored.
Other sites users can generate content on are Tumblr and Intersect. I have used Tumblr before both to write and to read, and I really enjoy it because of its usability. I didn't know what Intersect was until I read this article, and I immediately typed in my location to find stories near me. I was surprised when only two showed up, since Gainesville is such a community of journalists because of the college. Mobile phones are also making the consumption of news a social experience because of the cornucopia of applications available for smart phones. People can now walk and engage with the news at the same time.
In conclusion, after a long and laborious semester, Lavrusik said it best: "More newsrooms are hiring community engagers and social media producers."
Maybe now we can tell our professors that being on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr during class really is paying attention.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
FOIA results
1. The Letter
University of Florida News Bureau
RECORDS REQUEST
Dear Records Request Officer:
Pursuant to the state open records act, I request access to and copies of a detailed breakdown of where each and every one of students' tuition dollars goes.
I do not expect any fees.
If my request is denied in whole or part, I ask that you justify all deletions by reference to specific exemptions of the act.
Thank you for your assistance.
Sincerely,
Lily Parkinson
2. The response
Lily:
I received your public records request today for “access to and copies of a detailed breakdown of where each and every one of the students’ tuition dollars goes.”
I am not aware we have such a public record in existence but I will certainly inquire to find out. The University of Florida is required by law to provide existing records to you for your review but we are not required to create a record for you.
I will get back to you in coming days regarding your request. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Sincerely,
Janine Sikes
Director of Public Affairs
University Relations
University of Florida
101 Tigert Hall
Office: 352-846-3903/06
Cell: 352-214-6807
3. The follow-up
Ms. Sikes,
Thank you very much for your follow-up to my request. I was wondering if your inquiry into the existence of a document detailing where tuition money goes has yielded any results. Please let me know at your earliest convenience.
Best,
~Lily Parkinson
4. The results
Lily: Thanks for checking back. I have been out of town, only returning today. I will check on it for you. janine
Lily:
The State of Florida considers tuition to a part of appropriations and commingles these funds. Through our budgeting model, we allocated tuition to each college. Attached is a spreadsheet that details how much tuition we allocated to each college. At the college level, this money is commingled with state appropriations, so you cannot tell how much tuition is used to pay each faculty member or operating expense. I hope that helps.
Sincerely,
Janine Sikes
The spreadsheet is saved in my email and will be presented in class.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Read and Blog April 3
As we have seen from all of the readings of this semester, the Internet is redefining the way we do journalism. What the readings for this week brought to light for me was the ferocity of the debate surrounding this rapidly occurring change. Several of the readings were a response to a long report about how the Internet is changing journalism, and these three individuals had quite specific, and negative, opinions on what was said. Langeveld said that the world of online media is a fractured environment because of a plunge in reader loyalty. He suggested news media organizations from umbrella organizations under which they can share information. I think that while sharing information is a good idea, earning money off this system would be difficult to coordinate. I do think his suggestion of having "geek squads" at news media organizations would be a great idea. These teams can help create the organization's identity in the Internet journalism community. Schaffer had negative view on what the report said as well. She said news media should pay attention to what readers are saying about them and seriously consider if the tradition ways of doing things in journalism will be effective in our new technological world. She thinks it would be important to ask how the public would define journalism and then use that definition to create a stronger, more productive product. Finally, Starr thought the report was good, but definitely had his additions to make. He thinks journalism is likely to become more partisan, which is something I agree will happen, but I'm not happy about it. Journalism helps a democracy be successful. Journalism needs to remain strong for our country. If that means a shift from writing articles with a pen and notepad to making topic pages on journalism websites, so be it I believe. More information does cause more confusion, but journalists must work through that confusion to find a solution.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Wordled Speeches - Case Study 12
I think both Wordle and The Gender Genie are two websites that can be used in good and bad ways for journalism. I definitely believe readers will be interested in which words are used the most in speeches, but I also think that looking at this type of image will give readers a biased view of what was said. They may even decide not to read or listen to the actual speech because they think they know the important parts. These programs manipulate language in such a way that the most used words are the biggest. Just because a word was used often, however, does not make it the most important in a speech. What these programs lack is analysis of the meaning of speeches or stories: That is still the job of the reader.
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