Zen Through Mayhem

From the PEW Research center...(please substitute the word citizen for person)

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth

Democracy depends on citizens having reliable, accurate facts put in a meaningful context. Journalism does not pursue truth in an absolute or philosophical sense, but it can–and must–pursue it in a practical sense. This “journalistic truth” is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation. Journalists should be as transparent as possible about sources and methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information. Even in a world of expanding voices, accuracy is the foundation upon which everything else is built–context, interpretation, comment, criticism, analysis and debate. The truth, over time, emerges from this forum. As citizens encounter an ever greater flow of data, they have more need–not less–for identifiable sources dedicated to verifying that information and putting it in context.

2. Its first loyalty is to citizens

While news organizations answer to many constituencies, including advertisers and shareholders, the journalists in those organizations must maintain allegiance to citizens and the larger public interest above any other if they are to provide the news without fear or favor. This commitment to citizens first is the basis of a news organization’s credibility, the implied covenant that tells the audience the coverage is not slanted for friends or advertisers. Commitment to citizens also means journalism should present a representative picture of all constituent groups in society. Ignoring certain citizens has the effect of disenfranchising them. The theory underlying the modern news industry has been the belief that credibility builds a broad and loyal audience, and that economic success follows in turn. In that regard, the business people in a news organization also must nurture–not exploit–their allegiance to the audience ahead of other considerations.

3. Its essence is a discipline of verification

Journalists rely on a professional discipline for verifying information. When the concept of objectivity originally evolved, it did not imply that journalists are free of bias. It called, rather, for a consistent method of testing information–a transparent approach to evidence–precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work. The method is objective, not the journalist. Seeking out multiple witnesses, disclosing as much as possible about sources, or asking various sides for comment, all signal such standards. This discipline of verification is what separates journalism from other modes of communication, such as propaganda, fiction or entertainment. But the need for professional method is not always fully recognized or refined. While journalism has developed various techniques for determining facts, for instance, it has done less to develop a system for testing the reliability of journalistic interpretation.

4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover

Independence is an underlying requirement of journalism, a cornerstone of its reliability. Independence of spirit and mind, rather than neutrality, is the principle journalists must keep in focus. While editorialists and commentators are not neutral, the source of their credibility is still their accuracy, intellectual fairness and ability to inform–not their devotion to a certain group or outcome. In our independence, however, we must avoid any tendency to stray into arrogance, elitism, isolation or nihilism.

5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power

Journalism has an unusual capacity to serve as watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens. The Founders recognized this to be a rampart against despotism when they ensured an independent press; courts have affirmed it; citizens rely on it. As journalists, we have an obligation to protect this watchdog freedom by not demeaning it in frivolous use or exploiting it for commercial gain.

6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise

The news media are the common carriers of public discussion, and this responsibility forms a basis for our special privileges. This discussion serves society best when it is informed by facts rather than prejudice and supposition. It also should strive to fairly represent the varied viewpoints and interests in society, and to place them in context rather than highlight only the conflicting fringes of debate. Accuracy and truthfulness require that as framers of the public discussion we not neglect the points of common ground where problem solving occurs.

7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant

Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. It should do more than gather an audience or catalogue the important. For its own survival, it must balance what readers know they want with what they cannot anticipate but need. In short, it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. The effectiveness of a piece of journalism is measured both by how much a work engages its audience and enlightens it. This means journalists must continually ask what information has most value to citizens and in what form. While journalism should reach beyond such topics as government and public safety, a journalism overwhelmed by trivia and false significance ultimately engenders a trivial society.

8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional

Keeping news in proportion and not leaving important things out are also cornerstones of truthfulness. Journalism is a form of cartography: it creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map. The map also should include news of all our communities, not just those with attractive demographics. This is best achieved by newsrooms with a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. The map is only an analogy; proportion and comprehensiveness are subjective, yet their elusiveness does not lessen their significance.

9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience

"You’ve done all the hard work and now it’s time to think about how you are going to present it. Organizing and writing the story can be the key to an exceptional investigative report.How you do that will depend on the type of investigation you are conducting, but one common way is organize information chronologically, particularly when the trail is complex. Throughout your research stage, make lists of what you don’t know yet, but wish you knew. Check your list before you start writing to make sure you are not missing anything. It takes a lot of time and effort to get the information for an investigative story – don’t make the mistake now of rushing into writing it. One of the luxuries of investigative reporting is that it is not usually as deadline-driven as other news. Keep it simple and to the point. Avoid jargon and technical terms. Get used to the fact that you will never be able to use all the information you collected in your investigation. You want to give readers enough to see the truth of your story, but you don’t want to make them numb with too much information.

Don’t fret too much about the elements you have to leave out. Thanks to the Internet, information that does not make it into the story does not have to go to waste. Nowadays, you can use your own or your organization’s website to post details about how you did your investigation, copies of documents you used, links to other sources and complete interview transcripts, among other materials. If it’s possible, include photos, graphics, timelines or other visuals. Not only will they attract more people to your story, but they can often do a better job of telling a complex story than text alone can. Here, a picture really can be worth a thousand words. After completing your final draft, systematically check your notes, documents and interviews to double-check the accuracy of the information you included in the story. Have your story examined by your publisher or your company’s attorney to check for libel or other legal problems. Often a simple word change – without changing the thrust of the story – can keep you out of court.

Write so that ordinary people can understand your report. Remember that you are much closer to your material and much more familiar with it than the average person is, than you were when you started the project. You have to write for the average person, not the experts and other people you have been talking to for the length of your research. Find someone you trust who has no background in the subject matter – a co-worker, a friend, a family member – and have them read the story then explain it back to you. If they can’t explain it, or give a different angle than you intended, you have to go back and simplify."

Br Ross Collins professor of communication, North Dakota State University

www.ndsu.edu/communication/collins

1. Get in close.  Your photos will often be published on low-quality newsprint for a jaded audience easily distracted. Detail gets lost. Photos strong enough to break through the media competition focus on a single, frame-filling center of interest. Generally no more than two or three people. No more than a few objects. A clean, contrasting background. Sometimes photojournalists call this the "poster effect." This is why telephoto or zoom lenses are the workhorses of photojournalism: many photojournalists don't even use a normal perspective (35-50mm) lens. If you can't get in close, crop ruthlessly.

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."--Robert Capa, one of the century's top war photographers (killed by land mine while trying to get in close). 

2. Find unusual angles.  If you're sitting or standing like everyone else, you're probably going to take back some blah photos. Kneel. Climb on a chair. Crouch. Lie down. Shoot down a stairway. Get off your butt. Good photojournalists are always moving. 

Corollary to this rule: If forced to take photos of, say, a speaker at a podium (not an attractive option, but too often necessary), never sit in the chairs with the rest of the audience. Think you'll be too noticeable? Everyone already knows you're taking pictures--so what? If you're too shy to move around in front of an audience, become a copy editor. 

3. Get identification.  All subjects easily identifiable must be named. Journalism is about people, not abstract art. Most editors will reject photos without idents, unless they are used as generic illustrations. Beginners are intimidated by walking up to strangers, but it's not really very hard. Simply say some variation of, "Hi, my name is Irving Nern, with the Spectrum. I just took your picture, and I wonder if I can have your name? Can you spell that, please?" Write names in your Reporters' Notebook. Few people will turn you down: Americans love to be in pictures. 

4. Burn pixels.  Move in, move out, move high, move low, and keep on clicking. You'll have more to choose from, and you'll more likely have a strong image. Unlike studio photographers, photojournalists have to nab action as it's unfolding, so at least to some extent are forced to trust on luck to bring back good pictures. The old film rule used to be to shoot one roll (24 ex.) minimum at any event you're asked to cover, even a speaker at a podium. You can interpret this in the digital age. Half a football game should bag you 75 photos at least. How are you going to have any choice at all if you return to the office with a mere four shots? Pixels are free!

One caution: Anything worth doing is not necessarily anything worth overdoing. Don't just leave your camera in burst mode thinking you'll edit those 1,580 images later. It's a nightmare. I read a few years ago about a guy who took more than 2,000 images of a thunderstorm. TWO THOUSAND pictures. It the old days, that would have cost you about $550 for the film alone. One useful constraint about those old film days: it did encourage you to think at least a tiny bit before snapping the shutter. 

5. Go beyond the cliche. How many photos have you seen showing people talking on a phone? Working at a computer? At a desk with books in the background? In a mugshot? Shaking hands ("grip n' grin")? Making a lay-up to a basketball hoop? For goodness' sake, promise yourself NEVER to take a photo like this again! Assigned a mugshot of a faculty member? Ask the person to meet at the lab, engage her in her research for a photo. Supposed to shoot a basketball game? Dump the standard "armpit shot," look for interesting floor action. Make your shot stand out from the ruck! 

6. Avoid obvious posing.  Okay, sometimes you have to ask people to stand someplace or do something, but that still doesn't mean they have to just grin into the camera. Try to make the scene appear natural, as if the subject were involved in something and the photographer just happened to come by. Photojournalism aims to cover people doing things, not people posing. That's for the studio photographers. 

7. Add light, but don't make it obvious.  Available light is ideal, but usually its quality is hardly that. Especially when you're shooting color, you need to control the color balance of garish green florescent, or difficult combinations of artificial and natural light. In some cases, light comes from ugly angles (such as nearly every standard classroom or office), or is so weak you can't even get close to stopping the action. 

The normal approach is to carry a portable electronic flash, but NEVER to merely attach it to the hot shoe and blast away. That looks 'way too artificial. Solution: bounce. Aim your electronic flash straight up. Tape a piece of white cardboard at an angle so the light bounces up and off the cardboard. Adjust for your available light exposure, perhaps underexposing a stop. The added flash will fill in the ugly shadows, but still maintain a feeling of natural light. 

This is harder if your light is primarily florescent, as your bluish flash will clash with the greenish ambient light, but you should be able to adjust most color cast problems fairly easily in Photoshop. When all else fails, at least take your flash off your camera, hold it a few inches away, and shoot directly. 

As an added note, good photojournalists carefully analyze the light falling on their subject, and find an angle which best enhances the scene. For instance, if a subject is bending over, the face may be in shadow. Wait until he stands. If a subject is seated next to a window, wait until she turns toward this attractive light source. 

8. Focus faithfully, stay steady. You just cannot use a blurry photo in a publication: any slight fuzziness will be enhanced by poor quality paper and fast reproduction. Most fuzzy photos can be blamed on camera movement. If you're naturally jittery, get help: buy a mini tripod and lean it on your chest, or buy a monopod and lean it on the ground. In a pinch, lean against a tree or wall. Rule of thumb: any shutter speed more than one stop lower than the size of your lens will produce a fuzzy picture, unless you use a mechanical aid. This means If you're shooting at about 50mm or equivalent, you can't hand-hold anything slower than 1/30 second. If you're shooting with a zoom set at 200 mm, 1/125 is the limit. And this really is the limit: you must make like a rock to get sharp images even at this speed. (The older you get the harder that gets, by the way. I used to hand-hold 1/15 second. Not anymore....) Photoshop's blur filter can sharpen pixels, but can do only so much (or usually not so much) with pictures that were originally blurry. 

Image stabilization in some modern lenses may help steady your camera for slower exposures. But don't forget to pay attention to your auto focus. Is it actually focusing on the center of interest? I have found auto focus to give me the wrong setting at least a quarter of the time, and it hardly works at all in low light.

Conclusion: automatic cameras are wonderful devices, but you need to be aware of your settings, shutter speed, f/stop and focus.

9. Dump poorly exposed photos. Got a great shot, but the guy's face is in deep shadow? Got a great expression on that cute kid, but a telephone pole is growing out of her head? What about that nice little blurry photo of the sorority sisters' car wash? DO NOT submit poorly exposed photos for publication, no matter how much you like the image. On the other hand, BE CAREFUL to expose correctly. Automatic cameras are usually smarter than we are, but not always. Study principles of proper exposure. It's still hard to fix up poorly exposed images, even with Photoshop software: you can't add detail when nothing's there to begin with. 

Most of us in this world are now digital, be you a digital native or a digital immigrant, and that means your life is now in “The Cloud”.

Fo those that don’t understand what The Cloud is let me give you a brief run down:

You, as an end user, generate content—be it pictures, videos, documents or spreadsheets. It’s all just digital pages of computer code (data).  Your data is stored one of two ways: locally - be it a home server, computer, tablet or phone; or in The Cloud - larger server farms owned by either Apple, Google, Microsoft or any other 3rd party company.  

When data is “pushed” to The Cloud (automatically sent once created), it is then stored in a multitude of hard drives with your user id number linking it to your account.  Likewise, when you need to access that data it is ”pulled” from The Cloud (requested by your device for your apps to use), most times not requiring a password due to a previously established trust between the device and cloud account.  

The storage of the information in the account and the pushed data to The Cloud is relatively secure, because of encryption used by these companies.  The weak point of this whole ecosystem of data creation, connection, storage and retrieval is YOU.  

Now, I know that sounds mean but it is true. It is true for every single person that uses data; from the Tech savvy nerd to the senior who doesn’t understand the internet and doesn’t want to.  

The problem is passwords.  Most of us don’t put to much thought into them, and those of us that do…not enough.  Most people use birthdays, “abc123” or street addresses.  The ones who put a bit of thought into them might be clever and use numbers that look like letters and even special symbols (most commonly used symbols are “!” or “@” at the beginning or end of the password or to replace vowels.  Sadly, this is not enough.

Password cracking apps see these seemingly clever tricks as little more than minuscule hurdles to bypass these days with brute force attacks (trying every character, in every slot until it finds the password), and complex word dictionary attacks (literally a dictionary with numbers and special charters used in lieu of the letter).  

I can’t tell you how to make the best password because I don’t know.  With every bit of complexity used, retention of the actual password goes down.  The DOD’s recommendations are, as of 2013, 10-character minimum, with two upper-case letters, two numbers and two special characters.  The best password doesn’t spell anything, has nothing to do with any significant number or name in your life and is as random as you can make it.

Most security experts recommend lettering a phrase you will remember.  WHAT!?  Let me explain.  Take a phrase like “I was born one day after christmas in the eighties.”  At its most complex form, it  would look like “IwB1d@c!t80s”.  Can you match it up? It’s not any of my passwords so feel free to try and hack me with it.  Yes, it would be very hard to crack but it is also kind of hard to remember, thus losing its viability as a good password since I might not remember it.

So, as I said before, I can’t help you with your password.  All I can do is offer some tips and tell you what would be better as a password and tell you how to make password recovery a lot more secure.

Wow, finally getting to what this post is actually about!  So a few weeks ago there was a scandal where celebrity nude photos were leaked on the web.  Everyone thinks some high tech piece of software with a really smart hacker was responsible for this, half true.  Actually what happened is one person went back and analyzed a celebrity’s life through social media and guessed their security questions. After paying a legit legal service that holds public records of known email addresses (don’t think yours isn’t on some list, it is by law) they had all they needed to access the celebrity’s account.  After that it was like dominoes falling, one account had another’s information.

Here are my tips to make sure your questions can’t be guessed, and they are actually super effective because it takes the computer element out of the hacking.

Select your security questions and answer them with other security questions, answers that you did not choose.  Take, for example, favorite color, home town, and first kiss.  Put them in alphabetical order and answer them; black, lucy and saratoga (make a mental note never to capitalize your answers, some platforms distinguish).  Now pick three other questions from the selection and alphabetize them, Mother’s maiden name, street you grew up on and favorite movie.  Use the answers from the first set to answer the second.  

Yes writing down your answers or passwords is a bad idea, but you do want to keep a copy some where secure in the event you totally blank out.

Using these tips, along with the new security functions built into online account (such as linking to a cellular phone number, and automatic alerts of account access) will greatly reduce the likelihood of your data falling into the wrong hands.

The internet is an awesome thing we have, but like all great things, some one is going to exploit it.  Be safe.

You might think I greeted you incorrectly, but I assure you…it was intentional.  We are the worlds ego, balancing the id vs the super-ego and I am sorry to tell you that we, as a society, peeked.  

This blog, along with the website, Twitter, Facebook page, Instagram and Flickr are all dedicated to…well, what they are called; Zen Through Mayhem.  A collaborative community of artists and journalists that are committed to the truth.

There is a saying from the religious order know as the  Bene Gesserit in the book and movie Dune. 

"I must not fear.  Fear is the mind-killer.  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.  I will face my fear.  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.  And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing….only I will remain"

Well thats what Zen Through Mayhem is all about, we find the order in chaos, beauty in the horrific, and vice-vesa the abominable in elegance.

We also like pictures and words!