Jason Koski/University Photography

Jeremy Schaap '91, left, Vivian Schiller '83, Farhad Manjoo ’00 and David Folkenflik ’91 discuss how shifts in technology are shaping the media landscape at a Charter Day Weekend panel April 26.

What makes a good story?

This was the first question posed by moderator David Folkenflik ’91, National Public Radio media correspondent, during an April 26 panel discussion on campus on how technological shifts have affected the worlds of media and journalism.

Panelist Jeremy Schaap ’91, an ESPN anchor and correspondent, discussed how he made it a priority on “E:60,” ESPN’s investigative journalism newsmagazine show, to find stories where there exists an “intersection of sports and human rights, workers rights” issues, he said.

He added that an advantage of working for ESPN is that “we can go to places where their guard isn’t up,” such as a story he did on Shiite Muslim soccer players tortured by the government of Bahrain. “We say we are doing a soccer story,” he said.

Folkenflik asked panelist Vivian Schiller ’83, former president and CEO of National Public Radio, and former head of news and journalism partnerships at Twitter, how one takes items found in the digital sphere and make them into stories.

“There are stories in data,” said Schiller, who is also a journalism and technology adviser for Vocative, which offers news from the Deep Web, referring to information that can’t be found in a Google search.

Raising examples of the “kinds of stories that can be told now,” Schiller described a data angle to this year’s State of the Union address. Vocativ staffers took all “6.2 million words that have been uttered” by presidents during State of the Union addresses back to Woodrow Wilson, then crunched those speeches through an algorithm that spat back the grade level of the vocabulary used by each president. Since Wilson, the grade level of these speeches has steadily declined. While Wilson’s speech was written for college juniors, President Barack Obama aims his speeches at ninth- and 10th-graders.

Schiller said another data story examined all 1,396 Oscar acceptance speeches to determine who is “most thanked”: Steven Spielberg was No 1. God was No. 6.

These stories “take a moment in time and put it in context,” she said.

Folkenflik asked panelist Farhad Manjoo ’00, a technology columnist at The New York Times, to discuss his use of Twitter, the 140-character messaging service.

Manjoo said he posts news on Twitter, stories he finds on the Web, his own work, and sometimes he tweets comments on the news. When “Wheel of Fortune” host Pat Sajak, an “arch conservative,” tweeted against raising the minimum wage, Manjoo replied: “This guy stands there while people spin a big wheel on TV.”

Manjoo said he sometimes tries to simply be funny, get a rise out of people or write about things on his mind, as with this tweet: “Half of your face lotion is being wasted on your hands. I worry about this every morning.”

Professionally, Manjoo noted that being a Twitter personality has helped him meet sources for stories, get jobs and survey the public on questions. And it can help young journalists develop a brand.

Schaap said Twitter has pros and cons. “You have to be careful” with what you tweet, and sometimes you “don’t want to see all the things that people are saying,” he said.

Though Schiller agreed, she said she thinks Twitter is “good for journalism, in that it creates a kind of transparency … this notion of an open journalism … and the idea that we pull back the curtain on what we do,” where the public can participate and provide up-to-the minute updates on breaking news, she said.