| The Newsaic, home to FootnoteTV, Footnote Fahrenheit, and more | By Stephen Lee |
| Site FAQ
What is all this? (last updated April 14, 2002) (back to top) This is a news site. But there will be no breaking news, no scoops, no celebrity gossip or entertainment-world updates, no anecdotal evidence in place of actual evidence, and no talking heads simply regurgitating the same old positions and yelling at each other. I'm trying something different here. There is one big idea underpinning this entire site, and it is a simple one. Internet news sites are not limited to following the breaking-news model that dominates newspapers, weekly newsmagazines, and television. That model works for media that must pull readers in daily or weekly, but it emphasizes new developments at the cost of deeper understanding and it fails to serve people who might be curious about an issue independent of that day's news cycle. The Internet can follow different models, and Newsaic is an attempt to embrace this opportunity by:
 FootnoteTV (back to top) This is probably the most popular part of the site, where I explore the issues behind your favorite television shows (primarily The West Wing, Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and JAG), episode by episode. Rather than simply complaining that young people learn news from comedians, this site does something about it. This is especially important as policymakers and advocates have begun to use such shows to advance their own ends. The Department of Defense used JAG to rally support for military tribunals, and non-profit organizations such as the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines hailed West Wing episodes that mention their causes. I will be updating FootnoteTV regularly to keep up with new episodes of the television shows. I've footnoted every episode of the West Wing and Saturday Night Live for the past few years and have footnoted most episodes of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and as many law shows (Law & Order, the Practice, etc.) as I can manage, and I've even footnoted The Sopranos and South Park when appropriate. Issues (back to top) This is where I collect articles on a wide variety of topics. I've researched and written many of these articles because they happened to come up in the course of my doing FootnoteTV, but also have tried identifying topics that I want to know more about or where I believe I can contribute something. Cases (back to top) This is where I keep track of some major criminal and civil cases. Legal cases take years to reach a final resolution, and even a conviction or verdict may not end the legal process. Resources (back to top) This is where I collect and analyze major speeches and documents, such as the State of Union addresses and the Constitution. How do you make all this? (back to top) This site is really a labor of love, especially given my background as a journalist and as a lawyer. I've been a reporter in some capacity since 1988 and then developed legal skills through law school and through working as a lawyer. I taught myself HTML in the fall of 2000 and read some books on web- and graphic-design. The real work of this site is in the research, which I am constantly doing and which is why my apartment looks the way it does. I use the Internet (particularly government and research institution sites such as the General Accounting Office), the New York Public Library's circulating and research catalogs, and old newspaper articles, particularly the New York Times. I also have been archiving my favorite television shows for years, initially because my favorite shows tended to be always on the verge of being cancelled; that archive came in handy once I decided to create FootnoteTV. The site itself is designed entirely in basic HTML, though I am now using Dreamweaver 4 for its template function. I taught myself HTML using Cnet and then just played with the code until I got familiar enough with tables and links. For general design principles, I read Web Style Guide by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton (Yale University Press, 1999) and the design books by Yale professor Edward Tufte, particularly Envisioning Information (Graphics Press, 1990). I also got some ideas from David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third Generation Site Design (Hayden Books, 1997, Second Edition). I've also found Scott McCloud's books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, invaluable to developing my thinking about journalism. I've been a big fan of Scott McCloud since his comic-book series "Zot!" and his thoughts on how comics work helped inspire me as I thought about how journalism works and how it could work better. I highly recommend these books to anyone interested in media. I use Adobe PhotoShop to touch-up scanned photos and to create art as needed. I use Microsoft Excel to make graphs and tables, a trial version of Microsoft MapPoint to make maps, and TimeMap 2.0 to make timelines. How do you find the time to do this? (back to top) I do have a full-time job that usually goes into the evenings and weekends, but I manage my time very carefully. I work on this site whenever I can (mornings, nights, weekends, vacations), I don't sleep much, and I avoid heavy meals and dinners. And, perhaps most importantly, I'm a Broadway widower six days a week since my wife is a musician in the orchestra of the Broadway musical The Producers and, unfortunately, is not around much even when I do manage to be home. Besides, this is how I've lived most of my life. I've put in long days and late nights for journalism ever since high school and all the way through college and even law school. The summer after law school, I covered a murder trial all day long and then studied for the bar exam at night and on the weekends; I even left the actual bar exam early to get back for the closing statements (and yes, I did pass). This is just what I do. How did this all come about? (back to top) I've done a lot of thinking about journalism in the past few years. I worked the metro desk at the Chicago Tribune in 1995 and 1996 just as the Internet was emerging, and then missed the dot-com boom by going to law school. But stepping back from journalism for a few years gave me some valuable perspective and I really began working through some ideas in the fall of 2000, when I delayed starting at my law firm in order to develop some books, screenplays, and magazine articles that I want to write and publish someday. And then I went home for Christmas. I was talking to my two youngest siblings, Chris and Sandra, about a skit he'd seen recently on Saturday Night Live, a parody of the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Chris thought that Gore's constant use of the word "lockbox" was hilarious but he had no idea what the joke referred to. Chris is an intelligent, concerned young man, but he just doesn't read the newspaper or watch television news; neither did I when I was his age. Neither do most young people these days. Someone should do a news site that annotates shows like Saturday Night Live and tricks people into learning, I said. Rather than just complaining about how young people get their news from late-night television, someone should take advantage of that and meet the audience on its terms, I said. Boom. Things quickly fell into place after that night. I started sketching out ideas and thinking of all the ways that journalism was failing to inform people sufficiently. One friend complained that she couldn't simply go one place and learn everything she needed to know about the new Bush cabinet, so I did an issue piece on that. Another asked why the white-collar drug smuggler in Traffic went free after that witness got killed, so I wrote up a Mirror Law piece on that. A law-school classmate wondered out loud why Microsoft wasn't broken up yet, so I put together a page tracking that case and explaining why that remedial order was never implemented. I've been having a lot of fun ever since. Are you making any money off of this? (back to top) Nope. No subscription or membership fees, no advertising, no revenue at all. I want to serve educational, journalistic, and public purposes through this site, and I can do that best by being independent and by making this site available to anyone who wants to come take a look. Big media companies have their place, but I also believe in an independent, free press driven by nothing more than individual beliefs and dedication. I'm willing to pay something for that. This is my contribution to that ideal. What can I do to help? (back to top) Give me feedback. Tell me what I've missed or gotten wrong in my research, and help me make this site better. I'll also acknowledge help in the corrections page if necessary. Tell your friends about this site. As for help with original content, I plan on writing everything here myself in order to ensure consistency and responsibility. However, I already am planning a spinoff site collecting specific kinds of autobiographical non-fiction, which I would simply create and edit. E-mail me here if you want to know more about this as it develops. I could also use help with some advanced programming techniques. As I said above, I still know only basic HTML. |
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