Ernie Pyle’s legacy is homeless or about to be

Ernie Pyle’s legacy is homeless or about to be.
The artifacts of his life and work are spread across several sites, including two in his home state of Indiana now feuding over who is the real storyteller of his tale.
One of those, the Ernie Pyle Museum, is running on fumes and in danger of closing for good, the New York Times Reported yesterday.
The Ernie Pyle museum, in the man’s hometown of Dana, Indiana, is rather in the middle of nowhere and receives just a trickle of visitors—about 1,800 a year. The Indiana State Museum transferred some of the Dana site’s prized possessions, including Pyle’s typewriter, to Indianapolis, in part because it would expose Pyle’s legacy to more visitors—as many as 200,000 a year, said one Indiana official.
According to the Times’s Dan Barry, the museum in Dana “still has a lot to offer” and at one time gave visitors the “feeling as if they’d just been with Ernie, over there.”
With such a rich story to tell and the artifacts to do it, it struck me as a shame that the tiny museum has no Web presence (barely a Google Places entry), not even a skeleton site with a contact page.
How could the museum help itself and do a great deal to expose the story of Pyle to the world? Get it on the Web. Tell the story, display the artifacts, create interactive exhibits.
AND connect the sites of Pyle’s legacy. In addition to Pyle’s artifacts now housed in Indianapolis, others are in the Albuquerque Museum, in New Mexico, where he eventually settled before he went to war. His archives, including his many columns and academic research are at the Indiana University School of Journalism.
Creating an Ernie Pyle home on the Web that exposed viewers to the aspects of Pyle’s legacy at all three locations (are there others?) would knit the story together, enrich the experience of all three museums and, perhaps generate some revenue for the little outfit in Dana.
But it could do more. As the patron saint of American War correspondents, Pyle serves as the the exemplar of the trade and his legacy is their legacy. An Ernie Pyle Museum on the Web could be a home to the stories and study of War correspondence. Perhaps an organization like the Newseum, in Washington, D.C., which runs a meager War Stories section on its Website (it’s pretty limited and stops at the Bosnia/Kosovo operation in 1999), could join the three museums. Perhaps Scripps Howard, which, according to the Times, helped the Dana site build its exhibits—and which still has war correspondents in harm’s way—might help pay for such a project.
Pyle’s story is the story of war correspondents. It is the story of reporting on ugly events from a dangerous vantage point. The story is big and influential. It should be seen by more than 1,800 visitors a year. It should be exposed to more than 200,000 visitors a year.

What can we do to help?

Could Twitter verify news orgs, journalists?

Twitter’s Top News feature is the company’s attempt to compete w/ Google in real-time search, news aggregation.

The mechanics have people guessing how it might source those links in the Top News spot. Algorithm? Human curator? Divine intervention?

My 2Cents: LinkedIn Today might offer an example. Twitter may choose to use a blend of verified accounts and an algorithm to deliver news links.

The reader as user

As news editor at TheLadders, where content was but a small portion of the product, I slipped into the habit of referring to readers as… USERS.

Editorial purists will surely gasp. The word user makes it seem too much like we’re producing a commodity product that must meet a customer demand and make a profit. We practice a calling, not a business, Right? Imagine if artists were asked to think of their audience as users. They’re doing so now. And likely gasping.

The New York TImes’s video gaming critic Seth Schiesel wrote yesterday about Bjork’s latest album Biophilia, which was released as an iPad app in which “the user (no longer merely the listener) takes control of a sound-creation tool, tapping pools of light to combine and mix tones of Gregorian complexity.”

Schiesel writes about the evolution it is for artists to “ fans the ability to mess around readily with a treasured creation” and the creative possibilities that might unfold. But there’s a simpler lesson for journalists: If artists, the purest of purists, can see their audience as users, so can you.

And it makes a difference in how we report and deliver the news.

I often put myself in the shoes of the reader and ask reporters and editors to do the same:

• “Would you read that story?”
• “Would you share that story?”
• “Would you be able to find the vital information on that page?”
• “Is this an information source you could apply in your work?”
• “Would you come back to this news site?”

By considering the reader a user, we might begin to take the steps to deliver not just the best content, but the content most in demand by the audience, in the most useful and accessible format.

The reader is user. I think journalists can accept that.

Wait ‘til they hear their producing a product. :-X