Charles Apple

Herman Manson — a media columnist for South Africa’s BizCommunity Marketing & Media — interviewed your not-so-humble blogger this weekend.

He asked me about my thoughts on the state of visual journalism and on the effects online journalism have had on print.

Herman also asked me a lot of South African-related questions: My opinion of the design of South African papers, for instance, and on the importance for South African papers to contribute their front pages to the Newseum — especially during an event like the World Cup. The managing editor of BizCommunity Marketing & Media, Simone Puterman, tells me she’s inserting additional plugs on behalf of the Newseum into her publications.

The interview is online, as you can see above. Added degree of irony: An advertisement for Adobe’s Creative Suite appears across the top of the page. How come Adobe won’t advertise with VizEds or the Society for News Design?

BizCommunity Marketing & Media’s e-publication — Biz Marketing — has 50,573 daily subscribers in South Africa and 37,435 subscribers to its weekly newsletter.  More than 18,000 subscribe to its sister publication, Biz Marketing Africa. The web site contains a vast array of topic pages including various media, marketing and advertising interests, among others.

Find the BizCommunity Marketing & Media web site here. Read my Q&A here.

For the third time in the past three months, someone has passed along to me a message about a visual journalist stuck at an English hotel.

I’m quite certain it’s a phishing scam. However, none of the three designers or editors spoofed would confirm with me.

The latest arrived today in the in-basket of my good friend Jim McBee. Less than two weeks ago, I was relayed a very similar message — ostensibly from a college student designer — by my other good friend Doug Jessmer. And back in April, I received a similar faux plea from a German journalism teacher.

Here’s the text of the latest scam. I’ll pull the name of the editor — whom I know pretty well — out of the message:

Subject: Help Me Out!!!!!

It is with deep sorrow and broken heart that am sending you this mail. Am in deep need and my situation is lamentable. my family and I decide to come visit Wales, United Kingdom for a short vacation. To our greatest dismay we were attacked and ripped apart at the park of the hotel where we were lodging, all cash, credit cards and mobiles were forcefully robbed off us at gun point but we still have our passports with us.

We’ve seek help at embassy and high commission, the Police too, unfortunately they have been unable to help or offer any reasonable support whatsoever. Our flight leaves in couple of hour from now but we are being held to ransom by the hotel management because we cannot settle the hotel bills. It is clear we would not be allowed to leave until pay the bill. Word cannot explain the anguish in my heart now. I am in need of immediate assistance.

The message ends here — I presume we’re meant to hit “reply” or something. The previous versions of this have included account numbers to which we might wire funds directly from our bank.

Now, there’s no freakin’ way this came from my friend, who currently works as a copy editor. The errors you see above are very much unlike her, as is the syntax. I notice with interest the Yahoo e-mail account is one character off of the one I use for her.

However, I can’t seem to raise her today via e-mail or via Twitter. I’d feel a lot better if she’d at least say ‘hi.’

So anyway, if you get a message like this from someone you know, disregard it. It is interesting that our community — newspaper designers, artists and editors — are being targeted in this way, however. Very interesting indeed.

I’ve neglected to post about it the past two weeks, but we’ve been doing this regularly now on Tuesday nights: using Twitter as a chatroom.

It’s a bit odd to use Twitter that way. But a large — and growing — number of visual editors are on Twitter every day. So it makes good sense to take VizEds to where its audience is.

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HOW TO JOIN US

If you’d like to join us, tonight, look for the chat hashtag:

#vizedschat

Make sure to include that in anything you say tonight. If you don’t, most of the chatters won’t see it.

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TONIGHT’S TOPIC

As usual, our moderator is Jim McBee. Jim tells us that tonight, Robb Montgomery has suggested we discuss options for possibly taking Visualeditors off of Ning.

You might recall, VizEds has been a Ning social networking site for a little more than two years. VizEds started out in 2004 as a bulletin board site. A couple of weeks ago when Ning announced it was changing the way it runs its business, Robb assured me it wouldn’t affect VizEds. So this surprises me. You now know as much about this as I do.

Of course, there are a lot of folks who drop by just to say hello or to talk about other things. That’s OK, too. I think it’s fair to say there aren’t a lot of rules in the VizEds chat.

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WHAT TIME?

We’ll begin around…

• 9 p.m. Eastern time
• 8 p.m. Central time
• 7 p.m. Mountain time
• 6 p.m. Pacific time

…and we go until we get tired.

For those of you who have never chatted with Twitter, here are a couple of tips…

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TWEET CHAT TIP NO. 1

Be advised that when you chat on Twitter, you’re broadcasting your chat to not just the folks in our virtual “chatroom,” but to all your Twitter followers. If you post a lot, you could swamp your tweeps with messages that they find awfully baffling.

Therefore, allow me to suggest: Open up a second account on Twitter. Use your regular Twitter account every day. Use the new account just for chatting.

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TWEET CHAT TIP NO. 2

Another suggestion: Don’t try to chat in the usual Twitter window. Instead, go to TweetChat — a site that’s very easy to use:

Not only will this site update your window automatically — no more hitting “refresh” every 20 seconds — it’ll also add that hashtag automatically.

You’ll be amazed how smoothly this works and how much like an old-fashioned chatroom it seems.

Find an unedited transcript of last week’s chat here.