My industry
I can only pray that this video isn’t the last remnant of our culture thousands of years from now.
A 1:32 news piece on a 10-year-old boy who puts on 215 pairs of underwear to break a world record. Two shots of parents expressing their praise and then an afterthought at the end: a paralyzed marine.
Last month, The New York Times Magazine had a big piece on the price of online journalism… or at least content of some kind. I only dug into it this weekend.
It was a big piece riddled with stories of a handful of struggling entrepreneurs and a few buzz-y sites that haven’t prospered, but three paragraphs interested me most.
Let me share them below.
Continue reading New York Times on the price of online journalism; broken pieces to return
Most usually, when I’m speaking on an issue related to media convergence or the future of news or other fun related topics, the subject of mobile technology comes up.
In poorer rural and urban communities where the first wave of household IT infrastructure passed by, the notion that smart phones and other Web-capable handheld devices — which are cheaper, more ubiquitous and often more socially and culturally prized than a home PC — just may transform the so-called digital divide is hot conversation.
But it’s worth revisiting the depths of why that is.
After announcing I took a step away from freelancing, a legal aide with aspirations of a cushy freelance career shot me an e-mail.
“Can people still even start a freelance career?”
I did it for just a year and did so out of college, so I don’t pretend to be any sort of expert. Yet, as writing — like publishing — as a commodity falls in value (and the prices that come with them), I sure feel like it’s worth making clear my experience.
I shared the rough curriculum I had established for working with a journalism club at a neighborhood school before my time there was cut short.
Just a week after I took a full-time job and told the club’s adviser that I’d have to take a bit of a sabbatical from my time there, I wanted to give a primer to have a conversation about the basics of journalism with her students.
In fewer than ten minutes, I tried to bottle an entire journalism degree into five bullet points. Clearly I missed plenty.
Below, see what I shared. Let me know what giant holes these high school kids will have in their foundation because of my failures!
Continue reading The basics of a news story in five bullet points and five minutes
We may lose someday newspapers in their traditional form, but we’re seeing a flourishing of alternatives fill those lost pieces of pie.
Some are more skeptical of how quickly we’ll be able to bring back the creation of that news, but through variation, experimentation and loyalty, it my well be done.
I very much see a future of journalism handled by an endless collection of small niche, targeted news sites, big investigative work done by nonprofits and foundation-funded, independents, in addition to a handful of big news organizations finding their own niche — the NPR network and modified newspaper businesses like the New York Times owning international, the Wall Street Journal owning business (though they’re competing), USA Today and the Washington Post focusing on the national.
Below, I offer a hastily put together, rough breakdown of that.
Poynter curated a list of 100 things a journalist should never do.
As these things tend to do, it became a rambling collections of do’s and don’ts, but it was interesting nonetheless. Ten stuck with me as among the most important.
Updated @ 1:50 p.m. 11/07/10 Someone is doing a better job of keeping this up to date, so check that out.
*Updated @ 9:36 a.m. 12/23/09 **Many thanks to Jess Durkin for others.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that a big portion of the future of news will be this hyperlocal movement that continues to dominate the conversation and has grown in focus for many years.
So, I’m surprised to say I haven’t been able to find is a comprehensive list of already existing products. This isn’t going to be that list, but let’s give it a start. Help me highlight the existing, active hyperlocal news sites worth following.
Read my definition of What is hyperlocal news?
I’m not one for posting video clips on this site, nor am I about doing so more than two months late.
But then, by way of the Nieman Journalism Lab, I only now came across a lecture New York University new media professor and internet intellectual Clay Shirky gave to the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy back in September.
Watch video below and be reminded why Shirky — who doesn’t necessarily have any traditional line-item journalism resume builders — gets a seat at the serious discussion of where news is going.
Continue reading Clay Shirky: ‘a bad thing is going to happen’ to journalism
Community newspapers in Philadelphia remain wary of the Web, if any stock is to be paid to a morning panel from a journalism innovation conference held this month at Temple University.
Their thoughts just might be relevant to community-focused news gathers across the country.
Hosted by Temple’s journalism department, the Philadelphia Initiative for Journalistic Innovation was a day’s worth of smaller sessions focusing far less about the plight of big newspapers and more about smaller, more entrepreneurial ventures. Yes, the future of news just might be a series of conferences about the future of news, but I was happy to see a greater focus on the business side of the industry.
With the help of supportive chair Andy Mendelson, Temple journalism professor George Miller put together one of the first future of news conferences I’ve seen that tried to really pay attention to sustainability through profit. There’s incredible value in that, so I was thrilled to be a part of it.
Along with my two fellow co-founders of Technically Philly, I presented twice a session called ‘Be a Publisher Now’ on free tools that news-organizations and bloggers could make use of to create become more efficient and better prepared. See our presentation slides here.
I also got the opportunity to sit in on a session focused how community newspapers were dealing with the 21st-century’s dramatic paradigm shift in news-gathering. That’s where I was left more than a little puzzled.
Continue reading Community newspapers: a panel and their use of the Web at PhIJI