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Cynthia McCune's List: Journalism / New Media

25 things journalists can do to future-proof their careers | Blog | Econsultancy

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journalists future of news new media on 2009-08-29
Poynter Online - Where are J-Schools in Great Debate over Journalism's Future?

J-Schools: missing the boat.

"...journalism schools too face a crisis of competence and confidence. We have to agree that while much remains that is good, some of what we do is outmoded and badly needs to be fixed. To survive, journalism schools have to become much more intellectually and professionally ambitious."

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J-school journalism future of news on 2009-08-29 and saved by 2 people
- Finally, our profession needs to raise its sights much higher and link our teaching and research to broad issues of media, democracy and societal changes, and eschew the self-referential, inward-looking focus that marks too many academic exercises.
- The schools especially need to end the shocking economic illiteracy that marks too much of journalism education today, which makes it harder to get high quality economic reporting, while reinforcing the fire wall between the business and content sides of the profession
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- - Third, the academy must begin to produce more high-quality, relevant research that draws on rigorous traditions in the social sciences. These tough times demand big questions and big smart answers -- not puny answers to unimportant questions.
  - Second, what we teach and how we teach needs to be deeply informed by more regular conversations with practitioners. Journalism professors need to reach out more systematically to media professionals in the new and the legacy media. We need to go to professionals in their newsrooms and business offices, and to the garages and new media incubators of media entrepreneurs.
  - First, the teaching profession needs to admit the extraordinary urgency of our situation. Simply put, we adapt our we die.
  - The relations between professors and the profession seem curiously stunted
  - journalism schools too face a crisis of competence and confidence. We have to agree that while much remains that is good, some of what we do is outmoded and badly needs to be fixed. To survive, journalism schools have to become much more intellectually and professionally ambitious.
  - journalism schools obviously have a huge stake in the survival and future of the media. These are the institutions that hire most of our graduates. If the media markets don't recover somehow, someway, then we may lose half our students, half our revenues and half our faculty positions.
  - In a moment of root and branch radical changes throughout the media, where are the open, public debates over radical options coming out of the top journalism schools? Where are the suggestions on how to change our teaching, research and public service practice to contribute to the rehabilitation of American media? After all, the stakes are high –- arguably, democracy itself.
  - I find it curious that there hasn't been greater attention to the performance of the nation's leading journalism schools in the midst of the media meltdown occurring all around us every day.
  - Yet arguably, the performance of journalism schools has something to do with the current sub-par performance of the profession. And the performance of journalists working in independent, high quality media has a lot to do with the fate of our American democracy.
  - journalism schools are not adequately engaged with the great public debates over the future of their core sector.
Salon.com News | Who needs newspapers when you have Twitter?

www.salon.com/...print.html - Preview

twitter news journalism news media on 2009-07-30
- In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part-time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby.
- It's going to take us a decade or two to figure out what it is we're doing.
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- - More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We're tuning out television news, we're tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it's just that it's not like this drumbeat of bad news. It's news that matters. I figure by the time something gets to me it's been vetted by those I trust. So the stupid stuff that doesn't matter is not going to get to me.
  - I don't use the word "media." I don't use the word "news." I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.
Op-Ed Columnist - And That’s Not the Way It Is - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...26rich.html - Preview

news media news chronkite nytimes on 2009-07-27
- Watching many of the empty Cronkite tributes in his own medium over the past week, you had to wonder if his industry was sticking to mawkish clichés just to avoid unflattering comparisons. If he was the most trusted man in America, it wasn’t because he was a nice guy with an authoritative voice and a lived-in face. It wasn’t because he “loved a good story” or that he removed his glasses when a president died. It was because at a time of epic corruption in the most powerful precincts in Washington, Cronkite was not at the salons and not in the tank.
- The real test is how a journalist responds when people in high places are doing low deeds out of camera view and getting away with it. Vietnam and Watergate, not Kennedy and Neil Armstrong, are what made Cronkite Cronkite.
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- - What matters about Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walter and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust. He had the guts to confront not only those in power but his own bosses. Given the American press’s catastrophe of our own day — its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq — these attributes are as timely as ever.
  - his finest, and most discomforting, achievements are being sanitized or forgotten
Arianna Huffington: Bearing Witness 2.0: You Can't Spin 10,000 Tweets and Camera Phone Uploads

New media is not replacing the need to "bear witness," it is spreading it beyond the elite few, and therefore making it harder for those elite few to get it as wrong as they've gotten it again and again -- from Stalin's Russia to Bush's Iraq.

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journalism twitter China on 2009-07-16 and saved by 3 people
- this is precisely the kind of journalism that is so often derided and dismissed by those who think the function of journalism is simply to offer up both sides of a story or an issue and then get out of the way.
- search engines, news aggregation, live-blogging, and "miracles of technology" such as Twitter, Facebook, and real-time video delivered via camera phones, played an indispensable part in allowing millions of people around the world to "bear witness" to what was happening in Iran.
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- - When deadly riots broke out in the western province of Xinjiang last week, the Chinese government sprang into message control mode. It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest. At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area.
    
    That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media -- and offered traditional reporters a front row seat.
  - New media is not replacing the need to "bear witness," it is spreading it beyond the elite few, and therefore making it harder for those elite few to get it as wrong as they've gotten it again and again -- from Stalin's Russia to Bush's Iraq.
Reuters » A is for abattoir; Z is for ZULU: All in the Handbook of Journalism | Blogs |

Reuters Handbook of Journalism / style guide

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journalism style on 2009-07-10 and saved by 2 people
Ledger Live: How a newspaper webcast became less like a news show and more like a blog » Nieman Journalism Lab

Re: Evolving formats ... "For the web in general, you need a voice."

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newspapers webcast blog video on 2009-07-09
- The show’s evolution shows the limits of borrowing from an established model when building something new. Just as early TV had to evolve its own formats and get past just being radio-plus-pictures, newspaper online video is evolving beyond the metaphors television has handed it.
  
  “From a newscast, it got a lot more bloggy, which I like and have more fun doing — and I think it works better,” Donohue told me. “What we wanted to do was just go back to doing a video show the way reporters talk to each other. It’s more conversational. It’s snarkier. It’s a lot more fun. What you need for video to work on the web is more of a voice. For the web in general, you need a voice.”
- Like most blogs, Ledger Live depends on viral marketing and social media. All of the newspaper’s videos are crossposted on its YouTube and Blip.tv channels, where view counts are often low, but the chances of an occasional video going viral are higher.
What if the business model for news ain’t broke? | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog

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journalism business model online on 2009-07-09
- So why do we find the likes of Facebook, Digg and the mighty Google – and perhaps soon Amazon- adopting the ad-funded model to support services and software.
- Pay walls may work for niche information but not for mainstream news and exclusives. That’s something that even the Wall Street Journal, poster child of the paid model, accepts.
The Washington Post, Dan Froomkin and the establishment media - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

"To be a real establishment journalist (objective), you're not allowed to say when one side is lying -- even when they are."

And we wonder why news organizations are dying.

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journalism journalists truthiness MSM politics on 2009-06-20
- Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . .
- "If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.
  
  "I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter - whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way" -- Dan Froomkin, fired yesterday by The Washington Post.
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- - To be a real establishment journalist (objective), you're not allowed to say when one side is lying -- even when they are. All you're allowed to do is repeat what both sides say and leave it at that (Colbert: "The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home"). Froomkin -- unlike David Gregory -- believes that reporters should actually point out when the Government is lying. That's what he did. That's why, to The Post, he wasn't a real reporter but, rather, an "ideologue." That's the sickness of American journalism in a nutshell.
5 iPhone applications that can revolutionize mobile journalism :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews

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iPhone journalism apps future of news on 2009-06-05 and saved by 2 people
- 21 iPhone-friendly news sites and how to format your own
  • 6 Ways to create a mobile version of your site
  • 10 Essential iPhone apps for bloggers and reporters
  • 10 Not-so-essential (but totally cool) iPhone apps
- Many media organizations lack the funds or resources to produce iPhone apps, but it shouldn't stop everyone from imagining or working toward the next best thing in mobile journalism.
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- - The HearPlanet app is a lot like having a tour guide in your pocket: audio clips that describe thousands of landmarks around the world
  - iheart radio, which is also available online and for the Blackberry lets users pick a radio station by city or genre and listen directly from their mobile device.
  - The popularity of the Kindle and its companion iPhone app are proof that users are more than willing to read long passages of text on handheld devices. This is good news for media outlets to looking make lengthy content available to mobile readers.
Seven reasons charging for content won’t work « Transforming the Gaz

Taking the Tinkerbell approach to the news biz.

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future of newspapers future of news newspapers business model on 2009-06-01 and saved by 2 people
- Paid content has been tried before. One of the biggest myths of the newspaper business today was that we foolishly gave our content away early in the age of the Internet. Many newspapers were either slow to go online because of fear of cannibalization or erected pay walls. We finally got aggressive and free online because holding back our content and charging for it weren’t working.
- This meeting is an embarrassment. Our industry fights for openness and accountability in government and we are trying to find a path for success in a digital marketplace where transparency is increasingly important. Can these people not see how foolish and hypocritical it looks to think they can huddle behind closed doors and solve our problems?
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- - clapping our hands to save the newspaper industry, like we saved Tinkerbell at the movies when we were children, has more chance of succeeding than the paid-content-cartel approach that newspaper executives are dreaming and talking about
Getting Money from Readers Who Won't Pay for Online News

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future of news newspapers online steveouting on 2009-05-22 and saved by 7 people
- Charging on the Web won't work for general-news publishers, and there are better alternatives.
- the current thinking of a growing number of newspaper executives. To paraphrase: "We believe that our local reporting has high value, it costs us a lot to produce it, so we will retrain the audience that they must pay for it."
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- - Newspapers' local content is not as important as it once was, or as newspaper executives still believe it to be. The demise of some newspapers (Rocky Mountain News, Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example) and the degraded quality of many others due to severe cuts and layoffs has opened up opportunities for a wave of fledgling replacement news providers, both for- and non-profit. Generally they are small and/or target niches, but they're getting better and some are growing to represent a looming threat to local newspapers by offering up similar or the same coverage for free.
  - The move to hide locally produced content behind a pay wall gives new hope to other competitors, including local TV stations. If the biggest newspaper in town is going to shoot itself in the foot, it gives a savvy TV outlet's executives the chance to grab the dominant spot by creating a free news and community Web site that goes well beyond today's typical local-TV sites. It could even use the laid-off newspaper journalists in its market -- a talent pool looking for something else to do -- to accomplish this, probably at bargain rates.
  - Yet another model is to sell a custom news phone app rather than give it away.
  - ideas for what to offer to a newspaper's paid members:
  - learn to sell something else to support the journalism.
The American Press on Suicide Watch - Columnist Frank Rich - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...10rich.html - Preview

future of news newspapers Colbert internet nytimes on 2009-05-11 and saved by 3 people
- IF you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost exactly three years ago. That’s when Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq).
- to the Beltway’s bafflement, Colbert’s riff went viral overnight, ultimately to have a marathon run as the most popular video on iTunes. The cultural disconnect between the journalism establishment and the public it aspires to serve could not have been more vividly dramatized.
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- - In the last transformative tech revolution before the Internet — television’s emergence in the late 1940s — the pattern was remarkably similar. The entertainment industry referred to TV as “the monster,” and by 1951, the editor of the industry’s trade paper, Variety, was fearful that the monster would “eventually swallow up practically all of show business.” Movies had killed vaudeville a generation earlier. This new household appliance threatened to strangle radio, movies, the Broadway theater, nightclubs and the circus. And newspapers too: “NBC’s New ‘Today’ Attacked by Papers as Competition” screamed a front-page Variety headline in 1952.
  - Most movie studios pushed back against the future by refusing to sell their old movies to television or allow their stars to appear on it. Few seized the opportunity to produce programs for the new medium.
  - In 1952-53, Cinerama, 3-D and Cinemascope were all heavily promoted to try to retain movie audiences. None of these desperate rear-guard actions could slow the video revolution. Movie newsreels, movie palaces, radio comedy and drama, and afternoon newspapers, among other staples of the American cultural diet, were all doomed.
  - And yet in 2009, Hollywood movie studios, radio and the Broadway theater, though smaller and much changed, are not dead. They learned to adapt and to collaborate with the monster.
  - It’s not only journalism that is now struggling to plot a path to survival. But, with all due respect to show business, it’s only journalism that’s essential to a functioning democracy.
  - But opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive. Some of it — monitoring the local school board, say — can and is being done by voluntary “citizen journalists” with time on their hands, integrity and a Web site. But we can’t have serious opinions about America’s role in combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there. We can’t know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or some new bottom-up news organism we can’t yet imagine.
  - But someone — and certainly not the government, with all its conflicted interests — must pay for this content and make every effort to police its fairness and accuracy. If we lose the last major news-gathering operations still standing, there will be no news on Google News unless Google shells out to replace them. It won’t.
  - Looking back to the unpredictable social and cultural upheavals brought about by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, he writes, “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.” So who will do the heavy journalistic lifting? “Whatever works.”
  - The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?
    It’s all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.
  - Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.
Help with our Open Senate Contribution Data Project! - OpenKansas

Citizen journalism!

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journalism citizen journalism open records on 2009-05-09
- With your help we can set the Data Free! Any time you can give will help, whether you can help edit 1 record or 1000.
- OpenKansas.org is launching its community developed Open Data project. The goal of the project is to pull together data related to contributions made to current members of the Kansas Senate and make it more accessible for anyone to use.
Greg Mitchell: How Media Will Pay for Poor Warning on Financial Collapse

... a new Rasmussen poll revealed that one in four Americans now believe that the "faux" news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is replacing "real" news sources as viable outlets.

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future of news newspapers news on 2009-05-06
- Several leading newspapers announced new layoffs, furloughs and/or pay cuts. A few hours later, a new Rasmussen poll revealed that one in four Americans now believe that the "faux" news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is replacing "real" news sources as viable outlets.
- But in the wake of the financial collapse, I wonder if the remaining (if relatively low) public respect for the press is gone for good. Yes, the delivery platform of the future will change — the Kindle, iPhone apps or rubbery plastic may replace paper everywhere — but the content still has to be credible. And now it must be said: The media blew both of the major catastrophes of our time.
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- - I speak, of course, of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown.
  - "No one knew" and "we're only as good as our sources" or "they lied to us" are the common excuses. That sounds exactly like the media defending its Iraq miscues.
  - But to miss a story of this enormity, with consequences that will echo (like Iraq) for decades, only adds weight to the warnings of doom for the "old" media.
Jeff Jarvis: No Newspapers at Any Price

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future of news newspapers online on 2009-05-05 and saved by 2 people
- We're clearly now seeing a path to the end of the printed daily newspapers -- a trend that is escalating much faster than we had anticipated," Cole said.
- Their cushion is gone, and only those papers that can move decisively to the Web will survive.
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- - It makes less sense every day to try to preserve and protect - to invest in - what is obviously a failing model. Every day that papers keep printing is a day that they haven't reinvented themselves for a new reality.
  - The insane response to this change is to resist it and mourn it. The sane response is to find the opportunity in it.
    
    Don't bail. Build.
    
    It may be too late for newspapers to find that opportunity. But others will find it. That's not doomsaying. That's optimism.
Retraining Wire and Feature Editors to Be Web Curators - Publishing 2.0

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future of news newspapers editors on 2009-05-03 and saved by 5 people
- On the Internet, we have no need of wire editors; if we wish to have wire content on our websites, we can plug in AP Hosted News
- Yet there is a HUGE opportunity in this shifting landscape. Just because there’s a wealth of content a click away doesn’t mean that news consumers know where to click in order to find it.
  
  Instead, we have what Clay Shirky describes as “filter failure”:
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- - Thinking about information overload isn’t accurately describing the problem; thinking about filter failure is.
  - Helping readers find the best of the web could help local news sites remain daily destinations rather than just a host for content to be aggregated by someone else — which could help those news operations get back into the content distribution business, which is how they made money in print, and how they could make a lot more money on the web.
  - Wire and feature editors are already skilled content curators — they just need to adapt those skills to filtering the web.
  - If I were a wire or feature editor in a newsroom, instead of waiting to become obsolete, I would start immediately learning how to be a top notch web curator. I’d ask myself — how can I become the Jim Romenesko or Matt Drudge for my community.
Reflections of a Newsosaur: A tale of two very different journalism start-ups

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future of news start-ups on 2009-04-30 and saved by 3 people
- Crovitz believes a coordinated effort to build subscriptions could bring scale and lower costs.
- In the media business, he says, “it’s the package that’s valuable, not the individual article. … Newspapers used to own the distribution channel; they used to be at the front end.” But now, “Google and others have taken over distribution. And newspapers are at the tail end, which is the least profitable.”
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- - Karp wants news organizations to get back to the distribution business by sharing their own content broadly and surfacing others’ content aggressively.
  - Publish2 enables sites to fuse content sharing with the reporting process, and it also provides ways for journalists to surface the links they gathered in the reporting process. “Collecting links should be a work product,’’ Karp says. “Newsrooms can use and publish those links instead of throwing away that research.”
  - As Crovitz demonstrated at Dow Jones, a subscription strategy can generate substantial revenue and define a uniquely valuable audience.
    
    But as I wrote a few weeks ago here, it’s very hard to ask readers to pay for a publication you’ve trained them for more than a decade to expect to be free.
  - But what Publish2 also represents is a vision of how journalists can take advantage of each other’s strengths and readers’ knowledge, creating content that transcends what any one newsroom can do.
  - So there you have it: One new firm seeks to generate much-needed revenue by building a platform for subscription services, another seeks to generate new forms of journalism with a platform to share and distribute content. It’s hard to reconcile those two visions of journalism’s future.
East Bay, Peninsula newspapers increase circulation - San Francisco Business Times:

It's not all bad news.

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newspapers on 2009-04-29
- The Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times and San Mateo County Times all reported increases in paid circulation from October to March, even as other Bay Area papers and papers across the country continued their steep declines
On The Media: "Punctuation Infatuation" transcript (April 24, 2009)

Behind every good reporter is a good copy editor.

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editing reporting punctuation AP style on 2009-04-29

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Cynthia McCune

196 items | 183 visits

Articles and info related to journalism, the media and new media technologies, including the impact of social media, blogging, twitter and YouTube on journalism

Updated on 2009-08-29
Created on 2008-10-14

Category: Others

news future of new media technologies blogging twitter social

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Cynthia McCune's List: Journalism / New Media

25 things journalists can do to future-proof their careers | Blog | Econsultancy

Poynter Online - Where are J-Schools in Great Debate over Journalism's Future?

Salon.com News | Who needs newspapers when you have Twitter?

Op-Ed Columnist - And That’s Not the Way It Is - NYTimes.com

Arianna Huffington: Bearing Witness 2.0: You Can't Spin 10,000 Tweets and Camera Phone Uploads

Reuters » A is for abattoir; Z is for ZULU: All in the Handbook of Journalism | Blogs |

Ledger Live: How a newspaper webcast became less like a news show and more like a blog » Nieman Journalism Lab

What if the business model for news ain’t broke? | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog

The Washington Post, Dan Froomkin and the establishment media - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

5 iPhone applications that can revolutionize mobile journalism :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews

Seven reasons charging for content won’t work « Transforming the Gaz

Getting Money from Readers Who Won't Pay for Online News

The American Press on Suicide Watch - Columnist Frank Rich - NYTimes.com

Help with our Open Senate Contribution Data Project! - OpenKansas

Greg Mitchell: How Media Will Pay for Poor Warning on Financial Collapse

Jeff Jarvis: No Newspapers at Any Price

Retraining Wire and Feature Editors to Be Web Curators - Publishing 2.0

Reflections of a Newsosaur: A tale of two very different journalism start-ups

East Bay, Peninsula newspapers increase circulation - San Francisco Business Times:

On The Media: "Punctuation Infatuation" transcript (April 24, 2009)

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