Yule Heibel's Library tagged journalism →  View Popular, Search in Google

This is fantastically interesting, especially in light of the recent fiascos around Mike Daisey and Malcolm Gladwell, both of whom seem to think that disrespecting journalism and factuality is somehow ok.
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The book is a reprint of an essay about a suicide in Las Vegas that D'Agata submitted to the Believer along with text from the wildly extended and heated argument that then ensued between him and Fingal, his fact checker at the magazine. Things started off poorly. The now-infamous first sentence alone was riddled with errors. Here's just one of them: D'Agata writes that there were "34 licensed strip clubs" in Vegas at the time of the suicide. Fingal's research suggests there were only 31, and he asks D'Agata how he got 34. "Because the rhythm of '34' works better in that sentence than the rhythm of '31,'" D'Agata replies, as if this were a fiction workshop. Things degenerate from there.
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atlantic_monthly fact_checking david_zweig journalism

Super interesting. Must-read article.
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What works best on the Web, short or long-form journalism? The monthly audience statistics for two accomplished FORBES reporters prove that online news consumers crave both. They devour brief and timely information and seek out the in-depth coverage that news stalwarts feared would disappear in the digital age.
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journalism forbes lewis_dvorkin eric_savitz matt_herper shortform longform

Intriguing:
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Cowbird is a simple tool for telling stories
and a public library of human experience.

We are a small community of storytellers, interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than you're likely to find anywhere else on the Web.

Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate in documenting the overarching "sagas" that shape our world today. Sagas are things like the Japanese earthquake, the war in Iraq, and the Occupy Wall Street movement — things that touch millions of lives and define the human story.

Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events and universal themes. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.
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cowbird journalism story_telling online_publishing

Admittedly, I ignored this post when it first came out because, given my current interests, I didn't think I'd find anything worth reading from a Canadian journalist. Wow, was I wrong. This essay is brilliant and a must-read. Nagata is not your average 24-year-old or average anything.
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Consider Fox News. What the Murdoch model demonstrated was that facts and truth could be replaced by ideology, with viewership and revenue going up. Simply put, you can tell less truth and make more money. When you have to balance the interests of your shareholders against the interests of the viewers you supposedly serve, the firewall between the boardroom and the newsroom becomes a very important bulwark indeed. CTV, in my experience, maintains high standards in factual accuracy. Its editorial staff is composed of fair-minded critical thinkers. But there is an underlying tension between “what the people want to see” and “the important stories we should be bringing to people”.
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kai_nagata canada politics journalism ctv cbc press

This is really fascinating: Washington Post journalists acting as online teachers. Interesting melding of online/distributed learning, claims to expertise-ism, and attempts by old media to find new business / profit models. Fascinating.
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Prestigious. Washington Post MasterClasses are written by Washington Post experts renowned in their fields, many of them Pulitzer Prize and major award-winning journalists.
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washington_post journalism online_learning distributed_education business_model

Being naturally an Eeyore type of personality, I'm not sure that I can deal with the findings in this article... But I guess they're bang-on, and the conclusions are thought-provoking
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Emotion = distribution

I can tell you, anecdotally, that for our Twitter feed, @niemanlab, one of the best predictors of how much a tweet will get retweeted is the degree to which it expresses positive emotion. If we tweet with wonderment and excitement (“Wow, this new WordPress levitation plugin is amazing!”), it’ll get more clicks and more retweets than if we play it straight (“New WordPress plugin allows user levitation”).

For harder data, check out some work done by Anatoliy Gruzd and colleagues at Dalhousie University, presented at a conference last month. Their study looked at a sample of 46,000 tweets during the Vancouver Winter Olympics and judged them on whether they expressed a positive, negative, or neutral emotion. They found that positive tweets were retweeted an average of 6.6 times, versus 2.6 times for negative tweets and 2.2 times for neutral ones. That’s two and a half times as many acts of sharing for positive tweets.
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And from the conclusion:
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on the whole, figuring out how to make people want to share your work with their friends generates a healthier set of incentives than figuring out how to manipulate Google’s algorithm. Providing pleasure — pleasure that someone wants to share — is not an inappropriate goal. And when you broaden out beyond “positive emotions” to the idea of driving arousal or stimulation — positive or negative — the idea starts to fall a little more neatly into what news organizations consider their job to be.
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nieman_journalism_lab joshua_benton facebook socialmedia socialnetworks journalism

File under "resources": a collection of links for learning about journalism.
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Ambitious journalists don’t have to worry about affording extra education when free open courses are available for anyone to take online. Spend some time studying and exploring the various aspects of journalism with these classes before forging your own future as a journalist. These courses will help you learn about writing, reporting, photojournalism, multimedia, and more.
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journalism resources education

Interesting initiative from Columbia U:
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The Columbia program, which will accept its first 15 students (tops) in the Fall of 2011, seeks to attack the barrier between journalists and the increasingly important IT professionals whose web and digital savvy are crucial to any form of news gathering, reporting and delivery. The problem: Users really don’t know what to ask developers for (or how), and developers have no real idea what their software will need to do in the hands of the users.
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columbia_university journalism new_media_shift

Great interview with Jay Rosen (conducted by Jeffey Inaba and Talene Montgomery) that delves into (and knits together) the "pro" (professional) and "am" (amateur, blogger) divide. Rosen advocates for Pro-Am journalism. And what is "the public"?

"How do journalists decide how to tell stories? What are their responsibilities when reporting a story? And to what extent do they write in the public’s interest?"

The questions revolve around whether journalists represent or create the public.

jay_rosen jeffrey_inaba journalism volume_magazine citizen_journalism politics talene_montgomery

Although over 2 years old, Jonathan Weber's "FAQ" for starting an online publication focused on local news is still useful and highly informative. Weber covers raising money, staffing, competition, revenue streams/ business models, etc.

newwest jonathan_weber entrepreneurship journalism online_publishing local_news

Lee C. Bollinger's commencement address to the 2009 Columbia U. graduating class, with a special focus on globalization and freedom of the press/ media: "...the very same technology - the Internet - that is making global communication so pervasive - is simultaneously undermining the financial model of the traditional press, as we've known it."

Many great insights. Some excerpts:
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...you have been here at a pivotal moment in history. You came in texting and you're going out with a twitter. And regardless of whether you're a fan of digital downloads or old fashioned ink on paper, while you've been here you've seen the value of dialogue, and of access to timely, credible, independently generated information and ideas. In August, 2005, just as many of you were settling into your first semester here, Hurricane Katrina was ravaging the city of New Orleans, amid accusations of gross government mismanagement and misinformation. Your Columbia years have coincided with two brutal and still unfinished wars - in Iraq and Afghanistan - shaped by our own government's far too extensive control over information. You will tell your children about the unprecedented economic crisis that erupted during your time here - a global event fueled by inadequate disclosures and regulation. From the standpoint of our ability to acquire a full understanding of things that matter, we clearly have a long way to go before we can rest.

Meanwhile, you have been witness to and strengthened by participating in the process of vigorous open debate - on issues such as gay marriage, the conflict in the Middle East, and climate change. And you have played a role in one of the most exciting political campaigns in American history - a campaign waged like never before through online media and social networking.

Through it all, you have lived in the most privileged intellectual environment on the planet, perhaps of all time. Nothing compares to this - to the freedom you have felt - and possibly taken for granted - to consider every idea and t

columbia_university lee_bollinger commencement_speech media journalism press

Christian Science Monitor opinion piece making the case that journalists aren't pulling their weight in creating value for readers/ consumers.
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Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren't creating much value these days.

Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models.
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Picard then divides his piece into three parts:"Where does value come from?" and "What are journalists worth?" with "Adapt or Die" as conclusion.

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Robert G. Picard is a professor of media economics at Sweden's Jonkoping University, a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, and the author and editor of 23 books, including "The Economics and Financing of Media Companies." This essay is adapted from a lecture Professor Picard gave at Oxford. He blogs at http://themediabusiness.blogspot.com/
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Excellent must-read article.

journalism csmonitor value robert_picard

Great article by Clay Shirky on the changed status of media production, who owns it, who controls it, with an astute take on abundance. ("That era, when media were shaped by the scarcity of production and by the judgment of professionals, has ended.")

clay_shirky newspapers journalism business_model online_media the_guardian

Terrific article by Neil Henry, professor and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, about the J-School's initiatives around local news reporting. Focusing on Linjun Fan's success with Albany Today (albanytoday.org), Henry explains how the students cover local news and use cutting edge multimedia tools.
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For nearly every story over the next two years, Linjun was first on the scene, using the most highly advanced digital tools to file her work to her site from all over town.

Most of the time she was the only reporter at any of the events she covered, a stark reality shared by most of her classmates in their own coverage of places as varied as El Cerrito, Emeryville, and West Oakland.
(...)
Today, as they learn multimedia and community-based journalism, so do all of our students practice it, providing fresh content throughout the year to our other thriving digital news sites, Oakland North (oaklandnorth.net) and Mission Loc@l (missionlocal.org), which won a national award for Internet excellence recently for its coverage of San Francisco's Mission District.

And we continue to grow. In August we will launch a new digital news site devoted to the people of Richmond.
(...)
We want to partner with other local sites run by people similarly committed to covering Bay Area communities. We envision legions of small businesses and other potential advertisers in the Bay Area finding tremendous new audiences through these ties. We are filled with excitement and purpose, fueled by the idealism and dedication of young students who increasingly are showing the way.
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local_news uc_berkeley journalism

Excellent summary of a lecture by Emily Bell (head of digital content at Guardian News and Media). Bell gave the lecture at University College Falmouth, where she was just appointed visiting professor in the media degrees program. Her topic: "Journalism Ten Years From Now" - excellent insights. Bell also discusses the business model for journalism of the future: where will the money come from to support it? And there are some very surprising insights here, starting with "News has never been profitable."

newspapers emily_bell journalism business_model

Transcript of Kenneth Lerer's speech at the Columbia Journalism School Annual New Media Lecture Series, April 23, 2009.
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A lot of what we're seeing online today is actually a return, full circle, to the way things were when American newspapers began; a mixture of advocacy and investigative in-your-face journalism. There is a long and distinguished history of such newspapers -- from the papers that were fiercely loyal to Jefferson or Hamilton, to the abolitionist broadsheets, to the activist newspapers at the turn of the century. As my partner Arianna Huffington says, the mission of journalism has always been "truth-seeking, not striking some fictitious balance between two sides."
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huffington_post kenneth_lerer newspaper business_model journalism web2.0

Article about attempts by some alternative news organizations to recreate themselves as non-profits. Lots of interesting angles, from the demise (or at least being under siege) of traditional newspapers to the rise of alternative business models (embodied by the "watchdog" sites referenced by the article's title) for paying journalists/ newsrooms to stay in business.

nyt newspapers journalism business_model

Roy Greenslade reporting from a "future of journalism" conference in Australia, asking after 'the business model' for newspapers / journalism of the future. He mentions Jay Rosen, who joined the conference via satellite hook-up, and this in turn sparks some interesting conversation on the comments board (particularly by Rosen himself).

greenslade the_guardian journalism business_model newspapers jay_rosen