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Newspaper Readers Buy Papers for the Content
Ryan Chittum takes a stance against those who argue that news content has no value, that people are really buying ads and not news.
Why Fox News Is Un-American
Fox News' biased reporting is un-American, and respectable journalists should avoid dealing with the network, writes Jacob Weisberg.
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Any news organization that took its responsibilities seriously would take pains to cover presidential criticism fairly. It would regard doing so as itself a test of integrity. At Fox, by contrast, complaints of unfairness prompt only hoots of derision and demands for "evidence" that, when presented, is brushed off and ignored.
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That Rupert Murdoch may tilt the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox's model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings, Ailes has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. In this way, Fox hasn't just corrupted its own coverage. Its example has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.
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6 Ways to add tweets to your story
Examples of how to put Tweets into a news story.
Mr. Murdoch Goes to War
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It doesn’t matter much to a fully integrated media conglomerate like News Corporation how its customers choose to access this content, as long as the transaction pays.
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One of the first strong messages Journal reporters and editors received from their new owners was that Murdoch wants scoops. He wants his reporters out in front of every competitor on the planet.
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What The Future Will Look Like For Journalists | paidContent
Jim Spanfeller has a pretty rosy take on why journalists (if not newspapers) will persevere into the uncertain future.
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Stories will still develop over time and across many specific installments of reporting. But the idea of a “scoop” having great value is gone. In an internet-enabled world, a scoop lasts for only a very fleeting period of time. The real value is the insight about that scoop.
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It will also be important to present raw data well. “Give me your thoughts,” say the readers, but let me see the data as well. Give me a chance to disagree with your theories and commentary. For this to happen, the institution supporting and paying the journalist will have to collect or buy the appropriate data and present it in a way that is both easy to understand and work with.
On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting
LA Times writer David Sarnos draws a line between lifecasting and mindcasting on sites like Twitter. The latter seems a better way of using social media sites.
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Twitter, the micro-messaging service where users broadcast short thoughts to one another, has been widely labeled the newest form of digital narcissism. And if it’s not self-obsession tweeters are accused of, it’s self-promotion, solipsism or flat out frivolousness.
But naysayers will soon eat their tweets. There’s already a vibrant community of Twitter users who are using the system to share and filter the hyper-glut of online information with ingenious efficiency. Forget what you had for breakfast or how much you hate Mondays. That’s just lifecasting.
Mindcasting is where it’s at. -
Twitter takes the concept of social networking and blows the doors off
it. Because it’s a public messaging system — more like radio than
e-mail — you don’t need to be real-life ‘‘friends’’ with a person to
tune in to his feed, you just need to be interested. That means you
have the unique flexibility to program your own information stream. And
once you do, you quickly find you’re not swimming alone.
Readers expect news to find them
Readers today expect the news to find them, so journalists should be leaders in using every social media tool at their disposal to make that happen, says Gina Chen.
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The point of using social media isn’t that Facebook is popular and lots of people, particularly young people, hang out there. The point is the way people find the news today is they expect it to find them. If news organizations want to be valuable to their readers’, they not only need great content and interactive features, they need to to use these features. To me, what that means for news organizations is their staffs need to understand social media better than the readers, so they can lead, rather than follow.
Are you thinking, or "quorum sensing?"
Daniel Conover compares the way newspaper managers and staffers think to the way groups of bacteria will communicate via quorum sensing. In other words, it's only after enough individuals in your environment sense the same stimulus that the group will act -- all at once.
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We practice journalism today in the transitional period between an old equilibrium that has ended and a new equilibrium that has yet to take shape. The outcome cannot yet be reliably predicted, and the notion that the best, most productive ideas will naturally rise to the top is far from proven.
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Many executives are just sitting around, receiving signals from their environment, waiting for the signal that a "quorum" has coalesced around a new direction.
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Five phrases to outlaw in newsrooms
Journalist and Web 2.0 enthusiast Alison Gow lists a few of the things she never wants to hear in a newsroom again.
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Whether the issue is reporters speaking up, or news editors listening to them, or editors being clear on what the agenda is, it's not an insurmountable problem.
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Blogging isn't a mystery, but why some people in a newsroom view it as a chore to be avoided it at every opportunity is. The internet isn't going away and advertisers are not going to start hurling money at newspapers like they used to; this means that anyone planning on staying in journalism should want to be learning new skills - not only do these open up whole new ways of story-telling, but they make sense from a point of self-interest.
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Transparency is the new objectivity
David Weinberger tells us that transparency now carries a lot of the importance that used to be laid on objectivity.
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Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark.
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What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.
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The Dawn of Post-Journalism
The New York Observer supposes that post-journalism means the death of the objective observer and the birth of the writer as a worker.
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No doubt many of them will continue writing, but in a new style—what I call “post-journalism.” No longer “objective observers,” they will be writers-as-workers. This will lead to a rebirth of American reporting.
The Story Behind the Story
The Atlantic's Mark Bowden tells a tale of the interested voices who power today's increasingly "post-journalism" age.
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In this post-journalistic world, the model for all national debate becomes the trial, where adversaries face off, representing opposing points of view. We accept the harshness of this process because the consequences in a courtroom are so stark; trials are about assigning guilt or responsibility for harm. There is very little wiggle room in such a confrontation, very little room for compromise—only innocence or degrees of guilt or responsibility. But isn’t this model unduly harsh for political debate? Isn’t there, in fact, middle ground in most public disputes? Isn’t the art of politics finding that middle ground, weighing the public good against factional priorities? Without journalism, the public good is viewed only through a partisan lens, and politics becomes blood sport.
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In a post-journalistic society, there is no disinterested voice. There are only the winning side and the losing side.
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Is journalism an industry?
Jarvis argues that declining employment numbers are a poor way to gauge the health of an industry -- journalism -- in the midst of major restructuring.
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the fall news as an industry paralleling the end of the industrial economy. That’s not just about shedding the means of production and distribution now that they are cost burdens rather than barriers to entry. It’s about the decentralization of journalism as an industrial complex, about news no longer being based solely on employment.
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So is employment the measure of news? No. Is it the proper measure for every industry? Not necessarily. Is it the measure of the economy? Not as much as it used to be. Media is becoming the first major post-industry. Others will follow. You just have to know where to look.
What's an online-first newsroom?
Gina Chen discusses six attributes that she says form the foundation of an online-first newsroom.
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Newspapers have struggled for decades with the idea that they have the story, but they can’t tell it until the next morning (or afternoon.) So now we have the Web. Use it. Don’t wait.
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Every print story should have a Web element that’s meaningful, not just thrown in because, “you, know, we need that Web thing.”
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Journalist need to brand themselve on the Web
Gina Chen's advice on why journalists should start branding themselves today.
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Journalists today need to market themselves. People need to be able to find your name, your blog, your Linked-In profile as they assess whether to talk to you, hire your, write about you.
Statistical evidence: many newspaper execs not seeing reality
Steve Outing presents us with graphical evidence that newspaper execs and readers aren't on the same page when it comes to newspapers' free Web sites.
The price of information online
Daniel Axelrod suggests that newspapers drastically cut their print product and use the savings to hire more reporters.
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So, media companies should cease printing paper editions or publish their print versions far less often, and they should channel all the overhead they save into adding reporters. Then, newly potent, rejuvenated newsgathering operations could focus on the kind of hyper-local coverage, investigative reporting and watchdog journalism for which advertisers and readers would actually pay.
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So, media companies should cease printing paper editions or publish their print versions far less often, and they should channel all the overhead they save into adding reporters. Then, newly potent, rejuvenated newsgathering operations could focus on the kind of hyper-local coverage, investigative reporting and watchdog journalism for which advertisers and readers would actually pay.
The trouble is newspapers still believe they offer something so special that people will always want to pay for them. But, in reality, much of reason the reason many people bought papers to begin with was they were monopolies. Yet, newspapers can still prove they have value by entertaining people with arts coverage and offering them the stories they crave on local sports, schools, taxes, politicians and other community issues.
A poor craftsman blames others’ tools
Jeff Jarvis criticizes a pair of posts from journalists who find no value in Twitter because, Jarvis says, they fail to see how Twitter can be a tool to improve journalism -- "not just violate its age-old dictates."
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In these screeds, we also get a glimpse of these Journalists’ definitions of journalism. I say that news was made into a product by the necessities and limitations of its means of production and distribution in print and broadcast. News is properly a process, I believe. Cohen says, no, it must have a beginning, middle, and end, a narrative he sets, an order he gives, a chaos he rejects. He says elsewhere in his column that presence is necessary to do journalism; he thus says that it takes a reporter to report, that news without the journalist him or herself bearing witness to it is not real news. He puts The Journalist at the center of news. I say the journalist is the servant of news. I tell my students to add journalistic value to what is already being spread – reporting, fact-checking, perspective, answers – but recognize that the news is there with or without them. It is gathered and spread by the people who see it and need it with new tools, like Twitter. Like it or not.
Study finds US new media use Twitter as shovelware
Most news organizations use Twitter to promote links to their own stories, rather than for community building, a paper by Marcus Messner says.
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Most tweets were news related and only just over 5% were personal. Messner said most of the tweets were pitching the news content of the organisation. Overwhelming, news outlets provided links to their own material, rather than to external sources.
The study concluded that the news media in the US use Twitter as a promotional tool, with extensive linking to their own news content, with newspapers much more active than TV stations.
Messner said more attention needs to be paid to community building, to go beyond shovelware as happened in the early days of online journalism.
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The study concluded that the news media in the US use Twitter as a promotional tool, with extensive linking to their own news content, with newspapers much more active than TV stations.
Journalism By Game: Bringing The Community Into The Process
Michael Masnick at TechDirt looks at the possibility that games might play a role in getting the community involved in future journalism.
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In talking about the future of journalism, one point I've made repeatedly, is that news organizations need to realize that their community is their best asset, and they need to cater to them more and involve them a lot more in the process. Today's news "consumer" isn't really a consumer, but a participant. I've talked about how they want to share the news, write the news and comment on the news, but what about actually experiencing the news in some manner?
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