September 2007
41 posts
Name that country: Burma or Myanmar? →
From the editors’ blog at The Lexington Herald-Leader: do we use the name that the government uses for their country, or the name the protesters use?
Transforming the architecture →
… the Journal-Constitution this summer abolished traditional desks and reconstituted itself into four departments instead of more than a dozen. Two produce the content: News and Information, the largest department, supplies breaking news and other material directed first toward the Web. The Enterprise department develops surprising, watchdog-type stories largely for the morning newspaper....
Newspapers now stuffed full of blogs, but no clue... →
Gawker, which knows a thing or two about the Web, takes newspapers to task for starting copious blogs and then not publicizing them.
“Citizen journalists” evade blackout on Burma news →
The Wall Street Journal reports that protesters in Burma are using YouTube, camera phones and text messages to publicize what’s happening in their country — and evading government bans in the process. Another blog was updated at 3 p.m. Myanmar time yesterday with a few English lines: “Right now they’re using fire engines and hitting people and dragging them onto E2000 trucks and most of them are...
The Newsroom now open for comments
So, this post below is kind of silly without there being any comments on this blog. Now I am practicing what I preach! If you look at the bottom of this post and every link post you’ll now find a small link that pops up a place to leave a comment. I’ve been thinking about adding comments for a while, but held off until now. This is mostly because the blogging platform I’m using doesn’t easily...
Is lazy reporting harming the visual arts? →
By recycling six basic narratives over and over again, arts journalists might be distorting understanding of what’s newsworthy and what’s not. What types of stories keep getting bandied around in theatre journalism? (via kottke)
The Huffington Post to become an online... →
Why has The Huffington Post been doing so well? Because it’s a news Web site that actually acts like a Web site: “Traditional newspaper sites, he says, link to stories on their front pages by their reporters or wire services, but rarely to those of rival organizations,” reported USA Today. “Traditional newspapers, if they are going to survive, need to follow Huffington’s model, he says: “If...
Post-media journalism
post med•i•a journ•a•lism noun: journalism after media, or journalism without media. Now don’t really read that too literally. Of course you need a medium of some kind to get the message across from the journalist to the reader. But we’re in an age now where the point of journalism has moved beyond the physical product itself. The point of journalism now isn’t the production of the thing itself —...
Ten pieces of advice on how to be a journalism... →
Number five: Get a life. Journalists generally report about a particular area — politics, sport, the environment, science, health, education, communities, religion, technology, motoring, finance. If you haven’t picked an area, pick one, and start getting involved — join organisations, attend meetings, go to events, do things and talk to people. Stories don’t come with a convenient label: you need...
Don’t forget the value of hyperlinking →
Today, with the Internet, readers have access to the largest database ever assembled. That access is undermining journalists’ traditional role as gatekeeper to community information. But if we are no longer to be the gatekeeper of the world’s information, we can become great guides to it. Why not serve our readers by showing them the connections from the data we collect to other, related...
8020 Publishing announces Everywhere Magazine →
The publishers of JPG have a new venture: a community-driven travel mag called Everywhere. 8020 Publishing was at TechCrunch40 last week to announce the launch of Everywhere Magazine, a community-powered travel magazine that will showcase the experiences and stories of travelers from around the globe. TechCrunch40 is a conference where selected startups announce, present, and demo their new...
How to compete with free →
While ostensibly about the music industry, this argument can be applied to journalism as well:If you produce what everyone produces, you don’t have a good chance of making a profit. And that implies that, if you produce something that is reproducible without additional cost, your product value sinks to zero. In order to be able to raise the price, you need to deliver unique value.(via cubicle 17)
After Times Select: how do you support a big... →
The demise of the NYT’s pay wall has been discussed all around the blogosphere. Here’s my favorite take, from Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg:If their profession has a future — and of course it does — the answers for how to support that future are unlikely to come from the sort of old-line newsroom management that gave us Times Select and so many other ill-fated big media schemes on the Web. It...
Goodbye magazines, hello blog-azines →
“Blog-azines” is a new term for me — according to Google, it’s not used too often — but I complete understand what Matthew Ingram’s getting at here:The inescapable fact is that if you’re interested in anything remotely time-sensitive — technology (and particularly the Internet), news about celebrities (where TMZ.com and PerezHilton rule) and even sports or investment-related news (Marketwatch) —...
When net neutrality goes away →
A picture is worth 1,000 words: this is what your ISP’s ads might look like in a few years if net neutrality isn’t protected. (via Boing Boing)
Naomi Wolf: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps →
An oldie but a goodie. In some ways, #8 is already here: You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America — it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth...
2 tags
Professor: If you had actual skills, you wouldn’t... →
I often remind my students that, despite their belief that they have important knowledge to communicate to the world at large through their poetry, their status as poets already suggests that they have failed to make any momentous discovery that might have otherwise contributed to the history of knowledge; otherwise, the students might have exploited this insight in far more lucrative vocations,...
3 tags
The Guardian has photos of various writers’... →
The new trend is to secretly photograph your... →
An intimate ritual becomes a public performance, thanks to the transforming power of the Internet. I will say, though, that after I proposed to Ashley we did “recreate” the moment for the camera. But still.
That Florida student who got himself tasered at... →
Woodward: “Journalism is not stenography” →
Bob Woodward came to speak at IU, both in a small press conference and to a packed auditorium. Here’s Jon’s SoJ article; I’ll (hopefully) post some of my thoughts when I can.
The time has come — NYT goes free →
Now all NYT content from 1850ish to now is available online, no questions asked. Also, all the former Times Select content is open to linking as well. This is really, really cool.
“Getting a WordPress blog is a great way to add... →
Starting a Magazine →
A how-to blog. Fantastic.
Slacktivist: “Be not afraid” →
Bader-Saye goes on to discuss how this culture of fear can “inhibit … hospitality, peacemaking and generosity,” replacing them with “the ‘virtues’ of the ethic of safety — suspicion, pre-emption and accumulation.” 1 John 4:18 says that “perfect love drives out fear.” Bader-Saye argues that the converse can also be true, that fear can drive out love. When “We are in danger” becomes the...
3 tags
In honor of Madeleine L’Engle, an explanation of... →
Awesome bit of video explaining what exactly the “tesseract,” which figures so prominently in A Wrinkle in Time, means.
An actual tesseract is best described as a four dimensional cube…and is kind of confusing. So, in memory of L’Engle, we met up with Physicist David Morgan who took a little time out of his day to talk tesseracts with the BPP. Put your measley three-dimensional brains to...
I want my cell phone to sound like a normal phone! →
I am so fed up with my cell phone not having a “normal” cell phone ring option. Now, what I really want is the stabby, ticking ring sound they use for the phones on Battlestar Galactica. Doubt I’ll find it anywhere, though.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen (source) Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines...
Space on the infinite Web
Conventional wisdom is that the Web means “infinite column inches” — that is, there’s no need to worry about space, one of the big problems with print newspapers. But space is limited: readers only have so much time to read, and if their scrollbars get to looking too long, they won’t be finishing the article.
Headscarf-wearing j-school student detained for... →
Mariam Jukaku was practicing for a photography class by taking pictures of people walking into and out of the VA Medical Center in Syracuse, N.Y. Too bad she was wearing a headscarf.
Gordon Sclar, a medical center spokesman, said security officers were following hospital policy that restricts photographs on hospital property. He said Jukaku was between the sidewalk and the parking lot. She said...
2 tags
Madeleine L’Engle, Writer of Children’s Classics,... →
First Vonnegut, and now this. L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time is one of my favorite books.
Analyzing the Websites of American Magazines » The... →
Magazines are moving much more slowly than newspapers to adopt Web 2.0 tech.We can hypothesize that this is due to the differing cultures surrounding the two types of print media: newspapers and the content they present are essential to most people’s daily lives. In contrast most magazines are something “extra,” and are often focused on entertainment. (Via Romenesko via Journerdism.)
Facebook’s Public Search Listing Has Problems For... →
Saw this earlier when I logged in. Obviously, now, this isn’t something I’m too concerned about — especially when I have a link to my Facebook profile in the footer of every single page on this blog — but seeing how public Facebook profiles have already caused some drama in the last few months it seems like Facebook should be expecting some backlash from this.
ReporTwitters →
Ever thought that your Twitters should become publicised just like the articles you pen every day? Or that your editors would respect you that tad more if they knew how you got hold of that crucial information?
Journalism as a process, not an end »... →
Nardelli leaps into action at Chrysler →
So awesome: a Detroit Free Press reporter writes an “eye-witness” account of an exec’s speech by sitting down at his desk with a pre-release copy of the script. The editors failed to realize that the speech had been canceled and ran the story anyway. They even got a photo!
“With its vast and direct influence on public opinion, journalism cannot be...”
– Pope John Paul II
Steven Poole – Goodbye, cruel Word →