...was gotten by at b2b reporter. This is really worth researching, as Obama had said his mobile-using supporters would get the news of his VP pick first via text message. The message did go out, and the method was widely heralded as "breakthrough," but the media had already go Biden's nom out.
Paul Conley posted his take, with relevant links.
Daniel Libit of Politico on the relationship between blogs, journalists and audience engagement.
"Behold the Commentocracy, where big ideas and rough remarks sit shoulder to shoulder, altogether transforming the nature of the Web and of journalism...Writers and editors have become obsessed with comment tallies (even if many don’t deign to read the comments themselves), which have become a favored, albeit unreliable, barometer for determining editorial success and tapping into the political zeitgeist."
Pardon me for barfing up a whole press release, but as this is a research blog (and not really a reporting site), you can live with it.
Poynter Receives Boost to Transform Journalism Education Through E-Learning
$1.4 million grant from Knight Foundation to NewsU e-learning program adds digital transformation modules and multiple languages
St. Petersburg, Fla. - July 8, 2008 - The Poynter Institute announced today that it will use a $1.4 million, five-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to help transform journalism education by expanding the world's most successful and innovative journalism e-learning site. Launched in 2005 with a prior Knight Foundation grant, NewsU provides interactive, inexpensive courses to journalists at all levels of experience and in all types of media.
The grant will help NewsU expand in four key areas:
. Enhance the skills and digital abilities of journalists,
. Find new ways to teach and inspire journalists as well as those without access to formal journalism training,
. Increase news literacy, and
. Use the Internet to deliver training in innovative and effective ways.
Specifically, NewsU plans to offer new courses to help journalists and others make the transition to a digital world, shift its current content management system to a Web 2.0 platform, deliver course content in multiple languages, and create e-learning modules on news literacy for the general public.
"More than 73,000 participants have enrolled in NewsU courses since its introduction, vastly exceeding initial expectations and making NewsU the top e-learning destination for journalists and others interested in journalism," said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at The Poynter Institute. "We are excited about taking NewsU to the next level and reaching journalists around the world."
"This second Knight grant is a major vote of confidence in the work of our faculty and staff, our partners and our diverse and expansive user base," said Karen Dunlap, president of The Poynter Institute.
"New technology is transforming journalism," said Gary Kebbel, Director of Journalism programs at Knight Foundation. "Journalism education cannot meet the training needs of today's journalist without using that same technology. We hope this grant helps anyone learn to use new platforms to pursue the fair, accurate, contextual search for truth." He added, "Every community in this democracy has a core need for information that creates shared experiences that unite us."
NewsU was launched in 2005 to help journalists understand and adapt to the digital revolution. Through partnerships with more than 25 journalism organizations, the online site has developed and introduced more than 65 interactive learning modules that can be taken anytime and anywhere.
About The Poynter Institute
Founded in 1975 in St. Petersburg, Fla., The Poynter Institute (www.poynter.org) is one of the nation's top schools for professional journalists and media leaders, future journalists and journalism educators. Poynter offers training throughout the year in online and multimedia; reporting, writing and editing; leadership and management; TV and radio; ethics and diversity; visual journalism; and journalism education. Poynter's News University (www.newsu.org) offers training to journalists, journalism students and others through interactive e-learning modules and links to other journalism education and training opportunities.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes journalism excellence worldwide and invests in the vitality of the U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950 the foundation has granted more than $300 million to advance journalism quality and freedom of expression. Knight Foundation focuses on ideas and projects that create transformational change. To learn more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.
Contacts:
News University/The Poynter Institute
Howard Finberg, Director, Interactive Learning
Phone: 1.727.553.4371
E-mail: hfinberg@poynter.org
Marc Fest, Vice President of Communications
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Phone: 1.305.908.2677
Email: fest@knightfoundation.org
From Media Darlings to Public Enemy No. 1 in Five Years or Less is a nice piece by Simon Dumenco about the nature of blogging for a living and the threats thereof.
Zainab Zakari has penned This article is 1,689 words long for the New York Review of Magazines, reporting on the various theories concerning how long articles should be online. Mentions various studies on attention spans and anecdotal evidence of why 1,000 words is an arbitrary and incorrect benchmark.
"Weisberg chose 1,000 words arbitrarily, but he and Nielsen are echoing the prevailing wisdom that, on the web, shorter is always better. If you don’t keep it short, you’ll lose the reader’s attention—and once a reader is bored, all it takes is one mouse click to kill an article.
Are these assumptions justified? Based on my personal experience, an informal survey of the literature in the field and conversations with various social psychologists and social scientists, I believe they are not."
Christopher Shulgan has posted his feelings on the online rebirth of Toro with a tale that will make freelancers' cringe and rant.
"I think it was in December 2006 that I finally got frustrated with Finkle and started swearing at him on the telephone over a pair of invoices that were going on three months overdue. I had an excuse -- Christmas was coming up, the invoices totaled around $8,000 and my wife wasn't going to get any presents if those invoices didn't come in.
The thing was, it wasn't Finkle's fault -- he had done his best to get me the money and finally just gave me Bratty's office phone number. I started bugging Bratty with incessant voice-mails explaining the situation, and at the very last minute before Christmas vacation -- I think on the 22nd of December -- I drove out to the west side of Toronto and met Bratty at a Starbuck's near his house, where he handed me the cheque. What got me was Bratty's manner. He tossed off some random comment to the effect of, he hoped I was grateful that he was going out of his way to pay me. This was an invoice that was at least three months overdue. And what gets me to this day, and what is probably the reason for my current venting, is that I didn't call him on that asshole comment."
I attended the relaunch party last night. It wasn't "happening" as of the time I left. It certainly wasn't a magazine or a journalists' gathering. I wonder if it's because of what Shulgan describes in his post?
They're a little late to this particular game, aren't they?
MyNews.CTV.ca.
The Torontoist outlines this story fairly well, with a little blogger editorializing thrown in to get the conversation rolling.
The gist:
-photographer finds man breaking into his house, burglar jumps from window, breaks leg
-photog takes pics of injured burglar below his window, posts them to Flickr
-CP24 covers incident, asks for photos, does not get permission, but runs them anyway without attribution after accessing them on Flickr
It's a fair use issue which is fleshed out nicely in the comments section of the original post.
From the Marketing Blog, a PR guy openly states his contempt for us journos on his Facebook page.
Mr. D B Scott pointed me towards Toronto Life: Spectator, which he bills as the successor to the mag's Conrad Black trial blog.
Spectator will track "power" and "ego" in media (Canada's new Gawker? Not sure if I'd want that.)
Oh so very keen to read this.
I think Spark Wiki is what Aaron linked-to in his comment from a few days ago (the full url was cut off because Blogger, more and more, refuses to display properly in Firefox).
"Introducing the Spark Wiki
From the beginning, we wanted Spark to be a collaborative radio show.
So far, that's happened mostly through this blog. We use it to solicit questions for upcoming interviews, post raw tape, ask for your comments and story ideas, and then we include these things in the radio show.
But blogs aren't always the best way to collaborate on something like a radio show. As Luke Closs explained to me a few weeks ago, a blog is a one-to-many form of communication.
So that's why we're really pleased to announce the Spark Wiki. We hope it will complement this blog and the radio show (and podcast). Right now, it's an experiment: a place to collaborate on story ideas, suggest guests, music selections... whatever. It's a many-to-many form of communication, and I'm really excited to learn how we can use it to make more participatory, collaborative radio."
As of today, the Atlantic has torn the locks off of its online archive and magazine content.
Let the gorging begin.
A well-written first hand account of what it's like to work at a paper in North America. I (and Esquire) give you David Simon, creator of The Wire (which, incidentally, is the best television show ever produced in a kind of plain, epic way... but I digress) and former writer for The Baltimore Sun.
The excerpt I link to is a great read. I guess I'll have to pick up the March issue to get it all.
It took me a long moment to regroup.
“John,” I said finally, “if I was the editor of a major metropolitan daily and I had to retract three stories by the same reporter, I would remember it until the day I fucking died.”
I’m not prescient. At that moment, I can’t yet fathom all the still-to-come Tribune Company cost cutting at The Sun, the Kafkaesque reductions in staffing, the slow-motion demolition of the Washington bureau, the shuttering of the foreign bureaus.
And I am still as clueless as the captains of the newspaper industry when it comes to the Internet, still mistaking the Web as advertising for the product when, in fact, it is the product. I don’t yet envision the steep declines in circulation, the indifference of young readers to newsprint, the departure of display advertising to department-store consolidation and classified space to Craigslist.
Admittedly, I can’t even grasp all of the true and subtle costs of impact journalism and prize hunger. I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city -- eliminating such fundamental responsibilities as a poverty beat, a labor beat, a courthouse beat in a city where rust-belt unemployment and crime devour whole neighborhoods -- and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.
Edit Jan 17 - After returning to Understanding Crime after... well, after months and months, I've found the New Yorker profile of David Simon here.
Interesting. An online journalism school for rookies and those looking to brush up a bit.
Most interesting to me? The Be A Reporter Video Game. Seriously.
From David Jones' PR Works blog, a note on a new bill that may get passed providing reporters and some bloggers with some protection from governments wanting access to confidential sources.
CNet has a story on the blogging half of the equation.
An interesting new endeavour that I can't quite get my head around. Webb Alert is a five-minute daily news roundup of Internet/digital matters. Its host, Morgan Webb, is a tech geek goddess worshipped by many for her hosting of X-Play.
I'm not sure how popular it is, but experience with it so far has left me scratching my head. The stories are about a minute long, if not shorter, and summarize stories that can otherwise be found on any tech blog or even in the mainstream media. It's basically a vocalization of links the creators find interesting. They even say so in some of their copy.
Moreover, the broadcast can be embedded on your website. I found it at ArsTechnica.com, where I just finished reading all the stories Webb Alert ran in its broadcast.
There was one "unpaid ad for a blog that I like," during the broadcast, but that was it. If you click on the Advertise With Us link, you get Morgan's bio, which says volumes about where the creators are putting their money in terms of attracting an audience.
What is suspiciously absent from the site is an About Us page. Who's running this operation? Are they billing themselves as a news organization, or an aggregator with a talking head?
I'm looking at this through my media criticism lens (which may be unfair, depending on their intentions), but I find the site wanting. There should be more transparency here, given the precedent set by other of online independent media.
An interesting post from a PR-guy's blog about Google's decision to allow news subjects to comment or respond to news stories about them.
Oh, the possibilities for burned PR folk. Oh the flak that will fly.
Here is Google News Blog's explanation.
Edit, August 8: Here is Ars Technica's post on the subject.
Nate Anderson has a story/post on a new bill that would protect journalists from revealing their sources in the U.S. It may apply to bloggers as well (provided they make money doing their reporting).
Linky to post at Ars Technica.
Lots here on the state of citizen journalism. Many claims made (be sure to check those out later) and his bias seems apparent in the initial skimming.
Of note, in #10:
"What becomes increasingly clear is the need to update media literacy for a media-saturated age. When people are creators of media, not just consumers, the task is more complex — but more important than ever.
Think of media literacy in terms of principles, not a bunch of specific must-do kinds of instructions. They differ somewhat depending on the role one is playing in the media ecosystem."
You can find it here.
