Category Archives: Journalism

Clay Shirky & Jay Rosen: “The Newest Thinking On New Media”

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That’s the title of the post by Mitch Joel where I found a five-part video series (runs close to an hour) of a conversation between Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus) and Jay Rosen (Press Think). These are two very smart, informed thinkers and if you are even remotely involved with media or journalism, this conversation can help you make sense of what’s happening in your world. Here’s Part 1 to get you started:

In one of the segments Mr. Shirky uses the term “infovore” to describe someone with a voracious appetite for information. I now have a name for my condition. I spend a minimum of 4-5 hours every day grazing the information savannah and I never get full.

The post-anchor era of network news

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“So perhaps when CBS News signed Couric it understood that we had reached the end of the anchor-era better than I give it credit for. Indeed, when ABC News gave Diane Sawyer the keys to its World News telecast in 2009, they were overtly endorsing the CBS News strategy of hiring a middle-aged bottle blond from morning TV to chaperone all the unschooled geezers turning on their sets at night. Putting Couric and Sawyer in the anchor chairs was admitting that the programs had no future, only a past that could continue to be harvested for profits (yes, the evening shows are still profitable, thanks to pharmaceutical ads) until their audiences finally die off.”

–Jack Shafer, Slate

I suppose you want me to DELIVER the paper, too.

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Our company operates half a dozen news networks and they all have websites, Twitter feeds and –I think– Facebook pages. When I introduced our reporters to Twitter a few years ago, I made a feeble attempt to get our reporters to tweet their stories with a link back to the website. They explained they were too busy gathering and writing the news to do this, so I futzed around with RSS feeds so the stories “auto-post” to Twitter.

Since then, a few of our reporters have set up their own twitter accounts and manually post about the stories they’re covering. But for the most part, we’re still on auto-pilot.

This minor frustration was brought to mind by a story in the LA Times:

“A conversation this week in the offices of Neon Tommy, a USC student-run online news outlet, went something like this: Editor: “We should be tweeting more of the Tumblr content.” Journalist One: “You can publish automatically to Twitter from Tumblr.” Journalist Two: “But the tweets can look weird. It’s better to move the link to Bit.ly and customize it. Do your own.”

It’s pretty easy to distinguish an RSS-generated tweet from one written by a living, breathing person. The point of the story is about delivery.

“A generation ago, journalists wrote their stories and moved on to the next thing, with someone else worrying about delivery of the end product. In today’s digital world, journalists must not only create the stories but make sure they get to readers. The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism created Neon Tommy as a laboratory for these practices. Students promote their work in real time, highlight the best stories by others on the Web and repurpose old content with new analysis. That’s only a start, as they push their journalism through myriad channels to reach a maximum audience.”

So what do the folks at Neon Tommy know about serving an audience. It’s #1 among web-only college news sites (6th when thrown in with those that also produce print publications — such as the No. 1 Daily Bruin at UCLA and the No. 2 Harvard Crimson.)

I don’t spend much time nagging our reporters these days. They are no longer my responsibility. And they’re all smart people who can figure out stuff for themselves. Or not.

“The twisted psychology of bloggers vs. journalists”

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NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen identifies five sources of stress on today’s journalists.

  1. A collapsing economic model, as print and broadcast dollars are exchanged for digital dimes.
  2. New competition (the loss of monopoly) as a disruptive technology, the Internet, does its thing.
  3. A shift in power. The tools of the modern media have been distributed to the people formerly known as the audience.
  4. A new pattern of information flow, in which “stuff” moves horizontally, peer to peer, as effectively as it moves vertically, from producer to consumer. Audience atomization overcome, I call it.
  5. The erosion of trust (which started a long time ago but accelerated after 2002) and the loss of authority.

This is an insightful look at the friction between journalists and bloggers. A must-read for either species.

Fake news (2011)

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Nick Denton has been something of mover and shaker in the blogosphere since the beginning. Here’s his take on “fake news”:

“I don’t mean fake news in the Fox News sense. I mean the fake news that clogs up most newspapers and most news websites, for that matter. The new initiative will go nowhere. The new policy isn’t new at all. The state won’t go bankrupt. The product isn’t revolutionary. And journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news. Of course the public knows that most of these stories are published for the massaging of sources — and that’s why they don’t read them.

To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it’s frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I’d much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you’re going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me opinion or reference; just don’t pretend you’re providing news. That’s not news.”

This is a pretty good summary of where I find myself in regard to news these days. You?