Journalistas

Longreads: Reading List: Brave New Internet

poorerthandead — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:16:13 -0400

Longreads: Reading List: Brave New Internet:

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

1. “The Vice Guide to the World.” (Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 8 April 2013)

“My big thing was I want you to do stupid in a smart way and smart…

emergentfutures: The Future Of Technology: What You Can Expect...

poorerthandead — Sun, 19 May 2013 07:25:17 -0400

emergentfutures:

The Future Of Technology: What You Can Expect In The Next 50 Years

Paul Higgins: A bit ridiculous but interesting to look at and think about

Full Story: SimplyZesty

Legal Guide for Bloggers | Electronic Frontier Foundation

poorerthandead — Sat, 04 May 2013 21:18:30 -0400

Legal Guide for Bloggers | Electronic Frontier Foundation:

futurejournalismproject:

It’s World Press Freedom Day and while it’s historically been thought of as a day to reflect, celebrate and promote traditional press freedoms, it’s expanded with the understanding that activists, pro-am journalists and ordinary citizens deserve their communication and publishing rights protected as well.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great legal guide (US) for bloggers of all stripes to navigate issues ranging from legal liability issues to reporter’s privilege and issues specific to student bloggers:

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don’t want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that’s under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you’re doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn’t help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven’t yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

But here’s the important part: None of this should stop you from blogging. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn’t use the law to stifle legitimate free expression. That’s why EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.

Read it. Bookmark it. And blog away.

"I don’t get to complain anymore. It’s just true. Some of the most delicious time that you spend as a..."

poorerthandead — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:03:48 -0500

“I don’t get to complain anymore. It’s just true. Some of the most delicious time that you spend as a journalist is like, complaining. At no times have I had fewer actual friends to gossip with, and kind of complain with, or at least commiserate with. That is a hard part of being the boss. Newsrooms are just full of cantankerous complaining people. It’s so enjoyable to be part of that.”

- Jill Abramson, Executive Editor, The New York Times, about life as the boss. Capital New York, Editor Jill Abramson opens up about layoffs, the time she almost quit, and loneliness at the top. (via futurejournalismproject)

amalucky: Analyzing share of time spent on social networking...

poorerthandead — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 21:24:11 -0500

amalucky:

Analyzing share of time spent on social networking sites in December 2012, comScore reveals that while Facebook dominated at 83% share, Tumblr occupied the second spot (5.7%), more than Pinterest (1.9%), Twitter (1.7%), and LinkedIn (1.4%) combined, and almost as much as the aggregate of all other social networks (6.1%).

18-29-year-olds more than twice as likely as the average internet user to use Tumblr (13% vs. 6%).

(via Chart/table from: Tumblr Beat Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn for SocNet Time Spent in December)

searchengineland: When it comes to getting general news and...

poorerthandead — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 21:23:32 -0500

searchengineland:

When it comes to getting general news and information, consumers worldwide put as much trust in search engines as they do in traditional media — and more in both than they do in social media.

"Lee van der Voo tells Romenesko readers: I was just informed by State Farm here in Oregon, where I’m..."

poorerthandead — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:59:10 -0500

“Lee van der Voo tells Romenesko readers: I was just informed by State Farm here in Oregon, where I’m an independent investigative journalist, that they are dumping my office rental policy because of the kind of journalism I do. I asked whether if I were to write food reviews or puff pieces about bridal gowns they would insure me, and I was told yes, “just no controversial journalism.””

- No insurance for you, investigative reporter! | JIMROMENESKO.COM (via onaissues)

futurejournalismproject: AP to Publish News on Restaurant...

poorerthandead — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 23:36:52 -0500

futurejournalismproject:

AP to Publish News on Restaurant Receipts

Interesting, no? From now on, whenever you dine at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, D.C., your receipt will contain the news you’ve missed over the course of the meal.

From their press release:

The printed updates have several advantages in this venue over the smartphone, providing access to the news without people becoming absorbed in their devices at the same time contributing to table conversation and interaction.

Image: Press Release.

"It turns out Facebook’s doing just fine with the kids these days — in fact, slightly more of the..."

poorerthandead — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:39:09 -0500

“It turns out Facebook’s doing just fine with the kids these days — in fact, slightly more of the younger demographic reported using it regularly. But perhaps most impressive was Tumblr topping the list at #1, with 59% of respondents saying they used it regularly.”

- Garry Tan, cofounder of Posterous, did a survey on Tenth Grade Tech Trends (via evan)

"While Twitter’s Turks will help bring much-needed context to the platform, they’re not journalists..."

poorerthandead — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:37:27 -0500

“While Twitter’s Turks will help bring much-needed context to the platform, they’re not journalists who verify whether something is true. As we’ve seen with the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut and Superstorm Sandy, Twitter rumors ran rampant. Some rumors turned out to be true, but many were inaccurate or even malicious. Some were important, others were trivial. At Breaking News, we rely on experienced journalists (that’s one of them, Stephanie Clary, above) to verify real-time reports and prioritize their importance. We also add context, associating reports with ongoing stories, topics and locations. But accuracy and importance — along with speed — are the essence of breaking news for any news organization.”

- The Breaking News team to Twitter: Your Mechanical Turk team can’t compete with our actual journalists. (via shortformblog)

FJP: Some Background — The Twitter Engineering blog posted yesterday about how it uses real people alongside its search algorithms to determine the “meaning” of trending terms. It does this with both in-house evaluators and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced marketplace for accomplishing (relatively) small tasks.

The goals is to contextualize and understand, for example, that something like #BindersFullOfWomen is related to politics.

Here’s what Twitter has to say about what happens when topics begin to trend:

As soon as we discover a new popular search query, we send it to our human evaluators, who are asked a variety of questions about the query… For example: as soon as we notice “Big Bird” spiking, we may ask judges on Mechanical Turk to categorize the query, or provide other information (e.g., whether there are likely to be interesting pictures of the query, or whether the query is about a person or an event) that helps us serve relevant Tweets and ads.

(via futurejournalismproject)

parislemon: shortformblog: washingtonpoststyle: A Jan. 1936...

poorerthandead — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 14:29:17 -0500

parislemon:

shortformblog:

washingtonpoststyle:

A Jan. 1936 news item.

(No mention of how newspapers make huge amounts of money through these screens.)

Via T.J. Ortenzi via Phil Rosenthal

Ahead of its time by about six decades.

Future.

Looking For News Outside the Bubble

poorerthandead — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:16:00 -0400

Here are links to some articles in which student journalists write about national and international issues but with a local angle. Note the ways in which the national or international issue is made relevant to the paper’s readership.

http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2012/09/23/chicago-teachers-strike-swat-alumni-talk-picket-lines-and-politics/

http://www.biconews.com/2010/01/13/fords-protest-swiss-minaret-ban/

http://www.smithsophian.com/news/massachusetts-reduces-carbon-footprint-with-car-free-week-1.2905640#.UGsuoqTyYRg

pgdigs: Nov. 15, 1948: The Post-Gazette’s reporter Ray...

poorerthandead — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:45:00 -0400

pgdigs:

Nov. 15, 1948: The Post-Gazette’s reporter Ray Sprigle disguised as a black man.

Ray Sprigle was a top-notch investigative journalist. “He posed as a black-market meat operator to expose graft and corruption in the war-rationing system; he got himself committed to a mental institution to prove inhumane conditions; he disguised himself as a black man traveling through the South to produce a groundbreaking 21-part series in 1948” (Post-Gazette, Sept. 16, 1986). [ Here’s a link to the entire series of articles written by Ray Sprigle.]

In 1937, Sprigle won the newspaper’s first Pulitzer Prize for a story proving that Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who was then newly appointed to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court by President Roosevelt, had been once a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Sprigle’s report was accompanied by transcripts, names, signed affidavits, Black’s application for membership in the Klan from Sept. 11, 1923, his membership dues and Black’s handwritten resignation from July 9, 1925.

This photograph captures Ray Sprigle posing as a black man for the 1948 series titled “‘I was a Negro in the South for 30 Days.” In this disguise and using the name James R. Crawford, Sprigle traveled through the South and experienced firsthand what life was like for 10 million people living under Jim Crow’s system of legal segregation. To “pass” as an African American, as Springle writes in one of his dispatches, he “had shaved head, practically down to the skull, had my glasses reset in enormous black rims, and acquired a cap that drooped like a Tam o’Shanter.” Only twice in his month-long travels was his status as a black man “even remotely questioned.”

(Photo credit: Unknown)

— Mila Sanina

"Imagine this: The three men sit in court, awaiting their verdict. The youngest, a experienced..."

poorerthandead — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 04:36:32 -0400

“

Imagine this: The three men sit in court, awaiting their verdict. The youngest, a experienced dissident described by the media as a “sultry sex symbol” with “Angelina Jolie lips”, glances at his colleague, an activist praised by the Associated Press for his “pre-Raphaelite looks”. Between them sits a third man, whose lack of glamour has led the New Republic to label him “the brain” and deem his hair a “poof of dirty blonde frizz”. The dissidents – or “boys” as they are called in headlines around the world – have been the subject of numerous fashion and style profiles ever since they first spoke out against the Russian government. “He’s a flash of moving color,” the New York Times writes approvingly about their protests, “never an individual boy.”

If this sounds ridiculous, it should – and not only because I changed the gender. These are actual excerpts from the Western media coverage of Pussy Riot, the Russian dissident performance art collective sentenced to two years in prison for protesting against the government. Pussy Riot identifies as feminist, but you would never know it from the Western media, who celebrate the group with the same language that the Russian regime uses to marginalize them. The three members of Pussy Riot are “girls”, despite the fact that all of them are in their twenties and two of them are mothers. They are “punkettes”, diminutive variations on a 1990s indie-rock prototype that has little resemblance to Pussy Riot’s own trajectory as independent artists and activists. “Why is Vladimir Putin afraid of three little girls?” asked Huffington Post columnist Ron Galloway, intending it as a compliment.

”

- Manic Pixie Dream Dissidents. (via ceedling)

blergh

-naomi

(via rookiemag)

futuristgerd: (via Total Worldwide Social Network Ad Revenues...

poorerthandead — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 04:25:20 -0400

futuristgerd:

(via Total Worldwide Social Network Ad Revenues Continue Strong Growth - eMarketer)

Gerd says: social media is becoming a default now…

He Didn't Mean to Hurt You

poorerthandead — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 07:49:28 -0400

He Didn't Mean to Hurt You:

amywhipple:

Last season, Ndamukong Suh became the most vilified man in football, the poster boy for gratuitous violence and dirty play. But Suh’s not just a 300-pound destruction machine. He knows what you think of him. He understands the game and his role in it. And he’s happy to explain things, really, just give him a minute—but try not to mention The Stomping

BY JEANNE MARIE LASKAS

futurejournalismproject: Today’s Digiday Buzzword Tracker looks...

poorerthandead — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 13:30:01 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Today’s Digiday Buzzword Tracker looks at the evolution of the word “curation”. For example, in the 14th century “curate” referred to spiritual guidance.

With the rise of self publishing platforms, so too came a lot of thought about curation’s pros and cons. For example, as Digiday Points out, Jeff Jarvis’ 2009 post about the journalist as curator. Most important, since we live in and contribute to a curated digital world, we highly recommend reviewing Curator’s Code by Brain Pickings founder Maria Popova and designer Kelli Anderson.

The two created the site last winter and walk through issues of respect, attribution, the nuances between “via” and “hat tip” and even offer a browser bookmarklet that generates links and symbols to indicate to site visitors how and where you found your newly published piece of awesome.

As they write, “The internet is a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery. Acknowledging where information came from helps keep the rabbit hole open and makes the Web Wonderland better for all of us.”

Couldn’t agree more. — Michael

futurejournalismproject: Journalism and Democracy In this...

poorerthandead — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 18:40:42 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Journalism and Democracy

In this video, CUNY Professor CW Anderson imagines the future of journalism and its changing place in democracy. Partisan reporting, Anderson says, will thrive alongside some big names from today – like, say, the New York Times – to serve as news for the educated and the upper class. Will this reflect itself the democracy we live in? Anderson conjures up images of old torchlight parades and globalization, the Clinton impeachment and political apathy to remind us that democracy isn’t unchanging but is influenced by its press, its time, and what its citizens think of themselves.

FJP: Heavy stuff! See our first video with Chris here, and expect more from our interview with him soon.

futurejournalismproject: Warren Buffett buys 63 newspapers, we...

poorerthandead — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 20:53:21 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Warren Buffett buys 63 newspapers, we scratch our heads

About two weeks ago, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett bought 63 newspapers from Media General, a news company that operates throughout the US Southeast. The purchase has gotten a lot of criticism, as you can imagine, and some praise too. Let’s dissect the argument.

The papers themselves are small locals, and Buffett has said he wants to focus on local reporting. Fair enough.

via Buffett:

Our future depends on remaining the primary source of information in certain subjects of great importance to our readers. Technological change has caused us to lose primacy in various key areas, including national news, national sports, stock quotations and employment opportunities. So be it. Our job is to reign supreme in matters of local importance.

Buffett knows that much of what traditionally made a newspaper a newspaper – the classifieds, funnies, world news – is now free and online. So he’s wants to lean on local issues that only a local paper will cover. There’s got to be a market for that, right?

And he wants to charge for online content, probably:

We must rethink the industry’s initial response to the Internet. The original instinct of newspapers then was to offer free in digital form what they were charging for in print. This is an unsustainable model and certain of our papers are already making progress in moving to something that makes more sense.

But he’s missing something, according to the critics. Namely, that you can’t expect subscriptions or paywalls to finance a paper.

writes Clay Shirky:

He makes much of drops in print readership, but circulation has not been strongly correlated with revenue for two decades now.

Buffett expects that quality reporting will boost readership, boost sales, and then boost business. But it’s not that simple.

Shirky goes on:

Reading the letter, you’d never know that papers make most of their money from companies, not citizens, and have done for the better part of two centuries. It is disruptive competition for ad dollars, not changing reader engagement, that has sent the industry into a tailspin.

FJP: The jury’s still out on paywalls, but if they only sort-of work for the New York Times, then their adoption by a paper in a town of 10,000 doesn’t incite our confidence.

Matthew Ingram of GigaOm puts it well: newspapers have changed. The internet has most of what a paper has always had, and makes it easier to find. And the ad money, which has always financed the news, has followed our collective attention away from print.

Ingram writes:

The real business of a newspaper has been to aggregate content — news, but also comics and horoscopes and classifieds and lifestyle tips — as a way of capturing the attention of readers, and then sell that attention to advertisers. And the problem for newspapers, both hyper-local and national, is that advertisers are no longer as interested in that arrangement as they used to be. Much of the attention that they seek to monetize has gone elsewhere, to websites and services like Facebook — especially the attention of younger readers with disposable income.

But Warren Buffett is a business man, and as one of the world’s most successful investors, it’s not surprising that he’s not in much danger of losing money.

via Devin Leonard:

Yet it’s also important to look at the price Berkshire is paying for the Media General papers. As recently as six years ago, newspaper companies sold for more than 9 times Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Stephen Weiss writes today that Buffett’s company paid around 4 times Ebitda for the Media General assets.

At that low price, Berkshire Hathaway could make a nice return on its money. As the Wall Street Journalreported earlier this month, it has done surprisingly well since purchasing the debt last November of Lee Enterprises, another troubled newspaper publisher, from Goldman Sachs.

And there you have it, for now.

Image: Fiscal Muses.

"Twitter is where news breaks; Facebook is where news goes. This is something that members of the..."

poorerthandead — Thu, 31 May 2012 19:13:29 -0400

“Twitter is where news breaks; Facebook is where news goes. This is something that members of the media, who live on Twitter and regard Facebook with removed interest, take for granted. The coverage of and discussion about Facebook’s IPO may have been the clearest demonstration yet of one of the few things the service can’t seem to do: Lead the conversation.”

- BuzzFeed’s John Herrman • Making a wise point about how the Facebook IPO was really a much bigger story on Twitter than Facebook. Part of that, to us, is due to the way the networks work. “The site, as is, is great at building after-the-fact, heavily filtered digests,” Hermann explains, “While Tweets are like free-roaming units of information, Facebook posts live in the context of each users’ friend bubble.” We noticed the same trend when the IPO broke. And it is very telling — a level of engagement FB could never hope to have, even if it’s with a smaller audience. (via shortformblog)