Could this mean I don’t have to every see a flowmax ad again? I had no idea YouTube had organized news in this manner.
Malcolm Gladwell’s advice to young journalists. From a Q & A with TIME: “The issue is not writing. It’s what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he’s one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He’s unique. Most accountants don’t write articles, and most journalists don’t know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master’s in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that’s the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.” That must be hard to people who went to J-School to hear. Or agree with. Hailey Johnson’s 1-out, 7th-inning grand slam puts the Lady Tigers (Republic, MO) in the state semifinals. Final score: Republic 4, Southern Boone County. The video below was shot by my friend and co-worker, David, on his iPhone. KSPR (Springfield TV station) had a cameraman there, too . I think this illustrates two very different but equally valid approaches to covering the event. The TV package is more produced but obviously took longer to get on the air and online. David zapped his clip straight up to YouTube and a hyper-local blog he maintains. The following anecdote won’t mean much to anyone who has never worked at a small town radio station covering local news stories. And I don’t share this to embarrass or disparage anyone still doing so. It’s just a sign of the times. One of our network reporters called an affiliate in a small town, asking for a feed of a story about a bank robbery and the capture (and tasing) of the stickup guy. Our reporter was informed the station news person was on vacation and since they couldn’t find anyone to do the news in his absence, “they’re taking a break from the news this week.” Our reporter’s reaction? “The bridge is too far away for me to walk to it and jump. Our bluffs are not high enough to guarantee a fatal descent if I were hurl myself off one of them and I do not want to spend years as a paraplegic watching for more of these signs. My Norelco razor will not cut through any arteries and the only scissors I am allowed to have are the school scissors my children left behind when they grew up. My only recourse is to continue working in this industry until it reduces me to complete incoherence, upon which time I can be placed in a padded room where I shall be safe from the apocalypse.” Philosopher and poet-journo Bob Priddy: “Radio began to lose its soul when stations became “properties,” when communities became “markets,” and when staff became “human resources.” Etan Horowitz, posting on E-Media Tidbits, attempts (and succeeds, in my opinion) to answer the question: Which is better tool for journalists, BlackBerry or iPhone? I’ll just share his conclusions here and you can read the full post: “In the days when producing content mainly happened from a laptop or the office, the BlackBerry made a lot of sense. It is a perfect tool for communicating quickly by e-mail or text and looking up information online. But now that many journalists are expected to post stories, blog posts, photos and videos from the field, the iPhone is a better option. As a profession, journalism is still struggling to find its footing in the digital age. Since most of the innovative mobile applications are being developed for the iPhone, using an iPhone will help journalists stay current with technology and get them excited about its potential for news. Don’t believe me? Just give an iPhone to one of the old-school types in your newsroom and see how they react after a few days of use. They’re likely to tell you the device changed their life. You won’t get the same response by giving someone a BlackBerry. But that doesn’t mean the iPhone is best for all journalists. Editors, Web producers and others who don’t report from the field but frequently communicate with a team will probably be better served by a BlackBerry. And the fact that BlackBerrys cost less, run on multiple carriers and have removable batteries and memory cards are also valid considerations.” [Thanks, Aaron for the link] If you were recruiting for someone to manage a news organization in 2009, what skills or experience should you be looking for? What would the job description look like? (Since I know nothing about print, I’ll limit my questions to broadcast) In my experience, most people who make it to “the top,” come from the sales side of the business. The men and women who made their bones in the newsroom occasionally wind up running the show but they are the exceptions. So we’re looking for sales and marketing experience, yes? Someone who can figure out how to sell the advertising that funds company. Someone who can recruit and train people to sell 30 second radio and TV commercials? What about this Internet thing? Do our sellers need to know how to sell banner ads (or whatever), too? Or does our manager have to manage two distinct type of sales departments? “Traditional” and online? Strategically, do we manage the business we have today and hope it lasts a long time? Or, do we try to anticipate what our business will become in three, or five, or ten years? No easy task. Clay Shirky says the advertising model that has defined and driven news organizations worked because advertisers didn’t have alternatives. Now they do. But I’m getting away from my original question. Do we need a manager that is real good at “where we’ve been?” Someone with a good handle on where we’re headed? (if such a person exists) Or both? (tall order) What if advertising –as we have come to know it– plays little or no part in funding news organizations in the future? Uh, let’s not go there. Too murky and scary. As you can see, I have no answers… just questions. And I’m not sure they’re even the right ones. Maybe it comes down to finding someone who knows how to build a spaceship, verses someone who knows how to build a bomb shelter. The spaceship has to get us to a very different place. The bomb shelter will protect us for as long as our food and water hold out. NYU professor and Internet thinker Clay Shirky on the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers. On the advertising-based business model of journalism: “Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.” On the death of the home page: “The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.” From a post by Mindy McAdams that attempts to answer the question, “Why does anyone major in journalism?” This post by Jeff Jarvis raises a number of interesting questions –and what he calls myths– about the role of journalists in the ever-changing media world. Here are three nuggets (not contiguous) from the longer post: “In an offhand reference about the economics of news, Dave Winer wrote, “When you think of news as a business, except in very unusual circumstances, the sources never got paid. So the news was always free, it was the reporting of it that cost…. The new world pays the source, indirectly, and obviates the middleman.” This raises two questions: both whether news needs newsmen and whether journalists and news organizations deserve to be paid.” “The (printing) press has become journalism’s curse, not only because it now brings a crushing cost burden but also because it led to all these myths: that we journalists own the news, that we’re necessary to it, that we decide what’s reported and what’s important, that we can package the world for you every day in a box with a bow on it, that what we do is perfect (with rare, we think, exceptions), that the world should come to us to be informed, that we deserve to be paid for this service, that the world needs us.” “And that’s what Winer is trying to do when he reminds us that the important people in news are the sources and witnesses, who can now publish and broadcast what they know. The question journalists must ask, again, is how they add value to that. Of course, journalists can add much: reporting, curating, vetting, correcting, illustrating, giving context, writing narrative. And, of course, I’m all in favor of having journalists; I’m teaching them. But what’s hard to face is that the news can go on without them. They’re the ones who need to figure out how to make themselves needed.” Mindy McAdams (Teaching Online Journalism) points us to a speech by David Schlesinger, editor-in-chief for Reuters News, to the Intl. Olympics Committee Press Commission (June 23, 2009). “We in the traditional media … must concentrate our efforts on defining and developing that which really adds value. That means understanding what really can be exclusive and what really is insightful. It means truly exploiting real expertise. It means, to my earlier point, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand. It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them. Working against them would be crazy.” The last few days playing with the iPhone, Twitter, Posterous and YouTube make his last point really hop off the page. I think the long-term success of our news networks –of everyone’s news networks– will depend on understanding and implementing these ideas. Okay, maybe the short-term success.“Skip journalism school”
Republic Tiger Sports: Hyper-local sports
“Taking a break from the news”
Better tool for journalists, iPhone or BlackBerry?
Bomb shelters or spaceships
“The audience is being assembled by the audience”
Short list of must-have tools for journalists
“Reporting is what makes news news”
Exploiting expertise
How to catch the latest news on YouTube
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