July 2011
2 posts
The axis of Corleone-Bluth →
Graphic mashup via @stevaker.
On Chattarati's third birthday →
In many ways, I’ve wanted to write elements of this piece for a while. Here are two excerpts that stood out to my friend and colleague, Daniel Ryan:
Media is changing, because the tools to produce it and distribute it are changing. More importantly, the way it’s being consumed is bringing about that change at a very rapid rate. Three years ago, the landscape looked much different than...
June 2011
6 posts
Saturday →
Blogging. It’s serious business.
Jarvis on Jarvis →
Once again, I’m not getting rid of the story, not replacing it or the storyteller. I’m arguing that articles are precious, more precious than ever, and need to add value or we can’t afford to waste our time on them. I’m saying that the journalist takes on new roles and more tasks. But, yes, if as a journalist you see yourself only as a storyteller, a maker of articles, your horizon just got...
Using Twitter as an editor →
When you tweet a story with #muckreads, it goes into a queue that ProPublica editors weed through to find (and link out to) good investigative journalism. Clever.
Community, the business model →
This isn’t a brilliant new insight. We have long known communities are powerful and that local media thrive when they bring together and serve their community. Somehow though when it comes to the challenge of online media, we forget this. We search for new business models that involve paywalls, more video, the iPad, and wealthy donors, while the most powerful emerging business driver in...
Using Twitter as a database →
Fascinating.
A way forward for RSS →
The software’s job is to bring people articles that they’d like, or need, to read. Think of the app as a reader, not as an RSS reader strictly. (How the articles come in is not important. RSS will still play a major role, but it should be invisible to everyone except those geeks who get it.)
The user interface has to evolve to be much less email-like, and everything has to get way...
March 2011
6 posts
Fleet Foxes: 'Helplessness Blues' →
I can’t help but think of Bookends every time this comes on the radio. Such a great song.
First person view of mountain biker in urban Chile →
In a suit, no less.
Jason Fried on making money →
I did a double take when I first saw the SEO-friendly headline. Regardless, great read by one of the founders of 37signals.
What if? →
The Scoop:
The simple answer is that APIs are an extension of what reporters do every day: ask questions. The difference is that instead of forcing reporters to gather data from multiple sources, format it to fit your local database needs and then update that database when new releases are available, APIs allow reporters to query live data from all over the Web. If you have experience working...
With legal notices, maintenance of public trust is...
I don’t think I’ve ever received more e-mails or private messages about a story in Chattanooga’s newspaper as I have this week regarding a recent column by J. Todd Foster, executive editor of the Times Free Press, on the subject of legal notices.
Much of the correspondence was negative toward the newspaper editor’s somewhat scathing stance on why local governments should...
Nieman highlights Chattarati education project →
Nieman Journalism Lab recently ran a story on a Chattarati project being headed up by Aaron Collier and DJ Trischler. The project, tentatively dubbed Visual Report Card, dives into the data that Tennessee uses to measure local school performance and, through infographics and analysis, puts an easy-to-understand spin on how Hamilton County schools are really performing.
From Nieman Journalism...
February 2011
4 posts
Go long and take your time →
Jason Fry:
Reporters of all stripes are insanely competitive: It’s what makes them good, it’s fun (or at least supplies the adrenaline we all crave, which isn’t always the same thing), and of course it’s the way news organizations keep score. But those news organizations need to realize the game has changed. Being first with commodity news no longer registers with readers — and readers,...
Typing to zero →
David Carr:
The Huffington Post, social networks and traditional media may all seem like different animals, but as advertising, the mother’s milk of all media, flows toward social and amateur media, low-cost and no-cost content is becoming the norm.
For those of us who make a living typing, it’s all very scary, of course. It’s less about the diminution of authority and expertise, although there...
Business as usual at Huffington Post →
Huffington Post management in an e-mail to contributors:
Together, our companies will have a combined base of 117 million unique U.S. visitors a month — and 250 million around the world — so your posts will have an even bigger impact on the national and global conversation. That’s the only real change you’ll notice — more people reading what you wrote.
Dan Gilmour responds:
It’s...
AOL, Huffington Post strike deal →
The New York Times:
The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock.
It always struck me as odd that the pro-labor publication was built on the backs of so many unpaid writers.
January 2011
7 posts
How the Guardian's data blog handled WikiLeaks →
Simon Rogers concludes:
Sometimes people talk about the internet killing journalism. The Wikileaks story was a combination of the two: traditional journalistic skills and the power of the technology, harnessed to tell an amazing story. In future, data journalism may not seem amazing and new; for now it is. The world has changed and it is data that has changed it.
The Guardian also has a video...
The art of good writing →
Fish’s aim is to offer a guide to sentence craft and appreciation that is both deeper and more democratic. What, at base, is a sentence? he asks, and then goes on to argue that the standard answer based in parts of speech and rules of grammar teaches students “nothing about how to write”. Instead, we should be examining the “logical relationships” within different sentence forms to see how they...
Bill Keller on WikiLeaks →
Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times:
Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source. I will not say “a source, pure and simple,” because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take...
Get a grip on data →
Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian’s data blog, has some tips for data journalism. The first section deals primarily with obtaining raw data in the U.K., though there’s some useful tips for scraping PDFs in there. (We hate them in the U.S. too.) The rest of the article lists some handy-looking Excel functions I’d like to try.
Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Rogers last...
The Coenfographic →
Muller:
I decided to try my hand at mapping out the Coen filmography and map out the most prevailing actors throughout the years by film (each colour-coded) featuring the correct movie logo/brand and as an added extra some sideline award stats — and to top it off I created a custom typeface for the heading.
Recurring players Frances McDormand and George Clooney immediately come to mind, but...
A manifesto for the simple scribe →
6. And here is another thing to remember every time you sit down at the keyboard: a little sign that says “Nobody has to read this crap.”
If I had 25 offices, a different commandment would hang in each one.
Throwing in the towel
Chicago Business:
There are about 31 million blogs in the United States, a number expected to swell to 34 million by the end of this year. But Mr. Harbison is part of a small but growing trend of blog quitters. Last year, the number of blogging teens and adults ages 18 to 33 declined, in the first reported drop in blogging, according to Pew Research Center data.
Some have simply switched to...
May 2010
3 posts
Lewis Black: Glenn Beck and Nazis →
Lewis Black:
In one paragraph, Glenn Beck tied one of the most positive words in the English language to Hitler’s genocide. It’s six degrees of Kevin Bacon, except there’s just one degree, and Kevin Bacon is Hitler.
How to save the news →
James Fallows:
Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it …
Words to write by →
Elements of Style, No. 9:
Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic. If the subject on which you are writing is of slight extent, or if you intend to treat it very briefly, there may be no need of subdividing it into topics. Thus a brief description, a brief summary of a literary work, a brief account of a single incident, a narrative merely outlining an action, the...