Clay Shirky does a nice job exploring the biggest challenge currently facing news companies: that for the most part they are populated with people unaware of how profoundly the internet changes everything. Most people working in news organisations think their company will continue in roughly the same form but will publish a website as well as a newspaper. Or will continue in the same form and publish a website and a mobile site and to social media sites as well as a newspaper. Or will continue in the same form and publish everywhere online and to a Kindle instead of a newspaper.
From the Nieman Reports published by Harvard comes a piece written by Edward Roussel, the digital editor at Telegraph Media Group in London who manages telegraph.co.uk and was a prime mover in the Telegraph’s integrated newsroom project. It’s a worthwhile read as these excerpts demonstrate: Newspapers still tend to define themselves by their paper rather [...]
Erik Ulken has posted a must-read top 10 list of lessons learned while setting up the data desk in the LA Times newsroom.The data desk's job is to take detailed information that's dreary to read in text or table form and make it useful by presenting it in compelling and interactive formats. A well-known example is the LA Time's Homicide Map.
I enjoyed this rant from music blog The Lefsetz Letter which has a go at newspaper executives who are "online ignorant, even if they can speak the language, they’ve got no insight, because they don’t utilize the damn thing". He starts by noting how cross newspaper executives are with the likes of TradeMe and CraigsList for stealing their lucrative classified ads (Fairfax bought TradeMe to get them back again, although whether they're properly leveraging the deal is another story).
Anecdotally, I have been hearing more about reporters putting up their hands to go over to the digital desk, which is heartening, and not a bit surprising given the doom hanging over the future of print and the fact that online is so much fun.
Love this post from journalism teacher Mindy McAdams about throwing out the rulebook one day a month, forgetting everything you know about filling newspaper pages, and getting the whole staff engaged in some solid, local storytelling by all formats possible.
Monday, March 16, 2009
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