The Evolving Newsroom

Bernstein: no golden age of journalism

Mark Twain on what it’s like to be interviewed

From a PBS blog post, via givemesomethingtoread.com, which pulls out great stuff bookmarked for later reading on Instapaper (and which I came across in a Twitter link from @stkonrath), comes a lovely piece Mark Twain wrote (and probably didn’t finish) about what it’s like to be interviewed. “Concerning the ‘Interview.’” No one likes to be [...]

Our brains, digital media and journalism

From the Nieman report The Digital Landscape: What’s Next for News? comes a few thoughts about our brains, the way we respond to digital media and what that might mean for journalism. Ooh, shiny shiny Russell Poldrack, a professor of psychology and neurobiology and director of the Imaging Research Center at the University of Texas [...]

Talks on future of news in NZ + live storytelling

The future of journalism in New Zealand There’s a lunchtime series of talks coming up about the future of ‘serious journalism’ in New Zealand that looks interesting. Organised by the University of Auckland, the talks will run each Tuesday lunchtime (1pm) from July 20 to August 24 at the Maidment Theatre in Auckland. The topics [...]

The tyranny of the ‘daily 10 per cent’

I reckon I read 10 to 15 per cent of what a news org produces on a given day; more on some days, less on others, and some days none at all. So my perception of ‘the news’ as a whole is based on this small amount I see of what the world’s news orgs [...]

Young journalists, self-censorship & other notes

A few weeks back I attended an International Media Conference in Hong Kong along with hundreds of journalists from a staggering array of Asia-Pacific countries including Myanmar, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, China, US, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, Singapore and Nepal. I travelled to the conference with financial support from the Asia NZ Foundation, which aims to [...]

Time spent vs ad spend ‘out of whack’

There are a few interesting numbers in this slide presentation on internet trends made at a marketing conference in New York by Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker. (Links to a pdf download.) She points to big growth in mobile and the iPad being one of the fastest growing ‘new consumer computing devices’ ever. This one caught [...]

New journalism course, new students, new job

For the past few months I’ve been working to make the National Diploma in Journalism, a New Zealand industry standard qualification, available for online study through Wintec. It’s a big project which has demanded a lot of work by a core group of people and which has also involved a lot of imagining – how [...]

Why I’ve launched allaboutthestory.com #1

I wrote a few weeks ago to say that I was launching an online marketplace for news features and other stories. It’s called All About The Story, it’s in beta and it’s off to a great start. I said I’d write more about why we’re doing it and the people behind it. I can’t fit [...]

Got any stories to sell over the silly season?

I’m launching an online marketplace shortly where you can sell and buy news features, profiles, reviews and other stories. It’s called All About The Story and the idea is to use the web to make it easier for writers to sell their stories, test the market for new kinds of storytelling, and to make it [...]