My industry
After announcing I took a step away from freelancing, a legal aide with aspirations of a cushy freelance career shot me an e-mail.
“Can people still even start a freelance career?”
I did it for just a year and did so out of college, so I don’t pretend to be any sort of expert. Yet, as writing — like publishing — as a commodity falls in value (and the prices that come with them), I sure feel like it’s worth making clear my experience.
I shared the rough curriculum I had established for working with a journalism club at a neighborhood school before my time there was cut short.
Just a week after I took a full-time job and told the club’s adviser that I’d have to take a bit of a sabbatical from my time there, I wanted to give a primer to have a conversation about the basics of journalism with her students.
In fewer than ten minutes, I tried to bottle an entire journalism degree into five bullet points. Clearly I missed plenty.
Below, see what I shared. Let me know what giant holes these high school kids will have in their foundation because of my failures!
Continue reading The basics of a news story in five bullet points and five minutes
We may lose someday newspapers in their traditional form, but we’re seeing a flourishing of alternatives fill those lost pieces of pie.
Some are more skeptical of how quickly we’ll be able to bring back the creation of that news, but through variation, experimentation and loyalty, it my well be done.
I very much see a future of journalism handled by an endless collection of small niche, targeted news sites, big investigative work done by nonprofits and foundation-funded, independents, in addition to a handful of big news organizations finding their own niche — the NPR network and modified newspaper businesses like the New York Times owning international, the Wall Street Journal owning business (though they’re competing), USA Today and the Washington Post focusing on the national.
Below, I offer a hastily put together, rough breakdown of that.
Poynter curated a list of 100 things a journalist should never do.
As these things tend to do, it became a rambling collections of do’s and don’ts, but it was interesting nonetheless. Ten stuck with me as among the most important.
Updated @ 1:50 p.m. 11/07/10 Someone is doing a better job of keeping this up to date, so check that out.
*Updated @ 9:36 a.m. 12/23/09 **Many thanks to Jess Durkin for others.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that a big portion of the future of news will be this hyperlocal movement that continues to dominate the conversation and has grown in focus for many years.
So, I’m surprised to say I haven’t been able to find is a comprehensive list of already existing products. This isn’t going to be that list, but let’s give it a start. Help me highlight the existing, active hyperlocal news sites worth following.
Read my definition of What is hyperlocal news?
I’m not one for posting video clips on this site, nor am I about doing so more than two months late.
But then, by way of the Nieman Journalism Lab, I only now came across a lecture New York University new media professor and internet intellectual Clay Shirky gave to the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy back in September.
Watch video below and be reminded why Shirky — who doesn’t necessarily have any traditional line-item journalism resume builders — gets a seat at the serious discussion of where news is going.
Continue reading Clay Shirky: ‘a bad thing is going to happen’ to journalism
Community newspapers in Philadelphia remain wary of the Web, if any stock is to be paid to a morning panel from a journalism innovation conference held this month at Temple University.
Their thoughts just might be relevant to community-focused news gathers across the country.
Hosted by Temple’s journalism department, the Philadelphia Initiative for Journalistic Innovation was a day’s worth of smaller sessions focusing far less about the plight of big newspapers and more about smaller, more entrepreneurial ventures. Yes, the future of news just might be a series of conferences about the future of news, but I was happy to see a greater focus on the business side of the industry.
With the help of supportive chair Andy Mendelson, Temple journalism professor George Miller put together one of the first future of news conferences I’ve seen that tried to really pay attention to sustainability through profit. There’s incredible value in that, so I was thrilled to be a part of it.
Along with my two fellow co-founders of Technically Philly, I presented twice a session called ‘Be a Publisher Now’ on free tools that news-organizations and bloggers could make use of to create become more efficient and better prepared. See our presentation slides here.
I also got the opportunity to sit in on a session focused how community newspapers were dealing with the 21st-century’s dramatic paradigm shift in news-gathering. That’s where I was left more than a little puzzled.
Continue reading Community newspapers: a panel and their use of the Web at PhIJI
Small Business Social Media Mentoring Tele-class | Nov. 23, 2009
How to take your blog to the next level with more sophisticated, low cost features like web video, photo slideshows, free Google apps, social media integration and ways to have fun with it while jamming some traffic to your site. This is how you create a place for customers, clients and friends to know what you’re offering, how to get it, why they need it and make it look good for low cost. [Description here]
You can also download this as a PDF here.
E. Learn to hug RSS
Is distribution king, not content?
That’s the question posed here by Alana G.
Consider a simplified 2×2 matrix: content is either good or bad and distribution is either good or bad. Bad content with bad distribution is going nowhere. Good content with good distribution is in the best position to succeed. But there’s a lot of sports content that lives in the other two quadrants. There are distribution resources being wasted on bad content, and there are plenty of small bloggers making good content with bad distribution. This last category of unseen content may be even better quality than some of the content with good distribution, but this content will not float to the top on its own. [Source]
I like this 2X2 model of bad/good content and bad/good distribution.
As these panels tend to go these days, really no new ground was covered, but it’s hard to argue with getting accomplished people in a room to talk about it.
Technically Philly partnered with Young Involved Philadelphia this past Thursday to host a panel discussion on the Future of News.
A heavy reliance on foundation funding, a step into telecom, donation and membership programs and other methods that have been argued and re-argued all made brief appearances in last night’s 90-minute event held in a small civic space at the headquarters of WHYY.
Though the sentiment wasn’t hearkened on enough for perhaps the taste of those more obsessively engaged in the conversation, the wider perspective was brought to light.
“It’s really what all of us are doing,” said Sandra Shea, the editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Daily News.
