news on the news

After hiring a new digital editor, New York Daily News is planning to expand its online presence, reports Capital New York. Ted Young, who was the former editor of the Daily Mail’s website, was hired to oversee a new digital business strategy, which plans to expand into a national news site called Daily News America.

The Daily News has had much success in the digital arena lately. It has the third highest digital circulation in the country (after only The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal), and is beating its rival New York Post in terms of digital presence—in April, the Daily News had 10.2 million unique visitors, compared to the Post’s 6.6 million. The Post recently hired Remy Stern as a digital consultant, hoping to give more attention to its digital strategy, while the Daily News hopes to keep its lead in the digital realm with its click friendly slideshows and celebrity gossip headlines.

Author and journalist Susan Orlean (left) has written two nonfiction pieces that have been turned into films. She’ll discuss her new book, Rin Tin Tin, in Mediabistro’s first online Literary Festival & Workshops starting July 16. Other speakers include Rebecca Skloot, Jason Boog, and Jason Allen Ashlock. Register now.

Much is made about how social media has changed newsrooms, and I’m one of those people who talks a lot about it.

But for all of that talk, there comes a point where you need to decide what action to take, if any.

Newsrooms today are bombarded with lists of best practice, how-to’s and draconian Do This Or You Will Perish blogs and articles.

Do you go with the herd, or do you hold your own and keep moving forward the best way you know how?

I’d really like to hear from some of our readers who are “on the ground” as a part of, or observing, their newsroom’s transformation and/or adoption of social media and online communities.

Not everyone is going to have an easy time of it, but there is certainly opportunity to learn from each other’s experiences.

If you have something to share,  please chime in with a comment below about the horror stories, or the tales of greatness at the news organization you work at.

Research intern Kate Pape at NPR dug into some data from GfK MRI and was surprised to find that newspaper readership amongst young people is higher than expected—more than half of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper (in paper form) one to 14 times a month. She wrote, “Millennials keep pace with total US adults until it comes to comparing the number of heavy readers,” which is when adults outpace millennials by almost a half. However, young people have always read the newspaper less, even before people carried the Internet around in their pockets. As Christopher Sopher shows in his report on young people and the news, older Americans’ news readership declined by 29 percent since 1972, while that of young people declined by 16 percent. Read more

If you’re in the news business, it’s important to stay informed about what your fellow reporters (sometimes known as competitors) are writing and publishing. This can be hard to do if you aren’t scanning different websites constantly or glued to Twitter and Facebook.

Newsle, a relatively new web app, now lets you easily follow specific journalists and filter stories they write into a “Journalist” feed.

A new project out of American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, called Investigating Power, is touting itself as the first comprehensive visual history of America’s most significant reporting of the last 50 years.

The website features a rich collection of video interviews with journalists like Christiane Amanpour, Bob Woodward,  Carl Bernstein,  Ben Bradlee,  Bill Kovach and many more. You can filter down to timelines by “Moments of Truth” — McCarthyism, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, Corporate Power and Post-9/11.

According to the Investigating Power website, the number of entries for the Pulitzer Prize in the Gold Medal public service category dropped 43 percent from 1985 to 2010. In roughly the same timeframe, the number of public relations specialists doubled.  Thus, it’s a critical time to reflect on the powerful journalism that has created change:

At this critical juncture in the history of American journalism, as the news media and the nature and extent of original reporting itself undergo a very difficult transformation, we must reflect on the inherent, incalculable value of original, independent reporting in our nation and in the world. Facts are and must be the coin of the realm in a democracy, for government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” to quote President Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, requires and assumes to some extent an informed citizenry.
– ᔥ Investigating Power

They plan to grow the collection over the next decade. Explore the full project here.