new media - 10,000 Words

The Problem With the Old Media and New Media Debate

Karen Fratti — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:07:41 +0000

I am intrigued by the meta story surrounding the University of Toledo sexual harassment and resignation scandal. It’s not the story of leaked text messages that gets me, as gross and tiring as it is. Instead, it’s the old media versus new media argument that has resurfaced because of it. Which is just as tiring.

Both Deadspin and the Toledo Blade were working on breaking a story. On Tuesday, Deadspin posted it at 2:45 a.m., while the toledoblade.com posted at 7:13 a.m. That’s not exactly problematic; but the responses of both organizations was. Dave Murray, managing editor of the Blade, called out Deadspin on Twitter:

The difference between the coverage of this story by The Blade and Deadspin is that [Blade reporter Ryan] Autullo is a professional journalist who has named sources and you can believe what he reports.

Can’t we all just get along? Jim Romenesko’s blog has some insight about why print sport’s journalists may not like sites like Deadspin that, as he says, take sport’s journalism off the field and into the locker room. As we’ve found out, that’s where you break some big stories. It was Deadspin, after all, who shocked the media by breaking the Manti Te’o story. This shouldn’t become a shouting match were new and old media try to prove who is more reliable, who has more worthy sources, or who’s doing it right.

continued…

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5 Digital Skills Every Journalist Should Have

Mona Zhang — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:18:13 +0000

“[Journalists] are increasingly being required to take away from time doing actual reporting to do a million other things,” said Menachem Wecker, education reporter for U.S. News & World Report. Too true, as evidenced by all the talk of the “hamsterization” of journalism. But rather than lamenting the changing tides, you might as well take it in stride and ramp up your resume for the new media world. In the latest Mediabistro feature, seasoned journos give tips on how to acquire the digital skills that all journos must have. Here’s an excerpt:

4. Search Engine Optimization
Sometimes, maximizing page views is all about having the right words and phrases in your story, and Google AdWords reigns supreme for generating the best keywords.

“You enter the crux of what your story is about, search for a related keyword that has high search results and fairly low competition, then make that your keyword and ensure it’s in your title, URL, header and content,” explained Bret Love, a journalist from Atlanta who runs Green Global Travel.

For the full list, read 5 Digital Skills Every Journalist Should Have. [subscription required]

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How to Score a “Journalism-From-the-Future” Job

Mona Zhang — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 14:05:46 +0000

The traditional business models of publishing might be waning, but the shift to new media brings new opportunity to the industry. That’s something Jessica Bennett has taken advantage of. In the latest installment of Mediabistro’s “So What Do You Do?”, the executive editor of Tumblr’s Storyboard talks about breaking past the outdated lessons she learned in j-school, and how journos can score jobs that haven’t even been created yet.

“It’s hard to explain and it sounds very journalism-from-the-future, but it’s finding ways to pull out the really fascinating narratives and trends and issues that are coming out of Tumblr,” she said of her position.

“For example, we did this big piece about how fandom has changed in the Internet Age based around One Direction, the UK boy band, who is huge on Tumblr. It was the kind of feature story you’d read in a newsmagazine, but not so Tumblr-specific that it couldn’t be digestible to a mainstream audience. So, a lot of the ideas I come up with I’m getting from being on Tumblr and monitoring what’s happening on there.

And you can find great social media jobs on our job board. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

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The New Yorker to Tweet Entire Short Story

Mona Zhang — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:47:27 +0000

Long form writing has found all sorts of outlets in our digital world of tweeting and blogging. There are curators like Longform and Pocket, Kindle Singles for novellas and non-fiction exploration, and digital publishers like the Atavist and Byliner. Now, The New Yorker will tweet the entirety of Jennifer Egan’s latest short story—all 8,500 words of it.

The story, called “Black Box,” will be published in next Monday’s magazine. But starting tonight at 8 p.m., @NYerFiction will be tweeting the story every minute for an hour. This hour of story-tweeting will last 10 days, and was born out of the author’s inclination to explore serialized fiction. As Egan writes on The New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, “This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters.” continued…

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What’s The Equivalent Of ‘Ink By The Barrel’ On The Internet?

Meranda Watling — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:46:04 +0000

One of my all-time favorite journalism quotes, often misattributed to Mark Twain, goes something like:

“Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton.”

The actual phrasing, history and correct attribution of this quote, commonly called “Greener’s Law,” are hard to determine. (That page actually has a lot of good info on the history and variations, if you’re into that.)

The idea is generally, it’s a bad idea to argue with someone that wields so much power and influence as a daily newspaper (or at least, as much as the newspaper once did in many communities). Today, however, there are so many different forms of media outlets that the newspaper itself doesn’t hold so much power.

So, while figuring out who first said it and how might not be something we can do in hindsight, I thought — inspired by a blog post on the topic by Peter Lewis — it would be fun to look forward instead and figure out what the new media equivalent would be. I’m sure the 10,000 Words readership has a few fun ideas for the next incarnation of this phrase.

How would you adapt this idea to the modern media?

Here are a few fun suggestions from Lewis, myself and others:

Never pick a fight with someone who buys their bandwidth by the gigabyte. (From Darrell Patrick)
Never pick a fight with someone who gets more than a million uniques a month (From Lewis)
Never pick a fight with someone who has a black belt in SEO techniques (Lewis)
Never pick a fight with someone who has more than 500,000 Twitter followers (Lewis)
Never pick a fight with someone who has a camera and a Twitter following
Never pick a fight with someone who collectively goes by Anonymous
Never pick a fight with someone who knows how to use the Internet better than you
Never pick a fight with someone who isn’t above hacking into your voicemail for a scoop
Never pick a fight with someone who has compromising photos, video or audio you
Never pick a fight with someone who has access to Google to prove you wrong immediately

Send in your suggestions and I can append them to this list.

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$20K grants available for female-driven digital journalism start-ups

Meranda Watling — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:00:20 +0000

Journalist? Check.

Female? Check.

Great new idea for using digital media to deliver journalism? If you can check yes here too, this opportunity is for you.

The International Women’s Media Foundation is offering its second round of three $20,000 grants in its Women Entrepreneurs in the Digital News Frontier program. The first awards, meant to encourage females to expand their role in the digital news media landscape by becoming entrepreneurs, were made in 2011. It’s only open to U.S.-based women journalists (full-time, part-time or freelance).

In addition to funding to get the ideas off the ground, the organization will offer coaching and mentoring from leading digital news media experts to help their start-ups succeed.

The deadline to apply is March 2, and the group will notify winners in April. That gives you just shy of a month to pull the perfect pitch together. This could be your chance to turn your “if only” idea into a “finally” finished product. Stuck for ideas? Check out what the 2011 winners worked on:

Jeanne Pinder — Clearhealthcosts.com, a site that aims to bring a clearer picture of the cloudy world of healthcare pricing to the masses in a consumer friendly format. More background.
Maria Balinska — Latitude News explores how Americans are connected to international events and helps them understand how the U.S. itself fits into the global news picture. More background.
Lissa Harris and Julia Reischel — NewsShed is a spin-off of the founders’ Watershed, which delivers original reporting to the rural Catskills “news desert.” The NewsShed twist is that it launches only-only and self-sustaining news sites in some of these under-covered and under-served communities. More background.

Inspired yet? Read the FAQ and find the application on the IWMF website.

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Journo Ipsum: Funny New-Media Inspired Filler Text

Meranda Watling — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:13:34 +0000

It’s the Friday before a long holiday weekend (at least here in the U.S.). So I thought I’d pass along what’s amusing me at this hour as a service to folks planning to re-design their sites over the three-day weekend, or to those who just need some amusement to help make it through the last hour of work today (at least on the East Coast).

So you’ve probably heard of Lorem Ipsum, the standard filler text designers plop on a page when they lay it out. It’s Latin and it’s meaningless, which makes it great (and way less embarrassing than fake headlines someone doesn’t catch before they publish).

Nieman Media Lab has a new take on the filler text: Journo Ipsum. It’s not Latin, but it’s almost meaningless — and absolutely hilarious. Every time you refresh the page, you get a new serving of hilarity. To demonstrate, here’s the first paragraph I was served:

hyperlocal libel lawyer audience atomization overcome Alberto Ibarguen linking Android Like button, copyboy layoffs perfect for starting a campfire AP What Would Google Do MinnPost put the paper to bed, Gannett natural-born blogger Innovator’s Dilemma gotta grok it before you rock it content farm. hyperlocal Gannett Facebook WaPo Pulse meme innovation semipermeable retweet, Kindle Single Twitter topples dictators iPad app fourth estate reporting net neutrality hot news doctrine attracting young readers Alberto Ibarguen, discuss we need a Nate Silver if the news is that important, it’ll find me crowdsourcing community stupid commenters The Daily.

It’s like a Twitter, Romensko and an SEO e-book smoothie. It’s way more entertaining than plain old Latin dummy text.

You can read more about the project at the Nieman Lab blog. And let us know the funniest line it produces for you in the ~~tabloid dead trees anonymity nut graf Django, newspaper curmudgeon Mozilla reality-based stupid~~ comments or on Twitter @10000words using the hashtag #journoipsum.

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