Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? The New York Times sure does, and the venerable publication is making the most of it with their newest blog, Times Haiku. The blog itself is actually a bot, combing through all of the Times‘s articles from the day and putting them together in neat little haiku packages — naturally displaying in the standard five-seven-five syllable set the poem requires.

“We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we’ve added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times,” writes Senior Software Architect and Times hacker Jacob Harris.

Scrolling through the blog, which is powered by Tumblr, one can easily snicker at the randomness of it all — evoking the odd pleasure of other bots like the popular @horse_ebooks, which combs through free ebooks online and takes out snippets of the words. But Harris, who actually reverse-engineered @horse_ebooks to understand the nature of bots, has a little bit more sophistication up his sleeve in the form of careful curation by the Times‘ own journalists, who comb through the bot’s results to find the most interesting poems. Read more

There’s a lot of pressure on journalists and news organizations to be everywhere, not just when it comes to feet on the ground reporting but also when it comes to tweets, pins, posts, etc. on all form of social media.

We’ve even encouraged the trend with tips to maximize your presence on everything from Google+ to Pinterest. Which is why this Pew Internet & American Life Project’s study about how photos and videos are shared socially caught my eye.

Their findings shed some interesting light on how many (or few) people are actually using these various networks. (This wasn’t the focus of the study but looked interesting, so I created this graph.)

Primarily, their questions were about how many adults post photos/videos online and how many share them, and whether the media they post/share was their original creation or that of someone else. Nearly half — 46 percent — of the online adult population surveyed indicated they post original photos, while 41 percent share photos they’ve found online on social networks. Overall, their study found that 56 percent of Internet users do at least one of those activities, posting their creations or sharing someone else’s. News organizations rely on both: The eye-witness videos from the scene of the event and the “curators” who share the organization’s videos and photos so other online users can find it.
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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.

Read more at So What Do You Do, Jessica Bennett, Executive Editor of Tumblr’s Storyboard?

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

Here’s a quick mid-week laugh for any reporter who has ever found themselves stuck covering a three-hour meeting with other things on their mind, combined with zero cell phone reception and several deadlines looming.

Go visit the News Cat Gifs!, the latest animated gif Tumblr to take on the myriad of first-world problems journalists battle daily.

My personal favorites of the ones posted so far:

• When someone asks me to take their name off the police blotter
• When I monitor Twitter
• When news breaks

  What journalistic problem would you like to see depicted?

It’s that time of year again where newsrooms across the country are inundated with summer interns.

The Washington Post is taking a light hearted approach to summer interns with a fun feature called “Have you seen THAT intern?” where you can turn your questionable intern experiences into a meme.

Make no mistake about it, interns are great. I’ve been an intern and remember how strange it can be to jump into an office environment where you are temporary. I have also had interns who rocked.

Unfortunately, there is always THAT intern. You know who I am talking about. And Jenna Johnson of The Washington Post definitely knows about iffy interns. She describes it ever so aptly:

With thousands of college students once again arriving in Washington for summer internships, everyone who lives here has resumed making fun of those interns. It’s just so easy to do.

Yes, it’s often cruel and unfair. And, yes, most interns are dedicated workers who contribute so much to our city. But for every handful of amazing interns, there’s THAT intern.

As in, the intern who wears flip-flops to work. Or the one who hooks up a lot. Or who is always late. Or who stands on the left.

For the past two years, Johnson has documented various types of intern blunders in a hilarious series of columns called “That Intern” on the paper’s Campus Overload blog. This year, Johnson has decided to “quasi-retire” from writing the feature but she wants readers to pick up the torch. Read more