Greg Mitchell, author of the profile:

Sullivan, on the other hand [compared to previous public editors], is able to cover so much, so often, because unlike her predecessors, she has used her blog at the paper’s main website regularly—making good on one of her first promises to readers after taking the job.

Jay Rosen:

What strikes me is that she’s determined to participate in the online conversation about the Times and its brand of journalism. The previous public editors did not see this as important. One result: she is on top of things a lot more quickly.

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Arthur Brisbane

The new public editor praises some pieces that have challenged the validity of reports, thanks Jay Rosen for making fact-checking a big issue, and then — well, then she takes a tiny jab at Brisbane:

Whatever the conclusions, whatever the effectiveness, of challenging facts, the idea that we have to debate the necessity of doing so strikes me as absurd.

Right on.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Rosen breaks journalism down to four ideas:

1. The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be.
2. The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere.
3. The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people.
4. Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us.

We especially like idea number four, and always have. The thought that reporters and others are unbiased is ridiculous, and as Rosen explains, leads to mistrust among the public:

The problem is equating trustworthiness with the prohibition on taking sides, when the actual result may be exasperation with he said, she said, rage at the helplessness that ‘leaving it there’ creates, and mistrust of the formulaic ways in which journalists try to advertise their even-handedness.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Fallows basically makes the case that Denton and Gawker are the future of media, and that though their way might seem shocking now, it’s important to realize the benefits of a rapidly changing media landscape.

The problem people have with embracing Gawker is that it doesn’t neccesarily provide real news, but that’s something that even Denton admits:

In my first ‘interview’ with him for this story, conducted over the course of nearly an hour through an instant-message exchange, he said that a market-minded approach like his would solve the business problem of journalism—but only for ‘a certain kind of journalism.’ It worked perfectly, he said, for topics like those his sites covered: gossip, technology, sex talk, and so on. And then, as an aside: ‘But not the worthy topics. Nobody wants to eat the boring vegetables. Nor does anyone want to pay [via advertising] to encourage people to eat their vegetables.’

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Rosen thinks that journalists should disclose their biases because it would negate something he calls “the view from nowhere.” Folkenflik explains:

That phrase — ‘the view from nowhere’ — is what Rosen calls the media’s true ideology: not exactly on the right, and not exactly on the left. It is, he says, the way news organizations falsely advertise that they can be trusted because they don’t have any dog in the fight.

Most people already know that the media is biased [insert FishbowlNY Fox News joke #374 here] so Rosen makes a good point here. Why not just do away with all the posturing – like NBC scolding Keith Olbermann as if no one knew what his political leanings were already – and just tell it like it is? As Rosen says, the old method isn’t working anyway:

Removing all bias from their reports is something that professional journalists actually aren’t very good at. They shouldn’t say that they can do this, because it’s very clear to most of the people on the receiving end that they fail at this all the time.

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NYU professor and media expert Jay Rosen explain the aims of this project as well as what, exactly, an “explainer” might be:

An explainer is a work of journalism, but it doesn’t provide the latest news or update you on a story. It addresses a gap in your understanding: the lack of essential background knowledge. We wanted to work with the journalists at ProPublica on this problem because they investigate complicated stories and share what they’ve learned with other journalists. It seemed like a perfect match.

In case it’s still not quite clear, here’s an example: “An explainer for the Irish debt crisis would make clear why a weakness in one country’s banks could threaten the European financial system and possibly the global recovery. A different kind of explainer might show how Medicare billing is designed to work and where the opportunities for fraud lie.”

So it’s something like taking a news item beyond a headline to show cause, consequences and interconnected issues. The “Building a Better Explainer” project will run through the remainder of this 2010-11 academic year.

Goals for the project are as follows:

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The study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, funded by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, found that in Baltimore alone, only one-third of the number of stories were being produced from the same number of outlets in 1991. One would hope that with digital media making print obsolete (or at least, inconvenient and expensive), that blogs and online publications would pick up the slack, but unfortunately that’s not the case either:

“Digital-only outlets accounted for just 4 percent of original pieces of reporting: One report came from a local blog, and the other was breaking news disseminated by a police Twitter feed.”

This would concur with an idea floated during the Jay Rosen/Clay Shirky discussion at NYU last month: that the Internet was never meant to replace traditional journalistic sources, but to work as a supplement. If we decry print journalism completely, we’ll not only be losing a valuable resource of news, but nearly all of our original information-gathering stream. Publications as they exist on the Internet now simply do not have the money or man-power to incite long-term, investigative reports or keep journalists embedded overseas the way mainstream outlets can.

Read More: Most original news reporting comes from traditional sources, study finds –Los Angeles Times

Previously: NYU Media Professors Discuss Future Of Media By Looking Back

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Other Web sites like those belonging to The Financial Times have embarked on a plan that would eventually allow users to purchase individual articles for a small fee, much like buying a song from iTunes for 99 cents instead of the whole album for $10.

Media analysts don’t necessarily agree that bringing down the price of content (even if it costs customers more money in the long run) will make potential readers take out their wallets. Jay Rosen New York University journalism professor, Bryan Keefer of The Daily Beast and Josh Benton of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab both see the chink in pay walls’ armor as being that the majority of people just won’t pay for content in its current state, period. (Rosen actually predicted the paradoxical idea of paid-for “exclusivity” appealing to link-obsessed readers in a 2005 article for The Huffington Post.) So the people already paying for subscriptions will continue to pay, and the rest won’t be typing in their credit card information, no matter how small the fee is.

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While the topic may have officially been “New Media’s Present and Future,” the conversation quickly moved into the past: specifically delving into five years ago, which Shirky said most people mistakenly refer to as the Golden Era of Journalism — before the Internet came and took all the money away. Five years ago, Shirky stated, newspapers were losing readership left and right, but their revenue was booming. Ironically, now most newspapers actually have more readers due to their Web sites, but the money has dried up.

While most news orgs would have liked to take that conversation in the direction of how to get that money back, Shirky and Rosen were more interested in how the Internet plays into the public’s perception of the mainstream media.

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The panel was moderated by BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine, and featured (in photo from left to right) “rogue girl blogger” Maegan Carberry, NYU professor Jay Rosen, Mediaite.com Editor at Large Rachel Sklar and NewJerseyNewsroom.com‘s Matt Romanoski.

Moderator Fine started the panel off with some scary statics — comparing the amount of ad sales money generated by the New York Times versus the Huffington Post. The Times made over $1 billion in ad revenue last year. he said. How can an online media company compete with that?

Some suggestions were tossed around, including asking readers to pay for content. Sklar suggested that media companies should make it easy for readers to purchase access to information, replicating the “buy” button on Amazon.com or iTunes that is connected to saved credit card information. She also suggested charging for “freemium” or extra content, and said she wouldn’t mind paying a few dollars a month to use Twitter, Flickr or YouTube.

“I wouldn’t mind paying for Twitter because they I would own my Tweets if anything ever went wrong,” she said.

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We suspect this panel, moderated by BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine, will be similar to last week’s Reuters <a href="panel or this week’s Gotham Media panel about the media in crisis. However, while Reuters and Gotham Media offered insight from “old media” editors like Lawrence Ingrassia from The New York Times, the Financial Times‘ Chrystia Freeland and Andrew Edgecliff-Johnson and Air America‘s Bennett Zier, next week’s panel will have a distinctive point of view from panelists with vast online experience including NYU journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen, Mediaite.com Editor at Large Rachel Sklar, blogger Maeghan Carberry and former Star-Ledger staffer Matt Romanoski, who helped found NewJerseyNewsroom.com.

In the hopes of learning a little bit more about what this panel will focus on, we picked moderator Fine’s brain for a bit. “There isn’t an answer,” Fine said of the ever elusive online business model question for media companies. “But if you can get people to pay for something you’re in good shape.”

Expect panelists to wrestle with this conundrum, offer suggestions and advice and describe their own experiences. It all goes down July 16.

(Photo via flickr)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Rosen said he and his fellow professors are still figuring out how new media and social media fits into their J-school curriculum, but he said acknowledging its role in the future of the field is imperative. “Everybody who pays attention in events of journalism knows that the world of the press is undergoing a dramatic transformation,” he said. “It’s not just that journalism is moving to the Web…really the entire architecture of the press is falling apart. So we have to teach about this as a matter of survival.”

In addition to teaching the “rise of the Web,” Rosen said he also teaches blogging and social media skills — although he finds that the faculty sometimes has as much to learn as the students. Students, he said, come into NYU with knowledge of the Web as casual users, but are not prepared to use it professionally.

“Anybody who uses the web for their livelihood has to understand it as a system very well,” he said. “They understand the Web as an environment and they are able to communicate expertly on it.”

Rosen’s full interview with Reinhard after the jump

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Yesterday, our colleagues at WebNewser caught up with #cnnfail, noting that NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen had asked Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz, who also hosts CNN show “Reliable Sources,” to include #cnnfail in his column today.

Although Kurtz discussed the legitimacy of Twitter and whether journalists are “going overboard” with it on his show yesterday and in his column today, he completely ignored the protests taking place on the social network against the news network where he works. On Kurtz’s show, CNN’s Rick Sanchez mentioned that Twitter had helped him to more effectively cover happenings in Iran — a perfect opening for them to discuss #cnnfail.

“Last night, when…I started Twittering about what was going on in Iran, I learned as much about the situation in Iran as I would have watching frankly my network, the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post combined,” Sanchez said.

Kurtz’s thoughts on the issue would have been much more timely if he had discussed #cnnfail and how Twitter had become a media watchdog in this instance. Instead, in his column he talked about celebrity Twitters, and quoted actress Mariel Hemingway. Did he write his column weeks ago and never look at it again? We think he missed the boat on this one.

What do you think? How do you feel about the coverage of Iran by the news networks? Do you think Kurtz should have discussed #cnnfail?

Watch the Twitter segment from “Reliable Sources” after the jump

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

According to the release, the venture will “produce a broad range of investigative journalism created by both staff reporters and freelance writers, with a focus on working with the many experienced reporters and writers impacted by the economic contraction.” The project has a $1.75 million budget, and is being funded by The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and will be headed by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project, which will be folded into the Investigative Fund. Jay Rosen will serve as a senior advisor.

Says Arianna: “The importance of investigative journalism cannot be overstated — especially during our tumultuous times — and we are delighted to be creating an initiative whose goal is to produce stories that will have a real impact both nationally and locally.” She gives more details here. And for those of you wondering, Jay Rosen seems to suggest in his Twitter that unlike HuffPo’s bloggers the reporters involved in this venture will be paid. Full release is after the jump.

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Armed with Blackberries, cameras, and computers, the Twitterati and those seeking to break in flocked to last night’s Journalism and Social Media Panel at Tribeca Cinemas. Media types in the audience at the mediabistro.com-hosted event listened to journalists discuss that 140-character wonder of new media, Twitter. An informal audience poll showed that most were familiar with the microblogging platform, while nearly half were registered on the site. The event’s golden child remained at the heart of the conversation as panelists explored its current uses and its future practices. “Twitter is really the conversation that never ends,” said Andy Carvin (@acarvin)of NPR, who like fellow panelist Rachel Sklar (@rachelsklar) of Abrams Research and The Daily Beast, even managed to Twitter from the stage while discussing the medium.

The conversation kicked off with PressThink’s Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) citing Marx’s definition of revolution in reference to social media: “The means of production have changed hands in publication… It’s an open source revolution,” he said. Continuing the metaphor, Sklar quipped, “Sometimes revolutions swing a little too far,” and the panel concurred, citing mob mentality and a lack of respect for production as some social media trouble spots.

Echoing the question reverberating around conference tables across the country, the evening’s big x-factor was how to monetize the social media mechanism to bring in cash. Originally directed at Rosen, the question engendered a delayed response. His silence made people brace themselves for his answer. “Well, this is the question people ask,” he joked, to uncomfortable audience laughter. Collectively, the panel agreed that it envisioned more possibilities than disappointments in a new world of news fueled by social media.

More social media insights and video from the event, after the jump…

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