From L to R: TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel (moderator); Speaker Newt Gingrich, Bryan Cranston, Padma Lakshmi, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Matt Lauer 
Photo credit: Jemal Countess/Getty Images 

TIME hosted its annual Person of the Year panel today, where a seemingly random assortment of notable people give their opinions on who should get the honor. Moderated by managing editor Rick Stengel, panelists included:

Bryan Cranston – best known for his chemical concoctions on Breaking Bad, star of Argo.

Newt Gingrich – The only panelist who actually held the honor of “Person of the Year,” as speaker of the house back in 1995. Dubious about climate change.

Matt Lauer – host of the Today show, not dubious about climate change.

Padma Lakshmi – Host of Top Chef, woman.

Michael Nutter – Mayor of Philadelphia.

Here’s a roundup of the contenders, and what the panelists thought. Read more

“Technology is easy. Journalism is hard,” says the Wall Street Journal‘s mobile and tablets editor David Ho. The Journal was one of the first major newspapers to develop an iPad app, the process of which was the toughest professional challenge Ho has undertaken. “It was more than a news-journalism-tech challenge. It felt like some crazy endurance race,” he said.

And, having gone through that process of creating a news app from scratch, Ho said he empathizes with the pressure his peers at News Corp.’s The Daily likely face.

“I think everyone involved in tablet and mobile news watches The Daily. It’s this bold experiment: a brand new news organization created from scratch. How often do you see that these days? The Daily pioneered a lot of ways to deliver news on tablets,” Ho said in Mediabistro’s latest So What Do You Do? interview.

“It does look like The Daily is trying to make their production process easier,” he continued. “They dropped their landscape view not long ago. That I get. Supporting two tablet rotations all the time is a lot of work. It’s tough to put out a tablet issue every day.”

Read more in So What Do You Do, David Ho, Mobile and Tablets Editor at The Wall Street Journal?

Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica writes about the fact that the Federal Communications Commission has come up with a term for the “ever growing set of digital duties” that journalists must perform: “hamsterization.” He asks: “Hey there newspaper reporter—has your broadband-powered job got you filing not only conventional stories, but blogging, video blogging, Facebooking, podcasting, picture posting, and Tweeting?”

If you answered yes, you are not alone. The FCC notes in its just released report on The Information Needs of Communities that “these additional responsibilities—and having to learn the new technologies to execute them—are time-consuming, and come at a cost.” Journalists now “typically face rolling deadlines as they post to their newspaper’s website before, and after, writing print stories.”

These “rolling deadlines” is where the hamster wheel metaphor comes in. The observation was first made by Dean Starkman in a Columbia Journalism Review piece titled “The Hamster Wheel.” Lasar writes:

The “Hamster Wheel” isn’t about speed, the report quotes Starkman as saying. “It’s motion for motion’s sake… volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no.”

Journalists complain that where newsrooms used to reward in-depth stories, “now incentives skew toward work that can be turned around quickly and generate a bump in Web traffic.”

We have no idea what the FCC plans to do about this. But at the very least,  it’s nice to be acknowledged.

The biggest culprit for not linking to sources, according to Anthony DeRosa at Reuters, is not blogs with all of their aggravating aggregating, but the Old Media.

Apparently the New York Post is a common offender. The Post has gone so far as to have allegedly admitted, by way of correspondence from one of their reporters, that they in fact have a policy to not credit blogs (or anyone else) if they can verify independently after they’ve been tipped off from the source they choose not to cite.

This strikes us as very bad manners. As a blogger, one learns pretty quickly that if you forget (or wrongfully deem it unnecessary) to include a link, the author of the source will notice, will tell you, and you will feel unprofessional/foolish when they do so. Best to avoid it altogether. The only ones who apparently get away with this are old media outlets. Writes DeRosa:

Even here at Reuters, links are rarely seen, if ever, in the context of the articles we post. Felix Salmon recently referred to the Wall Street Journal as “the kid in class with his arm around his homework” in reference to their refusal to link. The New York Times is just as stingy with their links…

We highly doubt these practices will last long. More and more we hear about original sources standing up for their right to be linked, and this relic of pre-digital reporting culture will change, and change rapidly.

Jump Start is a government-funded program aimed at taking people from occupations that no longer exist in today’s economy, and teaching them how to apply their skills to jobs that still exist. Last spring there was a Jump Start program for those who worked in the financial services industry, which helped finance workers learn skills for a new career at a tech firm, or something.

Now the second phase of this program begins: Jump Start New Media, which features a curriculum designed to retrain people who have lost jobs in “old” media, like newspapers, magazines and at traditional broadcast companies. Media workers who go through the program will learn skills that they can put to work in new media. We don’t like to make fun, because people been asking for a media bailout for ages now, and finally the government is going to teach us all how to fish for ourselves instead of just injecting trillions of dollars into the industry. Great!

Except that the market is already over-saturated with young 20-somethings who know everything there is to know about new media, and the only benefit of bringing someone from ‘old media’ onto your ‘new media’ project is to get the wealth of experience and expertise that comes with working 20 years in a news room.

Still though, it never hurts to learn something new, especially when it’s free. The Jump Start New Media program, designed by The Levin Institute, which is part of The State University of New York, begins February 1 right here in Manhattan. Learn more info about it here.

Less than a week after announcing changes to its entry requirements making it easier for online writers to win awards, the Pulitzer Prize Board has announced a new appointment: Jim VandeHei, the co-founder of one of the most successful new media launches in recent years, Politico.com.

VandeHei, who is also Politico’s executive editor, is “the first representative of a primarily online news organization” to serve on the board, the Pulitzer committee said today. But he also has a print background. Before founding the Washington, D.C.-based site in 2007 with John F. Harris and Allbritton Communications, he worked for Roll Call and The Wall Street Journal — among other D.C. pubs — covering Capitol Hill.

It will be interesting to see if this new focus on online news will lead to Pultizers for online writers next year. Seems like they have a better chance now than ever before.

Previously: Online Writers Now Have Greater Shot Of Winning Pulitzer, Four Questions For Politico’s Jim VandeHei

Read more

Blogger, prolific Tweeter and NYU professor Jay Rosen spoke with German new media author Ulrike Reinhard recently about new media and its role in journalism today.

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

Read more