What is a Public Editor? I’m curious which news organization will be the first to implement this because eventually one will.
Tag: journalism
Local newspapers, news deserts, and simple stuff:
But truly, there’s no divine law nor any practical argument to explain why newspapers are the preferred caretaker and distributor of community information.
Stijn does a great job illustrating why local newspapers are not irreplaceable.
My Gettysburg oration: A vision for journalism that can long endure:
But let’s be honest: Most of the content we publish isn’t stories. It’s news. It’s facts. It’s information. Let’s respect the pure, traditional story – the narrative string of paragraphs – by reserving that form for real stories that have story elements such as plot, character, setting and theme.
This whole speech is phenomenal.
There’s no such thing as an objective filter: Why designing algorithms that tell us the news is hard. An objective filter for news may not be the algorithm we need, but that doesn’t mean the right filter is any less difficult to build.
Sustainable quality | via Daniel.
We need to reinvent the article. Sean Blanda illustrates that it’s time to rethink not just the article but how information is published on the web. I agree. My favorite narratives are those that answer long, winding questions by telling a story. They are more akin to a short book than a news story. This recent New Yorker piece is 50 pages and over 20,000 words when I drop it in to Pages.app. I loved that article, but defaulting to the same mental model and design presentation for a few hundred word piece about NFL draft trades is ludicrous.
Fungible. The smartest writing about journalism I have read this year.
WordPress leads pack of Pacemaker finalists picked. 53% of the finalists for this year’s online Pacemaker awards are running WordPress. That’s pretty cool. The numbers are even higher for smaller schools with less than 10,000 student enrollments. It’s great to see my alma mater in the list of finalists, too.
Three years on a beat, and then you move on
Chris Anderson as paraphrased by Andreas Kluth.
The first year after arriving to your new assignment was terrifying and exhilarating. It was a vertiginous learning curve, but you could ask dumb questions without fear and note that the emperor has no clothes.
In the second year, after the emperor had invited you in a few times to explain the subtle political dynamics that require him to go garbless for the ultimate good of the nation (but surely there were more important things to write about, such as his new elevated rail project), you would find yourself writing sophisticated analyses, traveling easily through the region, admiring your bulging rolodex and otherwise feeling very productive.
In the third year, you’d find yourself returning to stories with a certain cynicism and worldweary accounting of endless process. The elevated rail project has been delayed once again because of infighting within the opposition party. The emperor has no fiscal discipline. You understand everything all too well. It’s time to move on.
Some news is slow
There’s a big bug in our news system.
We like to say it’s a 24-hour news cycle. And maybe it is, but there’s real news, stuff that effects our lives, that happens over a much longer span of time. Boring or not, we have to keep cycling back to it, for our own good.
Dave Winer – Some news is slow.