Tag: journalism

Can the Guardian take its aggressive investigations global? Good read in the New Yorker about the Guardian and how it operates.

Cargo Cult Analytics:

If the pace at which you receive new metrics outstrips the pace at which you can change your newsroom’s priorities, then what’s the point?

Rebuilding the world technology destroyed

Rebuilding the world technology destroyed:

Influence lives at intersections. Yet, as an industry, it at times feels the boundaries we have built around who makes an effective product manager, or programmer, or designer, are stronger than ever, even as the need to cross those boundaries is ever more pressing.

Code with me: Portland

I’m really excited to be a mentor for Code with me, a 2-day workshop in all things HTML, CSS, and Javascript for journalists without coding experience. The event’s in Portland on May 4th and 5th and costs just $85. That’s ridiculously affordable for 2 full workshop days and a student to mentor ratio of 2 to 1.

Applications are due tomorrow, April 6th, at 9 pm Pacific. If you’re interested you should apply now!

The Code with me site has an early outline of what the schedule will be along with information on the rest of the mentors, sponsors, and more.

Where did the content go?

NY Times ad

There are experiments and then there are…well…I’m not really sure what this is. It’s so off-putting I want to think it’s a mistake. Unfortunately it’s likely the future, or something.

Journalism as service:

But instead, we got mostly articles. For that’s what journalists do, isn’t it? We write articles. We are storytellers! But not everything should be a story. Stories aren’t always the best vehicle for conveying information, for informing the public. Sometimes lists, data bases, photos, maps, wikis, and other new tools can do a better job.

It’s been said before and it still rings true. Related.

Shifting: The Newspaper

…on the web, it’s impossible to maintain the fiction that you can gather a single public together in one place. There’s always going to be one link further that you never explored, or one site that is totally different from you. And I think one of the things that the web does to journalism is that it gives lie to the notion that journalism can ever represent “the public.” And that makes us cynical about news.

Not sure when they launched but the topic pages that Evening Edition added are interesting. Syria’s one example I dug up. They seek to answer three questions: What’s happening? Why you should know about this? and What now?

At the bottom there’s then a list of related stories sorted chronologically. Cool to see some real-world experimentation with explainers. It’s probably a lot of editorial work to craft those summaries but the payoff is worth it, I think.

Stijn Debrouwere on the (mis)use of metrics:

Instead of thinking about metrics, think about projects and goals.

Good way of phrasing that.

Who should see what when?

Interest, effects, agency. These are three ways that a story might intersect with you, and they are reasons you might need to see it.

Great article from Jonathan Stray. I’d pay for a news organization that approached its product from these three principles.