Feb
15
These may be the last for a while, as I head out for a conference in Fredericton, New Brunswick tomorrow morning. Then again, given that my room has free wireless, blogging may continue almost as normal.
- When journalists don’t vote. A bit of a kerfuffle in the mediasphere at the moment over whether journos should vote or not. I used to buy into that absolute neutrality idea: now I’m not sure I would ever hire a journalist who ducked taking such a fundamental responsibility as voting on the grounds that it somehow interferes with their “objectivity.”
- Online Course in Science Journalism. The internet is coming to take our teaching jobs away! Actually, I love this idea and will probably not only point my students to the course, but will likely take it myself, just because I can (I’m particularly intrigued by Lesson 8: Preparing scientific TV programs and documentaries).
- Cutting up the newsroom. Jeff Jarvis does a thought experiment in chopping the newsroom in two, with gatherers on one side and packagers on the other, working hand in hand. Lots there to chew on.
- How Good Was 2007 for Newspaper Web Sites? Carl Bialik at the WSJ does what he does best — dig into the numbers — and concludes that last year’s “banner year” for U.S. online newspapers is not all that it seems.
- Major Newspaper Groups Form Joint Local Online Advertising Group. Four biggies go after all those online dollars flowing to Google.
- Layoff log: V-day massacres. Paul Gillin with more depressing numbers from his Newspaper Deathwatch site.
- Doing journalism: A number of pieces that will help with your storytelling are scattered about the web, including these: Cheat sheet for multimedia story decisions from Mindy McAdams, Sequencing: The foundation of video storytelling from Colin Mulvaney, and Webcasts are hard to produce well, harder still to make a hit from Howard Owens. As well, Rod Mar from the Seattle Times has The Old Man and the…Tug?, a nice behind-the-scences look at a recent feature photo assignment.
