Tuesday squibs

The mediasphere has been particularly vibrant lately. In my efforts to get caught up, here are some of the things that have caught my eye.

• What Will Happen When the Presses Go Silent? Mark Potts musings about what will likely happen if (when) a city loses its daily will surely have some in legacy media setting their hair on fire.
• How Photography Connects Us to the World. A TED Talk by National Geographic’s David Griffin on the storytelling power of photography. Nice quote: “Everyone one of us has at least one or two great photographs in them.” Via A Photo a Day.
• Industry Moves: Jonathan Dube Returns To ABCNews.com As VP. CBC’s loss, as Dube was head director of digital media for the national broadcaster.
• NewsCred launches public beta. Mathew Ingram’s detailed look at yet another news aggregator with a difference, this one drawing from a wide number of sources (none of them Canadian, by the way) and using a combination of audience votes on “credibility” and, eventually, a recommendation engine to rate the trustworthiness of the news. As Rex Sorgatz writes, “Good luck with that.”
• Dealing with the elephant: Hire web-native salespeople. The third post in Ryan Sholin’s excellent series looking at the business of newspapers and what can be done.
• Journalism: If They Dont Pay, Should We Stop? I pointed to Len Witt’s piece on this yesterday. Today’s reaction from Amy Gahran includes the response that there may be some fallacies behind the question, one of which is the idea that people ever wanted to pay for news.
• The Bigger Picture. The Wall Street Journal introduced a blatant rip-off of boston.com’s The Big Picture — right down to the name — then quietly killed that and has resurrected it as Photo Journal. Gerik Parmele has been on the story.
• The biggest challenge facing a young journalist – Steering the Diaspora. Digidave — Dave Cohn — rocks.
• YouTube to launch journalism program in September. That’s journalism program as in TV program, not as in educational program. What they appear to be doing is offering prizes and exposure for themed entries.
• The Cloud is Falling. A longish piece at Sportshooter on the current realities and future possibilities for photojournalists. From the piece: “… the reason that I’m using the analogy of the “cloud” – is to point out that as frightening as some of these prospects are, clouds always obscure the blue sky above – our industry is not dying – it’s evolving – and there’s no reason to run around in a panic… many of us will survive…and many of us will be forced to work in an entirely different field.”

Currently playing in iTunes: Beni Beni by Niyaz