A few more finds

I’ve already posted today’s squibs but since cleaning out my Bloglines reader (which, of course, is steadily filling up again *sigh*), I’ve discovered a few more items of interest.

One of them is the new-to-me blog Multimedia Reporter, which a lot of newspaper folk may find worthwhile. Ron Sylvester is a 30-year veteran of newspapers who has jumped on the learn-it-and-use-it multimedia bandwagon. He writes about feet-on-the-ground stuff in what seems to be a fairly typical newsroom. I like it. (Discovered via Angela Grant, who I think has found some way to get 35 or 36 hours out of the day, based on the number of discoveries she makes and the amount of blogging she does on top of her day job.)

Another is this: The irrational media makers. It’s from video storyteller David Dunkley Gyimah, and, to give you a taste, this is part of it:

So what are we to do? Irrational media makers report and with their multimedia skills let you thread, thus soon every niche of a debated issue becomes a top page rank. Last time I checked on google as an experiment – a story I posted with 90,000,000 returns placed me at number 3. Intelligent software and human eyes, intelligence gathering gives the stories new impetus.

~snip~

One of our features will be to move as “swarms” – think of it as special units. In London alone after one month, what you’ll know about the city will be far and above what the daily diet of a thirty minute news programme tries to show. And whilst we won’t neccessarily seek out “good stories”,our aim would be examine those that ripple with their effect.

David has a delightfully idea-to-idea, lurching writing style, so it takes some close reading to get to the essentials of his idea of “irrational media maker.” He starts his post: “I’d like to be involved in building a school for media makers; irrational ones who insanely believe they can make a difference.” I think I’d sign up.

I couldn’t resist clicking through to this headline: When ‘Lazy Journalism’ Is a Good Thing. It’s from Len Witt, and it deals with hyperlocal reporting, blogging, linking and citizen involvement. Len doesn’t outright say it but, yes, the way all that is used is journalism by any reasonable person’s definition.

Finally, Ryan Sholin may be onto something with his post, Flickr Pro and the freemium business model for newspapers, pointing out that people are willing to pay to upgrade from free services when there’s value at the “pro” level. It may apply to newspapers, he writes, and I agree, with a caveat: what newspapers consider to be of value is not always (often?) what readers do.

TAGS: JOURNALISM, VIDEO, MULTIMEDIA, BUSINESS, CITIZEN JOURNALISM