Dec
21
An almost-Christmas edition:
- Toasty holiday greetings from Florida. Roy Peter Clark, writing guru, is also a piano-playing, Christmas song-singing entertainer. Too much fun. Also: Amazon is taking pre-orders for the paperback edition of Roy’s essential Writing Tools.
- All the news that Fitz will fritz. Alan Mutter on the coming Zell regime in Chicago: “The $38 million exit package going to former Tribune chief executive Dennis FitzSimons is enough to cover the annual pay and benefits of more than 500 journalists in a metro market.” Related: Mark Potts looks ahead to 2008 and doesn’t like what he sees coming for newspaper companies. Depressing.
- Long Bet Winner: Weblogs vs. the New York Times. Rogers Caldenhead’s posts on a bet Dave Winer made five years ago about the ranking of blogs vs. the Times in searches. The blogs edged the Times, but Wikipedia beat them all, proving once again that five-year bets and projections are sucker’s bets.
- We Stand Corrected: When Good Journalists Make Stupid Mistakes. Nice Chip Scanlan interview with Regret the Error founder Craig Silverman, covering all of the essential points of Craig’s new book. I’m now halfway through the book and am convinced it should be put in the hands of every journalist and journalism student.
- NCAA Puts Severe Limits On Sport Event Blogging. The source is anonymous, but if these severe restrictions on reporters’ blogging during NCAA games are true, media seems to have lost another round in its fight with the sports industry.
- What is an Online Journalist? Craig McGill has lots of questions, and a few answers, about what being an online journalist means. Among those adding to the discussion is Bryan Murley at Innovation in College Media, who thinks it’s about understanding and approach as much as it is about skill.
