Saturday squibs

Because this is how we old folks send our Saturday nights. Longer blogging posts coming soon, I promise.

• Saving newspapers: scarcity isn’t the answer. John Robinson has a very nice answer to Ted Rail’s recent pitch to newspapers to take themselves offline and make the readers come back to them.
• twentysomethingjournalist. A new site for young journos to talk about the changing face of the news business. Odd that for such cutting edge folk, it’s being run on a BBS platform and not something a little more interactive and Web 2.0-ey.
• Do you twitter? A discussion at Sportshooter.com about Twitter where the opinions pretty much cover all the bases.
• (Note. There might have been a pointer here to a CJR article, bit it took the writer so bloody long to get to the point of the article that I gave up on it.)
• Did This American Life affect the media conversation about the mortgage crisis? Blogger Simon Olver talks to Jay Rosen and some of those involved in the recent, heavily-praised This American Life piece on the U.S. mortgage meltdown (The Giant Pool of Money), which is emerging as the poster child for explanatory journalism.
• An outline for taking ownership of your stories. Howard Owens was quite on the web front for a while, but he’s blazed back with some great recent posts, including this list of steps reporters need to take for their stories.
• We Interrupt This Rant. We have a great post here from David Sullivan (his second graf: “This could be the month when the newspaper business as we know it dies.”) and a great rejoinder from Doug Fisher. Read and ponder.
• Disappearance of a financially golden newspaper period. Robert Picard, as he often does, puts the current newspaper mess in perspective. It doesn’t make it any less painful for those caught in the squeeze, but it’s refreshing to read someone who takes a step back and a longer view.
• Newspapers Share of Online Ad Market Starting to Fold. Newspapers’ share of local markets is shrinking because, I suspect, they are suddenly facing many, many more competitors.
• Citizen Foreign Correspondence. Nicholas Kristof, on the new Demotix web site, writes: “I don’t know whether to be horrified, since it represents a further erosion of the newspaper business model, or to applaud another avenue to get international news coverage. The latter, I guess.”