Click here to look through Ted Rall’s cartoon series on the news industry.
Short Takes
06:00 AM - December 14, 2011
The Future of Magic Bullets
Cartoonist Ted Rall shows us how to save the news business
#Realtalk: This isn’t another ‘golden age’ for print - But it is one for media
Social media in smaller markets - How three social media managers deal with smaller markets and more local coverage.
A rally for laid-off Sun-Times photogs - A protest Thursday morning drew about 150 picketers to the newspaper’s headquarters
Reporting, or illegal hacking - Scripps reporters are accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Exchange Watch: California Dreaming - Low healthcare premiums on the West Coast were trumpeted as a big, good-news Obamacare story. But: “Compared to what?”
One of the great reporters of his generation died Tuesday at 33. The stories he wrote, and the ones he didn’t live to write
Michael Hastings: my friend and his enemies
Hastings was fearless and shook things up - especially with his McChrystal expose. The haters in the media couldn’t forgive him
Journalism is about finding flaws and magnifying them, and surely someone who would spill massive loads of state secrets must contain a few broken parts, right?
Call it the Politico rhetorical crutch
The inside-the-beltway publication’s go-to phrase
Rachel Maddow’s tribute to Michael Hastings
“Michael was angry … he was angry about things that weren’t right in the world. He was angry with war and with loss, and that drove his reporting.”
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
Two things.
1) It's sad that CJR is now doing using ridiculous click-click-click slideshows to generate page views.
2) To make #1 even worse - you require yet another click to even get to the click-click-click page.
This is a sad development. Sheesh.
If you're doing to have pointless click-click-click pages - merge step #1 and #2 and put something like "[slideshow]" in the title so those of us in the know won't waste our time.
Yes, I didn't say "please".
#1 Posted by F. Murray Rumpelstiltskin, CJR on Wed 14 Dec 2011 at 12:16 PM
Believe it or not, the slideshow thing isn't a naked page-view grab... it really did seem like the most elegant and efficient way to present Ted's cartoons. They were scattered throughout the print edition, and we wanted to mimic that page-turning experience, rather than just dumping them all on one page. Your point about putting "slideshow" in the title is a good one, and we'll do that in the future -- though, to be sure, I don't expect us to do very many slideshows in the future.
FYI, "The Moments," which went up on Tuesday, is also a slideshow, just in case you want to stay away from it.
#2 Posted by Justin Peters, CJR on Wed 14 Dec 2011 at 02:36 PM
@ Justin Peters
Oh, good - happy news! And thanks for the FYI heads up.
#3 Posted by F. Murray Rumpelstiltskin, CJR on Wed 14 Dec 2011 at 05:11 PM
I think the Ted Rall suggestion of settling another planet - but not giving them internet - has real potential for the future of newspapers.
Maybe they could do a special edition, without cartoons, for people without a sense of humour, or with nothing better to do than get twitchy about how many pages they turn. Twitch, twitch. In space, no one can hear you twitch. And other assorted space memes. Twitchelstiltskin?
Wonder what the F stands for.
#4 Posted by Jason Brown, CJR on Thu 15 Dec 2011 at 04:50 PM
You might want to put an upper bound in your slide show, I could keep clicking on inexistent panels until id=50 and beyond. And yeah, you don't need a slide show to do a multi-panel comic, eg..
http://www.leftycartoons.com/its-a-tidy-system/
http://www.leftycartoons.com/who-to-blame/
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 15 Dec 2011 at 08:18 PM