But it’s disorienting to think that a global communications nexus one day is MySpace the next. As Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, says in the piece, “…it’s not a given. It’s never a given.”
‘See you on the other side’ - Meet Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend what little time she had practicing journalism
#Realtalk: This is the best moment to be in journalism - The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay
Streams of consciousness - Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
Sticking with the truth - How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism
An ink-stained stretch - Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?
What to do if you find a baby bird
Expert advice
Inside Google’s secret lab
We might deplore the practice, but posting pictures of our food online is a way to bring everyone to the table
How the ‘World’s 50 Best’ list changed the way elite restaurants do business
“Every time the restaurant switched up its format, it got plenty of accompanying media coverage that let judges know they needed to return to see what was going on”
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.
Seriously? Have you spent any time with Twitter? I keep trying, really, but it reminds me of nothing so much as those AOL chat rooms circa 1995. If it's not blithering it's unintelligible.
#1 Posted by edward ericson jr., CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 03:31 PM
Actually, it's an acquired taste and skill. You have to choose whom you follow carefully and avoid people who fill your screen with junk (not naming names!). And it *really* depends on what you're doing. If you're blogging and looking for something good to read, more or less at random, within the general area of the people who follow, it's great. If you're writing a book, not so much. That's been my experience anyway.
#2 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 03:41 PM
@Dean:
If you're blogging and looking for something good to read, more or less at random, within the general area of the people who follow, it's great.
Well, it's great if one is too lazy be bothered to go out and talk to the 94% of people who do *not* twitter, like Trudy Lieberman does. As it is, we have legions of journalists following their twitter streams to glean any kind of ideas for "news", rather than going out and finding interesting stuff on their own. The result is even more of an insulated echo chamber of meaningless chatter, uninteresting as a retweet, for the most part. Once someone has read the original, who wants to read the same thing on 20 other blogs?
If you are addicted, I supppose it's "great", but it isn't "great" for journalism, or for a journo's reading audience. IMHO, of course.
Comment?
#3 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 04:12 PM
James,
Come on, this is a hoary and false dichotomy, blogging vs. reporting. Both have their place. Twitter helps one of them.
#4 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 04:40 PM
@Dean,
It seems I have hit a sore spot, which I did not intend to do. I don't regard blogging and journalism as separate enterprises, in fact, just the opposite.
Is Ryan Chittum a journalist or a blogger? Is Trudy Lieberman a journalist or a blogger? Is Greg Sargent a journalist or a blogger? Is Jason Linkins a journalist or a blogger? I think all four of them are both, journalists and bloggers.
I was going to the quality of what they produce.
I already noted the quality of @Trudy's work. She goes out to talk to real people, interviews them on a variety of subjects, and writes her outstanding and illuminating Town Hall reports. Let me say this about Mr. Chittum. As much as I can tell, @Ryan doesn't need twitter links to do his outstanding work, which is media criticism of business journalism. He actually reads the stuff on his own. He reads Nocera, he evidently reads and analyzes every business word written in the WSJ, he reads Leonhardt and NYT business journalism, and so on. And he writes his outstanding critique and commentary on the basis of what they have written, adding context drawn from his experience as a business reporter. That's exactly what makes these two journalists' work brilliant, as it is.
Contrast that with the work of Mark Knoller, a journalist for CBS radio news, with the work of Ed Henry, WH correspondent from CNN, Greg Sargent from Washington Post, Ezra Klein from WaPo. What they do is ride their twitter streams and scrape the blogosphere for their material. Not nearly as useful, illuminatng, or "great" as the former two journos.
I fail to see where Twitter adds value, or has added any real value, to journalism overall. That's what I was getting at.
#5 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 06:27 PM
Hi James, Sorry, I meant to be spirited but not harsh. A fine line sometimes. Thanks for the compliments about Ryan, Trudy, etc., and I agree. I guess I see Twitter itself as a tool, like netnewswire or other readers, just another way to find things you want to read in an ocean of stuff. Whether Ryan visits Web pages or finds a link on Twitter doesn't seem to matter. Sure, most of the world's Tweets are clutter, but if you find people who reliably send good links it can be helpful.
#6 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Thu 28 Apr 2011 at 08:18 AM
@Dean
I can understand how Twitter has become an essential tool for the hard-working journo -- if you don't get the initial "Dude! I just saw a plane land in the Hudson River!" or the "The White House is releasing the birth certificate at the gaggle this morning - 8 am, be there or be square!" then s/she has lost out to the competition.
But I have too issues with the advent of the twitter era of journalism:
1) It has made a lot of journos lazy and preoccupied with the echo chamber that is the twitterverse and the blogosphere. Many journos no longer get out and do hard-shoe reporting, preferring to follow links and report only what everyone else is getting from twitter, using the same narrow sources and the same ideas and perspective. Of course, there has always been lazy journos, but twitter addiction seems to have exacerbated this problem. It's really annoying to watch the front row White House journos -- Jake Tapper, Mark Knoller -- reading their iPhones and twittering during the briefing, for example. Aren't they there to ask and get real information in real time?
2) The tendency of many journos to think that "everyone" is on twitter. It is profoundly annoying when journos believe that issuing an "Oops!" on twitter absolves them of correcting and/or updating their work to their actual reading audience. Twitter users are a very, very narrow and specific slice of the audience -- only 6% of internet users according to Pew data -- and are not representative of the reading audience. Addiction to twitter causes many journos to ignore their *actual* audience, and it is frustrating when they do that.
Personally, I don't have time to troll the twitterstream gleaning every shred of information in almost-real-time, and I trust my favorite journos to report back to me the news they find on twitter that I need. I just wish so many of them didn't forget about this last step.
Sorry if I misread the tone of your comment. Happens to me all the time, too. Salud.
#7 Posted by James, CJR on Thu 28 Apr 2011 at 09:27 AM
Well, sure, Twitter is a tool. I like tools. There are really good ones, generally, like the Leatherman I picked up in the street 25+ years ago and still use, and there are crappy ones, like the Swingline special 'The Office' edition red stapler I bought three weeks ago that broke on about the 6th staple. The former is a device of many uses which has withstood very rough handling over a lifetime. The latter is what we mostly get these days.
Saying something is "a tool" absolves neither its maker or its user of doing something durable and/or efficient.
#8 Posted by edward ericson jr., CJR on Thu 28 Apr 2011 at 02:25 PM
I don't mean to be a tool, but I agree with both Ed and James on these last points. James, I'd only say that while I share your frustration with the incredible lack of shoe-leather reporting, I'd hang that on their bosses and whatever structural changes are driving up news-productivity requirements. Most reporters I know would love to get out the office and talk to people. For more: http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_hamster_wheel.php?page=all
#9 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Thu 28 Apr 2011 at 04:22 PM
I was fascinated with the drama of the Chilean coal miners and followed the NYT blog, which linked to Jorge Fernando Garretón, Journalist - Periodista in Santiago-Chile: http://twitter.com/Garreton. Soon I was exclusively following Garretón's tweets as he provided the most reliable, up-to-the minute accounts through his own work and via linking to other accounts in the Chilean media. This was the first time I grasped, in practice, that Twitter could be an outstanding tool of journalism, both for aggregation and for original reporting.
Social media played an important role in breaking through much of the tripe that passes for Middle Eastern coverage in the US. In the Arab Spring that could not be ignored, thanks to the presence of social media and Al Jazeera, the world saw the same hunger for freedom among Arabs in the Middle East felt everywhere by people living under oppressive dictatorships.
Social media is a tool that can be used for moral purposes.
Or not.
#10 Posted by Bonnie Britt, CJR on Sun 1 May 2011 at 11:39 PM