Journalism News

By Keith WoodsI appeared the other day on a segment of the NewsHour with the University of Pennsylvania's Kathleen Hall Jamieson and The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib to talk about how race is being handled in coverage of the presidential nominating process. RELATED Transcript of NewsHour discussion I raised two issues (I could think of 20) journalists need to take up, particularly covering the democratic primaries: dumping the race and class euphemisms that serve as proxy for a real discussion about these defining issues, and parsing the racial voting patterns in a way that's more…

By Mallary Jean TenoreA new study released last week reveals that 58 percent of black children can't swim and that they drown at nearly three times the average rate. An estimated 56 percent of Hispanic children can't swim, compared to 31 percent of Caucasian children. The findings are the result of a USA Swimming survey intended to help bring more black people into the sport and lessen the number of minority drownings. Experts from the University of Memphis surveyed 772 children aged 6 to 16 in six cities, two-thirds of whom were Hispanic or black. In conducting the survey, researchers…

By Thomas Huang RELATED Blog posts:"Girl Gone Mild," by Mary Elizabeth Williams, The Takeaway."The Miley Cyrus/Vanity Fair Saga," by Jamie Lee Curtis, The Huffington Post"Sexualizing Miley: Are Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus Letting Her Be the New Lolita?" by Bonnie Fuller, The Huffington PostNews stories:"Who's Minding Miley?" Forbes.com, April 28, 2008"Disney Taps Wants, Wallets of 'Tweens,' The Boston Globe, Nov. 6, 2006"In the Concert Hall, It Smells Like Teen Spirit," The Washington Post, Aug. 6, 2006"Marketing and Tweens," BusinessWeek, Oct. 12, 2005"Disney Finds Place for Tweens," USA Today,…

By Aly ColónThe coverage of the controversial Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. continues cascading down the political news stream and carries with it issues of religion, race and resentment. The furious flow of information tends more toward the political than the "r" factors. But whatever the focus, we need to provide context about what is being said. We need a more comprehensive understanding of Wright, his views and how representative they are.  We need to ask questions and hear from diverse voices. That requires journalists to seek out sources who not only agree, or disagree,…

By Thomas Huang RELATED "Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games" -- Excerpt on race-related games. "Remembering 7th Street: The Oakland Jazz and Blues Clubs Reality Project," background information. "Reviving Oakland's Jazz and Blues Scene, Virtually," National Public Radio"Mind Games: Points of Entry," The New York Times"Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games," MediaShift Idea Lab"Black Professionals In Games: NGai Croal Talks Stereotypes, Finding Video Games Spike Lee," MTV's Multiplayer blog"Heroes in Black and White: Diversity in the World of Games," Aly…

On a Wednesday a couple of weeks ago, French, Dutch and Polish camera crews gathered in a small studio on Park Avenue. All were correspondents for TV news networks in their respective home countries, and all had come to interview Amber “Obama Girl” Lee, who was in New York shooting a video for her latest song. (Her debut, “I...

Insurance giant American International Group posted a record $7.8 billion loss in the first quarter as it wrote down more than $15 billion in assets, much of them mortgage-related, and said it needed to raise more than $12 billion to shore up its capital. The Wall Street Journal on its page one says the news illustrates that “while...

David Broder wrote yesterday: I’d like to know what kind of people Obama would bring into his White House and where he would turn for a Cabinet, because there is so much uncertainty about his actual policies at home and abroad. Really? Is there actually all that much “uncertainty” about Obama’s policies, all things considered? Doesn’t seem...

In what might just be one of the most fun pieces of research ever conducted, ever, the Project for Excellence in Journalism spent 2007—yes, the whole year—watching, analyzing, and likely guffawing at footage of...The Daily Show. Ugh. Why do data analysts always have all the fun? Anyway, per the study's summary report, released today: When...

Howard Kurtz today takes a macrocosmic—literally, macrocosmic—view of the media's post-Tuesday treatment of the Democrats' Epic Battle for Cosmic Domina—er, Nomination: For the moment, there seem to be two separate media universes out there. In the mainstream print galaxy, Hillary's "options" are "dwindling," her "path" to the nomination is "narrowing," the "math" is "challenging," Obama is...

San Jose Mercury News: Wanted: Los Gatos bloggers. We’re looking for community bloggers in Los Gatos who can write about such things as events in town, school fundraisers, the score of the latest football game. We need someone who would love a forum for reflecting on the latest buzz story in town, or even write things to do for runners, kids, moms, retirees or other groups in town. This could be a fairly big deal, especially if it means the paper will do more than just highlight what the bloggers do (i.e. pay them for what they do). But the very fact that the paper has recognized what…

Mashable is looking for a Co-Editor and a handful of investigative reporters to be based in the Bay Area and New York. Job Descriptions: __________________________________________________________ CO-EDITOR FOR MASHABLE With more than 160,000 RSS subscribers, Mashable.com is one of the world’s largest blogs focused on the latest Internet trends with a focus on social media and Web 2.0 news. Mashable is currently hiring a Co-Editor who will report directly to Mashable’s Editor-in-Chief. Job Responsibilities Include: - Assisting the Editor-in-Chief in making editorial decisions -…

Holman W. Jenkins Jr., who writes the Business World column in the Wall Street Journal, is one of the more predictable of pundits there — entirely on the side of business people when it comes to their innate right to do just about anything they please. Today, however, he channels a common refrain in defending corporate executives in their shameful practice of backdating stock options. In this case, writing about Broadcom’s founder and CEO, Henry Nicholas, he says: Mr. Nicholas did not benefit from any backdated stock options. He was Broadcom’s largest shareholder, thus had…

Here’s the Dow Jones “Special Committee’s Statement” about its helplessness — which has been entirely evident from the beginning — in the wake of Murdoch’s ridding himself of the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, a journalist who was part of the old regime. Again, it’s his company’s paper now, and he and his team get to make these decisions. But the Not-so-Special Committee was always an unfunny joke, and clearly was designed that way. These folks get paid $100,000 a year for their supposed work. What a crock. They are: Susan…

Portfolio: How Murdoch Cheated ‘WSJ’ Independence Pact. Only the very naive didn’t expect Rupert Murdoch to find some sly way around the agreement he made to respect The Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence once it was his. But when the time came, there was nothing very sly about it at all: Murdoch just did exactly what he wanted, turfing out managing editor Marcus Brauchli in a way that, arguably, represented a concrete and blatant violation of the independence pact. Actually, only the naive gave this “editorial independence” committee any…

There are some really interesting results in the World Editors Forum/Reuters Newsroom Barometer report, released late yesterday. Zogby International conducted the survey. Here are a few of the results, with comments:   56 percent believe most news will be free in the future, up from 48 percent in 2006. This is good for democracy, giving more people access to more information, and maybe good for advertising, since more people may see advertising if the content around it is free. However, print circulation revenue does contribute a bit to most news companies’ bottom lines, so…

Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities.   Best Local Guide or Entertainment Site (circulation group 250,000 or more): Vita.mn Entry submitted by: Matt Thompson Minneapolis Star Tribune mthompson@startribune.com (612) 673-4000   Vita.mn, the Star Tribune’s…

A person from Google (who’s name I didn’t catch!) came to the NewsTools 2008 Conference this afternoon and gave a very helpful rundown of how to get your breaking news article onto Google News faster….   Here’s what to do: Know what Google is looking for? Google crawls pages faster that have these attributes: Original content. Multiple authors. Proper attribution. Quick response time. (Frequency of update may also factor in – such as when articles have a substantial change. Updating every minute and changing one letter will not help.)   Most legitimate…

Please check out these two awesome diagrams. They’re not directional, point-A-to-point-B maps. These are value network maps: The first diagram looks at the old news story (who’s involved, where the connections are between audience, source, producers, advertisers, etc.); the second one, below, looks at the emerging news ecology (editors as “sense makers” and a very different pathway between the audience, sources and others). These brilliant maps were drawn up by Sherrin Bennett with collaboration from the Journalism That Matters team.   Click here for a larger…

I’m in Sunnyvale, Calif., attending NewsTools 2008, part of the Journalism That Matters series. The conference brings together 150 technology people (social network builders, programmers, online community managers), journalists from legacy media companies, bloggers and broadcasters.   The goal of the conference is to look at participatory journalism and technology and discuss the opportunities and possibilities. In an e-mail to participants, Bill Densmore (of the Media Giraffe Project and one of the conference organizers) wrote, “We’re willing to share (perhaps…

Google now lets us explore places on its maps via the photos and videos we, the people, submit. When I saw on a panel with Marisa Mayer at DLD in Munich, she showed a map with dots covering the globe representing the data points users have contributed by their use of maps. She also said people have submitted millions of geo-tagged photos. This is what happens when you build a platform.

Nick Denton — who’s doing his best to destroy all journalism, of course — goes after the most sacred of cows (at his most profane website) arguing that it is time to for The New York Times abandon the false divide between news and opinion. What’s really happening at The Times, in my view, is that its blogs have been a Trojan horse for the invasion of voice and opinion into the news columns. I say it’s a most welcome shot of blood into those old, gray veins. Nick gives plenty of examples, starting with: When Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo fell through, hotshot…

NBC is going to start a 24-hour local TV channel in New York, competing with lots of other players: Time Warner’s NY1 and Cablevision’s News12s, not to mention newspaper video — see Rachel Sterne’s argument that newspapers are starting to steal the beat on live video from TV — and lots of independent comers — see Josh Wolf’s experiment in a live video network covering the Olympics torch protests on the West Coast using mobile phones, Qik, Twitter, and more. It’s crowded turf, local. But this is exactly where local broadcast must seek its future…

Seth Godin dissects the language in just one piece of coverage of the campaign and reminds us all that what news media are really selling is drama: . . . [A]s William Randolph Hearst taught us a long time ago, the goal is to sell newspapers, not to report the news. There isn’t media bias in favor of Hillary (my friend Jeff is the first to point that out). Nor is there media bias in favor of floods. There’s media bias in favor of drama. Most of us are inclined to believe that government officials, doctors and the media are making an effort to tell us the truth. Actually, just like…

It’s a hoot to see yourself translated and subtitled. Here’s the Elektrischer Reporter’s new video of me when I was in Munich for DLD. Below, that’s me saying, do what you do best and link to the rest. This was another subtitled interview with Die Zeit a few days ago. My book has been sold in Germany and so there, too, I’ll be translated. I’m actually a bit ashamed of all the years of high-school and college German I took leading to naught. I didn’t dare try to do any of this auf Deutsch myself.

"Before, it was my parents who watched out to make sure I did not swallow a screw or stick my fingers in an electrical outlet. Now, the supervision comes from the State" A Cuban woman who has gained worldwide acclaim with a blog that voices stinging criticism of the Havana government received a major journalism award Wednesday, and said it gave her a "small protective shield" ... via CNN

"He met with those creating unrest in Yangon and put their demands for the unrest in his broadcast" Burma/Myanmar has deported a BBC journalist who tried to enter the country to report on a cyclone that has killed 22 000 people, saying he had violated visa regulations, a state newspaper said on Wednesday. via Independent Online

"Reuters has long had a legitimate and fully accredited bureau in Harare, and has always complied with Zimbabwean regulations with the aim of accurately reporting the news" Two journalists and the lawyer for a third have been arrested in Zimbabwe in recent days, their spokesmen said Thursday, amid signs the Zimbabwean government is intensifying a post-election crackdown. via CNN

Sri Lanka's main media rights group today voiced alarm after the island's hawkish defence chief reportedly branded some journalists "traitors" and called for sweeping censorship. via The Sydney Morning Herald

"Look, we worked hard and gave it our best shot, but the demographics, well, they are what they are" Hillary Clinton's campaign has already begun the spin cycle, declaring as the polls open this morning that they expect to get decimated in North Carolina. via MooreThoughts

By Noah Barron: Q & A: Guest writer W00tBloggyBlogg sat down with OJR's departing staffer Noah Barron to chat about tips and tricks for online journalism success.

By Robert Niles: From NewsTools 2008: A Google insider explains how the search engine decides which sites to include and feature in the popular online news portal.

By Robert Niles: More from NewsTools 2008: The Washington-based foundation is working on "one-click disclosure" to help the public see why federal money is going where it does.

By Robert Niles: Commentary: The NewsTools 2008 conference sets its agenda as participants identify (and sometimes, exemplify) problems confronting online journalists.

By Patricia Padilla: Why do young readers flock to TMZ over so-called "hard" news? Economics explains why. Here's what journalists should do to take advantage and help keep the public better informed.

Obama and a half-dozen aides took on a team of journalists, mostly young TV network reporters who have traveled with him for months. The senator jumped in eagerly and often. When his communications...

Headlines The following headlines appeared in the major Indian newspapers on Friday: ***THE ASIAN AGE - 30 killed, many hurt in valley bus mishap - Pranab mission to Russia next week - Britain wastes ...

WASHINGTON, DC, May 8, 2008. Writing in Sunday's Washington Post, Joseph Joffe, publisher-editor of Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, says, "The perception that U.S. visa and entry policie...

) May 9, 2008 -- Blooming Tree Press has released its latest children's book, a 32-page picture book sure to be a delight for readers of all ages. "Patrick the Somnambulist" (a somnambu...

May 9 (Reuters) - The following were the top stories in the New York Times business pages on Friday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but Internet scalability has become a spectator sport. Perhaps it's a side-effect of the Web 2.0 boomlet or the increasing push to make open source software scale to greater and greater limits. Whatever the case, for every startup there is a case study of its architecture and how [...]

We received an overwhelming response to our search for NYTimes.com summer interns. We are no longer taking applications, but thank you for your interest. We hope to expand the internship program in the future. Stay tuned to the Open blog for updates on our summer projects. internship

DBSlayer lives! The development of DBSlayer -- our open source MySQL connection pooling middle layer -- has been a bit dormant for the past couple months. Luckily, there have been very few bugs and it continues to operate very effectively in our production environment. But over time, it accumulated several feature requests, so I took [...]

Do you thrive on difficult engineering challenges? Does your pulse quicken when you think about solving problems involving massive datasets or the technical hurdles in making search more relevant, personalization more powerful and easier to use, and delivering news and information instantly to millions of people around the world? Our platform team is responsible for [...]

I work in the NYTimes.com feeds team. We handle retrieving, parsing and transforming incoming feeds from whatever strange proprietary format our partners choose to give us into something that our CMS can digest. As you can imagine, we deal with a huge amount of text processing. To handle all of these transformations as efficiently as [...]

One of the more arcane (but nearly universal) shibboleths of the copy-editing profession is the knowledge that that thing that everybody else calls a podium is actually a lectern.It's hard to argue with the pod-/ped-* root, but, as I keep saying, please use your brain and not the search-and-replace function. OK, fine, a politician doesn't stand behind a podium to make a speech, but he or she most certainly could take the podium. (Who's to say such a reference is necessarily to the thing the speaker is standing behind, as opposed to the thing the politician is standing on?) Of course, you have…

I've been waiting all night for someone like youBut you'll have to do.-- The Psychedelic FursWe maintain distinctions not only to get things right this time, but also to leave room for next time, when we might mean the thing we don't mean this time. Did the youth in the (entirely correct) headline above lose his job? Of course not. But that's what readers are trained to read if publications omit helping verbs from headlines willy-nilly.Does the above lyric make you smile, or at least make the slightest bit of sense? It does, but only if you have some inkling that like is not the same thing as…

With more resources than most other publications, the New York Times is able to afford the necessary helping verbs.

Okay, so two people fired guns toward a school building and then the cops hauled in somebody who was learning to use Microsoft spreadsheets?[Yes, there's something missing from my headline. A helping verb.]

If you've read many of my rants or attended any of my presentations, you've probably heard me address "rules that aren't" -- those little superstitions have become the public face of grammardom even though they have little or no basis in fact. Split infinitives? They're just fine, and often preferable to the alternative. Ending sentences with prepositions? Beginning sentences with conjunctions? Nothing inherently wrong with either practice. But I'm far from being entirely descriptivist. There are plenty of very common usage habits that have to be called inadvisable or just plain wrong, even…

The younger generation will be our future leaders. We hear that a lot in politics, but it also applies to media companies wondering who will be leading them into a digital future. National Public Radio has two programs — Next Generation Radio (NextGen) and Intern Edition — aimed at training young folks to do quality radio reporting the NPR way. Not surprisingly, those twentysomethings have also pushed NPR further into the digital realm, creating an eye-catching blog and using Public Radio Exchange (PRX), an online marketplace for radio reports, to get wider distribution for their…

If you belong to social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter, Flickr, et al, you probably face this question each day: Should I add this person as a friend? Most services will send you an email alert that someone has requested that you become their friend. Now it’s up to you to decide to accept or ignore it. On Twitter, you can become a “follower” for anyone and anyone can follow you — but who should you follow? On Facebook, friends can see your entire profile and pictures. So who should you let in? People you know? You’ve met? Work colleagues?

Yahoo alone Microsoft drops bid, so pressure’s on Yahoo Maker Faire 2008 Burning Man meets a high school science fair Serious games Games used for contests, explaining subjects Nine Inch Nails New album is free, with Creative Commons license Digital IDG 52 percent of revenues online for tech publisher

Microsoft made what appeared to be its last bid for Yahoo at $33 per share, and Yahoo wanted $37. Microsoft walked away. What a weird way for this entire drama to end — if it is indeed over. Most people expect this to be a very bad week for Yahoo on Wall Street, with Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget predicting Yahoo’s stock will “drop at least to the low 20s.” That makes sense. But what about in the long haul? Everyone believes Yahoo will need to combine with AOL or MySpace or Facebook or someone somewhere. But what if Microsoft’s takeover attempt…

Are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution? That’s a question you hear a lot when people complain about something that’s gone wrong in our modern world. And there’s a lot of hand-wringing about the future of journalism and whether it will survive its painful transition in the digital age. But the conference I attended the last couple days, NewsTools2008: Journalism That Matters, is trying to be part of the solution. Put on by Bill Densmore, who runs the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the goal of NewsTools2008 was to…

Obama and a half-dozen aides took on a team of journalists, mostly young TV network reporters who have traveled with him for months. The senator jumped in eagerly and often. When his communications...

Headlines The following headlines appeared in the major Indian newspapers on Friday: ***THE ASIAN AGE - 30 killed, many hurt in valley bus mishap - Pranab mission to Russia next week - Britain wastes ...

WASHINGTON, DC, May 8, 2008. Writing in Sunday's Washington Post, Joseph Joffe, publisher-editor of Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, says, "The perception that U.S. visa and entry policie...

) May 9, 2008 -- Blooming Tree Press has released its latest children's book, a 32-page picture book sure to be a delight for readers of all ages. "Patrick the Somnambulist" (a somnambu...

May 9 (Reuters) - The following were the top stories in the New York Times business pages on Friday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

This is where I'm posting links to things I plan to read and/or write about once I'm through with end-of-semester grading and sorting-out... Expect this list to get longer...Degrees in the Past. "Ultimately, to change the media industries, we've got to change our universities," says my old friend Vin Crosbie, without giving away all the secrets of what should change. "Although the youngest professors are for change," he says, "so are a great many of the oldest. It's those aged in between who are most obstructive, those who worked in the media industries during the 1990s before entering…

Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com, has been answering questions from readers for the past week. One of those readers, Omar Yacoubi, offered the question our Web design students are most likely to ask: Q. What course of study would you recommend at the graduate or undergraduate level for someone looking to work in your field? Or, failing that, what practical experience do you think most prepared you for your current job? The design director answered in terms of what he looks for when hiring, not in terms of a literal "course of study" -- but he went beyond design and technology to a…

New River Voice, started last year as a biweekly print publication with a Web site, is making the transition to Web-only publication. Editor & Publisher Tim W. Jackson, an adjunct journalism prof at Radford, announced the change in the latest issue, along with a note saying the print edition had about 15,000 readers, but not enough advertisers and "essentially no advertising sales representatives" to change that. He said he plans to keep offering "progressive news and views and the best reviews that the NRV has to offer" at http://newrivervoice.com and would like to resume print…

Dieselboii, via Flickr (CC license) Public records aren't what they used to be... In today's Watchdog Tipsheet from the Society of Environmental Journalists, Joseph A. Davis reports on a lawsuit that aims to clarify whether Washington State government officials' e-mails are considered public records that could be covered by that state's public records act. If so, this could aid journalists, activists, and others who seek insight into that state's government decision-making.The case (Building Industry Association of Washington, vs. Pat McCarthy, Pierce County Auditor, and Pierce County,…

nytimes.com The New York Times offers a series of country-specific news aggregators. What's the point? Recently Chinadev asked me if I would allow them to post content from the RSS feed of my weblog China Herald in their news aggregator. Similarly, a few weeks ago, another new aggregator, China.alltop.com, also asked to post my content. And I discovered, by accident, that the New York Times new China aggregator posted my content without asking. And there are whole row of other China news aggregators I might have forgotten by now.Of course, I would not refuse to participate in any service that…

Cursed Thing, via Flickr (CC license) What do you do when online comments get nasty? Today, Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project is on a panel called "What to do when blog comments go awry?" held at The Day, a daily paper in New London, Conn.He sent out a query to me and some other media colleagues asking for perspectives this topic, including: "If you were to advise The Day's editors about how to handle blog comments, what would you say?" Here's my recommended strategy:Configure moderation. Set your comments to place the first 1-3 comments from any new user under moderation. People who…

washingtonpost.com WashingtonPost.com recently applied sports-style "bracketology" to the popular TV show Lost via an online game. (Character Desmond Hume won.) Many media organizations are developing strategies for "serious games". For example, bracketology (the process of predicting the field of the NCAA Basketball Tournament) is spreading into social networking sites and beyond March Madness. For instance, CBS Sports did a great Facebook application for its NCAA bracket. Also, Washingtonpost.com recently did a bracket game about "Lost" TV series characters. And last week the politics staff…

Today I'm at the Newstrust 2008 conference at Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. -- along with fellow Tidbits contributors Michelle Ferrier and Maurreen Skowran. Several people here, including me, are covering this event live via Twitter. Our posts are being aggregated into this Twitter account: NewsTools2008. Follow us there today and tomorrow to follow the action! You can contribute to this feed by frist following NewsTools2008 and then sending a direct message on Twitter to NewsTools2008. (That's a good way to inject a comment or question into the stream of conversation.)Here's the…

OK, I know I've given a lot of—maybe too much—space to the animals of our new Food Director (I promise I'll show other staff pets soon), but I can't help this one. This is Allie Lewis-Clapp's new dog, who is nameless, and we were hoping that you could vote on (or come up with) a name for the little guy: Allie says that she and her husband got him in Brooklyn on Sunday. "He’s settling in well with our other dog, Franny—constantly putting her whole tail in his mouth and pulling on her with his entire body weight," Allie writes. "Strangely, she seems to enjoy it, and…

..was April 24, and a number of Real Simple staffers' kids came to the offices and tried on clothes in our fashion closet. Here are a few of them: This is Jackson in the fashion closet with a fancy hat, pretending to be Spiderman. He loved the pizza party we held, but his favorite part about Take Your Child to Work Day was being the only boy with all the big girls. This is Kendall: Kendall came with her best friend, Michelle. Michelle has older sisters and they watch America's Top Model. Before the day, Kendall's mom told her that they were all going to be models. Kendall and Michelle were so…

We received this email from a reader on Sunday: "I wait eagerly at my mailbox for Real Simple every month, so the special Travel Issue was a real treat...and right before my 6-hour flight to Michigan!  The day of my travels, our plane sat on the runway for an hour, so I opened up the Travel Issue to the story called 'The First Thing to Do When....'  I had no sooner finished reading the tips on how to respond to a flight cancellation, when the pilot announced our plane was returning to the gate and all 150 of us passengers would need to go to the counter to reschedule on a…

The January issue of Real Simple featured a story on slow-cooker recipes that generated a lot of mail—mostly from readers who thought the recipes had not been tested, because they didn't seem to work. (Yikes.) The most vituperation was reserved for the "Orange Chicken with Potatoes" recipe, which some of you called "bitter" and "blah." Here's the reason the recipes were disappointing: They were designed for and tested using new six-quart slow-cookers, while many standard slow-cookers are four-quart. Anyone who made the recipe with a four-quart crockpot would have experienced problems. The…

What does SNCR mean? No, it's not an abbreviation of Snicker, the famous candy bar, though it's pronounced like that. The title of this post is an acronym for the Society for New Communications Research, a "nonprofit global think tank dedicated to the advanced study of new communications tools, technologies, and emerging modes of communication." That's a fancy way of saying that it involves a bunch of smart people who are trying to figure out how to interact more effectively with you—yeah, you, the person who's reading this. If you're reading this, you're reading something that wasn't even…

Five years and more.

ABC News has entered into a partnership with Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, as well as four other top U.S. journalism schools, with the goal of training and mentoring students.

The tabloid daily, published by Philip Anschutz's Clarity Media, delivered for free in Baltimore, Washington and San Francisco will now arrive on customers' doorsteps only on Thursdays and Sundays. They will beef up their Web sites.

An administrative law judge has ruled that The San Diego Union-Tribune engaged in unfair labor practices when it unilaterally mandated drug tests for production workers. He recommended that the NLRB order an end to the tests, but did not recommend reinstatement of two employees.

Still not a lot known for sure.

I love iCal, but it’s driving me crazy lately. Help! As you might have guessed, I’m a pretty busy person. If I didn’t have a good electronic calendar program, with alerts and reliable backup, I’d be totally lost. That’s why I’ve been a devoted user of Apple’s iCal program for about 10 years. A few months ago, when I upgraded to a Macbook Pro with the Leopard OS (original install, not a Leopard upgrade), iCal started getting weird on me. I’ve been to the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store twice about it, and have yet to find a problem. But…

Ning Blog : Blog Archive - Landing a Job in Social Media Good job-hunting resource for a growing field. (Thanks to Cathy Dold for the tip) (tags: career social+media social+networks resources tidbits+fodder) Personal Democracy Forum – Come Together, Now? The World Live Web and Politics “As much as I enjoy shooting virtual spitballs from the back of the digital classroom on Twitter, I want more real-time reporting and sharing of relevant information, too. Professional journalists aren’t the only ones who can report news, after all.” (tags: twitter social+media politics…

At the NewsTools 2008 conference last week, I had a chance to sit down with one of the emerging luminaries of entrepreneurial, experimental journalism. David Cohn runs the BeatBlogging project for NewAssignment.net, and he also works with NewsTrust . Plus, he runs a great blog of his own and is a constant presence on Twitter. Busy guy. I’m glad I got a few miinutes of his time. Here’s what Dave has to say about where he thinks journalism might be heading, and what he wants to do to help it get there: …Oh, and in this interview, Dave called me a "force of nature."…

Steve Jurvetson, via Flickr (CC license) Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson had some nice things to say about the Nokia N95 in March 2007. Wonder what he thinks of the US service and support?.. Looks like Nokia USA is making some initial moves toward improving how it serves the US market. So far, these seem focused strictly on the hardware — and not the service, support, and availability problems American consumers face. These steps may improve Nokia’s chances in the US market in a year or two. Well, it’s a start… Still, there is MUCH more room for Nokia USA to improve…

Dopp Juice » Blog Archive » Engage.com is neither bi-phobic nor lazy. (They’re just really busy and use slow servers.) Why can’t I be bisexual on your site? “That was a database decision. We allow you to be straight or gay, but bisexuality requires searching the entire database, and that’s a big load on the servers.” (Intriguing angle on technology & identity.) (tags: technology identity solutions problems) Gore speaks: I still may endorse « - Blogs from CNN.com Another take on identity, from Al Gore: “I don’t like that phrase party elder,” Gore…

I still don't know how - but I ended up on Journalism.alltop. So hey, I like it. I'm a little bummed that the interview below got cut-off. That's right, I ran out of memory in the middle of it, so the interview ends abruptly. But hey - I'll take what I can get. My favorite part is when Guy takes a moment and says... "I think, basically.... it's stupid," when talking about news organizations that adhere to a strict linking policy.

If you've never heard of Geneva Overholser you should take a look at her epic report: On Behalf of Journalism, a Manifesto for Change. Yes, epic is the right word to describe it. Below she talks about teaching journalism as it relates to her next job as director at USC's Annenberg School of Journalism .

What can be said about Amy Gahran? She is a force of nature. In the video below she talks about: The future of journalism education: "I'm not convinced that universities are the best institutions to support that." The newsroom culture that is stifling creativity: "It's grinding people down..." The future of mobile.

Video interview week continues here at Digidave. Later today I'll have a fantastic video with Amy Gahran who, if you are a journalist, you know kicks butt and takes no prisoners. But a quick internet sidetrack. Last night, excited about all the interviews I have to post over this week - I twittered "I wish I could interview everyone" - to which I got a response from Ryan Budke that he was ready to be interviewed anytime. Anytime indeed. I launched a recorded iChat with him 10 seconds later. For those who don't know: Ryan is in charge of the Scout program at Propeller. In this interview he…

It's a video week here at Digidave. I was hoping to stick just to my own video interviews, but this one is too good not to post. Hat-tip to Boss Rosen who pointed it out via IdeaLab. This video is only 15 minutes, but well worth the watch. Note: previous "Professional Mind Blower was Yochai Benkler in this TED Talk. I've had the opportunity to talk a little with Clay Shirky and yes, he seems to always be that sharp. Here's a Q&A with him from a year ago via Assignment Zero.

That’s right, it’s time for another Carnival of Journalism and this month, I’m proud to be hosting. Not sure what a blog carnival is? Check out this entry on Wikipedia. The Carnival of Journalism includes posts from some of the brightest minds currently blogging on journalism, in my humble opinion. The Carnival gets underway with a post from John Hassell of the exploding newsroom fame. For those of you who don’t know, John is the online editor at the Star-Ledger of Newark, NJ. He enters the carnival with “A day in the life of a big local story.” Want to see…

Over the years, I’ve interviewed my fair share of candidates. And while the positions I’ve been hiring for have changed and the candidates have varied, here are five areas that keep my head shaking in disbelief. So consider these points as either observations or, if you’re looking for a job, words of caution: No One is Perfect I don’t care if you really believe that you have never missed a deadline or that your work has never needed to be edited; don’t highlight those points. When I come across a cover letter or resume that emphasizes perfection, it’s typically a bee line to the…

So a funny thing happened to me on my way to starting my new job. In addition to everyone in our household (with the exception of our cat, Boo) getting monstrously sick, I managed to lose my bloggers voice. I initially chalked up the occurrence to the toll the flu had taken on my body, mind and spirit. But the more I tried to get back into my writing and figure out what was going on, the more I realized it was more then just the lingering effects of my prolonged illness. What I discovered was that I no longer knew what I wanted to say.The time that I had taken off from daily writing had left…

OK, here’s a prime example of a lost linking opportunity that actually annoyed at least one reader (me). On Sunday, the New York Times posted a story “Dancers in the Crowd Bring Back ‘Thriller’.” It’s an interesting and entertaining piece about how Sony BMG has used viral marketing as part of the 25th anniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. Central to the story is that videos of paid dancers breaking into “spontaneous” zombie dances aboard trains and on city streets have become very popular on YouTube, the video sharing…

I believe that the phrase “no one can do it all and frankly no one should” must be part of the discussion at any newspaper serious about their online operation. As I wrote in a previous post, there is a growing sentiment at many papers that there are just too few people to tackle what seems like ever-growing to-do lists. What concerns me about that reaction is that I fear it reflects organizations who are only considering the first “no one can do it all” part of the above phrase. While organizations can keep on increasing the responsibilities for their reporters,…

The Web allows for content, sometimes days or even months old, to enjoy popularity on the Web. But good SEO is needed to make this happen. The No. 1 traffic source on my blog is Google, and about a third of my traffic comes from search engines. Longevity is one of the keys to successful monetization on the Web. Unlike a static medium like print, content can be useful far beyond its original publication date. Case in point, my post “Hyperlocal will make money.” I posted it on July 9, 2007. Yet, it has gotten the majority of its views in 2008. Embracing social networking, deep…

I did a quick reedit of the video I did early today based on some of Chris Amico’s suggestions. It took at most 15 minutes, including encoding and uploading to Viddler. I think I personally prefer this second version, because it’s tighter, more immediate. I could polish it up a bit, because I did this reedit really fast, but it shows you how quickly you can take the same clips and do a different concept with them.

A lot of journalists are concerned that Web video will eat up a lot of their time. It doesn’t have to. In fact, in most instances it shouldn’t. The Return On Investment for spending a lot of time on Web video just isn’t there. There is a lot of advertising money available for broadcast news. Online advertising is a much more competitive landscape (just like online advertising is much more competitive than print advertising). Keeping this reality in mind, Web video can’t afford to be as polished (overproduced) as broadcast news. Not that that’s a bad thing. For…

Today I was out covering an event, while a TV news crew was there too, and it became quite apparent the difference between newspaper (Web) and TV journalists. We were both covering wounded veterans learning how to use Segways to increase their mobility — a tailored made story for visual storytelling. We all get that. My team had a video camera too, microphones, DSLRs, all that fun stuff. What we didn’t have was the audacity to ask people we were “journaling” to do things so we can get shots. The TV crew was telling the Segway riders to line up a certain way, move a…

It’s important for people making decisions on the Web operations of journalism Web sites to be heavy Internet users, be on the cutting edge and be willing to try anything and everything out on their own. Web native != young. Let’s get that straight. But it usually does, and if you don’t know what that first sentence means, you’re probably not a Web native. No, people leading journalism Web sites don’t need to be master programmers or multimedia experts. Hardly. But they should at least try — and more importantly, understand — the features they purpose…

I found this column by The Seattle Times' Jerry Large pretty interesting. For those who don't feel like following the link, here's the gist: An ad agency in Orting, Wash. has created an online newspaper to fill the void of the recently folded weekly, the Orting Gazette. The stories are written by community members and edited by employees at Carr Knowledge, the ad agency in question. Any reader complaints, questions, etc. go straight to the writers and it appears that there's no editor-in-chief or anything like that (other than, of course, the ad agency at large, which as the owner has…

Big shot in the arm today! Beatblogging.org -- leading the charge for Web 2.0 reporting -- gives a shout out to my work at the GT. I've learned a lot by following their experiments on blogging the beat. Recommended reading.

Have you ever wondered about downtime for Facebook.com, or LinkedIn.com. Check Downtime

Note: This post started as a reply to a post by WeMediaGuru, but it just got too long for that format and turned into its own animal. Today, Jason at wemediaguru notes words from Mike Blinder of the consulting firm The Blinder Group, which works with media companies to maximize revenue: The mafia (yellow pages) comes to town every year and steals 18 to 20 percent of the revenue that newspapers should be getting in their local market. Google is doing a great job at killing yellow pages. The enemy of my enemy is my friend today. Jason's wondering if incorporating Google is a wise strategy for…

I'm a regular reader of Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine blog. His posts about new media, we media, newspaper woes and the like are typically spot-on and spark creative thinking almost every day. But I've got to admit that his political posturing is getting a bit tiresome. He's a Hillary supporter and he's often pissed that Obama gets a pass from much of the media machine. Big deal. Anyone who reads a media insider blog like BuzzMachine already gets that journalism ain't objective. So I don't get why he's so bent. Politics aside, it also seems like a poor example of quality blogging. The mantra of…

Just got this message from the American consulate in Shenyang: Any large-scale public event such as the upcoming Olympic Games may present an attractive target for terrorists. There is a heightened risk that extremist groups will conduct terrorist acts within China in the near future. In light of these security concerns, U.S. citizens traveling in China are advised to use caution and to be alert to their surroundings at all times, including at hotels, in restaurants, on public transportation and where there are demonstrations and other large-scale public gatherings. Consistent with our…

This should worry people on both sides of the Pacific: (via Danwei) Stephen Hadley is the National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush. He was Condoleeza Rice’s number two in Bush’s first term, before Rice moved to State. Think what you want about China’s policy out west, where dissidents have clashed with police over religious freedom and national identity, where history can be confusing and complicated and politics even more so. Just make sure you know what country you’re thinking about. Hadley said two days later he favors “quiet diplomacy” with…

I’ll be posting live audio updates all day Wednesday. Click play on the widget above, or click here for the full play list. There’s a feed, too. Want to watch this somewhere else? Embed the above player on your own site by copying the code below.

Christine Lu asks a worthwhile question: “Do you feel western media is misinformed about China? If so, what source of information do you rely on when it comes to staying informed on China?” Plenty of Chinese think so. A Sina.com petition has garnered 1.19 million protest signatures alleging, “Western media organisations such as CNN and BBC have churned out untrue and distorted reports of the event,” according to AFP (via CDT). China Daily chimes in with an editorial: Media must be objective.” Meanwhile, Tim Johnson of McClatchy and Simon Elegant of Time report…

For the past few days now, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about Tibet. There isn’t much I can add, really. I’ve never been there, and what is worth saying has largely been said by people closer to the situation more knowledgeable about the complexities involved. So I’ve been reading, and because the internet is social, I’ve been posting links to news from Western China on Twitter, Google, Del.icio.us and Facebook. I’ve compiled those links into one RSS feed, which should be available within mainland China, where the news sites themselves are…

Image by Pandemia Web producers spend kabillions of hours optimizing and honing content for presentation on their news websites. But what about all those stories and photos that get sent directly to users via RSS? What happens to your content once it gets sent out through your feeds? What does the content in your feeds look like? Do you know how many people are subscribing to your RSS feeds and possibly circumventing visiting your news site altogether? All that control and information is just a free sign up away! What’s the magic web service? FeedBurner ! If you’ve heard of the…

Image by said&done Want to get some traffic out of Facebook but don’t want to spend moolah on developing an application? You’re in luck. Facebook provides a number of tools that can help you promote your content and cash in on social network referrals. And the best thing is - Anyone Can Do It! So what’s the secret tactic? - SHARING! In this post, you’ll learn about how creating a newsroom network and sharing your content with an easy-to-use tool can get you more visits from Facebook visitors. THE BASIC GOALS OF YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE Building a Facebook presence…

Image by Payton Chung While newspapers are working on getting their staff members interested in online, the fact remains that many print writers and photographers aren’t all that interested in paying attention to the ups and downs of their newspapers’ websites. From the online perspective, here’s a few strategies I’ve seen work in getting newspaper people thinking about success they can have online. 1. Pick one person to start with and cultivate This tip comes from Ryan Sholin, who brilliantly says in these transitional times “you can’t mandate mindset. But you…

Image by CarbonNYC A shortfall of some web analytics programs at news sites is they don’t always report the metrics producers need - a key measure being referrers . Why you should pay attention to referrers (people who link to your site and send traffic)? Knowing referrers gives a news site producer insight into who is scanning your content and also who is promoting your content! Engaging referrers, whether they be bloggers, social network profiles or other websites, can help you find news consumer evangelists who can help you spread the word on new projects and stories that could help…

Image by Robert Scoble You’ve heard about it, and sometimes feel somewhat scandalous when using the word - TWITTER ! This microblogging service is all the rage on the social mediascape and you can dig into it’s awesome power to promote your newspaper’s online content in fewer than 20 minutes! (I know I said 9 minutes in the headline, but for people that need to create an OpenID account, it might take a little more time). Why start twittering? Twitter is, imho, the most powerful social media tool for content syndication. If you want to get your content in front of as many…

An interesting ethical question came up this morning when one of our reporters interviewed the university president. The reporter used a digital voice recorder, and of course asked permission to record the interview. At the end, he asked the president if he minded the Northern Star putting part of the interview online as an audio file. The president declined, and said he would have spoken differently had he known the interview might be put on the Web. So the question is, are “print” reporters legally or ethically obligated to tell a source exactly how an audio recording might be…

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been off the path for a few days, and will likely continue to be for a few more days. I invite you to enjoy some of the rest of the journoblogosphere in the meantime.

It has been a while since I wrote on XML. I’ve been pouring over material and thought I would put some new information out as well as ask for some feedback. First, I need to make clear XML is a markup language, not programming language. It won’t “do” anything. Rather, it is a way to tag your content - words or pictures. So you can’t program XML to display a web page or interact with some database. You would use XML to tag the information for display on a web page or to identify information from a database but not actually to program anything. How do you…

Image via Wikipedia Update: Mindy McAdams comments more on the headline strategy. MediaShift’s Mark Glaser offers up a list of tips for increasing search engine traffic to your web site. If you’re not familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), this is a pretty decent place to start. A couple of Glaser’s points stick out for college media: Links and headlines. Links As Glaser (and countless others, including myself) notes, hyperlinks increase your search engine “weight.” That’s a good reason to link to other stories within your site, and also out to…

Image by karindalziel via FlickrI noticed a little icon popping up in a couple of RSS feeds yesterday (Specifically, Alfred Hermida’s Reportr.net), and started looking into the product behind the icon. It’s an interesting plug-in that may help make blogging a little easier: Zemanta. The simple explanation is that Zemanta follows your typing and suggests related content - photos, links, and articles - based on what you write. You install Zemanta as a Firefox extension, and it shows up as a pane in your blogging screen. Every 300 characters, it refreshes with content that it thinks…

Nathan, at FlowingData.com, passed along this interesting posting from the guys at Everyblock We think it hints at an interesting point of maturity in the evolution of JAGIS (i.e. Jounalism and GIS). That is, publications will want to start differentiating themselves from online and print competitors by design and look-and-feel attributes. That means NO just using Google Map mash-ups. Rolling Out Your Own Online Maps and Graphs with HTML/CSS Wilson Miner and Paul Smith, two co-founders of Everyblock, post tutorials and a little bit of their own experiences rolling out their own maps and…

An interesting blurb today in Directions Magazine. It had asked readers: Final results of the current poll (85 respondents) show that even mapophiles prefer a text front page for news. The poll asked, "How often do you use mapping interfaces to the news, such as Google Earth's new layer of New York Times stories or MetaCarta's GeoSearch News?"  Significance?  We're not sure, but it might help comprehension if there were more thumbnail maps "printed" with many stories.

Nathan at FlowingData sends this along.... H. G. Wells on Quantitative Thinking Posted: 11 Apr 2008 03:32 AM CDT The time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write. H.G. Wells, Mankind in the Making, 1904  

We have long been fans -- and users -- of the research tutorials created by the good folks in the UC Berkeley library.  This item below from The Scout Report reminds me of that work and why I like it so much.  You, too, might find it a helpful link for your training efforts. UC Berkeley Library's Congressional Research Tutorials [Macromedia Flash Player] http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/wikis/congresearch/ Making a clear and direct path through the vast amount of Congressional materials can be quite a chore, even for the most seasoned and experienced researcher. Fortunately, the…

Last week we had the opportunity to participate in a symposium honoring Phil Meyer, Knight Chair of Journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel. About 30 journalism educators, practitioners and former students of Phil's spent the better part of two days kicking hard on the topic ""Raising the Ante: The Internet's Impact on Journalism Education and Existing Theories of Mass Communication." Kathleen Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, used the symposium as the basis for her column last week at cbsnews.com. The column (not quite a blog) is called “Poll Positions” (about…

Like many readers of blogs about the news business, I started big. As in, with the big guys, the heavy hitters, the bloggers who showed up in Romenesko and were hard to ignore. The Jays and Jeffs and Dans of the media blog world. I’ve dramatically expanded my reading list since then, but meeting journalists and bloggers through Wired Journalists has led me to even more. Here are a few you should add to your reading list if you’re ready for some expansion: Matt Neznanski Jason Kristufek Mark Luckie Enjoy. Follow those links down the rabbit hole, find more unsung media blog heroes,…

(Flickr photo originally uploaded by David!!!!!!) Here are the highlights, in no particular order, from my trip to Missouri and Kansas: Talking shop with Will Sullivan and Kurt Greenbaum from STLToday.com. Getting much better at making my presentation on the mysterious world of Web-first publishing. Watching reporters get excited about pothole maps and point & shoot video. Pizza and pitchers with Clyde Bentley, Isabelle, and Beth at Shakespeare’s in Columbia, MO. Looking over a publisher’s shoulder as he signed up for YouTube and posted a video he had edited while I talked…

I’ve moved this here blog and most everything else at ryansholin.com, reportingon.com, and a domain to be named later off to WebFaction ’s servers. So far, so good. WebFaction support is already impressive, hitting me up with detailed instructions on how to easily import my WordPress database using ssh.  (Yes, I used the command line.  Be proud of me.) That said, forgive me if I haven’t had time yet to get all my static files in place, and your DNS may vary, so if something doesn’t ring up quite right the first time, just bang on your favorite refresh button. Thanks…

[If you're reading this in late April 2008, I've managed to post something on time for this month's Carnival of Journalism, hosted by Yoni Greenbaum this time around.] Lately, when failing revenues and/or an ill-fated JOA results in a newspaper closing up shop, there’s talk of “what if” they continued publishing online, but I have yet to see anyone actually pull it off. And this is where the update will go when twelve of you tell me about papers that have shut down in print but stayed online. I’ve definitely seen signs of papers that have switched from daily to weekly…

Trying to turn the tide of the decline of newspapers from the inside involves a great deal of evangelizing and pontificating and running through sets of common scenarios with folks who are still firmly planted in the Paper business rather than the News business. That’s no surprise. And it’s no surprise that top-down, do-it-this-way mandates don’t work just because the ideas are sound. Taking those two obstacles as a given, my basic goal when I talk with the staff at a newspaper is to try to identify — or bring out of the woodwork — one early adopter.  This might…

Barry Diller on media consolidation:"The conglomerates are like the Rothschilds funding both sides in the Napoleonic wars, They are on both sides of virtually every transaction."-- Forbes "Landscape of Giants," May 8, 2008

Eric Berlin:Here's what we know: people are online, they watch video online, they spend money online. Therefore, video producers and advertisers are going into overdrive to figure out a model that works.Mark Cuban quoting (I think) Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research: Ironically, we are headed down the same self-destructive road for other kinds of traditional media,as well. Five years into the video-over-the-Internet revolution, we have learned two things. First; consumers won't pay for content on the web, so it will have to be ad supported. And second; it won't be ad supported. We've got the…

Short is the new black. Did you make it this far.(Always has been.)

Something very similar to this breaking Twitter news happened to me on April  18 with this story.(via InfoDiva)

David Cohn does a  video interview with Scott Karp, who he calls "one freakin' smart guy," on Publish2, Link Journalism and more. It's a good overview of what Karp is doing with Publish2.

Robert Niles over at OJR reports on the NewsTools 2008 conference, where Google News insider Daniel Meredith explained how Google decides which publishers to include in its Google News index (official instructions here). If you’re at a major newspaper site, you[’re probably already included. However, when you go to launch a new editorial product, you’re going to want to do your best to be included in Google News. You have to specifically ask to be in the index. After that, there are four key factors considered in Google’s decision, Niles says: Original content Multiple…

Have you been searching the blogosfera for a Spanish-language guide to Internet terminology? Look no further than the Diccionario de Internet [Dictionary of the Internet]. The guide, put together by online marketer Jorge Ontalba, is available as a free PDF download (NOTE: it needs to be extracted using a tool like 7-Zip). The dictionary covers a wide variety of Internet terms mostly in English with Spanish definitions, though there are more than a few Spanish-specific terms. The next time you’re in Spain or Latin America, make sure to peruse the Diccionario de Internet and make sure…

Facebook developer Jesse Farmer has compiled statistics that indicate the big boom in developing Facebook applications may be over. Perhaps Van Helsing is out whacking Facebook developers to stop the vampires and other undead applications. Here’s the nutshell from the new Inquistr technology and pop culure blog: “Farmer compiled statistics on Facebook developer activity and successful Facebook apps, finding that since the beginning of the year, participation on Facebook developer forums has dropped 27% by unique users, and the number of posts a day has dropped 51%. Activity in a…

The business journalists at the Globe and Mail have put together a fantastic list of