Tag Archives: journalism

Will fact-checking go the way of blogs?

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With any luck, what’s happening to blogs will also happen to fact-checking. As fact-check columns proliferate and become impossible to ignore, reporters will start incorporating their conclusions in their reporting, and will eventually reach the (shocking!) point at which they habitually start comparing what politicians say with what the truth of the matter actually is. In other words, the greatest triumph of the fact-checking movement will come when it puts itself out of work, because journalists are doing its job for it as a matter of course.

Felix Salmon - Will fact-checking go the way of blogs?

Write more about your newsroom

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Last week I followed Lauren’s tweets about the Seattle Times’ move to a new building. It was fun to see the photos of packed up boxes and a newsroom in-flux. Watching all this over Twitter made me realize the opportunity something like this gives a news organization to open their newsroom up.

There are a lot of interesting questions that come up from a 24/7 operation like a metro daily moving to a new building. Here are just a few I thought of:

  • Who is responsible for tracking breaking stories while moving? What type of plans did the Times have in place if a critical story were to break while they moved?
  • In what ways does the production cycle of a news story change when a good part of the newsroom is packing and moving? What challenges is the Times having to work around in the move?
  • How could the workflow changes for efficiency made during the move be applied to the everyday process?
  • What were the goals for moving to a new building? Is the Times using it as an opportunity to re-think some of the ways they’re organized?

Times like this make me wish newsrooms had someone responsible for writing about what goes on behind the scenes. If you want your community to feel like a part of what you do then opening up information like this would be a great move, I think.

College Newspapers: Still Teaching Obsolescence

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Note that I differentiate between the print newspaper and journalism. Journalism is a practice; newspapers are a delivery mechanism.

Colleges ought to be focusing on teaching journalism and doing so in an appropriate manner which will best prepare students for life in the post-university “real world”. Teaching students how to produce a print newspaper is teaching them to be obsolete. Students should be learning electronic distribution through modern content management systems.

Aaron Hockley – College Newspapers: Still Teaching Obsolescence.

Pub Rules

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Pub Rules. In a follow-up of sorts to the quote I posted yesterday Brent Simmons writes about what he would do if in charge of a publication. I think it will only be a matter of time before we see someone try this with a large-scale site. I bet that when they do they’ll supplant whatever the main source is for that community. The trick will be sticking to these principles as the site grows and not becoming a bloated mess of “business opportunities.”

News sites as “Angry fruit salad on meth”

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Don’t let your drive for advertising dollars undercut your purpose:

I made the mistake of going to a website today. It’s understandable, of course — everybody does it, from time to time — and I’m sure I’ll forgive myself, eventually.

I don’t mean just any website, of course, I mean a publication. A place where a business publishes interesting things that I like to read.

I couldn’t hit the Reader button in Safari fast enough. In fact, I couldn’t hit it at all, so stunned was I by the flickering colorful circus the page presented. It was like angry fruit salad on meth.

Brent Simmons – The Pummeling Pages.

Self-criticism and the Times

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One day the Times will have the courage to devote a serious amount of their space to self-criticism. To teach the readers how to file bug reports, and actually learn how to listen to them. And their product quality will soar. Until then, we should all be following the Examiner so there’s at least some balance to the reporting in the Times.

Dave Winer – NY Times Examiner.

Getting it

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But by imitating the best journalism of yesterday without a full understanding of why that journalism was great and what made it so powerful, our industry is slowly amassing an unsettling amount of cargo cult behaviors: we’re imitating a 20th-century writing style and ethical code without the first idea about how these contribute to journalism that is informative, engaging and fair.

Stijn Debrouwere – Getting it.

Where Are All the Ed-Ex Designers?

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In the past I’ve written and lectured about the idea that we’re leaving an era where design operates in the narrative mode, in which its fundamental purpose is to create canonical, highly controlled visual stories. We’re now in an era — the digital era — where the new paradigm is designing for behavior: creating stateful systems that are responsive to user inputs and environmental inputs, where presentation is not just separated from content, but where presentation is volatile and continually changing by nature.

These two modes of thinking are so different and even so in conflict with one another that to find a nexus between them is very difficult. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” and that, more or less, is what’s required to be a great editorial experience designer. You must understand users and their expectations, and you must also understand authors and their expectations, and somehow, by hook or by crook, you must reconcile these wildly divergent worldviews into a single, coherent whole that looks and feels effortless.

Khoi Vinh – Where Are All the Ed-Ex Designers?.