There’s no such thing as an objective filter: Why designing algorithms that tell us the news is hard. An objective filter for news may not be the algorithm we need, but that doesn’t mean the right filter is any less difficult to build.
Tag Archives: journalism
Sustainable quality | via Daniel.
We need to reinvent the article. Sean Blanda illustrates that it’s time to rethink not just the article but how information is published on the web. I agree. My favorite narratives are those that answer long, winding questions by telling a story. They are more akin to a short book than a news story. This recent New Yorker piece is 50 pages and over 20,000 words when I drop it in to Pages.app. I loved that article, but defaulting to the same mental model and design presentation for a few hundred word piece about NFL draft trades is ludicrous.
Fungible. The smartest writing about journalism I have read this year.
WordPress leads pack of Pacemaker finalists picked. 53% of the finalists for this year’s online Pacemaker awards are running WordPress. That’s pretty cool. The numbers are even higher for smaller schools with less than 10,000 student enrollments. It’s great to see my alma mater in the list of finalists, too.
Three years on a beat, and then you move on
Chris Anderson as paraphrased by Andreas Kluth. The first year after arriving to your new assignment was terrifying and exhilarating. It was a vertiginous learning curve, but you could ask dumb questions without fear and note that the emperor has no clothes. In the second… Continue reading →
Some news is slow
There’s a big bug in our news system. We like to say it’s a 24-hour news cycle. And maybe it is, but there’s real news, stuff that effects our lives, that happens over a much longer span of time. Boring or not, we have to… Continue reading →
“Actually”
Such a simple word: “Actually….” And now it has a chance to become standard practice at NPR. Jay Rosen - Quote and Comment.
On Content: less is more. Sean Blanda nails it here. Great set of guidelines for any writer to aspire to. I wish more publications understood and followed these ideas.
Will fact-checking go the way of blogs?
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… Continue reading →