Friday, January 30, 2015
Aol dials up the stupid with 150 editorial layoffsBrianna Royce, Editor in Chief of Massively, the MMORPG arm of popular gaming blog Joystiq, which is also going away, talking about Aol Corporate’s most recent stupidity: I would like to be able to tell you truthfully that this is an equitable and …Monday, December 15, 2014
The ethics of reporting on the Sony hackEmily Yoshida (@emilyyoshida), entertainment editor at The Verge, one of my favorite tech news sites, on the publication’s ongoing and deep contemplation of the ethics of reporting on unethically leaked information: The contents of the leak are already …Wednesday, July 2, 2014
HuffPo and BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti recently said in a long and fascinating interview by Felix Salmon published at Matter: I love metrics and I love thinking about optimization, but I think that the optimal state is being slightly suboptimal because as soon as you try to actually optimize, …Friday, June 6, 2014
Journalism and tomatoesFrom a May 2013 editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review: Perhaps journalism can learn from the mistakes of the food industry, which bred a perfectly red, flawless-looking tomato, giving the edge to looks over taste, since that’s what consumers were buying. Redesigns …Wednesday, May 14, 2014
The true Julian AssangeAndrew O’Hagan reads his essay Ghosting, about the failed ghostwriting project during which he got to know WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange as few do. The full text is also available at the link.Thursday, April 17, 2014
Om Malik on digital advertising Is a page being auto-refreshed on an open tab in your browser really useful “attention?” I don’t think so. I saw this first-hand in a previous job. Here is a pro tip: You can be sure much of your traffic is open-and-forget (and therefore useless to advertisers) if …Thursday, April 10, 2014
This began as a link post pointing to Joel Achenbach’s Washington Post blog entry Journalism is aggregation. But, like more and more link posts lately, it got away from me and merged into its own article. Achenbach decides journalism is aggregation, and that’s okay. Or maybe he decides it’s not …Thursday, April 10, 2014
Margaret Sullivan takes her NYT colleagues to task like it’s her job, because it isMargaret Sullivan is Public Editor at the New York Times. She is tasked with taking the Times to task when it falls short, overreaches or otherwise misses the mark. And sometimes it does miss the mark, like when …Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Jay Rosen on the “View from Somewhere”The quarter-billion-dollar news company Pierre Omidyar is founding will be fascinating: a digital-first journalism outfit with old media money behind it. It’s an odd flip of the Jeff Bezos/Washington Post play, which involved a digital-first …Thursday, November 21, 2013
Is Google Play Newsstand a viable alternative to standalone Android apps?No.Wednesday, November 6, 2013
A new kind of freelance journalismThis is essentially journalism à la carte: Peter Jukes offered to continue live-tweeting the News of the World phone-hacking trial if the crowd would fund it. Interest was strong enough to do just that, and his Indiegogo funders ordered up some trial coverage, …Thursday, October 31, 2013
FBI asks DOJ to investigate source of Calderon leak to Al JazeeraIt could be that I’m new to the journalism industry and only recently interested in its developments. But it seems to me as if journalism and law are converging like never before, and on an international stage. While Al Jazeera America …Thursday, October 31, 2013
Jim Roberts joins Mashable as executive editor, chief content officerJim Roberts on his new role at Mashable: To some it might seem a bit of a departure. You might imagine a headline like: “Longtime New York Times and Reuters veteran forsakes legacy media for digital upstart.” Interesting. Roberts …Thursday, September 19, 2013
Reuters nixes Next: Failed redesigns and the challenge of expanding a digital audienceThat’s a shame. This image alone illustrates the design strides made by the Next team (the cancelled redesign is on the right). The Reuters iOS app is better than that of Associated Press, for what it’s worth.Monday, September 16, 2013
NYT managing editor: Guardian story on Israel and N.S.A. Is Not ‘Surprising’ Enough to CoverNew York Times news editor Dean Baquet suffered a serious lapse in editorial judgment. I mean, he can’t be serious, can he?Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Daniel Victor of the New York Times shows us how to be a reporter even on TwitterThis is a great story precisely because Victor wasn’t writing a blog post about how to properly commit journalism on Twitter, he was properly committing journalism on Twitter.Wednesday, August 14, 2013
How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front roomEliot Higgins’ work is a prime example of how the Internet and user generated content are changing journalism on a molecular level. What a fascinating read.Saturday, August 10, 2013
Legislative failure to define essential terms The definition of terms essential to the application of a law is the most basic requirement for competent lawmaking. Sometimes one or more terms are appropriately defined in an open way, to provide flexibility in the application of a law. This is not one …Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Strongbox and Aaron Swartz: Open source, anonymous tipsThere is plenty of Google news today coming out of their annual I/O conference, but this looks far more important and big-picture, if it actually gets used.Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News splitting into separate paywall sitesGawker’s Hamilton Nolan’s theory of the paywall suggests a local paper of high caliber can survive erecting a paywall. Maybe he is right, but can two local papers survive? It will be good to see the Inquirer and the Daily News …Friday, December 7, 2012
Washington Post reports “a person familiar with the plans” says Washington Post considering paywallOh. So. Meta.Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Philly.com posts NSFW photo, ‘production glitch’ blamedSomeone’s gonna get fired…Friday, October 19, 2012
Brazilian newspapers leave Google News en masseCarlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, president of Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers, on his association’s withdraw from Google News: Google News’ presence in the Brazilian market is small. We believe (the loss of traffic) is an acceptable price …Friday, September 21, 2012
Welcome to VentureBeat’s reporting-driven FridayGood on ‘em for trying this out.Friday, September 21, 2012
The new quote approval policy at The New York Times, as quoted by Times opinion writer Margaret Sullivan: So starting now, we want to draw a clear line on this. Citing Times policy, reporters should say no if a source demands, as a condition of an interview, that quotes be submitted afterward to …Wednesday, September 19, 2012
David Hoffman on quotation approvalTwo days ago, I mentioned a piece by David Carr on quotation approval. This morning, I found that Professor David Hoffman, whose corporate law class I took at Temple Law, had posted his own thoughts at Concurring Opinions. Specifically, this part stuck out to me: …Monday, September 17, 2012
David Carr on quotation approval Keep in mind that when public figures get in trouble for something they said, it is usually not because they misspoke, but because they accidentally told the truth. News junkies probably know this already, but it’s worth letting the Times's David Carr remind us that …Friday, September 7, 2012
Say Hello to Samsung’s Fanboy Factory - The Mobilers ProgramIndian mobile tech blogger Clinton Jeff of Unleash the Phones, talking to The Next Web's Brad McCarty: We got a call from Samsung India saying ‘You can either be a part of this and wear the uniform, or you’ll have to get your own …Friday, August 24, 2012
[Longread] Scamworld: ‘Get rich quick’ schemes mutate into an online monsterThis article by Joseph L. Flatley at The Verge is a feat of modern reporting and storytelling. Do yourself a favor and watch the associated documentary, too. I like to give everything a “link” / “longread” …Tuesday, August 21, 2012
A Vision for the Future of Newspapers—20 Years AgoMark Potts, writing about his major part in what might be properly called the genesis of the first digital publishing strategy: As someone said when they saw PostCard a few years later, “It looks like the Web.” Except that, in those early days of …