I Want My Rocky: Former Rocky Mountain News journalists to launch new journalism project

Watch this space… journalists from the now departed Rocky Mountain News are set to announce new plans for local news coverage later today.

Full post at this link…

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stevenberlinjohnson.com: The crucial ecosystem of technology news

From a speech by Steven B. Johnson, co-founder of Outside.in, at the South by South West Festival:

“I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism (…) It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve.”

Full post at this link…

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Clay Shirky: The old model’s broken – don’t try to replace it

“‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’ To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke,” writes Shirky.

The problem that publishing fixed – reducing the cost and difficulty of making information available to the public – has stopped being a problem because of the internet, he adds. As such it’s becoming less relevant to talk about ‘a publishing industry’.

Full post at this link…

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Another update on the 10 doomed newspapers list

Yesterday Alan Mutter joined the bloggers dismissing the accuracy of the ‘ten most endangered newspapers in America’ list published on TIME.com.

Many interpreted it as coming from Time magazine, but in fact it was a 247WallSt.com post, reproduced on the TIME.com site, under a syndication deal.

Journalism.co.uk asked its author, 24.7 Wall St’s Douglas A. McIntyre, if he defended his selections for which newspapers would next face the chop:

“The list may be viewed as controversial, but that is not its goal. The newspaper industry which was one of the largest employers in America two decades ago is falling apart. Most big cities have not comes to terms with that. This is an accurate list of which papers are at the most [at] risk and why,” McIntyre told Journalism.co.uk

A spokesperson from Time confirmed that TIME.com has been syndicating content from 24/7 Wall St. since January 2009. “This list was not something written by Time.com editors,” the spokesperson said.

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StinkyJournalism.org: ABC News ‘exploitation of medical conditions’

StinkyJournalism.org flags up what it thinks is an example of mainstream media’s “recent venture into commercial exploitation of what former generations unkindly called ‘freaks’.”

“The ABC News photo gallery titled ‘Medical Marvels’ might just as easily have appeared in a lurid grocery store tabloid from the 1950s. It titillates viewers with a black screen and the cautionary words: ‘WARNING: Some of the following pictures are of a graphic nature. Viewer discretion is advised’.”

Full story at this link…

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Dan Mason: ‘Five things journalists should do now – before they face redundancy’

“I’ve seen both sides of the story,” writes Dan Mason, a former regional newspaper editor (Coventry Evening Telegraph and Birmingham Post) and most recently, managing editor of 12 weeklies in London.

His post looks at ‘five things journalists should do now – before they face the threat of redundancy’. “It’s a beginning more than an ending,” he writes.

Firstly, ‘understand the redundancy process clearly BEFORE it starts,’ he says.

Full post at this link…

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BBCJournalismLabs: A data project with a ‘human face’

Bella Hurrell updates on the BBC’s development of a ‘UK fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq’ data interactive.

Originally a list of names, it then became a sortable table. Hurrell writes:

“This was followed by a dynamic visualisation of the figures in Flash. Last week we added the In Pictures page, which is an aggregation of thumbnail images of all those who have been killed in the conflicts.

“This latest page strengthens the coverage, adding another dimension that makes it far more personal, rather than purely a functional way to view the raw data.”

Full story at this link…

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Liberia’s ‘analogue blogger’ working from the Daily News news hut

A great post on AfriGadget: the story of a ‘blackboard blogger’ in Liberia.

“Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He take runs the ‘Daily News’, a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn’t afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand.”

The video below shows how Sirleaf publishes news headlines via a blackboard on his news hut.

Also, a report from 2006, on the New York Times.

(Thanks @ourman for pointing the AfriGadget post out)

Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

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Malcolm Coles’ blog post results in changed T&Cs on newspaper linking

Interesting to see that Malcolm Coles’ recent blog post, which highlighted newspapers’ terms and conditions forbidding linking from their websites, has resulted in some action – outlined in the comments below the post.

Ian Douglas, head of digital production at Telegraph.co.uk says:

“Thanks for pointing this out. As you saw, we deleted it as soon as we heard about it. I’m afraid it say more about the relevance of Ts and Cs than the various papers’ attitude to linking.”

David Black, group director of digital publishing at Trinity Mirror, writes:

“Malcolm, Thanks for spotting this – it’s being fixed for Mirror.co.uk.”

Malcolm Coles has now followed up with another post – what other sites have these kinds of T&Cs banning links to their site? Full post at this link.

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The Atlantic: Jon Stewart ‘has become Edward R. Murrow’

“Through karmic guidance, I sprang awake at the exact moment Jon Stewart was beginning his merciless demolition of interview with Jim Cramer of CNBC’s ‘Mad Money,’” writes James Fallows on TheAtlantic.com.

“I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud,” comments Fallows.

Follow link for post and YouTube video of the Daily Show clip.

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