Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » Newsweek

Five of the best Tumblr news blogs

Sarah Marshall — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:33:34 +0000

Blogging site Tumblr is growing at an incredible speed. There are now 32 million people in the US 4.5 million people in the UK visiting the site.

News organisations are engaging with the community by setting up their own Tumblr blogs. The Guardian set up a Tumblr account in January and started posting stories in February.

We have been taking a look at the Tumblr blogs of news organisations from around the world and have compiled a list of our favourite five.

1. Canada’s National Post

Why? For its use of photographs, front pages and graphics.

2. Washington Post’s Innovations

Why? For its linking of third party content, integration into its main site and the superb technology content (minus the deluge of royal wedding posts)

3. The Guardian

Why? For its design. It looks just like the Guardian. It includes a well-thought out layout, quantity and type of stories.

3. LA Times

Why? For it tone and fabulous collection of photos.

5. Newsweek

Why? For being very social and introducing us to their Tumblr person, linking multimedia content such as SoundCloud and for handy tabs within their layout theme

Follow our how to guide to creating a Tumblr blog for a news organisation.Similar Posts:

Mediabistro: The best/worst selling magazine covers of 2010

Sarah Marshall — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:34:36 +0000

Mediabistro has been taking a look into the best and worst selling magazine covers in the US last year. For Time magazine the best selling cover was of Mark Zuckerburg, for New York magazine it was about the best place to live in New York. Mediabistro blog Fishbowl NY has pictures of the best selling covers.Similar Posts:

SPD blog: First look at the Newsweek redesign

Sarah Marshall — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

The SPD blog previews Newsweek’s redesign as the US weekly merges with the Daily Beast. According to SPD, the new-look magazine is due in newsagents a week today. The post includes and interview with Dirk Barnett, the man behind the redesign, who discusses the new logo, how the team is “bringing strong, dynamic photojournalism back to Newsweek”, plus plans for presenting data.

The Newsweek redesign comes a week after the relaunch of the New York Times Magazine, which took place yesterday.

Infographics, another element killed off over the past few years at Newsweek, will definitely be coming back. While we plan to up the presence, we have no plans to blow them out in a Bloomberg/Wired direction, our content just doesn’t require or sustain it (plus, Bloomberg Businessweek is killing it, who can compete with that?!). Rather, it will be a vital tool to telling elements of stories that photogrpahy or illustration just don’t nail. We have introduced a new page, DataBeast, that will give us the opportunity to do a weekly infogrpahic on various subjects.

The full SPD blog post is at this link

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Center for Public Integrity strikes content deal with Newsweek and Daily Beast

Rachel McAthy — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:01:23 +0000

The Center for Public Integrity, a US non-profit investigative journalism organisation, will provide exclusive content to Newsweek and the Daily Beast as part of a new agreement announced this week.

The Center’s executive director William Buzenberg said in a statement today that the new deal is a “tremendous opportunity” for the organisation to provide its journalism to a new audience and get paid for its work.

See the full release on the agreement here.Similar Posts:

As the axe is readied, a heartfelt defence of Newsweek.com emerges

Laura Oliver — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 17:14:10 +0000

Someone claiming to be a Newsweek employee (or perhaps more than one individual) has written a heartfelt defence of Newsweek.com, following the news that the site will be closed after its merger with the Daily Beast:

The thing you have to understand about Newsweek is that it would only be fitting that its website would be the first to go. Like most print publications, Newsweek magazine has been led by people who deep down don’t understand the web, and because they don’t understand it, they fear it and don’t value it.

While high-level print editors were taking sleek black towncars to and from the office (and everywhere in between, including, on at least one instance, from DC to New York), this was a staff who slept on grimy couches while reporting on the road; forking out their own funds, at times, just to produce good work. The disparity in work hours, in pay, in resources – it was comical. And it was only telling that not so long ago – let’s say five years – one high-level company executive had to be corrected about the website’s URL: no, Newsweek.com wasn’t the same thing as the internal Newsweek intranet.

… In the face of indifference, condescension and even outright hostility from its print counterpart; with little to no resources; with more high-level hires and fires over the past couple of years than anybody could possibly count – and a revolving door of editors – the small but tireless staff at Newsweek.com consistently created editorial work that made waves: via a website, on video platforms, through multimedia, photo and social media. Whatever happens to Newsweek, we are all proud to have played a part in that.

The post can be read in full on Save Newsweek.com…Similar Posts:

New York Observer: Daily Beast and Newsweek to merge

Laura Oliver — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 09:47:04 +0000

Last night the New York Observer’s Media Mob broke the news that Newsweek and the Daily Beast will merge.

According to the report, the editorial staffs of the two titles will combine in a 50-50 merger of the two companies.

Full story on the New York Observer at this link…

The Daily Beast’s editor-in-chief Tina Brown confirmed the deal in a statement on the site late last night:

It’s a wonderful new opportunity for all the brilliant editors and writers at the Daily Beast who have worked so hard to create the site’s success. Working at the warp-speed of a 24/7 news operation, we now add the versatility of being able to develop ideas and investigations that require a different narrative pace suited to the medium of print. And for Newsweek, the Daily Beast is a thriving frontline of breaking news and commentary that will raise the profile of the magazine’s bylines and quicken the pace of a great magazine’s revival.

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ReadWriteWeb: Newsweek loses another journalist to new media as reporter joins HuffPo

Laura Oliver — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 10:10:57 +0000

Howard Fineman, a reporter at Newsweek for 30 years, is joining the Huffington Post. Fineman will become a senior editor for HuffPo. ReadWriteWeb comments on the number of Newsweek journalists who have left the title since its sale by the Washington Post Company to businessman Sidney Harman and the new homes many have found with new media titles.

Full post on ReadWriteWeb at this link…Similar Posts:

Imminent WikiLeaks Iraq cache ‘biggest leak ever’, report suggests

Rachel McAthy — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:06:07 +0000

More classified military documents are to be released in the coming weeks by WikiLeaks, this time on the war in Iraq, according to national reports over the weekend, such as this one from the Associated Press.

News began to circulate on Friday that the whistleblowing site was planning another release following comments made by Bureau of Investigative Journalism editor Iain Overton in Newsweek, claiming the cache will be “biggest leak of military intelligence” so far.

In its article, Newsweek reports that the collection of Iraq documents held by WikiLeaks is believed to be about three times as large as the number of reports released in July on Afghanistan.

More than 92,000 documents were released to WikiLeaks’ media partners earlier this year relating to military operations in Afghanistan, around 76,000 of which have so far been published by the WikiLeaks online while the remaining 15,000 were held back to undergo ‘harm minimisation review’.Similar Posts:

FT: Washington Post to sell Newsweek to Sidney Harman

Laura Oliver — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 09:28:00 +0000

The Washington Post has agreed to sell Newsweek to businessman Sidney Harman, the founder of one of the world’s largest audio equipment companies, reports the FT.

Harman said he is interested in “the publication’s mission” and was not investing in Newsweek to make a profit – just as well, given recent declines in the title’s ad pages and reported $30-million losses last year.

Full story on FT.com at this link…

According to the Guardian, Harman bought the title for a nominal amount “reported to be just a single dollar”.Similar Posts:

The Wire: Newsweek’s Tumblr editor is off to Tumblr

Joel Gunter — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:37:41 +0000

Mark Coatney, an online editor at Newsweek largely responsible for building up and running the magazine’s Tumblr blog, announced recently on his own Tumblr blog that he would be leaving for Tumblr.

[I]t’s a big loss for Newsweek given that he’s sort of become the public editorial face of the magazine as it continues to navigate a closely-watched sale from the Washington Post Co. (And also given that he was supposed to be one of the 10 staffers that can help save it! Another from that bunch, entertainment reporter Ramin Setoodeh, left for People at the end of June.)

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

Newsweek experiments with Twitter profile of Michele Bachmann

Joel Gunter — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:14:31 +0000

When Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano was dispatched by the magazine to profile ultraconservative Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann it was not, as he would have liked, with a pen, paper and pretend fedora. Instead they suggested he do it live on Twitter as he followed her around. She doesn’t seem to have taken to the idea. Romano’s article about the experience makes for a good read.

I hadn’t spent enough time with her to decide if she was unserious, or crazy, or whatever. Instead, I was simply doing what Twitter demanded: being pithy and provocative. Straightforward narration would go unnoticed. Quotes from Bachmann’s old friends would seem un-newsy. Nuance would cost too many characters. So I became a color commentator, casting off the reporter’s traditional cloak of detachment and publicly weighing in on the proceedings at regular intervals. And because observation and publication were now compressed into a single act, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to phrase my tweets that I otherwise would’ve spent absorbing a scene or speaking to locals. I don’t remember much about the crowd in Monticello, the businessmen in Blaine, or Bachmann’s larger themes. I do remember what I wound up tweeting, and that’s about it.

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

Peter Preston: Can the Economist succeed where Newsweek has failed?

Laura Oliver — Mon, 10 May 2010 08:03:45 +0000

Peter Preston looks into the problems faced by weekly US news magazine Newsweek, which was put up for sale by its owners the Washington Post Co. last week, and asks if news magazines need to rethink their remit:

America is a huge, scattered country. Before mass television, before satellite printing and long before the internet, it needed news magazines to set a national agenda and provide a common framework of fact and perception. It needed Time and then its slightly more liberal competitor, Newsweek.

But now the national agenda rasps away on cable 24/7. Now the facts are familiar and the perceptions old hat by the time they drop on the mat. Now readers don’t want to be told what’s happened in the past seven days, but how it fits and what to think about it. They need analysis and context, in short: not old, broken news. They need The Economist.

Full post at this link…
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US Digest: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern; Newsweek’s yearly results; Winnipeg’s bright future

Joel Gunter — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:42:06 +0000

Starting this week, the editor’s blog will feature an afternoon roundup of all things media from over the pond. From the hugely important to the very inconsequential, check in for a choice of America’s journalistic goings on.

A glimpse of a perfect media world

To the Chicago Tribune first today for a heartwarming paean to Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s, and to Eggers’ own heartwarming paean to the newspaper journalism of old.

Eggers is the founder of independent publishing house McSweeny’s, responsible for, among other things, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Issue 33 of the McSweeney’s quarterly – “so immense it comes in a pillow-size silver, Ziploc-ish bag” – has just been released. It is safe to say that Tribune reporter Christopher Borrelli, who likens it to “a fantasy, a tantalizing mirage — a glimpse of a perfect media world”, is a fan.

The books section runs 96 pages, the Sunday magazine 112 pages. The photos are large and gorgeous, the longest story is about 20,000 words, the arts section is two sections, and, basically, it’s fun.

Really fun.

So perfectly executed that if you work at a daily newspaper — heck, if you merely prefer the feel of news on print, or just adore the beleaguered medium (as Eggers does) — issue No. 33 may bring a tear to your eye.

In interview with Borrelli, Eggers discusses the pragmatic (financial viability) and nostalgic (reading the newspaper as a child) elements of his relationship with the printed word. He also offers a decent response to the accusation that print journalism is elitist:

Readers can tell you what’s important to them by what they look at, but there’s a great danger in that too. When I see a picture of a funny dog wearing a hat on the Web, yeah, I click it too. The problem is that pretty soon you’re down a rabbit hole, and who’s still holding the government accountable? I would much rather have reporters who have been at a subject for a while tell me what’s most important about a subject. Am I really going to cobble together my own news of what’s happening in Afghanistan?

Truth be told, if all the good newspapers called it a day Eggers probably would cobble together his own news of what’s happening in Afghanistan, and it would probably be pretty good. But I suspect this one man publishing phenomenon is not a very good test case for the rest of us. With luck, the San Francisco Panorama – “a nod to Eggers’ adopted hometown and the locality of newspapers” according to Borrelli – which broke even on its first run, will make it into regular print.

Dave Eggers

A glimpse of the real media world

North to the New York Post now, which reports that formal experimentation doesn’t seem to be paying off so well for Newsweek. From Post reporter Keith J. Kelly:

Attempts by Newsweek CEO Tom Ascheim and Editor-in-Chief Jon Meacham to reshape the magazine into a lower-circulation weekly with a more Economist-like feel do not seem to be paying off.

Tucked in the fourth-quarter earnings report from parent Washington Post Company were numbers that suggest the magazine lost $28.1 million in 2009, the first year of the process.

Newsweek is one of only two magazines currently published by the Washington Post Company. The other, Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel, lost $1.2 million bringing the magazine arm losses to a total of $29.3 million.

Politico commentator Michael Calderone was sceptical about the shake-up from the start. From early 2009:

It certainly is a big gamble to mess with the DNA of such an established brand. But given Newsweek’s losses — and the magazine industry as a whole — it’s not a bad time to try and switch things up.

Perhaps some new kind of gamble is now needed at the beginning of 2010, established brand or not.

The hyperlocal/local/niche debate: a follow-up

To, well, anywhere local now with Lost Remote, and a follow up to Wednesday’s US Digest story about local/hyperlocal/niche reporting.

What seemed at first like a fairly innocuous post by the site’s editor Steve Safran provoked a fair amount of discussion. Safran then returned to the fray with a follow up post to address some of the readers’ comments.

Last in: the last in

A little toward the trailing edge of technology, the Winnipeg Free Press, “whose dead-tree edition have been hemorrhaging readers for two decades”, is nonetheless deserving of a runners-up round of applause for finally catching the ‘tweet from local council meeting’ bandwagon.

Apparently, reporter Bartley Kives’ “irreverent tone is perfect for social media”.

Lest the improbably named Bartley Kives get carried away with fantasies of the Twitterati, Duncan McDonagle of Snoo.ws chimes in with a sharp reminder of the realities of modern local reporting in Winnipeg, to which the world’s best-named people clearly gravitate.

And poor old Kives still had to interview participants and write stories for the paper’s website and for the newsprint edition the next morning – as well as keep an eye on council’s debate about garbage containers.

Fear not though, Kives’ humour is very much intact, in evidence in his Twitter report that McDonagle had reported on his Twitter reporting:

Reporter tweets about journalism instructor blogging about reporter tweeting. http://tinyurl.com/yaytn3a #selfpromotion #wpgcouncil

Image of Dave Eggers courtesy of David Shankbone

Image of street map courtesy of HtonlSimilar Posts:

Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons: ‘Don’t bail out newspapers – let them die and get out of the way’

Judith Townend — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:21:05 +0000

Daniel Lyons, senior editor and columnist at Newsweek, argues on his Techtonic Shifts blog that US bailout plans for newspapers, such as a proposed ‘Newspaper Revitalisation Act,’ are pointless and stupid:

“All this hysteria has nothing to do with saving the news, or saving jobs. Nor is it about saving democracy, which is what the red-in-the-face newspaper lovers always get themselves huffed about, as if newspapers and democracy were inextricably linked. Democracy existed long before newspapers did, and it will survive without them. And plenty of countries that don’t have democracy do have newspapers. Nor would a bailout help readers. In fact, it would only slow down our shift to the internet, which is a far better medium for delivering information.”

Full post at this link….Similar Posts:

Charles Apple: Newsweek photo-cropping row

Judith Townend — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:32:23 +0000

Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly is not at all happy with the way Newsweek magazine cropped his photo of former vice-president Dick Cheney at home with his family, Charles Apple notes on his blog. The original photograph shows Cheney leaned over a chopping board, with his family in the background. The cropped version shows the vice-president only, to illustrate quotes that he made about C.I.A. interrogators.

“This incident is another example of why many people don’t believe what they see or read. And America clearly notices these shifts in journalism,” wrote Kennerly in a piece for the New York Times site. Newsweek has defended its use of the photo.

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