Who? Steve Buttry
Where? Steve Buttry is director of community engagement at TBD. He writes about journalism in his blog The Buttry Diary.
Twitter? @stevebuttry
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to sarah.booker at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
Blogger and director of community engagement for a new Washington news operation TBD, Steve Buttry, recently took a look at the paywall around new Honolulu site Civil Beat.
He was surprised to see the $19.99 monthly charge to access content, when eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched his new site. But while he thinks paid-for content models can be “foolish”, he also acknowledges that Omidyar knows a digital thing or two.
In this post (published on 4 June) he reviews the content behind the paywall. In the comments below, Civil Beat editor John Temple responds to some of his observations.
Steve Buttry attempts to start the “difficult but important job” of answering this question: “How do we need to work differently to command the attention of those people reading and tapping small screens?”
Courtesy of Slideshare comes Steve Buttry’s presentation on Twitter for Journalists.
(@stevebuttry is coach for the ‘Complete Community Connection’ (C3) programme at Gazette Communications in the US)
A great resource for those just getting into tweeting or if you need to talk your news colleagues around…
This list is doing the rounds under the headline 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students… and we’re not on it. Nope, not even a smidgeon of link-love for poor old Journalism.co.uk there.
The BachelorsDegreeOnline site appears to be part of e-Learners.com, but it’s not clear who put the list together. Despite their omission of our content and their rather odd descriptions (e.g: Adrian Monck: ‘Adrian Monck writes this blog about how we inform ourselves and why we do it’), we admit it is a pretty comprehensive list; excellent people and organisations we feature on the site, our blog roll and Best of Blogs mix – including many UK-based ones. There were also ones we hadn’t come across before.
In true web 2.0 self-promotional style, here are our own links which any future list-compilers might like to consider as helpful links for journalism students:
And here are some blogs/sites also left off the list which immediately spring to mind as important reading for any (particularly UK-based) journalism students:
Organisations
Individuals
Writing this has only brought home further the realisation that omissions are par for the course with list-compilation, but it does inspire us to do our own 101 essential links for global online journalists – trainees or otherwise. We’d also like to make our list inclusive of material that is useful for, but not necessarily about, journalists: MySociety for example.
Add suggestions below, via @journalismnews or drop judith at journalism.co.uk an email.
“It’s ok to be sick and tired of Twitter rants by journalists who don’t understand it,” writes Steve Buttry.
“The same day I posted about Edward Wasserman writing about Twitter without really learning about it, I read another piece from another journalist I respect, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, writing The Twitter Explosion in the American Journalism Review.
“Farhi, to his credit, did a fairly thorough job of researching Twitter by reading about it online and by interviewing journalists who use it. He just didn’t bother, from what I can tell, to learn anything firsthand by actually using it. And his writing revealed his ignorance.”
An ethical question from Steve Buttry’s blog, with some detailed examples about how conflicts might arise. He asks:
“How do small-town journalists maintain credibility while covering public officials who may be their family and friends?”
Steve Buttry, information content conductor at Gazette communications, shares the thoughts of a panel discussing journalism’s future for a First Amendment Day programme.
The panel, introduced by Dr Michael Bugeja, asked:
“Does journalism have a future? Can there be freedom of the press without a press? Can there be a free press if we give away the press for free? Ah, there’s the rub. If information has no value, then what will become of our news values, from fact to follow-up, from prominence to proximity, from usefulness to timeliness?”
NB: Steve Buttry’s contribution to the panel can be found at this link.