US newspaper publisher giant Gannett is to make all non-unionised staff take a one-week unpaid break in the first quarter of this year, in an attempt to minimise redundancies. Full story…
WhatTheyThink? map out employment levels in the US creative industries for the past three years, demonstrating that newspapers have been cutting staff since early 2006. Full story…
1. How to use Twitter to build communities, cover your beat, instigate and engage in conversations.
2. How to use RSS feeds to gather news and manage them using filtering techniques (basic or advanced).
3. That there is a difference between link journalism and ‘cut and paste’ journalism (aka plagiarism).
4. That your readers are smarter than you think. In fact, many are smarter than you – they know more than you do.
5. That churnalism is much easier to spot online. If you do this regularly, your readers are already on to you – merely re-writing press releases without bringing anything to the table no longer cuts it.
6. Google is your friend. But if you are not using advanced search techniques, you really have no idea what it is capable of.
7. You do not have to own, or even host, the technology to innovate in journalism and engage your readers. There is a plethora of free or cheap tools available online, so there is no excuse for not experimenting with them.
8. Multimedia for multimedia’s sake rarely works, and is often embarrassing. If you are going to do it, either do it well enough so it works as a standalone item or do it to complement your written coverage – for example, add a link to the full sound file of your interview with someone in your article, or a link to the video of someone’s entire speech at an event. The latter will enhance the transparency of your journalism too. Great tips and resources here and some useful tips on doing video on a budget.
9. How to write search engine friendly journalism. Old school thinking about headline writing, story structure etc no longer applies online and there is also more to learn about tagging, linking and categorisation. Sub-editors (if you still have them), editors and reporters all need to know how to do this stuff.
10. Learn more about privacy. You can find a lot of information about people online, especially via social networking sites, but think carefully about the consequences. And bear in mind that it cuts both ways, if you do not do it carefully, your online research could compromise your sources.
Update: see Ten things every journalist should know in 2010
Seattle’s oldest newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, was put up for sale on Friday by owners Hearst Corp and – if a buyer is not forthcoming in the next 60 days – the paper will close or continue only online. Full story…
A collection of sites and tools you can use to track news from the conflict in Gaza. Full story…
Dave Winer: “One of the common complaints from people in journalism about bloggers is that we just comment on reports in the news, we don’t do original reporting. It’s so often repeated it’s become a cliche, but it’s simply not true and I can prove it.” Full story…
Journalism students and their teachers in the US are to get more protection under a new state law which prevents administrators from taking punitive action against staff who to try to protect student press freedom (hat tip to Adrian Monck), writes the LA Times.
The Journalism Teacher Protection Act will also coincide with another initiative that seeks to educate students about 1st Amendment feedoms, the News Literacy project. This scheme will send working journalists to teach students how to “distinguish verified information from raw messages, spin, gossip and opinion,” Alan Miller, project founder, tells the Times. Full story…
UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph has outsourced some of its production work to Pagemasters, a company based in Rhodes, western Sydney.
The company, owned by news agency Australian Associated Press, will copy edit and layout raw copy for the Telegraph’s travel, motoring and money pages as well as parts of The Sunday Telegraph.
The move is intended to “save on night and overtime penalties for workers in Britain and get more expensive staff off its books”, writes the Herald. Full story…
Ben LaMothe takes newspaper publishers that impose group-wide templates on web editors to task. “This failed mentality does not recognize one simple fact: No two publications are the same. Each have different needs, different readers and present different opportunities in terms of design and layout,” he writes. Full story…
Dan Froomkin suggests seven ways Google could help journalism (if it really cared). Full story…