Next semester, I’m leading a group of students in a service-learning class at UNC-Chapel Hill that be using online reporting and publishing techniques to dig in to the story of North Carolina’s rising high school dropout rate. As part of this experiment, we’re working with news outlets in the state on a collaboration that will live both on their individual sites and on a centralized site at UNC. If you’re interested in participating, please take a look at our draft plan of attack here .
Author: Ryan Thornburg
Len Downie’s Rules for Good Journalism
The former executive editor of The Washington Post laid them out recently in a speech at Harvard:
1. All journalists should accurately identify themselves.
2. Conflicts of interest should also be disclosed, if not avoided altogether.
3. News and opinion should be clearly differentiated.
4. Photography and video should not be doctored or misleadingly used, unless it is obvious it has been altered only to entertain or express opinion.
5. Journalism should serve the public interest rather than the personal whim of bloggers or special interests of any kind.
Finally, he says, “Too much concentration on the philosophical questions about journalism in the digital world runs the risk of ignoring the most important question before us. Who will pay for the news?”
Those seem pretty straightforward and not too onerous. I have a quibble with his third and fifth points because I’m not sure these can be accomplished in a way that convinces and builds trust with the audience, even when done by the most well-intentioned journalists. Some people know the difference between opinion and fact, and for them labels are meaningless. Other people don’t know the difference between opinion and fact even when it’s labeled, and for them labels are also meaningless. “The public interest” I think is also a bit elusive and is phrase that has been so widely used by policy advocates on all sides that I’m not sure it has much ability to build or sustain credibility. Instead, I’d replace those two points with one — that journalism should be “evidence-based” and respect the scientific method.
Former UNC Student: ‘I Am a Blog (And So Can You!)’
My colleague Chris Roush has a nice interview with one of his former students who is trying to blog for cash.
Aaron Kremer launched RichmondBizSense.com at the beginning of the year, and he’s now reaching more than 1,300 readers a day through his Web site and via an e-mail service.
Roush gets Kremer to tell us how he did it… and how you can, too!
The keys appear to be these:
1. Find a niche and own it. All of it. All the time.
2. Get started by sacrificing your personal time and all your money.
This isn’t a business for the timid, my friends.
Survey of Journalism Want Ads
I can’t wait to read the results of this study by Serena Carpenter at Arizona State University.
I’m particularly interested to see whether there’s a disconnect between the words that hiring managers use in their postings and the words that journalists themselves use to describe online news jobs. Also, job postings are an important “leading indicator” of changing duties and skills in the industry. My survey describes the present state of affairs, and it doesn’t do a good job predicting what the future will be or what hiring managers WANT the future to be.
Murrow: The First Blogger
For more than a year, I’ve been holding up Dan Froomkin’s Nieman Watchdog article about I.F. Stone as a great first stop for journalism students who are trying to understand what I mean when I say that thorough, accurate reporting and “voice” need to co-exist in their writing if they want to be successful journalistic bloggers.
But at a faculty picnic tonight, my colleague Dave Cupp inadvertently gave me another old-media model — Edward R. Murrow.
The Challenge: ROI at the Story Level
Disaggregation of traditional news sources such as the daily newspaper is one of the most disruptive forces in journalism right now. And there was more evidence of it’s impact in yesterday’s layoffs at McClatchy Interactive.
Newsroom-Classroom Panel at ONA: A Bridge to Nowhere?
As yesterday’s Online News Association conference panel about collaboration between universities and newsrooms drew to a close, it was becoming clear that intellectual transactions were just waiting to be made, that a new marketplace must be created. The room had decided that the news biz did indeed have problems and that the academy just might be stocked with the resources needed to solve them.
The only thing standing in the way of better collaboration had been the difficulty so far in matching the problems with the resources. We would need to create a Match.com of journalism innovation, I said, where newsroom leaders could submit RFPs and where educators could post the research and technical resources of their students.
So with 10 minutes left in the panel, I whipped open a Word document and projected it on the screen at the front of the room. I was ready to start brainstorming right there and begin making a quick list of research questions and innovation projects. Oh, the excitement of a panel discussion that would be more than just talk! The bridges that would be built!
But then we hit just one small snag. Of the hundred or so people in the room, about 90 percent were from the classroom. Somehow, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon in Washington, the Statler conference room at the Capital Hilton had transformed in to an ivory tower. We had built a bridge to nowhere.
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Reporting From the Online News Association Conference
Tomorrow morning I’m headed to the ONA conference in Washington, D.C. I will blog and Twitter on occasion as news warrants and technology allows.
Also, on Friday at 2:30 p.m. I will be moderating a panel about the possibilities and challenges of newsroom-classroom partnerships.
Full coverage of the conference is here. UNC-Chapel Hill junior Alex Kowalski is one of the student journalists staffing the event.
‘Think Romanesko When He Was 20’
Collegerag.net is a site launched yesterday by two UNC-Chapel Hill journalism students, Sara Gregory and Andrew Dunn.
At Small Paper, Breaking News Boosts Audience
The Pilot in Southern Pines, N.C., is small by circulation but not by ambition. In the September newsletter for the N.C. Press Association, president Rick Thames notes that the paper, which circulates 14,584 copies three times a week, boosted the number of daily unique visitors to its Web site from 5,000 to 5,700 in six weeks. How? By posting more stuff more often.
The lesson, Thames writes: “The more you post, the higher your numbers will climb.”
Yes, and there’s a good reason for that.
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