Online Journalism Archive
25 Nov 2013
Why does the New York Times think it has to preserve its misjudgments online?
What should news media be willing to change about old online stories, and what should they insist on keeping unchanged? I faced this problem while Online Editor for The Plain Dealer. We regularly got calls from individuals or “reputation managers” (i.e., Internet fixers) who wanted us to make old stories go away. Usually, the stories
19 Nov 2013
Could photojournalists have avoided the newsroom purges?
Let’s start with a basic fact, now confirmed: Visual journalists, particularly photographers, are suffering disproportionately as the industry retrenches. Move on to a conclusion that a lot of us have reached: This is not a good thing. I said that myself back in October; someone far more qualified to judge, Mario Garcia, said so today.
14 Nov 2013
The Five W’s & How: Applying them to an individual fact
The Five W’s (who, what, when, where, why) and How are journalism’s double trinity. They’re generally applied to whole stories, as Jeremy Porter notes on the Journalistics blog. But they’re also a key to fact-checking, especially when you’re reporting on statistics dropped into speeches or such. An excellent example of that is a BBC News
11 Nov 2013
What’s so bad about reporting good news?
The last, but arguably most important, of Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules for writers is “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” In a blog post this weekend, former newspaper editor John L. Robinson suggested the same kind of principle for newsrooms. Try this exercise: Ask readers — it won’t work if
31 Oct 2013
What do journalism students need to know before they graduate?
What do journalism students need to know as they move into the job world? That’s what Shaina Cavazos asked in the comments on my earlier post about whether journalists need to learn coding. I’m splitting my answer into three parts: First, what most editors are looking for; second, what I would look for; third, what
25 Oct 2013
Could La Presse’s tablet app fill the gap in the logic behind giving away news for free?
One reason I’m not a fan of paywalls for news sites is that, with a few exceptions, the case for them seems to come down to: If they don’t work, we’re doomed, ergo they will work. I may have shown up for only four out of every five sessions of my 7 a.m. college Logic
24 Oct 2013
The art of the link: Do’s and don’ts for embedding links in stories
It dismays me that people still have to write posts defending content curation online, as Sarah Arrow did recently on SteamFeed. But it dismays me even more that most news sites fail in their use of even individual links embedded in stories, the elemental building block of what makes the web a web and not
21 Oct 2013
To code or not to code: What do journalism students need to know?
Olga Khazan has stirred up the “should journalists learn to code” argument with an article on the Atlantic that says, bluntly, no. This must mean that the debate had been shifting toward the “yes” side, since the Atlantic sites are among those that have gone past search-engine bait and even social-media bait right to contrarian
18 Oct 2013
Use the Commenting Rule of Twos to save your sanity
Reporters who are asked to take part in the comments on their online stories sometimes say they’re worried they will do something stupid. And I’ve heard editors express the same fear — about their staff, of course. But in the several years that I worked with reporter comments, there were only a handful of times
16 Oct 2013
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Editors: How top newsroom managers get picked
Rick Edmonds writes at Poynter of his surprise that at newspapers, “top editors with a strong digital background remain rare.” I don’t share his surprise — first, because the lack of digital natives in top newsroom jobs has been obvious to many of us; second, because the reasons this is true go beyond whether publishers