Monthly Archive:: October 2013
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
If you want to take a break from the ginned-up debates that dominate the Twitter feeds of journalists and journalism professors when they’re not being distracted by the latest shiny things from the widget mills — and God knows, we all need a break from that — I’ve got something for you. Something that can
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
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
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
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
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
Back when I was an editor in a business section, December and January brought the annual ritual of predictions from economic experts. I tried to make sure that each of our stories also went back and looked at the experts’ year-old forecasts. Turnabout is fair play. So here’s an article I wrote in 2006 for
I was going to write today about Bill Marimow’s dramatic ouster from the editorship of the Philadelphia Inquirer. But then I came across an item concerning people who are probably much less comfortably situated to cope with job loss than Marimow, and much less likely to have high-powered lawyers suing to bring them back. According
Jim Romenesko drew the journosphere’s attention yesterday to a note from The Oklahoman’s publisher, apologizing for a recent story about a couple of politicians. Not that anything in the story was false, the publisher wrote, but its “placement on the front page of Sunday’s edition did not comport with the worthiness of the story.” We