The State of Storytelling in the Internet Age. Podcasts are blowing up, great stories are reaching more people than ever, people are paying for content, and the modern web is giving the world a better platform to tell stories than the world has ever seen. But news divisions are still shrinking, great publications are still failing, local blogs are still shutting down, and journalists are telling our youth to avoid the profession. The age of wisdom We have the entire world’s knowledge bank at our fingertips 24–7. If you ask me who the first American daredevil was, I can pull up Sam Patch’s name in 5 seconds. Fifty years ago the number of journalists whose work an individual could access on a daily basis was in the hundreds or thousands at best.
Our access to knowledge and stories has never been greater, and it’s growing every day. The age of foolishness “21 things only a 90s kid can appreciate” will probably get 50 times more traffic than a post about climate change or political corruption. The epoch of belief The epoch of incredulity. » Newspaper reporter is ‘the worst job of 2015′ JIMROMENESKO.COM. – #200 out of 200 jobs/CareerCast graphic Newspaper reporter lands on the bottom of CareerCast’s Jobs Rated list for 2015.
Last year, it was #199 out of 200 occupations. Today’s press release says: Newspaper reporter, which displaced lumberjack as the worst job of 2015, has a negative growth outlook of -13.33% and an average annual salary of $36,267. Other rankings for 2015: Broadcaster, 196 (of 200 jobs); Photojournalist, 195; Author, 153; Public Relations Executive, 121; Publication Editor, 137; and Social Media Manager, 101.
A few years ago, I called CareerCast publisher Tony Lee and told him it was a brilliant move to put reporter on the bottom of his list. “The data is the data,” said Lee. . * Best jobs of 2015 | Worst jobs of 2015 (careercast.com) Earlier CareerCast reports: * 2014: Newspaper reporter is no longer the worst job * 2013: Why lumberjack did better than newspaper reporter in career report Earlier: Here’s a newspaper reporter who loves his job (jimromenesko.com) Comments. Good Old Fashioned Shoe Leather Reporting.
The entire French legal code dating back to Napoleon is now on GitHub. Among Napoleon Bonaparte’s earliest and most significant contributions after seizing power in France was to enact a uniform legal code, which had been mooted since the 1770s but successive revolutionary governments failed to accomplish. Napoleon began the process in 1800 and had preliminary drafts circulating the following year. “Neither kings nor representative assemblies had been capable of achieving so much, so quickly,” the historian William Doyle wrote. Napoleon was personally present at 57 of 102 sessions that produced the civil code, which was adopted in 1804, the same year Napoleon was crowned emperor.
The code, which inspired the legal systems in much of Europe, is still in force today in France. Now, a French freelance developer named Steeve Morin has put the entire civil code on GitHub, the web-based depository to track revisions in software code. He calls it “a little hack, the result of an afternoon of coding.” Memo To Publishers: Watch Where You Put That Taproot… Memo To Publishers: Watch Where You Put That Taproot… Well, it’s happening. According to no less authoritative source than The New York Times, The New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook. As Times’ executives contemplate moving The Grey Lady squarely under the rather constrictive confines of Facebook’s terms of service, they may be comforting themselves with a few palliative pretty-much-truths: We may be putting our content on Facebook’s platform, but we’ll still have our presence on the open web, apps, and in print.
All kinda true, and compelling enough to “test,” which is how the article carefully positions the Times’ intentions. Do you have full and unfettered access to reader data? A publisher lives and dies by its ability to maintain a strong connection to its readership. Do you have full and unfettered control over your advertising relationships and data? Facebook’s record here ain’t exactly encouraging. Q&A: Amy O’Leary on eight years of navigating digital culture change at The New York Times.
When Amy O’Leary announced in early January that she was leaving The New York Times to become editorial director at Upworthy, there was a collective jaw-drop in the digital journalism community. O’Leary is well known for the role she played in crafting the Times’ Innovation report, the influential (and intended to be internal) document leaked to the media press last May. Lab readers will recall the report as eye-opening and critical; in a candid speech at the Online News Association conference this fall, O’Leary remarked that, at the time, she was sure the leak was going to get her fired.
But it didn’t; in fact, in October she was promoted to deputy international editor, one of more than a half-dozen titles O’Leary has held at the Times in her eight-year career there. In our interview, O’Leary wasn’t able to say much about what she’ll be doing at Upworthy, though it’s clear she’s interested in working on measuring and directing audience attention. O’Donovan: Crazy. O’Leary: That’s right. From silos to aggregators: On mobile, apps that cross news org boundaries continue to have a pull. For a brief time, starting in 2010, the news industry convinced itself that it could put the toothpaste back in the tube, and Josh Quittner counted himself among the most optimistic.
In April of that year, Apple began shipping the first model of the iPad, and before even the first unit sold it was already being hailed by some as print media’s savior. With the iPad’s high-quality screen and app-based ecosystem, publishers were actually going to have a platform on which to charge for content — and readers, unaccustomed to this new device, could be retrained to pay for their news. The consensus on this was so strong that Rupert Murdoch announced that his News Corp. would invest millions in launching an iPad-only publication called The Daily.
Public relation flaks for magazine companies, after years with little good news to promulgate, furiously launched press releases announcing shiny new magazine apps that readers could soon purchase and download. Millennials say keeping up with the news is important to them — but good luck getting them to pay for it. Most millennials don’t seek out news on social media, but the vast majority of them get news from social networks once they see it there, according to a report released today by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Only 47 percent of the millennials surveyed said consuming news is a major reason they visit Facebook, but 88 percent of the respondents said they get news from Facebook at least occasionally. 83 percent said they get news from YouTube on occasion, and 50 percent found news on Instagram. Next in line: Pinterest at 36 percent, Twitter at 33 percent, Reddit at 23 percent, and Tumblr at 21 percent. “Simply put, social media is no longer simply social,” the report says. “It long ago stopped being just a way to stay in touch with friends. The report emphasizes that millennials don’t exclusively get their news only from Facebook or other social media. Will they pay for news? My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online.
The Glamorous Life of a Journalist, Sponsored Content Edition — The Atlantic. "We are keen to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with you. " Who could resist a possibility like this? Over the past few weeks I've received emails like the one below almost every day. Hi there, I am just contacting you to see if you would be interested in hosting some third party content on your website, theatlantic.com? I am currently working with a sports betting website to find websites to submit unique articles to which link back to our client's website. The letters vary enough in length, phrasing, introductory greeting, and detailed proposals to suggest they're not all coming from the same boilerplate source. I finally wrote back to one of the senders a few weeks ago. First incoming pitch: I am J... from a media communications and creative writing company. After deleting scores of messages like this I thought it would be interesting to find out a little more.
Yes, I would be interested in hearing more about your campaigns. And he replied: I didn't send anything back. How Vocativ Mines The "Deep Web" For Storytelling. Back in 2012, a group of digital journalists went hunting for Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. They tried to track him using a trove of data--like mercenary chatter found on an obscure corner of the web.
In the end, they weren't exactly able to string together enough information to triangulate his position. But Kony wasn't the only signal they were tracking. By setting geographic parameters for a data-analysis operation and opening their ears, the analysts and journalists of a new kind of news organization called Vocativ stumbled upon talk on a message board about something equally as curious as the Lord's Resistance Army's leader's movements. They found a thriving Facebook subculture of gun sweepstakes where gun shops and industry publications would give away weapons, including AR-15 rifles, to random fans who “liked” their page. The Facebook guns story wasn't what reporters and analysts went looking for. And it was only fleshed out by mining the unindexed, un-Google-able Web. A wave of distributed content is coming — will publishers sink or swim? Editor’s note: The new issue of our sister publication Nieman Reports is out and ready for you to read.
I write a column for the print edition of the magazine; here’s mine from the new issue. It deals with distributed content — a very hot topic given the Facebook news of the last 24 hours (though I wrote this before that news broke). Last August, when BuzzFeed announced a new $50 million round of venture capital investment, a lot of journalists heard a new phrase for the first time: distributed content. The company announced it would be spending some of that new money to start a new division, BuzzFeed Distributed, which it described as a team of 20 staffers who would “make original content solely for platforms like Tumblr, Imgur, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and messaging apps.” In other words, a team of people producing content that will never even appear on buzzfeed.com. Why would BuzzFeed spend millions on producing content for other people’s platforms, with no obvious financial benefit?
Newspaper Industry Is Running Out of Time to Adapt to Digital Future. While the rest of us were burning hot dogs on the grill last week, the newspaper industry seemed to be lighting itself on fire. There have been cracks in publishing operations that are both hilarious and terrifying. The Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pa., published a box score for a baseball game that was never played, after one of the coaches made up a result to spare the other team the embarrassment of a forfeit. The U-T, the daily newspaper of San Diego, published a two-week-old blog post — on its front page. And most notoriously, “This American Life” revealed that Journatic, a content farm owned in part by the Tribune Company that produces local articles on the cheap, was using fake bylines. Some of those hyperlocal pieces, which ran in newspapers like The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Houston Chronicle and The San Francisco Chronicle, were written in the Philippines.
Photo Or maybe not so confounding. Some of the bigger cracks can’t be papered over by financial engineering. Local News in a Digital Age. Whether in a tech-savvy metropolis or a city where the town square is still the communication hub, local news matters deeply to the lives of residents. Across three disparate metro areas in the U.S., nearly nine-in-ten residents follow local news closely—and about half do so very closely, according to a new, in-depth Pew Research Center study, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. About two-thirds of the residents in each city discuss local news in person a few times a week or more. Studying the ways that local news flows in a city’s population requires more than one tool in the social scientist’s tool kit.
Perhaps the most obvious way that local news climates differ across U.S. cities is in terms of volume and choice, the former of which may well have an impact on the latter. Denver’s 140+ identified news providers—including 25 digital-only outlets—is about 2.5 times that of Macon (24) and Sioux City (31) combined. Among the other major findings: Jonah Lehrer Wasn’t the Only Journalist Shaping His Conclusions -- New York Magazine. We are all bad apples,” wrote Jonah Lehrer, in probably the last back-cover endorsement of his career. “Dishonesty is everywhere … It’s an uncomfortable message, but the implications are huge.” Lehrer’s blurb was for behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves.
Among Ariely’s bite-size lessons: We all cheat by a “fudge factor” of roughly 15 percent, regardless of how likely we are to get caught; a few of us advance gradually to bigger and bigger fudges, often driven by social pressures; and it’s only when our backs are up against the wall that we resort to brazen lies. Lehrer, 31, had already established the kind of reputation that made his backing invaluable to a popular science writer. Thanks to three books, countless articles and blog posts, and many turns on the lecture circuit, Lehrer was perhaps the leading explainer of neuroscience this side of a Ph.D.
Then it got so much worse. The New York Times Is Screwing With Us, Right? After reading this piece today, which declares, “In New York, teens and preteens are becoming savvy connoisseurs of real estate,” I am officially convinced the New York Times is trolling us. A 13-year-old convincing his parents to buy a $14 million dream apartment? Come on. The Times’ Real Estate section has always been a relatively elitist shit show, but the spates of pieces depicting totally over-the-top, vaudevillian, ultra-rich lifestyles has really started to become especially noticeable. This piece, about an NYU student who simply couldn’t take living with roommates, kindled my budding hatred. Then we got this gem, where a millennial needed a place that could adequately display his self-portraits.
It’s like “Portlandia” for the Upper East Side. Personally, I think these articles are hilarious. What do you guys think? [NY Times] Journalism in the Age of the Accidental News Junkie — The Atlantic. A study of Millennial media habits claims that young people crave hard news. Do they really? Young Americans care about the news, honestly they do, but their discovery path typically winds through social media feeds, not through newspapers, news sites, or televised news coverage. That is one of the major conclusions of a new report on Millennial media habits, which finds that 80 percent of young people get their news from online sources, and social networks are replacing network news as the daily touchstone for current affairs.
Nearly 90 percent of young people get news from Facebook regularly, but less than half say that news is their main motivation for visiting Facebook's site or app. (Nor is news the primary purpose for Millennials on Twitter, even though Twitter is a popular destination for journalists and news junkies.) The American Press Institute's report claims that young people care about the news quite a bit. No, not quite "politics, crime, [and] their local community. " Amway Journalism. Zite. The Human Algorithm. Why Social Media Reinvigorates the Market for Quality Journalism. What Is a Curator in Chief?
Viral Journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity. Jeff Jarvis on what I’ve been beginning to call “The Content Creator’s Dilemma” | Business Mindhacks. Recollection: A Collaborative Tool For Sharing And Visualizing Cultural Data. Future of Journalism. The Human Algorithm.