May 2010
30 posts
Daily Dish' "Curated" E-mail →
Will be watching this audience initiative closely. Dish’ blog appears to be filtering audience e-mails, then pulling intellectual threads through those seemingly unrelated thoughts for a new take on issues. Sounds like a new kind of journalist-citizen collaboration/conversation. Fascinating. Thanks @davidquigg for drawing attention to this.
Ok. Back to holiday partying …
3 tags
One Big Idea: The Dissertation
Author’s note: This is part of a continuing series on the nuts-and-bolts of my dissertation on journalism as a conversation. Where appropriate, I link back to related posts in the series.
Tumblr’s fun, yall, but time to resume posts about the dissertation proper. When I first applied to doc programs, I was torn between two life-long passions: journalism and film. I even thought about...
Good News for Online Video
When I tell newspaper people I tested audience reaction to video in my first dissertation experiment on conversational journalism, they often sigh and ask just how badly it went. For years, they’ve complained no one watches their stuff.
I’ve wondered if it had something to do with the peculiarities of that “stuff.” A new report suggests it might, as do findings from the...
“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
– Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist (via quote-book)
When I was working on my master’s in American Studies years ago, my adviser David Yerkes once asked me if formal education makes you dumb. To this day, I’m still not sure if he was joking and just trying to be provocative or deadly...
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Conversational Journalism Players (Part 8 in a...
EstherThorson: In the field of media research, few scholars are as formidable in their girth of work as my mentor, Dean Thorson* (pictured here to the left after my blur of a dissertation defense). The volume and array of her research over 35-plus years is staggering, tackling everything from impacts of crime reporting on audiences to Internet advertising and public-health campaigns.
...
Digital First Approach Aids Conversation →
Fresh evidence that emphasizing digital operations over print actually leads to greater efforts at tapping the audience for news. Makes sense: Interactivity (in this case between professional newspaper journalists and citizens) is the revolutionary signature of the Internet. No traditional mass medium — newspapers, radio, TV, etc. — can match it, yet still too few newsrooms seem to understand this...
Remembering "Helen"
Painful as it is to remember today, for most of my childhood, Mount St. Helens was my family’s backyard campground. We lived in Vancouver, Wash. about two hours away from Spirit Lake, Gifford Pinchot National Park’s then-famed campers’ paradise.
We’d often go there with close family friends, the Blacks (Troy Black sits cross-legged next to me above, while my oldest...
Kagan's Sexuality and the "Fifth Estate"
Hats off to this Poynter Institute post for trying to tease apart journalists’ struggles with whether/how to address the sexuality of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan (pictured here courtesy Wikipedia). The mainstream press, including NYTimes, largely has declined to address the question, citing lack of relevance unless she raises the issue herself. I’m with them on that, though I...
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Conversational Journalism Players (Part 7 in a...
Sally McMillan: If Sheizaf Rafaeli begged scholars to take interactivity seriously, McMillan helped give them tools to do so. In an oft-cited essay in the book* pictured here, she catalogued the different ways scholars use “interactivity” and defined distinct traditions of academic literature to go with them. This is super big thinking for Internet theorists, and scholars interested in any...
Pro Tips for Crowd-Sourcing →
Smart, practical tips on how to crowd-source a story well — legally and efficiently — from recent Poynter Institute conference. Yet another reminder of Poynter’s classiness. See also Briggs’ Journalism Next for great tips on same. (I’ll be teaching some tips straight out of the book in the fall.)
Go Canada! Converse News Start-Up →
Three cheers for this conversational news venture in Toronto, OpenFile. Bottom-up, crowd-sourced news not unlike Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism efforts, possibly my all-time favorite conversational work.
Choice quote from story above:
One of the more interesting aspects of the OpenFile infrastructure — one connected to the “directed by its users” mandate —...
WatchIn the category of priceless …
Making Moonshine →
Got moonshine on my mind. Just what I need on Cinco de Mayo. Thanks, NYT.
“Just because you can write more doesn’t mean you should.”
– Seth’s Blog: All the news that fits (via infoneer-pulse)
Amen and three hail marys to this comment about the art of brevity. To be concise and elegant even on the interwebs is to be the master of your own writing.
NYT's Paywall: The "Emotional Connection"? →
NYT’s Publisher Arthur Sulzberger explains to shareholders that one of the reasons his paper plans to erect metered paywalls on its site next year is to build “an emotional connection” with readers. The logic: If readers are paying for the content, they’re likely to spend more time with it. No argument there.*
But I worry about the leap to “emotional...
