September 2010
25 posts
New Planet Found May Support Life →
“Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is orbiting a star about 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra.” — New York Times
Finally some good news about Libras …
Arthur Penn, "Bonnie and Clyde" director, dead at... →
Big loss. Ground-breaking guy.
Rosen: Why I'm Not a Journalist →
Priceless story. Love this guy. Rosen, I count you as a fellow journalist, regardless. You’ve done good.
Happy National Punctuation Day →
National Punctuation Day is about as sexy as a man in a purple polyester jumpsuit (present company of Albert excluded.) Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark has fun in the above post just talking about the power of white space in writing.
Commas. Periods. Semi-colons. I once tried to estimate the number of stories I’ve either written or edited in my life as a journalist, and my brain blew out...
Comments Policies for Non-Profit Blogs →
Bravo. Much of this could apply to comments policies for newsrooms, too. To these suggestions I’d add spelling out your reasons/goals for allowing comments in the first place, along with expectations for journalist/employee interaction with readers. (If you want your staff to engage with readers some or all of the time, say so.) I’d also suggest more detailed description of how to...
Re-Inventing Journalism Around the World →
Good stuff in this Poynter summary from an international roundtable on journalism trends around the world. We hear from the usual suspects, of course — Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, etc. — but theirs and others’ observations are worth pondering. Among my favorite nuggets:
A core challenge for news organizations going forward will be developing systems to incorporate what digital thinker Clay...
#Wherewereyou: WaPo puts the humble hashtag to... →
In our new age of two-way news, news organizations sometimes struggle to find a way to foster productive conversation: to move beyond superficial gestures of inclusiveness — empty questions, atomized responses — and to create conversation that is meaningful and purposeful. This weekend, The Washington Post found a way to create that kind of conversation, by way of commemorating Saturday’s...
Are Women's Colleges Still Needed? →
infoneer-pulse:
Doubters of women’s colleges will inevitably ask how such schools can prepare women―in a female only environment―to navigate a coed world. The findings, from not one or two, but several studies, show that women’s colleges actually do it quite well. According to a multi-year study by Hardwick Day, alumni of women’s colleges are more likely than all other graduates to serve in a...
With a Little Help From His Friends →
At 19, Sean Parker helped create Napster. At 24, he was founding president of Facebook. At 30, he’s the hard-partying, press-shy genius of social networking, a budding billionaire, and about to be famous—played by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network.
Fascinating Vanity Fair profile. Devour this.
Objectivity and the "Science" of News
Few subjects arouse more attention in American journalism than objectivity. It’s also easily the most misunderstood, and journalists haven’t necessarily done a great job demystifying the thing.
The New York Times threw a spotlight on objectivity this weekend with a thoughtful column from its new reader representative Public Editor Arthur Brisbane. Though the column applies to shifting...
Boulder J-School: It's a Wrap →
Amen to reform — and to new technology and innovations in journalism.
“If universities of the future are to survive, he argues, they will have to...”
– Radical alternative education a la Gardner Campbell, director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor University in Waco, Texas (via utnereader)
In things I love today … 