I don't buy a lot of imported British merchandise, so I never knew the cost of shipping for transatlantic purchases. Nor had I fully realized the exchange-rate between the British pound and the US dollar.
A couple weeks ago, my brother bought a Radiohead tee-shirt from the band's online store (based in England of course). That brought home the relative worthlessness of the USD, as the shirt's 15-pound British price tag translated to about 30 USD.
Last week, I pre-ordered the May 5 issue of…
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Posted by Christian Sheckler on May 12, 2008 at 2:31pm —
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CROSSPOSTED from my column at CCJ: http://www.concernedjournalists.org/bad-war-bad-science-bad-reporting-take-your-pick
War is bad. We can agree on this.
As both a practitioner and historian of war, I feel no compunctions about saying that and no reason to pretend otherwise. Some wars are Just, and some may be Unjust. Some wars may even be necessary, but they are all bad. The idea of a Good War is a myth. It is base propaganda, and nothing more. War should be the absolute last resort.
As a…
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Posted by Bob Bateman on May 10, 2008 at 4:31pm —
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The reporter sat down at his desk and placed his fingers on the worn, circular keys. It was the same typewriter he sat at night after night. The melodious clicking of each letter was his adrenaline. The black smell of fresh ink was a drug in his veins. The deadline rush addicted him to his job; it was the reason he woke up every morning. On the wall across from him was a flat, black clock. He didn't need to look at it; all he needed was to hear the slow and steady tick, tick, tick. He knew what…
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Posted by Lauren Rabaino on May 9, 2008 at 12:29pm —
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You'll see by my station blog that I'm a not-so-closet Survivor fan! Any more out there? The finale is Sunday night, and I'm wondering who you're rooting for. For CBS stations, do you do the tie-ins? Our morning crew does the satellite talkbacks with those voted out - makes for an interesting feature, although I see the Early Show doesn't have them on anymore.
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Posted by Melissa Brunner on May 9, 2008 at 9:52am —
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I found
this column by The Seattle Times' Jerry Large pretty interesting.
For those who don't feel like following the link, here's the gist: An ad agency in Orting, Wash. has created an online newspaper to fill the void of the recently folded weekly, the Orting Gazette. The stories are written by community members and edited by employees at Carr Knowledge, the ad agency in question. Any reader complaints, quest…
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Posted by Paul Balcerak on May 8, 2008 at 11:37am —
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Big shot in the arm today!
Beatblogging.org -- leading the charge for Web 2.0 reporting -- gives a
shout out to my work at the GT.
I've learned a lot by following their experiments on blogging the beat. Recommended reading.
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Posted by Matt Neznanski on May 7, 2008 at 1:17pm —
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Have you ever wondered about downtime for Facebook.com, or LinkedIn.com.
Check Downtime Continue
Posted by Merrell Ligons on May 6, 2008 at 11:01am —
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Note: This post started as a reply to a post by WeMediaGuru, but it just got too long for that format and turned into its own animal.
Today, Jason at wemediaguru
notes words from
Mike Blinder of the consulting firm The Blinder Group, which works with media companies to maximize revenue:
The mafia (yellow page…
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Posted by Matt Neznanski on May 6, 2008 at 10:31am —
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I'm a regular reader of Jeff Jarvis'
BuzzMachine blog. His posts about new media, we media, newspaper woes and the like are typically spot-on and spark creative thinking almost every day.
But I've got to admit that his political
posturing is getting a bit tiresome. He's a Hillary supporter and he's often pissed that Obama gets a…
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Posted by Matt Neznanski on May 5, 2008 at 8:40pm —
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AP has launched their
Mobile News Network. Very impressive.
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Posted by Merrell Ligons on May 5, 2008 at 6:45am —
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Is there someone at a newspaper website using regular-folk driven photo sites to help coverage of his/her community? It's festival season coming up, and I'd love to figure how how to showcase the best of Flickr shot in my town, but I can't figure our where to start.
Yes, my paper is on Flickr, but that's as far as I have gotten.
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Posted by Kat Powers on May 3, 2008 at 10:44am —
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Thanks for visiting my blog.
This weekend will be spent... in NYC. Wedding on Saturday. 7AM flight out of KCI to the LGA to see the most beautiful woman in the world. :)
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Posted by Jeremy Goodwin on May 2, 2008 at 6:38pm —
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What better way to ease into the weekend than with a fresh batch of Internet-based distractions?
CNN/LA Times Homicide Blog: Thanks to CNN for this story about the LA Times' Jill Leovy's homicide blog, which went from being a kind of morbid drive-by tally to what looks like a damned impressive example of online journalism.…
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Posted by Paul Balcerak on May 2, 2008 at 12:03pm —
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I have had this blog for several years where I review my concert experiences as well as post music news I find interesting. It is fairly tailored to the types of music I enjoy as opposed to a blanket music blog. I have been updating it more frequently as of late due to the fact the my newspaper is featuring it as one of the staff blogs. As we all know, keeping fresh content in a blog is what hopefully keeps your readers coming back.
Please take a gander at your leisure. I hope you enjoy it.
Th…
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Posted by Tonya Howell on May 2, 2008 at 6:58am —
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Last night Brooke White was sent home on American Idol after a week filled with controversy and conspiracy theory.
The 24-year-old nanny from Mesa, Ariz., was booted after a tragic and lackluster performance of “I’m A Believer” and “I Am…I Said” respectfully. The Neil Diamond tri…
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Posted by Dwayne Steward on May 1, 2008 at 10:51am —
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My newspaper, the Central Kitsap Reporter has a new Web site up just this afternoon, as does every paper in the Sound Publishing company. Check it out at
www.centralkitsapreporter.com.
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Posted by Paul Balcerak on April 30, 2008 at 5:20pm —
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I would say that Neil Diamond stopped by as a mentor for “American Idol” last night, but that may be a bit of a stretch since he got less airtime than the show’s Barbie-laden mosh pit.
In a bad choice by the producers, the Top 5 “Idols” were forced to sing two songs, holding off…
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Posted by Dwayne Steward on April 30, 2008 at 10:30am —
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I'm curious about how time spent on newspaper Web sites is measured. If the same kind of numbers are compared each time and they show a drop, that's a legitimate concern. But I wonder about how the total is measured.
You usually see it as a small-seeming total, such as 20 minutes a month, which would come out to less than a minute a day. But I wonder about two things:
1. It's unlikely that very many people will visit the site at 3 a.m., and there's really about a 16-hour window of prime Web si…
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Posted by Brian Cubbison on April 29, 2008 at 10:39am —
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The deadline for deciding has arrived and there are only a few seats
left in some of next week's classes in Web video journalism.
Visual Editors is bringing to Chicago top Web video instructors from the
U.S. and the U.K. to teach Web video fundamentals to the next wave of
digital journalists.
The Chicago Sun-Times is hosting the classes at 350 N. Orleans and the
sessions run from 9:30 to 5 p.m. (May… Continue
Posted by Robb Montgomery on April 29, 2008 at 8:27am —
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The
Carnival of Journalism is now open to the public. Take a moment and stop by.
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Posted by Yoni Greenbaum on April 27, 2008 at 11:47am —
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I've been such a prolific commenter at other blogs that I feel like I write more elsewhere than on my own blog at
blog.syracuse.com/newstracker. My own blog right now is a messy workshop of experiments and spare parts. I'd thought I'd take advantage of this blogging feature at Wired Journalists and fill it with some random thoughts.
First, a recommended link:
RSS needs an Easy button… Continue
Posted by Brian Cubbison on April 27, 2008 at 11:44am —
Comment
I'm hiring! I know, it's hard to believe in this economy, but philly.com is expanding its content team. What sets us apart from most online newspaper operations is that we're not simply an adjunct of the newsroom, but a separate company. We're more of a pure-play Internet company and that is reflected in how we think, what we do and who we hire. We need content producers/site hosts/channel managers; journalists who are excited about the Internet and what it has to offer. Intrigued? Interested? D…
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Posted by Yoni Greenbaum on April 25, 2008 at 6:33pm —
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The
Columbus Jazz Orchestra brought New Orleans to Columbus on Thursday night during an exciting, high-octane showing at The Southern Theatre.
The special guest,
Troy “Trombone Shor… Continue
Posted by Dwayne Steward on April 25, 2008 at 10:00am —
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This week,
“American Idol” gave us another shocker.
Last night’s blogs were abuzzin’ with predictions of Brooke or Jason’s demise, but in a twist — aptly appropriate for Andrew Lloyd Weber week — Irish rocker Carly Smithson was sent home.
Smith…
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Posted by Dwayne Steward on April 24, 2008 at 10:00am —
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I got into a
small discussion yesterday with fellow Wired Journalist
Christian Sheckler about (essentially) what was more beneficial to a career-bound college journalism student: GPA or experience? In short, Christian was longing to write "good stories," but more often than not, was inhibited in that venture by a more pressing need to comple…
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Posted by Paul Balcerak on April 23, 2008 at 4:16pm —
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Read a
great column in today's Seattle Times by Danny Westneat about a guy who's going around the country, arbitrarily fixing spelling and grammar errors on billboards, signs and anything else he sees.
Just wanted to link to it. It's one of those things that's probably a huge waste of time, but I'm kind of glad someone's doing it because I sure as hell don't have the time or resources to. I can't stand sup…
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Posted by Paul Balcerak on April 23, 2008 at 11:32am —
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I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been eagerly anticipating
Andrew Lloyd Webber Week on
American Idol since they announced it nearly a month ago. And, I must say, I was quite pleased by Weber’s app…
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Posted by Dwayne Steward on April 23, 2008 at 9:30am —
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I cannot say enough wonderful things about
CoverItLive.com! Today is
our paper's launch of our new design and we've experienced some "issues" with DNS propogation which was confusing for some of our readers. Being able to have a
live chat running to discuss the redesign and kinks with it has been helpful and frankly, fun!
I enjoy having this option avai…
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Posted by Stephanie Romanski on April 23, 2008 at 7:35am —
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In my last post, I expressed my desire to get out in the real world and find real stories. Recently I'd begun to doubt if other journalism students shared my aspirations. Then I met Drew.
When Drew showed up at random on the Grace campus, I assumed he was a prospective student or a friend of a friend. Later I learned that he is a Canadian university student hitchhiking across the U.S. before going back to school in the fall.
Like myself, Drew is majoring in journalism. Makes sense. Journali…
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Posted by Christian Sheckler on April 22, 2008 at 1:11pm —
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This may draw hoots of derision (derision only comes in hoots, I believe) from people with technical knowhow, but The Telegraph of Nashua, NH, has launched its first crowdsourcing-ish project, using cut-and-paste, rather than any specialized software-type stuff.
The background: Verizon recently sold all its phone lines in New Hampshire (and Maine and Vermont) to a small company, FairPoint. We covered the sale in the usual ways but we weren't sure how to keep an eye on the corporate handoff, sin…
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Posted by Dave Brooks on April 21, 2008 at 12:32pm —
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I'm in journalism because I like to write and I love a good story. Good stories are all over the place -- too bad school makes it tough to get out and find them.
I mean, I'm learning great stuff in class. But if I spend lots of time on assignments, I feel like I'm missing out on the real stories -- the kind that happen in the real world. So I have to choose. And given the choice between real stories and class assignments, I'd choose...real stories.
Like Sean Blanda says in his post…
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Posted by Christian Sheckler on April 21, 2008 at 11:55am —
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New York’s
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Company, in the midst of its 50th Anniversary year, showcased its junior talent, Ailey II, in Columbus Sunday night, yet there was nothing second-rate about the 12 dancers’ mesmerizing performance.…
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Posted by Dwayne Steward on April 21, 2008 at 9:30am —
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My fellow WiredJ member
Tonya and I will be teaching our first class on blogging. I'm excited and a little nervous about it. So I'm wondering if I could solicit ideas from you creative types on the stuff we should not forget to teach these guys. Now, these aren't journalists we're teaching, but just regular folks who are interested in blogging (and could potentially become part of our
com… Continue
Posted by Stephanie Romanski on April 18, 2008 at 11:36am —
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Working in retail now for four years I've had the awkward moment several times of explaining what an education editor with a degree in journalism is doing in retail. The answer is always evolving but the latest incarnation is: I'm working on it but in the mean time I love what I do here. Recently the conversation has evolved into a plea for help. "I graduate in December with a degree in communications can you help me find a job in newspapers?"
How do you mentor someone that aspires to join the…
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Posted by Susan Ruiz on April 18, 2008 at 10:30am —
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If any slice of your daily bread is baked from print B2B journ, I must call your attention to fellow member Paul Conley's latest series of posts on his blog,
. For the past few weeks, Paul's been doing a come-to-jesus talk to print journalists on how it's necessary to get beyond the page, but quick.
Though a very early adopter of web technology personally, I still make my most of my bucks in print, so Paul's jeremiads sometime grate. But his most recent--on w…
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Posted by Mary Atherton on April 18, 2008 at 9:46am —
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I had a chance to hear
Tim Leatherman, inventor of the multi-tool today (yes there is a guy named Leatherman). He was featured at
Speakerlunch a monthly pep-talk for entrepreneurs put on by a local guy in Corvallis.
I came away with a couple of entrepreneurial lessons to consider that I wanted to share:…
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Posted by Matt Neznanski on April 17, 2008 at 5:13pm —
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In the spirit of trying to integrate new technology and content into the newsroom, I thought I'd provide links to a few of my favorite online news sources.
The Seattle Times: This is probably the first site I navigate to when it comes to Northwest news. I love the Web site — it's one of the best on the Net by any newspaper, in my opinion.
Geoff Baker's Mariners blog… Continue
Posted by Paul Balcerak on April 17, 2008 at 1:59pm —
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Amazing, remarkable, extraordinary. These words don’t even touch the experience
“Riverdance” provided for its audience Tuesday night.
Typically lauded for its exciting Irish high stepping, The Boyne’s — Riverdance’s 2008 North American tour…
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Posted by Dwayne Steward on April 17, 2008 at 9:00am —
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I just read a
Mindy… Continue
Posted by Andy Johns on April 17, 2008 at 5:30am —
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We (The Anniston Star) have launched a crime map using
Zeemaps.
You can see the map at
annistonstar.com/crimemap.
I was impressed with Zee maps because of its import function. One of our news clerks copies and pastes crime information from out blotter (which runs daily in print) into an Excel doc. She saves it on the news drive weekly and our online team imports it into Zeemaps in about six clicks of the mouse.
The…
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Posted by Andy Johns on April 17, 2008 at 5:29am —
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And then wish you were what you found?
Google John Doran. There's a long list of entries, and you'd have to scroll to nearly the 93rd page to actually find me. But before you get there, you'll find some interesting fellas with the initials J.D.
There's the John Doran who, in 1891, played in 15 games for the Major League Baseball Colonials. The 5-foot-11, 175-pound lefty hit just .189 in 53 at bats, and posted a 5-10 pitching record (12 complete games) with a 5.46 ERA. Being a switch-hitting Di…
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Posted by John Doran on April 16, 2008 at 10:22pm —
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We have several job openings (http://www.kqed.org/about/jobs/index.jsp.) Although we are looking for experienced radio journalists, some of the positions also involve online skills, including community outreach and audience development.
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Posted by Bruce Koon on April 16, 2008 at 12:00pm —
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There's an interesting conversation on new ad models going on in the Poynter online news
e-mail list that started yesterday with
Steve Yelvington, who forwarded a
post from his blog for discussion:
The argument goes like this: We have an audience problem. We can fix our sales incentives, train our people, tune our pricing and our packaging, and…
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Posted by Matt Neznanski on April 16, 2008 at 11:30am —
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http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4509
The writer seems to equate today's newspaper woes to difficult times in the past.
I may be wrong, but I think the difficult times in the past were due to general economic problems in the country. Now it's due to general economic problems in the country AND the disruptiveness of the web and the associated tech.
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Posted by Carlos Virgen on April 16, 2008 at 11:29am —
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I had my first week where more people told me they had me on RSS feed than people told me they buy or subscribe to my paper.
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Posted by Kat Powers on April 15, 2008 at 6:10pm —
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(Note: I posted this to my real blog; I'm crossposting it here for a potentially different audience because I'm looking for answers and not pageviews.)
In my PublishAsia presentation in Macau I walked through a general business case for social networking as an integrated feature of a news website.
The argument goes like this: We have an audience problem. We can fix our sales incentives, train our people, tune our pricing and our packaging, and replace leadership as necessary. But at the end o…
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Posted by Steve Yelvington on April 15, 2008 at 1:11pm —
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Riverdance, the Irish step-dancing phenomenon, is bringing its “Farewell Tour” to
The Palace Theatre, 34 W. Broad St., Tuesday through April 20. A lead dancer and dance captain Marty Dowds, 27, of…
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Posted by Dwayne Steward on April 15, 2008 at 8:30am —
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I wanted to alert folks to a job opening at Harvard. The Nieman Foundation is looking for someone to head a new Web site that will support digital journalism and to coordinate and display original research (think business model) with the Harvard business school. I've been consulting with the project. They need someone with strong vision and good project management skills. Here's the link:
http://jobs.harvard.edu/jobs/summ_req?in_post_id=37493
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Posted by Michele McLellan on April 15, 2008 at 5:33am —
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I got an interesting — OK, well really just
an, if you want to get technical — response to my first blog on the sorry state of journalism.
Casey Cora, another Wired Journalist, sent along this suggestion to my droaning about how the business is "tanking":
"The scariest part is that most people under the age of, say, 30 years old, don't really seem to give a shit."
(You can check out my full blog post and his response…
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Posted by Paul Balcerak on April 14, 2008 at 4:31pm —
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Hi everyone,
here's a suggestion of something I think it's worth writing about. I'm pasting the press release below so you all know what I'm talking about.
POSTCROSSING HITS ONE MILLION EXCHANGED POSTCARDS
Project created in 2005 has over 47 000 users from all over the world
Who said the online and the offline world couldn’t co-exist? The Postcrossing project proves they can. Moreover, it proves they should. Created in July 2005 by Paulo Magalhães, the project has now reached a millio…
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Posted by Vera Alves on April 12, 2008 at 6:17am —
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From the trenches: A working journalist's vision for the future of print journalism
In the beginning, there was profit...
The news publishing industry is perhaps one of the greatest business symbioses in human history. Or, it was for a long time. It was at once a voice of democracy, enlightenment and entertainment to its readers, and the best delivery vehicle for mass marketing available at the time.
Whether the journalism we see in our communities today is good or garbag…
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Posted by Will Seberger on April 11, 2008 at 4:00pm —
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Interesting post today at
masteringmultimedia, who pulls this piece from
Rosenblumtv's post he calls microeconomics:
The web offers not just another platform for distribution of product, but rather an entirely new calculus for how an online media company can be run. By its very nature, it changes the construct of most media busi…
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Posted by Matt Neznanski on April 11, 2008 at 1:00pm —
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Maybe I should become a museum curator.
I ran across
this story in the LA Times today about a new journalism museum that opened in Washington, D.C., also today.
At least the print industry got its own wing and not a shoebox in the backyard. I feel like I'm gonna be forced into a
Ric Flair-esque retirement sometime soon.…
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Posted by Paul Balcerak on April 11, 2008 at 12:01pm —
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I'm not really sure if I want to theme my blog or anything, but if there's anything that deserves regular comment, it's the sad state of journalism. I can't speak for the other 49 states, but here in Washington, things seem pretty bad.
We've all — and by "we've," I mean the three or four people who may read this — heard about the Seattle Times cuts and I thought I'd pass along this related column by Times columnist Jerry Large for any who haven't read it yet:…
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Posted by Paul Balcerak on April 10, 2008 at 11:49am —
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Twitter is considered to be the online service that more will grow until the end of the year, with an estimated number of about one million users around the world. However, most po…
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Posted by Alexandre Gamela on April 9, 2008 at 10:55pm —
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I started to think of quotes in terms of stories after entering Penny Arcade's
Ten-Word Story Contest. The idea was to write a World of Warcraft-based story in just ten words. Ernest Hemingway's famous six-word story ("For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn") is a tad too mysterious for me to consider as a
story - it leaves too many questions unanswered. What happened to the baby? Who is selling the shoes? Who is the baby? As a reader, I'm lef…
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Posted by Lacey Waymire on April 8, 2008 at 6:56pm —
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everyone has thoughts on the reasons why the newspapers are commiting suicide, but it is as clear as the explanations available for the mistery of whales coming to die on the shore
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Posted by Alexandre Gamela on April 8, 2008 at 12:30am —
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For the past week students in
my Web journalism class have been immersing themselves in
NewsTrust, a social- networking site that bills itself as "Your guide to good journalism."
Last Wednesday
Rory O'Connor, NewsTrust's editorial director, led us in a presentation and workshop, highlights of which you can see in the embedded video below. Since then, we've been posti…
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Posted by Dan Kennedy on April 7, 2008 at 1:00pm —
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The N&R has just posted two multimedia presentations that I had a hand in, and I would welcome feedback on them.
Unfortunately, they don't have permalinks. To get to them, go to
our home page, scroll down the center column (under the "Latest Headlines" box) and look for the box tagged "Multimedia." Within that box, scroll down to:
-- "Going through Wii-hab", and:
-- "Dummy helps train nurses."
Although I've had a modicum of training in audio and vi…
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Posted by Lex Alexander on April 7, 2008 at 12:54pm —
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I am sure it will focus more on drama between the students then the actual journalism of it all given MTV’s history. That said, doing a show about a newspaper – high school or otherwise – isn’t commonplace anymore so I think this will be interesting to watch.
Premiere: Monday, April 14th @ 10:30PM ET/PT
The following is from MTV.COM:
http://www.mtv.com/ontv/dyn/the_paper/series.jhtml
FULL SUMMARY
Welcome to Cypress Bay High School -- home of the award-winning newspaper Th…
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Posted by Tonya Howell on April 7, 2008 at 6:54am —
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I started a new job, and one of the smaller projects I've been given is to redesign the company's YouTube channel and create banners and icon for the page. Let me know what you think! (I'm still working on all the branding, so ignore the banners, etc.)
http://youtube.com/user/TravelVideoStore
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Posted by Wendy Withers on April 6, 2008 at 8:46am —
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Expect to Pay Out the Ear for Transatlantic Shipping
War and Suicide and Political Considerations
The urge to merge
Calling Survivor Fans!
Ad agency starts up online newspaper, "community journalism" ensues
Must be doing something right
Twitter has been down for over 36 hours this year!
Flickr what? Buzznet huh?
Hello There
Touring with Tonya - Blog
IDOL RECAP: Brooke goes home as Paulagate explained?
Time spent on newspaper Web sites
Deadline: Last call for Web video training
Come to the Carnival
Using Coverit Live during Website relaunch
Low-tech crowdsourcing
Starting from Scratch
life after print = print
Zoom H2
Ever Google yourself ...
Jobs at KQED Public Radio
Any thoughts on this AJR article
Interesting job at Nieman/Harvard
Press Release - Postcrossing reaches 1 million exchanged postcards
My Humble Suggestion (Take All Weekend to Read It)
Twitter @Portugal
Brilliant quotes tell brief, specific stories
Re-editing the agenda with NewsTrust
Multimedia and me
My newest project
