The newsroom shrank to about 250 people from about 400 within a few years, and employees who remained have absorbed pay and benefit cuts.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/business/media/15strib.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
a most unusual ad appeared last week in The Star Tribune of Minneapolis with a less upbeat message, honoring — and naming — newsroom employees who had left the newspaper in wave after wave of staff cuts.
CNN’s chief international correspondent, best known for her coverage of conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, lives in a “big and comfortable” rental apartment overlooking Central Park.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14fob-domains-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
1. Most Amiable Dictator: Slobodan Milosevic. He would slap you on the back, offer you a drink. He tried to be charming. But many of them do. You have to be on your guard.
Morgunblaðið, Iceland’s oldest newspaper and most-visited website (now co-edited by the former prime minister and head of the central bank) has just announced an anti “deep linking̶…
What was missing from this reportage—both still and moving—was the opportunity for Haitians to tell their own stories. One blogger stated on Internet site Newspaper Death Watch, “When Diane Sawyer arrived on the scene she got to practice her O-Level French but, apart from that, there was nothing she said that could not have been said better, more concisely, more urgently, by anybody whose house had been reduced to splinters and rubble and whose family members were buried under it all.”
Link: Why Not Images of Haiti — By Haitians? – The Digital Journalist
He suggests that if news outlets saved some expense on one story, they would be able to cover news in more regions. That’s a little hard to believe; editors and TV producers know what sells, and they weren’t preparing to dispatch journalists to unreported stories around the globe when the Haiti earthquake happened.
Get the latest trends and analysis of the media industry from Observer.
via Observer: http://www.observer.com/2010/media/after-three-months-only-35-subscriptions-newsdays-web-site
“We’re the freebie newsletter that comes with your HBO,” sniffed one Newsday reporter.
Mr. Jimenez was in no mood to apologize. “That’s 35 more than I would have thought it would have been,” said Mr. Jimenez to the assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday staffers.
A reporter, driven out of Iran, returns via the Internet and finds herself freer to write about the meaning of events back in her homeland.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/weekinreview/17fathi.html?ref=weekinreview
I am an Iranian, a journalist now living in exile like hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. We were driven out after the June elections that were widely considered fraudulent, and the protests and repression that followed. Our offense was that we covered them too thoroughly.
A new study found that 95 percent of articles containing new information came from old media, which “set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets.”
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/media/11baltimore.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
the great majority of actual reporting still comes from newspapers
The South African Daily Voice is what all newspapers will look like after the apocalypse. It’s like Heat for the age of Mad Max; The Grapes of Wrath in handy Daily Star format. It’s leading the way with a new model of what a tabloid can be.
Newspaper articles are too long.
via The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/short-writing
ONE REASON SEEKERS of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.
In a way, this completes a full circle for McSweeney’s founder and editor Dave Eggers, who, in his 2000 book A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, recalled doing freelance design for the San Francisco Chronicle to pay rent. While journalism struggles to redefine itself on the Internet, Eggers maintains that “print is a more calm, and maybe even civilized, delivery vehicle,” and wants the Panorama to demonstrate things print can do that web content can’t. The day after the Panorama’s release, The A.V. Club called up Eggers to find out what his favorite things are about newspapers.
Link: Dave Eggers on his favorite things about newspapers | Books | Interview |
The A.V. Club
When owners of The Washington Times cut their 170-member newsroom staff yesterday, the entire photography department – with the exception of photography director Joseph M. Eddins Jr. and imaging tech Melissa Cannarozzi – lost their jobs.
Link: Washington Times Slashes Newsroom Staff, Wipes Out Photo Department
The existential crisis of magazines online.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03FOB-medium-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
But what is a magazine?
If you’re holding one, you can turn the page. But it’s very possible that you’re nowhere near a turnable page now. You’re reading on a computer or a hand-held device, even though this column was intended for a magazine — a Sunday newspaper supplement that started in 1896. Like hardcover books in Kindle editions and “Daily Show” clips on the Web, this column is produced in large part for a medium other than the one in which it is consumed.
Can a world without newspapers survive? Sure, says The Economist. What matters is the availability and quality of the news, not the medium that delivers it.
To what degree does the mainstream media show victimisation of certain subjects over and over again? Noelle LuSane, the Staff Director of the House Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, discusses the impact that stills and video footage from around the world have on lawmakers and the constituents who call them to action.
Link: dispatches / A Conversation between Photography and Policy: Part 3
Craig Silverman reports on trends and issues regarding media accuracy and the discipline of verification.Stories about errors, corrections, fact checking and verification
via Poynter: http://www.regrettheerror.com/2009/12/16/crunks-2009-the-year-in-media-errors-and-corrections/
This year’s winner is without question amusing — not to mention embarrassing for the news organization the published it — in that it demonstrates a certain amount of cultural/musical ignorance. But it earns Correction of the Year honors because of what happened after it was published. This Washington Post correction inspired an amusing Twitter hashtag, which saw people come together to come up with imagined corrections. It’s Correction of the Year because it communicates that people notice and care about corrections, and because it demonstrates the participatory potential being unleashed by the Internet.
In a interview with Blackbook (here) George Lois doesn’t pull any punches on the state of magazine design today. I was at the SPD awards ceremony when he received a lifetime achievement award of sorts and remember getting so charged up after listening to
via A Photo Editor: http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/12/10/george-lois-rips-todays-magazines-a-new-one/
I can’t wait for magazines to stop trying to become websites and go back to being magazines again. George agrees
I want to take this opportunity to offer heartfelt thanks to our colleagues who will be leaving the company for their dedication and commitment to Nielsen over the years. Please join me in wishing them well in their future endeavors.
