Techmeme’s “mimimalistic” aggregation approach — a headline and a snippet — brought 746 page views, according to Google Analytics. Huffington’s “short but thorough paraphrasing/rewriting” brought 57, Dumenco writes, although the site is “vastly bigger” than Techmeme
Category: Journalism
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The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 1)
The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 1)
The former Secretary of Defense’s most famous quip is explored through the impressions of the journalists who covered him for years.
via Opinionator: https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/the-certainty-of-donald-rumsfeld-part-1/
I was often struck by the difference between Rumsfeld and Robert McNamara. McNamara said that he never answered the question he was asked but rather the question that he wanted to be asked. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, would never answer the question he was asked or any other question — Ask Rumsfeld a question, and all you get is evasions. But are they just evasions or do they reveal a lack of substance? And McNamara expressed regret
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Working at Vice Media Is Not As Cool As It Seems
Working at Vice Media Is Not As Cool As It Seems
Vice Media is one of the hottest media properties in America. It's the counterculture empire that even Rupert Murdoch could love. Vice's founder, Shane Smith, has speculated his company could raise tens of billions of dollars. So why are its employees so broke and pissed off?
via Gawker: https://www.gawker.com/working-at-vice-media-is-not-as-cool-as-it-seems-1579711577
One intern two years ago was excited to receive a full time position—until the company offered him a salary of $20K. Employees who have worked there full time within the past two years say that salaries well under $30K are routine for “producers.”
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Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web – Quartz
Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web
What do we lose when we get our news via social media?
via Quartz: https://qz.com/545048/death-by-a-thousand-likes-how-facebook-and-twitter-are-killing-the-open-web
“Go where the readers are” is what publications whistle to themselves as they slink by the graveyard of their inflexible or unlucky brethren. “Go where the readers are” is what they whisper to themselves as they quiver before the mercurial platform gods, waiting to find out if they’ll be cherished or crushed. And it does make a certain amount of sense to go where the readers are, because that’s where all the attention is. But it will cost you.
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Beat the Press – The New York Times
Opinion | Beat the Press (Published 2015)
Because it’s open season on journalism — from the left and right — powerful partisan voices have emerged, injecting lies into the public arena.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/opinion/beat-the-press.html
I’d like to believe that this video snippet was just another absurdity of campus life, where the politics are so vicious, as they say, because the stakes are so small. But it goes to a more troubling trend — the diminishment of a healthy, professionally trained free press.
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Facebook’s referral traffic has plunged for some media outlets – Fortune
Facebook and the Media Have an Increasingly Landlord-Tenant Style Relationship
Some publishers have seen traffic from Facebook plummet by 40%, which reinforces the risks of handing over control of your audience.
via Fortune: https://fortune.com/2015/11/09/facebook-media/
Some publishers have seen traffic from Facebook plummet by 40%, which reinforces the risks of handing control over your audience to the social network.
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In Conversation with National Geographic Photographer Jay Dickman — Vantage — Medium
In Conversation with National Geographic Photographer Jay Dickman
‘The Power of the Frozen Moment’
Dickman, who is an Olympus Visionary, took time out from his relentless travel schedule to talk with writer Jeff Wignall about his accomplishments, his work with National Geographic and his lifelong passion for the still image.
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» Departing Oregonian reporter: ‘If you write a story to win an award, you won’t get one’ JIMROMENESKO.COM
Jim Romenesko
via Jim Romenesko: https://jimromenesko.com/
Two-time Pulitzer winner Richard Read wrote this farewell note to Oregonian colleagues after taking the paper’s buyout and leaving the paper on Dec. 31. “Hopefully other reporters can get a little bit of his wisdom,” writes the Oregonian staffer who forwarded Read’s email.
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Harper’s boss Rick MacArthur on blogging, paywalls, his editor shakeup and the future of journalism – Poynter
Harper’s boss Rick MacArthur on blogging, paywalls, his editor shakeup and the future of journalism – Poynter
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
Every idiot who could blog, and claim to be covering the local zoning commission, could say he was a journalist competing with the local paper. Readers learned not to differentiate and to see a free blog as same thing as the guy writing for the local paper. “And the paper doesn’t think it’s worth any money and is not charging me.” Then, the paper, having trained people to want information for free, diseducated people about the difference between a real reported story and something off the top of the head.
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Vice shows how not to treat freelancers – Columbia Journalism Review
Vice shows how not to treat freelancers
In an era of journalism in which freelancers have grown accustomed to being treated like disposable cogs of news production, Vice appears to be in a league of its own. Interviews with more than a dozen freelance journalists suggest the young, edgy news organization heralded as the future of journalism also has ushered in a […]
via Columbia Journalism Review: https://www.cjr.org/the_feature/vice_freelancers.php
I typed up a quick email detailing what had happened and sent it to the Columbia Journalism School international alumni listserve. The subject line was, “Warning for freelancers re: Vice.” Within minutes, my inbox was flooded with emails from other journalists who had suffered similar misfortunes with Vice. Most of the stories were worse than my own.
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The Trauma of Violent News on the Internet – The New York Times
The Trauma of Violent News on the Internet (Published 2016)
How violent images and news on the internet may be more traumatic for some viewers than those in traditional media.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/fashion/the-trauma-of-violent-news-on-the-internet.html
“The world has always been messy,” President Obama said in 2014 after a string of doom-and-gloom news events. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.”
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Gallup: Trust in media is at all-time low – Poynter
Gallup: Trust in media is at all-time low – Poynter
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
via Poynter: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2016/gallup-trust-in-media-is-at-all-time-low/
Photojournalist and documentary photographer Marissa Roth has a long photographic legacy of documenting the affects of war. She recently put down her camera to curate an unusual exhibition that shares personal photographs and stories of Vietnam veterans
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When Silicon Valley Took Over the ‘New Republic’ – The Atlantic
When Silicon Valley Took Over Journalism
The pursuit of digital readership broke the ‘New Republic’—and an entire industry.
via The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/when-silicon-valley-took-over-journalism/534195/
The pursuit of digital readership broke the New Republic—and an entire industry.
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John Lanchester reviews ‘The Attention Merchants’ by Tim Wu, ‘Chaos Monkeys’ by Antonio García Martínez and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ by Jonathan Taplin · LRB 17 August 2017
John Lanchester · You Are the Product: It Zucks! · LRB 16 August 2017
I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me…
via London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product
A neutral observer might wonder if Facebook’s attitude to content creators is sustainable. Facebook needs content, obviously, because that’s what the site consists of: content that other people have created. It’s just that it isn’t too keen on anyone apart from Facebook making any money from that content. Over time, that attitude is profoundly destructive to the creative and media industries. Access to an audience – that unprecedented two billion people – is a wonderful thing, but Facebook isn’t in any hurry to help you make money from it. If the content providers all eventually go broke, well, that might not be too much of a problem. There are, for now, lots of willing providers: anyone on Facebook is in a sense working for Facebook, adding value to the company. In 2014, the New York Times did the arithmetic and found that humanity was spending 39,757 collective years on the site, every single day. Jonathan Taplin points out that this is ‘almost fifteen million years of free labour per year’. That was back when it had a mere 1.23 billion users.