Posts tagged journalists
I don’t get to complain anymore. It’s just true. Some of the most delicious time that you spend as a journalist is like, complaining. At no times have I had fewer actual friends to gossip with, and kind of complain with, or at least commiserate with. That is a hard part of being the boss. Newsrooms are just full of cantankerous complaining people. It’s so enjoyable to be part of that.
Should people pay journalists and photojournalists to do what they do? As long as someone wants credible information the role of the professional remains important, but the role changes in that professionals are no longer the eyewitness. Think of all those [photography compilation] books in the 20th century which were called “eye witness” or “the eyes of the world” or something similar. That’s no longer relevant when there are 4 billion cellphone eyes out there.
Professionals are valuable as commentators, interpreters, validators. We know what is happening in Syria but for sifting all the detail and taking a position on all of that, we still look to the professionals.
Last year, during the Arab Spring, it was the “good little guy” against the “big bad guy”. Simple. Now, we are seeing is a much more complex mix of bad little guys as well a good little guys. I am learning all the different computations from experts — people who are studying the form, researching it, being present and reporting back out. That’s not something I can put together from Facebook. I need someone to guide me through that very complex area.
Branding is not about growing inequality but growing equality. In the old world there were a few big-name hotshot star journalists, and a lot of regular hacks pushing anonymous news. In future more and more journalists will be stars — some big stars shining all over, some smaller but maybe brighter stars twinkling to some important niche audience. And if a journalist has no twinkle whatsoever — then it’s time to find something else to do.
Saska Saarikoski, Brands, Stars and Regular Hacks — a changing relationship between news institutions and journalists (PDF).
Saarikoski, a former culture editor at Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat, conducted surveys and interviews with editors, publishers and reporters about the issues raised by the branding of journalists. The result is this recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Can I Make Stuff Up?
Fabrication, fiction, falsehood: see what you can do and when you can do it at Slate.
Press Pass - Journalists on Twitter, organized by beat, media outlet, & region
From The Next Web:
Press Pass, a ’live directory’ of journalists from major publications, is a brand new Dubai-based site that comes to us courtesy of co-founders David Haddad, a product manager and software engineer, and Valencio Cardoso, an interactive designer.
The site lists journalists by region, beat or by publication, making it incredibly easy to find the journalist who can cover your story. Not only can you find out which journalists work at major publications and sites, you can connect with them through Twitter. You can also find out what they’re personally interested in, as Press Pass highlights the stories that they’re sharing through their Twitter feed.
The site analyzes each journalist’s tweets, creating a profile based on that content – including what they’re reading, topics they’re interested in and who they’re talking to. Each journalist is ranked based on the number of followers they have and their number of tweets.
From the Press Pass Web site:
Press Pass is an open live directory of journalists and media professionals organized by the outlets they work for and the beats and regions they cover.
We track what journalists on Twitter are sharing, and show you what they’re reading, how they rank compared to others, the topics they care about, who gets their attention, and so on…Every now and then ordinary people need to get the message out to the public. Be it an entrepreneur with a new product, a non-profit that wants to raise awareness for a cause, or a citizen with a great photo of a protest.
Press Pass lets you discover reporters interested in your message so they can help you get the word out.
Ahem Press Pass….I don’t see The Future Journalism Project on your list of news organizations.
Can I reliably trust you to tell me what is going on? If the answer is yes, then I don’t care if you work out of a newsroom or out of your garage.
Blogger Fined $2.5 Million for not Being a Journalist
Over 40 states have shield laws that protect journalists from revealing information about the sources used during their reporting.
This is all well and good until you get into the tricky business of actually defining who a journalist is. Someone reporting for CNN? No brainer. Except for jaded, we all agree he or she is a journalist.
But what about someone reporting for a new startup with a part time staff of three? Or the lone blogger who digs deep into one particular subject?
In Oregon, a judge has decided that shield laws only apply to those who are officially part of an established media organization (again, defining what that might mean leaves us scratching our heads).
Via the Seattle Weekly:
A U.S. District Court judge in Portland has drawn a line in the sand between “journalist” and “blogger.” And for Crystal Cox, a woman on the latter end of that comparison, the distinction has cost her $2.5 million…
…Cox runs several law-centric blogs, like industrywhistleblower.com, judicialhellhole.com, and obsidianfinancesucks.com, and was sued by investment firm Obsidian Finance Group in January for defamation, to the tune of $10 million, for writing several blog posts that were highly critical of the firm and its co-founder Kevin Padrick.
Representing herself in court, Cox had argued that her writing was a mixture of facts, commentary and opinion (like a million other blogs on the web) and moved to have the case dismissed. Dismissed it wasn’t, however, and after throwing out all but one of the blog posts cited by Obsidian Financial, the judge ruled that this single post was indeed defamatory because it was presented, essentially, as more factual in tone than her other posts, and therefore a reasonable person could conclude it was factual.
The judge ruled against Cox on that post and awarded $2.5 million to the investment firm.
Now here’s where the case gets more important: Cox argued in court that the reason her post was more factual was because she had an inside source that was leaking her information. And since Oregon is one of 40 U.S. states including Washington with media shield laws, Cox refused to divulge who her source was.
But without revealing her source Cox couldn’t prove that the statements she’d made in her post were true and therefore not defamation, or attribute them to her source and transfer the liability…
…The judge in Cox’s case, however, ruled that the woman did not qualify for shield-law protection not because of anything she wrote, but because she wasn’t employed by an official media establishment.
From the opinion by U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez:
… although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law.
Who Are These Journalists
A new site called News Transparency is trying to bring transparency to journalists by publishing basic biographical information, recent stories and social media presences.
Via Poynter:
Ira Stoll is 38. He has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. His phone number is (718) 499-2199 and his email is ira@futureofcapitalism.com. He went to college at Harvard, has worked at the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Sun, and he considers Seth Lipsky a personal friend.
I know all this from Stoll’s profile page on NewsTransparency.com, a new site he just launched to make it easier for the public “to find out about the individual human beings who produce the news — human beings with opinions, relationships, history, and agendas.”
The site consists of journalist profile pages which, like Wikipedia, allow anyone to add information and, like Amazon, enable ratings and reviews. They also collect articles written about the journalist’s work.
If you’re familiar with Techcrunch’s Crunchbase, the idea should be familiar: Create a publicly accessible database that lets anyone learn more about the movers and shakers in a given field.
Created by Ira Stoll, News Transparency hopes to build trust between the public and journalists. Let’s see what happens when the journalists find their digital paper trail easy to find and read.
Why I Write: Q. and A. With Seven Times Journalists
Seven Times reporters from a variety of beats told us what they write, how, and why — even if, for at least one of them, the storytelling is more often done through multimedia than words.
via NY Times
How Journalists Use the Internet
Sixty-four percent of journalists say they spend more than 20 hours a week online, with 21 percent reporting more than 40 hours of online activity each week.
Via the 2011 Arketi Web Watch Media Survey. Arketi is a PR firm.
Vadim Lavrusik: How journalists can make use of Facebook Pages
Editor’s Note: Late last month, Vadim Lavrusik moved from his role as the community manager and social strategist at Mashable to become Facebook’s firstJournalist Program Manager. In his new position, Vadim is now responsible for building and managing programs that help journalists, in various ways, make use of Facebook in their work. Below, he shares some ways that journalists have been taking advantage of one of the site’s features: Facebook Pages.
This is such a great overview of the ways journalists have used Facebook. ~Chao Li
We noted the other day that 57 journalists were killed in 2010, according to Reporters Without Borders.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has created an interactive that explores the motivation behind the killings. Thus far they’ve identified 44 journalists whose deaths they can attribute to cause.
ReportingOn: A Post Mortem
In 2008, Ryan Sholin won a Knight News Challenge grant to create ReportingOn, a Web-based application to connect reporters working on similar stories so that they could share information.
Earlier this week, he mothballed the project and wrote a few words about the experience.
And a few recommendations for developers of software “for journalists:”
- Reporters don’t want to talk about unpublished stories in public.
- Unless they’re looking for sources.
- There are some great places on the Internet to find sources.
- When they do talk about unpublished stories among themselves, they do it in familiar, well-lit places, like e-mail or the telephone. Not in your application.
- Actually, keep this in mind: Unless what you’re building meets a very journalism-specific need, you’re probably grinding your gears to build something “for journalists” when they just need a great communication tool, independent of any particular niche or category of users.
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