Notes on a digital newsroom
Categories: The Web Site.
Categories: Uncategorized.
A new Pew study shows that young people use the heck out of the Internet; they just don’t seem to be using it to blog. They also use the heck out of social networking sites, just not Twitter.
Categories: Uncategorized.
If you’re still waffling about whether to use Twitter for personal or professional reasons, check out this post from Sree Sreenivasan, a journalism professor and the dean of student affairs at the Columbia Journalism School.
It includes links to all manner of Twitter introductions, tutorials and other resources. Some of his links can help you find people to follow. Others will help you see how Twitter can be engaging and, most importantly, useful.
There’s also some fun stuff near the end, videos, jokes and such.
And, if you want to get on a social media roll, check out this other post by Sreenivasan, which provides tips and primers for all sorts of social networking sites, from Facebook to LinkedIn.
And hey, one more thing: Take a good look at the blog that he’s put up. Sreenivasan is using a blogging service called Tumblr, which provides users with free blogs that are drop-dead simple to use. If you’re looking to start experimenting with blogs, Tumblr might be a good place to start. Wordpress.com and Posterous are also good.
As always, if you have any questions about this stuff, stop by any time.
Image from the Flickr Commons
Categories: Social Media.
More encoding “gremlins” snuck into the poll this week. Please, please, turn off “smart quotes” on your machine if you must continue using Microsoft Word to compose.
Better yet, use a plain text editor such as Notepad (on Windows) or TextWrangler (on Mac) to write everything that goes onto the Web.
This just looks bad.
Categories: The Web Site.
Our latest Chronicle video, shot by Michael Gibney, edited by me.
Categories: Uncategorized.
And I learned that the notion of objectivity is a fig leaf for journalists who don’t want to deal honestly with our own humanity and don’t want to take personal responsibility for the human impact of our journalism. We’re just doing our jobs. We’re just being objective. Objects can’t be responsible.
Categories: Uncategorized.
It was a busy Friday. In addition to editing audio for Jodi’s Sunday Page 1 story on the drop-in center in Livingston, I learned that we have finally been given access to our new Web site.
In case you missed an earlier post about Blox, this is the software that will run our new Web site. It means that we can have a much richer Web site, full of interweaving stories, extra features and beautiful photos.
Blox also means a lot of work. We are scheduled to go live March 2. There’s a lot of work to do between now and then to make sure that all the little bugs are worked out of the site (or as many of them as we can catch by launch day).
For the reporters, this will mean some Blox training before March 2. What will that training entail? It’s hard to say at this point because we have yet to make some preliminary decisions on what the workflow around the new site will look like in the newsroom. I’ll let you know more when there’s more to know.
You can see the site any time you like. Just stop by my desk and ask for a peek. I won’t spoil the surprise for the public by posting a image, though. Sorry.
Categories: The Web Site.
Here’s our latest Chronicle video, shot by Dan Person, edited by me. Continued…
Categories: video.
Journalism can’t be a one-way street anymore
I don’t know who made up the rule that news reporters aren’t supposed to respond to public comments about and critiques of their work. Maybe it’s not even a rule. Maybe its one of those arbitrary rules that somebody thought was a good idea once upon a time, though it really had no basis in life — like not ending an English sentence with a preposition.
Either way, it’s about time we got over ourselves as some institution of capital-J Journalism and responded to readers in the comments sections of our sites, engaged with them on Twitter and answered their questions on Facebook.
As Robert Quigley at Old Media New Tricks writes, “People seem to think we’re a giant, uncaring media corporation. They’re pleasantly surprised when they get a real human response.”
For the sake of argument though, what’s the justification for maintaining a wall of silence? Why should we not respond to reader questions and concerns? Anyone?
Comments
Categories: Social Media.
Tags: commenting, communication, journalism