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Since he lost his TV reporting job last year, Jarrett Hill has been looking for his next opportunity. It presented itself in an unexpected way. Hill was sitting at a corner table Monday night in a Culver City Starbucks, drinking a venti iced coffee and watching the Republican National Convention on an MSNBC live stream. As Melania Trump spoke, she uttered a phrase that the 31-year-old California native had heard once before — from First Lady Michelle Obama. “… the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams …,” Melania Trump said during her address to the Republican National Convention. Instinctively, Hill finished the phrase aloud to his laptop screen: “… and your willingness to work for them.” “Kind of like a song that you haven’t heard in a long time and you remember the lyrics as you hear them. Or a movie that you know the line to and you kind of respond to it,” he said. He recalled the words from Michelle Obama’s speech because, he said, he had thought to himself at the time that it was “really beautifully written.” “I believe I even wrote it down or typed it,” Hill said. “Obviously having no idea that eight years later I’d hear them again from a woman who wanted to be first lady speaking at a convention in front of 40 million people.”...
A population of 100,000 is no longer a guarantee that a city like Richmond, California can sustain a thriving daily paper. Readers have drifted from the tactile pleasures of print to the digital gratification of their smartphone screens, and advertising revenues have drifted with them. Titles that once served up debates from City Hall, news of school teams’ triumphs and classified ads for outgrown bikes have stopped the presses for good.
Last January, however, a site called the Richmond Standard launched, promising “a community-driven daily news source dedicated to shining a light on the positive things that are going on in the community”, and giving everyone from athletes to entrepreneurs the recognition they deserve. Since then, it has recorded the “quick-thinking teen” commended by California’s governor for saving a woman from overdosing; the “incredible strength” of the 5ft 6in high-school freshman who can bench-press “a whopping 295lbs”; and councilman Tom Butt’s warning about the costs of vacating a blighted public housing project.
The Richmond Standard is one of the more polished sites to emerge in the age of hyper-local digital news brands such as Patch and DNAinfo.com. That may be because it is run and funded by Chevron, the $240bn oil group which owns the Richmond refinery that in August 2012 caught fire, spewing plumes of black smoke over the city and sending more than 15,000 residents to hospital for medical help....
After years of grim news for the news industry marked by seemingly endless rounds of staff cutbacks, it’s not unusual for those thinking about a career in journalism or veterans trying to find a new job to look at options in related fields. One field outpacing journalism both in sheer numbers and in salary growth is public relations.
The salary gap between public relations specialists and news reporters has widened over the past decade – to almost $20,000 a year, according to 2013 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the public relations field has expanded to a degree that these specialists now outnumber reporters by nearly 5 to 1 (BLS data include part-time and full-time employees, but not self-employed.)...
A list of blogs by journalists, journalism academics and photo-journalists sharing tips and perspectives on topics such as social media, data journalism, apps, tools, and the latest developments in the industry.
The blogs are grouped by subject and are listed in random order. We have not included any blogs hosted by news organizations or other sites. This is an updated version of our 50 blogs by journalists, for journalists, published in January 2013....
...You’re off to a great start. However, you’ve only started to scratch the surface of the content possibilities because your audience reach is still limited — while your corner of the world is engaged, you aren’t quite at the center of the wider industry conversation yet. If we agree that the goal of content marketing should be to enable your content creators to function as brand journalists (we do, right?), then it’s fair to equate your content effort to that of a weekly community paper. However, there’s an even bigger opportunity here, because online content can help you extend your reach far beyond your current community and create an exponential opportunity for your business....
'There is plenty of room for light, fun pieces across newspapers. The issue comes when this casual, easygoing attitude towards numbers, statistics and the world at large extends into serious issues.' There was quite the bombshell in the news this week. It turns out that, contrary to expectations, women don't look their oldest in their 80s or 90s. No,the Telegraph reveals, they look oldest at 3.30pm on a Wednesday. Except, utterly obviously, they don't. The story is the latest in a stream of "polls", "surveys" or "research" designed to do nothing but promote a company's new product. In this case, it worked nicely. The story's fifth paragraph notes the "study" was "carried out by the tanning brand, St Tropez"....
When a helicopter crashed in a densely populated part of London around 8am today, next to one of the busiest trainlines in Europe and a large bus station, the news was always going to be broken, within seconds, by members of the public on Twitter, armed with camera phones.
Twitter user Craig Jenner was one of the first to put a picture on Twitter which was shared far and wide.
What happened next is indicative of the way the media are increasingly playing catch-up on such stories, moving from reporting to aggregating (or curating, if you must) - images, eye-witness accounts and videos. Journalists were asking to use the picture with a credit and were trying to get Jenner on the phone...
If Twitter can now assemble the raw materials of news into a meaningful place to see and understand what's happening anywhere in the world, on any topic, the instant it starts to matter, why would anyone get breaking news from another source? Twitter Tuesday announced new search capabilities that give it the upper hand as a breaking news destination over basically every other news organization on the planet, from newspapers to cable networks to websites and everything in between. When a new search begins to trend on Twitter, Twitter's new API will send the query toAmazon's Mechanical Turk service, where humans will categorize it to help make it more relevant to readers. Then Twitter can populate its Discover section with live, topical streams of news. If they want to keep up, other organizations that exist to break news need some new ideas, and fast...
[This post features a really good list of smartphone apps for photos, photo editing, video, audio, recording calls, writing and social network tools. Useful for PR, journalists or anyone producing content and stories. ~ Jeff]
The Internet Archive plans to make more than 350,000 programs available on its Web site beginning Tuesday. Inspired by a pillar of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle has a grand vision for the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, which he founded and leads. “We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,” Mr. Kahle said. As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news. The latest ambitious effort by the archive, which has already digitized millions of books and tried to collect everything published on every Web page for the last 15 years (that adds up to more than 150 billion Web pages), is intended not only for researchers, Mr. Kahle said, but also for average citizens who make up some of the site’s estimated two million visitors each day. “The focus is to help the American voter to better be able to examine candidates and issues,” Mr. Kahle said.....
University of Texas at Austin journalism professor Paula Poindexter has a new book out about the millennial generation’s low interest in news. Here are three points from her press release: * Millennials describe news as garbage, lies, one-sided, propaganda, repetitive and boring.
* Most millennials do not depend on news to help with their daily lives.
* The majority of millennials do not feel being informed is important. “In the future we may not have anybody consuming news,” Poindexter says in her release. “We can’t continue to ignore the problem. The older generation is dying out. Who will be the role model encouraging future generations to be informed?”... [Interesting study with implications for marketing and PR too - JD]
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's investigation into the origins of the Watergate break-in—which took place 40 years ago yesterday—is one of the most highly mythologized episodes in the history of journalism. It represents the Platonic ideal of what journalism-with-a-capital-J ought to be, at least according to its high priesthood—sober, careful young men doggedly following the story wherever it leads and holding power to account, without fear or favor. It was also a sloppy, ethically dubious project the details of which would mortify any of the smug high priests of journalism that flourished in its wake. The actual Watergate investigation could never have survived the legacy it helped create.... [Great read, highly recommended - JD]
From live blogs on 'Occupy' protests to footage of Syrian atrocities on YouTube, filmmakers now have access to a wealth of raw material – but can it all be trusted? In a digital world with a whole host of different ways to communicate a factual message it is increasingly hard to judge the value of amateur eyewitness film shot on a mobile phone and posted on the internet against a considered, observational documentary broadcast on a traditional television channel....
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The need to urgently shield investigative journalism in the post-Edward Snowden era is the burning issue in newsrooms globally, according to the World Editors Forum‘s Trends in Newsrooms 2014 report, launched this week.
The report was released at a gathering of more than 1,000 media professionals in Turin, Italy, at the annual World Newspaper Congress.Based on interviews with more than 30 editors in a dozen countries, the Paris-based World Editors Forum has identified the top trends in newsrooms in 2014 as...
Storyful recently launched a new Newswire to some of the biggest newsrooms around the world. Today, Chief of Product Adam Thomas (@datatheism) outlines what's new. Modern news is evolving. Journalists need to find news fast.
This is where the magic happens. Essential videos, images and embedded social media, all verified by Storyful’s journalists and augmented with context, dates, geodata, maps, local photographs, corroborating social media and – crucially – contact information for sources, so that journalists can follow up, cross-check and create their own unique angle.
The journey from Newswire to article (or TV segment, or online video package, or listicle, or …) is vastly improved, with the aim to be as frictionless as possible. Where available, every piece of media now has download, share and embed buttons. If a content creator has opted to license their content, you contact us for instant guidance on prices and usage....
If you're in the market for a free journalism education, hundreds of training materials are now at your disposal.If you're in the market for a free journalism education, hundreds of training materials are now at your disposal.
The BBC's College of Journalism made a slew of videos and guides - initially created to train its own journalists - available to reporters worldwide for free.You can watch videos and tutorials made by BBC journalists in the field on journalists' safety, social media, multimedia techniques, as well as subject and writing style guides galore. Check out the whole library here....
...“There was no Miranda rule, no PR people. We dealt directly with the cops,” said Bob Schieffer, then a cub reporter working the night shift police beat at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He was still asleep when his brother woke him to say the president had been shot. With most of his colleagues dispatched to Dallas, Schieffer was left to answer the phones when a woman called asking for a ride to Dallas.
“Lady, we don’t run a taxi service here, and besides, the president’s been shot,” he said, almost hanging up on her. “I know,” she replied, “I think it’s my son they’ve arrested.” The caller was Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother. At the National Press Club panel “Where Were You When Kennedy Was Shot?” this week, Schieffer said it was “odd but not unbelievable” that Marguerite Claverie Oswald would call the newspaper. The Star-Telegram had done stories about Russian defectors, and newspapers then were a bigger part of the community than they are today.
Mouth. Friggin’. Dropped.
Can you imagine what just happened? Oswald’s mother called Schieffer…directly. Today, that very call would have gone through a publicist or possibly a surreptitious tweet because Schieffer wasn’t following Oswald’s mother on Twitter. Riveting....
You can easily make the argument that young journalists need to learn that online verbal diarrhea has consequences in a business where you're expected to maintain at least a modicum of objectivity and personal distance from the audience.... In case you’re unaware of Shea Allen’s story, up until a few days ago she was an investigative reporter in Huntsville, Alabama, probably doing her fair share of personally satisfying work but I guarantee suffering through all the various indignities that go along with being a reporter in Huntsville, Alabama. That ended, both the good and bad, as soon as she published a post to her personal blog called “Confessions of a Red-Headed Reporter,” which both laid out and ever-so-gently riffed on the real life of a small-market reporter. This was the result...
While Twitter can be used as an off-the-shelf liveblogging tool, it's not the most sophisticated of options for the job. But then, it wasn't really designed for that.... Indeed, there is no shortage of liveblogging tools, but one company has just rolled out the public beta version of its own incarnation, built upon three key underlying tenets, with journalists firmly in mind. Here’s Liveblog Pro....
...It is important for students to have an online portfolio that showcases their work and will pop up when a prospective employer searches for them online.
WordPress, the choice for many students, has just made it that much easier to create an elegant portfolio site. It has launched WordPress.com/portfolios with 30 dedicated portfolio themes to choose from....
"What is needed are newsrooms that can filter, verify, curate, and amplify social media for their audiences, in addition to journalists reporting in enterprising and contextual ways." The approach that large traditional news organizations take in breaking news needs to be re-thought in the age of social media. Hurricane Sandy provided an example of how resources are often wasted by journalism organizations during breaking-news events while also demonstrating how vital authenticating coverage can be.... What is needed are newsrooms that can filter, verify, curate, and amplify social media for their audiences, in addition to journalists reporting in enterprising and contextual ways. Andy Carvin at NPR excelled at this during coverage of the Middle East and I think we should and will see more of it in 2013....
...I am tired of comparisons between print revenue and web revenue. I am tired of people who think content is the main business model of most publishing, rather than advertising. I am tired of people who think web-first was just about making money. I am tired of people who think journalism is about stories, rather than people. No one has the answer to the question of paying for journalism, but we should at least acknowledge that the old system is broken. We cannot go back to print profit margins: readers have left, and advertisers are following.... [Paul Bradshaw has an excellent analysis of media and the impact of the Web on the business model. Recommended reading ~ Jeff]
The topline of the University of Texas at Austin research study says “Millennials describe news as garbage, lies, one-sided, propaganda, repetitive and boring.” This stunning report collided today with another post to create a not-so-pretty picture of journalism. Is it any wonder that trust in media continues to drop precipitously? [Another gem from the report: “The majority of millennials do not feel being informed is important.” YIKES! JD]
The news story should have been about the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare. Instead, it became a story about media screw ups and trying to get the story first instead of getting the story right. Boy, did they ever blow it and there’s a cautionary tale for PR and crisis managers.... [The real story is the difference between a correction and an apology - JD]
I set out as an entrepreneur four years ago to change the world of journalism and build a digital business. I had a few decades in the news industry, one of them in new media, to guide me. During my journey, I’ve kept two quotes locked in my mind. This one, from Don Logan, the former CEO of Time Inc., in response to how much he spent building the ill-fated Pathfinder Web site: “It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.” The other was from Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal’s former CEO. In talking about digital video, he said: “Our challenge with all these ventures is to effectively monetize them so that we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies.” [Lewis DVorkin offers terrific insight into the search for a sustainable business model for journalism - JD]
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![Breaking [News] is broken | Nieman Lab | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/E_CUWUpjqNv8j07Dvgu1Uzl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
A national controversy over passages in Melania Trump's speech that resembled Michelle Obama's address was first brought to light by a former LA TV reporter sitting in a Starbucks. Good back story.