Daily Archives: March 14, 2007

One of my all-time favorite media bloggers is Tim Porter. He’s inspired me to think differently about journalism, and inspired me to encourage my colleagues to think differently — to challenge our comfortable assumptions about who we are and what we do.

After months of no new posts from Porter, I called him late one night (probably too late) a few weeks ago to find out what was up — why no new posts? It turns out, he was busy writing a book. We had a great hour-long conversation and it reminded me just how much we need Porter’s point of view in the media blogosphere.

It looks like Porter’s back, and one of his first posts goes right to the heart of challenging traditional journalism thinking. The simple title is “The Real Heroes of Newspapers.”

Newsroom budget cuts are routine these days (and will remain so for some time). It’s also routine for top editors to resign before, or amid, these reductions, throwing their careers on the swords of journalistic quality.

These martyred journalists – Dean Baquet, late of the L.A. Times and now relocated in the N.Y. Times Washington bureau, is the poster child for them – are hailed as heroes by their colleagues (whom they’ve left behind in the trenches) and some of their peers (who perhaps see a similar fate in store for them).

What hogwash. Journalists are celebrating the wrong heroes.

The real heroes of newspapers are those journalists who stay. The real heroes are the editors (from large papers like Atlanta or small ones like Bloomington) who are reconfiguring their newsrooms. The real heroes are reporters like those in Bakersfield who are shooting video while reporting. The real heroes are photographers like Fred Larson of the San Francisco Chronicle who using a blog to teach his readers how to make extraordinary photos like his.

…

Only one certainty exists: That future will belong to those who build it. Walking away isn’t the answer. Staying, working the problem, finding solutions, making hard choices, learning to think differently – those are the answers. And the people who do that are the real heroes of journalism.

Tim, as usual, says it better than I could. Read the whole thing. Continue reading →

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Mike Orren of Pegasus News thought he had a content sharing deal worked out with a Fox affiliate only to have the whole thing blow up in his face at the 11th hour. He shares the whole painful story:

Late Wednesday afternoon, my phone rang with Saunders and Mahaney on the other end. A vigorously unnamed FOX exec, who it was now admitted had been against the deal happening at all on the conference call about the press release had visited our site and seen that the requested text change had not yet gone into effect and unilaterally called off the whole deal. Yes, no one told us that the request was critical. No, there was no explaining that. No, there was no chance of reasoning, discussing or even learning who had cut the deal off at the nub. No, no part of the partnership could be salvaged. Everything Fox needed to come off our site and we wouldn’t be working together on hyperlocal news.

Those corporate suits can be such idiots, uh?

(via Local Onliner) Continue reading →

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Who says sport stars can’t blog? Here’s 38 Pitches from Curt Schilling. For personal journal blogging, it’s darn good. I get no sense that it’s ghost written. What is spectacularly cool for a media star of his stature is comments are enabled.

Maybe Schilling will start a trend of baseball stars blogging — and they’ll start to have a conversation among themselves, the way like-minded bloggers do … which, I imagine, would be quite enlightening, both about the lives of these men, but also the game they play. One can dream …

(hat tip: Steve Smith) Continue reading →

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From Cnet:

If any figure from the world of mainstream journalism could be forgiven for nursing a grudge toward new media, Dan Rather comes to mind.

Yet, he holds a surprisingly balanced view.

Anybody who blogs, who does real reporting, which is to say, make telephone calls, go interview people, go talk to people, in a spirit of independence…and (tries) to do journalism with integrity, I would consider a journalist.

Of course there are an increasing number of bloggers now who by any definition are reporters, or journalists. There are some others who in my opinion would fit into a gray area. They may do good reporting, but they mix in their own opinion, their own point of view, without clearly signifying the difference. Now that’s not a kind of journalism that I practice. It’s not one that I’m going to damn either.

Continue reading →

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One of the interesting experiments in citizen journalism is Orato. Orato isn’t blogging — it’s first person reporting by non-credentialed people. Here’s an interview with editor and publisher Paul Sullivan.

8) What do you think makes Orato unique?

Sullivan: Orato is unique in that it’s a collaboration between professional and amateur journalists –we want to provide a way for those without a voice to participate in the public discussion and we want to bring completely new, unmediated voices to that discussion. We want to support citizen journalism in new ways — such as hiring sex trade writers to cover a trial of a man accused of preying on sex trade workers. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, but no one has ever done it before. We want to bring citizen journalism into the mainstream.

Continue reading →

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Chuck Fadely sent this link to the newspaper video list — the video work of Hillman Curtis. Short, gorgeous productions and some great storytelling. If you watch, pay attention to the details — the lighting, the framing, the panning, and how those details are more than just technically good, but help move the story along. Continue reading →

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