In response to the previous post, Brian Duggan, Donica Mensing and I began an interesting disucssion via email. The question: Is advertising capable of being journalism ever?” Brian Duggan said: Ads provide objective information, yes, but to what degree? Does that baked potato in your Locals BBQ ad always look picturesque for every customer? Ask yourself [...]
A lot of people in the hardcore journalism world don’t think advertising is journalism (it’s threatening) and many people don’t believe advertising should be in journalism schools. But I think advertising is journalism and belongs in J-schools. Advertising can serve the same purposes and affect the same goals as journalism when done a certain way [...]
Has anyone asked you these questions lately?
It irks me that our industry is currently having a debate about who the customer is; readers or advertisers. The above Harvard Business blog talks about finding out how people read, something I’ve been whining about for a year now. A very anthropological, anti-focus group approach is what he suggests. I’d agree. Annie points out that [...]
Capitalize on this focusing point right this second. Do not wait for people to forget you screwed up. Move forward NOW! There are points in history where the world or a group or a culture pay attention to something and change quickly. They are called paradigm shifts. This is one of those opportunities.
Take everyone’s advice. Members have provided a lot of feedback not normally available. Do it. Then make sure there is a place for members to regularly provide feedback from today on into forever. Where the hell can we go to be heard other than when you piss us off? Nowhere. So make somewhere for us to go when we’re not pissed.
SND is no longer a society of print journalists, get over it. Many members lement that we’re no longer true to our craft. We’re not prepress people anymore. It’s odd that we can call ourselves forward thinking and still lement about that fact. It’s a tough world. I know, I just graduated and had to spend the last year ignoring print in order to ensure I could get a job. I still suck at new media, we all do. Let’s get better. Web design has just started, it’ll be like 2004! It’s like getting all your pages in color all over again. There are a limited number of web usability conventions and it’s not all that different than print.
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Creativity in journalism is an uncomfortable process. It involves twisting your brain into odd shapes, looking in strange places, talking to people others don’t talk to. Then you have to find ways to relate that story through complicated methods, such as writing, photographing, graphing, networking, videoing and hundreds of other new methods.
One lesson we learned from Poynter, then, is that it’s okay to be uncomfortable. Get used to being uncomfortable and spending time on the line between absolute failure and glorious success. More than that, it’s important to be creative and critically think about everything you do. Media is not a safe, happy place. If you’re satisfied with what you’re doing and comfortable, you’re not learning or working hard enough.
Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, wrote a column for the Miami Herald yesterday titled, “What readers want vs. what they need.” It represents in one concise package the cultural divide that is preventing so many newsrooms from progressing. This column neatly identifies some of the tenets of journalism [...]
The “future of journalism” discussion usually gets framed in the context of editorial content. We ask questions like: “how can we better connect with readers?” “how can we use technology to build communities?” “how do we ingrain ourselves into the conversation of existing communities?” or “how do we become a vital part of readers’ lives?” Some [...]
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but what you can do for SND