fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

I walked up to the imaginary doctor and interviewed him using my Evernote (btw, you need this if you’re a journalist, not just for iPhone) voice recorder. He told me Michael Jackson was in critical condition.

When I hit save on Evernote, it automatically uploaded the sound file to the web. Annie has access to my Evernote account and watched it load live, then saved it to her computer, briefly trimmed it down, uploaded it to SoundCloud.com (YouTube for audio) and Tweeted the sound clip embeded on the L.A. Times website with a nutgraf.

Total time for first breaking news report: 10 minutes

While I waited in the waiting room, the editor and I coordinated my and the L.A. Times tweets using a synced Tweetdeck (iPhone app + her desktop app). I tweeted extra details while the editor spread the word.

As people retweeted us, we retweeted them with #truth

People who lied (or abused the hash tag) were retweeted with #untruth so that people would ignore them and continue to retweet our reports.

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So let’s get this straight: Only teens don’t like frustrating, hard to use websites, only teens don’t like irrelevant, useless information, only teens don’t like liars and only teens want to use information they find for more than personal knowledge?

I don’t understand how the website suggestions are any different than how anyone at any age would like to read. The NAA and Northwestern did not identify how teenagers read, they identified a type of reader that happens to be slightly more common among young people.

In my research and personal usability testing, I’ve discovered two overarching type of readers: Surfers and Drillers. Underneath that, I’ve identified others. However, Innovation in Newspapers 2009 publication (PDF costs money) labeled them more clearly, so I will use theirs in the below descriptions.
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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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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 of these [...]

This one is a bit longer but very awesome. Specifically check out the area starting at 9 minutes.

The video is of Nick Bilton, Design Integration Editor for The New York Times and the User Interface Specialist & Lead Researcher for The New York Times Research & Development Lab to the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference:

I read a lot of articles about how my generation (1983-1987 ish) and younger are doomed because of social media and all the changes. We apparently have short attention spans and all that jazz. Well here’s a video that puts that into perspective for all you 26 and olders (kind of).

Intro: I’m Jessica and I spend a lot of time thinking about journalism, both its past and its future. Donica invited me a few weeks ago to crossblog between Fix Journalism and my personal blog, and I’ve finally gotten around to doing it.
Newspapers were my first journalism love, so I’m particularly fascinated with what forms [...]

Pew’s annual report about journalism’s prospects for 2009 is due out on Monday. According to an Associated Press story: “The state of journalism is bleak, but an annual study of the industry suggests all hope should not be lost.”

In other news, Pew has an interesting story about the changing face of the Washington press corps, the group of journalists responsible for communicating the going ons of our national leaders. What Pew found was a dramatically depleted press corps for mainstream media outlets (regional bureaus for newspapers have been especially hit hard) but at the same time more and more newsletters for specialized interests (climate change, ag policy, etc…) are emerging. There’s also been a dramatic increase in the number of foreign corespondents covering Washington.