A great interview with Jack Shafer on Reliable Sources about media criticism and having strong journalistic standards.
Dated Thursday, September 18, 1851, the newspaper back then was known as The New-York Daily Times. (I love the hyphen.) It was priced at one cent.
I must have walked by that replica thousands of times before I finally paused for a closer look. It was made up mostly of blurbs, many of them just a few sentences long. None was more than five paragraphs. The international news consisted of dispatches from Turkey, Bremen, Bavaria and Prussia, in most cases summarizing local publications rather than offering original reporting. The local New York City reporting was quite chatty, with headlines like “Disturbance by Rival Blacksmiths,” “Run over by an Ice Cart,” and “Women Poisoned.”
Even non-news was news back then. A short dispatch titled “False Alarm” read: “Item gatherer failed to discover the first spark of the fire.” And I was taken with a brief from another edition: “Not Dead.-Mr. John Overho, of Prince street, who was reported to be beyond all medical skill on Saturday, from the effect of coup de soleil, we are glad to learn is likely to recover.”
But what struck me most that day, as I studied that front page, was a single thought.
This looks like a blog.
This is the age of the individual voice, liberated by the new media. Anyone in the younger generation who yearns for a column on the Washington Post op-ed page is seeking oblivion.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
I think I’ve accomplished everything I wanted to with this project. I can’t imagine myself blogging about anything else ever again because I feel like I have already blogged about everything and I am just a slave to boring alt memes. It’s probably time to move on and find a real career & some challenges that can actually make the world a better place.
Thanks for the memories. We had a good run. I apologize to every one who I have hurt.
R.I.P. Hipster Runoff
How has Twitter impacted journalism?
It’s made news reporting much more distributed: no photojournalist produced anything like this, for example. It’s massively increased the velocity of news: people now know what’s going on before it’s formally reported. It’s made it easier to find things you didn’t know you were interested in. It’s given journalists a much more human voice, an outlet where they can be themselves. It’s helped build a culture of linking to wonderful stuff. It’s made the world smaller, and it’s made news travel faster than ever. Overall, it’s been great.
(Source: blogs.reuters.com, via futurejournalismproject)
Someone at the Times isn’t doing their homework.
57% of Twitter is 26 to 44 yrs old
I’d bet the average Tumblr user is well under that age bracket.
Blog “purists” will tell you that Tumblr isn’t “real blogging” and define it as long form post that take time to put together, whereas Tumblr is mostly quick shortform posts with an emphasis on photo, video and links.
Traditional longform blogging was always an older pursuit, the attention span of the young has always been short. If anything, Tumblr has provided a platform that did not exist before. It didn’t replace longer form blogging platforms, it just gave another option and captured a generation that had little interest in blogging in the first place (other than livejournal)
Will the generation that grew up on Tumblr graduate to other platforms as they get older or will they just post long form post here? That’s yet to be seen. There’s nothing stopping anyone from being loquacious here, it’s a matter of what you decide to do with it.
Deadspin has more power in its toe nail shavings than in every newspaper combined.
Congrats to my friends at Mediaite, that’s quite an accomplishment.
The point here is that the fight is not like the blogwars of old, despite the fact that both sides are publishing on blogs. We haven’t seen a lot of back-and-forth on the blogs, and the blog entries that we have seen have been clearly worked at considerable length. Instead, the debate has been raging on Twitter, where it’s much harder for an outsider coming to the subject afresh to follow what’s going on and who’s saying what.
(Source: seanbonner)
Here’s the dirty little non-secret about Gawker: Nobody knows what anyone else is doing. We sit here manically refreshing our browsers looking for something—anything—to write about that will help you make it through your workday and help us meet our post quota. Somewhere around us, idiots are blogging about cars or video games or some horrible thing like that. As happy as we would be to have some involvement with the business side of things, it is just not the case. Actually, we really wouldn’t. For one thing, Gawker Ad Guy Chris Batty is so dismissive of the editorial team that he refers to us collectively as “Meat” (he refers to Choire as “meat manager”). He’s actually kind of a dick.
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