One of the painful ironies of office life is that we can never quite get the temperature right. We spend our summers shivering in meat lockers and our winters sweating in saunas.
Source: Fast Company
What’s the right balance between restraint and aggressive repeating and redistributing of other people’s reports? (Remember, retweets aren’t endorsements, usually! But they can spread falsehood at the speed of light.) I’m not sure.
The ‘facts’ from Benghazi | Capital New York h/t @JulieWestfall
Source: capitalnewyork.com
Three reasons I gave Homicide Watch money
I am no Clay Shirky, guys, but here is my schpeel. Read it and back their Kickstarter, please.
1) Laura and Chris are two amazing human beings.
I may call a lot of people great and awesome, but these two….I met Laura at a fellowship last year. She wowed every single mentor and every single entrepreneur there with her spirit and her passion toward her project. I met Chris slightly later and he is no less awe-inspiring.
In an industry full of cut-backs and bankruptcies, it’s nice to have people with energy around.
2) Simple, amazing reporting.
I told someone yesterday about backing them on Kickstarter and they mentioned how impossible it seems that this crew gets so much information about each and every murder. But they do. Because they are not only amazing human beings, but they have a simple, fresh and unique way of reporting. Something I wish all reporters did.
3) Innovation on any level needs to be funded.
God Bless the Knight News Challenge, but some things don’t need $1 million. Some things need less. We need to find a way to fund medium-scale projects. I’m part of a newsroom that gets large foundations to help fund our journalism, but I’d like to be part of an ecosystem that funds all amazing journalism. $50? I can afford that.
Goodbye, B Mack.
B Mack, as she was known.
Things I know because of B Mack:
* Saying “like” constantly makes you sound much less smart than she knows you are.
* Don’t futz with copyright.
* You have a choice with your notes. Keep them all, and use them as backup if you get subpoenaed. Or get rid of them every six months and rely on your unreliable memory.
But there was more.
I should tell you Barbara Mack was my college professor in media law. She also taught ethics, and really, you got a little of both regardless of which class you took.
She had a whipsmart sense of humor. She was tough, but students streamed into her classes at Iowa State — my alma mater — because she cared. She was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had because she was determined that we would leave college with a firm base in media law.
She was pretty amazing.
I woke up this morning to a stream of messages from my fellow alumni about her. We were a close class, those of us who wrote and learned and became journalists at the Iowa State Daily. We have been flown far and abroad, close and nearby.
But there are things we remember about our time in Ames. B Mack’s tough as hell classes. Working until far too late to get the paper out. Living in that tiny room, forgetting you had class because the news did, and for some of us still does, come first.
Her death was the second piece of sad news I received while catching up on the world.
And it’s a reminder to live life, to be happy with what you do and to pass on your love, knowledge and kindness to others because teaching is part of what we do as journalists and as humans.
B Mack, thank you. There is so much more I can’t find the words to say. (Who knew that would ever happen?)
You will be sorely missed.
Resist the temptation to rely too much on a guru; hiring a guru will only take your organization so far. Many of the organizations who brought in “social media gurus” learned this lesson the hard way. A single individual cannot scale. However, if the organization is willing to put real teeth behind their mobile efforts, a single smart person can help form a center of excellence. Establishing a center of excellence that puts mobility at the core, and integrates it with other business initiatives, can get a business thinking about mobile more strategically.
Yes, I have been reading a lot about mobile.
The Future Isn’t About Mobile; It’s About Mobility - David Armano - Harvard Business Review
Source: blogs.hbr.org
It was the first time I really expressed myself all the way, not trying to be a professional, not trying to please my parents.” He adds “I had to let go of that fucking Asian guilt. The moment I let go of, ‘I should be a doctor,’ I truly soared.
Reasons to like Roy Choi again.
Source: The Atlantic
I like to think I work with a team across the site that’s really a disruption layer,” she said. “We like to do rapid prototyping and experimenting with platforms and projects.
I have a different view on this. Content creation ought to be a single multiplatform group. But content management ought to be specialised. I get very irritated when people say they are platform-agnostic, because each platform is a very different opportunity to create a different experience.
Interesting take on newsroom integration from Raju.
Source: themediabriefing.com
Because if this is just about bragging rights, it needs to stop. Now. And not just because it can lead to some outlets rushing to report incorrect information, as CNN and FOX did with the recent Supreme Court decision on health care reform. But because the race to be first is no longer just a feature of news coverage but often the main factor driving it.
But as they proceed, the Newhouses should remember that cutting corners ignores a fundamental fact: great journalism, on any platform, is the one sure hedge against irrelevancy.
Me being me is going to say it’s got plenty to do with digital and great journalism, but also with ceasing to do things the way we have, tell stories the way we have, and sell ads the way we have. Moving to a digital platform and producing the same stuff for “the web” instead of “the paper” will not help in the long run.
Newspaper Industry Is Running Out of Time to Adapt to Digital Future - NYTimes.com
Source: The New York Times
