The news never sleeps, but reporters should.

The average American apparently works a day of overtime a week, and we all live and die by our smartphones.

This will inevitably by great for sites like Lifehacker, who will find some way for you to be more efficient in your day, to hopefully not work overtime.

But, things are different for newsmakers. We can’t just shut off e-mail. What if a building burns down? People will expect it on Twitter right away. On the site very soon after. On the air/in the paper the next day.

Work-life balance is pretty shitty for most journalists. I have friends who I worry about — their diets close to vending machine only, fueled by caffeine and adrenaline, they work until 2 am on that scoop for tomorrow, then tweet about it all the next day. 

We are not a healthy breed.

There are too few of us, covering too big of towns/beats/arenas. 

I’d love work-life balance. I don’t take my laptop home anymore, but still, I work most nights until 7, and wake up at 8, spending an hour with my email and reading the news before I get in. I have whittled my personal hygiene routine in the morning to about 20 minutes. My friends either get that they must schedule time in between networking happy hours, late night project write ups, conferences and other work related obligations. Most of my friends are workaholics in other industries — marketing, entertainment, consumer web sites — places that also have erratic schedules. 

I try to actually take vacation for things other than weddings. 

When do we break? Are we human, or journalist? 

I really do want to know. I have no solution to this. At all. It’s been a personal struggle for years. Let’s discuss.

On when to embed tweets {gripes}

I love embedding tweets in stories. I’m all about it, especially when it takes the place of a quote.

The idea being, sometimes, people will tweet things that they wouldn’t say into your mic, or in front of your notebook. Sometimes, Twitter brings a truth serum to our lips.

Or, Twitter will be a good place to find sources, where you can quote their tweet and follow up with an interview later.

Social media sourcing can be a great way to get parts of the story you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. It’s a good way to display that in-the-moment thought, or quip.

But it’s not a good way to fill space. 

Take this HuffPo story: 

To take a step back, social media shouldn’t be used to fuel lazy journalism. It should never be a replacement for shoe-leather reporting. For a phone call.

And it should always be verified. Were they there? Did they see it? Do they have something to add?

What worries me is the idea that social media reporting is a good substitute for actual reporting. It’s not. It’s a good tip-sheet. It’s a good tool, not a replacement.

The telephone is used to make the call. Twitter is the telephone. It’s the mechanism by which we can touch our audiences. Using it does not mean you know how to ask the right questions, or call/tweet the right person.

There still needs to be good reporting behind it.

The New York Times, Flipboard, and “platform intelligence”

Very quickly, why I, for one, think the NYT/Flipboard thing is smart.

I sort of take issue with the wording on the above linked Atlantic article….it’s not really about becoming a wire.

It’s about becoming a service. Wire is a bit of an antiquated term and platform intelligence is not really the same thing that the AP does. 

Associated Press sells its work at a very, very high price to newsroom across the country to supplement their own local work.

The New York Times is being smart about what content they put where, and why they want it there.

What I am hoping is happening is they are looking at the bunches of content they create and saying “Where can we put this, and of what use will it be to our audience?”

It’s not that different than what a (good) social editor does. We look at content and say “How can I repackage this to make it relevant to our Twitter/Facebook/Google+/Pinterest/whatever audience?”

It’s high time we step away from our traditional outlets — be it radio, newspaper, or TV — and look at where our audience is and how we can serve them there best. That’s the whole point of iPhone apps and responsive design, right? It’s serving our audience on the mobile platform.

(I’m not thinking of platform in a device sense, I’m thinking of platforms as ways in which people consume information.)

I’ve had long talks with our tech team about how/why we decide to use a third-party app to build or distribute something instead of building it ourselves. Although we build some pretty awesome stuff, there are things we can’t build better, or don’t have the resources to build better.

So, hopefully, this is the beginning of a new era of platform intelligence.

(Side note: Did I just invent a phrase?)

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong — and in life, and in love, and in business, and in friendship, and in health, and in all the other ways in which life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid, or evil, or it’s all been done before? Make good art.
Advice on Living the Creative Life from Neil Gaiman | Brain Pickings

Source: brainpickings.org

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