Linkage+

I find most of these annoying, but what do I know? (via New Data...

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:18:46 -0700

I find most of these annoying, but what do I know?

(via New Data Shows the 7 Most Powerful Calls-to-Action for More Retweets | Dan Zarrella)

"At the same time, technology radically empowers individuals. Institutions are rarely successful on..."

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:58:04 -0700

“At the same time, technology radically empowers individuals. Institutions are rarely successful on social media; it is a profoundly intimate medium that is for individual persons, and as such opens up new opportunities for journalism.”

- The end of big (media): When news orgs move from brands to platforms for talent » Nieman Journalism Lab

Did print beauty get lost in the scramble for digital?

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:21:23 -0700

Last night, The Boy got a lovely package. It was a couple of books from the Folks at For Print Only. Each year, they do awards from print design and print them in a lovely little book.

I went to their site to check out some of the projects that didn’t make it into the book — namely magazines and journals. As I clicked through the sparse 3 pages of magazines, I realized something. Not one paper news outlet that I subscribe to is this beautiful. The magazines highlighted used words like bespoke, and low-fi, words I would not use to describe anything I have on my coffee table.

Wired is one of my favorite print subscriptions. It is pretty and well-designed. It is nothing like these. They have foil print, custom typography, paper that is heavy, things that I do not even know the word for.

Many of the amazing page designers I know have jumped into online wholeheartedly.

I’m not saying that online is responsible for the death of print design. I am obviously a huge proponent of online. But I simply cannot remember the last time I looked at a print product and said “Wow,” unless it was from the maker/artisan/Etsy community. What does that say about beauty in what we do?

I find the artisan community an interesting contrast to what has happened in journalism. I’ve been on Etsy since….ever, and many presents of mine come from there. I enjoy the curated, small shop experience. Etsy has brought back crafts that were thought lost like papercutting.

That feeling is one of the reasons I used to read Good Magazine and others. It’s a feeling that is all but lost in today’s print journalism.

Printing has gotten more expensive than ever, and online is cheap to make. A web site is nearly free whereas a piece of paper and ink costs. But Etsy is small scale. You want to own it before it is too late not to own it. I used to collect magazines for that reason. It’s why my father had a whole shelf full of National Geographic — it was something to save, something to look back at later. Why do that now when you can just archive it on a web site?

When the web first came about, it was the complement to the traditional product. Let’s archive it online, we would say. Cheap. Easy.

As web becomes predominant, what if we flipped that? Why has print not become the complement to online?

The notion of the dead newspaper might stay a notion if we change our thinking about what print can do that it has never done before.

Tell me, what’s the last beautiful piece of print journalism that you’ve seen?

(Note: This is probably the most strongly written thing I’ve said in a while and I do not confess to being a designer, just a consumer of design. I do want to be wrong about this — show me.)

Amy Webb’s new content workflow is out. Note: Look how...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:05:55 -0700

Amy Webb’s new content workflow is out. Note: Look how social is in almost every bubble, not just promotion.

(via Amy Webb)

Get more links, get more shares. An old article that’s...

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 12:05:42 -0800

Get more links, get more shares. An old article that’s been up on my Chrome for awhile. (via New Data: The Correlations Between Social Sharing and Inbound Links | SEOmoz)

"You have to make stuff. The tools of journalism are in your hands and no one is going to give a damn..."

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 12:37:10 -0800

“You have to make stuff. The tools of journalism are in your hands and no one is going to give a damn about what is on your resume, they want to see what you have made with your own little fingies. Can you use Final Cut Pro? Have you created an Instagram that is about something besides a picture of your cat every time she rolls over? Is HTML 5 a foreign language to you? Is your social media presence dominated by a picture of your beer bong, or is it an RSS of interesting stuff that you add insight to? People who are doing hires will have great visibility into what you can actually do, what you care about and how you can express on any number of platforms.”

- IAmA columnist and reporter on media and culture for the New York Times. : IAmA

Goddamnit, I love you David Carr.

For no other reason than it is pretty. (via Via the Moon, a...

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:57:59 -0800

For no other reason than it is pretty.

(via Via the Moon, a Theory of Life on Mars - Megan Garber - The Atlantic)

"Likewise, when managing, don’t dictate every detail of how to complete a project. Remember,..."

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 09:23:11 -0800

“Likewise, when managing, don’t dictate every detail of how to complete a project. Remember, employees can’t grow and gain new skills if you’re telling them exactly what to do for every project they work on. They need a sense of autonomy to feel that they’re succeeding.”

- The Employee-Motivation Checklist | Fast Company

Social is about the planning, not the tweeting (re: UpWorthy)

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 13:40:33 -0700

Social is about the planning, not the tweeting (re: UpWorthy):

I’ve followed UpWorthy for awhile (particularly after a friend said it was a viral startup that actually got news). I read Buzzfeed, too.

What strikes me about it, and this aligns with this Nieman article, is that it’s not about the easy viral story, it’s the viral story that matters to people. And the social bit here is that they plan social.

It’s not ”We wrote this story, now make it go viral via social media.” There is no false ploy to the audience for engagement to make something hopefully resonate with that audience. In an age of digital-first, I think Upworthy (and Buzzfeed) aims to be social-first.

I realize Upworthy is not writing stories. But they are taking stories, making photos, infographics, etc that make the story social without taking away the meaning of it.

I will argue until I am blue in the face that while it is fun to do Storifys about where the best taco in LA is (something I actually did), the opportunity has always been to figure out what about tacos resonates with your audience and write the story with that in mind.

This is the reverse of how many newsrooms operate. We do not produce meaningful content on social. We produce content, and then tack some strange engagement piece onto it to make it social. A thoughtful story about the history of cherry trees is D.C becomes “show us your cherry blossoms.”

Just because people enjoy posting photos of their cat on Instagram does not mean that we must make cat photos on Instagram into news. We should figure out what makes those cat photos do well and apply that lesson to things that matter.

Really, in a way, this is what makes Upworthy different than Buzzfeed. Now the question is, why can’t the rest of us do that?

"There has to be a certain scale at stations before you see creativity really begin to grow. Because..."

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:28:36 -0700

“There has to be a certain scale at stations before you see creativity really begin to grow. Because there have to be enough people who aren’t completely tired out by just the general production of radio every day to come up with ideas. I think that’s some reason why WNYC — 200 or so people there, everybody is busy, but so many people have just a little time every day to think of a really great idea and do something on it.”

- NPR’s Todd Mundt says public radio needs to innovate or die » Nieman Journalism Lab

Creativity and public radio. Two things on my mind today.

"One of the painful ironies of office life is that we can never quite get the temperature right. We..."

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 12:43:39 -0700

“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.”

- Want More Productive Workers? Adjust Your Thermostat | Fast Company

(Amen, I say.)

"What’s the right balance between restraint and aggressive repeating and redistributing of..."

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:48:54 -0700

“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

Three reasons I gave Homicide Watch money

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 16:39:51 -0700

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.

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:30:00 -0700

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..."

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 13:43:09 -0700

“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

"It was the first time I really expressed myself all the way, not trying to be a professional, not..."

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 18:36:08 -0700

““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.

Stinky, Spicy, and Delicious: The Radical Reinvention of Asian American Food - Nancy Matsumoto - The Atlantic

"I like to think I work with a team across the site that’s really a disruption layer,” she said. “We..."

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 11:08:31 -0700

““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 love Cory.

Haik: Washington Post web team a ‘disruption layer’ in the newsroom | Poynter.

"I have a different view on this. Content creation ought to be a single multiplatform group. But..."

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 12:01:24 -0700

“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.

Interview: Wall Street Journal digital chief Raju Narisetti on innovation, mistakes and opportunities | TheMediaBriefing

"Because if this is just about bragging rights, it needs to stop. Now. And not just because it can..."

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 13:05:01 -0700

“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.”

- Yup.

Amy Sullivan: Who Reported It First? Who Cares. | The New Republic

"But as they proceed, the Newhouses should remember that cutting corners ignores a fundamental fact:..."

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 11:15:55 -0700

“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