3 posts tagged “journalism”
I'm at Sree Sreenivasan's class tonight for journalists. I've been lax about keeping up with the blogging world lately. Though it's almost 8 PM and I haven't seen much new besides a zipcode-based blog search site called Outside.in
The guy in the pink is Sree's guest speaker, the ubiquitous Anil Dash from the Six Apart company. It was at a Six Apart mini conference that I became aware of Vox, as well as their Pro network, a consortium of hardcore Moveable Type bloggers who share their expertise.
A blogger/writer named Yakov Fain posted a fairly edgy piece on a Java news blog today titled "How to write an article for InformationWeek". At first glance I think, Yeah dude, let 'em have it! But, what good is going to do you to poke at the big daddy of tech trades like this? David Strom, writer of the piece was making a valid attempt at service journalism. I could take either side in a media debate like this, but the main theme for me is...publishers take note, printed trade mags could be obsolete in a few years unless you take a more integrated approach to publishing, Google may eat your lunch. Aren't they in the middle of cornering the market on all types of ad distribution?
I've done PR for trade publications before and know a lot of writers like Strom. They definitely care and aren't lazy about their beats, they're just writing for their given audience.
Jason Pontin of MIT's Technology Review (a former client) is making a valiant attempt at tackling the new realities of publishing. He's a favorite of Folio magazine for his honesty about the medium. I have huge respect for what he's trying to do with the 106-year-old magazine.
Jeff Howe landed a scoop on Gannett's crowdsourcing plan last week. This could be good news for smaller, regional papers. The local newspaper has had it's relevance Clearchanneled in the last ten years, leaving local problems to a few metro reporters, or back-n-forth letters to the editor. Howe's Crowdsourcing site has some good stuff too, including a link to Mechanical Turk, Amazon's attempt to put some structure to crowdsourcing. I saw parts of Jeff Bezos's speech on M-turk and the Elastic Compute Cloud at the MIT Emerging Technologies conference in September. I don't completely get it yet. Perhaps I can apply crowdsourcing to my Christmas shopping or Thanksgiving dinner cooking.
