Sobering news
Editor & Publisher reports the loss of 1,900 jobs in the newspaper industry this year, and maybe more since cuts at smaller papers usually don't get the publicity.
posted by Doug @ 1:10 PM
1 comments|
Common Sense Journalism
An extension of the Common Sense Journalism monthly column by Doug Fisher, former broadcaster, newspaper reporter and wire service editor. From new media to old, much of journalism is just plain common sense.
"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." - Unknown (often improperly attributed to Thomas Jefferson)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
"Common sense is not so common" - Voltaire
"Common sense is instinct; enough of it is genius" - George Bernard Shaw
Friday, November 18, 2005
Yes, I do coaching and consulting. That is the only shameless commerce you'll get from me here. Go to the bottom of the blog for more details.
Who am I: A longtime print and broadcast reporter/editor/producer and then AP news editor who now professes journalism at the University of South Carolina. (But please note, nothing on this blog represents official university policy or sentiment. If it did, I'd be very concerned.)
My point: That journalism is a great occupation, that most journalism is common sense and that our problems arise when we sometimes don't use it.
What's covered: My interests center on editing and writing and on editors and the challenges they face in a changing environment. I'm convinced editors are not being trained enough to face these challenges, but that common sense rules the day. I'm heavily involved in Newsplex, the new-media newsroom at the University of South Carolina. But my interests are wide-ranging, so anything, from ethics to some aspects of Web design, is fair game.
Hope you find something here worthwhile.
Who am I: A longtime print and broadcast reporter/editor/producer and then AP news editor who now professes journalism at the University of South Carolina. (But please note, nothing on this blog represents official university policy or sentiment. If it did, I'd be very concerned.)
My point: That journalism is a great occupation, that most journalism is common sense and that our problems arise when we sometimes don't use it.
What's covered: My interests center on editing and writing and on editors and the challenges they face in a changing environment. I'm convinced editors are not being trained enough to face these challenges, but that common sense rules the day. I'm heavily involved in Newsplex, the new-media newsroom at the University of South Carolina. But my interests are wide-ranging, so anything, from ethics to some aspects of Web design, is fair game.
Hope you find something here worthwhile.
Previous Posts
- What we should teach in J-school
- Yeah, right, a 'witch hunt'
- Word Mint
- Excuse me, your headline is squinting at me
- Don't make the reader guess
- SC FOI audit shows continued problems
- Heads Up on another fine editing blog
- Another good dictionary - oysergeveyn(t)lekh
- 'Will'ingly illogical
- Oregonian internships disappear
- The Convergence Newsletter
- Hartsville Today Report (1Mb PDF)
- CSJ-the column
- Doug's Homepage
- A J-School Year
- The Freedom of Information Act Wiki
- EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers
- Journalism Wiki
- Robert Niles' Reliable Numbers Online
- A copy editor's lament
- AP's Ask the Stylebook Editor
- Am. Heritage Usage Guide
- Your Dictionary
- One Look dict. - includes reverse lookup
- Yiddish dictionary
- Online Etymology Dictionary
- Alan Cooper's homonym list
- Sentence Diagramming Guide
- The Passivator
- Vocabula Review - for your inner prescriptivist
- Language Log - for your inner descriptivist
- alt.english.usage and FAQs
- Biker Week Cross-Media Coverage
- Journalism Desktop - Resources
- The Racial Slur Database
- Online Education DB's "150 Resources for Writers"
- Videogame Style Guide
Right click on the chicklet and copy the address to your newsreader. (Or click directly on the chicklet for some quick links to some of the most common newsreaders.)Or you can use the Atom site feed
- Newsplex
- Google News
- Yahoo News
- Topix
- CJR
- AJR
- Poynter
- ACES
- ACES Discussion Board
- On the Media
- Free Daily Newspapers
- mediadrop
- Media Bloggers Association
- Florida Press Club
- The Numbers Guy at WSJ.com
- Covering Crime and Courts
- Mystery Pollster takes the mystery out of political polls
- Reporters'Cookbook Wiki
- Crowdsourcing.com
- Newspapervideo
- Open Congress
- Citizendium
- Ed Henninger - design (check his column and helpful hints")
- McClatchy VP Howard Weaver
- Bob Baker's "Newsthinking"
- Testy Copy Editors
- Bill Walsh's "The Slot"
- Walsh's "Blogslot"
- Walsh's "Off-Topic"
- A Capital Idea
- Headsup: The Blog - "editing and the deskly arts"
- McIntyre's "You Don't Say"
- Bechtel-"The Editor's Desk"
- Pam Nelson's Grammar Guide
- Robinson-"Words at Work"
- Kilian's "Ask the English Teacher"
- David Sullivan
- Willis-"The Scoop"(investigative/CAR)
- Schaver-Depth Reporting
- News Librarians Blog
- 10,000 words
- Howard Owens
- Tim Porter's First Draft
- Skowran-News Atoms
- Journalistopia-Danny Sanchez
- John Rains'Coaching Blog
- Infomaniac
- Working with Words
- World Editors Forum
- Editor Evolved
- "morose copy editor"
- Micro Persuasion
- Public Journalism Network
- Journalism Hope, successor to J-Log
- Dan Conover
- John Duncan - Inksniffer
- DigiDave-Dave Cohn
- Copy-Editing Corner
- Regret the Error
- Bryan Murley
- Dale Cressman
- Jay Rosen's Pressthink
- Ralph Hanson-Living in a Media World
- McAdams-"Teaching Online Journalism"
- Innovations in Newspapers
- Alan Mutter on media economics
- Paul Conley
- The Language Guy
- Scriptae Viri Commenticii
- Media Giraffe Project
- Ctr. for Innovation in College Media
- Joe Marren
- Tom Mangan
- Will Sullivan's Journerdism
- Dick McMichael
- Andy Dickinson
- Pat Thornton
- SPJ's J-Education Forum
- Randy Craig's Readership 101
- Paul Gillen's Newspaper Death Watch
Porter now blogs at Second Draft
- CCJ's list of journalism Web sites
- Massive Web 2.0 list
- Metroblogging
- Tom Bowers' "Thinking About College Teaching"
-
South Carolina and related blogs
- The Bierbauer Report
- Post & Courier's Lowcountry Blogs Roundup
- American Entropy
- Crack the Bell
- Brad Warthen
- S.C. Headlines
- S.C. Hotline - extensive blog list
- S.C. Statehouse Report
- Elise Hu - a former Upstate TV reporter now at NPR
- Newsguyy
- Gary Karr
- David Stanton
- The State's editors
- Columbia City Paper blog
- S.C. Citizen Journal
Some of these are very political. No endorsements are made or implied. These are just some of the more active S.C. blogs. Notifying me of any dead links is appreciated.
Some other fun sites:
1 Comments:
This is a generalization and there are exceptions (see Dow Jones, NYT) and there may be developments that by the end of the year force me to eat my words – but look at the companies on this list and look what they’ve done on the Web. Generally they are under performers. The most egregiously bad Web operation (outside of San Jose) is Knight Ridder – horrible, horrible cookie cutter Web sites with no real revenue model. The KR top-down approach to the Web has really backed them into a corner competitively. I know one guy who was working for a Gannett paper and doing a few innovative stuff (pretty revolutionary for a Gannett operation to let one or two lone wolves operate outside of normal corporate strictures), and then when KR took over, he became basically an empty shell on the payroll. All of his creative power was stripped away and he just became an robot posting repurposed content.
We have yet to hear of layoffs with the companies that have most aggressively pursued online revenue – McClatchy, Scripps, Morris, News Corp. and Washington Post. Lee, which runs a pretty tight financial ship, but gives its editors and site managers a little more leeway to innovate, has only announced layoffs at its largest former Pulitzer property, which may have been bloated by Lee’s standard’s anyway. Really, only the NYT stands out as a reasonably smart new media company that has engaged in layoffs – I bet there’s more to the story with their layoffs than just squeezing the bottom line for investors.
Of course, we’re in a turbulent time for our industry and what’s true today could be false tomorrow, but from where I sit it looks like the companies struggling the most (and KR being the poster child of the lot) are those that have failed the most dramatically to adapt to the changing media environment.
-- Howard Owens
Post a Comment
<< Home