Tumblr guide

The Common Sense megaplex has a Tumblr blog, though I admit I need to do more with it. I have it primarily for videos or quick-hit graphical stuff.

But there is a good guide to getting started on Tumblr out on the Daily Dot. Worth checking out.

CSJ on Tumblr

A new branch of the Common Sense Journalism megaplex has opened on Tumblr.

I'll probably be putting a lot of the more visual and quick-hit stuff up there and cross-referencing here.

First couple are a screw-up in a hed and an ad that needs to understand you don't need "$" if you say "dollars."

Tumblr tutorial

Tumblr, the livestream blogging service, is finally going mainstream among journalists.

Need a good tutorial on it. Check out this one by Mathew Keys. You can download it in various formats too.

Tutorial: Tumblr for Journalists

View more presentations from MatthewKeys

The Awl shows boutique sites still might work

In an era all about scale, it's nice to read the N.Y. Times piece by David Carr about The Awl, a boutique site that isn't trying to be a vertical - just literate.

It gives me hope for some of the other sites out there (even this one - grin - though there are no ads here by design).

Speaking of this one - my apologies for not posting lately, but as lead instructor in our senior semester this year, my energies of necessity have been focused on getting copy cleared and publication (digital and dead-tree, in that order) done. Just when you think you're on top of it. ...

But check out http://www.datelinecarolina.org, which is under reconstruction and will look radically different in a few weeks, or our Facebook page.

A blogger's tale of getting a press pass

Philip Smith, proprietor of the "At Liberty to Say" site - a blog covering hyperlocal news in that Upstate S.C. town, tells the tale of seeking out a press pass ... and continues in part two.

Nothing overly new here, but I always like to relay these posts from the front lines. They provide a reality check (I love the student ID-turned-press pass).

Smith also publishes Fixyourthinking.com.

Tumblr - what's old is new again?

I was struck by the New York Times article this weekend on how media companies are suddenly discovering Tumblr.

Is there anything new here, other than that media companies are about five years behind. Or maybe that Tumblr is about three years behind in actually getting a clear message out about what it is.

Tumblr and another site, Posterous, loosely fall under a genre called "lifestreaming," sort of between blogging and tweeting/texting. Steve Rubel switched his blog, MicroPersuasion, to Posterous a couple of years ago. And he posted a good synopsis of lifestreaming and why he moved from a blog.

Among other things, lifestream sites make it easier to post multimedia elements. For instance, you might send up a series of images and some will automatically create a gallery.

(Update: Here's another good Tumblr explanation from Mediaite.)

Anyhow, if you are considering going this way, there are words of warning from the Times article:

Unlike Twitter, where it is not uncommon for publishers to simply set up accounts that automatically publish links to their articles and blog posts, Tumblr requires publishers to add more commentary and interaction if they want to win favor with its community.

CSJ recognized

While I've been away or mucking around (see previous post), the folks at Guide to Online Schools saw fit to name this one of their 50 inspiring journalism blogs (what it inspires was left unsaid ...).

Many thanks.

Mucking around

You might have noticed a scarcity of posts lately. It's because I have been mucking around - figuratively and, it turns out this week, literally.

My summer "off" - first one in a long time - has meant hanging crown molding, painting, laying a brick wall, and, in a few days, tearing apart a closet and rebuilding it. (It also has meant a trip to Indiana and Arkansas.)

And I have been mucking around literally - much to my dismay - as I fill a long-neglected garden with dirt (after laying that wall). This involves several cubic yards - well, many cubic yards - of topsoil, which involves many 40-pound bags. One finds a certain existential meaning in tossing dozens of such bags around in 90-plus-degree heat. (The meaning that most likely comes to mind is "fool.")

Now, it might be easier to have all those cubic yards delivered, but the dirt still has to be hauled back in a wheelbarrow, etc. And at $25 or more a cubic yard, I'm sure the landscaping places have fine dirt, but at that price I also expect to be able to pan for gold in it.

So we go with the bags at about $10 a cubic yard. Now, I'm not expecting the finest loam from that. But when you open a 40-pound bag from Home Depot and out comes not some granulated dirt, but a wet, sticky mess more suitable for making pottery than spreading about a garden, there is this vague sense that you are getting slightly ripped off - like maybe you are paying for 30 pounds of soil and 10 of water. Even the motorized tiller I've borrowed has trouble getting through it, with the stuff sticking to the blades and the wheels.

Which makes one wonder. How hard is it to sell a decent bag of dirt?

So it's off to Lowe's for the rest. So far the dirt I've bought there, for the same price, has been good, granular, black stuff, if not the finest grade, and it has the advantage of being sold in cubic foot bags, which is easier to calculate for what I still need (which I fear is many more bags).

Journalists turn to social media sites for stories

A survey by Cision and Don Bates of George Washington University finds journalists, especially those at online sites, turning increasingly to social media sites for story ideas. That includes blogs.

MediaPost story.

Survey results.

Good ideas gone horribly wrong

Time and time again, I've tried to drive home the point that the Web is not a turnkey operation. Yes, parts of it can be automated, sort of. But it's a dynamic thing that really does need tending and, to use the term of art of the moment, curating.

So why, as we approach 2010, is USA Today throwing out gibberish in the "historical figures" part of its site? (And how one gets on that list remains a mystery to me, too, eclectic as it is, from L. Frank Baum, Michael Manly and Jacob Javits (you really have to be a native New Yawker to get that one) to Atilla the Hun and Hannibal. But I digress ...

So how do I know this is gibberish? Because one of my blog entries showed up today under the "Abraham Lincoln" entry:

Why would that happen? Most likely because I have a quote from Lincoln in my blog header. That's it. Does that mean I will be on there every time I post. (Will this post be on there leading to a hall of mirrors effect?)

Someone probably thought they'd be doing something cool by throwing a filter up and sifting through all this information and tossing up anything with the relevant name. Probably just a little digital backwater, but people might find something useful. And it would be "cooooool" and show how we can take all this mass of info and filter it and ...

But it isn't cool. In fact, it's more like a spam blog. And I still can't understand why editors and publishers can't get into the idea that that sort of thing detracts. Yes, less is more, if you do the less correctly. Maybe someday we will have better intelligent filtering. Until then ...

WaPo layoffs again raise print vs. web talk

These are strange times we live in. Times when, from what I can tell about visiting, working in, and consulting with newsrooms and just shooting the bull with lot of journalists, we make Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde look like pikers when it comes to shifting personalities over the digital vs. the print.*

The latest to put this in bas relief are the layoffs at the Washington Post online operations, including, apparently, well-respected journalist Travis Fox.

Every so often an eruption will occur and venom, or at least highly acidic comments, will pour out from the "printies" and the "web heads." I trace it to about a year and a half ago, during the July Fourth weekend, when Media General laid off folks at its Tampa operation. An intern, Jessica DaSilva, blogged about it and appeared to take praise management for its forward thinkingness - and the knives came out and all bets were off.

Until that time, there seemed to be an uneasy truce between "trad" media folk who were tolerating the online whippersnappers and the digital folk who were convinced that the mainstream media types were clearly the problem and the answer was to stop being paticularly tolerant and just sweep them away (read all 200 + comments to DaSilva's post and you'll see what I mean). For several months, at least, the rhetorical wars seemed to escalate before calming down. But I sensed a shift had occurred, a wall of civility had been breached, never to be truly patched over again.

From time to time it flares up again, as it has with the WaPo layoffs. Read the comments on the Washington City Paper story and then read Matthew Ingram's thoughtful post on the subject.

For about a year, in my other hat as executive editor of The Convergence Newsletter, I've been trying to get some interest in someone doing a piece that looks at the rhetorical exchanges. Am I right, will historians look back and find that on that July 2008 weekend things did change irrevocably?

Comments here welcome, but even more welcome would be someone to take up the challenge (I've not written it myself because rhetoric is one of those areas where I know just enough to be dangerous). No money is involved (we're a publication that tries to span academics and the real world, after all). All I can do is offer 600-1,200 words and a byline in a newsletter with 1,000-plus international circulation.

---
*Strange phenomenon I have noticed is that in many newsrooms people know what needs to be done. They are not clueless. But they are paralyzed by inability to act in a coherent way. They know the dragon is at the door, but they alternatively want to get the fire extinguisher or just pretend it's a puddy kat.

Twitter stream for journalists

If you just have to keep up with a slice of the journalistic Twitter world, try muckrack.com.

Gawker ripped me off - a thought

A friend sent me Ira Shapira's angst-filled article from the Washington Post today in which he talks about first feeling giddy about having his article excerpted by Gawker, and then feeling angry.

An excerpt:

Even if I owe Nolan [the Gawker excerpter] for a significant uptick in traffic, are those extra eyeballs helping The Post's bottom line?

More readers are better than fewer, of course. But those referring links -- while essential to our current business model -- aren't doing much, ultimately, to stop our potential slide into layoffs and further contraction. Worse, some media experts believe that Gawker and its ilk, with their relatively low overhead, might be depressing online ad revenue across the board. That makes it harder for news-gathering operations to recoup their expenses.

My response, with a few additional thoughts:

Well, yes, I think Gawker went too far. Liberally cutting and pasting isn't coloring within the lines. If you want to summarize it in your own words, and with prominent credit, OK.

And if those referring links "are essential to our current business model," then you can't have it both ways. I'd like to see Shapira propose an alternative model (he really doesn't; though he does reference the recent debate about restricting linking, that's not an alternative business model).

But Shapira fails to broach the other point -- the fact that close to 10,000 people viewed it on Gawker instead of reading his 1,500-word tome ought to raise the question of why the WaPo doesn't have its own Gawker-type site excerpting its material. Maybe consumers are telling us something, namely that a lot of them don't want to read a river of text on something like Shapira's story on a millennial generation consultant because they have other things to do with their lives. Gawker et al. wouldn't survive if they didn't meet a need.

The publishing industry seems to think it is going to force people to do its bidding. No longer. They are like water and will seek their own level. Very little of what we do is so essential to running their lives that they could not survive with only a digest.

If your business model is hanging by the slim legal thread of the "hot news" doctrine, you have deep, deep problems that go far beyond "free riders."

Quick Hits 2 - More on AP, Emergency Mail on Twitter

More on the AP: One observer is less than impressed with AP's proposed technology to keep track of where it stories are being used. Says it's easily crackable. One of the reasons I wish folks would stop referring to it as digital rights management. Far from it.

I'd be a bit more concerned about AP's use of Attributor and its usage-tracing technology. One of Atributor's services is Fair Share, which basically compares text in your stories with others online and alerts you when it finds matches. Interesting thing - I've had some brief access to a newspaper's Fair Share account (with the paper's permission). All it's shown me so far is that too many news outlets are cutting and pasting the same stuff from the same news releases.
Maybe we should worry more about that and about boring our readers to death than about some two-bit spam site hoisting the headlines and summaries.

(This would be an interesting research study if a paper would set up a Fair Share account and give you access to its feed.)

Emergencyemail.org: I have always kept a subscription to this site. Not that it sends out that much or is overly timely, but during hurricane season, health scares, etc., it does do a pretty good job of getting the stuff from the horse's mouth to my e-mail. (You might consider it if you like getting such stuff on your mobile device.) Now, it's also on Twitter, though not with the local selectivity of the e-mail alerts.

Lifestreaming

Well, Steve Reubel of the well-read Micro Persuasion blog has taken the plunge into "lifestreaming."

Somewhere between Twitter and blogging, lifestreaming is, to my mind, blogging for the peripatetic.

OK, it's a little more than that. It's really about being able to more quickly inject yourself and your thoughts, etc., into the ever-growing stream of online social networking/conversations. It's about "The Flow," as Stowe Boyd described it.

I have noticed that I am starting to get as many comments on this blog's posting on Facebook as on here. That's an interesting sign that has me looking at things like Posterous or Tumblr. We'll see. For now, when I write I tend to write a bit longer. But the idea of being able to manage the hub and "spokes," as Rubel puts it, through one site is interesting.

Rubel has a bit more on why he's "lifestreaming" and specifically notes that blogging just seems too slow and "needs a reboot." Since he's been at the front of documenting a lot of the changes for the past five years, it's worth paying attention.

Online College

Normally, I don't do a lot of link exchanging or guest posting here because most of the entreaties are marginally relevant.

However, Nicole White did outpoint her Online College site, and I think it's worth taking a look at. She recently posted "Skip Journalism School: 50 Free Open Courses."

Not that I recommend skipping j-school mind you (ha!), but whether you are in school or in the field and wanting to brush up, there are some good links here. Many are from the MIT open course site. You can pooh-pooh that if you want, but remember, MIT's advanced communications lab has been on the forefront of a lot of the developments now roiling your media life.

Thanks, Copyediting

Thanks to Copyediting and Wendalyn Nichols for the kind words this week about this blog (Wendalyn featured it in her tip of the week). It's always nice to hear such things from those you respect in the industry.

Let me return the favor and suggest that you invest in a subscription to Copyediting newsletter. It isn't cheap, but I get more out of every issue than almost anything else I read.

If you are serious about the language and its evolution, you'll find a wealth of informed, reasoned discussion.

E&P gets it ... almost

OK, forget the disappearing stories that continually break links and the somewhat stodgy online layout. Editor and Publisher, has been coming around to the digital age. It finally established a good set of RSS feeds a while back, and its printing function has always done what I've said all sites should -- give you the option of printing out the links referenced in the article.

Now, it's finally blogging over at The E&P Pub. Decent stuff, though right now it looks a lot like the reason for having it is to open up a way to have comments that the magazine's legacy online system apparently won't accommodate.

But I went looking for the blog's RSS feed today? Oops ... close again, but I don't see one.

But maybe E&P will move more quickly this time to establish one. Type Pad makes it pretty easy.

Update
As Steve Yelvington notes below, E&P does have them but hasn't made them visible for those of us who use things other than our browsers. So if you need a feed, copy and paste away:
Atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0.

100 K and counting

This is small potatoes in the blog world, but still a nice milestone for us here at CSJ.

Our unique visitors passed 100,000 this past hour. That's in 749 days since the new counter went up. (When we had to switch on the old one it had about 58,000, but the new one went back to zero, so I figured we'd just wait and see if it hit 100,000.)

Thank you to everyone from your humble correspondent.

Read this 2 -- especially if you are in the newsroom

Over at Alfred Hermida's Reportr.net, Dayton Daily News education blogger Scott Elliott makes a persuasive case for why journalists should blog.

There will be a quiz.