Local NY Bloggers Speak: Why Write, When You Can Aggregate?

Local NY Bloggers Speak: Why Write, When You Can Aggregate?
By Drew Grant
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny
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"300 words, max...anything else, it's an essay." Those were the words of New York blogger Jake Dobkin at last night's panel for The Future of Local Media.

The topic this month was "Local Journalism: What's Cool In Your Hood?" But, the only thing the panelists could seem to agree upon was the more posts, the better -- even when it means the death of any original journalism.

"We write 20 to 24 pieces of content a day," said Jonathan Butler, founder of Brooklyn blog Brownstoner. "And only three of those pieces are original reporting...Picture posts are great."

Dobkin, who founded Gothamist in 2003, was definitely seeking to provoke his audience. When asked about the concept of pay walls for online publications, the young entrepreneur flippantly replied that this would be the best thing for his business. "Have them charge $20 for content! No one else will pay, but we will, and we will steal their stories," he said. "That's my two year plan."

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Are You Writing A Novel Next Month?

Are You Writing A Novel Next Month?
By Rachel Kaufman
http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily
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Love it or hate it, NaNoWriMo is just around the corner. Eleven days away, in fact.

The madcap write-a-novel-in-30-days project is now in its 10th year. Haven't heard of it? Check out the About page on the site. In essence, however, the idea is that people all around the world will be "competing" (on the honor system) to write a novel (actually 50,000 words, which counts as a "novella") within 30 days. Some are crap, some have been published, by real publishers nonetheless (Sara Gruen's Flying Changes and Water For Elephants both started life as NaNovels).

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New York Times to Eliminate 100 Jobs

New York Times to Eliminate 100 Jobs
By Rachel Kaufman
http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily/
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The New York Times will cut 100 newsroom jobs by year's end, or about 8 percent of the total, by offering buyouts—and resorting to layoffs if not enough employees sign up for the offer, Richard Perez-Pena of the Times' Media Decoder blog reports.

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TV Writers Reflect on Walter Cronkite

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TV Writers Reflect on Walter Cronkite
• Aaron Barnhart / Kansas City Star: "Former Kansas City mayor Kay Barnes was a young girl living in St. Joseph when the Cronkites returned from Europe. Her father and Walter's father were brothers, and Barnes can still vividly remember the first sight of her first cousin driving up to her parents' home. 'Walter opened his clenched hand and in his hand was a very, very small camera which he had with him during the Nuremberg trials,' Barnes recalled. 'I'm not sure they were supposed to have cameras in there.'"


• David Barron / Houston Chronicle: "Walter Cronkite's life and career reflected the words he used in a familiar advertising campaign for his alma mater, the University of Texas: 'What starts here changes the world.' Born in Missouri, he moved with his family at age 10 to Houston, where he attended Lanier Junior High School and San Jacinto High. It was at San Jacinto where he met Fred Birney, one of his earliest journalism instructors. Birney, Cronkite wrote in his autobiography, taught him the 'sacred covenant between newspaper people and their readers. We journalists had to be right and we had to be fair.'"


• Robert Lloyd / Los Angeles Times: "We have come to understand news as show business, and are inclined to consume it as such, as part of the many-channeled entertainment package our broadcasters and cable companies provide, and not as a break from it -- as a sacred space in which facts matter more than opinions, but in which opinions, when rarely and carefully expressed, matter. When Cronkite spoke, it was with a thoughtfulness that the 24-hour news cycle does not encourage; and when there was no time for reflection, he avoided melodrama, frenzy and guesswork."


• Alessandra Stanley / New York Times: "People tuned in to his program even on routine days when his broadcast - Senate subcommittee hearings, gas prices, detente talks with the Soviet Union - was as dull as toast. Mr. Cronkite's air of authority, lightly worn and unquestioned, was unusual even then, but nobody comes close to it now. For viewers, however, it sometimes seems as if everything Mr. Cronkite did was for the last time, that his outsize tenure bracketed a bygone era when America was, if not a more confident nation, certainly a more trusting one."

Newspapers Failing Social Networking 101

Newspapers Failing Social Networking 101
Source: http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny
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According to a report from Gartner Inc., newspapers need to do much, much more to engage the social side of their readers if they hope to compete in the increasingly difficult marketplace.

Specifically, newspaper Web sites fail to integrate social media tools effectively. As a result, while 49 percent of those surveyed use search engines to find news or content every week (and that number seems low), only 20 percent use search tools that exist on newspaper and magazine sites.

This trend mimics one discussed in Mark Bowden's Vanity Fair article about The New York Times that made the round yesterday. In it, the author discusses how one of the revolutions of the Web — one that newspapers failed to capitalize upon — is that news has become deaggregated.

Those who grew up using the Internet, which now includes a full generation of Americans, are expert browsers. It's not that they have short attention spans. If anything, many of them are more sophisticated and better informed than their parents. They are certainly more independent. Instead of absorbing the news and opinion packaged expertly by professional journalists, they search out only the information they want, and are less and less likely to devote themselves to one primary site, in part because it is less efficient, and in part because not doing so is liberating. The Internet has disaggregated the news.

These latest numbers from Gartner would suggest newspapers still aren't learning any lessons.

New Job Site from Mediabistro.com: MediaJobsDaily

http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily/
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Here's how mediabistro describes it:

"That's right, mediabistro.com in expanding once again. Introducing MediaJobsDaily mediabistro.com's blog covering all things jobs-related for media professionals, recruiters, and HR. Want to know who's hiring, who's firing? Who's innovating, with new new-media positions and job descriptions? And how do you attract those high-performing innovators to work for you? They've got you covered."

Great idea! And at the perfect time!

Sad State of Print Journalism: Rocky Mountain News "Final Edition"

It's time for us journalists to reinvent ourselves!

Source: mediabistro's fishbowlNY

Most readers have heard by now that today will be Denver's Rocky Mountain News' last. With the San Francisco Chronicle hanging in the balance, and Seattle holding discussions about what it would be like to be a no-newspaper town, one can only hope the RMN's closure isn't just the first sign of what is to come. Meanwhile the RMN has put together this (well worth watching) good-bye vid which covers the last month of its existence and is currently running on their homepage.


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.