Civil Engineers rely partly on data provided by others to do their research. This post describes the challenges of getting, keeping, and maintaining the data.
A successful "mini-publisher" program is helping reporters test product and coverage tweaks designed to help drive consumption and subscriber growth.
Hayley Campbell (Twitter)PSA: with all the websites dying, go save the stuff you wrote as pdfs before they disappear. Otherwise you’ll be trying to get jobs with pocket fluff.
— Hayley Campbell (@hayleycampbell) February 1, 2019
Ben Welsh of the LA Times data desk has built Savemy.News which leverages Twitter in combination with archive.is, webcitation.org, and archive.org to allow journalists to quickly create multiple archives of their work by simply inputting the URLs of their related pages. It’s also got a useful download functionality too.
Richard MacManus, founder of RWW, wrote a worthwhile article on how and why he archived a lot of his past work.
Those with heavier digital journalism backgrounds and portfolios may find some useful information and research coming out of Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Dodging the Memory Hole series of conferences. I can direct those interested to a variety of archivists, librarians, researchers, and technologists should they need heavier lifting that simpler solutions than archive.org, et al.
Additional ideas for archiving and saving online work can be found on the IndieWeb wiki page archival copy. There are some additional useful ideas and articles on the IndieWeb for Journalism page as well. I’d welcome anyone with additional ideas or input to feel free to add to any of these pages for others’ benefit as well. If you’re unfamiliar with wiki notation or editing, feel free to reply to this post; I’m happy to make additions on your behalf or help you log in and navigate the system directly.
If you don’t have a website where you keep your personal archive and/or portfolio online already, now might be a good time to put one together. The IndieWeb page mentioned above has some useful ideas, real world examples, and even links to tutorials.
As an added bonus for those who clicked through, if you’re temporarily unemployed and don’t have your own website/portfolio already, I’m happy to help build an IndieWeb-friendly website (gratis) to make it easier to store and display your past and future articles.
Jack Jamieson (jackjamieson.net)Thank you to @RyersonResearch and especially @joyceemsmith for inviting me to talk about my research today. I had a great time talking IndieWeb, and specifically, Bridgy.
I presented a study I’ve been working on about Bridgy, i...
Jack Jamieson (jackjamieson.net)Thank you to @RyersonResearch and especially @joyceemsmith for inviting me to talk about my research today. I had a great time talking IndieWeb, and specifically, Bridgy. Jan 30, 2019 Lunch and Learn at Ryerson Journalism Research Centre I presented a study I’ve been working on about Bridgy, i...
Jason Sweeten (BuzzFeed Community)"As you know, the company is going thru a reorganization..."
The odd part was that in terms of presentation I didn’t realize until almost the end that this wasn’t a primary part of BuzzFeed, but rather their “Community” section. While it’s nice that they give readers a place like this to contribute free content which only goes towards their own clicks for advertising, it would be far more interesting and useful if they were letting their community use their platform to host their own content on their own domains instead, and then allowing them to either pay for it directly or using advertising against it to cover the tab. This would be the sort of hybrid social media and journalism idea I’ve touched on in the past. Instead, this effort and those of others like the Huffington Post seem to be wholly benefiting the outlet more than they do the individual. The pendulum needs to swing back the other way soon.
I am sorely disappointed in The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo, CNN’s Brian Stelter, and other journalists who these days are announcing to…
Here yet again, I can’t help but think that journalistic outlets ought to be using their platforms and their privilege and extend them to their audiences as a social media platform of sorts. This could kill the siren song of the toxic platforms and simultaneously bring the journalists and the public into a more direct desperate congress. There is nothing stopping CNN or The New York Times from building an open version of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or even blogging platform on which everyone could participate. In fact, there are already several news outlets that have gotten into the content management system business and are selling their wares to other newspapers and magazines. Why not go a half-step further and allow the public to use them as well? The IndieWeb model for this seems like an interesting one which could dramatically benefit both sides and even give journalism another useful revenue stream.
The Lincoln Memorial debacle showed how vulnerable the press are to a myriad of social and political forces. This week, we examine how the outrage unfolded and what role MAGA hat symbolism might have played. And, a graphic photo in the New York Times spurs criticism. Plus, a reality show that attempts to bridge the gap between indigenous people and white Canadians.
1. Bob's thoughts on where the Lincoln Memorial episode has left us. Listen.
2. Charlie Warzel [@cwarzel], tech writer, on the zig-zagging meta-narratives emerging from the Lincoln Memorial episode, and the role played by right-wing operatives. Listen.
3. Jeannine Bell [@jeanninelbell], professor at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, on MAGA hat symbology. Listen.
4. Kainaz Amaria [@kainazamaria], visuals editor at Vox, on the Times' controversial decision to publish a bloody photo following the January 15 attack in Nairobi, Kenya. Listen.
5. Vanessa Loewen, executive producer of the Canadian documentary series First Contact and Jean La Rose, CEO of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, on their televised effort to bridge the gap between indigenous and settler Canadians. Listen
I increasingly want to get my news once a week well after a story has begun and most of the facts have shaken out. Rarely is something so timely that I need it immediately. I saw a few mentions of this story as it was developing, but it all had the stink of click-bait, so I kindly moved on. It’s amazing to hear the underlying pieces and fuller story after-the-fact.
The best section of this episode (and probably the most thought provoking story I’ve heard recently) was that of the interview with Kainaz Amaria on how we report on wars and famines that affect other countries and particularly countries involving poor people and those who are non-white. While the recent photo of the Yemeni girl (in conjunction with Jamal Khashoggi) may have helped to turn the political tide with respect to US participation in the crisis in Yemen, we definitely need a better way to engage people in the US without trampling over the dignity of the people living in those communities. Interestingly I’ll also point out that we all know the name and almost all of the details concerning Khashoggi, but almost no one knows the name of Amal Hussain and this fact alone is a painfully stark one.
The final portion of the episode was also truly enlightening. I’d love to see the documentary they made and hope that someone might make an American version as well.
How an encounter between high school students and a Native American man became an explosive political moment.
Jeremy Cherfas (Jeremy Cherfas)Because it is an inescapable law of journalism that a simple yes/no question in a headline almost always requires a "No". And in this particular case, I do not believe blogging waned in 2018. QED.
I’ve been writing on Medium for three and a half years.
Online media, despite being so different from traditional printed media, is still trying to maximize its potential audience, and in order to do that, going for quantity over quality. ❧
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)It sounds ludicrous now, but back in 2014, when I cofounded Known as a startup, a lot of people were questioning whether a business even needed a website. Pockets of people - for example in the indieweb community, which I enthusiastically joined - were pointing out how short-sighted this was, but it was a minority opinion. There was Facebook and Twitter! Why would you want to have any kind of property that you fully controlled on the internet?
Fast forward to today, and...
Perhaps Kinja wasn’t a bad idea for a CMS cum commenting system, it just wasn’t open web enough?
Kyle Chayka (The Nation)How content-management systems will shape the future of media businesses big and small.
For a low cost per month, it could be an interesting side business, or even be bundled with paid subscriptions?
Presidential eulogizing, special counsel speculation, immigration coverage, and forgotten Hanukkah history.
The death of George H.W. Bush brought us a week’s worth of ceremony, eulogy and wall-to-wall coverage. This week, a look at the choices journalists made when they set out to memorialize the president. And, immigration stories in our media focus on the U.S.–Mexico border — but what about immigration elsewhere in Latin America? Is there a journalistic solution to the scale of global immigration? Plus, a baseball metaphor and a bit of forgotten Hanukkah history.
1. Anne Helen Petersen [@annehelen], senior culture writer at Buzzfeed, and David Greenberg [@republicofspin], historian at Rutgers University, on the history — and pitfalls — of presidential eulogies. Listen.
2. Bob on the speculation surrounding Robert Mueller's investigation. Listen.
3. Diego Salazar [@disalch], journalist, on the immigration crisis within Latin America. Listen.
4. Masha Gessen [@mashagessen], staff writer at The New Yorker, on her modest proposal for immigration coverage. Listen.
5. Rabbi James Ponet, Jewish chaplain emeritus at Yale University, on the historical origins of Hanukkah. Listen.
Masha Gessen’s story makes me wish we had many more Masha Gessens.
I particularly liked the story and history of Hanukkah given here. Definitely something to think about.