When a local newspaper dies, the community loses. The Rocky Mountain News had served Denver for 150 years, even since the city’s founding. Today, the Scripps-owned paper printed its final edition, ceding the field to its younger competitor, the Denver Post. The paper was on the block to be sold but no one wanted to …
Continue reading ‘Goodbye Rocky’ »
How cheaply can you build a multimedia tool kit? Does $10,000 sound about right? That’s what NBC’s Maria Schiavocampo says she carries around in her gear bag. How about $6,000? That’s what Andy Glynne says it costs to build a basic documentary kit. Still too much? Consider the Adam Westbrook approach. Decide what you really …
Continue reading ‘Videojournalism on a budget’ »
Its really a shame the apostrophe doesn’t get it’s fair share of love. See the glaring errors? John Richards would. He’s a retired British journalist and founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, an organization devoted to just one cause: saving the much-abused little punctuation mark. Richards told the Washington Post’s John Kelley that he sees …
Continue reading ‘Apostrophe love’ »
A friend of mine who’s teaching a journalism course for non-journalism majors asked me recently to recommend some movies he could show in class as conversation starters. I offfered up a few from my list of favorites: All The President’s Men and Good Night and Good Luck, for starters. Then I started digging for more. …
Continue reading ‘And the Oscar goes to…’ »
Add one more category to the list of endangered journalism jobs. In his introductory column, the Washington Post’s new ombudsman, Andy Alexander, says many of his fellow reader representatives have been casualties of budget cuts. That’s a shame, because it seems to me that the role of ombudsman is critically important to the survival of …
Continue reading ‘The vanishing ombudsman’ »
One of our core principles here at Advancing the Story is that you have to think differently about journalism if you’re going to succeed in a multimedia world. Nikki Usher of USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism obviously agrees. Writing in the Online Journalism Review, Usher argues that skills training is not enough for digital journalists. …
Continue reading ‘Skills training is not enough’ »
What multimedia skills do journalists need? What are managers looking for (if they’re looking at all)? Joe Grimm, who writes the “Ask the Recruiter” column for Poynter, says there’s no one “must” skill every journalist needs to learn, but every journalist should bring something digital to the table. Increasingly, recruiters are looking for that X …
Continue reading ‘Multimedia know-how’ »
Whether you’re one of the people already looking for a job or someone who’s thinking about that next move, the director of digital content for Scripps television stations, Chip Mahaney, has something to tell you. The key thing I advise job applicants is to realize that in any job search, there’s only one winner for that …
Continue reading ‘How to “win” a journalism job right now’ »
TV news producers take pride in crafting their rundowns, putting stories in just the right order so the newscast flows seamlessly. At ESPN, the rundown sometimes shows up on the air. Both SportsCenter and Pardon the Interruption use an on-screen rundown to show what stories are coming up next. A few local TV stations use …
Continue reading ‘A rundown on steroids’ »
Many local TV Web sites leave a lot to be desired. They’re better than they used to be, thank goodness, but they still have a long way to go. Too many sites remain hard to navigate, crammed with news, ads, promos, videos and all kinds of random content that leaves the user feeling overwhelmed and …
Continue reading ‘Reboot local news’ »