The most popular social media sites — YouTube, Facebook and Twitter — are free, aren’t they? Well, maybe, says social media guru Jeff Cutler. “Social media are definitely a time suck,” says Cutler. “They are shiny and fun and they can waste your time.” But journalists need these tools because they let you be “where [...]
Filed under: 02. Finding the Story, 12. Getting Ready for the Real World | No Comments »
I love reading what other journalists have to say about their work and sharing their insights here, but sometimes I find myself in a bit of a quandary. What to make of this comment? “You’re in the wrong job if you think that political journalists can or should be entirely up-front and open in their [...]
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How real are class-based reporting assignments? Karl Idsvoog, an associate professor at Kent State University, tries to make his assignments as real as possible. “Journalism students don’t learn to play hardball by playing softball,” he writes in the most recent issue of the IRE Journal. For a class reporting project on the fees universities in [...]
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“It’s not about the beer,” says Boyd Huppert, describing an assignment to profile a successful local brewery. Instead, Huppert’s story focused on the family behind the business — tapping into a universal theme. “My goal is to go out and cover a story to make someone care about it,” says Huppert, “make you laugh or [...]
Filed under: 02. Finding the Story, 03. Multimedia Newsgathering, 04. Reporting in Depth, 05. Writing the Story | 1 Comment »
If you’ve been feeling despondent about the current state of local TV news, just take a look at the latest issue of Quill, the SPJ magazine. Here’s all you need to know about the section that cheered me up: Despite the cutbacks in TV newsrooms, some local stations are still producing truly excellent work. The [...]
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So, you just got your new job in a new city and your new boss expects you to have new story ideas on a daily basis — lots of them. “We are supposed to have three “leadable” stories every day,” says Allison Croghan, who got a reporting job at KSN/KODE in Joplin after graduating from [...]
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Information travels so fast these days that it’s hard to keep track of where it came from. Technology makes plagiarism and deception a snap. Online text can be copied and pasted in seconds, photos can be manipulated and no one may be the wiser. But thanks to technology, problems are also easier to detect. If [...]
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Jerry Gumbert, CEO of AR&D, a local media strategy firm, says the No. 1 reason why TV news is flagging “has been a failure of news management to sustain focus on a formal beat system.” News leaders have to realign priorities and reinstitute beat systems — and the kind of enterprise reporting that comes with [...]
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Can you be a good journalist and not be plugged into social media? The Washington Post’s Local Editor Vernon Loeb says, “No.” “Social media are not really optional anymore,” says Loeb. “You can’t do your job without them. Social media are where news often breaks first. They’re a great way to cultivate sources, track events, [...]
Filed under: 01. The Multimedia Mindset, 02. Finding the Story, 03. Multimedia Newsgathering | 2 Comments »
Reporters do it every day. They talk to people “across differences” as Poynter’s Kenny Irby likes to say. But reporters don’t always do a good job of exploring those differences for the audience to tell richer stories. “If you can get to appreciate ‘otherness,’” says Irby, “embracing conditions of difference can help us move to [...]
Filed under: 02. Finding the Story, 11. Multimedia Ethics | No Comments »
