Investigative reporters often have to interview people who don’t really want to talk. In a courtroom, they might be described as hostile witnesses. For journalists, especially in television, these kinds of interviews require a lot of preparation or choreography, as…
Month: January 2009
Ten things every journalist should know
Only ten? John Thompson has posted a terrific list that goes beyond the obvious (learn Twitter, RSS and search techniques) to add spot-on advice and links to more information. For example: Multimedia for multimedia’s sake rarely works, and is often…
Outlook for journalism grads
Solutions to newsroom troubles
Amid all the reporting about coverage cutbacks and layoffs in newsrooms around the country, there’s not enough focus on what news organizations might do to reinvent themselves. Rich Gordon of Northwestern University has been working on and thinking about new media…
Writing for Twitter
Journalists who don’t Twitter are “crippling [their] online publishing effort,” says OJR’s Robert Niles. In his view, Twitter is the ideal medium for breaking news and delivers information to readers more efficiently than RSS feeds. But how do you write…
Goodbye NY Times?
As if the reports of trouble in the newspaper world weren’t scary enough, now comes a piece in The Atlantic magazine suggesting the venerable New York Times could go belly up within a few months. The Times has a billion…
TV live shot options
New technology and the pressing need to cut costs have led some local TV stations to try new options for going live. We recently wrote about KIFI-TV’s use of WiMAX technology. The latest buzz is about TV live shots via…
Six tips for convergence
How is newsroom convergence like a shotgun wedding? Just ask the folks at Kent State University, where the campus newspaper, radio and TV stations share one newsroom and Web site. The story behind the story is now online–a humorous and…
Stuff journalists like
Jargon. Bylines. Swag. Those are just a few of the items on the list of stuff journalists like on the blog of the same name written by two former newspaper reporters in Colorado. Denver’s alt-weekly Westword calls the site “hilariously…
A successful reporter’s approach
He’s won three Pulitzer prizes, writes a regular column for the New York Times, and his non-fiction books sell like crazy. Okay, so Tom Friedman isn’t your average reporter, but a profile in the New Yorker magazine offers some insight…