Month: February 2009

Goodbye Rocky

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…

Share

Videojournalism on a budget

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…

Share

Apostrophe love

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…

Share

And the Oscar goes to…

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…

Share

The vanishing ombudsman

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…

Share

Skills training is not enough

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…

Share

Multimedia know-how

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…

Share

A rundown on steroids

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…

Share

Reboot local news

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,…

Share