The Islamic Republic of Iran has been, and remains, one of the world’s harshest censors of the Internet, frequently blocking sites that are deemed “immoral” and politically offensive to the unelected authorities in power.
Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms.
While many professional journalists fondly remember the work they did in college–covering townie news for the university paper or radio station–some are trying to erase their past work from the Internet because it shows up prominently on search engines like Google.
Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight–that is, more efficient–times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?
The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today [April 20] — and sincere congrats to the hard-working journalists who’ve won those highest of prizes.
The Conficker computer virus continues to make sensational headlines, mostly of The-End-Is-Nigh variety. Most recent news accounts–most prominently a feature on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday–are portraying Conficker as some unstoppable force which will melt the world’s computers and maybe destroy the Internet on April 1. There’s a kernel of truth to these reports, but just a kernel.
Professional journalists in the age of the Internet look as doomed as blacksmiths in the age of the combustion engine. Local newspapers are disappearing. National newspapers and commercial TV stations are seeing the Web take their advertisers.
Even the gloomiest forecasters expect there will still be a few reporters around in 2025, but as with blacksmiths, we will be curiosities.
If not all lawmakers were 100 percent attentive during President Obama’s speech before Congress on Feb. 24, there’s a good reason. D.C. has become a land of Twits–or perhaps the proper term is Twitterers.
Journalists are obsessed with Twitter. Obsessed. They use it, talk about it, analyze it, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, love it, hate it, capitalize on it, become experts on it, monetize it, argue about it, and become micro-famous on it.
It’s a long way from $700 billion, but the media start-up Six Apart is introducing its own economic bailout plan. The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform.
In the rapidly shifting era of blogger and media relations, we can expect one thing to occur as we forge ahead: mistakes. It happens to the best and the worst of us.
After the derision that greeted the New York Times’s blogging-will-kill-you story on Sunday, I’m probably not going to do much for the reputation of the mainstream media with hard-core bloggers. So it goes.
Out of curiosity, I drew up a list of 55 technology journalists to find out how many use Twitter, arguably one of the most important social-media technologies on the scene. I included names of some online reporters–including colleagues from CNET as well as TechCrunch–but in the main, the list is comprised of people employed by A-list newspapers and periodicals.
1. Get out of the newspaper business. Culturally, you can’t look and define your business as the delivery mechanism. The business is truly content and distribution across all pipes. The asset is journalists and the brand. A print-based property is just one of the many ways to distribute the digital bits. Most newspapers have in charge of their leadership “newspaper men.” They should turn over the reins to young execs, women and people with diverse backgrounds, who are Web-based and consumer savvy and will NOT be wed and enamored with the print-based delivery system of the past.
The time-worn debate of bloggers vs. journalists has finally run its course. For years, traditional journalists scoffed at bloggers as pajama-wearing screamers, while bloggers have pointed to MSM (mainstream media) as secretly biased and obsolete. While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly (and it continues to this day), what has happened quietly in the background has received less attention: Mainstream media reporters have started blogging in droves, while larger blog operations have hired seasoned reporters and focused on doing traditional journalism.
When I started blogging four and a half years ago, there was a clear delineation between bloggers and journalists. But that’s all changed, and now we have this new category, the journablogger.
The journablogger has his or her own blog or works in a blog network like paidContent, TechCrunch, Gigaom, Silicon Alley Insider, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc., etc. Just look at the top of Techmeme’s leaderboard and you’ll see them right next to the traditional journalists like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNET, etc.
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