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- Commenting survey resultsJanuary 7
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For a couple years now, I’ve been working with editors, reporters, and commenters on news sites taking the following hypothesis as a given:
Commenters will be the most civil in the place that is the most public.
For example, I expected commenters on news stories, where more people could see their words, to be more civil than commenters on blog posts on a news site, which theoretically have a smaller audience, and I expected the worst of the lot to show up on message boards, buried deep in the bowels of the sites that haven’t flushed them from their systems yet.
I was wrong.
A quick question or two on Twitter gave me enough anecdotal evidence to justify whipping up a quick Google form as a simple survey on commenting for news site managers.
Onward to the results, based on 49 responses as of the morning of January 7, 2009:
- 23 of you said commenters are the most civil in threads on blog posts; 7 of you said they are most civil on news stories; 3 of you said they are most civil on message boards.
The following came from a respondent who said commenters are most civil on blog posts and least civil on
- Suzanne Yada recommends you grow a pairJanuary 1
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From Suzanne Yada’s resolutions for journalism students in 2009, this bullet point:
“Grow some cojones.
Let me level with you. The world doesn’t need more music reviewers or opinion spouters. The world needs more people willing to ask tough questions. The first step to reversing journalism’s tarnished image is to have the guts to dig for information the public can’t easily find themselves, and be an advocate of unbiased, straightforward truth.”A damn fine idea. Knowing the classrooms and newsrooms she’s working in, it makes even more sense.
Bonus link: The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University is hiring a “Database Journalism Professor.”
Previously
- Looking back: My year at the Santa Cruz SentinelDecember 29 2008
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For those of you unfamiliar with my personal and professional timeline, I worked at the Santa Cruz Sentinel from October 2006 through the end of September 2007, first in a position accurately titled Webmaster, and later as the Online Editor, working in a mostly bright, young newsroom in downtown Santa Cruz, blocks from the Pacific Ocean. I walked to work. I liked it.
Morale got pretty crappy there a couple corporate owners into my stay, and rather than stick around when the newsroom moved a couple miles up the highway out of town, I took a new job with a GateHouse Media in Fairport, NY, worked from home for a while, and then moved out here to the frozen (well, it’s been warm and melty for a couple days as I write this) tundra.
So the year in question isn’t 2008, it’s October 2006 through September 2007.
Tom Honig was the executive editor at the Sentinel during my time there, and along with Don Miller, the managing editor, presided over what were clearly pretty crappy times for a local newspaper.
If you’ve been reading my blog on any sort of regular basis, you know that I’m not one to pull punches when it comes to newspaper management, but I am going to disappoint you if you expect me to dish about the miniature dramas and deleted blog posts and questionable decisions that are the fodder of local e-mail newsletters and DeCinzo cartoons.
In other words, sure, these guys weren’t
- CoPress launches hosted WordPress sites for student mediaDecember 29 2008
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First, a bit of history: The first time I fiddled with a newspaper Web site, it was thespartandaily.com, after I walked into an adviser’s office at San Jose State’s School of Journalism & Mass Communications and asked something like “hey, any way to get an RSS feed off that thing?”
There was, and we did, and I spent a good chunk of time over the next two semesters redesigning the site, migrating it from one host to a second one that had purchased the first, and supporting early efforts at multimedia at the Daily.
But it wasn’t easy. And little of the code I had to muck about in to get the site to do what I wanted was code that I could learn from, or re-use, or maintain in any sort of extensible way.
Since then, more options have popped up for hosting student media Web sites, the most popular and obvious one being to launch a WordPress site on your own server.
But of course, it would be nice if there were one place to share tips, tricks, plugins, ideas, and code snippets with other students and advisers working with WordPress for student newspapers, right?
CoPress wants to be that place.
I’ve had a chance to talk, chat, and tweet with some of the students and recent graduates behind CoPress over the last few months, and I think they’re clearly the sharpest minds in o
- Carnival of Journalism: Five positive predictions for new media in 2009December 21 2008
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For this month’s Carnival of Journalism, Dave Cohn is asking for positive (if possible) predictions for the new media world of 2009.
How about 5?
- Mobile video streaming goes mainstream: Probably tied to disaster/breaking news reporting from non-professionals, a la 9/11 blogs, the YouTube tsunami of 2004, Flickr bombings of 2005, and the livetweeted siege of #Mumbai in 2008. Whether it’s the expansion of a startup like Qik or Flixwagon or a wildcard like an improved iPhone with a real video camera, something is going to change in 2009 that’s going to put live mobile video at our fingertips.
- Fewer newspaper jobs means more local news startups: As major metro news organizations continue to contract, consolidate, and implode, more journalists will walk away from the press, but not walk awa