Aspiring journalists must specialise, says Malcolm Gladwell. Try stats or accounting… October 20, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , 1 comment so farFrom his interview in Time: "The issue is not writing. It's what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he's one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He's unique. Most accountants don't write articles, and most journalists don't know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter."
Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive If you are laid off, here’s how to socially network « January 15, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , 1 comment so farAdvice on using social media to get work — Robert Scoble offers 19 points, starting with these three (more in comments, too):??"1. Your blog is your resume. You need one and it needs to have 100 posts on it about what you want to be known for.?
2. Remove all LOLCats from your blog.
?3. Remove all friends from your facebook and twitter accounts that will embarrass you. We do look. If we see photos of people getting drunk with you that is a bad sign. Get rid of them. They will NOT help you get a job."
Swimming Lessons for Journalists | PBS November 5, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentWiden your view of jobs in journalism, urges Amy Gahran:
"In my opinion, journalists need to start leaping en masse from the sinking ship of the newsroom and start working for search engines, nonprofits, think tanks, collaboratives, and other kinds of businesses and organizations. In fact, it might even be a good idea to trade in the label "journalist" for the more inclusive "person with journalism skills" […] That kind of humility offers considerable flexibility and room to grow.
Also, today's journalists can — and probably should — consciously shift away from jobs that revolve around content creation (producing packaged "stories") and toward providing layers of journalistic insight and context on top of content created by others (including public information). Finding ways to help people sort through info overload is far more valuable than providing more information."
Focus on 'what,' not 'where,' in planning your journalism career October 17, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentGeneva Overholser's summary of a point made at an Annenberg event:
"So you want to do journalism but are worried about all the change hitting the craft?
Do what digital pioneer and entrepreneur Elizabeth Osder has done: "I always tried to be about what I get to do rather than where I get to do it."
But the economic models just aren't working for newspapers online, lamented one student attending USC Annenberg School of Journalism Director's Forum.
Not true, said Osder, fresh off consulting work with Tina Brown's just-launched "The Daily Beast." Plenty of people are making plenty of money online. (As if in confirmation, David Westphal, Annenberg's executive in residence, noted that McClatchy right now makes more money online than it costs to pay all the editors and publishers in the company.)
Two delicious tools: improved search, and an online portfolio October 16, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Online, Personalised learning environments (PLE), Social networking , add a commentFirst, del.izzy, which addresses one limitation of the standard delicious search, enabling you to search all of the content of the pages you bookmarked. But they claim they need your password for this.
Second, a clever way of setting up an online portfolio on delicious. Michele Martin outlines how it works, using the optional tag description field to head the page with an introduction, and then tagging anything you wish to show up there.
A neat idea: not the most beautiful, but it works, and is easy to update. It has two other benefits, says Michele Martin:
- The del.icio.us feature that shows how many other people saved the item acts as a kind of “recommendation” system. […]
- If people sign up for the RSS feed to this tag, they can automatically be notified when I add new items to my portfolio.
And then of course there’s the RSS feed to do other things with, if you want to take it one step further and embed that somewhere, have it post automatically to a blog… etc
Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make it Worthwhile – ReadWriteWeb October 4, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentNeed to convince anyone that blogs could inform their work? A round-up from ReadWriteWeb, with some interesting links (inc research): “If you’re not reading blogs at work, you may not be doing your job as well as you could be. Below we discuss three advantages to reading blogs on the job and offer examples of the kinds of blogs that people could benefit from reading in three different non-tech professions. 1) Staying Up to the Moment on News 2) Knowing What People are Talking About 3) Reference Resources”
Was the Scotsman right to sack Nick Clayton for blogging? September 27, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentLaura Oliver at journalism.co.uk follows up the apparent sacking of Nick Clayton from The Scotsman because of a blog post on allmediascotland. How many staff journalists’ contracts forbid them (in theory) to contribute to other publications?: “Reactions like this and the idea of more stringent restrictions on where journalists can write online are counterproductive: letting journalists write, comment, engage and react with colleagues and readers online can help build an online community around them and their content, driving users back to the publisher’s site. Spilling company secrets is one thing, but Clayton’s post was hardly exposing something that’s hidden from the rest of the newspaper industry.”