Corrected: How Many Online Journalists in the U.S.?

Correction: March 16, 10:10 a.m. ET

Update: March 6, 10:44 a.m. ET

Following the news that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is likely to go online-only if it stops printing sometime after March 10, Ken Doctor wrote on his blog, Content Bridges, uses some loose estimates to wonder if newspaper newsrooms are about to go from employing 44,000 journalists to 6,600.

A recent scan of newspaper mastheads and some loose estimates of my own put the number of online journalists currently working in the U.S. at between four and five thousand.

Continue reading “Corrected: How Many Online Journalists in the U.S.?”

Stuck in the Middle With News: When Professors Report and Technologists Aggregate, What’s Left for Journalists?

Two opinion pieces that were published yesterday have been getting a good ride in the discussion about how to save newspapers. Jonathan Zimmerman’s opinion piece on The Christian Science Monitor proposes that professors play a role in creating free content, an idea that’s getting panned even though it’s already happening. David Carr’s piece on The New York Times puts a nefarious sounding twist on his proposal for media co-opetition that’s going to happen naturally.

Continue reading “Stuck in the Middle With News: When Professors Report and Technologists Aggregate, What’s Left for Journalists?”

Social Media and User Generated Content for Journalists

There are so many great new buzzwords — distributed reporting, citizen journalism, crowd sourcing. They excite a lot of people who don’t think through their implications for public affairs reporting… and they terrify a lot of people who don’t realize that in many ways they are just juiced-up version of pretty common “old-media” techniques. In either case, they’re exciting because they pit two traditional journalism values — giving voice to the voiceless and accuracy — directly against each other.

Here’s an introduction, with audio to come in a future version. (If you can’t wait for the audio – give me a call or shoot me an email.)

FAQs on North Carolina’s Dropout Rate

An earlier post provided a quick introduction to writing FAQs, and how they can be used to apply several concepts of online news writing.

The students in Public Affairs Reporting for New Media have posted their FAQs. They’re a good example of explanatory journalism and online news writing. They’re also the kind of evergreen content that can be re-used when there’s a strong news peg for the topic.

Our next step? User-generated content. More on that tomorrow.