Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

Despite all the talk of the death of magazines and newspapers, it’s actually easier than ever before to read great long-form journalism.

Most, if not all, major publications place their content online. But unless you spend all day surfing magazine websites and skimming RSS feeds like an 11-year-old hopped up on Mountain Dew, you’re not going to find all the great stuff out there.

Fortunately, I recently found two websites that can help you find great long-form features online.

Longform.org and Long Reads are both very similar and they curate features new and old from magazines, papers and websites. They’re both run out of Brooklyn, so the focus is mostly American publications. They’re both big fans of the Instapaper app for your iPhone, which helps mobile users read articles by stripping them of fancy website formatting and saves them later.

Both of the services look like labours of love and both Longform.org and Long Reads on Twitter, so why not follow them both? Another useful long-form gold mine is Give Me Something To Read which is a selection of articles saved by Instapaper users.

I heard a few months back about a pretty forward thinking project by the Journal Register newspaper company in the U.S. called the Ben Franklin Project.

The papers would publish their print editions and websites using nothing but free tools and crowdsourced journalism.

From their site:

The Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project is an opportunity to re-imagine the newsgathering process with the focus on Digital First and Print Last. Using only free tools found on the Internet, the project will – from assigning to editing- create, publish and distribute news content on both the web and in print.

Traditionally the model has been for the reporter/editor to determine what should be covered and how it should be covered. That story would then weave its way through the journalistic process – reporters gathering facts from the usual stable of sources and the editors guiding the efforts – before ending on the printed page. From there the vast majority of newspapers have then pushed those stories onto the web. They are literally going from a slow medium to fast. And that’s just backwards both in timing and audience desires.

The project involved some 18 publications and wrapped up over the July 4th weekend. The projects appear to be a success and there are definitely a lot of very exciting lessons here for adventurous publications. I’ve listed some of them below, but there’s lots to mine here from the BFP’s blog. (more…)

Most Canadians won’t see it until later this week, but this week’s New Yorker, which hit U.S. newsstands on Monday, has got a lot of Canadian content advertising.

From the New York Times:

The issue, which is coming out on Monday, has a cover date of June 28. Inside, every ad page other than a house ad has been sold to Canadians: more than a dozen government units, tourism organizations, financial firms and educational institutions.

(more…)

There was a time in media when professional journalists hated bloggers. They hated their guts and thought they were little more than badly-adjusted, shut-ins who sat around at home and wrote ill-informed (sometimes patently wrong) rants. I thought that time was behind us. Obviously, I was wrong.

Michael Cooke, editor-in-chief, of the Toronto Star accepted an award recently at the Canadian Journalism Foundation and trumpeted the investigative work done by his journalists. Cooke also took the time to slam bloggers and citizen journalism.

“Is journalism one hundred unpaid bloggers all talking and yattering at once, or a city filled with amateur citizen journalists uncoordinated in all their efforts? Those bloggers and citizen reporters are as close to real reporters as karaoke is to Frank Sinatra live and in person.”

He quickly followed that up with a conciliatory comment about how there’s room for both “serious” investigative journalism and yattering bloggers. It was like splashing cold water in someone’s face and then following it up with a handshake and an introduction. You’re not going to get a warm reception.

Cooke isn’t just wrong about this, he’s plain insulting. I wonder how the citizen bloggers who contribute to the Star’s Your City, My City blog feel about Cooke’s remarks? Or what about the bloggers who have their uncoordinated work rewritten by Star staffers feel about this?

Sure, many, many bloggers aren’t worth a second glance but a few show the tenacity, smarts and journalistic moxie that any editor or professional journalist would find enviable.

It’s also patently unfair to compare a Toronto Star journalist, with the resources of Canada’s largest paper behind them, and a nice salary to allow them to work full-time, to a blogger, who more often than not is doing this for exposure, for fun or just for the sheer passion of it. They often have few resources to work with, little or no training and most certainly don’t have the luxury of pursuing their work full-time. It would be like an NBA star badmouthing the guys who play 3-on-3 at their local gym. It’s in bad form.

The journalism ecosystem has changed and bloggers are a legitimate and crucial part of it. A better thing to do would be to figure out how to interact with bloggers and citizen journalists. What Cooke and other recalcitrant traditional journalists should do is try to figure out why, despite the scant rewards and obstacles, so many do take that microphone in their hands and try to do their best Frank Sinatra.

Just in case it wasn’t dead obvious that journalism is transforming before our very eyes, Poynter Online has made it perfectly clear with this graphic that looks like 200 moments from 2000-2009 that transformed the industry.

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell talks about the decade that inspired the graphic:

Funny thing about the transformation of media: there’s often no way to tell, in the moment, whether any given development signals a passing fancy, a seed of destruction or a glimpse of tomorrow.

Thus were most of us puzzled, at the time, by the introduction of the CueCat, the acquisition of Times Mirror and the founding of Facebook.

But there’s nothing like a little hindsight to provide some context.

A little perspective, in 2000 U.S. newspapers saw a peak in advertising ($49-billion) but right around the corner was one of the things that would soon level this lucrative market, Google’s adwords. Friendster, founded in 2002 and one of the early harbingers of social media, is now a punchline.

Check out the graphic, or click on the image below:

One of the skills that people in journalism want to learn is how to use Twitter. Who knew that 140 character updates would be so hard for people who crank out hundreds of words a day?

Kidding, of course. Fortunately, those of you without a friendly and helpful Twitter expert to nudge can turn to a few great resources.

The blog Twitter Journalism has lots of great hints and tips on how to get the most out of the social media tool. Here’s a great top 10 list of pros and cons for Twitter and journalists. Here’s another one on how to verify Tweets while newsgathering.

The blog was started by Craig Kanalley of Breaking Tweets and the Huffington Post.

There is also the official media blog from Twitter that also points out lots of great practices from journalists and media types.

Clay Shirky has another great essay out that I’m still taking time to digest. It argues that radical change causes complex systems to collapse because they’re unable to change. Not because they don’t want to but because their complexity causes them to lock up.

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

Mathew Ingram also sums it up on Gigaom.

Poet Edward Carson argues that our familiarity with the internet is changing the shape of non-fiction.

David Sasaki, over at the PBS Idealab looks at why curation is becoming more important in today’s news environment.

Finally, some eye candy: A gallery of Penguin covers sorted by decade.

One other face-palm inducing stat that I pulled out of that PR Week study that was published last week:

Among the total respondents, the use of blogs and social networks for research increased significantly in 2010 as compared to 2009; however this spike appears to be skewed by online magazine/news reporters and bloggers. While 91% of bloggers and 68% of online reporters “always” or “sometimes” use blogs for research, only 35% of newspaper and 38% of print magazine journalists suggested the same.

This divergence was also seen when using social networks for research. Overall, 33% of respondents indicated using such assets, but blogger usage (48%) was greater than newspaper (31%) and print magazine (27%).

The emphasis is mine. That figure is mindbogglingly low. Lets flip that around, almost two-thirds of newspaper journalists don’t use blogs or social media when doing their research. I can’t think of many beats where you wouldn’t do some research on blogs or social media. More importantly, print and magazine journalists, need to realize one fact;  your stories are going online. There’s even a chance that your stories are being read by more people online than in print. Whether you like it or not you might just be an online journalist. Maybe it’s time to start acting like one.

Update: Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis also expressed his doubts over the iPad.

It’s too limiting,  places too many shackles on sharing, mixing, and content creation. And for what? Pretty pictures and some video? Really?

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It’s made both the cover of Newsweek and Time, taken over my Twitter stream and gotten every tech/media/internet geek out there in a froth. And while the iPad might be a gorgeous device that does lots of cool and fun things, gaming is going to be a blast on that thing, there’s a group of media pundits out there that don’t think Jobs’ Jesus tablet will do much for the media.

Of course if you want to see glowing praise for the iPad you can check out this round-up of reviews on Wired.

Jose Antonio Vargas at Huffington Post sees it as desperate delusion borne out of a salvation mentality. Media needs someone, something to save them. Why not the iPad?

“What we’re seeing is a desperate wish — the last gasp of desperation. Editors and publishers and advertisers want to regain control of the media experience that the Internet took away from them. In their minds, this iPad is the magic pill that will make all of this Internet crap go away. Surely, it won’t,” Jeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and author of What Would Google Do? told me in a phone interview. Upon reading that Time magazine is charging $5 a month for its iPad app, Jarvis tweeted Friday morning: “Mag iPad prices are delusional: In no form, even engraved in gold, is Time is worth $5/issue.” Jarvis followed it up with this tweet, linking to a story in paidContent: “if Time’s iPhone app is free & iPhone apps work on iPad, why would I pay $5 for an iPhone app? Naked newsmakers?”

Kevin Charman-Anderson on the Strange Attractor blog looks at the price and strategies for some apps on the iPad (hint: they’re more expensive) and calls shenanigans. He notes that the WSJ iPad app is a whopping $17.99 a month. A weekly online subscription sets you back $1.99. I’ll let the sheer lunacy of that sink in.

MarketWatch’s John Dvorak agrees that old media is expecting way too much from the iPad and, more importantly, calls out traditional media outlets for swooning over the device:

The reviews came out this week for a device the public will buy on Saturday. We see these written up by Apple’s hand-selected core of tech journalists who are known to be friendly to the company and soft with reviewing its products.

It’s the usual suspects plus the emergence of the two major news weeklies, Time and Newsweek, to out-and-out promote the iPad as the future of, uh, well, everything!

No mention that their future will be dependent on the success of the device.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt also takes a jab at old media and their almost unquestioning devotion to the iPad:

The media has been making a huge deal about how the iPad is supposed to “save the business,” because suddenly everything will return to apps, and people pay for apps, and toss in a big dose of “Steve Jobs!” and there’s some sort of magic formula which includes some question marks and inevitably ends in profit! Now, the iPad does look like a nice device, and I have no doubt that it will do quite well for Apple, and many buyers will be quite happy with it. But it’s not going to save the media business in any way, shape or form. It’s just the media chasing a rainbow in search of gold that doesn’t exist.

I’m going to leave the last word to Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow, because I’m sure he’d want it that way. To him the iPad is not unlike AOL and multimedia enhanced CD-Roms. Anybody remember those?

A lot of people got taken aback by a PR Week study that showed that 52% of bloggers consider themselves journalists. I can see some people wringing their hands about this.

“Bloggers don’t have standards. They don’t have a code of ethics. Who are they beholden to?,” the naysayers will say.

But if anything, I see this great blogger/journalism explosion as an amazing opportunity for journalism and the media itself, here’s a few ways old-school media can take advantage of this.

1) Give more people a voice

Think of this mass of bloggers as a very engaged, very excited crowd. Take the opportunity to find interesting voices, unique voices and give them a big platform. Many bloggers would be happy for a bigger soapbox.

2) Lead the way

There is a massive wealth of journalism expertise in your average newsroom and journalism school. Engage bloggers and citizen journalists. Show them why accuracy, objectivity, research are important. Even better show them how to do this. A progressive non-profit or j-school could get some good press putting together a how-to package for bloggers looking to add a bit of credibility to their blogs.

3) The power of the network

Hypothetical scenario: You’re a national news website (or a newspaper) and you’re covering an election but there’s no way that you can have enough journalists to cover an entire country (or state for that matter). Engage bloggers to be on-the-ground correspondents to help you do this work. The results might not be perfect but in the right hands can be molded into something compelling and readable.

My former colleague Sarah Millar wrote about the study as well and tries to unpack the blogger/journalist dichotomy.