An Editor's Eye

latimes: Twitter is not the world: Or America, for that matter....

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:29:28 -0800

Twitter is not the world: Or America, for that matter. In a new study from Pew Research, reactions to events on Twitter often are detached from society’s reactions as a whole. While Pew found that Twitter consensus moves back and forth from liberal to conservative, what really sticks out is just how much more negative Twitter discussions can be.

For both [presidential] candidates, negative comments exceeded positive comments by a wide margin throughout the fall campaign season. But from September through November, Romney was consistently the target of more negative reactions than was Obama.

And as always, it’s important to understand the limitations of Twitter’s reach.

The overall reach of Twitter is modest. In the Pew Research Center’s 2012 biennial news consumption survey, just 13% of adults said they ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages; only 3% said they regularly or sometimes tweet or retweet news or news headlines on Twitter.

Read Pew’s full study here (or follow them on Tumblr, which will hopefully be proven to be more positive than Twitter).

Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP

"Ten years ago, this could have been done and no one would have figured out about it. Social media..."

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:35:43 -0800

“Ten years ago, this could have been done and no one would have figured out about it. Social media makes work easier to steal—but it also makes the people who take it more accountable.”

- When DKNY mistakenly used some of Brandon Stanton’s (a.k.a. Humans of New York) photographs in a store display in Bangkok without his permission, Stanton found out thanks to a fan. Stanton asked for the company to donate $100,000 to the YMCA in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The company has apologized and agreed to give $25,000.

Read the full story. (Also, follow Humans of New York.)

fastcompany: Trying to make it big on social media? Want more...

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 10:45:12 -0800

fastcompany:

Trying to make it big on social media? Want more followers? Here are10 Tips From Boing Boing On Making Online Content Sing

At the dawn of blogging in 1995, Mark Frauenfelder moved his ‘zine Boing Boing online. Boing Boing—whose mission was to explore “the coolest, wackiest stuff”—became and remains one of the Internet’s most popular blogs.

“The recipe for an excellent blog is to be so deeply obsessed with something that you need to communicate it to others,” says Frauenfelder. “If BoingBoing stopped making money tomorrow, I’d still need to do it.”

Excerpted from The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It so Well, here are Frauenfelder’s 10 tips for building a addictive, compelling website—and a big following:

1. Tap into the Zeitgeist.

If you can tap into the right cultural moment you’ll have a lot of fans.

2. Be original.

If you try to emulate a successful blog, you’ll just be a second-rate version of something already out there, and who needs that?

3. Make the connection.

Instead of obsessing on digital marketing the mission of the blog should be to share information with like-minded people.

4. Get an attitude.

Without a point of view, your blog is unfiltered mush. Whether you love or hate a blog, you still want it to have a unique perspective.

5. Don’t waste people’s time.

If you’ve developed a trust with your readers that they’ll get good value for the time they invest in visiting your site, they’ll be back.

6. Mix it up.

You have to have an editor’s gut feeling to get the mix right. We’re as likely to have a post about a chilling political development as something on the frothiest bit of pop culture.

7. Appeal to the novelty gene.

They say that there is a novelty-seeking gene. It causes people (like me!) to crave excitement, and to want constant hits of surprising things that don’t fit the conventional model of the way the world works.

8. Let feedback change you.

The community feedback has made me more aware of my insensitivities and the blog has evolved because of it.

9. Think of a friend.

So to get over blog stage fright, when I post something I’ll often have a friend in mind who has the same sense of humor as me.

10. Keep it real.

People love to hear about real life, as if they’re sitting there with you, experiencing it.

What other tips do you have? What makes your blog special?

kateoplis: The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know...

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:39:40 -0800

kateoplis:

The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It | Wired

People ask what the next web will be like, but there won’t be a next web.

The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream. It’s already happening, and it all began with the lifestream, a phenomenon that I (with Eric Freeman) predicted in the 1990s and shared in the pages of Wired almost exactly 16 years ago.

This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams, and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the “flatland known as the desktop” (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a concrete representation of time.

It’s a bit like moving from a desktop to a magic diary: Picture a diary whose pages turn automatically, tracking your life moment to moment … Until you touch it, and then, the page-turning stops. The diary becomes a sort of reference book: a complete and searchable guide to your life. Put it down, and the pages start turning again.

Today, this diary-like structure is supplanting the spatial one as the dominant paradigm of the cybersphere: All the information on the internet will soon be a time-based structure. In the world of bits, space-based structures are static. Time-based structures are dynamic, always flowing — like time itself.

The web will be history.

"We report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when..."

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 17:14:19 -0700

“We report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports. We strive to give our audience confidence that all sides have been considered and represented fairly.”

- NPR ethics handbook, Fairness in presenting the news (via copyeditor)

"A good curator is thinking not just about acquisition and selection, but also contextualizing."

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 00:39:41 -0700

“A good curator is thinking not just about acquisition and selection, but also contextualizing.”

- Joanne McNeil in What We Talk About When We Talk About “Curation” (via explore-blog)

"Journalists used to be powerful. But now there are so many 25-year-old bloggers, many of them..."

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 15:09:58 -0700

“Journalists used to be powerful. But now there are so many 25-year-old bloggers, many of them showing up on the TV talk shows, that the old-timers are struggling to catch up, tweeting their hearts out and using hip language like ‘hashtags.’”

- Sally Quinn on the end of power in Washington. (via peterfeld)

youneededaneditor: Wow, DirecTV, we don’t know if we’d describe...

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 09:19:02 -0700

youneededaneditor:

Wow, DirecTV, we don’t know if we’d describe a brother and sister romancing each other as “good clean fun” (or even “good, clean fun”), but, then again… Oh? Ah! You meant that “a brother and sister each find romance…” Gotcha.

No big deal, although we imagine the incest pervs might have been disappointed once they watched this through to the end.

youneededaneditor: We’re sad that we didn’t take a screen grab...

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 09:18:52 -0700

youneededaneditor:

We’re sad that we didn’t take a screen grab of this before all the commenters on Facebook pointed out to Think Progress that the article talked about “North Dakota,” but the FB caption and FB headline said “North Carolina.”

Easy mistake. They’re exactly the same and almost in the same place.

futurejournalismproject: The New Renaissance Journalism...

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:29:06 -0700

futurejournalismproject:

The New Renaissance Journalism Website

If you’re not already familiar, Renaissance Journalism, a program of San Francisco State University’s Department of Journalism, is a great resource on the future of news (especially for those in the Bay Area). Also see their new media toolkit for curated tools and tutorials. Some new features include:

What’s New?

A new blog called “Media Matters” by Jon Funabiki, Renaissance Journalism’s executive director, who weaves together insights from a career that spans journalism, philanthropy and academia.

Bay Area Ethnic & Community Media Map: Based on a 2011 Renaissance Journalism survey, we’ve charted the more than 140 ethnic and community media organizations in the Bay Area. You can narrow down your search by primary language or search by a news outlet’s name.

Resources page, where we’ll be posting studies, research and writings on media innovations—from Renaissance Journalism and other journalism and media organizations—as well as links to many of our partners’ and collaborators’ websites.

In Which Editors Become Brand Managers

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 10:18:00 -0700

In Which Editors Become Brand Managers:

futurejournalismproject:

Click through to read John Koblin’s piece on the new role editors have had to take on as magazines develop into multi-platform brands. Highlights below.

Some aren’t worried.

Everyone at Condé Nast is supportive of the most important thing — editorial freedom and independence — and, at the same time, I know that financial health is essential and so is getting our work to new readers through new technologies. Still, I don’t much love the talk of ‘brand’ and ‘brand managers’ — I prefer ‘the magazine’ and ‘editors.’ Harold Ross used to talk about The New Yorker as a cause and that’s what it is for me and for all of my colleagues.

-David Remnick, Editor, The New Yorker

Some are a bit worried.

Journalism, photography, design, creative thinking, editing and packaging, they’re what drive it all; they require a great deal of care, thought and attention, and I don’t hear a lot about them these days. What I hear is ‘That’s great for the brand.’ No, that is the brand!

-Jim Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, GQ

The consensus: This isn’t a bad problem to have.

Even though it can be annoying to hear magazines talked about as brands — because magazines themselves are fantastic creatures and brands sounds a little more homogenized — they are brands. I’m just a big believer in a good editor to understand his or her reader and their needs better than anyone. I like the future of a magazine industry that puts editors in charge of directing their brands in partnership with publishers. Would any of us really want a world that those decisions are being completely made by people who are not relating to our readers?

Cindy Leive, Editor-in-Chief, Glamour

FJP: I’d like to pull a different question out of this debate, one related to a comment Nelson made when interviewed. He argued that editorial work suffers on account of the meetings that distract from it.

Meantime, magazine making? It’s become an assumption that that’s the easy part of your day; you’ve got that covered. But it has never been easy, and the day you take your focus off it is the day the magazine becomes less interesting. So yeah, I worry about ADD, about being spread too thin, absolutely. And sometimes I think we’re pushed to do too much with too little. And I’m concerned about stress levels, for quality-of-life and quality-of-job reasons but also because, crucially, you need mental space for creativity and excellence.

Mental space for creativity and excellence. I’m instantly reminded of a Digiday piece I read yesterday, on whether privacy or collaboration better fosters creativity. It referenced an earlier NY Times opinion on the same topic, in which Susan Cain wrote,

Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

Now this isn’t completely related to the editor-turned-brand-manager dilemma, but it is some interesting food for thought. I think Nelson’s point about needing mental space for creativity and excellence warrants a lot of attention. That allotting time for non-editorial endeavors is crucial for the financial health of a publication is indisputable. But I do wonder what steps publications are taking to nurture the creative health of their content.
—Jihii

I’m not a “curator”

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:42:17 -0700

I’m not a “curator”:

kateoplis:

marco:

Codifying “via” links with confusing symbols is solving the wrong problem.

Re this.

Grammar quandary: “Ever present, never quite the...

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:52:44 -0700

Grammar quandary:

“Ever present, never quite the same”?

“Ever present never, quite the same”?

“Ever present never quite, the same”?

"Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance..."

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:28:22 -0800

“Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.”

- NPR’s ethics handbook and Jay Rosen’s great post about it (via soupsoup)

elkeism: To be or not to be…

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:40:16 -0800

elkeism:

To be or not to be…

What Men’s Interest Magazines Are Really About | Modern...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:01:48 -0800

What Men’s Interest Magazines Are Really About | Modern Primate

Slacktory has a brother blog! We are being semi-secret about it, but they just published three brilliant photoshops of men’s magazines so we wanted to show you.

curiositycounts: While Time readers in the rest of the world...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:27:03 -0800

curiositycounts:

While Time readers in the rest of the world get a serious profile of a key figure in the euro crisis, Americans get a cover story about animal friendships — the latest in American news distortion.

There's a terrible stereotype about Web editors...and it's true.

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:54:56 -0800

There's a terrible stereotype about Web editors...and it's true.:

“A terrible, pernicious thing has happened to journalists in the past decade, that’s had us second-guess everything we know.”

guardiancomment: ‘Photographer Photoshops image’ shock The...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:33:24 -0800

guardiancomment:

‘Photographer Photoshops image’ shock

The Sacramento Bee newspaper has fired a man for editing a nature image. But don’t all journalists alter reality?

Photograph: Sacramento Bee website

Thought You Should See This: Submit a Résumé? Pfft. How Last Century

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:21:48 -0800

Thought You Should See This: Submit a Résumé? Pfft. How Last Century:

thoughtyoushouldseethis:

No More Résumés, Say Some Firms is an interesting piece in the Journal looking at how companies are trying to implement more rigorous filtering systems for their hiring processes and avoid having to wade through countless impersonal CVs. Fred Wilson and his New York City-based VC firm, …