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Making sense of the intersection between media, society and technology

Advice on how to land a job in journalism

There is no doubt that this is going to be a tough year for the media in Canada and beyond.

Journalism students graduating this year have the talent and the skills that the industry needs, but the question is whether news organisations will invest in them.

Even student journalism award winners are finding it tough. Azeem Ahmad, the winner of Birmingham University Student Journalist of the Year award sponsored by media group, Trinity Mirror, has talked about his struggle to find a suitable opening:

It’s not that there is a lack of job opportunities, but there is definitely a lot of competition for the more interesting roles, naturally. I believed that achieving my award would set me apart from the competition and make potential employers take more notice of me, but I’m still finding myself just as unsuccessful in getting my foot on the ladder as I did before I won the award.

His advice to budding journalists reflects how landing for a job has changed:

Blog as often as possible; subscribe to and read the key influencers/speakers in your chosen field – and comment too Let the author know you’ve read what they’ve written and agreed or disagreed with it; start and get involved in the discussions, engage with the community online and create one around yourself; join Twitter and become a networked journalist.  Engage, engage, engage – I can’t stress that enough.

This is career-seeking 2.0 for journalists. Dan Schawbel at Mashable provides some good advice in using social media for job-hunting.

Among the recommendations – create a video resume, capitalise on LinkedIn and tap into Twitter to network and make connections.

It is a far cry from mailing a CV and cover letter to the HR department.

Filed under: Web 2.0, internet, journalism, media, news , , ,

US newspapers struggle to understand the web

Brookgreen Gardens in P...Image via WikipediaA major study into US newspapers by the Project for Excellence in Journalism presents a picture of an industry struggling to come to terms with the seismic changes taking place in the media.

As the report highlights:

On one hand, financial pressures sap its strength and threaten its very survival. On the other, the rise of the web boosts its competitiveness, opens up innovative new forms of journalism, builds new bridges to readers and offers enormous potential for the future. Many editors believe the industry’s future is effectively a race between these two forces.

Editors' attitude to the webEditors are clearly divided on the potential of the web, and this is to be expected. After all, some veterans may hark back to a mythical golden age of newspapers.

The make-up of newsrooms is changing, with the report finding that staff are “smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web”. But there is a cost, with less experience and knowledge in the newsroom as the older generation take lucrative buyouts.

The section on the influence of the web provides a more detailed look at how digital is impacting newsrooms. There appears to be an acceptance that the web is not the enemy:

Although several editors voiced concerns about the web as a distraction that deflects resources from the print edition, overall, the view of the web appears to be increasingly positive.

Editors' timeAt the same time, the study suggests that print remains the primary focus for editors. This is understandable given the importance of print revenues. But it also suggests that print is still considered more important editorially to the web.

Interviews for the study showed that editors felt the growing demands of the web on newsrooms at times sapped attention and energy from the print edition, as reflects in this quote: “The demands of producing more web content are diminishing the print product.”

This suggests that editors still think of themselves as print people, rather than as leaders of a news outlet with different distribution points reaching different audiences. This is the fundamental shift that needs to take place in newsrooms.

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Filed under: journalism, news, newspapers, online ,

Asking whether local is better in journalism is the wrong question

June’s Carnival of Journalism, a monthly collection of thoughts from the journalism blogosphere, focused on the issue of local.

The question was whether journalism is better the more local it is. The range of responses shows this is a rich area for debate.

I sat out the carnival as I was on honeymoon in Thailand. But one of the entries from Paul Bradshaw, arguing that online all journalism is potentially local, got me thinking whether we are asking the wrong question.

The concept of local news is based on the news value of geographical proximity – the notion that events close to us are more relevant than those in far away lands.

The problem with this approach is that it is based on an out-dated model of news, where there was a scarcity of news and information and the sources for this were limited by geography.

In other words, news was hard to come by and the primary source for this was the local daily paper.

The explosion of electronic media, from radio to TV to the Internet, has undermined this model. We now live in a world where there is an abundance of news from an abundance of sources.

Maybe rather than asking whether journalism should be local, we should ask ourselves what does local mean in the 21st century. Geographical proximity is still a factor in news, as people are interested in what their neighbours are up to.

But perhaps we should pay more attention to the notion of cultural proximity, so stories concerned with people who speak the same language, look the same, and share the preoccupations as the audience receive more coverage than those concerned with people who speak different languages, look different and have different preoccupations.

The issue then becomes how do we decide on what is cultural proximity? Take Vancouver as an example. This is a Canadian city, with several significant and vibrant ethnic communities.

The result is a multifaceted local population, where diversity rather than homogeneity is the norm.

In this case, local takes on a meaning beyond geography, encapsulating issues of demographics, culture and values. Take the example of a story by Anupreet Sandhu Bhamra, one of my students at the UBC School of Journalism.

She produced a video piece on how attitudes to the elderly are changing among Canada’s Asian community.

This story is based in Vancouver but it has a relevance beyond the city. It resonates on a national and global level, as well as across demographics.

You don’t have to live in Vancouver, or in Canada, to be interested in the piece, so to call this “local news” is to deny its wider appeal.

The issue then is less whether local is better, but rather how do we redefine local to remain relevant in a digital news environment.

Filed under: internet, journalism, news, newspapers , , ,

Knight News Challenge winners reflect digital trends

Tim Berners-LeeThe 16 winners of the $5.5m Knight News Challenge have been announced, with the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, among the recipients.

The full list of winners illustrates how people are tapping into emerging trends in digital media to revitalise the news environment.

Several projects – Free Fone, The News is Coming, News on Cellphones – focus developing mobiles as platforms for news, especially in parts of the world where much of the population has not easy access to a computer or the net.

Other projects, such as Transparent Journalism led by Berners-Lee and Martin Moore, aim to build on the rise of tagging, to develop a system to provide an additional layer of information to news stories.

Spot Journalism is going to experiment with micro-payments as a way of paying for investigative journalism, while Reporting On aims to use social networking technologies to allow journalists working on similar topics will be able to communicate and share ideas.

In contrast to last year, more than a third of the winners were from outside the US. Ten came from the United States, and six were from Canada, England, Lithuania, South Africa, Russia and Zimbabwe.

Filed under: Web 2.0, internet, journalism, news, technology , , , ,

How to make sense of media convergence

Ramon SalaverriaAs the Online Journalism Symposium draws to a close, I wanted to draw attention to the keynote on Saturday by Ramón Salaverria.

He is a professor and vice chair at the School of Communication, Navarra University, Spain

In his address, he tackled the illusive topic of convergence. In his view, convergence is very different to integration.
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Filed under: academics, journalism, news ,

Why news outlets need to engage with audiences

The afternoon session at the Online Journalism Symposium focuses on the shift from passive audiences to online communities.

Jim Brady, executive editor of the WashingtonPost.com makes a compelling argument for engaging with audiences online.

The Post’s strategy is smart – it tries out a lot of different things, from blogs to live discussions to comments on articles, to see what works and what doesn’t.

“Out of all the things we’ve done, engaging readers was the one that had the most resistance from the print side,” he admits.
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Filed under: internet, journalism, news, user-generated content ,

Insights into the hybrid print/digital newsroom

Online Journalism SymposiumSecond panel at the Online Journaism Symposium focuses on the hybrid newsroom, bringing together Chris Lloyd, Assistant Managing Editor, of The Daily Telegrah, Rich Meislin, Associate Managing Editor/Internet Publishing of The New York Times, Almar Latour, Managing Editor of the WallStreetJournal.com, Guillermo Franco, Editor of ElTiempo.com in Colombia and Liza Gross, Managing Editor/Presentation and Operations at The Miami Herald.

Lloyd touches on the theme of change, talking about how The Telegraph made its transformation from a print business to a media company across platforms, about the “pain and angst” of the process.
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Filed under: journalism, media, news, newspapers ,

Off to Texas for Online Journalism Symposium

I’m off to Austin, Texas, for the 2008 International Online Journalism Symposium to present a paper on the BBC’s blogging strategy during the Saturday session.

There is a promising line-up and some 200 scholars, professional journalists and media executives have registered for the event. If you can’t make it, students will be live blogging the sessions using CoverLive, and I will also be writing about the sessions.

New this year is the video news games panel, which symposium chair, UT journalism professor Rosental Alves says will “explore the use of video game language and style in the construction of the digital journalism narrative.”

Filed under: blogs, news, online , ,

News you can dance to

Local news in the US reaches out to the ‘kids’ with Dance Party Friday, at least at Local 12 News in Cincinnati.

Filed under: broadcast, news, online ,

Who reads the newspapers in Britain

A student sent me this clip from the British comedy programme, Yes Prime Minister, on who reads the newspapers in Britain. It is very funny, especially because its analysis is spot on.

Filed under: YouTube, news, newspapers , ,

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