James

"Make no mistake about it, Twitter has in many ways been a boon to the media. It's one more way a story might go viral and it's arguably the best way for a news outlet to get closer to their readership. Most outlets now have a presence on Twitter with a feed directing readers to their respective sites. But even in an Internet world that has for years eroded the distance between media and consumer, Twitter is a jolt of democratization to journalism." - James

"The latest subscriber figures (see table below) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it's time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds - and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts." - James

""Check the source" may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later. If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers." - James

"Michael Wolff told Ad Age he couldn't see a way for the Sulzbergers to hold on. "Within a very short period of time, 12 months, maximum 18 months, there will have to be a control transition at the paper," he said." - James

"The Daily Mail posted a story on their website about my friend Andy Stanford-Clark, and used a crop from one of my photos to illustrate it. As it happens, I would have been perfectly happy for them to use it (and even to crop it) if they’d asked for permission. At the time I post this, they are not following the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence." - James

"Given that even these daily digests are faltering, how is it that a notionally similar weekly news digest—The Economist—is not only surviving, but thriving? Virtually alone among magazines, The Economist saw its advertising revenues increase last year by double digits—a remarkable 25 percent, according to the Publisher’s Information Bureau. Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively." - James

"A journalistic problem with images of demonstrations and violence is that besides what can be seen or technologically verified, the context of events or the identities of those involved often cannot be independently proven. Some sources check what is offered, starting with knowing their contributors, contacting them by email where possible and using whatever metadata the images carry to verify when, and increasingly where, they were taken." - James

"The annual Newspaper Institute for Minority High School Students, sponsored by the Oregonian and Oregon State University, is under way again. It is supported by a generous grant from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation in Oklahoma." - James

"I can actually gauge the precise moment when I knew it was all over for print journalism, when all the speculation and escalating dread crystallized into an inescapable, wrenching reality. It was May 20 at 8:07 p.m., when I downloaded an App for my iPhone that carried the ironic handle of News Fuse USA. Like a stick of dynamite, it exploded in my face, any speck of subtlety blown to the proverbial smithereens." - James

"As newspapers around the country struggle to develop strategies for growing revenues online, more and more of them are turning to an unlikely ally for salvation: Yahoo!. Last week, five struggling newspapers including the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Orange County Register joined the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium, an online advertising partnership between the Web publisher and the print publishers." - James

"With 33 Iranian journalists and bloggers in jail, Iran ranks alongside China as the world's biggest prison for journalists, the press rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Sunday. The Paris-based organisation voiced alarm after several high-profile journalists were arrested including Jila Baniyaghoob and her husband Bahaman Ahamadi Amoee, who were taken from their Teheran home on Saturday." - James

"As a provider of news, Twitter has serious flaws that are too obvious not to complain about. " - James

"Like almost everyone in journalism, we're fascinated by the subject of where the industry is going, what news is going to look like in the future, and how it's going to be reported. This blog, in fact, arose out of an internal e-mail list at Salon, which in turn was started to channel the ongoing chatter about, well, the future of journalism." - James

"Roughly five years ago game critic and comic book author Kieron Gillen posted an essay called The New Games Journalism on his blog. It was inspired by Tom Wolfe’s essay on the same topic, which was the tradition of weaving yourself as a journalist into an event you were reporting on. Since then, the article has been blamed for producing utterly abysmal writing and creating a giant bucket of fuck-all in the gaming scene. It’s also produced some of the most interesting and fun writing about games on the web today." - James

"Over two million pages of 19th and early 20th century newspapers go online today, part of the vast British Library collection." - James

"Iran experts and social networking activists say that while Iranian election protesters have certainly used social media tools, no particular technology has been instrumental to organizers' ability to get people on the street. Indeed, most of the organizing has occurred through far more mundane means: SMS text messages and word of mouth." - James

"And those out of the know? They aren't any longer just grandmothers, the apolitical, and the middle manager in Scranton who gets all his news at 11 o'clock after the game. Now people who watch The Daily Show, subscribe to The New Yorker, and read the CNN subtitles as they run on the 24 Hour Fitness treadmill possess radically less information than a self-selecting group of their fellow citizens, granting that they mostly catch up on any given piece of information in a matter of days." - James