Wired Journalists NewsNewsgroup

This Newsgroup powers the News page at Wired Journalists and the News widget on the home page at WJ.

University of Central Missouri to phase out 10 majors

Associated Press Nov 5, 2010

Chris Amico said: Sad to see another journalism program die, but if no one's taking the classes, it's time to go.

Those programs are defined as majors that failed to produce an average of at least 10 graduates in each of the past three years.

Journalism, Education, higher education

Teaching journalists to read

Felix Salmon's Blog Sep 17, 2010

The biggest thing that’s missing in the journalistic establishment is people who are good at finding all that great material, and collating it, curating it, adding value to it, linking to it, presenting it to their readers. It’s a function which has historically been pushed into a blog ghetto, and which newspapers and old media generally have been pretty bad at. And of course old media doesn’t understand blogs in the first place, let alone have the confidence or the ability to incorporate such thinking into everything they do.

Journalism, curation, blogging

Forking is a Feature

Dashes.com Sep 10, 2010

Linus has, in just a few short years, changed the social dynamic around forking, turning the idea of multiple versions of a work from a cultural weakness into a cultural strength.

open source, software, culture, linux, Github, git, Linus Torvalds

Fork it!

Stack Overflow Blog Sep 2, 2010

Chris Amico said: Just the right mix of programming, Freud and Monty Python to make my day.

The Unix world loves to take sides. I don’t have to blog about this; Freud already did, in 1930. He called it “the narcissism of minor differences.”

Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, linux, Ubuntu, Unix

100 Days of Gushing Oil: Eight Things to Know About How the Media Covered the Gulf Disaster

Project for Excellence in Journalism Aug 25, 2010

The oil spill was by far the dominant story in the mainstream news media in the 100-day period after the explosion, accounting for 22% of the newshole—almost double the next biggest story. In the 14 full weeks included in this study, the disaster finished among the top three weekly stories 14 times. And it registered as the No. 1 story in nine of those weeks. 

Media & Journalism, Deepwater Horizon oil spill

The Twitter Diet: a simple, three-point plan for Twitter dominance

Argo Project Blog Aug 4, 2010

Ryan Sholin said: From @mthomps at NPR's Project Argo, a strategic content analysis of @poynter and @niemanlab's tweets.

Both of these accounts are successful. 15,000+ followers is nothing to sneeze at. But @NiemanLab on the right is definitely more successful. These accounts are tweeting pretty similar types of information – news and useful information for journalists and media types. Yet @NiemanLab seems to be garnering more influence for its efforts. @Poynter has tweeted more than three times as much as @NiemanLab, but it has 10,000 fewer followers, and it’s on 1,000 fewer lists. Why might this be?

Journalism, social media, twitter, content analysis, community engagement, Matt Thompson, Poynter, link economy, Nieman Lab

TBD debuts with no new ideas, but real action

Lost Remote Aug 9, 2010

Ryan Sholin said: Friends at @lostremote review friends at @TBD: "What’s novel about TBD is not the ideas, but the action."

These are all old ideas, quite frankly. Journalists have talked about them for years now. Others have pitched them to their bosses until they’re blue in the face. And still others have launched elements of these ideas as niche products, subsets or prototypes. But this is the first time that a local media group — especially in the TV space — has wrapped these ideas together and aggressively launched them with an investment to back it up.

Journalism, hyperlocal, Online News, TBD

Spot.Us Goes National, Gets Clay Shirky as Sponsor

PBS IdeaLab Jul 27, 2010

Ryan Sholin said: Spot.Us goes national, with stories brewing in Illinois, Texas, Minnesota, and across the country.

It makes little sense for me to tell a good pitch from Illinois or Texas that they can't put their pitch up until we find a handful of other pitches in their region. So, as of last week, the sub-domains at Spot.Us have been removed. Trying to convince people in a specific region to use the site -- while stopping others from using it because they aren't in the right region -- is not the best use of our time or energy.

Journalism, knight news challenge, spot us, David Cohn, crowdfunding