University of Central Missouri to phase out 10 majors
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.
Teaching journalists to read
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.
Forking is a Feature
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.
Fork it!
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.”
100 Days of Gushing Oil: Eight Things to Know About How the Media Covered the Gulf Disaster
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.
The Twitter Diet: a simple, three-point plan for Twitter dominance
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?
TBD debuts with no new ideas, but real action
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.
Spot.Us Goes National, Gets Clay Shirky as Sponsor
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.
