Good reads for 08.06.07

Posted on August 6, 2007 by Melissa Worden

>> Photo podcasts from washingtonpost.com. Says wp.com: “Our newest podcast features some of the best photo and audio slideshows on our site.”

LOVE this idea.

>> Smashing Magazine takes a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.

Be sure to take a look because there’s some way cool stuff in here, including this 2007 Web Trend map, which shows “the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.”

>> Paul Bradshaw offers recent graduates a 5-step plan to getting a journalism job.

1. Get a job.
2. Get a blog.
3. Get involved.
4. Get a good mobile phone.
5. Get an eye for news.

>> Seems that 5 is the “it” number. Laura Ruel and Nora Paul offer 5 steps for testing your multimedia news packages.

Here’s what you need to do:

>> recruit FIVE people
>> set aside FIVE hours (that’s total time, start to finish)
>> follow the FIVE steps described below.

Step 1: Determine tasks to test
Step 2: Experimental design
Step 3: Develop questions
Step 4: Gather data
Step 5: Analyze data and make list of potential improvements

>> Mindy McAdams says her Travel Channel Academy was an excellent experience and explains how the TC’s strategy to educate TJs (travel journalists) connects to the newspaper business (read more about this from TJ teacher Michael Rosenblum):

Journalism is a child of the printing press (Rosenblum spiels the same schtick as I do about Gutenberg), even though news was spread by mouth and by drum for centuries before metal types were cast in Germany. As we move out of the age of printed texts and deeper into the digital era, journalism will not necessarily come loping along beside us. Adjustments must be made.

The Travel Channel is adjusting itself to the new marketplace. Is journalism adjusting in the same proactive way, looking for new talent and offering opportunities to new people?

>> Vin Crosbie, however, isn’t sold on the future of video. In his response to Business Week columnist Jon Fine’s recent article, When Do You Stop The Presses? he says:

These presumptions ignore the fact that newspaper readerships have been declining for more than 30 years and that approximately half of those declines occured before the Internet was opened to the public or the public had any online access. Shouldn’t that give publishers a hint that the major cause of their readerships’ declines isn’t the Internet or their content not being online?

And is adding video and audio to that content (so-called ‘multimedia’) going to reverse those declines? Consider that television station’s news viewerships have been declining for more than 20 years and that radio station’s news listenerships have been declining for even longer. Do you think that if radio or television stations add newspaper-like texts to their own websites that this will reverse the declines in their viewerships or listenerships? So, why do publishers think that newspapers adding video and audio to their own texts online will reverse newspapers’ declines in readerships? Adding together two or more declining media do not an ascending new-media make.

The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn’t that your content isn’t online or isn’t online with multimedia. It’s your content. Specifically, it’s what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you’re giving them, stupid; not the platform its on.

(link via David Black)