Lovejoy Journalism and News Literacy

Behind the Lens by Susan Nester

My friend is a journalist here in Washington, DC. A couple of weeks ago, he covered a tragic accident where a city bus had killed a pedestrian in a busy intersection. As you can imagine, it was a gruesome crime scene, abuzz with police activity. My friend was hustling to gather the needed elements for a TV news story, interviewing emergency personnel, eye witnesses, and transit authorities on the scene.

Days later, the same journalist was up to his waist, literally, in the bitter cold Chesapeake Bay after a brutal Nor’easter ripped through the mid-Atlantic , flooding homes and washing cars away. Just getting to this spot was a precarious challenge, and only then did his job of bringing breaking news to anxious TV viewers begin.
But the TV news man in both cases isn’t who you might think. He isn’t the blown-dried, polished reporter everyone saw on ABC for either of those stories. He is, in fact, the videographer. And I think this job is the most misunderstood and underrated position in television news...

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Hold the Obit: Newspapers Aren’t Dead by David Offer

When I told friends that my wife and I were moving to Fairbanks for a year and that I would be teaching journalism at the university here, several asked how I could teach about an industry that is dying and why any student would want to learn about it.

I talked about those questions and the future of newspapers recently in a speech to about 50 people in downtown Fairbanks. I called my talk “Hold the Obit: Newspapers Aren’t Dead!” and explained why I am optimistic about the future of the industry in which I worked for more than 40 years...

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iTunes as a Model? Google and the News by Beth Healy

Let me get this straight: Newspapers everywhere are struggling to make money. Most of us are giving our product away for free, online, and we have no idea how to get people to pay for news. Google, meanwhile, turned a $1.6 billion profit in the third quarter – right, that was just for three months.

We are doing something seriously wrong.

Now Google, the king of search, does lots of things well, not least selling online ads (something we ink-stained types could learn to do better). And users have lots of reasons to go to the ubiquitous Internet utility – to find a restaurant, to check a fact, to get some background on a date or figure out how to replace batteries in a wireless mouse (turns out you don’t; you throw it away).

But Google has another, increasingly big, draw: News. Type in health plan or Madoff or bank bailout, and you get the top stories of the day – of the moment, really. And, no surprise, the top reports are generally from the best newspapers and wire services in the country.

I’ve often wondered: What would happen if we all withheld our news from Google (and other search sites) for a day? . . .

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Can there be much more that can go wrong with newspapers? by Cindy Skrzycki

Last month, the publisher of the New York Times compared print journalism to the Titanic. Not that the grand ship sunk because of the hubris of the captain (there’s a lot of that in the newspaper world, too), but because it would have gone down anyway in the wake of a new industry taking over sea-bound shipping—airplanes.

Most journalists still at their posts and those hanging on for dear life would buy the simpler explanation: the ship sank slowly. Period. It’s hard to tell a class of journalist wanna be’s that their lives are going to be built around an industry that provided pretty decent salaries, benefits, and career challenges. It’s like telling them to buy a ticket on the Titanic. The main challenge they are going to have is finding a stable news outlet, online or otherwise, that is underwritten by a sugar daddy who values their work. They will have to find the new financial model that works because their elders have not had much luck. In fact, they are fiddling while Rome burns...

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Fighting for the Local Edge by Chris Morrill

Which would you choose: The New York Times on your doorstep, or the San Francisco Chronicle? How about the San Jose Mercury News vs. the Wall Street Journal?

Two of the nation’s most respected national dailies are launching San Francisco editions, taking advantage of the struggling metro papers that are battling advertising and readership declines. Perhaps this is good news for many well-educated Bay Area print readers, who will now find a certain amount of good local content packed inside these quality-driven media giants.

It makes me wonder: Could this fly in cities across the country, hastening the demise of the metro daily? And if it did, would people be well enough served without their once-healthy regional paper? That’s assuming they can afford home delivery of national papers, find weeklies packed with local “good news” and advertising, and turn to the Internet for much of the commodity-type news that has filled papers for years (stocks, weather, entertainment listings, news updates, and so on).

Would we really have much to lose? What are the points of differentiation?

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