In case you haven’t seen our new RebelMouse page, DigitSlam, you should really check it out. We just got a neat little bit of recognition for it. If you like news in numbers, fast, hop over that way. Oh, and our Twitter is hopping, too.
And I’ll repeat: if you provide value to people, they’ll pay for it.
Awesome.
Whether this is the way to go for the industry at large, you have to admit this is awesome promotion for TinyPass, which I bet you most people didn’t know about until today. Only issue I can see? Sully has a staff, and he needs more than just six figures to pay their salaries. It it was just him, this would be solid, though.
rachelcstella says: Wait, this was only for the summer? You’re not going to continue? Oh, I wish you’d keep this feature going!
» SFB says: We like The Pitch, too, but we want to be careful to give features a chance to lay dormant, for fear of overexposure. (For example: We want to bring the Tumbl-zine back at some point.) We think that there’s a lot of opportunity to do things like The Pitch, but at the same time, we don’t want to have such a feature wear out its welcome. We may bring it back at some point based on time and reader demand for sure. We like doing it! :0 — Ernie @ SFB
The Pitch’s four-week-aversary: Last week, SFB editor Ernie won The Pitch; have you read his piece on journalism outsourcing? Because you should. Voting has opened this week for our latest round! From tech companies’ legal troubles to Bachmann’s “Islamophobic” witch hunt, there are five awesome stories for you to choose from. The story with the most votes by Friday evening wins, so head over to SFB’s FB so you can get in on this sweet action. source
Plans for the evening: So, I have a full-time job on top of all the other stuff I do with the blog. Ever wonder how I pull it off? The friendly people who run the weekly #wjchat (Web Journalists Chat) on Twitter were wondering the same thing. So, tonight, I’ll be hosting it and offering a couple of my own thoughts on balancing side projects with main gigs. Wanna follow along? Hop on TweetChat around 8 p.m. EST and follow the #WJChat hashtag. It’ll be fun! — Ernie @ SFB
WordPress is finally integrating its blogging platform more closely with social networking sites. A new publicize feature allows users to link various social media accounts to their WordPress blogs. Previously, users had plugins they could install that allowed them to cross-post their articles.
daniscalifornia wonders, however:
do you have a distinct use case for Tumblr/Wordpress, and would it make sense to post Wordpress blogs onto Tumblr?
I use my Tumblr to curate stuff written by others - mostly journo/tech news links and quotes, and my personal blog to write longer pieces (700+ words) sometimes about journalism but often personal or creative writing. So it’s important for me to have both, right now.
I think WordPress coudln’t sit idly by for much longer while Tumblr traffic is skyrocketing. Let’s face it: A lot of the conversation that used to happen through blogs is now happening on social media. Blogs are becoming more of a home base for longer articles, as Dani says. But those articles are spread through social media, and making that easier from WordPress is overdue.
Kind of curious as to what this kind of addition means. We use a kind of hacked-together WordPress plugin to do kind of the same thing, but I imagine what we use is far more customizable than WordPress’ own option. Appears to only be WP.com for now.
(Source: danifankhauser)
“So like there’s nothing for you to curate without creation? This precious bit of dressing-up what people choose to share on the Internet is, sure, silly, but it’s also a way for bloggers to distance themselves from the dirty blogging masses. You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You’re in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you’re a low-grade collector, not a curator.”—
Choire Sicha: You Are Not a Curator, You Are Actually Just a Filthy Blogger
Gonna curate some links in the meantime.
Saw this yesterday, found it to be a bit of a talker, wanted to write up a response. First up: Choire has been at this long enough (he worked at Gawker nearly a decade ago) that he’s arguably an elder statesman of blogging, along with folks like Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall and a couple of others. That automatically makes his opinion valid enough that we should listen, but I’m sure in a lot of ways it gives him a different take on this whole thing than someone who got into this in, say, 2008 or 2009.
So let’s take on this term. “Curation.” The first time I ever heard someone use the term in relation to Web content was in 2009, when Robert Scoble wrote this great piece about how “curation” was going to be a billion-dollar industry, once someone figured out a killer product that made it really stupidly simple to organize our thoughts into one piece. Not long after that, we got Storify, and, separately, Tumblr sort of became the place for this style of link sharing. I don’t see a billion dollars yet, but the basic idea seems to be catching on. (And no, it’s nothing like curating art. Big deal.)
But here’s the thing: I don’t think anyone is actually trying to “class up” their work by using this term. (Well, maybe except for the dude quoted in Choire’s piece.) These “curators” are just using different techniques than people were using a decade ago, and someone threw out that term one day, and it stuck.
And it’s happened before, too. Do you know how long pre-digital journalists bristled at the term “blogger” around 2004? I’m sure there’s some middle-aged newspaper columnist somewhere who once wrote a column titled “You Are Not a Blogger, You Are Actually Just a Terrible Journalist.” Do we need to rehash the purist’s argument every time someone does something a little differently? I’m sure the telegraph guys were pissed when they were shown the telephone for the first time.
So let’s get down to it: You’re not a curator, but then you’re not a blogger, either. You’re just a person with an internet connection who uses it to communicate. The quality of the information you share, report, or comment on is what matters. Not the term. — Ernie @ SFB
Even with a journalism-lite approach to the news, where reporters post as many as 15 news stories a day based largely on work by rival reporters - there’s not much money to be made. It’s a poor way to make a living.
Mr Blodget is not lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills and stubbing them out on the backs of hard working journalists doing original reporting elsewhere.
In 2010, Business Insider had its first profitable year, it made $2,127 on revenues of $5 million. Even by rewriting other people’s news stories there is barely any money to be made - so how can quality journalism be supported?
First off, we recommend you read The New York Times’ piece on Weisenthal — that guy has more obsessive work habits than all of us, combined. (Then, when you’re done, read Blodget schooling a college professor.) Weisenthal’s habits show an issue with modern journalism in general. It’s all about getting as many pageviews as possible, no matter how stressful that proves to be in practice and how much that limits your quality control. “Henry Blodget and the Business Insider editorial team aren’t the ones responsible for the poor state of journalism today,” Foremski says, “they are merely the expression of what’s currently possible given the means available - which isn’t much, a whole lot of nothing much (about 250 news stories a day at Business Insider).” Foremski suggests the current model of advertising — obsessed with pageviews over quality — is the problem.
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“We don’t have any interest in selling TechCrunch or Engadget,” he said firmly. “Our number one goal basically has been to scale them up. At this point, it’s likely we’ll just end up investing ourselves.”
TechCrunch itself covered the rumors, saying that the situation was rooted in a stunted spinoff and suggesting PandoDaily, run by former TC staffer Sarah Lacy, got caught up in its own issues when reporting the story: “We figure this story got skewed because PandoDaily is going through its own troubles, and looking for a target to project its drama onto; Sometimes not wanting to seem weak makes you seem weak.”
They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing. Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.The Post fails a young blogger (via frontofbook)
You don’t know him, but you’ve seen his work: The rise of Creative Commons has leveled the playing field for bloggers, giving many the opportunity to illustrate stories with free-to-use images that are at times comparable to wire photos. But the quality varies, and it’s rare to find someone sharing high-quality pictures consistently — but Gage Skidmore pulls it off. The 18-year-old photographer, who shoots celebrities and conservative politicians largely as a hobby, has uploaded nearly 9,000 photos to Flickr since early 2008, and thanks to favorable licensing, finds his photos of famous and important people in use all over the Web — including such sites as MSNBC, Fox News, The Atlantic and Mashable. What drives his work? Click on to see his take on the matter.
See all that stuff around the text? It’s white space. Tumblr user Max Temkin’s new news project is quick info minus clutter, updated once a day. “I’ve always wished I could get my news on a plain white page with a few well-curated stories; no ads, no social media, no comments,” he writes. “I got tired of waiting for someone to build that page, so I made it myself.” Minus the newspaper, this reminds us of the approach of the old Frontpages tumblr (whose loss we’re still upset about and we miss greatly). Just the links. Nothing more, nothing less. Give it a follow.
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