Buzz Machine

Buzz Machine is a blog I’ve only recently started following, but its writer, Jeff Jarvis, had a post this morning that caught my interest: What’s a Medium? In it, the journalism prof talks about how his school, CUNY (City University of New York) isn’t making students choose a track to concentrate on anymore (print/radio/broadcast), because you have to be able to do them all now. The sentence that caught my attention, though, was this one:

Or a student who comes in with good skills in those electronic media may choose to strengthen skills in what we used to call print (we’re not sure what to call it now so we’re calling that core). [emphasis added]

If this doesn’t point to how desperately print publications (ie/ newspapers) have to change the way they do journalism, I don’t know what does. The newspaper journalists who survive this change in our profession are going to be the ones who can do everything: take photos and audio and video and be able to present them in a meaningful, useful way online. I think a lot of print journalists are wary of this, scared of it maybe. But again, I think it’s exciting. It presents so many more ways we can tell a story. Yes, it’s more work. And requires training that some organizations don’t have the budgets for right now, which is incredibly, incredibly sad.

But it’s true that the “print” aspect, the writing and everything that goes into that process, will remain at the core.

Save The Media

When I stumbled on Save The Media a few weeks ago, it immediately started changing the way I use the Internet… and I’m someone who uses the Internet for, well, almost everything (inhaling news, watching TV, communicating with family/friends, all that typical stuff).

Run by the Family Life editor for The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y., Gina Chen, Save The Media is all about helping journalists become all they can be, online. It is a treasure-trove of tips. I use Google Reader thanks to this post. The blog also helped convince me to join Twitter. And made me realize I can lurk around all I want and read all I want and… then what? If you wants to understand what the Internet means to you, yourself, then you, yourself, have to become an active part of it. Facebook is so ubiquitous it almost doesn’t count.

What I like most about this blog is its practicality. And its optimism. There is no end to the doom and gloom blog posts and news stories out there. But on Save The Media, it’s all about adapting. Embracing. Moving forward. And it’s exciting! There are so many tools out there that most journalists aren’t even aware of, let alone using. The idea of having a newsletter seems like a no-brainer, after reading Chen’s post. Exclusive tips will then come to your e-mail inbox? That’s pretty cool. It really makes me yearn to be back on the reporting beat instead of behind a copy desk, but that’s another story.

Blog Central at Macleans

Blog Central is one of the first sites I started visiting regularly when I became an Internet news freak. I was initially pulled into it through Paul Wells’s blog, Inkless Wells, which I started reading on a daily basis four or five years ago. Wells would link to his colleagues quite regularly, and I would sit and read their posts often enough that I decided to start seeing them myself. For actual commentary on Parliament Hill and Canadian politics in general, delivered quickly and generally with wit, there isn’t a better place to go.

I say “commentary” rather than “news” because that’s what this blog is good for — that and the liveblogging of various parliamentary committees provided by Kady O’Malley at ITQ (Inside the Queensway). This site shows how a newsmagazine, which publishes weekly, can actually be a news leader, day-to-day, online. Daily newspapers could learn something from this, because Macleans has gone and done what a bunch of news organizations are still talking about doing: namely, providing up-to-the-minute news online and something meatier in their print product. (I subscribe to Macleans and read that sucker cover to cover.)

One criticism I have of the site is that its RSS feeds can’t be broken out. I use Google Reader (for where the tip on that came from, see the next post) and tried adding Blog Central or just Inkless Wells to it, but all I could get was the one generic Macleans feed, which delivered a bunch of news items that clogged up my reader and just annoyed me. If I had my druthers, I would be able to subscribe exclusively to the Canada Blog of Blog Central, which includes all the political bloggers. The arts/entertainment blog posts are sometimes interesting, but not enough for me to have them flowing into my Reader.