State of the craft

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Never heard of him? Well, how about his magazine, McClure's, which published the work of Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens more than a century ago? Dean Starkman of Columbia Journalism Review discussed his influence at March’s Narrative Arc Conference: "McClure and the muckrakers, after a fashion and without intending to, crafted what can be called a journalism ideology of sorts, an ideology of anti-corruption, a keystone value of American journalism to this day."

All those struggling journalism startups can only envy the $11.5 million Roger Goodell draws as National Football League commissioner, Joshua Benton writes at Nieman Journalism Lab: "The future-of-journalism point here is that the NFL has found a spot in the vagaries of the tax code — a defined niche in which they can fit," Benton says. "I just wish the IRS could find a way to give dozens of small, community-oriented news organizations the same sort of status."

They beat our best at Jeopardy. Now they've set their sights on journalism, Joseph Stromberg writes on Smithsonian.com. "Software is being developed that can use raw data — such as Twitter feeds, company earnings reports and baseball box scores — to automatically produce news articles that seem as though they were written by a real live human," Stromberg says. If it works, software could "outcompete traditional journalism, since the cost is so much lower."

Dahlia Lithwick writes for Slate about Virginia's slow pace in exonerating convicts cleared by new analysis of DNA evidence, then talks about the writing process for Nieman Storyboard. On breaking free of Slate's usual 1,500-word limit and one-day turnaround: "So this was a big departure for me," she said. "This was a real lesson for me in how you can take two weeks to write a piece and have it come out really significantly better reported."

Non-profit news organizations may be the coming thing in journalism but they're having trouble convincing the Internal Revenue Service that they deserve tax-exempt status, Justin Ellis writes on the Nieman Journalism Lab site. One reason: Their applications often describe them as journalism organizations. "That’s a problem, because the IRS doesn’t recognize journalism as one of the defined categories eligible for non-profit status. But what is eligible? Education."

Here are nine tips from the Poynter Institute on how video can enhance journalistic storytelling, with examples. "We can quickly establish a sense of place with video," Casey Frechette writes. "Wide shots — the sweeping views that establish a scene — can tell us where a story takes place and convey the size and purpose of a location. Medium shots and closeups can reveal detail and texture, providing a sense of a location’s age, condition, energy and character."

Doctored quotes, altered facts, invented characters — those are just some of the sins Hillary Rosner recounts in her tell-all blog post, Their So-Called Journalism, or What I Saw at the Women’s Mags: "My experiences working for women’s mags have been incredibly frustrating and disheartening — and I’ve long wanted to share them publicly but haven’t, for fear of alienating potential clients." She finally relented and found support in her post's comments.

Salon's Kerry Lauerman says his publication tried the formula — quick summaries on trending topics — and found it didn't work. So it moved the pendulum back: "We've tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We're actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago." More from Nieman Lab and CJR.

Craig Silverman on Regret the Error offers two stories about danger lurking in a publication's archive and trapping an unwary reporter years later. In one case, a reporter writing a blog post reused material from a story he'd written 30 years earlier — only to find afterward that he'd misspelled a source's name. Silverman cites the resulting correction and offers three tips for reporters who want to stay out of trouble when mining their own clips or anybody else's.