Phony photos and misleading videos seem to be a calling card of major news events these days, and Tuesday's earthquake in Virginia was no exception. Jeff Sonderman at the Poynter Institute writes that journalists have to be careful not to be fooled by, say, a fake Paul Krugman writing, ”we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.” Earlier: Verifying tips from social media.
State of the craft
Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review calculates the value consumers place on news stories. His conclusion won't please many journalists: "Incremental, commodity daily news reports have close to no cash value to the consumer. Longer, more in-depth magazine-style pieces have small but significant value, but almost always under a dollar and usually just a few cents. Only book-length journalism has substantial per-unit value, in excess of $1 and often much more."
It may sound like a new kind of medicine. But it's actually a future journalism job title, according to this post from Kennesaw State University's Center for Sustainable Journalism. "Journalism isn’t dying; it’s evolving," Lindsay Oberst writes. "To survive, we’re all going to have to get more creative and adapt as new technologies and methodologies appear." And among other things that means adapting to new job titles like "Data detective" or "Curator in chief."
Danielle N. Lee poses that provocative question on a Scientific American blog.
Facebook’s journalist program manager, Vadim Lavrusik, sets forth some principles for journalists to follow in the move from print and broadcast to social media. A refreshing note is that he acknowledges one source of tension: "How can we serve consumers’ needs by delivering a story in a format they prefer, while avoiding the danger of creating news consumers who only read about things they want know (and not news they should know)?" From the Nieman Journalism Lab.
Journalists think it means something they write. Children think it means Mother Goose. This post from Blogfather Bora Zivkovic at Scientific American examines the differences between narratives and inverted pyramids; different types of science stories ("cool," "relevant," "fishy"); and what the future holds: "My bold prediction is that the length of a typical article will go in two directions: super-short, just the gist of the news, like a tweet; or super-long."
Keith Schneider was a longtime national correspondent for the New York Times. So what's he doing writing for an environmental group's magazine, OnEarth? That's the question Charlie Petit raises on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker. "So this is, overtly, not a disinterested story. Is it journalism without need of qualification? I’d say no, but with little vehemence. It is hard to wag a finger at this piece."
That's a question Paul Raeburn raises on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Raeburn discusses a story last week in the Gray Lady about the bone-growth product Infuse. The story said a group of spine specialists were charging that "misleading and biased" research was being used to promote the product. Raeburn's criticism: The Times failed to credit a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter who had the story earlier — and better, in his view.
The San Andreas fault is a California obsession for obvious reasons. So this week's Nature Geoscience article on the fault's southernmost reach was bound to get media attention. Unfortunately, says Andrew Alden at KQED's Quest blog, many stories went too far in saying a huge quake was ovedue on that reach. The coverage "went from an intriguing journal article to 'we're all gonna die' TV stories in the space of a day," Alden complained.
At first he got 35 minutes to report and write a story. Then 30 minutes. Then 25. Oliver Miller recounts his short, sad tenure with AOL. "We — by which I mean me and my fellow employees — were all so grateful," Miller writes. "Which allowed us to ignore — or willfully overlook — certain problems. Such as the fact that ... we were paid to lie, actually instructed to lie by our bosses." More from CJR, Razib Khan.