An upbeat report on the future of print journalism prompts a wake-up call from Nikki Usher. on the Nieman Journalism Lab: "This celebratory conviction of journalists doing God’s work to protect the community appears throughout every portrait of the 50 newspapers profiled. But there’s an underlying, unacknowledged fact: Local news, and in particular local news online, is not something people care about as much as local journalists might hope."
Science writing news
The founder of Narrative Science predicted in Wired magazine that one of his computer algorithms would win a Pulitzer Prize in five years. Wired's Steven Levy seems convinced that the Chicago company really can move "from commodity news to explanatory journalism and, ultimately, detailed long-form articles." Rebecca Greenfield from Atlantic isn't buying it. And PolitiFact developer Matt Waite reframes the question.
Winning the Pulitzer Prize was only the latest from the Great Aggregator, Michael Shapiro writes in Columbia Journalism Review. Tracing its birth to a lunch in 2003, Shapiro explains how Arianna Huffington's web site managed to "surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a trip to a mall where the exits are impossible to locate."
Beth Winegarner says she was "painfully shy" as a child and had to work around that to became a reporter. In this Poynter post, she lists five tips for shy aspiring journalists to practice: "Research shows that our brains are plastic: the more we do something, the easier it gets. The same goes for overcoming shyness. Think of it in terms of statistics: the more interviews you do, the more successes you’ll have under your belt — and the less likely failure will seem."
Kevin Sack faced that exact problem when he wrote “60 Lives, 30 Kidneys, All Linked” for the New York Times in February. Nieman Storyboard discusses how he solved it by focusing his story on the chain of kidney transplants that brought his characters together. Also, Sack talks about his story's other challenges, from getting HIPAA permissions for each patient to reconstructing each step in the 30-transplant chain.
From the Association of Health Care Journalists comes news of victory in a fight that should never have begun. "Can you imagine holding public meetings open to everyone – except reporters who want to cover them?" Pia Christensen writes. "That’s exactly what the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did last year. But, after complaints from the Association of Health Care Journalists, HHS has agreed to make it a policy that public meetings are open to the media."
One of the disputed H5N1 flu virus papers is now out; the other is on the way. Two swell explainers explain that and much more. But wait, there's more in other H5N1 blog posts too. What does childhood bad behavior portend? How to read science news. Why sex robots won't eliminate sex trafficking. Twitter is terrible at prediction. NEJM 200th birthday, a medical timeline, and how the journal invented science journalism's schedule. Plus Atul Gawande's horrifically beautiful history of surgery,
And should you care? A bad score on the social media influence site may have cost Sam Fiorella a marketing job, Seth Stevenson writes in Wired magazine, but Erik Kain at Forbes says Klout is inaccurate, obscure, and redundant. Which makes Klout sounds like a subject ripe for parody: "This is about as scientific as Klout’s own measurements — which is to say, it’s pretty much a crapshoot."
Apply technology to muckraking and what do you get? The recent Techraking conference, sponsored by Google and the Center for Investigative Reporting. The 10,000 Words blog has a rundown on some of the top tools discussed in a session on using technology to improve the reporting process, including LiveScribe (a "smartpen that records audio and syncs it with your handwritten notes"), and NodeXL ("a tool for finding connections between people").