Two views on the social media phenomenom's viability, centering on its business plan — if it even has one. First comes Bloomberg Business Week with a cover story saying that "Twitter is becoming a plausible contender for the online budgets of the world’s top advertisers." The contrarian view comes from Gawker: "Twitter's business has been a joke, will have to be rebuilt from the ground up, and as far as we know is still in terrible shape."
Science writing news
The veteran NPR reporter recently talked to Nieman Storyboard about how he coaxes subjects into producing broadcast-quality answers to his questions on subjects like the epidemic of traumatic brain injuries among recent combat veterans. "Sometimes we get great tape through luck, but usually, Zwerdling says, it takes persistence, time, and someone higher up willing to spend the money for that," Julia Barton writes. "But of course there are other factors money can’t buy."
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."
Chris Jones's Esquire story about the night Terry Thompson turned his menagerie loose is a "Notable Narratives" pick on Nieman Storyboard. Exotic animals roamed as police tracked them down: "Jones doesn’t waste words telling readers how to feel about what happens. Instead, he sticks with the momentum of events on the ground, delivering the unforgettable image of a tiger lit by headlights stripped down to its 'disrobed spine' by a bullet."
Does it matter whether a news story includes links to outside sources? Does it distract readers or enhance the experience? Does anyone even click on those links? These and other questions were discussed in a pair of posts by Jonathan Stray at Nieman Journalism Lab and Felix Salmon on Wired. Stray: "I can’t see any reason why readers shouldn’t demand, and journalists shouldn’t supply, links to all online resources used in writing a story."
The new iPad! Sorta. Brain Awareness Week! Critiquing brain imaging studies. Can an MRI predict future performance on new tasks? The last ape genome: Gorilla gorilla gorilla. Is an auditory system gene a gene for speech? Genetics of complex traits. The resurrection of the Solutrean Hypothesis; were the First Americans really Europeans? The complexities of ancient human migrations.
Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg talked with students at Columbia recently and Allan Kustanovich reported some highlights in Womens Wear Daily: "We hate quotations at Slate. We almost never use quotes. They don’t do anything. They waste the readers’ time. Only use quotes when you can’t say it better yourself." Also, "I’m against fact-checking because I think it encourages error. The items I’ve made mistakes in are when I’ve been fact-checked."
The answer can be anywhere, according to this exchange on The Open Notebook, partly funded by NASW. Nature features editor Brendan Maher: "It will rarely be one single piece of evidence, but rather one or two things heard in passing (i.e. reading a paper, or talking with a trusted regular source at a meeting, or having a random conversation on a plane, or seeing a single line in a news story that makes you go, “Huh. I wonder if there’s something more to that!”).
Nine months after launch, "Google+ is a virtual ghost town compared with the site of rival Facebook," Amir Efrati writes in the Wall Street Journal. "Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore," Efrati continues. Google+ users reacted to the news, as in this thread.