State of the craft

Subscribe to RSS - State of the craft

Sarah Marshall writes about what she learned in two-and-a-half years at a small British website reporting on innovation in the digital news industry. The main lessons: Focus on originality, share widely, and keep redefining what works: "As a small team (of two or three journalists and two or three marketing and sales staff), we had to be efficient. If something didn’t get the expected traffic or impact, we would reconsider. We were constantly listening, learning, evolving."

How often have you seen a story about the nation’s most stressed zip codes, as gauged by a real estate web site? Or which city's residents have the most rat complaints, according to a pest control company? Jacob Harris thinks reporters should be more skeptical of these reports and the motives of their sponsors: "The problem, though, is that these stories are not reported with the same rigor traditional journalism is … Sometimes, it’ll be true, but often it’s misleading."

If you believe Scott Carney's back-of-the-envelope math, it's vanishingly small: "The total market for long-form journalism in major magazines in America is approximately $3.6 million. To put it another way: The collective body of writers earned less than Butch Jones, a relatively unknown college football coach, earned in a single year." It didn't take long, however, for Carney's numbers to draw a skeptical reaction. Details from Romenesko.

Buzzfeed's Carolyn Kylstra talks to Ed Yong, Gary Schwitzer, and others for a listicle of red flags for bad health reporting, such as muddling correlation and causation, or considering a medical test's accuracy but not its specificity: "If a story only reports on accuracy but does not say anything about specificity, then you can be sure that you’re not getting all the information you need to make a fully informed judgment about how valuable the test is in real life."

Stephen J. A. Ward is interim director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen and he has some surprising things to say about how journalists present themselves to the world: "The plain truth is that journalists and news organizations are always advocating, interpreting and educating, not just reporting in some narrow sense. The important point is to identify the type of interpreting that constitutes good journalism, rather than deny that interpretation exists."

Some left-leaving magazines may be in turmoil, but the scrappy publication that broke the Mitt Romney 47% story is doing well with a formula that relies on investigative reporting, social media, and a strong donor base, Lucia Moses writes: "Under co-editors Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein, who took the helm in late 2006, Mother Jones has tripled its editorial staff to 45, raked in 12 National Magazine Award nominations (including three wins) and gone into the black."

Fast Company's Reyhan Harmanci thinks that editors who rely on freelancers are shortchanging themselves and their readers, because staff writers are more reliable and do better work: "As an editor, when I want to assign a breaking story, I look around to staff. It doesn’t seem fair to pay someone $200 for a post but then demand it be fast and good." Randy Dotinga, president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, begs to differ.

Chris Ip surveys the longform market and concludes that many of the new web-based markets for lengthy non-fiction storytelling are unlikely to survive for much longer: "As barriers to entry to participate in what was once the preserve of high profile career journalists have been obliterated, narratives several thousand words long hit the Web daily. The market is flooded with longform producers, even as the model for how to succeed is still yet to be cracked."

As traditional news media have declined, social media and other digital outlets are beefing up their in-house content creation. Lucia Moses writes that the results have been a mixed bag. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr have already backtracked on plans to create their own content: "When platforms create homegrown content, they essentially become competitors with the very publishers they’re also trying to get to freely post content on the same platform."

Pulizer-winning New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks.talks about working with reporters, dealing with public criticism, and how the news has changed now that everybody has a camera: "It’s not just about how people communicate in regard to pictures, but it’s also about the amount of photographs that are out there … There’s a lot more competition, but then you have to ask yourself, what is that competition? How do we determine, how do we decide what is valid news?"