ScooptWords blog

Viva la 'J' list

The New York Times runs a short feature on journalists, namely Om Malik, Rafat Ali and Nina Munk, who've gone it alone, left the deadwood behind, received varying degrees of funding and made a success of it. The money quote comes from Ali,

“A lot of journalists are going to have to rethink what they are doing if they are going to survive,” said Mr. Ali. “If you stand back and do nothing, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? The newspaper you are working at could go away and then you won’t have a place to work.” via Cyberjournalist.

Gloom and doom in the press is one thing, but look beyond these 'A' listers who are scurrying their way out rather successfully and you'll discover a whole lot more bloggers earning $100 in Adsense here, $1000 there, a commission this month, a BlogAd next month, a new contact today, a regular client tomorrow. These bloggers who find their blog 'leads to something unexpected' far outweigh those like Malik, Ali and Munk who impress with headlines, but who represent the more freakish corner of blogdom.

Technorati Tags: benefits of blogging, blog marketing

The deadline is dead

I've been corresponding with Linda Jones, the journalist and blogger behind an opinion column in this week's Press Gazette. Linda comments here now and then, Hi Linda :) I don't quite agree with her stance in the column. Actually, that's a lie - I don't agree with it at all. But, rather than go into the details of our amiable email chitter-chatter, I'll quote this single bit from me:

And as for "the deadline" Forget it, it's exactly what it says it is, dead. Instant publishing will crush the notion of the newspaper deadline within one year. And those newspapers that don't understand why that is so, will die a year after. But, that's a topic for another day...

Or, as it happens, not another day, but today. Blog uber-god Jeff Jarvis, a man I once interviewed over the net and met briefly on Regent Street a few months back, chimes in,

It’d [be] ironic, or possibly just odd, that one of the newest papers in Britain, The Independent, is the most stuck in the mud online. They put  up pay walls and the editor, Simon Kelner, just decreed that he’d never put stories on the web first, like his competitor, The Guardian, and that he wants to raise the price of the declining print product... Roy Greenslade sits Kelner down for a talkin’-to

Technorati Tags: deadline, newspapers, online first

Another day another survey

The latest in a recurring series of internet surveys is being dissected around the Net.

'Much of the public and press attention to bloggers has focused on the small number of high-traffic, A-list bloggers,' said Associate Director Susannah Fox. 'By asking a wide range of bloggers what they do and why they do it, we have found a different kind of story about the power of the Internet to encourage creativity and community among all kinds of Internet users.'

Cristiano Ventura, MSN Spaces marketing manager said: 'It remains to be seen whether blogging will take over traditional media, but growth in the next five years is going to be expediential.'

This is true. There's no indication that the growth is slowing. What does this mean? Well, too many things for me to go into here. However, for print and publishing outlets interested in harnessing and paying for blog content - and we now know there are plenty of those - it means there is an ever greater, more immediate need for the likes of ScooptWords to collate, filter and present the most commercial content for magazine and newspaper editors to select and purchase. So, nothing we didn't already know, just more impetus to do it.

Technorati Tags: Pew, survey

Pilger on blogs

Staying with the Press Gazette for a minute. Julie Tomlin has a long interview with the journalist's journalist, John Pilger. Well worth a read, here's Pilger on blogs, bloggers and the power of... hmmm... CitJ,

“People on the internet are shaming journalists”

If you take the reporting of Iraq, the best reporting has been on the internet.

If you go online you can read someone like Dahr Jamail — he’s a Lebanese American who speaks Arabic — and he has been reporting on the net since the invasion. He’s the one I turn to because he reported from inside Fallujah, where journalists either don’t go or go with the American army or the British.

Another I used in the book I edited last year about investigative journalism, Tell me no Lies, one of the non-journalists was a young British woman called Jo Wilding. At the time she was just filing. She was living with a family in Baghdad and then was in Fallujah and she was just filing every day. It was some of the most seering eye-witness journalism I have ever read. It told me what was happening in the country.

Can you imagine hearing “Here is the news, children are being starved in Palestine”, or “Here is the news, the state of Iraqi children is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein”?

Both those are true, but we are never going to hear that because the way it is reported in the mainstream is skewed towards the idea that it is a civil war, that the Iraqis are all fighting each other and that the occupiers are only really crisis managers.

“A lot of blogging can be nerdish”

It was a couple of bloggers who finally got into American documents and got an admission from the US that they were using chemical weapons in Fallujah.

I have got some criticisms about blogging. A lot of it can be simply nerdish, but informed blogging can be really wonderful diary journalism.

It is the people who are doing the equivalent of journalism on the net who I admire. When I get up in the morning, instead of picking up a newspaper, I will log on and go through a whole series of sites for the best or relevant journalism on particular issues across the world. I will download those, then I will go and look at the paper. That change of habit as a journalist is quite interesting to me.

“Bloggers are battering down the doors of the club”

The defensiveness of journalists is quite something to behold. How dare the public challenge us rather than writing a polite letter to The Guardian for it to be edited and published if they are lucky? They can now say what they think. Alright, some of it, if it is simply invective or abuse, is worthless. But the way some leading journalists have reacted to factual meticulous analysis is quite revealing.