My Beck Pages http://mybeckpages.posterous.com Most recent posts at My Beck Pages posterous.com Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:49:58 -0800 This Is Broken: From Game Stories to, Well, Everything « Reinventing the Newsroom http://mybeckpages.posterous.com/this-is-broken-from-game-stories-to-well-ever http://mybeckpages.posterous.com/this-is-broken-from-game-stories-to-well-ever
Why didn’t we change? Journalists are masters at filtering, synthesizing and presenting information, yet we’ve spent more than a decade repurposing a 19th-century form of specialized storytelling instead of starting fresh with the possibilities of a new medium. Newspapers could have been Wikipedia, instead of being left to try and learn from it. And what are we learning? The news article is in some fundamental ways just as broken as the game story — if it weren’t, Jimmy Wales wouldn’t see a surge of traffic to Wikipedia in the wake of any big news event. We need to rethink the basics: If we were starting today, would we do this? But when will we unshackle ourselves from print and really ask the question? And at what point will the answer come too late to matter?

Smart take on reinventing (read dumping) sports game stories and traditional news articles by Jason Fry.

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Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:32:00 -0800 Smart thoughts on next steps for journalism http://mybeckpages.posterous.com/buzz-machine-the-building-block-of-journalism http://mybeckpages.posterous.com/buzz-machine-the-building-block-of-journalism

A running list of thinking on our next steps for smart journalism...

Read and summarize these:

How Social Media is Taking the News Local

--From Mashable

Five concrete steps to improving the news

--From Matt at Newsless.org

 

Buzz Machine: The building block of journalism is no longer the article

The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. I’ll argue here that the new building block is the topic.

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative.

Read Jeff Jarvis' full post

Another good quote:

Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter, as everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room — and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information and understanding.

More links from Jeff's post:

LATER: See Steve Yelvington on community memory and what he’s building.

Here’s Folkenflik’s story.

 

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1689817/youngme_reasonably_small.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bmKtNJ1FoR3 Martin Beck mybeckpages Martin Beck