Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: journalism

  • Longreads is thriving

    Longreads is thriving under Automattic. It’ll be interesting to see where this ends. They’re using a member funded model to pay for original stories, with a bonus attached:

    Longreads has raised about $250,000 from “thousands of members” since it added memberships in 2012. The suggested monthly amount is now $5 a month or $50 a year, though readers can choose to donate any amount, and Armstrong said that the company’s gotten some thousand-dollar donations. All of that money now goes to pay authors, and WordPress.com matches every $1 from a reader with an additional $3, which clearly makes it a lot easier for Longreads to do what it wants to do.

  • The 2017 Pulitzer winners

    Looking for something to read the next couple of days? Longreads has made a list of all the Pulitzer Prize winners this year. Enjoy.

  • What's wrong with journalists

    Travis Loose, writing on Medium, under the Society For Professional Journalists banner:

    Citizen journalists are springing up everywhere, and in some cases they’re skewing the definition of what actually makes a journalist, which is no good for a number of obvious reasons.

    I don’t know about you, but I haven’t spent the past four years of my life accruing $40,000 in student loan debt just so I could compete against some blogger with zero journalistic training who Snapchats stories and calls it photojournalism, or posts grammatically atrocious, subjective columns on Medium and calls it reporting.

    Hang on now, your point is that because you spent time and money you didn’t have, you shouldn’t be competing with people who didn’t? That’s not just whiny, that’s downright stupid. There is absolutely nothing to gain by bashing citizen journalism, bloggers, or whatever you want to call people who add to the debate, the reporting, and to journalism. If you spent all that time and money wisely, you’d surely realize that you’re not only well equipped to meet reality as it is (as opposed to what you might think it should be), as well as understand that you don’t know everything.

    The linked piece ends by declaring it is, in fact, what journalism is now. I’m sure you all are capable of coming up with a snarky comeback to that on your own.

  • The Gothamist wants you to write for $5,000

    This is an awesome experiment that any semi-serious journalist should take a closer look at. Gothamist wants to get in on the long-form feature thing, and will pay one journalist $5,000 to write a piece landing somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 words.

    We’ll cover the editing and production and then publish the piece to the various eBook singles platforms (Kindle, Apple, etc.) with a reasonable price: $1 to $3. Then we’ll handle advertising the piece on our NYC site. If this experiment makes a profit, we’ll share them with the writer once we’ve recouped our initial costs. Will this work? We’re not sure—but we want to find out.

    I love it. The concept isn’t exactly new, new ventures such as Byliner are already dabbling in it in an organized fashion, but it is awesome nonetheless.

  • SEO isn't killing journalism

    I think it is time to calm down, take a deep breath, and drop those MacNook keyboards for a little while. Maybe that’s the medicine needed for this SEO sickness that’s been going around for some time, culminating in the AOL Way leak and then AOL’s deal with the Huffington Post.

    Enter the “SEO is killing journalism” blog posts, editorials and other echo chamber nonsense. (more…)

  • Valleywag's off the mark in post about journos becoming coders

    Valleywag’s Ryan Tate is off the mark in his post Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer. That probably doesn’t surprise most of you, but still. The post itself is entertaining enough, including a nice lists of journalists coming from technical backgrounds, but I got stuck on this:

    Your typical professional blogger might juggle tasks requiring functional knowledge of HTML, Photoshop, video recording, video editing, video capture, podcasting, and CSS, all to complete tasks that used to be other people’s problems, if they existed at all: production, design, IT, etc.

    Coding is the logical next step down this road, albeit one that might only appeal to more ambitious or technically-minded journalists, the sort of people who want to launch their own websites, or attach a truly powerful and interactive feature to an existing one.

    While that is true, that some journalists need to know HTML and a bunch of other things to properly function in the online publishing landscape, the leap to coding isn’t the logical next step. Quite the opposite actually, since the CMS’s get better all the time, WYSIWYG is getting ever more competent and the need to actually understand what’s behind your site is shrinking all the time. (more…)

  • Pressmeddelanden med bloggkommentarer

    Det här är coolt. Newsdesk, som publicerar en väldig massa pressmeddelanden, har kopplat in bloggosfären, via Twingly förstås. Newsdesk-grundaren Kristofer Björkman tipsade mig om det i en kommentar till min svenska YouTube-post, och mycket riktigt syns den nu i Twingly-rutan på pressmeddelandet hos Newsdesk. Läs mer hos Twingly och på Newsdesks PR2.0-blogg.

    Så varför är det här coolt? Jo, Newsdesk är en källa för nyheter för gammelmedia. Det betyder att de, redan i insamlingsfasen, kopplas in i bloggosfären. Definitivt en bra sak, även om risken för att slöa journalister skall nosa upp bloggares vinklingar och lansera dem som sina egna plötsligt blev betydligt större. Nej, jag är inte alls cynisk…