OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Pamela Moreland

California

Homepage: http://www.gldnwhl.com

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These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.

Don't just blame the player - blame the game, too

October 18, 2011
I would have hired former Politico.com reporter Kendra Marr.

Why? Because her resume and my resume are so alike.

Same journalism undergrad and grad school. Same love of journalism. We both worked in the San Francisco Bay Area region. Both women of color. In other words, if I was a hiring editor interviewing her for a job, I would figure that we shared the same journalistic values.

Yet I also understand how the kind of plagiarism accusations lodged against her could lead a young reporter to resign from a good job.

Sure, the player has to shoulder the blame. But I blame the game, too.

These days chances are shrinking for an ambitious journalist to get a job that pays a middle-class salary with benefits. Young journalists no longer have the luxury of making mistakes out of the spotlight. If you want a job, you have to go directly into the big leagues. More likely than not, your job will be on the growing digital media side of the business. The side, to be polite, that is more like the Wild West than reasoned halls of journalism school.

What's more, the Internet, and its research techniques, make it easy to find facts, stories, sources and so much more. A lot of the material is already written in coherent sentences and has attribution, which under the current rules of the game, can be an embedded link to the original news story.

Don't get me started about cutting and pasting. Yes, I can understand how someone can cut and paste reference material on the wrong take (Google Docs, anyone?) and, in the rush to deadline, forget what is yours and what belongs to someone else. These days it's just too easy to make a series of career-ending errors early in the game.

But the game deserves blame, too. More...

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From the classroom to the digital marketplace: How we got to launch

July 19, 2010
The team behind foodgal.com called my bluff. Well, maybe I wasn’t bluffing. Maybe I am ready to become a digital media entrepreneur. We’ll find out on Thursday (July 22, 2010).

Here’s the back story. I took a buyout from the San Jose Mercury News in March 2008. I was the AME for Features when I left. My intent was to start my own digital media company. During my 20-plus years in journalism, I had supervised the creation of news and feature sections, redesigns and special projects. That was on top of meeting daily deadlines. With my three years as the Merc’s newsroom-based Online Team Leader for mercurynews.com, I had hands-on experience with news sites and felt the exhilarating rush that comes with Web publishing.

I started Golden Wheel Communications (GWC), a digital news and information company. I talked a good game. I went to workshops financing startups. I attended KDMC’s Media News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. I took a Stanford night class called “Running Internet Advertising Campaigns.” But I never launched a Web product. More...

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