Robert Hernandez: December 2010 archive
It's not your imagination, there are more journalism jobs
December 20, 2010
Have you been noticing more posts and tweets for journalism jobs lately? Me too.But to make sure it wasn't the spiked eggnog that was making me feel more positive about the journalism industry's financial state, I shot a quick email to the folks at JournalismJobs.com.
They immediately responded, confirming "jobs are up overall over the past 15-18 months."
Well, not to sound cynical, but nearly EVERYTHING is up when you compare it to a year and a half ago.
"At our lowest point, we fell to 650 or so job listings in mid-2009," added Dan Rohn, founder of the site, when I asked for more information. "We have a little more than 880 total listings now. That's about a 25 percent increase over the past 15 months."
He also said that at the site's peak in 2007, they had about 1,200 job listings, not including include 150 internship posts.
Eric Wee, president of JournalismNext.com, also confirms an increase. More...
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Journalism of the Web, not just on it: Jim Brady discusses how he got to TBD, and where he's going next
December 13, 2010
In the Web journalism world, it is hard to find someone who has been more of a pioneer than Jim Brady. From being a print sports reporter to becoming the executive editor at Washingtonpost.com to, most recently, launching (then leaving) TBD.com as the general manager, his career path is a proven track record committed to exploring Web journalism.
For this week's post, I had the privilege to "talk" with Brady a few days after he was the guest host on #wjchat, a weekly Web journalism chat held through Twitter. There were a few questions we had to cut because of time and hope to ask and explore them here.
Can you tell me a little about your background? Mainly, what was your first Web journalism job? How did you start? What was the environment like at the time? The culture?
The first Web job I had was in 1995. I'd been a sportswriter at The Washington Post for a while, and had always been interested in new media, as they called it back then. I had a Prodigy account, an AOL account and even an eWorld account. Loved the idea of getting information whenever and however I wanted, but there was no practical application for a journalist to work online in the early 1990s. But then The Post launched a subsidiary called Digital Ink, and I joined in April 1995 to help it launch The Post's first online adventure. We were a channel on a dial-up proprietary system called AT&T Interchange, which launched in late 1995. But we jumped on the proprietary bandwagon right as the Web took off, so we quickly shuttered our presence on Interchange and I was sports editor [for] the team that launched Washingtonpost.com in June 1996.
The culture was totally freewheeling and wide open, and none of the Web-print newsroom tensions existed at that point because, frankly, very few people at the paper gave a crap about what we were doing. We had an amazing creative bunch of folks there at that time, and many of them are still in digital media. It was a blast.
You have an amazing Web journalist, pioneering career. Your last adventure was with the D.C. local start-up TBD. Can you describe the news org for folks? And, the question on people's minds, the reason why you left it?
The concept of TBD was to produce a local news operation that wasn't just on the Web, but OF the Web. What that meant, in my view, was avoiding the trap of producing traditional journalistic forms and just throwing them up on the Web. To truly be OF the Web, you have to produce journalism in ways that works in that medium. Sometimes, that still means producing a traditional all-text narrative. But, more than that, it means truly engaging with your audience, which we did via very aggressive conversation and newsgathering done via social media, via live chats and by building a network of more than 200 local blogs and linking to them and selling advertising for many of them. Being of the Web means linking to other sites, so that you can become the first stop for readers interested in a topic and expose them to multiple voices in a region. It means not viewing mobile at something you have to do to check a box, but truly making an effort to produce a mobile site that thinks about that kind of information someone would want when disconnected from a laptop or desktop. It means not viewing the Web as just another platform. I hate the term "platform agnostic." I think it's totally backwards. Some content works on multiple platforms; most of it does not. So we tried to blend these elements -- all of which had been done separately in other places -- into a unique local blend. And the audience response and traffic suggests TBD is on to something. And many of the calls I've gotten about consulting are asking for guidance on how we built TBD, which suggests others see it as a viable model as well. More...
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Can journalists call a lie, a lie?
December 8, 2010
For me, one of the strongest messages that got tweeted out from Newsfoo, a recent invitation-only meeting of the journo+tech minds, was one by Andrew Golis, who said a major theme was "not just to report truth, but attack untruth."That goes to a question I've been thinking a lot about lately: Has a journalist now, or ever, had the ability... the option... the support... or even time... to call a lie, a lie?
Clearly I am oversimplifying complex scenarios we report, but in certain cases when the opportunity arises, do we have the courage to, you know, call bullsh*t on something?
We've all hear the interviews where we, as the audience, can tell the "expert" is just adding spin. But it feels like it's only in rare cases where we hear the reporter push back. The notion of truthsquading is very much a part of our journalistic DNA, but lately I've been feeling that we haven't been doing this.
So these are the questions bouncing around in my head: Is it a rarity? Was it always a rarity? What happens if you do or don't call someone out? And, if it is a rarity, why? What keeps us from doing one of the most important responsibilities in our job? More...
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Debate over journalism's required skills gets heated
December 1, 2010
Thanksgiving is traditionally the time distant family members come together over a delicious meal... and, well, fight. Last week a fight (okay, more like a heated debate) broke out over what skills a modern day journalist needs to have.It began with a post from Mark S. Luckie, The Washington Post's National Innovations Editor, founder of 10000words.net and author of The Digital Journalist's Handbook.
His 5 Myths about digital journalism sparked a flurry of reactions, most notably from Andy Boyle, digital developer with The New York Times Regional Media Group, Anthony DeBarros, senior database editor at USA TODAY and Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News at The New York Times and co-founder of DocumentCloud.org.
If you don't know these names, you should. They are some of the most innovative minds in the industry ... and I happen to respectfully disagree with all of them.
Well, sort of.
To be honest, I think there is more of a misunderstanding rather than a disagreement here.
Before I go on, let's address a question that may have popped into someone's mind: Who the hell am I to weigh in on this debate?
I've been a Web journalist for more than a decade and, prior to coming to USC Annenberg, I was the director of development for seattletimes.com where I led a team of engineers and designers. We developed and innovated projects for the site ranging from a taxonomy to geolocation to a custom commenting system to hijacking/hacking the print publishing system to data-driven special projects.
So, allow me to set up the framework from my point of view. More...
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