“We just would look at the board and say, ‘We already have too many white men. We can’t have more.’ Really that was it,” Hayes said. “Always, constantly just counting. Monitoring the diversity of the guests along gender lines, and along race and ethnicity lines. A general rule is if there are four people sitting at table, only two of them can be white men.”

They also make up for shows when they can’t book fewer than three white men. Hayes also said that the increased diversity of the guests inevitably increases the diversity of the subject matter discussed on the show, pushing him further away from the television news status quo.

While diversity remains a passive-aggressive issue with the media, Hayes’ primetime show keeps it simple by realizing there’s no difficult secret to avoiding a monopoly of white dudes.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. (RambergMediaImages/Flickr Creative Commons)

The topic of paid and unpaid freelance writing continues to develop Thursday. While someone accused Nate Thayer of plagiarizing the North Korea piece he wrote that set this all off, Ann Friedman at the Columbia Journalism Review broke down her freelancing philosophy.

Friedman pays her bills with a number of freelancing gigs, including two columns, and has created a paradigm that allows her to do unpaid and low-pay work that may benefit her in other ways. She separates her approach to doing free/low-pay work into four categories: to establish experience; because she was writing it anyway; to raise her profile; and to be part of a project she loves.

Unpaid work, she says, is a great way for some writers to make headway. It can even lead to some happy accidents, as it did for her when she started publishing some “silly, hand-drawn charts” for free, and it led to her getting a job to draw for a monthly magazine.

And then there’s Paul Carr, arguing for a sort of return to the high-flying days of Big Journali$m, when (apparently) a reporter could expense the purchase of a Mustang on assignment. Read the comments on this one — not everyone agrees with him — but it’s quite a defense of the value of in-depth, well-reported, and expensive stories.

Newspapers! (Wikimedia Commons: SusanLesch)

Ann Friedman at Columbia Journalism Review urges us to turn all death-of-print conversations into ones about process, since, she says, print is not dead but has just lost its primacy. She points to a recent piece in Flavorwire that praises “the rise of the artisanal magazine,” a sort of ode to the ability of certain publishers to keep an audience with print mags that have an aesthetic quality to them.

Friedman claims that web-only publications hold readers less strongly than those that manage to blend print and digital content. The teen magazine Rookie, for example, released a print collector’s item component to diehard readers.

Perhaps this conclusion will transcend the nostalgia for print and the simpleton takedowns of online journalism from the less-informed.

Credit: Mindy McAdams (macloo/Flickr)

Columbia Journalism Review has coverage of a talk at Columbia Journalism School’s Social Media Weekend, where two editors/producers from ProPublica talked about how their reporters have incorporated social media into their investigative process. Investigative reporters are indeed skittish about giving up their motives before formulating their projects, but ProPublica has no shame about using Facebook groups to gather sources for an ongoing report they’re doing on medical error.

By contacting potential victims of medical error on message boards and inviting them to join their Facebook group, ProPublica’s reporters (including award-winning investigative reporter Marshall Allen) can see how prevalent their issue remains and who to talk with further. They actively monitor and comment on their group to create a lively but controlled environment where no one gets hurt prematurely (doctors don’t get named, etc.).

“This will never replace reporting tools,” said senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora, “but it will augment them.”

NY Times app on a phone | Credit: methodshop.com/Flickr

For years now journalists have discussed how online paywalls can help “save” the newspaper industry, that if major print publications could just figure a way to charge for web content then the industry could thrive.

The New York Times is hardly your run-of-the-mill paper, but they have managed to lead the way with successful paywall strategies. After two years, the Times’ online page keeps adding tens of thousands of subscribers per quarter, according to CJR. In the fourth quarter, NYT online reached 640,000 digital subscriptions and added 74,000 new subscribers.

Still, as writer Ryan Chittum points out, the paywall was really about slowing the decline of its print operation. The company still has a way to go before it can make up in digital advertising what it’s losing in its quickly vanishing print ad revenues.

Al Jazeera English newsroom–the old school. (Wikimedia Commons: Wittylama)

Ann Friedman at CJR has a post for her series #realtalk that suggests freelance journalists should consider forming collectives. She’s seen it work well with her friends in the graphic design community and in groups like the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto, where writers are rarely at a loss for ideas.

“One of the most tangible benefits of working in a shared office space is having officemates who pass along assignments when they’re too busy,” said The Grotto’s co-founder Ethan Watters, according to Friedman’s post. “Over the years, I can safely say that I’ve covered at least half of my office rent through such overflow work. I’ve also profited from having a stable of writing pros on hand to pick up my slack, critique first drafts, and give me advice.”

Though writing is thought of as a solitary pursuit, Friedman argues, journalists benefit from a newsroom atmosphere.  It “makes a lot of sense for those of us who work freelance,” she says, because most freelancers have left newspaper and/or magazine offices. In a collective space, journalists can collaborate to complete projects, share story ideas, learn each other’s skills (I’ll take your website design and raise you my photojournalism…)

The point is, really, why not? Of course, you have to know people you trust and whose work you admire, but if you’ve ventured off into freelancing chances are you do.

(Wikimedia Commons: Google Inc)

Google recently released its twelfth end-of-the-year list of trending searches, according to CJR.  They collected data from 55 countries to see what topics, people and events were the most searched terms for 2012.  Whitney Houston and Kate Middleton were the most-searched people (with Middleton’s topless photos earning the number two spot on most-searched events, behind Hurricane Sandy).  One Direction, the boy band, was the top trending term on image searches.  “It’s quite a snapshot of what makes us human: a blend of guilty pleasures and higher pursuits,” said Amit Singhal, SVP of Google said on their blog.  If you’ve paid attention to news in the last year, all these terms remain all too familiar, with news sites paying close attention to Google Analytics to drive their content focus.

Washington Post building back before the web was even a thing. (Flickr Creative Commons: DC Public Library Commons)

Dean Starkman at CJR has a meditation on what will survive when The Washington Post puts up paywalls for its online content.  Weighing sustainability and readability issues, Starkman mourns the possibility that the Post’s recent shows of public-interest feature reporting won’t rake in audience dollars. He offers a page-one profile of a lower-middle class high school student struggling to make it out of her home town.

“[L]et’s face it,” he writes, “the downer subject, and the five screens of copy, all but cry, ‘skip me.’  It had other obstacles to popularity. It’s written in newspaper-feature-ese, so some of the writing might seem strained, depending on your taste.  I couldn’t find it on my mobile phone, either on the Post’s mobile app or via my browser.  The piece is economics-statistics-free–a smart editorial decision, but it doesn’t leave much room for interactivity.”

Starkman notes that type of public interest reporting is important because it connects elite readers with people and stories they would otherwise never know about. But it also takes months to report and comes, therefore, with a hefty price tag.