(Bluemarine/Wikimedia Commons)

As USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism looks for a new journalism director, Columbia’s Graduate Journalism School hired former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll to lead. Though some have criticized Coll for taking a job sculpting tomorrow’s journalists having never tweeted once in his life, The New York Times’ David Carr wrote a positive appraisal of Coll in which he calls the Pulitzer-winner a Dumbledore to Columbia’s Hogwarts.

Carr, the Times’ media columnist, suggests that Twitter isn’t central to journalism (“my boss likes to point out that I tweet constantly but Twitter never sends me a check”). He also argues that Coll definitely has a knack for thinking ahead, evidenced by an early plan to equip reporters with portable cameras, which Carr made fun of at the time.

“I think the great digital journalism of our age has yet to be created,” Coll told Carr. “The cohort that is at Columbia now is the one that will be making the journalism that is going to shape our democracy; working on mining data sets, creating video that is not 2012, coming up with much more powerful ways of accruing and displaying information.”

(daodeqing/Flickr Creative Commons)

These are the glory days of American journalism. Never before have we had access to the variety and depth of information we have now, and never with such immediate availability. So says Matthew Yglesias of Slate in a post debunking any notion that the struggles of print media reflect a larger cancer growing in the heart of the field.

His piece comes in the wake of Pew’s latest State of the Media Report, which he says “makes no mention of the Web’s speed, range, and depth, or indeed any mention at all of audience access to information as an important indicator of the health of journalism.”

He writes: “[The Pew results are] a blinkered outlook that confuses the interests of producers with those of consumers, confuses inputs with outputs, and neglects the single most important driver of human welfare—productivity. Just as a tiny number of farmers now produce an agricultural bounty that would have amazed our ancestors, today’s readers have access to far more high-quality coverage than they have time to read.”

Yglesias takes us through his rich process of reading up on current events, showing how readers can build on breaking news by following links and recommendations towards in-depth features and even books written on the subject. Digital media also allows journalists more tools for crafting stories and presenting complex information at a much quicker pace.

“In other words, any individual journalist working today can produce much more than our predecessors could in 1978. And the audience can essentially read all of our output. Not just today’s output either. Yesterday’s and last week’s and last month’s and last year’s and so forth. To the extent that the industry is suffering, it’s suffering from a crisis of productivity.”

Back when The Atlantic had a lot more poetry in it! (The Atlantic Monthly/Wikimedia Commons)

On Monday freelancer Nate Thayer created a buzz when he made it known that The Atlantic had asked to republish his work without offering to pay him for it. Two days later, Alexis Madrigal, one of the magazine’s senior editors, offers a very long, very personal reply that also turns out to be a meditation on the state of the industry.

Madrigal opens with harrowing details about the depths of his early freelance days, where he was paid $12 for pieces and had to go to the ATM drunk to handle his credit card balance. But he also gives the publications’ side of the freelance story. According to him, it’s not the big publications’ fault that they can’t pay freelancers as much as they’d like to (ostensibly). The economic model for online publications has become equally pressurized.

Madrigal, a digital editor, says they have six options:

1. Write a lot of original pieces.
2. Take partner content.
3. Find people who are willing to write for a small amount of money.
4. Find people who are willing to write for no money.
5. Aggregate like a mug.
6. Rewrite press releases so they look like original content.

Madrigal says he sympathizes most with No. 1 and No. 5, but that digital journalism mores must be taken case by case, as everyone (except the high rollers) is making compromises to keep afloat. His parting shot offers little in the way of consolation:

“Anyway, the biz ain’t what it used to be, but then again, for most people, it never really was. And, to you Mr. Thayer, all I can say is I wish I had a better answer.”

Newspapers are for the birds! (Flickr Creative Commons: Nationaal Archief)

Poynter chatted with Chris Seper, founder and CEO of MedCity Media, who says “there has never been a better time to be in journalism.”  Seper spent nearly a decade working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is now in its death throes.  “I think in the past we associated journalism jobs with big outlets that contained hundreds upon hundreds of jobs,” he said in the chat.  “And we associated them with traditional media outlets.  That’s not the case now.” 

But because of the rise of digital, he said, there are “more opportunities to publish than ever before. To start your own shops. To launch and serve readers in the ways they truly want to see themselves served.”

You can read the whole chat here.

Murdoch in 2009. (via Flickr Creative Commons: World Economic Forum)

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. said Monday that The Daily, its iPad-only “newspaper,” will shut down December 15.  While Murdoch is facing financial turmoil with most of his print publications, The Daily served as an experiment of how newspapers could respond to their technological armageddon.  The Daily launched in February 2011 and fired a third of its staff in July, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.

Marco Arment pointed out that The Daily’s staff size was unsustainable and its content not up to par with things The New Yorker or The Atlantic published.  “There’s no room in today’s market for publications like The Daily,” he said, “and their heyday ended long before the iPad launched.”

Another CJR piece said the fact that viewers had to download the whole publication each issue made The Daily look impractical next to simpler mediums.  The piece also looks at numerous ways the iPad provides less than an ideal format for reading stories.

(Flickr Creative Commons: mirkolorenzmustang)

For those hoping that the in-depth journalism of the near future doesn’t only revolve around Storifies:

Poynter held a symposium in October that hoped to discuss the ethics of journalism in the digital age.  Instead of hopping into the usual conversations about accuracy and objectivity, several journos wrote about how preoccupied they became with discussing the formation of a new depth and humanity to digital pieces.  How do you fit a moving profile onto a smart phone?

Craig Silverman argues that journalism should always be rooted in empathy, not technology, and another Poynter piece shows journalism compassion in action in a piece about life on a South Dakota Indian reservation.