“There has never been a better time to be in journalism”

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’s News Corp. Shuts Down the Daily

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.

Poynter Symposium Talks Digital Journalism Ethics

(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.