(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.”

The old NY Times, pre-web. (Flickr Creative Commons: Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library Archives)

Poynter has a rundown of The New York Times’ “Snow Project,” the text and multimedia project the paper put together to tell the story of skiers and snowboarders trapped under an avalanche in Washington.  The Snow Project has impressed more than a few people.  The Times’ Graphic Director Steve Duenes told Poynter that the goal of the project was to “find ways to allow readers to read into, and then through multimedia, and then out of multimedia.  So it didn’t feel like you were taking a detour, but the multimedia was part of the one narrative flow.”

Check out the Snow Project page here.

NY Times from 1960. (Flickr Creative Commons: The U.S. National Archives)

The New York Times recently reported that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg might buy The Financial Times.  Why are billionaires thinking of investing in newspapers, the dying breed of media?  AdAge suggests it may be because several papers (including The New York Times) are doing quite well.  The piece also says that struggling papers don’t dissuade shrewd buyers either, as evidenced by Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev’s purchase of The Independent.  The AdAge compiled graphics showing some of the current winning and losing papers.