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.

(Wikimedia Commons: Cortega9)

Online journalists take a special kind of abuse, especially when they willingly throw around controversial opinions like elbows.  CJR discusses Chris Chase, who they dub “the most hated blogger in America.” Chase, 31, a former elementary school teacher, writes about sports differently than other sportswriters (if you want to call Chase a sportswriter instead of that derogatory term “blogger”).  He writes, for instance, about Tim Tebow’s muscles.

“Chris Chase is the Nickelback of sportswriters,” one of Chase’s critics wrote.  “He is this polarizing force of terribleness that no one can get rid of.”

While print journalists have always insulted each other, the Internet gives us the opportunity to field abuse from the hoi polloi. Abuse, you might say, has no constructive purpose. The complaint about the blogosphere has always been that it allows for too many feeble writers to spout off at will. But perhaps Internet trolling helps to weed out those “bloggers” who don’t have Chase’s fortitude. After all, solid journalism comes in no small part from determination.

An old issue of The Virginian Pilot. (Flickr Creative Commons: Jesse757)

While most of the media world considers the ethics of the New York Post’s recent front-page photograph, Mallary Jean Tenore at Poynter meditated on “longform journalism.”  By all accounts, longform has found a home online despite original worries it would be killed by readers’ unwillingness to read it on a screen.

Tenore’s piece (“Longform journalism morphs in print as it finds a new home”) looks at how The Virginian Pilot has stretched longform journalism across print, online and booklet formats.  The Pilot apparently found a way to make money from this technique.