(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.”

(Screenshot of Visual Revenue website logo)

Analytics firm Visual Revenue is offering services to big-time news outlets like The Atlantic and USA Today to help them determine the best ways to use their online presences. According to Nieman Journalism Lab, news organizations with specific personalities develop specific needs in their publishing and social media strategies.

“Even fantastic content can die if you don’t put it out right,” Visual Revenue CEO Dennis Mortensen told Adrienne LaFrance. “The Atlantic can put out content from four o’clock in the afternoon to nine in the evening and it’s equally powerful. It is very much property-specific. I can’t take my learning from The Atlantic and copy over to the Economist.”

LaFrance says that one thing remains constant for all publications: “tweeting more is better than not tweeting enough but tweeting all at once is worse than not tweeting at all.”

Visual Revenue uses editorial information provided by publications and inputs it into an algorithm that objectively determines optimal tweet and publishing timing. The robotic element, they say, makes the publication as productive as possible. Mortensen said that before The New York Daily News began using Visual Revenue, it was putting new content on its homepage about 80 times a day. Now it updates 160 times a day.

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.

(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.