David Carr praises new Columbia director Steve Coll

April 2, 2013 by

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.”

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We’re living in the golden age of journalism

March 19, 2013 by

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.”

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The Atlantic responds to unpaid freelancer drama, offers a State of the Biz

March 6, 2013 by
Back when The Atlantic had a lot more poetry in it! (Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)

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.”

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