Print supplements enrich online publications

Newspapers! (Wikimedia Commons: SusanLesch)

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.

Journalists Worry About Publishing Too Much Information

(Wikimedia Commons)

Jeff Jarvis tackles the question of how ethical and shrewd it is for the media to publish things like a map of gun permit applicants.  Some journalists, like David Carr and Jim Wilse (who Jarvis says is the “best American newspaper editor [he’s] ever worked with”), have felt uneasy about such releases.

Jarvis comes to a different conclusion: “It is not up to journalists to decide what gun permits are public information.  It’s up to us as citizens to decide that, as a matter of law.  If there is something wrong with that, then change the law.  If society is not comfortable with making that information public, then don’t try to make it somewhat public, public-with-effort…There’s no half-pregnant.  In the net age, there’s no slightly public.”

 

The New York Times Takes a New Step with “Snow Project”

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.