Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

A discussion of the 'new' journalism

Follow this link to a online discussion on the Lucy Ann Lance Show (WLBY 1290) with Larry Eiler, Eiler Communications; and Charles Eisendrath, Director of the University of Michigan Knight-Wallace Fellows / Former Foreign Correspondent for Time Magazine.

It is about a 40-minute discussion of the status of journalism and journalism education today. As the timer counts down at about 24:30 you will hear a critique of AnnArbor.com and later a defense of print journalism. At about 4:30 there is an additional critique of Newhouse and AnnArbor.com.

When you get to the page at the above link you'll need to scroll down to the April 19, 2011 item and click on the "Click and Listen" tab.

Pulitzer Prize awarded to old fashioned beat reporting

The LA Times won a well-deserved Pulitzer for its work on the Bell, California public employee salary scandal. In its coverage of the prize, Poynter describe the various interactive tools used by the reporters to enhance the story.

What is interesting to me is that many of us suggested to our FJ leaders more than ten years ago that we should use the Internet and website to post the many documents that we were obtaining in investigations. So many times, we gathered information that was interesting, but simply too extensive to use in the printed version of the story.

I know that I had a direct discussion with the current content czar at AnnArbor.com about how we should make those documents available to our readers when we were first discussing how to use the Internet in the early 2000s.

Other reporters had similar suggestions, but what we heard back at the time is that MLive.com was not set up to do that kind of thing. The Michigan Booth group suffered, and continues to suffer, from the limitations of MLive.com and the fact that they can't, or won't, do the kind of linking and attachments that you find on other more sophisticated newspaper websites.

So the same ideas many of us were suggesting back then contributed to a Pulitzer at the Times this week.

Oops, maybe we should have disclosed this conflict of interest a little earlier

If you saw the 60 Minutes piece on Greg Mortenson and his alleged charity rip-off you will appreciate his hometown paper finally acknowledging that one of its editors had a direct connection to the charity.

Here's the Bozeman newspaper's coverage of the controversy after the 60 Minutes piece.