Mediamania

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Planning for a major news event never gets easier than this — we know what will happen, when, and where, to the minute, and we know what the outcome will be. But this advisory sent out by The Associated Press is still something to behold. Here’s how the world’s largest news-gathering organization will cover tomorrow’s royal wedding. Read the rest of this entry →

John Douglas Marshall.

I’ve been involuntarily unemployed twice in the past 10 years, once for 13 months, so the plight of John Douglas Marshall, the former book critic and an editor at the late Seattle Post-Intelligencer, sure sounded familiar. Writing for Crosscut, Marshall says he’s not the only wordsmith still struggling to find work two years after Hearst closed the print edition.

I knew little of “Unemployment Insurance” before 2009, assumed that those receiving such benefits were unfortunates lacking in initiative or training or schooling or something. What I have learned since 2009 is how unemployment can happen to anyone and how much work is required to find possible work.

This, too, is a sad truth:

Little did I know that being over 60 could be such an economic curse. I’m a writer, for godsakes, not a pro athlete.

The writer in the Crosscut office, 2007.

One of the little-cited down sides of the free-journalism “economy” is the fact you don’t get what you don’t pay for. By that I mean a news outlet can’t set its own agenda — it has to publish what people are willing to create for little or no compensation, and that content likely is not the most newsworthy thing you can think of. You are a slave to what comes over the transom.

Even the journalism you can pay for, at $50 or even $500 an article, is going to be limited by the talent willing to work at those rates: the very green, or the seasoned and retired.

This was writ large for me when I helped launch Crosscut.com in 2007 (that’s me in photo, in the Crosscut office) as the Seattle local news site’s first editor. Read the rest of this entry →

Wow, even Fisher Communications-hating blogger Michael Hood hates the people from New York trying to take over our hometown media company, owner of KOMO-TV, KVI-AM, KPLZ-FM and others:

Fisher CEO colleen brown “responsible for $173 million in losses” – BlatherWatch.

A Seattle Times baseball writer files a game story on deadline but doesn’t write it through to reflect a come-from-behind upset. It winds up in print. Kathy Gill of the University of Washington explains:

How Transparent Do Corrections Need to Be in Online Journalism? | concreteghost.

The slot must have been across the street or something that night.

Gary Love and I have been very encouraged by the enthusiasm that greeted our re-launch a couple of weeks ago of Newsdex Seattle. If you’re wondering what Newsdex is, read this introduction to our social-media measurement tool. For now we’re focusing on measuring the social networks of independent news and other media websites that are actively and visibly extending their brands to social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Read the rest of this entry →