Category Archives: Journalism

Journalism

Sites making me giggle lately

Facebook is not just a way to waste time, its a way to find more ways to waste time. Via Facebook, I’ve stumbled on a few genius sites that I would now like to share. You know, its like paying it forward.

First off, Criggo makes me giggle like nobody’s business. That’s where I lifted the image to the left. The blog  posts the funniest tidbits from newspapers throughout the country (I presume) and sticks an ironic headline on it.

The other site I found when my buddy and former GNP refugee Mark put himself down as a fan of it — Overheard in the Newsroom. OMG, who knew such tiny tidbits of conversation could make you collapse in giggles? One of my favorite tidbits recently was this one:

“I wonder who actually says to themself, ‘You know, I really need to bedazzle my hoo-ha.’”

One features copy editor to another, about a bikini-wax story that said some spas will “add crystals” for additional cost.

Oh, there’s so many more. You must discover them for yourself.


Bad header info

Why oh why do we insist on creating pages with bad header information?

I don’t understand, journalists. I’ve seen this repeatedly on IBD. Without this information, the headlines don’t show up, no one knows what the link is about. C’mon!

/ rant

Newspagedesigner.com goes dark

Is it any surprise, with so many actual newspapers are losing revenue at an exponential rate, that the site that hosted designers’ news pages for free has finally gone down?

I only discovered the the site went down last night, when Trinity tried to check on his portfolio and got an error message. The only blog post on the darkened site I found via a casual Google search was from Feb. 17. The front page’s message says:
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Can Twitter save journalism?

Don’t be silly, I’m not suggesting that at all. But it still cracks me up how journalists latch on to what they think might be the new thing — i.e. Twitter — when there’s no evidence that it will actually stick around and become something that regular people — you know, ones who don’t spend eight hours a day online or texting on their cell phones — will actually use. Even Twitter’s CEO admits that:

Where Stone will say things like, “We’re here to impact people’s lives; we own up to our leadership position here,” Williams admits that he has trouble getting his mom to figure out his service. He is also wary of all the publicity Twitter has generated, mostly from nervous journalists striving to stay relevant in a free-information age.

You can forgive journalists their Twitter obsession. If you haven’t noticed, we’re in an economic clusterphooey of historic proportions, and many analysts are blaming the media’s failure, in particular, to create information-sharing services like Twitter. But Twitter isn’t making any money yet, either.

It’s a little irritating, to be honest. Right now, journalists are spreading themselves too thin to actually be any good. Learn how to put stuff online? Sure! Twitter? OK! How about blogging tidbits that won’t make it into the paper? Sounds great!

What a load of crap. And FYI, I don’t text, much less Twitter. I do enough in my spare time.

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Post-journalism blogging

Blogging has come a long way. There was a time when it was the bastard child of writing — totally beneath the realm of novel writing, a step below harried dignity of newspaper journalism, not quite to the standards of freelance writing. After the muckraking and so-called yellow blogging years of Drudge Report-tidbits of salacious news (he’s not a blogger, yet everyone groups him into the group of bloggers), it seems that authors and journalists, and of course, freelance writers, find having a blog is as big a must-have as a personal website.

Now that journalism as we all know it seems to be on its deathbed (which I actually don’t believe), old school journalists are turning to blogging (finally) as if it could be their saving grace. Could you go from buy-out to being the boss of your own work via a blog? That’s the eternal question. The latest asker is a former Orlando Sentinel food writer. And this is what he found:

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