I’m giving a talk at City University on ‘Journalism in the Digital Age’ next Monday for Barbara Schofield’s undergraduates.
Here are six articles/resources that I’ve asked the students to read/explore beforehand. They’ve all come from my delicious account, which is now one year old and is starting to be useful.
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1. British Journalism Review. How SEO is Changing Journalism by Shane Richmond. [link]
2. Online Journalism Blog. Basic Principles of Online Journalism: B is for Brevity by Paul Bradshaw. [link]
3. 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students [link} (lots of good resources)
4. Save the Media Blog. ‘Old Journalism’ standards that shouldn’t die by Gina Chen [link]
5. Clay Shirky’s Blog. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable by Clay Shirky [link]
6. Peston’s Picks. What future for media and journalism? By Robert Peston [link]
(Updated with some extra suggestions)
7. Reuters: The rise of Social Media and its impact on mainstream journalism [link] (via @priyal)
8. Bitch Buzz. The Future of Journalism: just get on with it by Rebecca Thomson [link] (via @rebeccats)
9. The Guardian: In praise of the subeditor by Kim Fletcher [link] (via @Matt_Parsons)
10. Internet Evolution. The audience still exists if you believe it by Nicole Ferraro [link] (via @Matt_Parsons)
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What would you recommend that I add to this list? What are the best articles on the state/future of journalism that you’ve read this year?
Could you add something below? I’ll put it on the list.
You will be compensated with alcohol, cake or chocolate when I see you.
Here are a few different examples of the varying ways in which news has been broken over the past 250 years.
For the most part this is a visual/interactive list. It’s intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.
1. 1762: War between Britain and Spain (the news took seven months to reach the Philippines by ship)
“In 1762, when the Seven Years War widened into conflict between Britain and Spain, the enterprising British Admiralty sent a message to British forces in India to set off immediately to attack the Spanish colony in Manila in the Philippines. Arriving seven months after the original message had been sent from London, the British achieved the ultimate surprise attack, since word had still not arrived from Madrid that war had been declared at all. Their ship sailed under the Spanish defenders’ guns unchallenged before launching their successful assault.” –
2. February 1830 – The Oddingley Murders. Reports were spread across Britain by newspapers and also street-corner ballads in the month after the story broke.
Here are the first two verses of one:
The greatest of all miracles is going to unfold,
I’m going to unfold
Of two atrocious murder
As true as ever was told.
A horrible band of miscreants
A cruel plot did lay
‘Gainst Parker this Church Minister
To take his life away…
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3. 16 April 1912 – Reports of the Titanic’s Sinking(the news took around 30 hours to appear in the newspapers)
Here Stephen Bottomore explains the role that photographic images were beginning to play in breaking news events.
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Since mass-media became a major industry in the late 19th century, whenever there was a major news event, there was an accompanying scramble by journalists for all and any information about it.
When the Titanic went down the scramble became a positive melee, which reports and photographers hunting out any information that they could relate to the ship and its passengers.
This frenzy shook Bert Garai, later one of the great pressmen of the twentieth century who was starting out at the Havas news agency in Paris when the Titanic story broke. ‘It was most impressive and it gave me a glimpse of the speed, efficiency and enthusiasm such work entailed’, he later recalled.
Indeed in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic disaster, the press demonstrated just how quickly and pictorially it could cover a news story pictorially. Within a day or two of the sinking, newspapers and periodicals published artists’ impressions of the disaster, along with numerous photographs of the victims and other aspects of the story.
4. 1 June 1953 – The conquest of Everest(the news arrived in London one day later)
There is a fascinating story behind James Morris’ (now Jan Morris) scoop for the Times. The news of Hilary and Tenzing’s successful summit attempt was broken by the newspaper, but only after the reporter had foolled other journalists who were trying to intercept his message> He used the following coded communication:
5. 22 November 1963 – Assassination of President Kennedy(there was only a slight delay due to overloaded telephone exchanges between Dallas and the other parts of the US)
It is interested to see how these journalists received and delivered news back to their audience in the minutes following Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Jammed phones and unreliable testimony hampered their attempts to fish out the facts.
6. 31 August 1997 – Death of Princess Diana(no delay)
By the time of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, what we have is a smoothed, colourful and evolved version of the JFK video. This and the 11 September attacks might have been the last enormous breaking stories to be covered – almost unopposed – by the traditional media.
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7. 7 July 2005 – The London Bombings(reported by “citizen” journalists on the spot)
July 2005 was a big milestone for bloggers and the Internet. All of a sudden breaking news was being reported differently – by people with personal experience. Accidental journalists.
To look at the role of the Internet in breaking news, there are two very good starting points. Paul Bradshaw and Mindy McAdams.
I’m lucky enough to be one of the first eight people through the doors of City University’s new MA in non-fiction creative writing, and as it is coming to an end I thought I’d add this post.
It is a unique and brilliant course – the first of its kind on the country.
In the first year you read a book a week for two long terms – ripping each one apart for its narrative arc, structure, use of language and dialogue, characterisation and ‘truthfulness’ (not all non-fiction books are 100% factual), and then in the second year you get sent off to write your own one.
The work that we’ve all come out with spans several genres. There are memoirs on the art scene in LA, the culturally adrift Chinese community in Canada and another on Poland, war and jazz. There is a brilliant sociological account of race and sport (from Viv Richards to Barack Obama’s basketball court); a journalistic account of the infamous storm which resulted in the first ‘White Christmas’ and another which I can’t even mention for legal reasons.
Digital publishing
I’m fully aware that ‘I’m going to write a book’ is rivalled as a cliché only by walking into a guitar shop and sitting down to play the intro arpeggios to Stairway to Heaven.
To that ends I’ve tried (honestly) to keep my mouth shut as much as possible, but over the next months I might be trying some new ways of circulating my work that bends the traditional publication model.
These are some questions that I am thinking about:
Some snippets of our work are currently being put into an anthology. For any of you that are interested, here’s a working snapshot [replete with a stray typo - don't worry, I'm on it ] of my first two chapters here.
