What’s Needed in the Newsroom in 2008

Via Romenesko: Even at the college level, where you might expect all students to be on board with the notion of a digital-centric, publish-it-right-now, multi-media approach to news, I still run into budding journalists who cling to the hope of finding a traditional newspaper reporting job. Especially in the newspaper profession, the notion — outdated, … Continue Reading

Raja Rao’s Kanthapura part 2

I get so much traffic to my post on Kanthapura and it seems most people are looking for Cliff’s Notes or something. Then I found this post by Manu Saxena, a plot summary of the book, of sorts: The story, at the beginning, is very boring. That sort of sets the tone for the entire book.     The language … Continue Reading

Why do we still “Mapquest” directions?

Last month I wrote briefly about how “facebook” has become a verb. “To facebook someone” is equivalent of saying “to look up someone’s profile on Facebook.com.” This makes sense. To “google” is to perform an internet search (never mind that Google has its fingers in pretty much every business and software known to man). To … Continue Reading

One more resolution for ’08

I will never mention LOLcats again. If we have a LOLcat bible and LOLcode there is nothing more that I can add to this conversation. So with a heavy heart, for the last time I say K, THX, BAI.

Alexandria (Va.) Times sold

I know I said I’d not be posting on my vacation, but the last couple of days have been kind of rough. The last straw was waking up and finding that the Alexandria Times, where I’ve freelanced for the past few months, had been abruptly sold to NewsUSA, a company that rewrites press releases and … Continue Reading

Can blogs do journalism?

Great post by Scott Carp over at Publishing 2.0 about Gawker’s search for a real live journalist. Nick Denton, publisher/owner of Gawker Media (aka that one guy who’s supposedly raking in all that cash) , wrote this in the post advertising a managing editor opening: “We’re casting a wide net for candidates, beyond the clubby … Continue Reading

Anyone else still baffled by “w00t”?

Earlier this month, visitors to M-W.com voted “w00t” the 2007 Word of the Year. I’ve been waiting to post this because I have been hoping that if I let enough time pass, this will sink in.  Would w00t–which means, as the dictionary succinctly put it, “yay”–not be better served as the word of five years … Continue Reading

Can the San Jose Mercury News save itself?

“We all look at our slumping circulation and revenue numbers and wonder what kind of changes it will take to grow — or even keep — our audience. The good news is that we can find out. The answers lie in the people who walk, talk, drive, shop, and read among us every day.” “The … Continue Reading

Tuesday’s Tools: Analyze a block of text with Textalyzer

Textalyzer, a free online tool, combines Microsoft Word-style readability statistics with  detailed “instance counting” for up to (it says) 1000 words. That means it will display a table with up to the 1000 most commonly used words in your document; I doubt anyone would ever need that many, but it’s there if you need it. Textalyzer … Continue Reading