http://erikgable.com Personal site Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:22:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This Nieman Lab post about Voice of San Diego's search for an "engagement editor" got me thinking about all the things somebody in that kind of position could do -- and just how far the potential extends. OK, sure, they'd hang out on Twitter and Facebook, and probably serve as the ... http://erikgable.com/2010/03/31/10-things-that-could-go-into-a-community-engagement-editors-job-description/ Two recent posts dealing with building static (or relatively static) reference material into news sites to augment the flow of day-to-day news ... and, yes, this is one of those posts that's more for my own future reference than anything else: Robin Sloan writes at Snarkmarket about the economics concept of ... http://erikgable.com/2010/02/01/building-reference-material-into-news-sites/ I've found myself quoting Steve Buttry a lot lately, particularly his posts about innovation in the news business. In an August 2009 post titled "Newspapers' original sin: Not failing to charge but failing to innovate," he wrote: The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising ... http://erikgable.com/2010/01/30/why-my-new-years-resolution-is-to-learn-about-programming/ A "where news comes from" study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that the vast majority of original reporting on six major news stories in Baltimore, Md., came from newspapers. A nice little ego boost, certainly, for those of us who work for conventional media outlets. ... http://erikgable.com/2010/01/11/notes-on-pews-where-news-comes-from-study/ From 1989 to 1992, Pamela Hughes' class at the Waldorf School of Cape Cod published a class newspaper called The Waldorf Weekly. We published 11 editions in all: six in third grade, four in fourth grade and one in fifth grade. Headlines were mostly handwritten, stories were mostly typed on a ... http://erikgable.com/2010/01/04/my-first-journalism-job/ Jay Rosen recently interviewed Dirck Halstead, editor and publisher of The Digital Journalist, about that publication's December 2009 editorial, titled "Let's Abolish 'Citizen Journalists'." Others have done a far better job than I can of addressing the editorial's arguments (see both story links above), but I want to zoom in on ... http://erikgable.com/2009/12/09/the-news-as-food-an-analogy-for-the-citizen-journalism-debate/ Gawker says: "Nearly 90,000 print jobs have been lost in the last year." I say: "What's a print job?" Newspapers and magazines are considered part of the print publishing category. Which makes sense to a large extent. But I suspect most news organizations have very few people who can be defined as ... http://erikgable.com/2009/12/06/90k-print-jobs-lost-whats-a-print-job/ My boss from 2002 to 2005 -- Jeff Wilson, publisher of The Fairfield Ledger -- had a question he would always ask when groups of children toured the newspaper offices. It was this: "How many of you have ever had your name or picture in the paper?" Usually, about half of the ... http://erikgable.com/2009/12/05/raise-your-hand-if-youve-ever-been-in-the-paper/ This post was originally written for GateHouse Media's GHNewsroom.com. 1. Comment threads can be part of our journalism. We're accustomed to thinking of a story as a complete package: We went out, we discovered what there is to know, and we presented it to our audience.  But what happens when someone asks ... http://erikgable.com/2009/12/03/5-things-ive-learned-about-online-story-comments/ As news sources proliferate and the methods used to deliver the news become faster and more efficient, twin problems arise. First, when every rumor and unconfirmed report can spread like wildfire almost as soon as it's generated, how do you figure out what information to trust? And second, if you're ... http://erikgable.com/2009/11/08/verification-context-and-slow-news/