Posts Tagged ‘journalism’
The Reader’s Guide to Journalists (Cont’d)
Rule No. 39: Anything that has been common knowledge for less than three hours is breaking news.
The Reader’s Guide to Journalists (Cont’d)
Rule No. 35: A survey’s rigor is inversely proportional to its “wow” factor.
The Reader’s Guide to Journalists (Cont’d.)
Rule No. 34: Sources we like say “going to” and “want to.” Sources we don’t like say “gonna” and “wanna.”
Life on general assignment
In the new world at NBC News, I’m now doing general assignment after many years covering various beats. That yields a certain variety to one’s work week.
At 1 o’clock this morning, I was hunched over a spreadsheet calculating word-frequency counts for President Obama’s State of the Union address. Ten hours later, I was writing this:
One of the busiest interstates in the U.S. remained closed Wednesday, hours after a semi-trailer transporting French vanilla coffee creamer overturned in Phoenix, coating more than 150 feet of the highway with a white slick of delicious-smelling traffic hazard.
You never know what life on GA will bring next.
Grab your coffee mug: French vanilla creamer closes busy Arizona interstate (NBC News)
#JournalismRules update: ‘exclusive’; ‘scoop’
I’ve updated The Reader’s Guide to Journalists with two new entries. Check it out and pass along your proposed rules.
Can you scientifically quantify social media opinion?
Over at NBCNews.com, we’ve started publishing daily charts tracking what people are saying about the presidential and vice presidential candidates on Twitter and Facebook. Here’s today’s for the weekend (click here for the full-size version):
In my analysis, I write:
In recent weeks, Obama has generally led Romney by two to seven percentage points in national polls, which carefully select their samples to reflect Americans most engaged in the election and registered to vote.
The picture is different among Americans who have gone online to talk about the election, however — NBCPolitics.com’s analysis indicates that that narrower but more diverse sample of the country prefers Romney by 36 percent to 32 percent overall and by 51 percent to 49 percent when they’re compared head to head:
Nope, I haven’t changed jobs, or: Welcome to NBCNews.com
But my employer changed names:
NBC News has acquired full control of msnbc.com and its digital network from Microsoft Corp. and is immediately rebranding the site as NBCNews.com.
Many details of the arrangement remain to be worked out, and financial terms weren’t disclosed.
But NBC News President Steve Capus said the site — one of the news industry’s earliest and most successful online operations — would become part of NBC News Digital, a new division led by Vivian Schiller, the former president and chief executive of National Public Radio. Schiller joined NBC News as chief digital officer last year.
Full story (M. Alex Johnson/NBCNews.com)
‘Alternative story telling’? No — just telling the story
Sometimes reporting, editing and producing a breaking news story can be frustrating, because two new developments land on your doorstep before the last one has made it through the production process.
That’s what happened when a gunman entered a real estate office in Valparaiso, Ind., today and took about 10 hostages. So in parallel with writing msnbc.com’s running main story, which you can read here, I also set up a Storify stream, immediately publishing news, images and local reaction as they came in. By the end of the day, it was a lively, largely unintermediated narrative of the entire drama as it unfolded:
In re the frumious beer bet
Update [May 9, 8:10 p.m. ET]: Now you can even buy a Bandersnatch Cummerbund T-shirt.
Original post: I worked there seven years, but it took this to finally get my name in The Washington Post.
In re Bandersnatch Cummerbund controversy (Lisa de Moraes/The Washington Post)
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 