Archives for the month of: April, 2008

It seems all media organizations large and small are scrambling for direction and product differentiation on- and offline, even as they struggle with bleak forecasts for the future.

Today, the Knight Digital Media Center announced News Leadership 3.0, a new forum for “newsroom leaders” to discuss and offer solutions for their biggest newsroom challenges, including adjusting mindsets and culture, encouraging adaptation, and forging new ground in digital journalism.

It’ll be interesting to see who participates. Just as the news industry has fractionalized, so have the forums in which to discuss the business — now, there’s a group for every stripe, specialization, and professional permutation.

The irony, of course, is that as Mindy McAdams once told me, the luminaries within these groups all tend to be the same individuals.

So while the spirit and intention of the new Knight blog is to be commended, I wonder whether the people participating, in addition to the ideas, will be both new and influential.

I have yet to figure out a good way to publish my relevant del.icio.us links in this space. I’ve tried the “daily blog posting” feature that’s described step-by-step on Theory Is The Reason, but the results were less than ideal.

Bear with me while I experiment. If you’d like to get these links automatically, subscribe to the RSS feed or add me to your network.

Meanwhile, today’s interesting news-related reads and useful tools:

Eric Ulken has created a tag cloud culled from the nearly 2,800 anonymous comments posted at AngryJournalist.com.

What’s interesting is the most frequent words by far are “work,” “story,” “people” and “editor” (which is, technically, a person too).

Without reading through each comment, Eric’s data tells me journalists are mad about the same things most workers are: They don’t like certain aspects of their jobs and they don’t like their coworkers.

Without more context, someone trying to tackle the problem wouldn’t have a lot to go on, showing once again the tag cloud is a decent navigation tool, but not a useful interpretive tool.

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