Kvetch of the Week: All hail the grim reapers

Naming this week’s winner was especially tough, given the plethora of candidates on either side of the old media vs. new media tug-of-war that competes for the emotions of journalists in transition or those who are soon to be in new career mode. The pro-print cranks are back with a vengeance, clinging even more desperately [...]

A good week for watch-dogging on the Web

I hope those folks who believe that only newspapers can best serve as the platform for sound investigative reporting were watching a couple of developments this week that ought put a dent in that theory. That they are sort of close to home to me is only incidental, since the examples I’m about to cite [...]

Another big hit for my old newsroom

The news today that my former employer is slashing the size of the newsroom again — by 30 percent, or 90 full-time positions — drives home a rather obvious reality I’ve lived through since I left there eight months ago. As excited as I remain about developing a career beyond the newsroom, it’s also imperative [...]

Kvetch of the Week: Move over, old man

About halfway through an otherwise uneventful “Talk to the Newsroom” live chat with readers, New York Times assistant managing editor Richard Berke got a virtual earful from a young journalist fanning the journo-generational wars that on occasion get lost amid the ongoing rows over old media vs. new media and paid vs. free content. All [...]

Another playground spat in the journosphere

There’s a fresh new techies vs. printies tiff brewing with the future-of-journalism set, triggered by San Francisco columnist Mark Morford’s diatribe today that new media evangelists Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Dave Winer, among others, don’t have any more of an idea about how to transform journalism than the newspaper folks. Well, I thought that [...]

Tough noogies and self-help for journalists

I shouldn’t have read The Economist’s leader on the “jobs crisis” over lunch yesterday. A few snippets: “An American who loses his job today has less of a chance of finding another one than at any time since records began half a century ago. . . . “Morever, many of yesterday’s jobs, from Spanish bricklayer [...]

Some help for entrepreneurial journalists

As the news about the news business begins to delve into journalism startups and independent alternatives to the mainstream press, the role of displaced journalists in this chaos is gaining more attention as well. A former print journalist who’s made the migration to online news with a special eye on the entrepreneurial skills journalists must [...]

Journalism’s age of experimentation ramps up

When I first saw that only 20 of the estimated 170 journalists at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer would carry on in the news organization’s all-online format, I was aghast. Surely they need more newsroom people than that to keep a vibrant site updated 24/7 with fresh reporting, photography, video and other multimedia components. How are they [...]

Kvetch of the Week: ‘F**k new media’

So says the head of the Columbia Journalism School’s “Reporting and Writing 1″ curriculum that covers the essentials of . . . well, what do you think? Professor Ari Goldman was reacting heatedly to plans to include more digital components in his course. New York Magazine takes it from there: “F**k new media,” Goldman said [...]

Of ‘Mad Money’ and March Madness

I’m not the television watcher I used to be, especially in the late evening hours, but the ballyhooed mano-a-mano with Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart, plus the full onset on college basketball tournaments, had me tuning in well past my bedtime Thursday/early Friday. Although I’m paying for it now, it was well worth it. After [...]