There has been much concern about people selecting only news and information they already know they are interested in and that agrees with their point of view via the internet. I have found that increasingly the “omnivore” blog from bookforum.com has been fulfilling that role for me, bringing me articles every week on the future of books, of journalism or of academia. Unfortunately, I am starting to suffer from punditry fatigue. Read too much on the same subject from newspapers and magazines – even if the subject is important to you – and it all starts to blur together after a while. In truth, it shows up the problems even with good journalism as compared to academic work. There is copious opinion but often little reference or only selective reference to new data or even to new arguments or approaches to the issues. Yet I feel I still need to read or at least skim it all in case I miss some new piece of information. Perhaps I would be better off just relying on the stuff that my peers circulate via the blogosphere and twittersphere?
Archive for the 'journalism' Category | back to home
8 September 2010
6 September 2010
The NYT just ran a piece on how various high profile US newsrooms use web traffic figures to inform their judgement about the news. Most seem to claim that low traffic stats don’t cause them to withdraw resources from stories that aren’t getting traffic but interestingly there is buried in there some evidence from the NYT itself that its blogs don’t have the same status as that paper’s traditional product. According to its executive editor, Bill Keller, “we don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play because we believe readers come to us for our judgment” but “Mr. Keller added that the paper would, for example, use the data to determine which blogs to expand, eliminate or tweak.”
