Save the Media

Haven’t done short-takes for a while, so seems like it is time for my list of interesting stuff from around the blogosphere.

Great blogs: I love lists. I think they are a very useful way to convey a lot of information quickly in a format that’s easy to read.  Journalistics has compiled a great list of blogs about all things journalism — from citizen reporting to commentary to academia. Full disclosure: I’m humbled to have made the list, but even if I didn’t, I’d be linking to it and saving it as a delicious bookmark for future reference. You should, too.

Twitter list:  Have you started listing on Twitter yet? If not, you should. At the very least, it’s an easy way to keep track of the people you follow on Twitter by categorizing them into topics (journalists, academics, moms.) I find my lists are a good way to sort through the people I follow and to find smart new to follow from the lists of other people. Twitter lists also can be a powerful branding tool, Daniel Honigan writes on Old Media, New Tricks. Twitter lists can be part of building “reputational currency” on the Web, or as Honigan calls it: showing other people how well-rounded you are.

RSS feeds: I used to be one of those people who subscribed to blogs through e-mail, but that quickly became annoying. My inbox would fill with blogs I didn’t have time to read at that moment, so I would delete them. Then I discovered RSS. I have 67 blogs in my Google Reader right now, and I check the reader every few days or so. These are not the only blogs I read, mind you.  I’ve memorized the URL to the ones I’m really addicted to, so I don’t use a reader to get to them. But an RSS keeps everything there for me, so I can read it when I have time. To me, that’s one on the important factors in media today. Media should be tailored to fit the timen needs of  the reader of the message, not the sender of the message. Anyway, I know some say that RSS is passe, but I still find mine useful. Beat Blogging offers a thorough how-to for beginning RSS users with some examples of how journalists use RSS.

What not to cover:  Sometimes doing good journalism is about knowing what not to cover. That’s the point Jeremy Littau, a j-prof at Lehigh University, makes on his blog in a post about the Texas Tribune deciding not to cover the Fort Hood shooting. (I realize his post is from more than a month ago, but I think his point is timeless.)  The new journalism model, Littau writes, means: “You need to figure out what you are, then be who you are.” I agree. In a niche-dominated world, the old mass medium idea of serving everyone no longer makes sense. If you try to be something to everyone, you’ll end up being nothing to no one. A niche needs to be narrow, specific, and meaningful to a highly interested but perhaps small group of readers. The value is in reading multiple niches.

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