The next miracle (v11.1): Owen Youngman

Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill / Northwestern

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All the news that fits in links

(Note:  I usually limit the number of links in a post, so maybe I got carried away a little.  So OK, the fun stuff is the Intel ad site and the Jenny 8. Lee Twitterstream.  Other links for reference if you missed them.)

Taking a cue from Hearst President Steve Swartz, with whom I sat on a Medill panel last week in New York, I tweeted early this morning that today’s Business Day in the NYT had fallen short of its Monday quota of death-of-newspapers stories today, with approximately one instead of the usual three-plus, though they did substitute in some dispatches from other death-spiral fronts.  (Perhaps yesterday’s Week in Review counted for some of the quota, with pieces from Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd sandwiching a public editor column on Times coverage of the Boston Globe.)

But Monday just can’t go by without the Times elbowing its way to the forefront of consciousness.  First there was this piece from CrunchGear about TimesReader 2.0, asking whether dead-trees editions might be on the way to being dead.  

The NYT in 2040, courtesy Intel

The NYT in 2040, courtesy Intel

(On my way there, I ran across a screen-filling ad on nytimes.com (at right) that confused me, because I had already been alerted to a NiemanLabs video of New York Times 2.0, as opposed to TimesReader 2.0  But it was an Intel ad; the actual Nieman video is here.)

And then finally, courtesy of TweetDeck, the news that Jennifer 8. Lee was live-Tweeting a nytimes.com strategy presentation to newsroom employees about  the state of its business. Her 25 tweets are well worth the visit.

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J-Schools Play Catchup (NYT)

Sunday’s New York Times does a quick survey, assembles some anecdotes, and draws a few conclusions…..

The changes [in media] are forcing colleges and universities to rethink what a journalism education should look like. The perennial debate about journalism programs — theoretical teaching versus professional skill building — has been displaced by more urgent questions: How can you help students find sustainable business models, while introducing the formerly verboten subject of the business side? What are the implications for the craft of journalism in the shift to digital? And how do you position students for an uncertain future in the media?

via J-Schools Play Catchup – NYTimes.com.

The online headline, as headlines are wont to do, oversimplifies the conclusions one easily can draw from the story: For one that, that J-schools perhaps saw this coming somewhat before the people running paid newsrooms. (The print presentation, in the Education Life section, is way different.  In fact, the first deck is “J-schools boom despite crisis.)

Boom is not far off. I don’t think that the more than 100 admitted-but-not-yet-enrolled graduate students who attended a two-day Medill open house this week (Thursday at the downtown newsroom, Friday in Evanston) felt like they had applied to a place that’s a lap behind.

Is there lots yet to figure out? Sure.  I kinda think that’s one reason I’m here, to help.

I have heard people rant and rave and bellow…*

 

Note to self:  Good news sells, too.

Note to self: Good news sells, too.

Wednesday night when I got around to updating my Facebook status, I was in a whole different state of mind than I was Monday morning after reading the NYT business section.

Apparently I was in a whole different state of mind than a few other folks, as well, based on the public and private reactions to my announcing that I had “Spent a day with smart high school students after spending a couple weeks with smart college students. I feel good about the future, including the future of journalism.” 

(Of course, this was before I read the Sun-Times Media Group’s 2008 annual report, full of cheerful phrases like “the economic obsolescence occurring in the newspaper and printing industry,” but I digress.) Continue reading