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great ideas - now we go and do it. Check out http://mozillaopennews.org/ note - I work for mozilla.
The idea is good i.e. teach journalists to hack. But there's a conflict of interest. Look who's doing the teaching. Mozilla and Google are in business together. Mozilla != journalists Mozilla == web developers == middleman FAIL. (It's been tried before: Web developers purporting to "help" journalists. The results have not been good.)
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Any others?
The Baffler and N+1 http://thebaffler.com/ http://nplusonemag.com/
"Suddenly everyone..." Hyperbole. I'll believe it when I see it. Even in print, there is only one NewYorker. There are some other mags that are almost comparable, but it's not like there are scores of them to choose from. And how exactly does longform help websites advance their dodgey advertising tactics? It's just my opinion but I honestly think writing on the web was better in the 1990's. These type of websites wo…
I honestly think the web was better in the 1990s, period.
So are we just going to opine on the state of affairs, or should we take action?
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The idea is good i.e. teach journalists to hack. But there's a conflict of interest. Look who's doing the teaching. Mozilla and Google are in business together. Mozilla != journalists Mozilla == web developers == middleman FAIL. (It's been tried before: Web developers purporting to "help" journalists. The results have not been good.)
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Meanwhile solid journalism is deteriorating.
As for me, I am taking action, but at a lower level. The stuff I'm working on is much bigger than page views, pay per click, or even news. I'm interested in software that can alter paradigms. I want to see the original version of the internet. No middlemen.
All I really want from journalists is the information that most of us are too lazy or busy to collect. I want them to make phone calls, speak to insiders, cross reference public statements with available records, generally make a nuisance of themselves until they have some new insights to bring to light. Most times though it seems they're barely doing any more research than what went into a well received HN comment.…
"Journalist" has somehow mutated into "Blogging" and "Live streams", with a page hit, view count, ad revenue pumping machine that tries to incinerate whatever relics remain. I agree with your notion of "journalist". A rebranding of the burnt name may be in order. I like the idea of calling those who practice the craft Detectives.
This is a strange article. I say strange because Sarah Lacy hasn't seem to look into what "New Yorker style" prose / stories look or feel like. The New Yorker is not only a publisher of journalism. It also does short stories, serializations, and I generally consider it an incubator of literary thoughts, methods, and practices the way YCombinator is an incubator of entrepreneurship. Just look at the list of authors: h…
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Perhaps the model of full-time fact checking needs to change? I've been a fact checker at a magazine. My job consisted of calling sources up, and asking them each line of identifiable facts - to see if they actually said this, or whether this person's birth date is actually x month, y day, z year. Whether the moon really was waxing on this time of this month like the writer said in the article. Whether Nasa did publi…
So creating a fact checking Stack Exchange, like the one recently created for crowd sourcing prior art for patents.
Who's going to write it? How about the writers for The Atlantic , The Nation , The New Republic , The Wilson Quarterly , The Economist , The Paris Review , etc. I could fill up the length of a long-form article with names of publications that have long-form writing. The real question is, who's going to pay for it? This is like when someone complains that there aren't any good programmers out there, and, P.S., they're…
Aren't those guys already writing for those outlets?
Plus, I don't know much about the others, but the Atlantic went from a high quality outlet I've followed for decades, to a lower quality rag, after Bradley lost most of the stuff in 2005. It's online presence, now, is even more abysmal, for people who value good journalism and the old Atlantic.
I forgot what the value of publishing was. Fast forward to today and the noise of content-farming and SEO keyword-stuffing is deafening.
And on the topic of long form, rarely have I ever gained anything from 500 words.
Who's going to write it? How about the writers for The Atlantic , The Nation , The New Republic , The Wilson Quarterly , The Economist , The Paris Review , etc. I could fill up the length of a long-form article with names of publications that have long-form writing. The real question is, who's going to pay for it? This is like when someone complains that there aren't any good programmers out there, and, P.S., they're…
I spent 4 years freelance writing long-form narrative journalism stories for a foreign magazine, and let me tell you that I wouldn't even consider getting out of the house for less than $1500 per story + expenses. And that's for a short one. (Oh, and I find Harper's to be the king of general-interest magazines.)
thanks