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• WTSP-TV Uses Skype to Broadcast Live Shot, Poynter Online
  

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Monday morning, WTSP-TV anchor/reporter Janie Porter was on TV, reporting live from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., on the run-up to this week’s national college football championship game. She didn’t have a big live truck accompanying her, or an engineer tuning in a shot or a photojournalist standing behind the camera and setting up lights.

Porter set up her own camera, opened her laptop, connected the camera to her computer, slipped a wireless connection card into her laptop, called up Skype and used her Blackberry to establish IFB (the device TV folks wear in their ears to hear the off-air signal). It all looked just great on air.

• Who will pay for serious journalism? Well, newspapers can , Mark Hamilton

At some point, newspaper execs who believe in serious, quality journalism — not Google, not government, not some outside agency — are going to have to make the decision to support it with as much as possible of the remaining resources that they have. It is newspapers — even now, because they are still making money — that are going to have make the commitment to make serious journalism their prime, and perhaps only, reason for being, even if it means letting the lighter stuff (which makes up a substantial amount of the weekly page count) go.

• Clay Shirky X 2

The shape of things to come, The Guardian

The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be. It’s like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered life before the Soviet Union – nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people are like Russians, in a way.

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I | Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II, CJR

One of the things that I’ve noticed with criticisms of the Internet is that very often they’re displaced criticisms of television. That there are a lot of people, Nick Carr especially is a recent addition to the canon, wringing their hands over the end of literary reading. And they’re laying that at the foot of the Internet. It seems to me, in fact, from the historical record, that the idea of literary reading as a sort of broad and normal activity was done in by television, and it was done in forty years ago.

• Mad to start freelancing in the recession? Thou shalt make overly-ambitious new year resolutions, Journalism.co.uk

2. Thou shalt aim high. I must remember that my experience, expertise and capability are precious – and will not be tempted to sell myself  short or write for free. Because thou is worth it, right?

3. Thou shalt be more persistent. I will make sure I’m being proactive about pitching and will not be afraid to bang on doors – everyone else is doing it, after all.

• 2009: the year hyperlocal becomes sustainable, Journalism2.0
  

Much of the information that most people want doesn’t readily exist in a publicly available database. It’s in the conversations and community interactions between real people. (This is the key to Twitter’s amazing growth.) And I believe that people want to know what’s happening in their neighborhood.

• O futuro do jornalismo, träsel/blog

Uma solução para o financiamento da atividade jornalística pode estar em oferecer material mais atraente ao leitor e cobrar por ele. Os jornais digitais poderiam deixar a informação que pode ser encontrada em outros lugares (abundante) disponível a todos e investir maior esforço de reportagem em pautas inusitadas e exclusivas. Isto é, produzir informação escassa. E escassez, como qualquer estudante de primeiro semestre de Economia sabe, é uma das bases do valor de qualquer produto. Enfim, é preciso primeiro aumentar a qualidade das notícias, para depois querer cobrar por elas.

• Raid Gaza! Editorial Games and Timeliness, NewsGames

The game argues against the justification of Israeli attacks on Gaza, representing them as unprovoked and characterizing Israel’s response as overt aggression. The game’s goal is to kill as many Palestinians as possible in a three minute session. The game begins with a quote from Ehud Olmert on “minimizing the number of Palestinans” in Gaza. The game connects the dots in the statement, suggesting that minimization implies killing. As shown above, special rewards are offered for occasional attacks on civilian targets. A creepy muzak-like instrumental version of the Carpenter’s “Close to You” plays throughout.