links for 2011-03-15

"To most journalists, once copy gets through the editors, through the copy desk, and onto a page, there comes a point where magic happens and poof — the paper appears on the doorstep. But if you’ve seen it, you know it’s not magic: It’s a byzantine series of steps, through exceedingly expensive software and equipment, run in a sequence every night in a manner that can be timed with a stopwatch. Any glitch, hiccup, delay, or bump in the process is a four-alarm emergency, because at the other end of this dance is an army of trucks waiting for bundles of paper. In short, it’s got to work exactly the same way every night or piles of cash get burned by people standing around waiting."

"To counter the negative view of journalism,
journalists should aim to do useful journalism."§

"Mr. Zuckerman said that the organization was committed to supporting freedom of speech as well as to keeping up with the developments unfolding all over the world. 'People are not always interested in knowing what is happening in Yemen,' he said. 'We have been waiting for people to pay attention to this corner of the world for a long time, and now we are ready to tell their stories.'"

"In essence it seems that many companies are looking for a magic wand that will take the challenges of community management away. Certainly, I've had plenty of experience of people whose attitude to comments is to ignore them until they become a problem, and then demand a magic technical solution"

"News of Twitter’s announcement to developers yesterday has created a bit of a shockwave online – essentially they just delivered a killer blow to their developer community, by telling them to stop developing new clients for Twitter". There needs to be some clarification around these headlines - it appears that what Twitter really said was that basing your entire business model on making a straight Twitter client was unwise

"All those people like Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and Spectator publisher Andrew Neil who used to say Private Eye should put all its content up online were completely wrong and we were right to have a very limited approach."

The Wannabe hacks pick up on a point from Paul Bradshaw's lecture the other week, and spot signs of bad habits forming at a very early stage of the journalist's career

A look at the language used to define "real" women by what they are not

Great article that has sparked an interesting discussion in the comments