Friday reading #3
Number three in a series of experimental Friday blog posts gathering together some of the things I’ve read or noted over the week, so you can load up your Kindle or Instapaper or Pocket app for the weekend. Please let me know if you find it useful...
Friday reading
“Stop Documenting, Start Experiencing” - Daniel Gulati, Harvard Business Review blog network
“We must choose between capturing these moments or viscerally experiencing them as they unfold. That we can’t do both simultaneously seems obvious — we aren’t really enjoying the live concert if we’re busy taking photos of the band. Recent research hammers this home, showing that our performance drops when we try to perform both encoding tasks (experiencing what’s around you) and response selection tasks (capturing stimuli) at the same time”
Read the full article
“The robot journalist: an apocalypse for the news industry?” - Emily Bell, guardian.co.uk
“Visit the website of Forbes.com and read the earnings forecasts for the New York Times Company, and you will notice the byline ‘By Narrative Science’. Normally you have to open a copy of Wallpaper* to find someone with such a florid monicker. Except of course Narrative Science is not a person but a robot journalist – actually a set of algorithms which take data and turn it into words.”
Read the full article
“Howard Rheingold on how the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills” - Justin Ellis, Nieman Journalism Lab
“If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool.”
Read the full article
“Writer’s Cramp: In the E-Reader Era, a Book a Year Is Slacking” - Julie Bosman, New York Times
“The e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.”
Read the full article
“Educated for unemployment” - Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail
“Journalism schools have spread like mushrooms in May. Some of them are excellent. They also provide high-quality employment for aging journalists, including some very, very dear friends who, I hope, will think of me some day if I ever get laid off. What these schools do not provide is jobs in journalism.”
Read the full article
“10 ways to make waves in journalism & publishing” - Adam Westbrook
“The industry already has more reporters, subs, producers, editors and designers than it needs, and you’re up against thousands of others to become one of them. What the industry sorely lacks are people who come up with big boat-rocking ideas and execute on them.”
Read the full article
“Hindsight Journalism” - Josh Stearns, Groundswell
“After the fact, journalists have done admirable and important work explaining how we got here, but what if those investigative pieces had come out beforehand? Could they have helped changed the course of events? Perhaps. But, what more could we be doing to foster the kinds of journalism that can help us address problems before they become a crisis?”
Read the full article
PastPages – The news homepage archive
An ever-expanding archive of news website homepages “run at a loss by a fool who thinks it ought to exist.”
Visit the site
£10k Bootstrap challenge
“I'll publish my weekly bank balance, income, and progress, plus running daily updates. The challenge continues in public until I've either quintupled my money or have lost it all.”
Visit the site
“Why UX is better marketing than marketing” - Peter Merholz, peterme.com
“Traditional advertising grew up in an industrial age world dominated by mass-manufacture and products. As we shift into a connected age built on services and customer relationships, savvy businesses are those that recognize money is best spent not cramming messages down people’s throats, but tirelessly figuring out how to enhance the service experience.”
Read the full article
“Aggregation guidelines: Link, attribute, add value” - Steve Buttry, The Buttry Diary
Perhaps an appropriate note to finish on this week: “The people who are critical or dismissive of aggregation and curation fail (or refuse) to understand the value that aggregation and curation have in themselves. Pointing out things that people may be interested in has value. It’s a great function of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ and other social media, which together drive huge traffic for news organizations.”
Read the full article
Things you might have missed...
By me on currybetdotnet and the Guardian this week:
- “Digital news is heading for a mobile future” - The Guardian Media Network
- Please carry on learning to code
- Guardian & Observer NUJ debate on the nature and future of journalism
- Google Currents - a system for publishers, not journalists
- Metro comes out fighting for photographers’ rights
- I’m running two training courses in June: “Improve your blogging” and “Kindle Publishing”