These are connected: Future of Journalism Links and Communication for September 23, 2009

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Ethan Zuckerman covered a Clay Shirky talk given at the Shorenstein Center” on journalism today and its future. It’s an absolute must read for media/info/com future thinkers: “Clay Shirky and accountability journalism”.

Mark Bowden traces the path a story takes, from political operatives, thru social media, to mainstream news, in the The Atlantic piece“The Story Behind The Story”. Another must read.

Paul Graham: Post-Medium Publishing. Slashdot thread.

Mathew Ingram: Micropayments for news: The holy grail or just a dangerous delusion?

The Atlantic: The Rise of the Professional Blogger

And finally, Timothy Egan attacks an entire subset of the population for their passion based on a lack of facts, missing the point that he is working for a member of the industry that has a role in that: “Working Class Zero”

If you build it, but don’t participate, you get what you deserve

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The Nieman Journalism Lab: Mathew Ingram: Newspapers get the kind of communities they deserve:

many newspapers still see comments as some kind of necessary evil: a bone tossed to readers to help drive traffic, but something that produces little else of value

That attitude is behind what renders the commenting at most newspaper websites so defective.

Surfacing the community around your news has way more to do with participating with it online than just enabling comments and walking away. In fact, doing the later by itself never works.

The web is littered with sites where commenting is enabled, and the hosts do not participate, do not curate, do not even moderate in a transparent fashion. The results of which are never good – thread after thread of trolling, personal invective, and lack of communication. This leads to far too many finding commenting as worthless add-on that you must have for a website, but for no other reason.

It’s a missed opportunity and for many of these sites, part of their failed web strategies.

If you have 10 million visitors a month and only 1 person focused on ‘community’ or ‘commenting’ – you have already failed.

CMS links for September 19th, 2009

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I don’t agree entirely with the first first link from Sunlight Labs – blanket statements like ‘x is dead – use y’ – are poor generalizations – however it raises strong points about frameworks and CMSes.

I just wish organizations and individuals would realize that there is not an either/or choice here – as projects such as Alfresco-Django and Alfresco-Drupal show.

Sunlight Labs: Content Management Systems just don’t work.

fiercecontentmanagement: Rolling your own CMS just doesn’t make sense

CMS Myth: Is interest in content management declining?

Stop looking for golden hammers.