To do good writing, read good writing. Here’s some of the good writing I’ve been reading this week:
I can’t get too worked up about the demise of Newsweek as a print weekly because I haven’t read a print newsweekly in ages. Apart from Sports Illustrated, which my son got as a Christmas present for years from an aunt and uncle, we haven’t paid for a newsweekly in years. It’s the latest sign of the changes taking place in the news business. In the current environment, there’s no appetite for a weekly, which provides background and context for the week’s events plus a smattering of features, profiles and reviews. Today’s readers can get all of that so many other places, plus breaking news on Twitter and other news websites, and long-form narrative journalism in print or digital (tablet-only) magazines. The Awl is running this campaign to have readers make suggestions for cover photos for Newsweek’s final 10 issues.
The Strange Tale of Violentacrz
One of the other more interesting media stories of this week was the Gawker profile that revealed the identify of a volunteer moderator of some of the more unsavory – some have labeled them pornographic – sections of the popular Reddit online community and the controversy that ensued. After Gawker writer Adrian Chen outed the guy as a 49-year-old Texas computer programmer, other Reddit moderators blocked links to Gawker stories from appearing on the site, and Reddit community members defended his right to publish whatever he wanted under the 1st Amendment. The guy went on “Anderson Cooper 360” to defend himself, and ultimately lost his day job. Who’s right? Read more here and decide for yourself:
- The Man Behind the Troll: Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrz,the Biggest Troll on the Web (Gawker)
- The Curious Case of Reddit’s Media Kerfluffle (JasonKonopinski.com)
- Man behind ‘Jailbait’ exposed, loses job (CNN)
- Violentacrz admits doing CNN interview was a huge mistake (Beta Beat)
Here’s other news of interest to writers I stumbled upon this week:
Report: Why low self-worth drives lower wages for women freelancers and what you can do about it (International Freelancers Academy) – If you’re a woman who freelances, you owe it to yourself to read this lesson in empowerment from veteran writer and business-to-business web marketing expert Dianna Huff.
List of top 100 tools for learning is full of useful sites for journalists (Reynolds Center) – The biz journalism school shares a list of websites and apps such as Tiwtter, Pinterest, Google Translate, Flipboard and Instapaper that reporters can use to compile or investigate information. The list was created by the U.K.’s Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies. Pinterest, Google Translate, Flipboard and Instapaper.
50 essential tools I use for blogging and freelance writing (Best Vendor) – More tools. This list from writer Kristi Hines includes everything from banks with mobile apps to e-book readers to social networks.
Stop pagination now: Why websites should stop making you click and click and click for the full story (Slate) – Splitting articles into multiple pages is supposed to make longer articles web friendly and help sites bring in more advertising. But it doesn’t. At most it makes them made, and at least, they stop reading rather than click to the next page, argues writer Farhad Manjoo. Something to think about if you’ve been contemplating having blog posts on your site run over more than 1 page.
How to get Google News to take notice of your WordPress site (Leaders West) – Jim Dougherty explains how writers with blogs or websites can use Google’s news_keywords tag, to write relevant, interesting headlines and also alert Google to the specific topic in the metadata of the post. Please note: you need to be an approved news source on Google to use this feature. Dougherty also shares information on a WordPress plug in that shares the news_keywords meta data for your site.
Twitter CEO says curation tools for newsrooms are coming (Poynter.com) – This one’s a hold over from last month’s Online News Association conference, but still good. At the conference, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the service is developing curation tools journalists can use to report live on news events he hopes to offer free to newsrooms, according to Craig Silverman’s report.
[Flickr image from Karen Horton]