Amusing post …

Clifford Stoll, a US astronomer and author, wrote an article in 1995 in Newsweek predicting Why the Internet will Fail.

Spot.us, headed up by David Cohn, recently changed its site to allow for the possibility that users can now easily follow updates on a reporter’s pitch and donate their time or expertise to a story, instead of just their money.

via Nieman Journalism Lab

A recent post at Nieman Journalism Lab talks about new ways journalists are experimenting with new Web tools. What do we use Google Wave for?

Here’s a possible use.

Using a wave abandoned the traditional linear approach of Source > Reporter. Instead, a group suggested ideas, and all the group members could kick those concepts around in real time. The result, I’d argue, could be more valuable than if any of us on the wave had been interviewed separately.

A novel concept emerges from The Washington Post’s Story Lab. The paper is attempting to “lift the curtain” to show readers how stories come together or not. Editors and reporters will use it as a way to get people talking about how journalism is done.

The Lab is, as you’d expect from the name, an experiment. This is a place for people who are not only curious about what’s going on in the world, but also about how the news is gathered and packaged. With the media landscape in turmoil and readers empowered to construct their own windows onto the world, the role of traditional news organizations is ever more in question. We want to add to those questions, and maybe provide some answers along the way.

Reporters will ask “Is a concept for a story right? How should it evolve? Can readers help reporters find the sources and scenes that might take us closer to the truth? Sometimes reporters will want reader advice about how to shape a story; other times, readers may be asked to contribute directly to reporting, as in this pioneering effort by a radio station that asked its audience to go out and check the price of milk at their local groceries — a story that demonstrated that people in poor areas are more likely to face price-gouging than their affluent neighbors.”

This is the question I’m thinking about as I was recently among a panel of media folks invited to suggest ideas for new classes as faculty and staff at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, Calif., plan for the opening of a new building for multimedia.

The conversation started with ideas about software the school should teach students – Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and various audio editing programs, the differences between each, the pluses and minuses. Great ideas were floated.

But a theme developed quickly.

Yeah, you can and should expose students to all kinds of software programs to help edit and publish work online, but we kept coming back to the fundamentals.

Good storytelling.

One of the panelists, a music editor for a popular TV show, said it best. (I’m paraphrasing.)

It’s quicker to train someone how to push buttons than teach the fundamentals of storytelling.

That’s the idea. And that might just be the best value of a good college education. This isn’t to say that software training isn’t important. It certainly is and ever increasingly.

But as we got to talking a bit about classes, the panelists talked about the fundamentals of using these programs – how to edit well. And also, how to get a story, how to get data from a government agency, how to make sense of data, covering a local community. Beat reporting, getting out there, doing the reps.

Of course there were probably even more great ideas floated after I left, but I enjoyed hearing from colleagues outside of the news world and am look forward to hearing the outcome.

Everybody’s writing, but there’s a great need for good writers and reporters who can dig up data and help people make sense of it.

That’s the conclusion by Robert Niles in his latest post in the Online Journalism Review.

There’s no longer any use in merely teaching people to write to a formula and conform to a specific stylebook. While those skills had enough value a generation ago for an individual to build a career, the new, hyperliterate media marketplace has rendered those skills – in isolation – as practically worthless.

He says that journalists who wish to continue earning a living from their work must either be superb storytellers, excellent reporters or have specialized knowledge.

There are a lot of writers out there, he says, but few “have the expertise to discover and analyze fresh information of interest to those audiences.”

Many folks will be able to report the news when it happens in front of them, but there remains great market value in knowing how to dig up news when it’s not out in the open.