Happy Friday and happy weekend reading. Here’s our weekly roundup of things we read about journalism and the media this week on Medium. Thanks to Gurman Bhatia and Katie Hawkins-Gaar for helping curate.
The Evolution of Magazine Covers
Karen X. Cheng and Jerry Gabra offer a fascinating look at how magazines have changed (or not changed, New Yorker,) over time.
Screen shot/Medium
They write:
Together, these magazine covers reveal a peek into our history. Sure, we’ve gotten more sexualized. More superficial. We read less. We have shorter attention spans.
But we’ve also gotten more open-minded. At each step along the way, society has pushed the limits of what’s considered acceptable.
When tragedy hits home #WeStandWithWDBJ
Tauhid Chappell writes about previously interning at WDBJ.
I’ve covered some tragedies before: Sandy Hook, Yarnell, Charleston — all from a distance. But this hits closer to home given my affiliation and history with the TV station and the amazing employees there.
When you work in the news and cover tragedies, there are some things you can’t unsee, some sounds you can’t hush. There are certain moments in your career where you can clearly remember where you were and what you were doing when tragedy happened.
The ‘Ten Commandments’ of Using Eyewitness Video
Storyful’s David Clinch offers lessons learned on using UGC “ethically and responsibly.” Here’s commandment five:
Thou shalt not bear false witness
It is cheating (and also bad journalism) to allow people to upload a video to your website, claim that it is theirs, and then sell or distribute the video without verifying that they have the rights to it.
We see this happening all the time, and some news agencies hide behind the forms they have uploaders fill out by saying the legal burden is on the uploader, and that they don’t have to verify or ascertain the rights to videos themselves.
Something like this also happens in real time, with news organizations asking for permission to use videos from social accounts that clearly do not own the video they have uploaded.
Journo Salary Sharer: How much do Web producers make?
Julia Haslanger continues sharing what she’s finding about what journalists make. This week – Web producers (about 300 of them).
A few demographic notes about who responded:
Women outnumbered men, 3:2
The youngest batch of salary respondents yet. More than 60% of responses came from those in their 20s. Less than 10% of responses came from people 40 or older.
Half of responses came from high-cost-of-living cities. 30% came from medium-cost cities, and 20% from lower-cost areas.
More responses came from large organizations than smaller ones:
Large: 44% | Medium: 32% | Small: 23%
Pete Brown writes for Eyewitness Media Hub about watching Periscope after Monday’s bombing in Thailand.
…Audiences aren’t (or shouldn’t be) exposed to the most graphic content and journalists handling such material have support mechanisms to fall back on if they feel adversely affected.
Neither of these hold true with eyewitness media. And in both cases, without forewarning or education, the potential for harm might not be recognised until it’s too late.
AJR: The internship that changed my life
Priya Kumar worked as an editorial assistant at the American Journalism Review in college.
I began college thinking I had my whole life planned out. By the time I graduated, I had no f*&%ing clue what my life would look like. I’ve since recognized that some decisions, whether due to fate, serendipity, or just plain luck, transform moments into turning points. Applying for that AJR internship represents one such turning point for me. Especially because, superseding everything I described above, two of my fellow AJR interns threw an ugly sweater Christmas party five years ago where I met a guy, fell in love, and married him.
Innovation lessons from the Cambodia Daily
Subscriber cards at the minimart? Newsgroups to push headlines on messaging apps? Damian Radcliffe offers some cool ideas from South East Asia.
“We’re looking at customisation, once you log in [to our site] you get a dashboard and can save articles. We have to differentiate to encourage payment and if they’re paying for it, people want more than just access.”
Plans currently being developed include different homepages for different subscribers based on their likes, what they save in the dashboard, their searches.
