Blog Posts Across The Next Newsroom Project

Chris O’Brien
12:42 AM | bio | Comments: 0

"While professional newspapers are grappling with falling readership, particularly among Facebook-crazed college students, student newspapers are still widely read by their target audience. That's the word from Alloy Media + Marketing, which just annou…

"If you walk around dow…

An article from tomorr…

"Does the newsroom of the future really need to be a brick and mortar newsroom?"

…

From the guy who brought you the Internet browser comes a "Deathwatch" blog post on the New York Times. Mark Andreessen (founder of Netscape, Ning), was apparently angry over the hiring over conservative columnist William Kristol:

"I

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• several of them are redoing their websites.
  
• WXDU is redoing its bylaws.
  
• They also started a new talk show with the center for doc. studies, called Durham Noise Network.
  
• Cable 13 is trying to do a major studio upgrade (about $150k worth).
  
• freewater publications is shooting lots of films. Including one big shoot on Super 16
• Small Town Records is cl
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Congratulations to The Stanford Daily which broke ground Tuesday on its new home in the heart of the Palo Alto Campus. Pictured above is Stanford Daily alum Lorry Lokey '4…

Anyone interested in the challenges facing college media, especially independent college media, should check out a series that ran this week in The Daily Bruin, UCLA's independent student newspaper. There are three stories posted so far, including one that features The Chronicle, and its editor…

If you're thinking about exploring the world of online journalism, then Erik Ulken, an editor for latimes.com, has an interesting post about what kind of skills are needed. He teaches an online journalism class at the University of Sourthern California. For his students, Ulken combed through listings for job openings, and then built a tag cloud of the words us…

At 1:40 this afternoon, a soft hum permeated the 110,000 square feet of The Birmingham News. Editor Tom Scarritt exclaimed, “It makes it feel alive, and I like that.” His second floor newsroom is part of a grand new headquarters for the city’s morning paper, which circulates 150,000 papers daily on weekdays and 175,000 on Su…

Over the weekend, Mindy McAdams had a post over at her Teaching Online Journalism blog about innovation and college media. She highlights a new article from noted designer Hugh Dubberly about how innovation happens. You can read her full post here and part of…

The New York Times continues to get attention for its new building. Slate is the latest to weigh in with a slideshow essay.…

Trinity Western University's student newspaper, Mars' Hill, (named after the place where Greeks and Romans waxed eloquent in past centuries), is a biweekly for a student population of approximately 4,000. The newsroom is located in a former dorm and the staff was appalled to find out their space held the toilets, showers and washbasins in the old days. How would I know? It was my dorm decades ago. Sounds crazy, but it's really OK now and answers for the high windows along the t…

One of my colleagues at the Mercury News recently passed around a copy of a Fortune magazine story about The Washington Post and its race to re-invent itself. The lead of the story featured Barry Svrluga, a Duke grad from 1993. And his anecdote demonstrates just how dramatically -- and quickly -- newspapers are changing:…

This week I made another trek out to North Carolina. Officially, I was invited out there by Phil Meyers, the renowned journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I spoke to his graduate class for about three hours, giving me plenty of time to gab about my work at the Rethink team at the Mercury News, and the Next Newsroom Project.

While I was out there, I also hosted a gathering at Duke for folks to talk about the Next Newsroom Project. My goal for the even…

Last week, I got a note from someone who'd been following this project and the blog. They sort of summarized the lessons and ideas they were getting here. And they wanted to know if I generally agreed with their take. I did, and here is a copy of my e-mail that I wrote in response:

Thanks for your note. I think your reading is right on the money. There is definitely a push for journalists to learn new tools: video, audio, web. But in the larger framework, we're being asked to…

There's an interesting debate shaping up in the college journalism blogosphere over the skills a college journalist needs. Is it writing? Multimedia? Some of both?

This was touched off by a post from Leonard Witt, a j-school prof at Kennesaw State University. He was worried that in all the rush to focus on multimedia, the essential skills of writing and reporting would get lost. He was responding to…

A stream of never-ending red eyes has brought me back to the East Coast once again. This time, I’m in Washington, D.C. for the College Media Convention. I managed to get to the convention hall just in time for the first panel, which appropriately enough was about: “Building the ‘ideal’ Student Media Workplace.” I’ll be giving my own talk on this topic on Saturday.…

Earlier this month, I got a chance to give an update on our project and our progress to The Chronicle’s board via a conference call. After the call, the board (officially called the Duke Student Publishing Company or DSPC) had a discussion to try and set its p…

I’m currently attending the College Media Conference in Washington, D.C. And what I’ve been hearing from college media advisers this week confirms something that I’ve been seeing anecdotally while working on the Next Newsroom project at Duke. Advisers from colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes are frustrated at how resistant their students are to embrace new digital media tools and to collaborate with other me…

I spent last week at the Online News Association Conference, courtesy of our sponsors, the Knight Foundation. I came away with a greater sense of urgency about this project and what we need to accomplish.

After years of talk, newsrooms are finally changing dramatically. The best example of this came during a talk by…

Here's a fascinating project that demonstrates how quickly newsrooms are changing: It's called "Not Just A Number."

This is a fabulous project that combines community journalism, digital media, and plain old fashioned beat reporting. It was done by the Oakland Tribune. They hired a documentary filmmaker and a photgrapher who teamed up with their reporter and web team. Last we…

I continue to be fascinated by the reactions people have to Second Life. Perhaps it’s just because I’m paying more attention now that part of our project will touch on this virtual world.

So far, it’s not clear to me how interested college students are in this stuff. When I visit the Duke Student Affairs island, which they just acquired last spring, it’s pretty empty. And when I spoke to so…