Zombie Journalism

Social networking is supposed to be about connecting with old friends and making new ones. It can involve marketing products, but it takes individualized recommendations to be anything but spam.

Lest anyone think I’m casting stones without acknowledging my own sins, I decided to share a list of the shameless ploys I’ve used to get page views for my employers. What I’ve listed is hardly out of the ordinary for any website, but I still feel bad about it sometimes.

Big minds in journalism and marketing take on the confusion and misleading nature of web analytics as they relate to readers and news.

Does the quest for page views drive news judgement decisions in online news? Does that make us, the newsroom types, in the employ of advertisers?

We need to move away from the almighty page view just to get back to the core of our business.

A few notable bits of news on social media, Google’s developments, news start-ups and more I wanted to pass on before this week really jumps off.

Changes to the federal shield bill to exclude unpaid journalists and bloggers seems to go against the entire premise for the law in the first place – and we should all be upset about it. We need all the watchdogs we can get.

Even aside from the Washington Post’s social media policy itself, the method of its distribution and construction is cause for concern.

The Washington Post’s new social media policy for staff has more than enough eyebrow-raising ‘dont’s’ that are sure to scare any staffer away from the social web and seeks to turn off great connections with sources and readers.

I’ve been playing around with caching plugins and a few other tinkerings inside the site code. Let me know in the comments if you see anything out of the ordinary. First and foremost, this site is for me to play and learn without the risk of wrecking my employer’s server, so you’ll see weird stuff [...]