Zombie Journalism

I’ve had a bunch of links sitting around I meant to share forever ago, but they fell through the cracks. So if they seem a little late, well, too bad.

Cool Stuff

• A lot of sites (Cincinnati.Com included) have been running with the idea of expanding data coverage on local crime, but the Knight News Challenge entry named Homicide Watch D.C. has a great idea to do more than that by  putting a focus on the victims instead of jut the crime. While such a database would be meaningful tot he community and become a valuable news resource, I think it would be tough to keep up in the long run.
• Ethnic media’s four-step model for the news industry’s future - Ethnic press has a lot of evolutionary tendencies that could be taken to heart by more general interest new providers – honestly, what they suggest here should have been done all along.

End of year/2010 Stuff

• An online journalist’s 10 resolutions for 2010 - A lot of good advice here for online journalists, beat writers and web developers alike.
• Ten things every journalist should know in 2010 – Great tips for the skills and basic understandings of the business journalists should learn or consider in 2010.
• The Gawker Decade: How Gawker Media Defined The 2000s – A thoughtful look at Gawker’s success and how it has changed journalism – mostly for the worse. Gawker and its properties have forced media to evolve, which is great, but at what cost to the overall business?

The Twitter

• Why Twitter Will Endure – David Carr explains the inherent usefulness of Twitter – and how because of its utility, he believes it will outlast its competitors once the novelty wears off.
• The Use of Twitter by America’s Newspapers – A detailed analysis with lots of data on how newspapers use Twitter. While I’m still unclear as to how they determine a paper’s overall rank (does it evaluate all the paper’s accounts?), it is interesting to see which paper’s interact the most, as opposed to blasting out updates all of the time.