David Carr leaves a huge hole in journalism: Who will decode us?

Carr’s 2008 memoir, The Night of the Gun

Last night’s death of David Carr leaves a bigger hole in the media than the suspension of Brian Williams from NBC News or the planned departure of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show. 

By coincidence, Carr’s last Media Decoder column/post for the New York Times was about the simultaneous career changes of Williams and Stewart (as was my most recent blog post). I really don’t care much who fills the NBC anchor chair while Williams is gone for six months or longer, and I’m only mildly interested in the jockeying for Stewart’s chair. But I worry about who will decode media for the Times, and I doubt anyone can approach Carr’s mastery of this field that I cover and teach and where for decades I worked (unless this blog and occasional consulting entitle me to still use the present tense).

I didn’t make this about me so quickly (and it won’t be for long) to compare myself to Carr. I would lose such a comparison quickly, as you can tell if you read the Williams/Stewart links above.

And I certainly don’t claim any special connection (we never met). My only Decoder mention that Google can find or that I can recall was a derisive dismissal of my paywall criticism (which I defended in a comment on Carr’s post). We never exchanged emails (not because I never sent him one), but I think we had a Twitter exchange or two. But the first tweet I found from Carr directed at me was also derisive:

Digital hyperbole sends @stevebuttry flying off rails: “@Carvin using Twitter to be the best foreign (cont) http://t.co/yFyCeM1A

— david carr (@carr2n) April 8, 2012

That criticism I defended as well, but here’s the point: Carr’s opinion and analysis mattered. When he disagreed with you, you stopped a moment to ponder his point, and, even if he didn’t win you over, he made you think. His reporting was thorough, his analysis incisive, his criticism fair.

Read Full Post »

My keynote for student media leaders: You will shape journalism’s future

I’m a keynote speaker at the Journalism, Leadership and Management Conference for student media leaders this weekend at the Greenlee School of Journalism at Iowa State University.

I was asked to talk to the students about leadership and the future. My primary point is that young journalists are already providing important leadership in our profession and they have an extraordinary opportunity and extraordinary examples to shape journalism in their careers.

I don’t have a written version of the address, but my slides are below. I sought advice for these young journalists from some outstanding successful journalists. I shared some of the advice on my slides. In other cases, I drew my advice from things these journalists had posted online (or things they said in interviews). Or I just drew my own lessons for the students from these journalists’ careers.

Here are the responses from the young journalists who sent advice to the students:

Read Full Post »

@bydanielvictor challenges the overuse of #hashtags

Daniel Victor wrote a thoughtful (and much-criticized) piece about hashtags for the Nieman Lab Tuesday.

I Storified some of the reaction (Storify apparently no longer offers the option to post to a WordPress blog, and it doesn’t embed here, so I’m just linking to it).

 

Read Full Post »

Belated aggregation on the life, times and death (finally) of TBD

I was traveling and leading workshops this week for the anti-climactic final end of TBD. I didn’t have time to weigh in then, except on Twitter, after my former TBD colleague Jenny Rogers broke the news:

TBD’s long, slow, painful road to death is over. TBD.com now reroutes to WJLA.com. So that’s that!

— Jenny Rogers (@jennyrogersDC) August 15, 2012

I’m way past pain. MT @jennyrogersdc: TBD’s slow, painful road to death is over. tbd.com reroutes to wjla.com. — Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) August 15, 2012

@skenigsberg @jennyrogersdc Fond memories of great colleagues & a great start. But I’ve turned the page. Miles to go before I sleep. Or weep — Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) August 16, 2012

I don’t have a lot to add, but I’ve blogged a lot about TBD here, so I should note the denouement. TBD made our mark in part through effective aggregation of Washington local news, so I’ll note its passing with some aggregation on its brief history. It won’t be complete, but I invite you to add some more links in the comments. Where I aggregate content from TBD, I should note that I don’t know how long it will remain available. Archived content appears to be online, though the home page and some searches redirect to wjla.com.

Before we get to the actual demise, I have to share a link and screenshot from the coverage of our launch: I don’t believe any elaboration is needed here.

As for coverage of the actual death, it was pretty muted, perhaps appropriately for an operation whose life and death throes were perhaps overcovered. Here are the best accounts I saw of the final demise (normally that phrase would be redundant, but TBD’s demise was drawn-out enough that I consider it appropriate):

Erik Wemple’s No more TBD.com (Erik was TBD’s editor and now blogs about media for the Washington Post:

Read Full Post »

Digital First Social Media Wire: a product of two creative groups

Creativity is contagious. One of the best ways to make a good idea better is to share it with other creative people.

Digital First’s new Social Media Wire is the child of two groups of creative people: the original Journal Register Co. ideaLab and the community engagement staff at TBD. The Social Media Wire is testing now on the site of the New Haven Register and eventually will roll out across Digital First Media’s news sites across the country.

Mandy Jenkins, our Digital Projects Editor, writes about the Social Media Wire on her Zombie Journalism blog. Mandy is leading the way on the project and played a key role in development of the idea at TBD.

As we were planning the TBD launch, scheduled for Aug. 9, 2010, I suggested that we tell the story of the day in Washington through the content people were creating about the day: Gather all the local tweets, Facebook updates, news stories, YouTube videos, photos and so forth that we could find and show them in chronological order, as quickly after they happened as we could. I thought if we promoted it well, it would be something people would come back to again and again throughout the day and would establish us as something different from traditional news sources.

I saw it as a one-day project of intensive work by the community engagement team. Fortunately, my team had better ideas. The team was Mandy, Jeff Sonderman, Daniel Victor, Lisa Rowan and Nathasha Lim. I don’t remember who had what ideas, but it’s fair to credit the whole group with the idea. Because once I outlined the idea, the discussion took off, with everyone contributing, and they just left my original idea in the dust.

Read Full Post »

Career lessons from Daniel Victor’s swift ascent

The old career advice doesn’t always fit today. For most of my career, veterans would have counseled a young journalist to stick around a while, so your résumé showed some stability. You want to show some commitment, an ability to hold a job.

Daniel Victor

But the New York Times just hired my friend Daniel Victor to his fifth job in just a little over two years. I was one of those others who hired him (to his longest tenure of the past three jobs) and I enthusiastically recommended him to other employers.

Dan was a reporter for the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., when 2010 started. I hired him to join TBD’s community engagement team. When TBD cut its staff, Dan moved to Philly.com to help build an online community. When Amanda Michel was looking for someone to help with social media at ProPublica, I recommended Dan and she hired him. Then she moved to the Guardian and Dan got her job leading ProPublica’s social media efforts. Now he’s moving to the New York Times.

I’m thrilled to tell you that I’m joining @nytimes as a social media producer.

— Daniel Victor (@bydanielvictor) June 4, 2012

News is a volatile industry right now with lots more journalists looking for work than finding jobs. A journalist who has been hired four times in 26 months is a journalist in high demand.

Since I know a little about Dan and his career moves, I thought I would (with his permission) share some career lessons from watching him, as I did after hiring Mandy Jenkins for the second time. The first four lessons are nothing new and their importance can’t be overstated:

Read Full Post »

Maps are great engagement tools; try one for Veterans Day or community art

I have two interactive map ideas to share: one that’s timely this week and one that I tossed out in conversation with some arts journalists Saturday:

Friday is Veterans Day. We got some pretty good engagement last year at TBD with our #wheretheyserved map (below), created by Daniel Victor.

Read Full Post »

Thanks to Dan Victor and Lisa Rowan for excellent contributions to TBD

My favorite team of my journalism career is breaking up.

Again and again, I have been blessed to work with extraordinarily talented and friendly colleagues. But I have enjoyed working with the TBD community engagement team more than any team in my career. And I have enjoyed the larger collection of TBD colleagues more than I have enjoyed co-workers anywhere.

Read Full Post »

Loryn Wilson joins us as a community host

I have hired five of six people for our community engagement team. Loryn Wilson will be a community host, joining Jeff Sonderman, Lisa Rowan and Daniel Victor, whom I already announced. I also have hired Mandy Jenkins as social media producer. We’re still working on hiring the mobile producer.

A graduate of George Washington University, Loryn is a veteran blogger, both on black girl blogging and on the Women’s Rights blog for Change.org. She used to work for the Center for Progressive Leadership, where colleagues say she guided more experienced staff members through unfamiliar social media waters. She served on the social media team for Becky’s Fund, an organization assisting survivors of domestic violence. She has been a panelist for programs discussing social media and digital communication.

I cringed when Laura McGann of the Nieman Journalism Lab quoted me Wednesday as saying that I’d have five of my community engagement jobs filled by the end of the week. Yeah, I had said it in a confident moment when she interviewed me Tuesday. But when I read it, I wasn’t sure I could actually get the hiring done. But with Loryn’s acceptance, our team is nearly complete.

Read Full Post »

Daniel Victor joins our community engagement team

It may take a while for me to learn to call Daniel Victor, my newest staff member, Dan. I’ve followed him on Twitter so long that I just think of him as @bydanielvictor.

Dan’s the latest recruit to the Allbritton Communications metro news operation (which Jim Brady says will have a name soon, perhaps today).

Read Full Post »