new media

If you can suffer through the puppetshow at the beginning, there is a nice short BlueNC shout out in the middle of this Stateline article.

http://cms.stateline.org/working/details/story?contentId=473783

Making room in the statehouse press tent
By Melissa Maynard, Stateline.org Staff Writer

In the mid-90s, a reporter from the Carolina Journal Online was briefly admitted and then ejected from the North Carolina statehouse press corps, which issues the passes. A legislator had complained that the news outlet’s parent organization, the John Locke Foundation, had partisan conservative leanings and its primary purpose wasn’t gathering news.

Seems like a good idea, until you think about it for more than 45 seconds:

These schools have for years operated internal publications and news services, and professional news outlets often buy freelance pieces from reporters who are still in school. So why not make more explicit arrangements to have journalism students, who will work for course credit, fill the gaps left by the pros whom the news outlets could no longer afford to pay?

That is exactly what a number of institutions have done. The latest partnership, announced this week, is an alliance between New York University and the New York Times, which cut 200 newsroom jobs last year. The university, in consultation with the Times metro desk, will run a hyper-local news site covering Manhattan’s East Village.

The for-profit blogging network, Politicker has closed most of its sites. In this article at Politico, the bloggers are referred to as "reporters." The same is true at Talking Points Memo.

It doesn't matter what we call ourselves, running an operation like this for profit is next to impossible. When Pajamas Media started up, Roger Simon lured a large number of conservative bloggers from BlogAds with the promise of a stream of advertising dollars and apparently some subsidizing. That doesn't appear to have worked out too well for them. Wolcott had some fun with the demise of the PJM blog network. The B-Listers weren't happy.

Apparently North Carolina State has decided to only allow accredited journalists to have credentials to certain events on campus. It might be time to find out what the policies are at other universities/colleges.

We have folks here who are just as professional and work just as hard as those in the corporate media. I understand not opening credentials up to just anyone with a blog, but there are more than a handful of bloggers in this state who could have and would have provided professional coverage of this speech.

At the Spiritual Progressives meeting I was interviewed by Kelly Nuxoll, a freelance writer with some great NC connections who is here writing for the Huffington Post. She posted an article about that meeting which quoted me. I reposted the article here and she linked the HuffPost article to BlueNC so people could see my vlog!

We reconnected on Wednesday to talk about new media and old media at the Democratic National Convention. Doing a mutual interview with a real journalist meant I had to step up my game! It turned out to be a fascinating conversation about outsider stories at the DNC, how new media is changing the convention, and the role that young people can play in our political landscape.

Here's part 1:

I made a shocking discovery last night. If you use the word "sexy" during the course of an interview, TV editors are incapable of cutting the sentences in which the word is embedded. As you'll see in the video below, I kind of blew it by couching the word in the negative (as in "landfills are NOT sexy") but this tactic could be used to great effect during your own "earned media" opportunity. For maximum impact, say "sexy" at least three times, though you may have to work up to this advanced level.