Today's essential reading for journalists

Every journalist needs quick access to their most important sources of information.

One of the most effective ways of ensuring you don’t miss anything is to set up feeds from those key sites, individuals and publications from which you get the most news, information and ideas.

I’ve bundled the RSS feeds that I find most valuable into a combined feed. It appears to the right of this post.

You’ll want to make your own, tailored to the work that you do. Actually, you may well want several, focusing on different subjects.

If you are following Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide and are a journalism student, you will want a feed for each of the publications you are creating as part of your course, and  for any reporting beats you have been assigned.

My beat is multimedia journalism and I suggest that, if you want to keep up to speed with developments in the media, it should be one of your beats too. So you might find my feed useful as a starting point. You can preview it by going here, and then subscribe if you find it useful.

There are 17 feeds in my bundle. Not all of them post every day, but some of them post several times a day. I have set up this bundle to give me what has been posted just that day, hence it’s called Today’s Essential Reading.

Here’s what I value each of them for

10,000 Words

This is one of my top three sources on innovation and learning. I like it because, in the words of 10,000 Words, it is: “a resource for journalists and web and technology enthusiasts to learn the tools that are shaping digital journalism. The site offers examples, resources, and tutorials of both new and established technologies used to enhance journalism.”

Buzz Machine

Jeff Jarvis is journalism professor at City University of New York, one of the very best educators, and another of my top three. He understands better than just about anyone how multimedia and social media affect journalism. He’s also very good on entrepreneurial journalism and much more besides.

Dan Blank

Dan Blank specialises in B2B and is way in the lead on how this sector can keep up with web developments and cope with profound challenges to survival. He offers great, detailed advice in long posts on, for example, optimising the use of Twitter and Facebook, and the future of magazines. He completes my top three.

I also have three most-trusted sources of news about journalism:

Roy Greenslade

Jon Slattery

Journalism.co.uk

The latter is also invaluable for tips on new developments in multimedia and how to learn about and use them

I could easily add the also-excellent Press Gazette and Holdthefrontpage to this list. Check them out, you might prefer them.

The rest of my 17 have their own specialisms

Adam Sherk

Expert information on developments in social media

Currybet.net

Martin Belham’s blog. He’s part of the Guardian’s web development team and is very good on newspapers and the future of news and information online

Cybersoc.com

Robin Hamman devises, implements and manages social media projects, particularly within broadcasting. He posts daily clusters of links to posts on a wide range of topics. A recent post covered geotagging, coping with negative feedback on social media sites, community management, new tools for journalists, and paywalls, among others. A great way to survey a lot of potential leads swiftly.

Innovations in Newspapers

Does as it says.

Internet marketing and Social Media Connections

Good on social media and internet marketing. Publishers have to get much better at marketing themselves through social media, and thereby reaching out to new audiences, and this blog covers this area well.

Martin Stabe

Martin Stabe’s the online editor of Retail Week magazine. He posts a daily bundle of links to things he has spotted across the media.

OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Part of the Knight Digital Media Centre , which “is dedicated to helping good journalists and good journalism succeed in the 21st century” through training. So it helps the working journalist get better, by keeping them abreast of developments and demonstrating how they can be used.

Paid Content UK

Covers “the UK’s digital economy” under headings including digital Britain, newspapers and the BBC.

Reinventing the newsroom

Explores the challenges faced by newspapers in the digital age

TechCruch Europe

Is “a blog covering Web 2.0 and mobile start-ups” edited by Mike Butcher.

How do you make a bundle?

I did it in Google Reader. If you have found other software that does good bundles, feel free to share by adding a comment.

Journalism can be a class act, or a middle class act. It can't be both

So here’s a thing. Many, many people now have the means to publish their text, video, audio and still images. And yet journalism has become one of the most exclusive middle-class professions of the 21st century.

So, while the journalistic tools are now available to the many, professional journalists are drawn from the ranks of the affluent, well-connected, well-educated few.

Why?
The debate over the causes of the increasingly elitist nature of journalism has been rumbling on all week. It was sparked by an all-party report, Unleashing Aspiration, which revealed that social mobility in Britain has gone into reverse.

The underlying reason for journalism becoming a middle class profession is that the industry handed training over to academia.

Over a generation, the traditional pattern of school-leavers entering journalism via indentured training (apprenticeships weighted towards on-the-job experience) was replaced with a default model of an entrant to journalism having a first or second degree in the subject.

Roy Greenslade has reflected on how, when he joined his first local paper, staff from cleaner to editor were working class. Today, he says: “We have reached a position in which the working class do not even consider ‘the media’ as a career possibility.”

What got lost in this transition is sight of the fact that journalism is not a profession, it is a craft. You don’t have to be a genius to be good at it. You don’t have to be someone who thrives in an academic environment to write a sound, compelling news story, cover an event, review a book or movie.

Someone with an Oxbridge first might become a brilliant journalist, but they might just as easily be a lousy one. Likewise, a kid from a sink estate with a mediocre academic record could be a very bad journalist – or they might become a great one.

The only meaningful distinction in journalism  is between those who can do it, and those who can’t. And academic performance is not a reliable indicator of that.

So what’s the solution? Unleashing Aspiration says universities must do more to end elitism by admitting thousands more students from poorer backgrounds.

Another proposal is to pay interns, so you don’t need to be rich enough to work for free to get on the first rung of the journalistic ladder.

Dominic Ponsford of Press Gazette has some practical advice. Instead of a City MA at £7,000, he says, go for an NCTJ fast track at £900 as a much more cost-effective way of training.

All good, but to my mind the real solution lies with journalists themselves: specifically those who hire other journalists. They must hire on the basis of demonstrable ability as much as, if not more than, academic prowess.

Let’s put this into the wider context: young people don’t read newspapers any more, nor do they watch or rate TV news. They do use Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the rest. They do, in an unschooled way, create journalism which is popular with their peers.

If we can’t attract these people into formal journalism, formal journalism will become increasingly marginalised.

So here’s what has to happen: journalists who hire, training organisations and universities running journalism and media course need to attract those who show a relish and a talent for the multimedia publishing opportunities that are open to them. They should worry much less about a potential student’s academic background.

Teach these people well and we’ll protect and reinvigorate mainstream journalism. Fail, and journalism fails.

You can read about my contribution here