Bloggers and mainstream media can cooperate
One of Toby's dino pictures, from the Sinclair station in St. Louis at South Broadway and California, near Interstate 55.
I weary of the drama that exists sometimes between the pure “blogging community” and the so-called “mainstream media.” If we can just communicate, we can work together nicely. I think we’ve missed some opportunities to do that at the Post-Dispatch, but I think we did it right this week with a story that ran on Wednesday.
The story was a brite about the disappearance of the Sinclair Oil dinosaur mascots in St. Louis in the wake of a takeover of the company-owned gas stations. My colleague Matt Hathaway found the tip on a blog called BELTSTL.com, which writes about local preservation and architecture.
It wasn’t hard news, but it was a worthy feature, given how ubiquitous the dinosaurs are on the Sinclair logo and the toys that the stations sell.
While Matt wrote his story, I reached out to the blogger, Toby Weiss, to ask for permission to run some of her pictures of one of the dinosaurs in the paper. She granted it, asking that we credit her by name and by the name of her blog. When the story ran, Matt included this paragraph in the story.
After rebranding of the stations started early this month, a local preservation blog — beltstl.com — broke news of the dinos’ disappearance. And since then, Sinclair enthusiasts have been ramping up their searches.
Toby was also happy to have us work on the story, apparently, because she was “ultra-curious to know” what came of the statues. Toby sent us a nice follow-up after the story ran: “Great reporting makes a good story. So glad you guys did that!”
In Demand Media’s machine, one cog’s view
As a freelance copy editor for Demand Studios, I know when I’m editing an article by Jason Artman before I ever see his name. His copy is always clean. His voice is authoritative. His steps are clear and easy to follow. It rarely takes more than five minutes to edit one of his 300-to-500-word articles. If every article I edited was that easy, I’d make $42 an hour as a Demand Studios copy editor.
I don’t make $42 an hour.
Demand Studios — an arm of Demand Media — has been in the news a lot lately. Most notably, its business model and its ambitions to score some clients among traditional media outlets have been written up in The New York Times (Feb. 7), Vanity Fair (Feb. 3) and Folio Magazine (Feb. 4). The tenor of the recent articles about Demand ranges from bemused to hostile. Criticism of the company and its business model typically falls into three categories: Read more
Data visualization: Rise and fall of Missouri jobs
Rise and fall of jobs in Missouri and the St. Louis area.
I love this visualization of how jobs have fluctuated over the past five years in the St. Louis area. Link to see the functioning graphic on my colleague Steve Giegerich’s blog, STL JobWatch. The graphic shows expanding and contracting circles each month over the past five years, representing how many jobs were added or subjected to the economy each month.
Post-Dispatch interactive designers Brian Williamson and Erica Smith created the graphic based on research I’d done with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which adjusted the data for seasonality.
The graphic, a snapshot of area employment, reflects the counties and cities where the employed and unemployed reside and not, necessarily, the business locations where they work or worked. The graphic includes representations of the rise and fall of jobs in the St. Louis metropolitan area and the major metro areas of Missouri.
A similar graphic of the national employment scene, designed by TIP Strategies, provided the inspiration for this map.
7 sites to train freelance bloggers about journalism
Courtesy kogakure, via Flickr under CC 2.0 license. http://bit.ly/tzAfY
One of my small pleasures at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is a blog our religion writer Tim Townsend and I created. It’s called “Civil Religion.” For a year and a half, it’s been The Little Blog That Could. Nearly every post attracts comments. It gets respectable traffic numbers (more when it’s featured on the home page of STLtoday.com, of course). And its following is a loyal one.
The blog started with a dozen writers from the St. Louis community, representing a variety of faith traditions from Judaism to Islam to Christianity in many stripes — Catholicism, Mormon, evangelical and Episcopalian.
About a week ago, we debuted an expanded stable of bloggers. Some had dropped out of the earlier group. Now we’re up to about 30 who contribute and, already, we’ve seen traffic increase from the more-frequent contributions to the blog. I’m grateful for their contributions and their passion for the subject. They engage readers, they are often insightful and frequently controversial.
Now, a new development: Public relations people have begun taking notice of the blog, and send releases to our contributors, all of whom have day jobs, some of whom are clergy men and women. They have asked Tim what they can do with the releases. Some are interested in pursuing interviews, doing some research on the books, people, products and events that are presented to them.
They want to be reporters. Read more
Interesting stuff I saw online, Aug. 26 to Sep. 9
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Aug. 26 through Sep. 9:
- The newsroom view of user content revealed – Well, this isn't really a surprise. Most journalists find user-generated content a distraction.
- Social Media: Fighting the Fear – Good piece reinforcing the ways individuals (and, particularly, businesses) can get past the fear of social media.
- Measuring the Value of Social Marketing and Media – "While social marketing was originally developed from the desire companies had to capitalize on commercial marketing techniques, it has evolved into a more integrative and comprehensive discipline that draws on a wide array of technology, from the traditional media to new media referred to as 'social media.'"
- ‘Skanky’ Blogging, Anonymity and What’s Right – More helpful fodder for those of us who are constantly fending off attacks on the ability for readers to post anonymously. I was particularly fond of your point, “People who’d ban anonymity don’t seem to realize that it’s technically impossible unless we’re willing to turn over all of our communications in every venue to a central authority — a system that would herald the end of liberty.”
It’s a point I’ve made often to anyone who will listen. Even Facebook, which prides itself on “requiring” real names, can live up to that requirement.
Kurt's Tweets- Why is this not a national story? Maybe I missed it. Appalling. Disabled woman was tortured and held as a sex slave http://ow.ly/2CiAq
- Bravo. RT @pwthornton: "Banning unsigned online comments undermines the media’s role as a forum for debate.” http://bit.ly/bmZsOn
- I would like to just take the two steps forward and skip the one step back. How about that? Would that be OK?
- Still seeking talented journalists to run #Patch sites in two south St. Louis County communities. Know anyone? http://ow.ly/2Axnv
- Waiting for a listings collector to give her more #Patch marketing cards. The work never stops.