Kamis, 05 Januari 2012

Come work for Nieman Lab


Nieman Journalism Lab


Posted: 04 Jan 2012 08:30 AM PST
We’re looking for someone to join us in our cozy little Harvard newsroom. Specifically, we have an opening for a staff writer here at the Nieman Journalism Lab. You can see the job posting here.
If you read us regularly, you know the kind of work we do — we look for and write about innovation in news. That can mean innovation at traditional news organizations; that can mean innovation at online startups; that can mean innovation at technology companies that impact how the news gets reported, distributed, and consumed. We cast a wide net; fundamentally, we’re interested in how useful information gets discovered and shared.
A couple years ago, when we had a previous opening, I summed up our ideal candidate this way:
First and foremost, you need to be an excellent reporter: digging up stories, working beats, tracking down journalistic innovation, figuring out what’s new and important in the future of news. You know how to spot a hot one and how to turn it into a story. You ask the right people the right questions. And you’re already dedicated to staying on top of the latest goings-on in the space, through rigorous reading and social media. (You probably spend a not-insignificant chunk of time in Google Reader and/or on Twitter each day, and you like it.)
Second, you’ve got to be an excellent writer. Writing stories for the Lab isn’t exactly the same as writing news stories for a traditional outlet — but it also isn’t the same as writing a blog with your own personality high-beams on. The voice and tone we’ve developed in our 19 [now 37] months of existence is important to us, and you’ll need to be able to write clean copy that both grabs the audience and respects its time.
Third, you have to be a nerd. I don’t mean you have to be a coder (although, hey, great if you are) or a multiplatform, multimedia wiz (although, hey, etc.). I do mean that you’re the kind of person who geeks out about the things we write about here. You’re engaged with the theory and the practice of online journalism. You’ve read some Shirky, some Rosen, maybe some Schudson — for fun. Maybe you can drop a well-timed Habermas reference into dinner conversation. (Okay, I’m going too far here: thoughts on Habermas a plus, but not required.) You have a favorite journalism startup. You’re not a curmudgeon, but you understand their point of view. You don’t just know about MinnPost, ProPublica, Talking Points Memo, EveryBlock, or Spot.us — you’ve got thoughts about them. If asked, you could recite three arguments for and against paywalls.
In other words, you care about all this stuff — it matters to you, and it occupies your thoughts in ways that go beyond just wanting a job.
That’s the kind of person we want around here. If you’ve got those three qualities, just about anything else is negotiable; anyone from a veteran reporter with decades of experience to some punk 22-year-old could be right for the job.
All that still holds true.
This is a great job, if I do say so myself. And — while I hesitate to mention it because I selfishly prefer it when my people aren’t lured away — it puts your work in front of some of the most influential people in journalism today. The last four people who’ve left our little newsroom have all departed for great positions at fine news organizations: outreach/social media editor at The Wall Street Journal, online managing editor at O’Reilly, deputy Congress editor at Politico, and staff writer at The Atlantic.
(This position is to replace Megan Garber, who’s Atlantic-bound. If you’re interested in applying, I’d suggest checking out her past Lab articles to see some of the kinds of work we like.)
If you have any questions about the position, feel free to email me — but don’t send me your resume, clips, or statements of how awesome you are. To actually apply for the job, you need to go to the actual job posting and apply from there. I’d strongly suggest doing so in the next week or so (say, by Jan. 11) — we’re looking to move pretty quickly, and the posting will disappear from the Harvard HR site not too long after that.
One final note, because there’s one line in the posting I always have to explain when we have an opening. It’s the one that says “Note: This is a term appointment ending June 30, 2012, with the possibility of renewal based on funding and department priorities.”
I don’t want people to be scared off by the idea that this is a temporary position — it’s not. Many (nearly all, I believe) Harvard jobs of this type are officially run as a series of one-year term appointments. In the three years since the Lab launched, every full-time position we’ve had has been posted under these terms, and every one of them has been renewed every year. If we're happy with the work being done (and barring any surprise funding issues), our hope/expectation is that this person would stay well beyond that one year.
Happy to answer questions about it, but to sum up: Don’t hesitate to apply because you think this is a temp job for six months.
Posted: 04 Jan 2012 06:00 AM PST

A year ago, Slate stepped up its video game, committing to twice daily, quick-turnaround pieces on water-cooler talk and memes of the moment. The Trending News Channel, born in December 2010, turned out to be a decent traffic draw for Slate.com, bringing in between 500,000 and 750,000 video plays a month in 2011.
But traffic really took off in March, when Slate began cross-posting the content to its YouTube channel. Those videos have accrued about 18 million views since then.
Today, Slate is one of more than 100 media partners who begin rolling out new, exclusive video channels in a deal with YouTube, which reportedly spent more than $100 million to become a major source of original content. Slate’s slice is called the Slate News Channel.
As part of the deal, Slate is expanding the TNC franchise, producing three stories per day about politics, science, and tech (topics they’ve found tend to draw bigger audiences). And for the first time, Slate will bring its famous Explainer series to video once a week, starting with a videxplainer on how commercial pilots “make up time” in the air.
The video explainer was YouTube’s idea, said Bill Smee, the executive producer of Slate’s video unit, Slate V. “When we pitched the idea of a news channel, they were like, what about the Explainer?” Smee said. “It may be boneheaded that we didn’t do this sooner, since it is one of Slate’s signature franchises, and certainly it makes sense to turn it into a video format.”
The arrangement is novel. YouTube commissioned Slate for the work with a “sizable check,” Smee said — not as sizable as what YouTube might be paying fellow launch partners Shaq and Madonna, perhaps, but sizable enough to cover Slate’s production costs. While Slate ultimately retains ownership of the content, the videos must live exclusively on youtube.com for the first year. YouTube recoups the initial cost by selling advertising. If and when YouTube breaks even, Slate is entitled to a revenue share for every additional dollar, Smee said. The YouTube-exclusive stories will be produced in addition to the two stories a day Slate is already producing for its own site.
To review: Slate spends nothing to produce the content, and if that content is engaging enough to attract eyeballs and advertisers, Slate eventually makes a little profit.
“There’s still a tremendous number of people out there who still don’t know that Slate makes video.”
Back in 2010 and early 2011, Smee said he was a little queasy about Slate potentially cannibalizing its own video traffic by cross-posting to YouTube. That feels like a long time ago. “That’s just no longer a consideration. We see this as added audience,” he said.
“It’s an opportunity for us to build the franchise out. We’re going on five years of making video at Slate. There’s still a tremendous number of people out there who still don’t know that Slate makes video, original video.”
The YouTube deal is a step away from the old-fashioned insistence that a content producer’s work must live on the content producer’s domain. (An insistence, to be fair, inspired in large part by a reliance on ad impressions.)
Smee said Slate’s news videos have an audience because they are “of the web.” They are meme-ish and disposable; they tend not to be stories that hit A1 but “things that might be a little quirkier,” Smee said. Yesterday’s 31-second piece about Rupert Murdoch’s new Twitter account will probably feel stale by tomorrow. Last Thursday’s 47-second piece about the death of Cheetah the chimp feels ancient.
That’s unusual, because video is not as versatile as tweets or text; it takes more time to produce. But Smee’s team has created something of an assembly line. The team initially spent a lot of time building a production template using After Effects and Final Cut Pro, which lets producers create stories with color-by-numbers ease. Writing the scripts takes about 20 to 30 minutes apiece. Then the scripts go to copy edit and narration. Slate produces two pieces a day in about three to four hours each, he said.
“We’ve created a kind of visual voice and style that I think works well on the web,” Smee said. “We are not like some legacy media organizations that are creating video from an old-school playbook — my background, by the way, is television, I was in television for 20 years, so I don’t sit in sneering judgment of television — but I do think TV and print organizations that have come to the web have not tended to kind of experiment with the form in the way ways that I think we have.”
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