Readership nuggets

A lack of posts recently, due to out-of-town work at PTA. Here are some capsules of fresh material:

Reinvent journalism
Terrific advice from Howard Owens.

What to axe?
A compilation from a Google Forms survey created by Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine. See what 400+ journalists believe should be axed at newspapers. Sports, once again, appears to be undervalued.

The anger within
A new blog that collects anonymous posts of what makes journalists so angry these days. A “vent” site to be sure…I’m not sure it’s a healthy one. Some of the posts explode with an anger so vicious that it is frightening. This kind of negativity cannot be good…certainly can’t help newspapers prosper. I am not a sunshiny optimist for most things, but the kind of pessimism on display here will do nothing but assure the industry of certain death. You can’t innovate with this kind of attitude. Look at angry Journalist #470.
http://angryjournalist.com/?page_id=4&cp=47#comments
S/he gets brutally slammed in some subsequent posts, but s/he has the right attitude.

The posts also reveal an age-old problem with the newspaper industry—grinding young journalists into pulp. Say what you want about attitudes and generational differences, the fact is the same arguments have been made for generations—crappy hours doing crappy work for crappy pay. This has to change. The talent drain will not end otherwise. Keep beating the snot out of talented, motivated kids for a few years and journalism will shrivel and die.

Bad feature ledes
A lively discussion on the American Copy Editors Society board on a feature lede that, in the opinion of most, does not work. I hate it, too. What doesn’t get said, though, is how much damage poor writing can do to a paper’s credibility. Editors must protect this. Yes, writers need to have some freedom to experiment and branch out and try things. But they have to know their audience and have to know the power of their words. This writer—and the editor—missed this completely. Reporters and copy editors must read this.