Once a week, we gather stories about the media business, journalism, writing, publishing, and freelancing—with a Canadian focus—and share them in Off the Wire. Who needs a water cooler?
From Canada:
- These American Lies: The agony and ecstasy of fact checking [The Walrus Blog] (via @timfalconer)
- Help us mark 50 years of Report on Business [Globeandmail.com]
- Last week’s Sunday Edition: a discussion on the state of Canadian publishing with three publishers [CBC.ca]
- Amateur Bloggers, Professional Journalists, and Partisan Politics: A new study on that volatile mix [David Akin’s On the Hill] (via @dylan_robertson)
- Keep Canada Connected: Stop Severe Cuts to the CBC [ReimagineCBC.ca] (via @saraoleary)
- The Network: Fixing the CBC [TheStar.com] (via @jenwilsonTO)
From the U.S. and beyond:
- Theater, Disguised as Real Journalism [NYTimes.com] (via @mathewi)
- Facebook users get news from family & friends, Twitter users get news from journalists [Poynter.org] (via @evonnebenedict)
- State of the News Media 2012 shows audience growth for all platforms but newspapers [Poynter.org]
- When 30% of Workers are Freelance, How Do They Build Power On the Job? [AlterNet.org]
- AOL Prepping New Weekly iPad Magazine Called ‘Huffington’ [Forbes.com] (via @romenesko)
- Robo-journalists are already writing the next generation of news stories [TheVerge.com] (via @kim1811)
- Why working more than 40 hours a week is useless [Inc.com]
- Patch ignored early advice about one journalist-per-town model [NewspaperTunraround.com] (via @jayrosen_nyu)
- New Knight Lab tool makes great-looking timelines easy [PBS.org Idea Matters] (via @tscurrie)
- Gay Talese: The New York Observer: Gay Talese helped launch literary journalism in 1966 when Esquire published his profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” He shares his thoughts on the craft [Nieman Reports]
From Story Board last week:
- Study this! Even more reasons to join a union, from a librarian: You’ve seen it here before. We’re not shy about our support for unions, and whether it’s the Born Freelancer explaining why unions are boss or a fun video from the Canadian Media Guild demonstrating the sticky situations that unprotected workers find themselves in, we’re glad to share. We can write about reasons to join a union until we’re blue in the face (fingers?), but sometimes hearing it from someone who’s experienced the benefits of union membership is most powerful. That’s what you’ll find here, in a post from Laura Kaminker, a librarian-in-training who works in a unionized job in Mississauga’s library system and also holds another non-unionized position.
- Settlement reached between writer Patricia Pearson and Rogers Publishing: When freelancer Patricia Pearson wrote an article called “It’s Just Nuts” for Chatelaine in 2009, she probably didn’t think a dispute that followed from that piece would end more than two year later. But late last year Pearson — with the help of legal representation from the Canadian Media Guild and support from the Canadian Writers Group — reached a settlement with Rogers, Chatelaine‘s publisher.
Spot a story you think we should include in next week’s Off the Wire? Email the link to editor@thestoryboard.ca.