While You Were Writing – 7/20/12

By Sara Castillo, under While You Were Writing. Sara Castillo is a blogger, entertainment writer and editor.

As always, we’re busy reading the wires and scanning pages of magazines to find what we consider the top reads for freelance writers interested in perfecting their craft and building their business. This week, we look at the changing world of reporting.

Now, on to the stories!

The future is now and the newsroom of the future is Twitter. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram writes, National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin sees his Twitter followers “as his newsroom” and Reddit is on the ground in a way traditional news sources aren’t. “In one recent case, a member of Reddit pulled together a news report about a shooting in Toronto, including the tweets of those who attended and later became victims of the incident — another sign of how social media is changing both the way we consume and the way we produce journalism.”

This may not be quite what you meant when you said you want to write for the Guardian. Mashable.com reports the newspaper’s U.S. division is launching a “pop-up aggregator.”
“After a major news story breaks … a writer will put up a post asking for the best commentary and analysis that surfaces in the following hours and days. Participants are asked to tweet nominations on Twitter with the hashtag #smarttakes.”

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum rails journalists for accepting the new, more draconian rules of campaign reporting from both sides of the campaign trail. He argues that writers have “no one to blame but themselves” for the lack of freedom. “These kinds of campaign stories almost never produce anything of real interest. If reporters were banned from doing them, virtually nothing would be lost. In fact, the quality of campaign reporting might very well go up.”

Where did the term “freedom of the press” come from? The New Statesman.com’s David Allen Green reviews the origins of the term and how it relates to online media. ” … ‘freedom of the press’ was not some entitlement of a media elite but a more basic right of anyone to circulate their ideas more widely than they could do simply by themselves.”

New York Times contract talks have taken on a bit of a prime-time drama feel. The paper’s management proposed two separate contracts for staff: one for digital, one for print. But the Guild refuses to be divided and the staffers are banding together and taking it to YouTube with this latest video.

And finally, The New Yorker’s Mara Bustillos suggests you take a page from your favorite authors when deciding what books to read … The twins from Sweet Valley High are texting … Lens Baby mixes art and documentary with these cool, Instagram-like lenses for professional photographers … Project Runway is jumping on the tweet-curation bandwagon with its Real-Time Runway tool and according to Mashable, “18% of teens would stop communicating altogether if their favorite social networks shut down.” One has to wonder if that’s a bad thing.

(Image Courtesy of Flickr, FateDenied)