Bloggasm

I have spent hours and hours– after heading home from my job as a newspaper reporter — dreaming about what I would do if I were to have $1 million or so fall into my lap. Almost all of these daydreams consisted of me starting some kind of online media publication, of which I would be editor and publisher. I’ll keep most of my ideas to myself, just in case that scenario ever comes to fruition.

Of course I was salivating today when I read that lucky students from Jeff Jarvis’s class will get to live out a very similar scenario. They’ve received a $100,000 grant to engage in “entrepreneurial journalism.”

Of course if I were to receive this kind of financial backing, then it would ruin the idealist nature of Web 2.0, the sense that we can pick ourselves up to media stardom by simply starting with a blog.

With the doom and gloom storm clouds gathering, we’ve seen news article after article about layoffs in major newspaper companies. But we also see little trickles of information that local newspapers are doing well–actually increasing in ad sales.

So it has been interesting to see the debate as to how the journalism job market is doing. Mediashift has an in-depth discussion on the topic, followed by a rebuttal by Rough Type, followed by a counter-rebuttal from Mediashift.

Verdict? Journalism jobs are decreasing, but at a slower rate than perhaps we originally thought.

What the articles fail to point out is the increase in full-time bloggers. I would say that there are now more than 1,000 bloggers out there who make a full-time living–whether it’s through adsense or some other form of online advertising. If you combine this with the new digital jobs at more traditional forms of media, then perhaps you’ll see an even more healthy job market.

Have I been sleeping under a rock for the last few days? I just found out that Mediabistro, the huge blog network that focuses on the media, has sold for $23 million to Jupitermedia Corporation. To my knowledge, this is the second largest blog sale in history, second only to the $25 million acquisition of Weblogs, Inc by AOL.

Suddenly, running a media blog doesn’t seem so hopeless.

via nyobserver

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2. Interview with Laurence Simon from This Blog is Full of Crap

Here’s a real shocker, a study shows that teens don’t follow current events.

I was watching the excellent movie Sicko last night and it got me thinking about the mainstream media’s rush to debunk everything Moore does. He makes for an easy target, a way for them to prove they’re not biased. How could they be liberally slanted? They just spent five minutes attacking his documentary, after all. If they spend time attacking him, then maybe conservatives would think that they were “balanced” after all.

Read about the hit job CNN performed on Moore the other day.

This is something that I think about every day. If I had a few million dollars drop in my lap and I could start some kind of news publication, how would my model work? I might have some time at a later date to actually go into great detail about this plan, but for right now, Media Shift is asking its readers to come up with the perfect newsroom. Given all the available technology systems for journalists– wikis, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, twitter, plus traditional systems— if you could build a news room from scratch, how would you do it? If you have more free time than I do, go answer.

Bill O’reilly’s radio program, “The Radio Factor,” was dropped from local Washington DC stations. Other than Rush Limbaugh’s program, talk radio isn’t popular in DC. Its ratings are so low that it isn’t even listed on most rating charts.

At first glance, one would assume this is because DC is a liberal city. But this isn’t the case.

“”It’s not that we’re a liberal town,” says Jim Farley, who oversees programming for all-news WTOP and news-and-talk Washington Post Radio.

The Washington Post article says “By comparison, Seattle and San Francisco — two famously liberal areas — have popular conservative stations. And “Savage Nation,” the radio show hosted by Savage, who was once fired by MSNBC for making anti-gay slurs, is a perennial hit in the Bay Area.”

via national review

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