Journalism job

This is a real post found on journalismjobs.com. Looks like Brandon and I sure picked the right degree. Oh the future of journalism. At least they are honest.

Position: LONG HOURS LOW PAY
Location: Southern, Oregon
Job Status: Full-time
Salary: $20,000 to $25,000

How bad do you want to be a reporter? Bad enough to work nights and weekends? The poor glutton for punishment that's chosen will cover city and county government. Sports and general interest feature stories.

In exchange for your long hours and tireless efforts you will be rewarded with low pay and marginal health insurance. This is a full time salaried position located in the beautiful northwest.

Good bye, Washington D.C. Sports

That's right, sports officially don't exist in Washington D.C. anymore. Or maybe newspapers don't exist anymore as a viable money-making entity.

The Washington Times Sports section is preparing as if this Friday's edition will be their last. Caps beat guy Corey Masisak isn't with the team on the West Coast. Wiz beat guy Mike Jones referred to Tuesday night's dreadful loss as his last. Redskins beat guys Ryan O'Halloran and David Elfin aren't going with the team to San Diego, which is just unimaginable, a Skins game without the Times guys. College ace Patrick Stevens covered the frigid EagleBank Bowl on Tuesday and will do Maryland-William & Mary Wednesday night, and then a follow the next day, just for the heck of it. Georgetown beat guy Barker Davis, who's been covering that school since the 19th century, will cover the New Year's Eve game.

And then, silence? As of this writing, the staff hasn't been told anything official, but the paper is moving forward with plans for a new product on Monday, and there have been no indications that product will include sports. The 25 full-time sports staffers are thus assuming they'll get the official pink slip sometime before the New Year.

Okay, if you're a journalist right now you have to be freaking out because the Washington Times is a major sports paper in a major sports market and they just dropped their sports section like a hot potato. What does that mean for the guy that covers the Central Valley Coyotes arena football team? Might want to start seeing if you cant turn that late night karoake talent into a job because this is another sign that newspapers are going down in flames.

Video Bites: Adam Morrison

The December 18th edition of the JustSON Video Bites. That's right, bite sized videos!

Send your outdoor photos and cute animal photos to justsouthofnorth@gmail.com

Just Northwest
http://www.justnw.blogspot.com

National Geographic Adventure closing:
http://blog.outdoorzy.com/2009/12/04/...

Mike Holmgren:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html...

Seattle P-I test results still unknown

This evening I came across this blog post by Kenneth Corbin in which he talks about the future of journalism and how the Seattle P-I is testing the waters in this new media age.

And if that's not interesting enough, check out this site. It's called Paper Cuts and it shows exactly how many newspaper jobs have been lost to-date. And also where these cuts have been made. Great time for print journalism right? Well, looks like to survive journalism must adapt. Kinda like JustSON. Welcome to the future.

WASHINGTON -- In some ways, the Seattle P-I is one of the best testbeds the country's got going for what local journalism will look like after the city paper takes its inevitable place behind the glass case at the Smithsonian.

The paper, formerly the beta daily in a two-newspaper town, ended its 146-year print run in March, a victim of declining circulations and the spare economics of digital advertising.

The paper, though eulogized thoroughly, was reborn as a Web-only experiment, a digital news organization pruned from an editorial staff of almost 180 down to about 20.

"It's an adventure," said Monica Guzman, who carriers the title of "news gatherer" at the online-only incarnation of the Seattle P.I.

That title refers to the diversified role of what old-media types knew as reporters. Now, Guzman says everyone on staff does everything. Next Saturday, she'll take a turn at the production shift, leaving her in charge of managing the Web site. All writers are to be trained how to use a camera, to ease the load of the one full-time photographer on the P-I's staff.

"There's this acknowledgment that reporting isn't just reporting in the traditional sense," Guzman said this afternoon at the Gov 2.0 Summit. The event, co-hosted by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb, focuses principally on government and technology, but justified the panel on the future of journalism for the civic good that investigative reporters sometimes provide.

As a "news gatherer," Guzman said she is often cast in the role of facilitator, marshalling the verve of bloggers and citizen journalists by doing things like packing the P-I's site with raw government data that leads to a wellspring of fact-based reporting and commentary, much of it of the hyper-local variety.

"Any time we put up a database online, it just takes off," she said.

So, given the tools, time and inclination, anyone can be an investigative reporter of the sort that helps keep civil servants honest?

Well, it's an experiment. Seattle, Guzman readily admitted, is blessed with a comparatively tech-savvy population that has spawned a vibrant blogging culture. The way she tells it, they're getting street cred in the halls of power. Whereas a couple years ago, press passes for new media types were hard to come by and the desk sergeant might not have given a blogger the time of day, in Seattle of 2009 it's "bad news" for the officials who don't work with the blogging community, Guzman said.

Some of them are even making money, farming out paid assignments, she said.

Enough to shine a light on City Hall, to avoid the descent into the golden age of corruption that David Simon darkly warned a Senate panel about back in May?

Too early to tell. But it's hard to argue that Seattle isn't better off for the online P-I and its burgeoning courtship with the local bloggers. So the experiment continues.

The Magazine Death Pool

I came across this web site today. It is a very harsh reality on the state of journalism right now.

The site is called Magazine Death Pool and the author has had it going for a number of years now.

They document each magazine that has gone under as it, well, heads down to visit the Reaper as the writer calls himself.

Reading through the posts, it's like taking a walk through an actual graveyard. I remember a lot these magazines. The site is more like an archive of failed journalistic attempts.

It truly is a sad state affairs for journalism.

The truth about sportswriters

Obviously writing about sports is something that I enjoy, but I would classify myself more as a blogger than a writer. Namely because I can't write proper sentences and I'm not doing any real journalism, just spitting out bad jokes about Derek Jeter.

However, what blogging does allow me to do is voice my opinion, which some may not agree with, some may - it's a toss up. However, it's understood that this is opinion and not a credible media report.

Here in lies the problem with today's sports writers. It seems more and more that it's becoming about opinions, speculation and judgement. It's become a smear fest.

Example: steroids.

On Colin Cowherd's show on ESPN today, he made the point that fans don't care about steroids nearly as much as the sports media. However, since the steroids scandal in baseball a few years ago was a virtual cash cow for sports writers - they just keep jamming it down our throats.

Fans don't really care about the moral implications and the guys that keep bringing it up are the writers who long for the "pure" age of baseball - you know, when they didn't allow people of a different race play or the ball was a goat's head. Wouldn't it make better sense to explore WHY the players took steroids as opposed to putting a full-time beat reporter on Manny Ramirez's stool?

And for a profession that claims to be looking for the truth and reporting on stories that matter - it's a little fishy that we have a book about how A-Rod is a poor tipper at Hooters.

And here in lies the problem with today's journalism. With the Internet, blogs and mass media in general, sports writers have become less and less influential. It use to be that you're only avenue of communication with your baseball team was. Now with all these other sources, writers have to make a name for themselves by being moral blowhards. And the ones that scream the loudest get the most attention.

This means that less care and more guess work is thrown into the equation. More and more of the writing is fluff meant to piss people off than serve any real purpose.

Look at ESPN, how much of their programming and website is opinion? How much of it is just reporting the facts? With things like GameCast, box scores and a quick highlight reel, writers aren't going to get much attention for a 400-word game story. But a 800-word piece tearing down a baseball player for taking steroids? Brilliant! Put it on the first page! We're the media and we're going to take this player down because it's our responsibility. Look at us!

It's this kind of philosophy that has skewed sports coverage to the point where we're filming TO bench pressing in his driveway. It has gone from being a somewhat respected occupation to something that is now comparable to Entertainment Tonight but with athletes.

I will credit the media and sports writers with the way they've held off on judgement in the Steve McNair death, reporting the facts and not trying to jump to any conclusions. But instances like those are far and few between in the world of sports writing.

Dying to Diet

I didn't know that this was an actual diet, but apparently this was something I should have engaged in to cut down on the food bill.

The idea of forgoing food in favor of alcohol isn't new. Dieters everywhere cower in fear of carbs; but alcohol, gram for gram, has even more calories than carbohydrates do. For many people, this creates a dilemma: If you want to restrict calories, you have to cut back on either food or booze. For a college student or 20-something who wants to party and have a good time yet still have a bikini body, the choice is obvious.

The result is a trend among young people, particularly young women, called drunkorexia—restricting food calories to make room for drink calories. The practice is widespread: 30 percent of women between 18 and 23 diet so they can drink, according to one study.

People haven't you heard of light beer? That's really the key to everything. That, and drinking so much that you throw up whatever you had for dinner. It's perfect! You don't even need to stop eating because it really doesn't stay down anyways.

Okay, so that was a bit mean, but I did like the mention in the article about the "coffee, water, alcohol and cigarettes diet" which makes me laugh because roughly 95 percent of journalists are already on that diet anyway. They just throw in the occasional BK Quad.

It's looking like that journalism degree will pay off

It's nice to go into an industry that's losing millions of dollars every year. By the time I get a good job, journalists will probably printed papers on the back of napkins.

NEW YORK The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.

According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.

You can read the full story here.

I hope Red Robin is hiring.