Profile of Michael Yon

The New York Times today has a profile of Michael Yon, the best-known and most respected of the so-called war bloggers. The money quote:

[H]e created a niche outlet that is better reported than most blogs, and more opinionated than most news reporting, with enough first-hand observation, clarity and skepticism to put many professional journalists to shame.

You can find Yon's blog here.

Your blogs are now linked

I've added your blogs to the right-hand sidebar, so please have a look. If you're having trouble getting started, read what some of your classmates are doing. It's far more important that you start blogging than wait to come up with the perfect subject.

If you run across something interesting in a newspaper or magazine, online or on television, write about it. Use Google to find links. It might take you a couple of weeks to find a subject that you want to keep returning to. But once you get in the blogging flow, you'll find that it comes more easily.

I've also subscribed to all your blogs with my RSS aggregator, so I'll know whenever you've posted anything new.

One thing you ought to do is spend a little time spiffing up your sidebar with links and other content. I'd like to see all of you add a link to this blog. That way, it will be easy for us to navigate back and jump off to other student blogs.

Finally, I've created a separate section called "Course documents." You'll find our Syllabus and Online Reading List, as well as the PowerPoint slides on "The Six Circles of Web Journalism." You might want to download it, because you'll find links to everything I demonstrated in class.

Facebook founder on "60 Minutes"

Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook, was profiled Sunday on the CBS News program "60 Minutes." Here's a clip:

More than anything, reporter Leslie Stahl seemed impressed with Zuckerberg's age. Tech columnist Kara Swisher also appeared, criticizing Zuckerberg for a recent Facebook advertising program that he had to abandon in the face of protests.

Setting up our blogs

Hope everyone is dug out from yesterday's snow storm. It wasn't a big deal, but the timing would have made for a miserable commute.

Tomorrow we'll be setting up our blogs. If you already have one, you can repurpose it for this class. I'm going to be demonstrating how to set up a blog with Blogger, but you can use anything you like. Probably the most viable alternative is WordPress.com. Each is free and easy to get started with.

I still don't have a good feel for how many people we're ultimately going to have in our class. If you're one of the folks whom I've asked to bring a wireless laptop every day, tomorrow will be a must.

I also hope you've begun reading "Journalism 2.0," by Mark Briggs. It really is a terrific resource. Every young journalist — and every old journalist — needs to understand the tools Briggs describes, and his book will give you an introduction to many of the themes we'll be talking about this semester. I've added a link to Briggs' blog at right.

Although "Journalism 2.0" is a free PDF, you might find it's worth moving onto a flash drive and bringing to Gnomon Copy for a printout. I find that PDFs are hard to read on screen — maybe you do, too.

New journalism, old politics

Given how badly the mainstream media performed during the past week in predicting — and virtually celebrating — the demise of Hillary Clinton, here are a couple of alternatives.

The first is Purple States, a citizen-journalism initiative in which ordinary people are traveling the country to interview presidential candidates, as well as actual voters, about their concerns and how the political system can address them. Here's a story on Purple States that appeared recently in the New Haven Independent, in itself an interesting new-media entity.

Where are the jobs in such a venture? Behind the camera. Although the citizens are the stars of Purple States, in fact, a heavy dose of professional journalism is needed to generate fully edited video reports and to help frame the stories in ways that are worthwhile for viewers. Purple States is a good example of pro-am collaboration.

The second is Political Lunch, a very different idea compared to Purple States. Political Lunch is a project put together by two young, entrepreneurial journalists who are carving out a niche for themselves outside the traditional media.

The site was featured in a Jan. 5 story in the New York Times on the expanding market for short videos that people can watch at noontime while they're eating lunch at their desks. Unlike Purple States, Political Lunch could be criticized for being as superficial as the mainstream media to which it is an alternative. But it's a good demonstration of the kinds of opportunities that are open to young journalists willing to try something new.

Beyond "EPIC 2015"

Brendan Gupta passes along "Prometeus: The Future of Media." Definitely worth a look.

Though it's not as news-oriented as "EPIC 2015," it's a little more up-to-date — and a lot more out there.

The magic wand

Steve Outing has a good column in Editor & Publisher in which he asks news-industry people: "If I had a magic wand with me today, what would you have me do with it to solve one or more of your company's problems?"

As you'll see, the answers revolve around blogging, social networking and the notion of journalists as facilitators of an ongoing conversation. (Via Romenesko.)