I can’t imagine anyone outside of an affluent family pursuing a career with so little room for financial growth. And I wonder: Would that well-to-do reporter shake hands with the homeless person she interviews? Would she walk into a ghetto and knock on a door to speak with the mother of a shooting victim? Or would she just post some really profound tweets with fantastic hash tags?

Maybe that’s what people – editors and readers – put at a premium now. Maybe a newsroom full of fresh-from-the-dorm reporters who stay at their desks, rehashing press releases and working on Storify instead of actual stories, is what will keep newspapers relevant.

But I doubt it.

—Allyson Bird’s poignant and pointed story on why she left her job at a newspaper.

The Bacon-Wrapped Economy

More on the transformation of the Bay Area by the influx of a lot of young money.

While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. [They are] more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.

—UC Berkeley psychologist Paul Piff trying to explain why the rich don’t give to charity.

you have a lot of young, hopeful, unrich people, and a lot of older, less hopeful, but orders-of-magnitude wealthier people who want to invest in the young, hopeful people, often in the same way an older man with a videocamera wants to invest in a porn starlet.

—Goddammit, I love Paul Ford.

San Francisco is a city in which we are besieged from both sides: the infinitesimal middle class here contends with rich creeps and poor creeps. For every meth-addicted jerk-victim spraying spittle and salacious slurs at commuting women, there is an ostentatious startup scion hijacking a social situation and crashing it into the ground with his self-aggrandizing prattle. While the schizophrenic is defecating on the children’s playground, the high-flying narcissist at the bar waylays five adults with an unsought lecture on the intricacies of his moral hobbies.

—Creep City gets a lot about San Francisco mostly right.

davidpierce:

From NBC News in St. Peters’ Square, how our world has changed in one picture. Pretty unbelievable.

journo-geekery:

Dissecting a Trailer: The Parts of the Film That Make the Cut - Interactive Feature - NYT Graphics

How scenes from five of the nine best picture nominees were reassembled to promote the films.

Click through to inspect along each timeline.  I’m sure we’ve all sensed some of these patterns in trailers but it sure is awesome to see it broken apart and annotated.

Incredible work. I love the use of data journalism in “soft” stories like this.

(If you back For Journalism, you can learn how to do this, too!)

For Journalism

Some of the smartest people working in data journalism today are going to teach you their secrets. Journerdalists from NPR, ProPublica, The New York Times, The AP, The Spokane Spokesman Review, and more will show you how to build a modern news app. Twenty bucks gets you started, a crisp benjamin gets you the whole course.

On its own, this is a great thing, I want it to do well, and I hope they can help educate the next round of hacker journalists.

Here’s why this is capital-I-Important, though, and why you might consider pitching in even if you’ve never considered an opportunity in the highly lucrative field of data journalism1. We are awash in “data”, some of which seems important, but most of which is so much flotsam. Data is powerful if we can translate it into information but it can also drown us if we just let it wash over. Or if we let corporations control it or use it to bully our cities and towns, or let governments get away with misusing it, or we just accept anecdote or conventional wisdom as truth.

The tools for working with all of this data are out there. There has never been a better time to dig into all of the numbers and systems that intersect with our lives every day. You can literally spin up a server for basically nothing and build a web app that real people can use. If you’ve ever had an idea for something that can better inform people about the world they live in, a hundred bucks and a few hours of your time will help you build it.

Places like NPR and The New York Times are always going to have smart folks working for them on the big stories, but they can’t be everywhere. We can, though, and with the right tools, we can be just as powerful.

actual lucrative career mileage may vary. The good news is, you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing you helped make the world a better place. ↩︎

Neither service is a lost cause. Yet. But both would be well served to revisit what made them special in the first place: engaging with peers, not merely consuming content from brands and celebrities; being a creative platform for developers; and championing social media where users, not advertisers, call the shots.

—

Why Fast Company doesn’t consider Facebook or Twitter amongst the most innovative companies.

As much as I agree, I just don’t see it happening. What they are describing here is social networking circa mid-2007, not 2013. It’s like pining for the old 5-cent store and soda fountain in an age of Walmart and McDonald’s.

I’m more than a little surprised by the sudden willingness to outsource publishing to what is at best a quasi-reliable, third party platform … at the end of the day news operations are being rebuilt around a company or two that seem largely disinterested in those very operations. To put it another way, imagine if there were only one network for email and one, albeit pretty cool, company controlled that. Would we be so excited about newspapers jumping on that trend?

—I was reminded of this thing I wrote this three years ago during yesterday’s Facebook brief outage. I continue to be surprised that companies not only rely on third parties like Twitter and Facebook but implement that integration in such a way when that third party goes down it breaks everything.