My editor stood in my doorway. “How did your first day go?” he asked.

“I didn’t get anything done,” I said, holding out the list. “All I did was talk to people.”

“That’s your job!” he shouted at me, laughing. “That’s what I need you to do!”

Call me slow. But what I began to realize on that March evening in 1981 is that managers who take responsibility for a staff and its work have two primary jobs:

Product and People.

And here’s the important part: They are equally important, but rarely treated that way. –Poynter..

News report from 1981 about the Internet. [MOBILE VIDEO].

There will always be a public appetite for reporting on baseball, movie stars, gardening and cooking, but it’s of no great moment for the country if all of that work were taken over by amateurs or done by machine. What is of great moment is reporting on important and true stories that can change society. The reporting on the Catholic Church’s persistent harboring of child rapists, Enron’s fraudulent accounting and the scandal over the Justice Department’s Operation Fast and Furious are all such stories.

Because telling true stories is vital, the value of journalism can’t be reduced to other, ancillary needs. Journalism performs multiple overlapping functions, and there never used to be much urgency in defining those functions. In the period in which public speech was scarce (which is to say, all of history until now), journalism was simply what journalists did, journalists were just people hired by publishers, and publishers were the relative handful of people who had access to the means of making speech public.

We believe that the role of the journalist–as truth-teller, sense-maker, explainer–cannot be reduced to a replaceable input for other social systems; journalists are not merely purveyors of facts. Now and for the foreseeable future, we need a cadre of full-time workers who report the things someone somewhere doesn’t want reported, and who do it in a way that doesn’t just make information available (a commodity we are currently awash in), but frames that information so that it reaches and affects the public. –Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

One Author Breaks Down the Reality of Violent Games in the Media.

A few years ago, I updated the scenario to refer to President Obama instead. Today I came across an amusing example of a real-world exchange in which context is important, but in this case the reporter did not resort to the lazy “when asked about.” Note that this amusing exchange comes late in the story. (The headline “Wiener blasts TV as ‘dying industry’” would be misleading.)

In due course Weiner, posing for cell-phone snapshots and conducting the occasional voter encounter, made his way through a thicket of boom mikes and video cameras to a waiting SUV. But before leaving, he had a dialogue with Jenesis Vaughn, an eight-year-old second-grader at PS 182 who told the candidate she wanted to be a journalist one day.

“What kind of reporter do you want to be?” Weiner bent down to ask the vivacious little girl. “A print reporter, for a newspaper, or a TV reporter?”

“I just want to be a TV reporter,” she answered eagerly.

Weiner bent down lower, as if to impart a confidence. “You might not want to go into TV—it’s a dying industry,” he told her. “The Internet is where it’s at.” –The Daily Beast.

Nancy Grace and Ashleigh Banfield Hold Split-Screen Interview in Same Parking Lot – Dashiell Bennett and Philip Bump – The Atlantic Wire.

Ever wonder if the news story youre reading is a product of real journalism or just a spin off of another story posted elsewhere? Discover the journalism you can trust and what you should question.

via Churnalism Search.