fittingly.net

The Great Blessing

Millie — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:44:47 +0000

“Journalists have the great blessing of being able to link disparate subjects, to bring undeservedly obscure information and knowledge to public attention, and to ask important questions that other people aren’t asking.”

via Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Dean Lemann’s final commencement speech given to class of 2013.

Tools for the Coming Chaos

Millie — Mon, 06 May 2013 23:03:04 +0000

Joi Ito’s nine principles for operating in a chaotic world:

Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.
You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.
You want to focus on the system instead of objects.
You want to have good compasses not maps.
You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.
It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.
It’s the crowd instead of experts.
It’s a focus on learning instead of education.

via Wired

Actual state of the media

Millie — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 04:06:41 +0000

“But what if the news media is judged on these metrics: How well does it provide citizens the information they need to govern themselves? How effectively does it fulfill its role as a watchdog? Judged accordingly, the verdict is a lot murkier.”

via The Atlantic

Impact

Millie — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 03:39:53 +0000

“But the next thing he said was, ‘If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.’ I tell people in their careers, ‘look for growth.’ Look for the teams that are growing quickly. Look for the companies that are doing well. Look for a place where you feel that you can have a lot of impact.”

via ABC News

Steve Brill: “I knew nothing about the subject”

Millie — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:35:57 +0000

This encapsulates what I love about journalism — it’s as much about writing as figuring out the facts and making sense of it:

“That’s in large part because I knew nothing about the subject, literally nothing about the subject. If I have one virtue, it’s that I’m not intimidated to dive into things that I know nothing about. I’m never afraid to ask really stupid questions at the beginning. When I’m interviewing people and they use acronyms, I always stop them and say, “What does that mean?” even though it’s an acronym that’s branded onto their forehead because they use it every day. I used to teach my reporters that. I remember when Connie Bruck started on her great Mike Milken piece that then became a book, she knew nothing about what a junk bond was. She literally couldn’t have told you in the simplest terms what a junk bond was, and I said, “Well, who cares? You’re smart. You’ll figure it out. Just ask people what a junk bond is.””

via ProPublica