Pew Research Center: Newspapers generate nearly all online news consumed

At least, that’s one of the findings in a new(ish) study: 95 percent of all Baltimore news (the subject for the study) reported originated with traditional media, most of it from newspapers. Most of the other venues, including online, were mostly just regurgitating and discussing what the Baltimore Sun had turned up to begin with. Even in a market with now 53 (!) different entities covering local news, only 17 percent of their coverage had anything new, and most of that was generated by “old” media online.

Of course, it’s not all good news: The Sun is posting more government press releases verbatim in an apparent attempt to having news break as fast as possible.

Still, this (limited) study confirms what I’ve believed for a while: While Twitter and other social media might be great for disseminating the fact that an event has happened, and then linking to news stories about said event, it’s not going to replace traditional media any time soon. It’s not like there’s a big barrier to entry to live-blogging a Baltimore city council meeting on Twitter: It’s just that unpaid amateurs are unlikely to sit through all those meetings and do the basic work of reporting, especially in the absence of some burning issue that speaks to them personally.

Kraak & Smaak – “One Of These Days”

The Deep Cuts smart play list

For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been listening to less new music. Oh, I still listen to a lot of it, but I’m also rediscovering a lot of stuff in the dusty back shelves of my iTunes library.

The way I do it is through a smart play list, which is a playlist that iTunes will auto-populate based on criteria you set. I realized a while back that, although I was succeeding in my goal of not just listening to the same stuff that was in my CD collection when I graduated college (and succeeding albums from only those artists, forever and ever, amen), I was turning into some sort of NME/Pitchfork douchebag who could only listen to artists that were five to 10 minutes from being discovered, and nothing else. (Which is ironic, since I think that the staff of Pitchfork should be dealt with harshly, using their titular farming implement.)

So back into the library my iPhone now goes, with a Deep Cuts play list, which I named after a segment that one of the Washington, DC classic rock stations (does anyone really have the ability to distinguish one classic rock station from another?) that basically consisted of “hey, it turns out there’s more than four songs that we can play, although we promise to still play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ every hour.” They would go “deep” into an album and play something other than the main hit said album was best known for.

My version of this idea is an iTunes smart play list with the following criteria:

Genre is Rock
Play Count is 0 (I reset the play counts of all the songs in my iTunes once a year, just so I can track the year’s top 100)
Last Played is not in the last 12 months
Limit to 50 items selected by random

Then there’s several bands that I exclude — I have Billy Joel’s 1970s albums in my iTunes collection, but I don’t want him popping up in the middle of a bunch of modern rock tunes.

So every time I listen to the play list (which I have set to random play on my iPhone), I get a whole lot of surprises. Often it’s songs that have made my previous top 100 lists — the current Deep Cuts line-up includes “Swimming Pool” by the Submarines, “I Turn My Camera On” by Spoon and “One of these Days” by Kraak & Smaak — but it’s also a lot of stuff that I’ve rarely, if ever, listened to since getting my first iPod for Christmas in 2004 (including, at the moment, “Jesus Wrote a Blank Check” by Cake, “Since I Don’t Have You” by Guns N’ Roses and a remix of “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood).

The nice thing about this sort of play list is that it should work for anyone, whatever their taste. (If you don’t like rock music, just change the genre to one you prefer.)

Wired preps an iPad edition

I’m not sure if this is practical for everyone — I’m curious how much more time this adds to the layout guys’ workload — but it’ll certainly be interesting to see a rich media version of a “print” product. Hopefully I’ll be able to borrow an iPad and check it out later this year.

Michael Kinsley uses 1,800 words to praise tight writing

Full disclosure: I met Michael Kinsley years ago, and he acted like a complete dick.

I was doing a profile of local boy Pat Buchanan for the now-defunct McLean Providence Journal and spent an evening at Crossfire, where Kinsley and Buchanan were then the partisan co-hosts. Kinsley was extremely condescending and snide — he seemed to find the notion of a local newspaper doing a profile of a resident who had run for president and hosted a cable talk show seen in multiple countries to be “cute.”

That said, I mostly agree with this piece from the January/February issue of the Atlantic, other than its basic premise, which I partially disagree with:

One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.

He then goes on to beat up on several papers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, for writing long stories full of background and reporter opinions delivered via a third party expert. He doesn’t ever cite any evidence that readers don’t like long stories or that anyone has actually ever photographed a reader in the wild tossing down a paper and screaming “TL:DR!”

Like a lot of journalists his age, he also seems to be unaware that every day, readers link countless stories to their friends and colleagues and very few of them are the tiny little news nuggets that consultants keep insisting that readers prefer.

Overall, though, his insights into the journalistic process are spot-on, and might be pretty illuminating to non-journalists, especially when he lets the cat out of the bag about third party experts’ opinions in many news stories. (Which is why I mostly avoid doing it: The only opinions I think a reader cares about are the reader’s own and the involved parties’.)

The total number of words Kinsley needed to illustrate his point, including taking a shot at the NYT for a 1,456-word story? A not-particularly-tight 1,797 words. (I used 374 here, for the record.)