Quick hits

Some things you might want to read:

Pep Talk - Robert Niles posts some positive news to counteract all the negativity out there in medialand. The market for good journalism — engaging, relevant, accurate and enduring information — lives. What the market is rejecting is the half-baked, lazy and boring reporting that doesn’t stand the test of time — the sort of reporting that understaffed and under-trained newsrooms too often have delivered over the past generation.

 Angry journalists can be a good thing - Maurreen Skowran posts a number of initiatives journalists are taking to help save the industry. Navigating between the past and the future deserves both experimentation and analysis. Newspaper readership has been studied for decades. But we also need to examine what factors make comparable newspapers sometimes perform vastly differently online.

Journalism may fade in NU name game - Eric Zorn highlights the name-game going on at Northwestern U.’s famed Medill school. Personally, I don’t find anything sacrosanct about the name “journalism,” but some of the alternatives are so vague as to be useless.

College High Five of the Week: Tennessee Journalist - Pat Thornton highlights the differences between two media products at the University of Tennessee. I’d rather see the current student media produce experimental projects. But if the student newspaper isn’t going to step forward, perhaps it’s time for more online media products. College is a time for experimentation, pushing the boundaries, discovering new things and not being afraid of failure (it’s a lot less costly to fail in college than it is after graduation). If there was ever a place for journalists to take risks and try things that may not work, it should be in college media. College is the perfect time for failure.

Mashup Fun - Jack Lail details how he put together a homicide map for Knox County using an XML file and Yahoo! Maps.

Exclusive: Charting 4-year circ decline at major papers - E&P posts some grisly numbers, but wouldn’t this be better in a chart?

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