Newsweek’s redesign, Pulitzer jokes and Twitter stuff

The Daily Double: Do you take your Newsweek pandering and slightly elitist? Then you’ll love Reinventing Newsweek, wherein Assistant Managing Editor Kathleen Deveny shrewdly sells the news outlet’s upcoming print and Web redesign (emphasis below is mine, all mine):

Our research indicates there is a large domestic audience — 17 million strong — of smart, educated readers who are looking for a publication that can help them put the flood of news into perspective.

Maybe some of those smart readers will pick up on the irony of narrowing one’s audience in an economic climate that has compelled a sickly industry to tout the importance of journalism to an informed democracy (again, emphasis mine):

We will drop our guaranteed circulation from 2.6 million to 1.5 million by next January. We will focus on a smaller, more devoted, slightly more affluent audience. Over time, we will increase subscription prices. I think the new design is sophisticated and airy, and makes the stories we work so hard on seem more inviting.

“Good journalism is expensive to produce,” writes Deveny. The power of the press belongs to those who own one. And, apparently, to those who can afford to buy its content. So this is what niche publishing is all about.

“Oh, snap!” of the day: “Does the Pulitzer give prizes for works of fiction? Perhaps they just got the wrong category” — former Pentagon Assistant Secretary Dorrance Smith, on David Barstow’s Pultizer Prize-winning story, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.”

Save these online journalism classes

Fire up your bookmark folders, I’ve got a good ‘un today: Online Journalism Blog has a number of useful online classes, PowerPoint-style. Topics covered include writing for the Web, podcasts, blogging practices (including points both for and against frequent posts), Twitter for beginners and managing feeds.

Writing great Twitter headlines is an art

And here’s the irrefutable proof: A blog post named The art of writing great Twitter headlines. To wit:

Your headlines must:

1. Be USEFUL to the reader,
2. Provide him with a sense of URGENCY,
3. Convey the idea that the main benefit is somehow UNIQUE; and
4. Do all of the above in an ULTRA-SPECIFIC way.

These seem like pretty sound tips, and the blog from which this derives is also a good source of general writing advice. Expect them to continue to be abused by people whose sole use of Twitter is to spam you with tips on how to use Twitter.

Ashton Kutcher, king of Twitter

At Nieman Journalism Lab, Mathew Ingram looks at criticism of Ashton Kutcher’s race against CNN to become the first with a million followers on Twitter. And he concludes that “Far from being just an egotist who wants to take advantage of a medium to promote himself,” Kutcher has something to teach us about the evolution of media:

As a celebrity who is in the public eye almost all the time, he also has a somewhat unique take on the media industry and how it is being transformed.

 

In his video discussion with Oprah about Twitter, for example, Kutcher says he believes that “we’re at a place now with social media where a single person’s voice can be as powerful as an entire news network — that is the power of the social web.” (although obviously it helps if that one person is a celebrity). He then talks about how his life is “somewhat on display anyway, and not always by choice… so instead of them publishing pictures and videos I don’t like, I can publish pictures and video of myself… that I’m happy with. If there’s some sort of fallacy that’s out in some magazine or that some blogger has written about, you can respond to it, and you can actually respond to it in a genuine way, directly with your fans, as opposed to having to go through the whole rigamarole of publicists and so on.”

Stephen A. Smith, Carlie Becker, Ray Sansom

Here’s what I’m reading right now on the Web:

State Rep. Ray Sansom indicted

Stephen A. Smith is out at ESPN

High school coach Carlie Becker fired for Playboy pics

Cessna plane crashes in Oakland Park (Broward County) And here’s what people are saying about the plane crash on Twitter.

The revolution will be Twittered

No, this isn’t some high-minded think-piece about the social networking glories of Twitter (you’re welcome). Instead, it’s about an uprising taking place in Moldova, where demonstrators are protesting the recent victory of the Communist party during elections. And tweeting their hearts out:

In the last 48 hours, students from Moldova have been tweeting, trying to rally others into demonstrating against the communists. If you look under the search terms “pman” (stands for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, a square in Chisinau) or “Chisinau,” you can see the tweets about the demonstration coming in a rapid pace.

And then police in riot gear responded with the Fail Whale. If only.

Making sense of the economy

At Columbia Journalism Review’s The Audit, business writer Ryan Chittum consistently posts his insightful analysis of the mainstream media’s coverage of our economic troubles.

From stories about misleading unemployment numbers to the ramifications of the economic downturn, Chittum, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, holds journalists accountable for their reporting and gives readers his plain-language insight into what it all means.

Be like me (supercool, that is) and subscribe to the Audit news feed, and/or follow Chittum on Twitter.

Saved searches come to Twitter

Good news if you’ve discovered the power of using Twitter to work on stories.

Beatblogging reports that Twitter has now developed a Web interface allowing users to save their searches.

The Circle of Twitter

At TechCrunch, a guest author invokes the Bard when he asks:

Does Twitter want to be more like MySpace, which is cleaning up to be more like Facebook, which wants to be like Twitter? Where shall these three meet—in thunder, lightning or rain?

Headline to make your synapses misfire

Yahoo Sideline: An Open Source Desktop Twitter Keyword Monitor