I’m just getting around to reading this piece by Sandra Tsing Loh from The Atlantic’s March issue, and it’s pretty great. Its jumping-off point is Paul Fussell’s wonderful 1983 book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. (It’s hard for me to recommend Fussell generally and Class specifically highly enough — both brilliant.)
Go read [...]

Here’s Part 2 of my interview with Jesse Thorn, the host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Here’s my intro post and Part 1.)
In this part of our conversation, we talk about the state of the radio business — both commercial and public — and its unwillingness to imagine a truly new model [...]

Here’s the second excerpt from our interview with Richard Koci Hernandez. Here he talks about overcoming his natural fear of technology:
This is not a time for wusses! Those that survive and continue to tell stories in the future are going to have to get their hands dirty more than they ever did. I’m not ever [...]

We’re finishing up posting the videos we shot with speakers at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Over the next few days, we’ll be posting excerpts from our session with Richard Koci Hernandez — ex-newspaper photographer, multimedia maven, and now a fellow at UC Berkeley. He was one of the big hits of the conference, [...]

Last weekend, the Nieman Foundation hosted its annual Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, which was great fun for all involved. In the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you a taste of the conference — more accurately, the parts most aligned with our topic here at the Lab, figuring out the future of journalism.
We’ll start [...]

I feel I should point out that, although my name is Josh and I am from Louisiana, I am not the “Josh” from New Orleans who got a little mouthy with Rick Berke in this week’s Talk to the Newsroom feature at the Times. To quote “Josh”:
When you came up through the newspaper system, it [...]

Newspaper bosses and media companies can be short-sighted. Dull of wit. Evil, even. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention.
Myself, I’ve taken an active role in meetings where the topic — stated or unstated — was “We need to save a pantsload of money, and if that means we create [...]

At the risk of being burned at the stake by my fellow journalists, I wanted to pass along a thought that occurred to me recently about the wave of layoffs and mass firings that has been rolling through newsrooms across North America — namely, what if this is actually a good thing? Please, hear me [...]

News that The Chicago Tribune is including “attitude” as an employee evaluation metric has made Romenesko.
This is a surprise? In so many ways, attitude is everything, more important often than skills or even experience. It doesn’t substitute for them, of course, but it can accelerate the learning curve significantly.
That said, I think Romenesko buries the [...]

— The interactive crew at The New York Times are answering questions from readers all week. Of particular note so far are the answers to the second question, from Andrew Dunn:
I’m a student journalist trying to break into the journalist-programmer field. I’m curious — what skills do you need to have to be successful in [...]

Danny Sanchez and Joe Murphy both wrote recently about the need — in an era when your employer may not be around tomorrow — for reporters to keep copies of their clips. They focus on keeping your online-only clips, which are more likely to disappear without notice, but the same advice applies for regular ol’ [...]

— Interesting to see a NYT writer blogging for the NYT about being laid off by…the NYT. Marci Alboher was a freelancer for the Times (who wrote great pieces on career advice), but still, this feels like a step in the direction of openness. (More here, including the response Marci got from readers.) There are [...]

Blogger and web developer Rex Sorgatz has an interesting take on ex-MSNBC anchor Dan Abrams’ journalism/consulting outfit. Setting aside for a moment the specifics of Abrams’ plans:
If self-proclaimed journalists really want to survive, they’ll need to start thinking of themselves in a sphere that includes researcher, pundit, entrepreneur, speaker, performer — actually not too different [...]

FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver signs a $700,000 book deal with Penguin. When people ask me if they can make money blogging, the answer is usually a qualified “maybe” — it’s possible, but hard to make a living. But there are real opportunities to turn a blog into real money through other means — like a book [...]

[Here's the second response in this month's Lab Book Club. We're reading Crowdsourcing by Wired writer Jeff Howe; Rosita Boland from The Irish Times responds below to chapters 4 through 7. See here for more about the Lab Book Club. —Ed.]
Something I thought about throughout this section was: Does an international perspective make a difference [...]