One of the best things to come out of the demise of Good magazine is that Ann Friedman has been unleashed on the wider world of editing and publishing. She wrote a great post for Nieman Journalism Lab called “#Realtalk for the j-school grad” that’s filled with great advice not just for journalists starting their career, but any journalist who wants to change jobs or just stay on top of their game. Such as this tidbit:

Learn to write headlines, even if you don’t want to be an editor. Headline writing is about distilling complicated ideas and selling what’s sexy about a piece. This is also called, “being good at Twitter” or “effective pitching.”

And this one, which especially applies to tech journalists — whether aspiring or established:

Be an early adopter. Mess around with new reading apps, new blogging platforms, new social media sites. You don’t have to use all of these things every day, but you need to be familiar with them. One of your main selling points as a newbie journalist is that you’re “hip” to the “Internet sites” and “gadgets” that “the young people” are using today. Deliver on that stereotype. And while you’re at it, learn a lesson that your journalistic elders have largely failed to grasp: Evolution is a lifestyle, not a conference you attend once a year. Keep at it.

If you can’t evolve in the ever-evolving world of journalism, then you’ll limit yourself to the parts of the industry that are dying off.

This past week, John Gruber called out AllThingsD for their odd practice of not crediting sources by name or even blog name.

Until this is fixed, no more mentions by name of “All Things D” or anyone who writes for them. I’ve corrected this piece from earlier today accordingly.

The correction:

Some Guy With a Goatee on the TouchPad

Hilarious.

Note: Gruber explains more thoroughly here why attribution is important — not just the act of attributing, but also how one attributes information.

Creating and defining a publication’s editorial voice is extremely challenging. (West Gold Editorial has a process I’ve used on several publications — and it has helped immensely.) That’s one reason I love looking at how other companies do it. Here’s Groupon’s editorial handbook. I love how they show how far is too far.

• This tweet is yet another reason why I love Esquire’s Twitter feed. Esquire has one of the most well-defined editorial voices out there–even on the Twitters and even when talking about a topic that, at most magazines, no one except the copyeditors would think about.
• Captivating color photography of America from 1939-1943. Looking at these–and seeing how color photography really makes a time I’ve only seen in black and white truly come alive–makes me appreciate how innovative and magical color photography must have been when it became accessible to consumers (but before it became ubiquitious). Further viewing: Russia, in color, a century ago. (Hat tip: @isoughtajam)
• Late addition (1:46 pm): Elizabeth Spiers on some of the many self-defeating beliefs held by traditional media companies. So true.

This article explains roughly why I think digital publishing is the future of print:

There’s a lot of angst in the book publishing industry — and among book lovers — about the rise of the e-book and the decline of the printed version, but there’s good news for those who care about books regardless of what form they take: A growing body of evidence shows that people with e-readers are reading more books. (from GigaOM)

Yet, it also explains why magazine publishers probably will take a lot longer to embrace digital: there is empirical evidence that they should do it and do it now. Seriously, what is it about publishers that they don’t make changes that are nearly guaranteed to save their industry?

This Folio article on staffing changes at the top of Print‘s masthead (the editor was fired, and now the publisher is looking for a multi-platform content manager) feels emblematic of what’s going on all over the print world right now–especially if former editor Gordon is accurately describing her accomplishments, which sound like exactly what a content manager would do.

It reminds me of one of my new year’s resolutions: stop expecting praise or credit for my work.

The fact is everyone in publishing–from editors to publishers to the accountants to the receptionists–is panicking. No one knows what the future of our industry looks like. All we know is that we have to create it. And that is one thing the publishing industry is not used to. We’re used to innovating within the confines of a working business model. The business model no longer works. All hell has broken loose.

Looking at it through that light, you can see why good, smart, innovative people are being fired because higher-ups are looking for people who are even better, smarter, and more innovative–even though they don’t know what “innovative” looks like yet. This, of course, feeds staffers’ worst fears, stifles innovation, and keeps us stuck in the spin cycle.

Link: Multichannel-Bent Publishers Give Longtime Print Staffers the Cold Shoulder – Jason Fell – Blogs emedia and Technology @ FolioMag.com.

David Carr has a good post over on the NY Times Media Decoder blog about a Project for Excellence in Journalism study on the lack of reporting in blog posts. The study found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that an average of 8 out of 10 stories online contained no original reporting, but rather linked to reporting done by other sources.

Carr writes:

The activity has its merits, but truly kicking the can down the road and advancing the story is not generally one of them. Instead, we depend on the source material for insight, sometimes treating it as our own — the technical, legal term for that is stealing — or sometimes excerpting.

So, basically, bloggers add nothing except perhaps new audiences to the same content. But by saying “we depend on the source material for insight,” he also implies something much bigger: if we rely on traditional media for reporting AND for analysis, where will the ideas come from if print (or subscription-based journalism, as I am now thinking of it) dies?

Source: Reporting on a Scarcity of Reporting Without Reporting – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com.

Editors and writers are faced on a daily, if not more frequent, basis with the failings of definitions. There are so many gradations to meaning–connotation, context, subtleties of usage–that it’s more difficult than I often think it should be to answer the question “Is this the right word?”

In a recent On Language column, Erin McKean offers an opposite, but equally complicated, perspective–that of the definer. McKean takes the dictionary dicussion beyond the standard descriptive and prescriptive debate and really gets to the heart of the matter: it’s simply impossible to truly define a word in a few sentences.

Though I feel uncomfortable with how McKean then goes on to use the article to promote her site, Wordnik (it feels a bit like using the Gray Lady for an infomercial), I do agree that her site is often a more useful resource for me than the traditional dictionaries. With definitions from multiple, trusted sources, it’s far more helpful than the purely user-generated round of online dictionaries (see Urban Dictionary, which, though useful, is a victim of a slightly wonkier version of the comment thread “me too!” effect). The usage examples are particularly helpful, often more so than the definitions themselves.

It’s interesting, too, to see how she has found a model for user-generated dictionary content that works and is helpful, as opposed to sites like the now defunct Wordie, which always seemed to me to be kind of a pointless intersection of social networking and dictionaries. (Wordie’s content has since been incorporated into Wordnik. Also, for the record, “bomb donkey” was a friend’s term, not mine.)

More resources: TED Blog: Erin McKean launches Wordnik — the revolutionary online dictionary.

Sometimes you need a human to prevent what looks like human error.

France: Automatic translation of La Tribune site garbles the news – Editors Weblog.