Aram Zucker-Scharff

The Last Temptation of Tina Brown:

More than two and a half years later, Ms. Brown has missed the mark. Synergies have long since slipped away. After the magazine hemorrhaged tens of millions of dollars, Barry Diller, the billionaire media mogul whose company owns both publications, publicly called the purchase of Newsweek “a mistake” and the original plan to save it “stupid.” On Saturday, the company announced that it had sold Newsweek for an undisclosed amount to the digital news company International Business Times.

So, David Yanofsky over at The Atlantic’s Quartz has just released the awesome tool they use to quickly generate charts within their editorial side (in other words, no code required). 

The tool is amazing, simple and easy to use. Basically everything you’d want for a finance- or numbers-focused newsroom. But I have to wonder, if you’re working in WordPress (like Quartz does), then why not integrate it into the actual WordPress workflow? 

Seems to me like it would make things a lot easier.

So, I put in a few hours and took the first step, getting the Chartbuilder tool working within WordPress.

I’m not going to call this a huge deal, because it isn’t. They did a great job of making the tool very portable and simple, it was just a matter of dropping the code into a WordPress menu page.

The biggest problem was just altering the Javascript to work within WordPress’s no-conflict rules for Javascript (aside: no matter where you’re building, using the `$` shortcut for jQuery is sort of bad form). I probably didn’t even do that as effectively as it could be done. 

All that said, it’s the first step towards building it into the editorial workflow of a WordPress website. The next step is to make the whole process accessible from the Add New/Edit Post area. Then to automatically save the items in the WordPress media area. Then to have them insert into the post as soon as you’ve finished creating them. 

After that we could build out a method to save the form states in options or post meta-data and give users the ability to insert a form and then go back and edit it. 

All that could happen. Let’s work together on it.

shortformblog:

This is undoubtedly an amusing headline, but it actually touches on a serious issue in democracies: How can policymakers sell and implement necessarily policy when the general public is almost comedically misinformed about what policy is needed? The poll cited showed that Britons believe that 24% of jobless benefits are fraudulently claimed (the actual number is .7%); that violent crime is rising (it’s falling); that immigrants comprise 1/3 of the population (more like 13%); and that teen pregnancy is roughly 26 times higher than it actually is. “Politicians need to be better at talking about the real state of affairs of the country, rather than spinning the numbers,” said one of the pollsters involved. In addition, “the media has to try and genuinely illuminate issues, rather than use statistics to sensationalise.” So, in other words, the incentives structure of politics and the media needs to do a complete 180 from where they are now. Awesome, that should be a quick fix. source

Very true. 

The Journalism Internship From Hell:

Editors cared about this sensational stuff because it had once sold newspapers. But now almost nothing inspired people to buy a hard copy from a newsstand when all of the same stories were available online, free, immediately. Even voyeurism couldn’t save these sinking ships, so why was I there? It was difficult to imagine Woodward and Bernstein sweating under the Miami sun, almost crying, disgusted with themselves for what they were doing. Would they call this journalism? Should I?