So of course I’ve been following news about journalism education, and it becomes increasingly clear with each passing year that larger journalism schools are facing a particularly difficult time. By their very nature, large bureaucratic institutions — i.e., colleges and the departments within them — do not adjust consistently well to rapid change. And few things are changing faster than the field of journalism.

Click here for a cogent lecture by Robert G. Picard, director of research at the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. It was delivered yesterday (5/31/14) as the keynote at the Toward 2020: New Directions in Journalism Education Conference at Ryerson University in Toronto.

The opening:

The whole piece is well worth reading.

I became aware of Picard’s talk via the highly recommended Twitter stream of Jay Rosen at NYU. I tweeted one response:

.@jayrosen_nyu Interesting that Picard criticizes "hiring middle-aged and senior journalists" but leaves out the word "tenure".

— Bill Dawers (@billdawers) June 1, 2014

From the piece:

The fact that so many journalists are on Twitter has made Twitter incredibly professionally valuable to journalists. Tweeting your articles ensures they’re seen — and discussed, and retweeted — within a community that includes not just your friends and peers, but the people who might hire you someday. (Costa, for instance, will be coming to The Washington Post in January!) That’s much less true on Facebook. It’s readers, not colleagues, who dominate Facebook.

That’s created something of a collective-action problem in the media sphere. It makes sense for each individual journalist’s career to put the bulk of their social media effort into Twitter rather than Facebook. But it makes sense for journalism outlets to have their writers putting the bulk of their social media effort into Facebook rather than Twitter.

As I’ve used Twitter more and more after the last few years, I’ve found it to be invaluable for following breaking news and for discovering items of specific interest about a wide range of topics — items I never would have discovered through other media. (Click here to see my Twitter profile.)

I don’t tweet all that much, however — on average just slightly more than three tweets per day I guess. I’d say over half of my tweets are just the sharing of links to posts here on this blog.

However, even though I have over 1600 Twitter followers, I get far more hits on this site from posts to my Savannah Unplugged Facebook page, which has just under 1600 fans, and from other shares via Facebook.

Take a look at referrals to this site over the past 30 days:

So that’s about 80 referrals per day from Facebook, about 60 from search engines, and about 12 from Twitter.

I do have an account on Pinterest, but I put little time or effort into — I haven’t updated it in months. But, in the big scheme of things, Pinterest is now generating even more referrals than Twitter, according to the latest data from Shareaholic.

So journalists might love Twitter because of the stories they find and the ways in which they can brand themselves, but Facebook is the real driver of web traffic.

From the Washington Post’s Washington Post to be sold to Jeff Bezos:

The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham familyâ€s stewardship of one of Americaâ€s leading news organizations after four generations.

Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the worldâ€s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses.

Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days.

And this:

The Washington Post Co.â€s newspaper division, of which the Post newspaper is the most prominent part, has suffered a 44 percent decline in operating revenue over the past six years. Although the paper is one of the most popular news sources online, print circulation has dwindled, too, falling an additional 7 percent daily and Sundays during the first half of this year.

And from the Post’s Ezra Klein:

Don Graham says the decision to sell came from a simple calculation: The Washington Post is a public company, and it doesnâ€t have infinitely deep pockets. They looked to the future and saw that theyâ€d have to keep cutting. The implication is that Bezos doesnâ€t have to keep cutting, and wonâ€t keep cutting, though nobody really knows.

From Jim Tankersly’s Journalism needs a business model. Can Jeff Bezos find one?:

And that is my hope for the Post under the new owner from Seattle: that we will figure out a way to turn a profit on the type of journalism that everyone here believes in. I donâ€t know a single reporter who got into journalism for the money. I do know a lot of really talented young reporters who worry there wonâ€t be money in journalism for much longer. Iâ€d like to prove them wrong. Iâ€d like to be a part of the place that figures out the business model without sacrificing the things that drew me into the business in the first place.

And Bezos’ letter to Post employees:

So, let me start with something critical. The values of The Post do not need changing. The paperâ€s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and weâ€ll work hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we will own up to them quickly and completely.

I wonâ€t be leading The Washington Post day-to-day.[…]

There will of course be change at The Post over the coming years. Thatâ€s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy.

Forbes estimates that Bezos has a net worth of $25 billion, so this amount is literally 1 percent — 1 percent! — of his net worth.

While I don’t relish the idea of the super-rich becoming personal owners of major media outlets, this sale might take some of the pressure off the Post to generate yearly profits as a publicly held company. Because we’ve seen again and again in recent years that shareholder demands for profits means deep cuts to newsroom staffs.

Maybe Bezos will begin by rolling back the metered paywall that the Post recently unveiled . . .

We’ll see what happens from here.

Silver, who rose to fame with his award-winning website, FiveThirtyEight.com, also will appear on ESPN and its broadcast partner, ABC News. FiveThirtyEight.com, which had been hosted on The New York Times website since 2010, will be independent of ESPN but connect to other sites owned by the network and parent company Disney.

Silver gained attention analyzing baseball statistics before he moved to politics. In 2012, FiveThirtyEight.com correctly predicted the presidential election outcome in all 50 states. The site will include forecasts of the 2014 and 2016 elections. […]

The FiveThirtyEight’s new incarnation will allow Silver to return to his sports roots while expanding his approach to other disciplines.

In the brief ESPN article quoted above, Silver says he now has his “dream job.”

But shouldn’t working for the New York Times have been a dream job?

If you want to get a taste of some of the tensions in journalism today, read this post today by the NYT’s public editor Margaret Sullivan: Nate Silver Went Against the Grain for Some at The Times.

In that revealing and somewhat disturbing post, Sullivan downplays her own criticism of Silver at the height of last fall’s campaign and overstates her support for him. I blogged about the issues involved (CLICK HERE for that lengthy post a few days before the fall election), and the various nuances of the controversy left me convinced that Sullivan herself didn’t even quite understand what Silver was even doing with his ratings and aggregation of various state and national polls.

Now comes this from Sullivan’s post today:

I donâ€t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” Of course, The Times is equally known for its in-depth and investigative reporting on politics.

His approach was to work against the narrative of politics – the “story” – and that made him always interesting to read.

As it turned out, of course, the traditional “horse race” model of how to cover politics led many Americans — and apparently even the Romney campaign itself — to many flat, dead, totally wrong conclusions about the state of the presidential race.

If Silver “disrupted” that journalistic culture, then good. The Times should have been embracing Silver and his approach not only to political polling but also to other fields heavy in data.

And this from Sullivan:

A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.

Let me echo Kevin Drum’s thoughts in Mother Jones about that snippet:

Even for those of us who are pretty cynical about political reporting, this is astonishing. If I were editor of the Times, I’d do whatever it took to find out who those three are, and then fire them instantly. Whoever they are, they shouldn’t be trusted to cover the pig races at a country fair, let alone write about politics for the most influential newspaper in the country.

Again, Silver and his team’s analysis of last fall’s presidential election, not to mention their work on other elections and topics, was spot on. Reading and watching other political coverage throughout the cycle, Americans might have had the idea that the Obama-Romney matchup was a highly volatile affair with voters switching sides constantly, with large numbers of undecided voters, and with totally unpredictable turnout. But while there were some mild surprises in the final numbers, it all went pretty much according to the script that Silver and his team laid out: Obama had a relatively solid lead many months ahead of the campaign, that lead shrank by a small amount after the first debate, and Obama won rather handily, as Silver’s model projected.

Nationwide, Obama ended up winning 51.07 percent to 47.21 percent for Romney. Silver’s model’s final projection was that Obama would win 50.8 percent to 48.3 percent.

I can’t say I’m sorry that Silver has left the Times — we can expect that he’ll continue to do his rigorous analysis wherever he is.

But the handling of Silver while he was with the NYT and Sullivan’s statements regarding his departure send up some big red flags about political coverage at the paper, not to mention raising real concerns about the Times’ adaptability as new media continues to put pressure on traditional journalism.

The piece is primarily a Q&A with Fred Ritchin and has a provocative subtitle: “Renowned photography theorist Fred Ritchin has a simple message for those behind the camera: Innovate or die.”

From the introduction to the piece:

In late May, the Chicago Sun-Times took the unprecedented move of gutting its photography department by laying off 28 full-time employees, including John H. White, a 35-year veteran who had won the paper a Pulitzer. The nation’s 8th largest newspaper figured it could cut costs by hiring freelancers and training reporters to shoot iPhone photos, to which Chicago Tribune photographer Alex Garcia responded: “I have never been in a newsroom where you could do someone else’s job and also do yours well. Even when I shoot video and stills on an assignment, with the same camera, both tend to suffer. They require different ways of thinking.”

The Q&A comes on the heels of the publication of Ritchin’s new book Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen. I think I’m going to have to pick this one up. Again from MJ:

Bending the Frame is a vigorous wake-up call to photojournalists to innovate or die. Photographers, Ritchen writes, should continually be asking how they can create more meaningful imagery rather than just chase the “trail of the incendiary.” I asked Ritchin to fill me in on the details. Interspersed throughout the interview are examples of photographic projects that he considers particularly innovative or audacious.

It’s no secret that the rise of digital cameras, which can capture images that do not require the complexities of darkroom printing and processing, revolutionized news photography. The revolution has actually been slower coming than I expected; I’m puzzled by the number of seasoned journalists who apparently did not see the writing on the wall and did not try to advance their own photo skills.

I’m struck too by the quote from Tribune photographer Garcia above. For someone trained to either be a photojournalist or a reporter, the skill sets might be very different — trying to do both could obviously hamper the ability to do either well.

But what about journalists of the future who learned to capture images from the time they were small children?

And we see radio news producers who are able to gather the news while capturing sound. Is it really so different to gather news and capture images?

There’s obviously a lot more in the piece. Highly recommended. Thanks to Jay Rosen for pointing this out via Twitter.