Nick Bergus Thoughts on what media do, and can do better, and other things

For a semester now, I’ve pointed my  multimedia introduction students towards a bunch of good multimedia sites and asked to  find and share in class something that they’ve really liked. It’s good for them because they have to look at multimedia in a critical way. It’s good for me because I find neat new things [...]

There was a Roger Ebert — yes that Roger Ebert — Twitter post the other day got me thinking: ”I speak restaurant HTML.”
When I worked in restaurant kitchens, before launching into my current, glamorous career, I could speak what is commonly called “restaurant Spanish;” that is I knew some basic vocabulary and syntax that helped me [...]

Robert Niles posted a list of 8 things journalism students should demand from their journalism schools. Included on that this was “a place to hack”
Online is becoming the dominant news publish medium. And online publishing will not look the way it does today 10 years from now, just as it looks little now like it [...]

I usually cover social media generally — and Twitter specifically — as a reporting and audience-building tool the last day of my multimedia course. (Social media isn’t multimedia per se, but I worry that if I don’t cover it, it won’t come up at the j-school at all, though that’s changing.) This semester, I’ve moved it [...]

Getting a job in journalism isn’t easy, but here’s some advice for journalism students.

One of the big changes in journalism these days has nothing to do the death of print or any other medium. Rather it’s this: journalists have a wide array of new, powerful tools available for news and information gathering.
“I hate the term ‘computer-assisted reporting. It’s as ridiculous term as ‘notebook-assisted reporting,’” said  Steve Buttry, The [...]

Combing through my RSS feeds earlier this week, I came across a post from Rob Curley looking for interns. I posted a link on Twitter, which then goes to FriendFeed and Facebook (which, sadly, still makes it impossible to find permalinks), since the Las Vegas Sun is doing really cool things and thought my students [...]

That’s according to a memo published by Romenesko today. I interned at the paper and its sister Web site, TBO.com, last summer as part of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s online editing program.
I understand why Managing Editor Duke Maas, who was very accommodating to me during my stint there, might do it. The newspaper industry [...]

Today I’m reminded of a lesson I learned in a reporting 101 class:
People die.
People do not pass away. They do not meet Jesus. They do not cross over. They are not lost.
People die.