links for 2011-03-13

Modern digital curators for early-stage entrepreneurs are the expert bloggers who put “content into context.” They write and tweet every day, with the single guiding credibility and personality that the new social culture demands.

Finally, we will start to link the site more directly with the other Media Standards Trust transparency projects — notably journalisted.com and hNews. This should help us to create a whole toolbox of transparency and accountability mechanisms for online news and create an ecology that will foster and advantage original journalism.

Two-thirds claim to have written a story that originated via social media, giving rise to up to one in seven of all published stories.

Our newsroom salaries for full-time employees, for example (which include bonuses and benefits) are now higher than at many companies in the traditional news industry. Because the digital news business is quite different from the traditional news business, we often promote from within, and we've had the huge pleasure of watching folks who joined us as interns grow up to take leadership positions. True, we can't yet toss around the $300,000-$500,000 a year per brand-name columnist that Huffington Post and Daily Beast are now reportedly tossing around. But, in future years, if we keep doing what we think we can do, we should be able to pay our top people a lot more than we do today.

The point is, of course, that these skills are easy to pick up and will soon be commonplace. Perhaps that’s a little frightening, but it’s also an opportunity. If councils look to help these people – by working with them and supporting them – it might help to have a positive impact on how people can engage with democracy.

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Sneering at bloggers was a way journalists avoided confronting these developments. In short "this is fucking neurotic."