Law, shorthand, driving licence, the three essential skills for a print journalist in 1987.

If I was starting again now I would have to add a few things to my list, an understanding of communications technology (how to send a picture message, or update a facebook page for instance), an understanding of web tools, an understanding of how to build and manage a community, audio and video skills, communication skills, which actually we were never taught but should have been even then, a rudimentary understanding of statistics, and most importantly an ability to market yourself and your stories to the audience – wherever they might be.

And by that I do not mean get noticed by making stuff up.

Good stuff for students and journalists.

And it was clear from his very first news conference, when I began covering his long-shot bid for the White House and he began referring to stories he had read in The Times, that Mr. Obama’s supple mind was nourished by news and books. You knew he would never inspire alarm as W. did, that if Condi walked too far away or his notes blew off the lectern, he’d be utterly lost.

Awesome. Maureen Dowd hits a home run.

In his second month as a professor at Arizona State University, Tim McGuire was standing in front of 13 students teaching “The Business of Journalism” when his inner voice interrupted. “You dummy,” he recalls thinking, “you are teaching a history course.” It was fall 2006, and he was talking about the production of a daily newspaper, but not about the parallel production of a 24-hour-a-day Web site. He was explaining the collapse of the print classified advertising market, but not the striking success of Google search advertisements.

In a city in which half the adult black males are without consistent work, the poverty and social services beat was abandoned. In a town where the unions were imploding and the working class eviscerated, where the bankruptcy of a huge steel manufacturer meant thousands were losing medical benefits and pensions, there was no longer a labor reporter. And though it is one of the most violent cities in America, the Baltimore courthouse went uncovered for more than a year and the declining quality of criminal casework in the state's attorney's office went largely ignored.

Meanwhile, the editors used their manpower to pursue a handful of special projects, Pulitzer-sniffing as one does. The self- gratification of my profession does not come, you see, from covering a city and covering it well, from explaining an increasingly complex and interconnected world to citizens, from holding basic institutions accountable on a daily basis. It conies from someone handing you a plaque and taking your picture.

The prizes meant little, of course, to actual readers. What might have mattered to them, what might have made the Baltimore Sun substantial enough to charge online for content would have been to comprehensively cover its region and the issues of that region, to do so with real insight and sophistication and consistency.

May 7, 2009

A must-read. Heavy on Arizona State. Quotes from Medill, Columbia, U. Miami (Rich Beckman). Brings home the importance of entrepreneurial, business model, preparing students for an actual career and not just a first (corporate) job.

Non-Malays who draw inspiration from Obama's presidency overlook the fact that he has much more in common with the majority race in the US than any local minority politician has with the majority race here.

Yes, Obama is a black man in a predominantly white country. But his presidential campaign would not have gotten anywhere – in fact it would be stillborn – if he happened to be a Muslim rather than a Christian and if he spoke Swahili better than he spoke English.

"Umno's glory has dimmed," Abdullah said. "Today everything that Umno does is seen as wrong, everything that Umno says is believed to be untrue."

UMNO changes bad for worse in this transfer of power.

Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi will step down to make way for his deputy PM, Najib Razak, to take control of the country in an uncontested leadership takeover.

Read more: "ANALYSIS: Malaysia ruling party polls hint at turbulent times ahead" - http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/asiapacific/news/article_1466180.php/A...

They have 65 correspondents - hoping people will pay for a walled section - offering free section also. Started up in January 2009.

QUOTE/ Passport subscribers, who pay as much as $199 a year, can suggest article ideas. “If you are a member, you have a voice at the editorial meeting,” although the site will decide which stories to pursue, said Charles Sennott, a GlobalPost founder and its executive editor. He said Passport is meant to “create a feeling of community” for subscribers who might otherwise see newsrooms as “impenetrable and fortresslike.” /QUOTE

1. Core functionality 2. The editor 3. Managing assets (yes!) 4. Search 5. Customization 6. User interaction 7. Roles and permissions (yes, yes!) 8. Versioning 9. Multiple website support 10. Multilingual support ... ALSO: Archive handling!