SoloJourno

Via Media Beat:

Morgan Spurlock has more in common with working journalists than you may think. For one, he toiled for years in obscurity, and debt, before making it big in Hollywood. Furthermore, his documentaries have achieved the ultimate coup of quality reporting: change. (While Mickey D’s won’t admit it, we’re sure Super Size Me is responsible for the disappearance of those humongous portions.)

Here, Spurlock gives tips for journos treading into video for the first time and talks about the effect technology has had on the art of filmmaking.

THE GOOD: “The democratization of cinema has made it where anyone with a camera, computer, and a good idea can make a movie.”

THE BAD: “There will always be a turd that rises to the top.”

His words, people.

Via TechCrunch:

Research firm Outsell has published its third annual News Users’ report, which is based on a survey about the online and offline news preferences of 2,787 US news consumers.

The Outsell report unsurprisingly predicts ongoing, steep drops in US newspapers’ print circulation as consumers continue to head online for news consumption and sharing, forecasting 3.5 percent annual declines in both daily and Sunday circulation by 2012.

Interestingly enough, the research also talks of what is referred to as the “dramatic effect” aggregators like Google and Yahoo have had on print and online readership.

Says analyst Ken Doctor: “Though Google is driving some traffic to newspapers, it’s also taking a significant share away. A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers’ individual sites.”

Read the full article.

Google News is “a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalized interests.” (source: CrunchBase)