That’s how many words it took Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky to explain the site’s new commenting system.
Engadget’s comments system needed an overhaul, but as before, I’ll simply ignore the whole thing. Comments just give me headaches. Life is simpler without them, don’t you think?
(You can always email me or ping ForkBombr on Twitter. I view that as better than comments, as it leads to actual conversations, not just yelling.)
What a journalism undergraduate degree will get you are amazing memories, good connections with profs who know hundreds of working journalists, marketable skills in the form of writing and communications abilities. What it will not get you, and what no one ever promises it will get you, is a job in journalism.
To be clear, in my recollection, no one at j-skool ever lied about this, either. I’m pretty sure that from literally day one, lectures included messages from profs that, if you wanted to get a job in journalism on the other side, then you were going to have to hustle outside of class.
University of Georgia [PDF warning] has new research out about journalism graduates:
The percentage of spring journalism and mass communication bachelor’s degree recipients who reported having at least one job offer when they completed their studies dropped in 2009 by nearly 10 percentage points compared to a year earlier. Only 46.2% of the bachelor’s degree recipients had a job on Oct. 31, 2009, which was more than 10 percentage points fewer than a year earlier. The level of full-time employment for bachelor’s degree recipients in 2009 when they returned the questionnaire was 55.5%, which was down significantly from the figure of 60.4% a year earlier. Such a low level of full-time employment has never been recorded since 1986.
The Des Moines Register will be one of five regional design centers for Gannett Co. newspapers, the company announced Tuesday.
The announcement is expected to bring 35 to 60 jobs to Des Moines, said Carolyn Washburn, the Register’s editor and a vice president. Gannett hasn’t determined the timeline for the project, but it is expected to take at least two years.
The Des Moines center will design news pages for 21 newspapers, including the Iowa City Press-Citizen, and other locations in South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.
LeBron James has made at least one decision, just not the one the basketball world had been waiting for.
The most sought after NBA free agent of 2010 has joined the social networking site Twitter under the moniker ‘kingjames’, his publicist Keith Estabrook confirmed with Reuters on Tuesday.
More than 84,000 people have signed up to follow James as speculation mounts as to where he will play next season, even though he has not yet made a single posting.
John Gruber has addressed (once again) why his ever-popular site Daring Fireball doesn’t have comments:
What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.
[…]
Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches. DF is a curated conversation, to be sure, but that’s the whole premise.
Engadget has a liveblog chugging away right now.
Coast Guard officials also said there was no intent to conceal the scope of the disaster. Rather, they said, the spill’s complexity had made it difficult to allow the open access sought by the media.
Reporters have been turned away when attempting to reach the coast — even being threatened with arrest. This is a huge problem.
Jon Gilkison over at InterfaceLab, on Wired’s iPad edition:
There are certain interactive elements to the articles, but – and I apologize to all of the people who put in a lot of back breaking work into this – they’re pretty lame. Tapping on a button-looking element switches out part of the page with another image. You can drag your finger across certain images to make them sort of animate like a flipbook (and in truth, that’s what it is – a series of PNG or JPEG images). There are videos you can tap on to view fullscreen. There are audio clips that you can play. The interactivity in the Wired application is very 1990’s. I am not trying to be insulting either, it’s simply the truth. The Wired application has pretty much brought back image rollovers.
It’s quite interesting. Here’s Brian Lam, in response to a question the criticism voiced about the leaked iPhone story:
I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And I notice it’s usually Apple-only press. I don’t know how they see their jobs, but I think reporters have to be critical of their subjects and hungry for stories that expose the truths that companies may not want in the light of day.
The tablet is our opportunity to make the Wired we always dreamed of. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated infographics. We can offer you a history of Mars landings that lets you explore the red planet yourself. We can take you inside Trent Reznor’s recording studio and let you listen to snippets of his work in progress. And we can show you exactly how Pixar crafted each frame of its new movie, Toy Story 3.
Valleywag editor Ryan Tate, irked by an iPad ad, drunkmailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs just after 9:30 last night. To Tate’s shock and delight, Jobs argued back and forth with him until 2:20 AM in four rounds of messages, reproduced below.
Hit the link to read the emails. They’re pretty great. Once again, a Gawker employee looks like a total ass.