Steven Davy's notes from the net

Jim Roberts, executive editor of Reuters Digital, on some of the thinking behind the new shift at Reuters in a conversation with Justin Ellis at Nieman Lab.

“Roberts said news sites homepages are still a powerful driver of traffic, but the tide is shifting in another direction. “The days where you could drive big portion of audience to any single page? That’s pretty much done,” he said. The media have to be willing to adapt to changing times, Roberts said, and that means having a highly adaptable website and apps. “This is just the beginning,” Roberts said.”

A fantastic essay on good writing and the net from The Browser’s Robert Cottrell over at FT.

After thousands of diligent appraisals, I can confidently sign off on this excessively simple truth: good writers write good pieces, regardless of subject and regardless of publication. Mediocre writers write mediocre pieces. And nothing at all can rescue a bad writer.

I’d suggest substituting “writer” with “producer” and the same contentions apply. Read the whole piece, it’s great.

Hat tip: @jayrosen_nyu & @jeffjarvis

Om on creativity and good writing

Here’s Om Malik on creativity and good writing for the web. Extrapolate and there are nice lessons here for journalism.

The “ability to edit everything down to the very essence in an elegant, interesting and enjoyable way that delights (and informs) is what writing is all about”

Logging into a future Twitter

Wired’s John Battelle has an interesting prediction for Twitter’s future:

I imagine logging into Twitter at some point in the future and seeing a dashboard not of Trends, but of “Happenings” – Events edited to my interest graph, location, and the like. When I click on on of those events, I enter a meticulously edited media experience – a pulsing, ever changing feast of information tailored around that event.

More here»

(via Jenna Wortham’s Vine test run)

The best description of Tumblr

People ask me all the time to describe what Tumblr is compared to other blogging/social platforms. Here’s the best description I’ve seen via Jeff Bercovici at Forbes.

If Facebook is where you check in with your real-life friends and Twitter is how you keep up with current events, the Tumblr experience can be boiled down to people expressing themselves publicly. Like those other two networks, Tumblr is organized in the form of streams of posts. But it’s far more sensory and emotive, a swirl of photographs, songs, inside jokes, animated cartoons and virtual warm fuzzies. On the main Tumblr feed compiled by its editors, a photojournalist’s visual diary of Afghanistan might be followed by a cartoonist’s impressionistic drawings of Darth Vader, which give way to a gallery of hamsters that look like President Obama.

Users make sense of the chaos with the aid of a dashboard, the interface for finding and following other users and keeping track of the feedback their posts receive. Hearts are good; “reblogs” are better, suggesting another user liked your post enough to share it with his or her followers. The tools for creating these multimedia posts are simple: seven buttons that let you add text, photos, hyperlinks, video, music, dialogues or quotes with a click.