LJ Digital

"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other. … By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly."

-Paul Krugman, 1998 (via New York Review of Books). Read more on the past, present and future of the Internet.

***

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Friday, August 14, 2009

5:38 p.m.

Day 1

Using the Creatavist tool, Evan reimagines life on the lam, and for the first time is able to share some of the digital scraps he collected along the way.

See Evan’s story here: http://atav.st/1choVYP

The modern college campus is a much more complex place than what news reports and movie depictions might have us believe. Each year’s class of students brings a new element to the college experience and has new stories to share.

Throughout May and June, a new generation of reporters, writers, editors, and essayists make their way out of school and into the professional world. They come bearing clips, work samples produced for class or during an internship. Hundreds of media outlets at colleges and universities across the country publish student work, and an equal number of professors, instructors, and advisors help students report, write, and edit their best journalism. We’d like to encourage those writers to produce more and better work, and introduce these new voices to a wider audience of readers—and maybe even future employers and mentors. To help in this effort, we’ve teamed up with Aileen Gallagher, assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, to help search for and share outstanding student work. Students, writers, publishers, professors: We need your help to find and share the best work of the past year.

If you’ve read (or written) something this school year, just tag it #college #longreads on Twitter or Tumblr, or email it to [email protected]. Student publications are the easiest and best place to find college #longreads, like Mary Kenney’s account of an Indian sex worker, published earlier this year by Indiana University’s INSIDE magazine. Or Project Wordsworth, the outstanding new pay-what-you-want experiment from Michael Shapiro and students at Columbia University. Sometimes a piece that a student writes for class, such as the one Syracuse University grad student Danielle Preiss wrote about high suicide rates among Bhutanese refugees, lands in a professional outlet. And of course, we’ll also tout good work produced by students as part of a fellowship or internship, like Columbia undergrad Jack Dickey’s investigation for Deadspin about Manti Te’o. The only rules for #college #longreads are: Stories should be over 1,500 words and written by a student enrolled in a college or university at the time of publication.

Share stories worth reading by tagging them #college #longreads.

***

Pulitzer Center grantee Sarah Neville:

The Financial Times’ Austerity Audit has proved a vehicle for some of the most innovative digital journalism the paper has ever done.

But the genesis of the idea was a piece of old-fashioned shoe leather reporting.

In November 2011, in order to write a piece about changes to welfare benefits for the long-term sick, I had visited Barnsley, in the former industrial heartland of the north of England, where large numbers were affected by the imminent shake up.

In passing, a number of people mentioned to me, in interviews, their concerns about the likely impact on local businesses and shops of a wider raft of welfare reforms which, from April this year, would reduce the scope of benefit entitlements and also the value of benefits.

It struck me that if we could find a way of calculating exactly how much money was being taken out of local economies – and the hit to spending power – we would have a truly original take on the austerity story and one which would have a particular appeal for theFT’s business readership.