Giving news 'games' another chance

More and more, I seem to come back to the question of whether the news can be made into a game that makes it more appealing -- à la that old "Mary Poppins" song about a spoonful of sugar.

Today, the Nieman Journalism Lab posted a feature on "Future-Jobs-O-Matic," a project of "Marketplace," American Public Media's business program, that makes U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers fun to play with.

Specifically, Jobs-O-Matic takes data from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, which lays out prospects for individual job titles over the next decade, and presents them interactively. Reading the BLS handbook: kind of dry. Clicking specific professions at Job-O-Matic: pretty cool.

Of course your first inclination is to find out what the outlook is for your own job. For me, it looked like this: not too bad, since the expectation is for an 8 percent increase in jobs in the author/writer/ editor category over the decade ending in 2018. The caveats, though, were that the growth will primarily be online and jobs for editors might even fall slightly.

But that picture was a bit better than the one offered for reporters: a 6 percent decline in jobs. "Competition will be tight," according to the outlook. Ugh.

Ready! Set! Read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

For your rest-of-the-weekend reading pleasure:

"The Newsonomics of Journalist Headcounts" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Ken Doctor supplies an exhaustive rundown of journalism jobs lost in the last decade and those being created today. Bottom line: We've lost more than we've gained, even as "technologies and growing audiences have built out a huge capacity for news."

"When Campaigns Manipulate Social Media" (The Atlantic): Here's some food for thought post-midterm election: 140-character attack campaigns may be more worrisome in the future than deep-pocketed interest groups.

Creative video interlude: "A Life on Facebook."

"Rusbridger: Openness, Collaboration Key to New Information Ecosystem" (Poynter Online): Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian newspaper in London, writes about the "mutualisation" it employs that embraces Web attributes of openness (linking) and collaboration (working with readers and others). Be sure to follow the link to one example he gives, "Comment is Free," a cool comment website.

"U.S. Mobile Data Traffic to Top 1 Exabyte" (GigaOM): An exabyte, you'll learn here, is "a unit of information equal to 1000 petabytes or a billion gigabytes" -- which I still can't fathom, but the short of it is that our appetite for access to data whenever and wherever we want it is growing rapidly. Hello smartphones.

An appropriate music video interlude.

"I Am a Blogger No Longer" (The Atlantic): Marc Ambinder bids adieu to his gig as blogger for The Atlantic, saying he missed the rigor of print and found the 24/7 nature of online exhausting. "What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called 'Marc Ambinder' that people read because it's 'Marc Ambinder,' rather than because it's good or interesting."

The post got folks talking on Twitter, and also spawned this: "Escape from Thunderdome" (Snarkmarket), a three-fer that dissects Ambinder. One interesting comment to the dissection, though, raises this point: maybe Ambinder got tired of being a brand, a supposed goal of all journalists going forward. Sacrilege!

Hilarious video interlude: The Washington Post generates a lot of chatter for a video -- featuring a befuddled Bob Woodward -- that introduces its new iPad app. (It even earns a jab from Washington City Paper.) But I want to know about the hole in the sole of Ben Bradlee's shoe -- real or a prop?