We often talk about dead-end jobs, those jobs that offer no hope for advancement, but if you work for a company with the right kind of culture, then none of the positions there are necessarily dead-ends. At a dead-end company, however, all of the jobs are dead-ends too. Just what is a dead-end company? How do you know if your company is really just a dead-end? Below, I’ve listed a handful of traits that I think to be indicative of a dead-end company. Use the comment form to add yours.

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As more and more local newsrooms embrace social media as marketing and distribution channels, it becomes increasingly easier to catalog our missteps into the space. Microblogging site Twitter, in particular, has been susceptible to misuses by our industry. Lost Remote pointed out Chron.com’s poor use of Twitter in pushing truncated headlines during Hurricane Gustav, and a Colorado newspaper’s decision to twitter a three-year-old boy’s funeral garnered them a number of slaps on the wrist from even the national press. While there are bound to be some of these missteps, they’re far from unavoidable. To that end, I’ve tried to outline some basic concepts and concrete steps that will help your newsroom better leverage its Twitter presence and, hopefully, without repeating some of the mistakes of our colleagues.

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As newsrooms take their first steps into social media, as they work to extend their citizen journalism efforts and as notions of community begin to be a part of our internal conversations, it feels to many as though we embark blindly, with only our best guesses to guide us. And, to be sure, we don’t know precisely what form our industry will take going forward, what methods for news gathering and reporting have yet to be forged, or what roles many of us will play as the stage shifts beneath our feet. And yet, I feel confident in saying that what we’re moving towards could be called the communitization of news– that is, a model of journalism by which communities of voices, that need not be attached to any traditional news organization, are responsible in large part for the collection and dissemination of news.

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