Journalism

Columbia Journalism Review
New Financial Sheriff in Town, Part III

9 Feb 2010 | 8:35 am

The Times continues the business-press tradition of hailing new regulators as saviors from the previous bad regulators. "S.E.C. Enforcers Focus on Avoiding Madoff Repeat" The problem is, as we've said, that we usually hear about the badness of the previous regulators only after they're already gone. Don’t get me wrong; the Times’s focus on the SEC’s...
Unforced Error at Salon

9 Feb 2010 | 8:32 am

It’s not often that, barely a week after sparking a mini media circus by being arrested on federal property in the course of an undercover operation, an individual can be at the center of another press controversy. But in James O’Keefe’s world, it seems, anything is possible. Last Wednesday, Salon published an article by Max Blumenthal, titled “James...
Flip Through The Years, with Palin and Fey

9 Feb 2010 | 8:08 am

The Magazine Publishers of America and the American Society of Magazine Editors have jointly produced a neat little video that retells the story of the 00'-10' decade via magazine covers. Some are eerily prescient, like the ESPN Magazine that features a baby faced Yao Ming alongside the tag line "He's Next," or the February 2000 People cover asking...
Father and Son

9 Feb 2010 | 7:54 am

A conflict-of-interest concern that’s been rumbling around The New York Times was dragged into the open over the weekend by the paper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt. In his Sunday column, Hoyt confirmed what the Web site Electronic Intifada reported a few weeks ago: the son of Ethan Bronner, the NYT’s bureau chief in Jerusalem, has enlisted...
Audit Notes: Bloomberg Backs the Buck; WSJ on Future State Taxes; Big Money vs. Student Loansharks; Mortgage Banker Schadenfreude, etc.

8 Feb 2010 | 3:18 pm

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner did his best on ABC News’s “This Week” to shoot down Moody’s speculation that the U.S. government could lose its triple-A bond rating. Bloomberg follows with a detailed analysis of the long-term strength of the dollar (based on the handy Bloomberg Correlation-Weighted Currency Indexes), and why the greenback retains its position as the...

Poynter Online
Woods: 'We Miss the Normal Part of People's Lives' When Covering Diversity

29 Jan 2010 | 8:14 am

I've been writing and teaching about diversity, race and ethnicity for more than 15 years -- about as long as Keith Woods has been at The Poynter Institute. His "Untold Stories" seminar shaped the way I reported on undercovered communities, and became the model on which I built a class on covering race issues. I know many journalists and educators share similar stories about Woods' work at Poynter. In the wake of controversial layoffs at National Public Radio, Woods recently accepted a new gig as NPR's vice president of diversity in news and operations. Today marks his last day at Poynter. I…
Events, Not Enterprise, Drive Most Stories about Hispanics

14 Dec 2009 | 12:05 pm

An editor's most predictable question to a reporter is: Does your story have a news peg? Events drive news coverage. They always have.But something clearly has changed, forcing events, breaking news or the story of the day to drive the narrative more than ever.When I arrived at the Houston Chronicle in May 2007, I supervised two immigration reporters, two reporters writing about Hispanic affairs and one reporter focused on the African-American community. After some restructuring and layoffs, I'm down to one immigration reporter. No one person is tasked with strictly covering the Hispanic…
Reporters' Views Differ on Treatment of Race in Woods, Salahi Coverage

11 Dec 2009 | 9:33 am

For better or worse, Tiger Woods and Tareq Salahi have captivated the news media as much as, if not more than, the troop surge in Afghanistan and the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Beyond tabloid headlines and blond wives, the philandering golf legend and half of the White House party-crashing team don't have much in common. But as I watched both stories develop, I was waiting to see when journalists or commentators would make each man's race or ethnicity an issue in the coverage. Each is the child of an interracial marriage, and each is in an interracial marriage. As a…
When is Fort Hood Suspect's Faith Relevant in Media Coverage?

9 Nov 2009 | 1:20 pm

On Friday morning, Minhaj Hasan, editor-in-chief of The Muslim Linkin College Park, Md., checked local headlines on the shooting at Ft. Hood, Texas, that had taken the lives of 13. They rang all too familiar.A Washington Times' headline read: "Army: Suspect Said 'Allahu Akbar!' Before Shooting." Meanwhile, a Washington Post ran a story ran with the headline: "Suspect, Devout Muslim from Va., Wanted Army Discharge, Aunt Said." The story started out talking about how the suspect prayed every day at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring -- something that isn't all that unusual given that…
Ex-Unity Pres.: NAHJ, NABJ, AAJA, NAJA Should Not Merge

21 Oct 2009 | 4:18 am

When the National Association of Hispanic Journalists announced earlier this month that it had a $300,000 budget shortfall, people began tweeting the news and expressing concern over the group's financial woes. One NAHJ member, Mo Krochmal, tweeted that the shortfall is an indication that "at some point, minority journalists orgs are going to have to merge to save funds."But Rafael Olmeda, former Unity president who stepped down from his leadership role last week, disagrees. He tweeted a response to Krochmal, who he knows from NAHJ: "The minority journalism orgs do not need to merge any more…

the nytpicker
No David Paterson Sex Scandal In Today's NYT. Everybody Back To Bed.

8 Feb 2010 | 4:05 am
Ethics Breach: NYT Regularly Repeats Toyota Scoops First Published In The Los Angeles Times And Elsewhere -- Without Credit.

7 Feb 2010 | 8:31 am

"When we first use facts originally reported by another news organization, we attribute them."--NYT Company Policy on Ethics in Journalism. ***In a series of page-one stories in recent days -- including the lead story in today's paper -- the NYT has tried mightily to cover the massive Toyota recall with its usual aggressive fervor: long takeouts with anecdotes, interviews and angles meant to suggest scoops to its readers.But what these stories have failed to disclose is that the NYT been consistently late to report on details of the unfolding scandal.The stories have also failed to credit…
Conflict Of Interest? Son Of NYT's Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Ethan Bronner, Is Inducted Into Israeli Army, Prompting Questions.

6 Feb 2010 | 6:16 am

The son of NYT Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner -- long a lightning rod for criticism of the NYT's supposed biased reporting in the ongoing Mideast conflict -- has just joined the Israeli Army.Does the move represent a violation of the NYT's conflict of interest policy?As the news of Bronner's son trickled out of the Mideast in recent days, pro-Palestinian watchdog blogs have argued that the move does break the rules -- and that the NYT needs to shift Bronner off the Mideast beat in the wake of his son's military service.The NYT disagrees. In a statement to "The Electronic Intifada," a…
NYT's David Pogue Removes His "Pogue's Favorites" List From Twitter -- Including The One Where A Girl Gushed, "OMG You're Adorable!"

4 Feb 2010 | 4:26 am

NYT technology columnist David Pogue removed his "favorite" tweets from his popular Twitter feed yesterday -- shortly after a social media analysis website posted a story about how easy it was for Twitter users to read the self-selected "favorites' marked by celebrity twitterers.Martin Bryant, a British blogger posting on a site called The Next Web (at www.thenextweb.com), noted in the February 3 article, "Favorite Tweets Reveal Self-Obsessed Celebrities," that top twitterers like Paris Hilton, Alyssa Milano and Pogue -- who currently has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter -- tend to…
UPDATE: Subject Of Andrew Martin's Sunday Business Profile Pled Guilty To Criminal Charges, Sentenced To Three Years' Probation.

1 Feb 2010 | 8:29 am

We've now learned that Richard Eitelberg -- whose new purchase-loan operation was the focus of Andrew Martin's Sunday Business profile yesterday -- pled guilty in May of 2003 to felony charges of computer intrusion, and was sentenced to three years' probation, and paid more than $25,000 in restitution and fees.Eitelberg had been charged by the U.S. Attorney in April of 2002 with criminal intrusion into the computers of a former garment district employer -- a fact overlooked by Martin in his lengthy profile of the Queens businessman who now runs an "alternative" lending company.Yesterday, we…

BuzzMachine
What Toyota should do

Jeff Jarvis

9 Feb 2010 | 8:19 am

Including my parents, we own four Toyotas in my family; over time, we’ve probably owned eight or 10. Will we ever buy another? Depends. Depends on whether we can trust the company given its performance lately. There’s a reason we bought our Toyotas. They are incredibly reliable. I abuse mine, skipping service calls. But — knock wood — I’ve not had any major problems. So even though I don’t much like Toyota design and — as a professor, can no longer afford to pay for that styling with the Lexus brand — I thought I was pretty much stuck buying…
Stop selling scarcity

Jeff Jarvis

8 Feb 2010 | 5:27 am

If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance. Start with advertising. I wrote in my report on a local advertising sales roundtable we held at CUNY that sites should shift from selling media — their own inventory of banners and buttons — to selling services for merchants, helping them succeed through…
NewBizNews: What ad sales people hear

Jeff Jarvis

5 Feb 2010 | 2:33 pm

Recently, at CUNY, we held a roundtable for ad sales people from hyperlocal blogs to big newspapers to hear what they are hearing from local merchants. We’re wrapping up our research for the New Business Models for News Project — indeed, it was Alberto Ibargüen, head of the Knight Foundation that funded this work, who said he really wanted to hear sales people’s perspective — and beginning research for Carnegie-funded work on new ad models, products, service, and sales methods, working with The New York Times on The Local. Some of what we learned; the first four are…
The Flip dance

Jeff Jarvis

5 Feb 2010 | 5:40 am

At the Google party at Davos, I was enticed into doing the Flip dance with none less than Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Another Sir Tim video from a session on social media. The first half of this 3:44 is him talking about the need for authority signals i social networks. In the middle, he takes pains to correct people who say that he invented the internet or created the web (no, he invented the web). The last half is his intriguing call for academic study of the web: And, yes, it was a thrill to meet the man. I was wonderful seeing people come across him, spy his name tag, and gasp with glee and…
The disrupted of Davos

Jeff Jarvis

1 Feb 2010 | 1:10 pm

The theme of this year’s World Economic Forum meeting at Davos was “rethink, redesign, rebuild.” When a friend recited that list for me, I responded that given the institutions there, the more appropriate slogan is “replace.” Last year when I arrived at Davos, I wondered whether we were among the problem or the solution. This year, I wondered whether we were among the future or the past. Well, actually, I don’t wonder. We were among the disrupted. The only distinction among them is that some know it, some don’t. At Davos, I fear, most don’t. I…

Media Matters for America - Latest Items
Fox & Friends ' one-sided coverage of Brennan's remarks widens Fox's credibility gap with its terrorism experts

9 Feb 2010 | 9:57 am

Since White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan's February 7 appearance on Meet the Press, in which he criticized Republicans for politicizing the Obama administration's response to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, Fox & Friends has repeatedly hosted only conservatives and opponents of the Obama administration to discuss Brennan's remarks and the administration's response to the plot. Moreover -- following a trend set by Fox News since the Christmas Day bombing attempt -- Fox & Friends has hosted these guests, most of whom have a history of…
No longer "overexposed"? Fox & Friends complains about lack of recent Obama pressers

9 Feb 2010 | 9:30 am

On Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade and Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. criticized President Obama for not holding press conference since July, which Johnson claimed was a "tactic" to "avoid hard questions." But Fox News' newfound concern with Obama's purported press conference neglect stands in stark contrast to Fox's broadcast network's refusal to air both Obama's July and April 2009 conferences; and at the time of his most recent press conference, Fox News hosts claimed Obama was "overexposed."Kilmeade, Johnson criticize the White House for not holding a press conference…
Conservative media preemptively attack Obama's bipartisan health care summit

9 Feb 2010 | 6:34 am

Numerous conservative media outlets have criticized President Obama's plan to hold a bipartisan health care summit "to go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward," by attacking the summit as a "dog and pony" show or a "PR stunt" before the event has even occurred. Additionally, some have urged Republicans not to participate.Right-wing media criticize Obama's invitation to GOP to discuss health care reform WSJ: Summit is staged "pseudo-event." A February 9 Wall Street Journal editorial asserted that the Obama administration's statement that health care…
Quick Fact: Carlson falsely claimed Republicans were "sidelined" in health care reform debate

9 Feb 2010 | 4:31 am

On the February 9 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson advanced the false claim that Republicans had been "sidelined through the whole" health care "discussion." In fact, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee and Senate Finance Committee bills contained nearly 200 Republican amendments. From the February 9 broadcast of Fox News' Fox & Friends: CARLSON: I understand that the Republicans want to start over and start from scratch because they were basically sidelined through the whole discussion initially, but it is going to be a huge mistake if…
Eric Boehlert: Palin headlines birther conference; press pretends not to notice

9 Feb 2010 | 3:20 am

If you don't think there's a media double standard that favors Republicans over Democrats, then let's play a game of what-if. What if, in 2006, at Yearly Kos, the first annual convention of liberal bloggers and their readers, organizers shelled out $100,000 for former Vice President Al Gore to address attendees? And what if the same organizers booked as an opening-night speaker a fringe, radical-left conspiracy theorist who'd spent the previous year pushing the thoroughly debunked claim that some Bush White administration insiders played a role in, and even planned, the 9-11 attacks. What if…

Topix: Journalism News
Philippine clan patriarch, 195 others indicted ...

9 Feb 2010 | 6:50 am

State prosecutors filed multiple murder charges on Tuesday against the head of a powerful clan and 195 other people, including his three sons and dozens of police officers and soldiers, in the massacre of 57 people in the southern Philippines.
Daily Beast's Gerald Posner joins growing number of 'inadvertents'

9 Feb 2010 | 2:25 am

Both veteran journalist Gerald Posner and the site he published his piece in THE DAILY BEAST admit that five sentences had been copied from the MIAMI HERALD.
Too Close to Home

8 Feb 2010 | 10:01 pm

LATE last month, a Web site called the Electronic Intifada reported that Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times, has a son in the Israeli military.
Lysandra Ohrstrom: The New York Times' coverage of Israel-Palestine...

8 Feb 2010 | 5:40 pm

This week the editors of The New York Times's sprang to the defense of Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner following weeks of controversy over his son's service in the Israeli Defense Forces.
Sri Lanka journalists hold anti-government protest

8 Feb 2010 | 1:18 pm

Nearly a hundred journalists demonstrated in the capital Colombo, urging the government to allow the media to report without hindrance and to free Chandana Sirimalwatte, editor of the Lanka newspaper.

Big News Network
Pixie Press Worldwide Brings Green Virtues to Luxury Books & Company Launch

9 Feb 2010 | 9:08 am

When Pixie Press Worldwide began planning the events leading up to the release of their new celebrity-driven book, ABOUT FACE, they decided to stay true to their green publishing philosophy. By consul...
Sudan to press ahead in 2010 on critical issues

9 Feb 2010 | 9:06 am

New York, Feb 9 : The outgoing United Nations envoy in Sudan has lauded recent developments in the country's electoral process, and urged the parties to the north-south peace agreement to press ahead ...
2009 Online Journalism Award Winners Featured in New Newseum Display

9 Feb 2010 | 9:04 am

Online News Association , the world's largest membership organization of digital journalists, today announced the opening of an interactive display featuring the winners of the
Google Gmail press conference

9 Feb 2010 | 8:39 am

Google is hosting a press conference at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters Tuesday morning at which it is widely expected to make a Gmail-related announcement--more specifically, that
2009 Online Journalism Award Winners Showcased at the Newseum

9 Feb 2010 | 8:31 am

/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The winning entries in the 2009 Online Journalism Awards (OJAs) competition went on display today at the Newseum, the interactive museum of news in

NYT: Open
What We're Reading

By MICHAEL DONOHOE

19 Jan 2010 | 11:24 am

Following last Decembers post, I've collected a slightly larger round of links from my colleagues as well as solicited links from our readers - from Flash on the iPhone to official New York City subway data.
More Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud

By EVAN SANDHAUS and ROB LARSON

13 Jan 2010 | 11:21 am

Today we're pleased to announce the addition of approximately 5,000 new subject headings to data.nytimes.com: organizations, publicly traded companies and geographic identifiers.
Article Search API Enhancements

By DEREK GOTTFRID

12 Jan 2010 | 1:53 pm

The Times Article Search API already had a rich set of data attributes, but we couldn't resist adding a few more.
What We're Trolling

By MICHAEL DONOHOE

15 Dec 2009 | 12:37 pm

This post is the first in a new series that offers a look at what NYTimes.com developers are reading and sharing online.
Nominations Data Added to Congress API

By DEREK WILLIS

3 Dec 2009 | 7:58 am

We've added civilian nominee data to the Congress API, to allow you to track the progress of presidential nominees as they move through the process.

PBS: MediaShift
How Digital Marketing Helped 'Avatar' Break the Box Office

8 Feb 2010 | 3:03 pm

Do you remember August 21, 2009? Moviegoers in more than 100 IMAX 3-D theaters worldwide watched 16 minutes of footage from a new James Cameron movie. That same day, Ubisoft debuted a trailer for a videogame based on the film, and Mattel unveiled action figures inspired by the film's characters. A day earlier, the teaser for the very same film broke a record on Apple.com after beng streamed more than four million times on its first day. August 21 was celebrated as "Avatar Day." Today, it should be remembered as the dawn of the most comprehensive digital marketing campaign ever developed to…
Rent vs. Own: The Streaming Music Debate Continues

5 Feb 2010 | 10:00 am

The exponential growth of Internet bandwidth combined with the ability to significantly compress digital audio has impacted the music industry in numerous ways, for better and worse. Just as file trading created a massive network of pirated music, the ability to stream audio in real-time has allowed for a number of innovative content distribution and promotion methods. Digital music streaming services have been around for over a decade. Companies such as Rhapsody, Napster, MOG, and We7 have experimented with various business models and user experiences, with mixed results. The traditional…
4 Minute Roundup: Facebook as News Reader; Engadget Comments

5 Feb 2010 | 7:35 am

This episode of 4MR is brought to you by GoDaddy, helping you set up your own website in a snap with domain name registration, web hosting and 24/7 support. Visit GoDaddy to learn more. Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the rise of Facebook as a place to find news. Hitwise found that Facebook was the #4 referrer of traffic to news sites, after Google, Yahoo, and MSN -- and above Google News. Plus, the tech blog Engadget shut down comments after an influx of trolls, before relenting to open them again. And I ask Just One Question to Google…
Google News to Publishers: Let's Make Love Not War

4 Feb 2010 | 6:11 am

In the view of some traditional media execs, Google is a digital vampire or a parasite or tech tapeworm using someone else's content to profit. As that rhetoric heated up in the past year, Google has responded not with equal amounts of invective but with entreaties to help publishers. Google launched Fast Flip to help bring old-style page flipping to the web, promoting higher forms of visual journalism and sharing ad revenues with publishers. Then came Living Stories, a new format for updating stories at one URL, designed in tight collaboration with the New York Times and Washington Post.
Email is Far From Dead

2 Feb 2010 | 12:24 pm

For years, the digerati have been declaring the end of email as a useful tool. Back in 2003, experts said RSS feeds would spell the death of the inbox. In 2007, Wired and CNET said younger generations were using IM, Facebook and MySpace instead of email. More recently, PC Magazine's John Dvorak proclaimed "9 Reasons E-mail is Dead," and The Wall Street Journal told us "Why Email No Longer Rules." The prognosticators point to the annoyances of spam; the difficulties of getting mass messages through corporate firewalls (and of having them stripped of HTML or graphics); and the fact that…

E-Media Tidbits
Shut Off Google? C'mon, Mark Cuban

8 Feb 2010 | 10:46 am

I can understand why Mark Cuban said newspapers should keep "blood-sucking vampires" like Google from indexing their content. But his argument falls short in a few key ways, I believe.Cuban said newspapers have to understand that there is real value in what they do best, which is to "go out and find news and create good content." "Aggregators and search engines think there is no value to that," the Internet entrepreneur, HDNet co-founder and owner of the Dallas Maverick basketball team said at the OnMedia conference in New York last week. "They think there's an unending supply of necks."If…
Licensing Delay Complicates Decision Between Open Source and Proprietary Video Players

8 Feb 2010 | 7:55 am

RELATEDThe Future of Web Content -- HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps In at least a short-term boon for HTML5 proponents, the consortium of groups that own the patents for the H.264 video-encoding codec announced Thursday that it will not seek royalties for another five years on videos that use the codec and are free to end users."Gack!" you say (justifiably). "Thank goodness I don't need to know about this H.264-HTML5-Ogg Theora mumbo-jumbo." Unfortunately, if you are in charge of encoding video for your Web site, if you design video players, or manage those who do, then you probably do need to…
Google's Real-Time Search Raises Importance of Link Sharing Via Social Networks

1 Feb 2010 | 6:55 am

One of the most important ways for blogs to get good traction in search used to come from links on other highly linked blogs and Web sites. The exchange of links from blog to blog created "link love," which then helped to increase a blog's Google PageRank. Along with keywords, PageRank could significantly boost a blog's position in search, sometimes putting that blog higher in results than a major news site. Even when bloggers linked to newspaper sites, news sites didn't always see those links as beneficial to them. Now, a new kind of link love, associated with real-time search and social…
Foursquare, Metro Partnership Shows How Media Can Benefit from Geolocation Apps

29 Jan 2010 | 9:36 am

As geolocation apps and features continue to be developed, they're bringing a new dimension to the relevancy and immediacy of information. Some news organizations are now beginning to see their potential and act on it.Earlier this week, Canada's free daily, Metro News, announced a partnership with Foursquare, an application that lets mobile users tell their friends where they are. It also has a built-in gaming feature that lets people earn "badges" for traveling to new places with different people. Under the partnership, which is just one example of how geolocation features are bringing about…
Watching Kindle, iPad and e-Readers? Openness is Key

28 Jan 2010 | 8:27 am

Even before the launch of the Apple iPad, pundits were declaring it the Kindle killer, and hours after its unveiling others were adding their voices. But I smelled trouble for Amazon's e-reader weeks earlier.Though I own a Kindle and have also read its books on my iPod Touch, the last three or four e-books I've bought were from Barnes & Noble and O'Reilly publishing.The reason? It's not that I own B&N's Nook or some other e-reader (yet); rather, those e-books come in formats that enable me to consume them on many devices, share them with friends and even grab portions to send to the…

Eat Sleep Publish
Autocorrect

Jason Preston

14 Jan 2010 | 11:51 am

Notice how inaccurate Twitter memes correct themselves: Update 12.57 am: Silly me. I went to the American Airlines website looking for info, but it did not occur to me to check out American’s twitter feed. There it is, from @AAirwaves (like I would have ever guessed that handle): Cannot fly individual drs/nurses to #haiti, working w/ Red Cross & other agencies 2 provide aid. Donate http://bit.ly/4zOgi0
Bad numbers, good read

Jason Preston

4 Dec 2009 | 3:41 pm

On printing obviously false “facts”: Ok, so this photo number is wrong: 1.4million photos per second is 3.6 trillion per month, or roughly 20 photos uploaded for every person on the planet every day.
Neglect and l33tsauce

Jason Preston

18 Nov 2009 | 9:17 am

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here on Eat Sleep Publish. I’ve been neglecting this blog while I’ve been working hard on my latest project: L33tsauce. It’s a publishing sort of venture, but it’s got everything to do with video games, and not really anything to do with traditional journalism. One of the conclusions that I’ve been coming to while writing Eat Sleep Publish over the past year and a half is that it’s increasingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to run a profitable content company on the internet if you’re paying for your…
New Cooperatives

Jason Preston

28 Oct 2009 | 2:46 pm

From Romenesko: The Chicago News Cooperative (CNC) Wednesday announced that the Chicago Tribune’s leading City Hall reporter has joined the staff of the new multi-platform news venture that will offer public service reporting about Chicago for the New York Times, the city’s public television station and on the Internet. The idea of similarly structured freelance cooperatives was briefly floated last night at The Pitch as well. It could be a workable structure, building content and selling it to multiple buyers in multiple media formats.
Newspaper circulation, a visual reference

Jason Preston

27 Oct 2009 | 11:28 am

Very interesting chart of circulation at several major newspapers over the past few decades. The site I got the image from is loading suuuuper slow, probably because they got linked for Daring Fireball, so for now I’ve uploaded the image here: It is apparently a very bad idea to be the Los Angeles Times.

Editor and Publisher
Bollinger Named 'Aberdeen American News' Publisher While Leone on Medical Leave

8 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

The Aberdeen American News has named an interim publisher while Publisher Dave Leone is on medical leave.
Ken Doctor's 'Newsonomics,' a Fitz & Jen Book Review

8 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

Ken Doctor's new book "Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get" not only crisply explains what the heck is going on with newspapers, Doctor (left) does it in such a conversational tone that the pages fly by.
Minneapolis 'Star Tribune' Achieves Record Web Month

7 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

StarTribune.com, Web site of the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, surpassed 100 million page views in January, an all-time high in monthly traffic and a 9% increase year-over-year.
'N.Y. Times' Ombudsman: I'd Transfer Jerusalem Bureau Chief With Son in Israeli Army

7 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

Ethan Bronner should no longer be The New York Times' Jerusalem bureau chief now that his 20-year-old son has joined the Israeli Army, the newspaper's public editor says.
Remembering Subscribers in Mill Valley -- By Painting Stripes in Front of Their Houses

7 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

A new carrier for the Marin (Calif.) Independent Journal hit on a novel way to remember subscribers -- he painted six-inch-wide white stripes in front of their homes. The IJ is paying for their removal.

contentious.com
links for 2010-02-09

Amy Gahran

9 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

San Francisco Peninsula Press Club: KTVU's mobile pageviews jump 300% in a year "KTVU is out with its report on its ratings in January, and perhaps the biggest headline doesn't deal with TV viewership at all. Channel 2 reports that pageviews for Mobile KTVU.com have increased by more than 300% to 1.6 million in January compared to the same month last year." (tags: mobile statistics Bay+Area news+biz tv RJIcollab) How do I make my Facebook group or fan page interesting? :: Free Tech Support :: Ask Dave Taylor!® Good list of tips. Especially with integrating different types…
links for 2010-02-08

Amy Gahran

8 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists "The stenography model of journalism must die. Many random people off the street will be able to paste together a "he said, she said" story. What the hyperliterate media marketplace needs are experts who can analyze, and advocate for, information in the public interest. "That demands journalists who have professional-level training and experience with the beats that they cover. It demands journalists who have the analytical skills, including training in statistics, to make sense of datasets and to find the stories…
links for 2010-02-07

Amy Gahran

7 Feb 2010 | 6:01 am

Forrester tells analysts no more personally-branded research blogs with interesting implications for analyst relations » SageCircle Blog Dumb, dumb, dumb…. Looks like Jeremiah Owyang had good reason to jump ship from Forrester, if they're going to be so short-sighted. "Credible reports are coming into SageCircle that Forrester management has set a new policy that analysts with personally-branded research blogs must take the blog down or redirect readers to a Forrester-branded role-based blogs. "Forrester response: when we say “personal blogs” we are referring to…
links for 2010-02-05

Amy Gahran

5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

AT&T forcing text and data plans on ‘quick messaging’ feature phones "If you thought you had it good because your plan to buy a text messaging-oriented feature phone from AT&T (NYSE: T) didn’t include a mandatory data or text plan, you might want to rethink your options. Newly minted rumors indicate that AT&T will require some feature phones in its stable to sign up with requisite data and messaging plans. If that feature phone you’ve had your eye on is considered by AT&T to be a “Quick Messaging” phone, AT&T will slap an additional $20 onto your voice…
links for 2010-02-03

Amy Gahran

3 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

Build a better journalism career by shifting your focus from writing stories to creating assets Excellent primer for anyone who wants to understand how to make a living doing journalism today. It's not just about stories anymore. "Notice the word I just used: "assets." To me, that's the word that should replace "stories" in your vocabulary as a journalist. Too many of the journalists I've seen try to make the transition to running their own blogs and websites remain mired in the "story" mindset, endlessly creating newspaper-style…

DigiDave - Journalism is a Process, Not a Product
The Connection Between Communities and Small Business

Digidave

26 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

This is by no means a “discovery” – just a quick observation on the role that small businesses play in the mental creation of a community. When people aske me where I live now – I say “by 51st and Telegraph.” I always know their response: “Oh, right by Bake Sale Betty’s!” Sometimes Piazollo wins out – but it is one of these two businesses 90% of the time. When I lived in San Francisco I would often tell people that I lived by Zeitgeist (still one of my favorite bars in the city) and most people knew exactly where that was. The irony:…
Micro-Payments vs. Crowd Funding

Digidave

25 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

In a recent Tweet LA Times media columnist James Rainey commented. “Hector Tobar colmn on low property taxes for wealthy country clubs from story 1st funded by micro-payment site Spot.us http://bit.ly/5Yzz6N“ This was quickly followed by Steve Rhodes “@LATimesrainey @spotus is crowdfunding I’d think of a micro-payment site as one where people contribute after a story is written.” James noted the difference: “Thanks to @tigerbeat for correcting me. Spot.us is a pioneer in crowd-funding, not micro-payments. My apologies.” To some extent – I think…
How Did I End Up In Journalism?

Digidave

24 Jan 2010 | 3:37 pm

There is a logistical and ideological story. I have tried to capture both. Life can be a war and everyone picks their battles. Which is to say – everyone has a passion. One is lucky if they are able to identify it. Even more so if they are put in a position to pursue it. But answering that internal call can be one of the most satisfying of decisions. If life IS a war – then it is better to choose your battles, on the fronts and fields that you are passionate about – rather than feel like a cog in someone’s brigade. It was sometime in college, while working on my honors…
Information Finds a Way, but Does Revenue?

Digidave

20 Jan 2010 | 7:30 am

My last post was “Fear Not, For Information – It Always Finds a Way” published in the Sacramento Bee. To play a little devil’s advocate with myself. I propose a look at revenue. This is a post for PBS’s IdeaLab. My writing on PBS Idea Lab was introduced to me as a way to publicly discuss the growth of Spot.Us, my Knight News Challenge project. I’ve received kudos for being honest in my blog posts. I’m comfortable talking about where Spot.Us is falling short, and where we are exceeding expectations. I think we are doing a bit of both — and trying…
Links I’ve Touched – Trying to Keep Track of My Digital Footprint

Digidave

19 Jan 2010 | 8:49 pm

Somebody recently asked me for my resume and I realized how horribly outdated it is. Perhaps because I look at my blog as a “living resume.” If that’s the case, however, I’ve still been doing a poor job of keeping it up to date. I need to start collecting links like those below. Tomorrow’s blog post will be a more thoughtful analysis of the business revenue of journalism (or a rehash of the link at the bottom). Search, Monetize and Fact Check YouTube Transcripts with Speakertext readwriteweb.com My buddy Matt Miriles launched his startup. Me and Matt have late…

Newspaper Death Watch
J-Schools Get an F in Finance

paulgillin

9 Feb 2010 | 5:46 am

Yesterday I visited with a journalism class at a major university. This institution’s journalism program is considered one of the finest in the country and its faculty boasts notable veterans of the newspaper and broadcast field. I spoke to a small class for about 90 minutes, devoting the first hour of that time to a discourse on the state of the US media: Why it’s in a predicament, how the story is likely to play out and what it all means for aspiring journalists. The rest of the time was discussion. My material wasn’t the type of stuff these students are used to hearing, judging by…
Spreadsheet Journalism

paulgillin

3 Feb 2010 | 4:12 am

Alan Mutter is stirring things up again with a spreadsheet that journalists can use to value their work. His thinking: Stop debasing yourself by working for peanuts. Figure out what your time is worth and charge accordingly. With his characteristic eye for detail, Mutter figures such factors as the self-employment tax and capital expenses in his calculations. The sample shows a fictional reporter charging about 55 cents a word to cover his/her fully loaded costs figuring an average pay rate of about $30/hour, which is union scale in Pittsburgh. Your mileage may vary, of course. If journalists…
Newsday Paywall Nets Just 35 Subs

paulgillin

28 Jan 2010 | 8:29 am

Publishers who cheered The New York Times decision last week to build up a wall in front of its content should be considerably less cheery about the news emanating from Newsday. The Long Island daily has admitted that it has signed up just 35 paying subscribers since it put most of its content behind a pay wall in October. At $260 per subscriber per year, that amounts to just $9,000 in annualized revenue for a relaunch that reportedly cost $4 million. There’s more to the story, of course. The total audience of potential online subscribers to Newsday is pretty small, given that the…
NY Times Swallows Paywall Pill

paulgillin

22 Jan 2010 | 6:48 am

The New York Times is building a paywall despite the 2005-2007 disaster that was TimesSelect. On Wednesday, the Times announced the decision to start charging for access beyond a specified number of articles beginning in 2011. Details, including the fee and the access threshold, weren’t revealed. The Times is leaving itself plenty of leeway to modify or even call off the program, knowing that the eyes of a $35 billion industry are upon it. “We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right,” said Times Co. publisher…
Who Will Tell Haiti’s Story in the Future?

paulgillin

20 Jan 2010 | 5:16 am

Watching the heart-rending images and stories coming out of Haiti over the last week, we’ve found ourselves worrying not only about the human tragedy but also about how much we really know about what’s going on down there. The Haitian earthquake is a vivid example of how the world still relies upon the mainstream media to tell the stories that no one else will. The news media is often guilty of overkill, such as when Tribune Co. sent 14 reporters to cover a Super Bowl in which none of its hometown teams played or when reporters jam-pack a Presidential press conference to report on the…

Endemic
On knowledge

pat

14 Jan 2010 | 7:44 am

Today I finally did what I should have done a long time ago: I donated to Wikipedia. I strongly believe that all human knowledge should be free. Wikipedia is the leading project to help make human knowledge free and accessible. We still have a lot more human knowledge to unlock, but Wikipedia has been an indispensable tool for millions of people all over the world. Making knowledge only available to those who can afford to purchase it or who have direct access to a large, physical library isn’t ideal. The Internet is the perfect place to store and disseminate the world’s…
It’s not about the perfect Pepsi but rather the perfect Pepsis

pat

20 Dec 2009 | 7:08 pm

Where would the world be without chunky tomato sauce? Watch this TED Talk about not trying to create the perfect product and how we should instead try to create the perfect products to target distinct groups. Apply this logic to journalism. What do you come up with? So why are news orgs trying to create the perfect product? Shouldn’t they be trying to create the perfect products?
It’s OK to lose control

pat

17 Dec 2009 | 8:29 am

“You no longer control the message. And that’s OK.” If you want to succeed on social media (and the Web in general) you have to be willing to lose control. This fantastic TED Talk should be a must watch for anyone engaged in social media and for marketing departments around the world.
My best advice for social media

pat

16 Dec 2009 | 9:24 am

Be yourself. Be passionate. Social media is nothing like the tightly controlled, sterile communication messages of the past. Want to get good at social media? Be passionate about something and let that passion show through. It’s really that simple.
On journalism

pat

13 Dec 2009 | 4:10 pm

You know that day that you never thought would come? Well it came. And I’m no longer a full-time journalist. There are a lot of reasons that I’m no longer a full-time journalist. The main reason is that I don’t want to be. These are incredibly difficult times in journalism, and it was sapping my energy away. I had increasingly become a bitter, angry person. Angry at the established media outlets who were pissing it all away. Angry at all the editors and publishers who couldn’t see that big, radical change was necessary. I started as a professional journalist in 2006.

Wired Journalists
Pakistan reinventing microfinance

Farhat Abbas Shah

Reinventing microfinance in Pakistan Farhat Abbas Shah Poverty certainly emerged as the single most problem that lies at the heart of modern day crisis. It quite recently has assumed alarming proportions. Many efforts were made in the past but they could not wholly succeed. Among significant tools, the microfinance was also used for getting rid of poverty which quite recently plagued the whole world. There is always a room for innovation to be introduced to already existing structures. Though microfinance made some gains in alleviating it but with sufficient services the amount invested lie…
Audio slideshows vs Video

Daniel Sato

This post was written for an internal blog that I have been keeping for my work and my own journalism blog: Multimedia is a relatively new endeavor for newspapers, and The Telegram is no exception. As an industry, we are still feeling our way around in the dark, trying to find what works and what does not work. In a few years time we have cycled through What was once the golden bullet can quickly turn in to a resource black hole. Here at The Telegram, there has been an emphasis on shooting video when possible, however, according to Richard Koci Hernandez, founder of Multimediashooter.com and…
Facing media to empower microfinance a strong microfinance idialogy

Farhat Abbas Shah

Daily "The Post", January 21, 2010 Lhore An ambitious goal of fighting poverty Staff Reporter LAHORE: Farhat Abbas Shah emerged on the literary secne of Lahore about couple of year ago and immediately got the attention of the youth. He is a prolific writer who has already written about 67 books. Now he has ventured on a poverty alleviation drive by according to him a new coincept of micro financing which shuns interest and aims at profit loss sharing. Excerpts from his interview are being given below Q: Microfinance generally failed to alleviate poverty. What different you intend to do in…
Somali Journalists launch Media for peace initiative

Mustafa Haji Abdinur

Somalis have elated a media for peace and development initiative officially launched by courageous local media professionals led by an award wining Somali journalists who recently returned from New York where he was honored for his commitment to free press in his country and throughout world. The idea of the initiative, Somali Media for Peace and Development (SOMEPED) which dates back early 2006 was founded by local journalists who tried to start working for peace through the local media, but for delayed researches on the issue, the initiative was finally announced officially on January 18,…
Eco Journalists -- take note!

Jeanette McDermott

Six of the world's eight species of bears are perched on the brink of extinction and journalists are not writing about it. Why? 75% of a species nearing extinction is news. Why aren't stories being written about it? Why aren't journalists ferreting out important information like this and reporting on it? 2010 is International Year of Biodiveristy. If journalists don't write about issues like the plight of bears in 2010, then we are surely missing the boat! We burn and clear forests for personal gain. When bears search for food because they can no longer find it in destroyed habitat, we call…

New Media Bytes
How To Use Facebook Ads to Get a Journalism Job

Shawn Smith

5 Feb 2010 | 11:34 am

A friend of mine asked me recently, ‘how can I use Facebook targeting to advertise jobs or get hired?’ I started by writing out the lengthy Facebook reply, but for some reason, FB wouldn’t send the mail…. So here I will share it with everyone! YAY! :) I’ll break this up into two posts “Advertising a Job” and “Getting Hired” using Facebook ads. 1. Click on Advertising at the bottom of the page on Facebook.com (While completely logged out) 2. Click “Create an Ad” (green button) 3. Create a “test” ad by going through steps 1-3 (Title:…
How To Get Hired for a Journalism Job Using Facebook Advertising

Shawn Smith

5 Feb 2010 | 11:34 am

Why Use Facebook Advertising? Only because it’s the most powerful advertising platform when it comes to targeting! Seriously, you can get in front of nearly anyone at company…. because… well, they probably are using Facebook too. If you want to get hired, there’s no shame in advertising your skills and background. How else are people going to recruit you if they don’t know you exist. So let’s start. What you are about to read will get you further along than 90% of Facebook advertisers out there :) Before You Advertise Get yourself a: Blog (self-hosted, not…
How To Advertise a Journalism Job on Facebook

Shawn Smith

5 Feb 2010 | 11:33 am

Why Advertise on Facebook? If you have a job you want to fill, facebook is an awesome platform for targeting ideal candidates. Why? Because the Facebook has a huge, sometimes-educated, DAILY audience – much bigger than the daily audience on say JournalismJobs.com. Now I can’t speak on cost, because JournalismJobs.com runs ads for $75 for 5 weeks, and the audience is fairly targeted. The cost really could back out. Facebook runs on a CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model. Depending on your budget, Facebook be more cost-effective but also more costly.
No Newspaper Bailout! Bailout News Instead

Shawn Smith

21 Sep 2009 | 5:41 am

Since bailouts became all the rage, a lot of journo’s have asked “where’s our bailout?” Where’s the bailout for the newspaper industry? Looks like the buzz is getting a second wind as The Hill reports President Obama may be open to the idea of a bailout for the newspaper industry. The Hill cites an interview during which Obama told some newspaper editors he would be happy to view proposals. Reports the Toledo Blade: Several bills have been introduced in Congress to aid the newspaper industry, including a Senate measure that would allow newspaper companies to…
Journalism Monetization: How to Make Money with Your J-Skills

Shawn Smith

8 Sep 2009 | 8:14 am

This is part two of my series about diversifying your income streams. See part 1 if you missed it. If you read my last post in this series, you’ve likely put together a list of your skills and a few other lists as well. If you didn’t, go back to post 1 and write your lists. Then come back. Now that you have your lists, finding ways to monetize your journalism background should get a lot easier. In this post, I’ll give you an 8-step plan for getting started with skills monetization outside of newspapers and a few excellent examples for putting your skills to work. Let’s…

Holovaty.com
EveryBlock acquisition and me

I'm excited to announce some huge news. EveryBlock, the project I've led for the last two years, has been acquired by MSNBC.com. The main details are at the EveryBlock blog, but I wanted to mention a few other things here on my personal site, to try to anticipate questions. First, this has no impact whatsoever on my involvement with Django. MSNBC.com is half-owned by Microsoft (although it's a separate company), so I expect plenty of Microsoft jokes -- but that's all they are: jokes. I'm not going to start developing things with Microsoft technologies; EveryBlock is not going to be converted…
The definitive, two-part answer to "is data journalism?"

It's a hot topic among journalists right now: Is data journalism? Is it journalism to publish a raw database? Here, at last, is the definitive, two-part answer: 1. Who cares? 2. I hope my competitors waste their time arguing about this as long as possible.
Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering

We've launched user accounts at EveryBlock, and we faced the interesting problem of needing to cache entire pages except for the "You're logged in as [username]" bit at the top of the page. For example, the Chicago homepage takes a nontrivial amount of time to generate and doesn't change often -- which means we want to cache it -- but at the same time, we need to display the dynamic bit in the upper right: One solution would be to pull in the username info dynamically via Ajax. This way, you could cache the entire page and rely on the client to pull in the username bits. The downsides are…
Looking toward EveryBlock’s future

It's been a year and a half now since I've started working on EveryBlock, and I'm still having the time of my life. Starting from scratch in July 2007, our team of six has built a one-of-a-kind local news site that now serves 11 cities and makes more than a hundred distinct types of local information useful to people. By all measures, from passionate user feedback to press coverage to traffic numbers to influence on other projects, the site is a success, and we're incredibly proud of our work. Thanks to our out-of-the-ordinary funding — a generous grant from Knight Foundation — our team…
Announcing the Django Book, second edition

I'm excited to announce that I'm working on a second edition of the Django Book. The first edition, which I cowrote with Jacob Kaplan-Moss, was published in print by Apress more than a year ago, and, sadly, it's become out of date. It covers Django version 0.96, and many of the examples don't work with the current version, 1.0. Fortunately, now that Django has reached 1.0 and is committed to backwards compatibility, this book will have a much longer shelf life. :-) At this point, I've rewritten/edited the first three chapters and published the drafts for free online, as we did the first time…

Innovation in College Media
Xtranormal: in ur text, making it video

Bryan

6 Feb 2010 | 6:17 am

I linked to this site almost a year ago when I first discovered it, but I thought it was worth looking at again: xtranormal.com. The site allows you to produce an animated movie based upon the text you type into a script. It allows for various camera angles, characters, and actions. And, as with most online software, it's free to sign up and use. Here's a movie I produced in about 30 minutes: How is this helpful for journalists? I can think of a couple of uses for this. Suppose you are covering a court case where cameras aren't allowed in the courtroom. You could produce a "dramatic reading"…
Video camera guidelines: how much money?

Bryan

4 Feb 2010 | 7:41 am

The Canon Vixia HF200 A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about video cameras. In the comments to that post, Kathleen Flores, adviser at UT-El Paso, wrote: I'm considering the Sanyo Xacti. It is only $160 but has no microphone/headphone inputs. I want to get something inexpensive so that I can purchase at least four or five cameras and equipment (I could make a mojo kit for $250) to make them accessible for our students. Has anyone used these or have any other suggestions. I would rather get more students doing some basic multimedia than just one or two using the more expensive equipment.
RTNDA’s social media guidelines

Bryan

4 Feb 2010 | 7:31 am

Via Al Tompkins at Poynter, here are the guidelines for social media as proposed by the Radio and Television News Director's Association. College journalists should perhaps pay special attention to this one: • Avoid posting photos or any other content on any website, blog, social network or video/photo sharing website that might embarrass you or undermine your journalistic credibility. Keep this in mind, even if you are posting on what you believe to be a “private” or password-protected site. Consider this when allowing others to take pictures of you at social gatherings. When you work…
Frontline’s very serious Digital_Nation

Bryan

3 Feb 2010 | 6:19 am

I like most everything Frontline puts out. Digital_Nation is worth watching, just to be reminded how much of our lives are surrounded by, and wrapped up in, technology. Obviously, this has tremendous implications for student media. The first clip is embedded below. You can see the whole series, and associated content, here.
PBS’s MediaShift blog offers advice to student newspapers

JennaStaul

31 Jan 2010 | 7:38 pm

PBS's MediaShift blog had some interesting insight to offer college newspapers in the wake of the New York Times' predicted move to install a paywall on their site. Specifically, the site urged student newspapers not to be lured into the promise of a paywall. While I'd say that's sound advice, I'm not sure there is much legitimate discussion amongst college newspapers to install paywalls while they're still offering their print product for free. Nevertheless, the blog offered some tips about how college newspapers can keep afloat in uncertain times. According to MediaShift: 1. Beef up…

Institute for Analytic Journalism
How-to: Turning Netflix data into map

analyticjournalism

8 Feb 2010 | 9:20 am

From the Society of Newspaper Designers via FlowingData: The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic January 20th, 2010 By Kevin Quealy One of The Times’ recent graphics, “A Peek Into Netflix Queues,” ended up being one of our more popular graphics of the past few months. (A good roundup of what people wrote is here). Since then, there have been a few questions about the how the graphic was made and Tyson Evans, a friend and colleague, thought it might interest SND members. (I bother Tyson with questions about CSS and Ruby pretty regularly, so I owe him a few favors.) Most readers are…
More Visualization Links on Twitter

Tom Johnson

23 Jan 2010 | 9:40 am

Thanks to Steve Doig for the pointer to.... More Visualization Links on Twitter By: Jeff Clark Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 In a recent post I showed the Top 20 Individual Data Visualizations Mentioned on Twitter and remarked that many of the most frequently mentioned twitter links were to collections of visualizations. Shown below is a meta list of the top collection-type data visualization or infographic links. Top Collections of Data Visualization Links 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization - Webdesigner Depot Data Visualization and Infographics Resources - Smashing Magazine…
How to Make a Heatmap – a Quick and Easy Solution

analyticjournalism

21 Jan 2010 | 12:45 pm

Thanks to Nathan at Flowing Data: How to Make a Heatmap – a Quick and Easy Solution By Nathan / Jan 21, 2010 to Featured, Statistical Visualization, Tutorials / 11 comments How do you make a heatmap? This came from kerimcan in the FlowingData forums, and krees followed up with a couple of good links on how to do them in R. It really is super easy. Here's how to make a heatmap with just a few lines of code, but first, a short description of what a heatmap is. The Heatmap In case you don't ...
So what ARE people talking abouit

analyticjournalism

13 Jan 2010 | 8:23 pm

One of the things we've noticed about journalism operation that allow comments and discussion on their web pages is that few take the time to analyze that interchange and content. Partially, that's because of a lack of tools. The "tldr Project" is a step toward meeting that challenge. tldr PROJECT - http://demaws.net/projects/tldr#about Recent years have seen a proliferation of large-scale discussion spaces on the internet. With increasing user participation, it is not uncommon to find discussion spaces with hundreds to thousands of messages/participants. This phenomenon can be…
David Rumsey's website redesign

analyticjournalism

14 Dec 2009 | 12:14 pm

New davidrumsey.com Website Redesign "For the first time since its launch in 1999, the www.davidrumsey.com website has been completely redesigned and updated. With better navigation and structure, users will find it easier to explore the site's many viewers and collection database with over 21,000 maps online. A new Blog has been added to the site, and includes entries for Recent Additions, News, Featured Maps, Related Sites, and Videos. Over 200 historic maps from the collection can be viewed in a new browser-based version of Google Earth, and users can enter the Second…

Invisible Inkling
Epistemology and sources

Ryan Sholin

2 Feb 2010 | 7:16 pm

Back in the excellent philosophy class I took in high school (Hi Mr. Lutness!), epistemology was simply explained as How You Know What You Know. And different philosophers said you know what you know for different reasons. George Berkeley, for example, had this whole “seeing is believing”thing, for example. If he didn’t perceive it with his own senses, it might as well not exist. No retweets for him, I suppose. No newspapers. I seriously doubt he would have trusted cable news had it existed in his day. (Scholarly friends: I am aware that Berkeley took the above given as step…
Five

Ryan Sholin

1 Feb 2010 | 4:45 am

When I started this blog, in my first week as a Mass Communications graduate student at San Jose State, it was called “Big Silver Robot,” it was hosted at Blogspot, and it was anonymous. That lasted for about a month. Pretty quickly, I signed up for a free WordPress instance at Blogsome, where I enjoyed a bit more freedom to learn html and css by fiddling with the files in the WP admin. It was ryansholin.blogsome.com, and I’m pretty sure that was the point where I started calling it “Ryan Sholin’s J-School Blog.” Straightforward enough, right? Of the early…
A Newsstand for the Tablet that might work

Ryan Sholin

29 Jan 2010 | 4:59 am

“Newsstand” by triin on Flickr. Mario Garcia probably believes the lifespan (halflife?) of print newspapers will stretch out ever so slightly longer than I believe, but I’m constantly inspired by his original thought about the problems associated with sustaining any version of the existing structure of journalism, assuming for the moment that it’s a good idea. And of course, he’s thinking about the Tablet. (I’m going to try to avoid focusing on any single product here, instead using the word “Tablet” as code for: multitouch slab of glass with…
Don’t do this

Ryan Sholin

21 Jan 2010 | 6:10 am

Hugh MacLeod is certainly one of my favorite cartoonists around. I’ve bought business cards with one of his drawings on the back before, and I’m happily subscribed to his e-mail newsletter, where he’s gone the way of Jason Calacanis and cut down on blogging while ramping up (well, on and off) an old school broadcast-like e-mail blast. Love you, Hugh. And my mom bought your book. But folks, please don’t do this: Seriously. Whatever you’re working on isn’t worth compromising your mental and physical health over. Unless, it’s like, world peace or…
Notes on the Cleverness Economy

Ryan Sholin

20 Jan 2010 | 2:25 pm

As a young aspiring writer (of what, I didn’t know), I wrote an awful lot of words in notebooks for the better part of the 1990s, and I mean “an awful lot” to have multiple meanings in this case. All self-deprecation aside, one of the easiest, most satisfying ways to string words together was to attempt both brevity and wit at the same time. To write an epigram encapsulating one thought, hopefully with some sort of sarcastic or otherwise clever twist on a conventional concept. I read a lot of Byron and Coleridge in those days, so here’s an obvious example from the…

Random Mumblings
On Friday, the Talk stops

Jack D. Lail

9 Feb 2010 | 5:08 am

One of the pioneering efforts in new ways to deliver news and connect with audiences in Tennessee (and the country) is "going dark"WKRN-TV's "Nashville is Talking" Web site, termed a "quaint reminder" of days gone by shuts down on Friday.On the Web site WKRN general manager Gwen Kinsey writes:NIT in its infancy introduced individual blogging to our mass media vehicle. The site generated buzz, a fair amount of regular readers and a provocative discussion about what role new media might play in the future of mainstream media. It was fun and it was messy. Our community's level of…
Social Media Summit

Jack D. Lail

4 Feb 2010 | 9:18 am

The new Scripps Convergence Lab at the University of Tennessee is being quickly put to use by the public as well as students. The Knoxville Digital Strategy Winter Summit will be held in the Convergence Lab on Feb. 24 and is being put on by The Knoxville Social Media Association and Social Media Club of Knoxville.According to an email from the Knoxville Social Media Club, the Summitl features three panels: Panel 1 - 3:30 - 4:15 pm: "Social Media & the Health Care Industry: Where We Are & Where We're Going" Panel 2 - 4:30 - 5:15 pm: "Journalism and Social Media: Breaking Down Barriers…
Seeing the journalists of the future

Jack D. Lail

31 Jan 2010 | 3:53 pm

I spent most of last week at Hampton University at Scripps Career Days. The students I met were extremely bright and they have a wonderful facility to work in at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications. There are links to more coverage, including photos and videos, of the week at the ScrippsDays.com Web site.(Photo by Hampton student Nolan Smash, who also shot video of some of the panels.)
Birds enjoyed the snow

Jack D. Lail

30 Jan 2010 | 11:26 am
Bulldog Calacanis bites comScore's leg

Jack D. Lail

24 Jan 2010 | 8:35 am

Jascon Calacanis gets his rant on comScore, calling them "the technology industry's biggest bully."It has always baffled me why people continue to rely on comScore when its data is so flawed, particularly when the data drills down to local markets. Generally, it's beyond wildly wrong.He called comScore a "protection racket" and says:it was an unspoken truth for years that if you paid Comscore they fixed your numbers, and if you were a small company and didn't, well, you suffered. Comscore would probably deny this, but their recent "pay to play" product shows their true stripes.Calacanis tends…

sans serif
Indian youth prefer newspapers over TV for news

churumuri

9 Feb 2010 | 5:42 am

Newspaper printers, publishers and promoters have plenty to thank India’s youth. A nationwide survey by the National Council of Applied Economics Reserch (NCAER) shows that two out of every three people in the 13-35 age band prefer to get their news from newspapers, although more youngsters are exposed to television than print. Infographic: courtesy The Indian Express Read the full story here: Print media holds its own Filed under: Issues and Ideas, Magazines, Newspapers, Radio, Television Tagged: Churumuri, NCAER, Sans Serif, The Indian Express
A bigger masthead than the previous week

churumuri

8 Feb 2010 | 4:00 am

The front page of the second issue of M.J. Akbar’s new weekly newspaper, The Sunday Guardian. Filed under: Art, Newspapers, People Tagged: Churumuri, M.J. Akbar, Sans Serif, The Sunday Guardian
Will M.J. Akbar recreate The Telegraph magic?

churumuri

2 Feb 2010 | 3:38 am

New Delhi has a new Sunday paper, The Sunday Guardian, edited by the veteran editor, author and columnist M.J. Akbar. The 40-page weekly, priced at Rs 3, hit the stands on 31 January with the renowned lawyer Ram Jethmalani as chairman of the board of MJP Media Pvt Ltd. This is the second weekend paper to be launched in recent weeks after the Crest edition of The Times of India, which is priced at Rs 6 and is published on Saturdays. The 20-page main section of The Sunday Guardian has one page of city news, two pages of [covert] investigations, three pages of national news, one page of the week…
A columnist more ‘powerful’ than all media pros

churumuri

31 Jan 2010 | 1:46 am

There are 12 media professionals—proprietors, promoters, publishers, editors—in the Indian Express list of the 100 most powerful Indians in 2010, but an irregular columnist is listed to be more powerful than all of them. The quirky list, which makes no mention of the methodology or the jury, has two newcomers from the 2009 list—columnist Arun Shourie and TV anchor Barkha Dutt—and shows the door to three others. Like last year, the IE list chronicles the kinks of the boldfaced names. And like year, Express has diligently kept editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta’s name…
Is a bank not allowed to change its newspaper?

churumuri

31 Jan 2010 | 12:21 am

PRESS RELEASE: “T. Venkattram Reddy, president, the Indian Newspaper Society (INS), strongly condemns the direction issued vide a circular dated 15 December 2009 by the deputy general manager (P&E) of the Kerala State Co-operative Bank Limited, Kerala, to all senior managers of the bank directing the branch offices of the bank to stop subscription of the Malayalam daily being subscribed and make available Deshabhimani daily, a Malayalam daily published by a major political party, which is in power in Kerala, at their offices. “This is in gross violation of the spirit of the…

Random Mumblings
On Friday, the Talk stops

Jack D. Lail

9 Feb 2010 | 5:08 am

One of the pioneering efforts in new ways to deliver news and connect with audiences in Tennessee (and the country) is "going dark"WKRN-TV's "Nashville is Talking" Web site, termed a "quaint reminder" of days gone by shuts down on Friday.On the Web site WKRN general manager Gwen Kinsey writes:NIT in its infancy introduced individual blogging to our mass media vehicle. The site generated buzz, a fair amount of regular readers and a provocative discussion about what role new media might play in the future of mainstream media. It was fun and it was messy. Our community's level of…
Social Media Summit

Jack D. Lail

4 Feb 2010 | 9:18 am

The new Scripps Convergence Lab at the University of Tennessee is being quickly put to use by the public as well as students. The Knoxville Digital Strategy Winter Summit will be held in the Convergence Lab on Feb. 24 and is being put on by The Knoxville Social Media Association and Social Media Club of Knoxville.According to an email from the Knoxville Social Media Club, the Summitl features three panels: Panel 1 - 3:30 - 4:15 pm: "Social Media & the Health Care Industry: Where We Are & Where We're Going" Panel 2 - 4:30 - 5:15 pm: "Journalism and Social Media: Breaking Down Barriers…
Seeing the journalists of the future

Jack D. Lail

31 Jan 2010 | 3:53 pm

I spent most of last week at Hampton University at Scripps Career Days. The students I met were extremely bright and they have a wonderful facility to work in at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications. There are links to more coverage, including photos and videos, of the week at the ScrippsDays.com Web site.(Photo by Hampton student Nolan Smash, who also shot video of some of the panels.)
Birds enjoyed the snow

Jack D. Lail

30 Jan 2010 | 11:26 am
Bulldog Calacanis bites comScore's leg

Jack D. Lail

24 Jan 2010 | 8:35 am

Jascon Calacanis gets his rant on comScore, calling them "the technology industry's biggest bully."It has always baffled me why people continue to rely on comScore when its data is so flawed, particularly when the data drills down to local markets. Generally, it's beyond wildly wrong.He called comScore a "protection racket" and says:it was an unspoken truth for years that if you paid Comscore they fixed your numbers, and if you were a small company and didn't, well, you suffered. Comscore would probably deny this, but their recent "pay to play" product shows their true stripes.Calacanis tends…

Telegraph: Shane Richmond
Safer Internet Day is pitching too young

Ian Douglas

9 Feb 2010 | 6:32 am

Ask a parent if they’re worried about what their kids get up to online and of course they’ll say yes. Who wouldn’t worry about their precious little ones adrift in a sea of porn and paedophiles? Safer Internet Day aims to teach good practice to web users, especially when it comes to social media. Think [...]
Jonathan Schwartz leaves Sun

Ian Douglas

4 Feb 2010 | 8:02 am

Jonathan Schwartz, ex-CEO of Sun Microsystems, despite wearing a ponytail, has a stylish way with a goodbye note. Now that his company has been bought by Oracle he is out of a job, a fact he announced on Twitter in Haiku form. Financial crisis Stalled too many customers CEO no more Java remains the basis of a vast number [...]
Nokia Ovi Maps downloaded by one million people in a week

Ian Douglas

3 Feb 2010 | 6:24 am

Nokia just hasn’t been able to capture the imagination of the app-crazy mobile users that have been flocking to the iPhone and Google Android. Not until now, anyway. An update to the Ovi Maps app that works on a range of Nokia phones was launched last week and has already been snapped up by more [...]
Apple iPad: Why I'm waiting before casting judgment

Shane Richmond

29 Jan 2010 | 4:57 am

We live in the age of instant analysis and so, within minutes of the Apple iPad announcement on Wednesday the pundits were queuing up to pass judgment. Many of them were critical. Here’s my colleague Justin Williams writing yesterday: “I have read enough about it in the last 18 hours, though, to know that I do [...]
Apple iPad: What we know and what we don't about the UK release

Shane Richmond

28 Jan 2010 | 9:22 am

Since Apple announced the iPad yesterday evening, everyone who has mentioned it to me today has wanted to know when it will be available in the UK. I don’t know for definite but I can tell you what I do know. The Apple iPad comes in two models, WiFi-only or WiFi + 3G, with three storage [...]

MediaShift Idea Lab
What Can Virtual Goods Teach Us About Paying for News?

8 Feb 2010 | 11:22 am

Why will people spend $1 to send you a virtual beer on Facebook, but not to read a news story online? On the surface, it defies logic. I think most people would agree that whatever economic value news and information has, it's greater than a virtual piece of clothing, or something that gives your avatar a special power in a gaming environment, or that gives you elevated status on a social network. But in terms of consumers' actions, the exact opposite is true. I've been thinking a lot about this issue because the market for virtual goods has exploded. People are expected to spend $1.6 billion…
Moving on After the Knight News Challenge

5 Feb 2010 | 4:00 am

In 2008, the Open Media Foundation (then Deproduction) received a $380,000 Knight News Challenge award, and it was a major turning-point for our organization. We added staff, formed new partnerships, and maintained a level of growth that had us approximately double in size each year over our first five years after forming in 2004. The Open Media Project grant is for a four-part effort that began with a re-building of the software we developed to automate an unprecedented approach to user-generated and community-powered TV in Denver. The second phase saw our team implement this re-built Drupal…
What Are the Universal Principles that Guide Journalism?

2 Feb 2010 | 8:27 am

Defining principles of journalism is difficult. Rewarding, but difficult. Back in 2005 it took the Los Angeles Times a year of internal discussions to settle on its ethical guidelines for journalists. The Committee for Concerned Journalists took four years, did oodles of research and held 20 public forums, in order to come up with a Statement of Shared Purpose with nine principles (which was subsequently fleshed out in the excellent "The Elements of Journalism" by Kovach and Rosenstiel). Time spent thinking can then translate into a lot of principles. The BBC's editorial guidelines -- which…
Printcasting 1.5 Boosts Design for On-Demand Publishing

1 Feb 2010 | 11:11 am

A funny thing happens when you win a contest like the Knight News Challenge. Suddenly, what was once just a wacky idea that you threw into a web form becomes a long list of things you have to do. And those of you who are lucky enough to be filling out a full Knight News Challenge proposal this week for the second phase of the competition should take note: If you win, you have to do allof it. If you haven't seen the list of features we originally promised to build into Printcasting, let's just say it was pretty darned long. So it's with great satisfaction that I can say that, 18 months after…
Truly Serving the Public -- With Web Tools

1 Feb 2010 | 10:22 am

We journalists are fond of saying that journalism is constitutionally protected because of our critical role in providing information that people need to be citizens in a democracy. Which makes it all the more shameful that most newspapers -- in print and online -- have historically done such a lousy job of helping people navigate the core functionality of democracy: elections. The Chicago Tribune's Election Center, developed by the team that includes the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism educations were financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships), is a great example of…

MultimediaShooter
Multimedia Rules to Live By and Seven Steps to Training Yourself

This teaching thing must really be getting into my blood. Now that I'm on winter break and I haven't been in a classroom for over a week, I have a strong urge to spew unsolicited and unnecessary multimedia advice. Please excuse the rant and take it for what it's worth--the ...
9 Multimedia Projects You MUST Experience

1. Highrise HIGHRISE, a multi-year, multi-media, collaborative documentary project about the human experience in global vertical suburbs. We will use the acclaimed interventionist and participatory approaches of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) project. Our scale will be global, but rooted firmly in the FIR philosophy — putting people, process, creativity, collaboration, ...
10 Sports Related Multimedia Projects Worth Watching

First let start with this awesome video that reveals the future of magazines from Sports Illustrated. 1. Sports Illustrated - Tablet Demo 1.5 2.World Series Time-Lapse By the time the Yankees rushed the field to celebrate their 27th World Series victory, Robert Caplin had photographed the action — 12,000 times. The result ...
7 Free Firefox Extensions For Journalists

Guest post by Mary Ward ReminderFox This is a sort of date planner extension. Journalists have meetings and important deadlines all the time. This extension helps any journalist to keep track of all deadlines and obligations so that their minds remain free to handle the journalism and not the minutiae of day ...
8 Projects I’m Thankful For Seeing This Week

1. Kroo Bay Beautiful interface, panos and strong storytelling. 2.Salt SALT is the story of award winning and internationally renowned photo-artist, Murray Fredericks on his annual solo pilgrimage to the heart of Lake ...

News Videographer
I have new respect for my readers

Angela Grant

31 Jan 2010 | 4:44 pm

When I started this blog and committed to it in a serious way, I was a full-time videographer at a major newspaper in Texas. Even though I had to self-teach a lot of my video skills — Which was very hard — I had it easier than a lot of my readers because I was able to spend all hours of all days devoting myself to my studies. The idea of this blog was to share my lessons, as I learned them, with others who were struggling to learn the same things. Well, I have a whole new respect for those readers now because of my new job. The time constraints that my current responsibilities…
My dirty little secret: I have no tripod

Angela Grant

30 Jan 2010 | 3:40 pm

Around May of last year I took the plunge and bought my own video set up. I got the Sony A1U, a Sennheiser wireless kit, a nice light, and a jiffy bag. Here I am working in West University Place, Texas on Jan. 17. Photo by Greg Smith. Around that time my workplace had two tripods I could borrow any time. Plus, I really didn’t know what type of tripod to get. So I skipped it. Well, now I don’t work at the same company, and I have no tripod. There, I said it. I have no tripod. It seems like an innocuous enough statement, but longtime readers of this blog now have the right to point…
links for 2009-11-12

Angela Grant

12 Nov 2009 | 1:03 am

Ten ways to make your photos better « Mastering Multimedia Colin's giving great advice! Read it all. (tags: photography tutorial) a links for 2009-11-12
One door closes, another opens

Angela Grant

11 Nov 2009 | 8:06 pm

Until about two months ago I really didn’t know what would happen to my journalism career. I had put it on pause so I could move to the same city as my fiancee. I took a job in another industry and spent a lot of time missing journalism. Finally that job ended, and I was unemployed for several weeks until I found my current job working for an independent hyperlocal news site. My luck has opened my mind to new possibilities in my chosen career, and I’ve also learned a huge lesson. I don’t care much if I’m working for a huge daily newspaper that is well known around the…
VideoWTF?

Angela Grant

5 Nov 2009 | 7:49 pm

Here’s a cool new site to ask and answer questions about video: VideoWTF? The site has great functionality. Anyone can post questions, answer other people’s questions, rank them, tag them, etc. It seems like there are some really knowledgeable people contributing to this site. Check out this one. I learned something new! a VideoWTF?

Newspaper Next
Powerful lineup for New Revenue seminar

Mary Peskin

29 Jan 2010 | 12:37 pm

Relying on traditional advertising streams alone is no longer enough. Attend API's New Revenue Models That Work! seminar (Feb. 15-17) to learn practical strategies and tactics for developing, launching and maximizing a wide array of effective new revenue models. Program highlights include: Beyond Advertising Karen Feldman (IBM Institute for Business Value) Why and how media companies must develop new products/services and move to a more customer-centric business model. Includes case studies on organizations successfully making this transition, from both outside and inside the publishing…
Dollar Match Program extended until Feb. 15

Mary Peskin

22 Jan 2010 | 9:08 am

You now have two additional weeks to take advantage of API's 2010 Dollar Match Program, and double the value of your training investment! For every tuition dollar deposited into an API training bank by February 15, 2010, API will match it. You can invest your tuition dollars in any combination of 2010 seminars and regional workshops. It's completely up to you. For example, by putting $2,500 in your training bank, you will receive $5,000 worth of tuition credit in 2010. Upcoming programs range in price from $150 for a one-day regional workshop to $1,500 for a multi-day revenue seminar. They'll…
API, Poynter team up for "Beyond the Newsroom"

Mary Glick

14 Jan 2010 | 12:51 pm

The American Press Institute and The Poynter Institute will collaborate on a new seminar for newsroom executives. The joint effort is Beyond the Newsroom, a 2.5-day seminar here at API in Reston, Va., March 22-24. The seminar will feature Poynter Managing Director Butch Ward and API Associate Director Mary Glick. They will be joined by a number of industry experts addressing the challenges of providing quality news and information despite newsroom budget and staffing cuts. Among them: - Jeff Jarvis, author, blogger, consultant and journalism professor who advises journalists to "do what you…
Use this knowledge to grow online revenue

Mary Peskin

12 Jan 2010 | 7:37 am

Which business models work online? Should news organizations charge for content? What paid access approaches are successful? "Paid Access Models: Practices and Profiles," a must-have report from the American Press Institute and ITZBelden, informs these critical decisions facing news executives. It provides actionable data, case studies and approaches for success in the transitioning landscape for news. The insight report provides sharp analysis of the opportunities and obstacles presented by "going paid" and guidelines to help publishers make critical decisions. It examines both replica…
What's in your 2010 Revenue Portfolio?

Mary Peskin

12 Jan 2010 | 7:15 am

API's Revenue 3.0 Portfolio Series packs actionable data, sharp analysis and measurable results into five integrated programs that will help next-generation, cross-platform news enterprises maximize success and minimize risk in the transitioning media landscape. Each seminar draws on exclusive API/ITZBelden Research and Insight Reports that provide up-to-the-minute data analysis, case studies and actionable recommendations for approaches that capture new revenue. And by participating in API's Dollar Match training bank, you can attend all five seminars and receive all five Insight Reports --…

paulconley
Beware of geeks bearing gifts

Paul Conley

26 Jan 2010 | 6:16 am

Don't expect the geeks in your office to get much work done tomorrow.Because Wednesday, Jan. 27, will be something akin to Christmas for geeks. For it is on that day that Apple will unveil their long-awaited, much-rumored ... something.Most of the tech world expects the product Apple will unveil to be some sort of tablet-style computer, i.e., something sort-of, kind-of like a Kindle.But better.And cooler.And as excited as I, a bit of a geek myself, may be about the arrival of the iSomething, I'm a little bit concerned about what it may mean for B2B publishing.To understand why, let's look…
Predictions old and new

Paul Conley

10 Jan 2010 | 1:14 pm

(Editor's note: As many of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook already know, my mother passed away on Dec. 30. Since then I've been overwhelmed by the kindness I've received from friends and acquaintances in both the real and virtual worlds. Thank you all. As my Ma took a turn for the worse in mid-December, much of my working life had to be put on hold. So I wound up running late on many things ... including a long-promised follow-up to my predictions about 2009. But as Ma taught me, there's "a time to die ... a time to mourn" and a time to get back to work. So with no further ado, let's…
Happy Birthday, dear blog. Happy birthday to you

Paul Conley

22 Dec 2009 | 11:44 am

God how time flies.It was five years ago today that I launched this blog.Much has changed since then -- particularly my career.When I started this blog I was largely unknown to much of the industry. But because of the kind support of my early readers, my name got passed around. And because of that, I've been able to do what I set out to do on Dec. 22, 2004, -- share my thoughts about the challenges that B2B journalism was about to face.So I want to take a moment here to say "thanks" to those folks who offered their support way, way back in the early days.Today it's not all that hard to share…
Looking ahead at content marketing

Paul Conley

17 Dec 2009 | 3:16 am

It's prediction time. Everyone in media is publishing their lists of insights and wild guesses for the upcoming year.I'm no different ... except that I'm running way behind schedule since finishing off an eight-month consulting gig last Friday. It's just too hard to do anything other than goof off with my daughter, who yesterday informed me that "working is silly."So until she takes a nap long enough to allow me to get around to revisiting last year's prediction that the "B2B industry as we know it is about to collapse," I'll just link to other places where my predictions might appear.First…
Rest in Peace, old buddy

Paul Conley

30 Nov 2009 | 8:45 am

Last night, sitting in an airport and reading the news on my iPhone, I learned that a friend and former boss had died.And I want to take a few moments here today to remember him ... and to share with you why he was important to those of us in B2B.Mark Pittman was only 52 when he died. But he was already a legend in the business. If you didn't know Mark or his work, take a few minutes now to read about his accomplishments. CJR has links to major events in his career as well as an interview with him from earlier this year. And the Washington Post has published a fitting obituary.Mark will be…

Photojournalism From A Student's Eye
Fake captions

Daniel Sato

27 Jan 2010 | 12:28 am

Some outtakes from the High-Plains League basketball tournament, held this past weekend at Garden City Community College. Girl A: “Rawr! It’s my ball! Mine I say!” Girl B: “Pshhaw. Whatever. I didn’t want to play basketball anyways. Ima go get my nails did.” The sky is falling! Left: Kid on the left: Mmmmm brains! Brains…. brains! Hand from the right: Brains! Must get brains! Right: High-five FAIL.
Audio slideshows vs Video

Daniel Sato

26 Jan 2010 | 10:30 am

This post was written for an internal blog that I have been keeping for my work: Multimedia is a relatively new endeavor for newspapers, and The Telegram is no exception. As an industry, we are still feeling our way around in the dark, trying to find what works and what does not work. What was once the golden bullet can quickly turn in to a resource black hole. Here at The Telegram, there has been an emphasis on shooting video when possible, however, according to Richard Koci Hernandez, founder of Multimediashooter.com and current Ford Foundation Multimedia Fellow at UC Berkeley: Unless your…
Save the Rafu

Daniel Sato

11 Jan 2010 | 3:41 pm

As a child growing up in Los Angeles, I was only vaguely aware of the Rafu Shimpo. It was that paper that my grandmother would cut box scores out of after my Crescent Bay Optimist basketball games. It was not until college, when I took my first photo internship at the paper and took an asian american studies course that touched on the paper and its role in the community prior to and after internment during World War II, that I got a a greater sense of the importance that the Rafu has had in the history of the community. Now, like so many print media organizations, especially ethnic media,…
Some thoughts on multimedia in a small market

Daniel Sato

5 Jan 2010 | 12:35 am

In the beginning of December, I wrote a short post on some of the realities of working in a small newsroom. Today was the first day of work for our new paginator/copy editor and, in many ways, marked the first day of my real job as well. As such, I thought I would share a couple of thoughts on doing multimedia in a small newsroom. You can’t just focus on those that are interested. Yes, this goes against most posts on the subject of multimedia training by people that matter. Perhaps this is possible in a larger newsroom, where it one is more likely to find at least a few journalists in…
New Telegram photo blog

Daniel Sato

29 Dec 2009 | 9:44 pm

Yes I know it’s been done before. In fact, quite a few papers have their very own photo blog where they share their favorite staff and wire photos. Now you can add the Telegram into that mix. At best, it will provide interesting visuals on a consistent basis as well as provide an outlet for photographers to showcase their work (until a more in-depth multimedia landing page is created). At worst, it helps to keep my eye fresh even though I am not shooting by scanning through the AP wire every day. My editors are hoping to keep the focus of the photo blog within the confines of the…

Recovering Journalist
Newsday's Unconventional Subscription Model

Mark Potts

28 Jan 2010 | 9:56 pm

When Newsday announced last spring that it was contemplating putting its Web site behind a paywall, I wrote a scathing critique of the idea. I was wrong.Newsday, as it happens, is in a unique position, and is taking advantage of it. Owned by Cablevision, the paper is circling the wagons around its core news and cable market on Long Island. Its online subscription plan goes like this: If you're a Cablevision cable-TV or Newsday print subscriber, you get access to Newsday.com site for free. If you're not, Newsday wants non-subscribers to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year. That's a…
And Verily, Steve Jobs Came Down from the Mountaintop With a Tablet, and It Was Good (But Version 2 Will be Better)

Mark Potts

27 Jan 2010 | 8:43 pm

After all the fevered buildup, we now know the actual details of Apple's iPad tablet. Probably not surprisingly, it doesn't quite live up to all of the pre-release hype and speculation (including my own). But it still appears to be a remarkable device that, in its first generation, has the potential to change a few corners of the media world. And that's just the beginning.Out of the box, the iPad is a very interesting reading device. Lying flat on a desk or table, it can mimic a lot of the readability and convenience of print (and adds a lot of bells and whistles). It makes the…
Visionaries in Action

Mark Potts

21 Jan 2010 | 7:21 pm

Two of the smartest thinkers—and good guys—in new media just got important new jobs. John Temple, who's practically been born again as an advocate for new models for journalism and the news business since the Rocky Mountain News got shot out from under him a year ago, will be the editor of Peer News, Pierre Omidyar's budding online local news effort in Hawaii. And Jonathan Weber, a real pioneer in regional/local online news as founder/editor of NewWest.net, has been named editor-in-chief of the nascent Bay Area News Project, the $5 million project funded by entrepreneur Warren…
Apple's Tabula Rasa

Mark Potts

3 Jan 2010 | 7:16 pm

As the new year rolls in, the talk of the tech world is Apple's allegedly upcoming tablet computer. The New York Times has even dubbed 2010 as "the year of the tablet."Sites and publications that cover Apple and the tech industry are abuzz with the usual frenetic levels of speculation that always precede the secretive company's future product releases. Nobody really knows anything, but the guesses have taken on a life of their own, creating a froth of hype that Apple itself probably couldn't achieve if was being forthcoming. The consensus of speculation seems to be…
Rupert, The Grinch and Google

Mark Potts

28 Nov 2009 | 1:05 pm

This is frickin' brilliant. (Hat tip to Jeff Jarvis, and a deep bow to the author, AOL DailyFinance's Sam Gustin.) Then he got an idea! An awful idea! The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea! "I know just what to do!" The Grinch laughed in his throat. And he thought of old Microsoft, and disruptions to float. And he chuckled, and clucked, "What a great Grinchy thing! For a Google disaster, I'll hook up with Bing! You have to admit: There is an eerie resemblance...

Reflections of a Newsosaur
Why it’s perfectly OK to blog for free

Newsosaur

8 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

In response to my recent posts saying journalists should insist on being paid properly for their work, several people have asked how I justify blogging for free. Good question. Easy answer: Blogging for fun and profit – or, ideally, for both – is a victimless pursuit. But it is unethical to abet the exploitation of fellow journalists by working for publishers who pay nothing or something
Journos aren’t helpless against market forces

Newsosaur

5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

Without question, there never has been a bigger response to this blog than the one that greeted the piece the other day encouraging journalists to demand to be paid decently for their work. The preponderance of comments – which apparently were authored (for free) by starving journalists – was quite favorable. Thanks, guys. But the most interesting reaction came from people (here and
Why many newspaper pay sites may fail

Newsosaur

3 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

If modern publishers shared the smarts of Benjamin Franklin, one of the shrewdest of their number who ever lived, they might today be selling content successfully on the web. “Gentlemen,” intoned Franklin, urging fellow patriots to sign the Declaration of Independence in the sweltering summer of 1776. “If we don’t hang together, we most assuredly will all hang separately.”While Franklin
Gannett profit slide points up industry peril

Newsosaur

2 Feb 2010 | 6:18 am

Gannett Inc., long regarded as one of the most parsimonious newspaper publishers, may be running out of expenses to cut. But this is no reason for the company’s oft-furloughed employees to cheer. Quite the opposite. Gannett’s inability to reduce costs fast enough in recent years to sustain its traditionally high operating margins illustrates the grave challenge facing the newspaper
Stop the exploitation of journalists

Newsosaur

1 Feb 2010 | 5:45 am

It’s time for journalists to stop participating in their own exploitation by working for a pittance – or, worse, giving away their valuable services for free. Apart from the sheer righteousness of being paid an honest dollar for an honest day’s work, journalists need to stand together – and stand tall – to reassert the stature of their profession. The reason is simple: If they don’t

20 headlines from the reading list
Dirty, Pretty Thing, The Canon 5D MKII and other DSLR Stuff

9 Feb 2010 | 3:40 am

I love my 5D. I'm a huge fan of the shallow depth of field and low light capabilities. I went to great lengths to get that look with my Canon HD video cameras. I use the 5D almost exclusively for freelance/client work. There's so much out there - good and bad- ...
MediaStorm Behind The Scenes

9 Feb 2010 | 3:40 am

Of course the stories produced by the students are fantastic, but I especially love to look behind the curtain. Not to be missed. Behind the Scenes by Maisie Crow MediaStorm intern Maisie Crow takes us behind the scenes of the MediaStorm Advanced Multimedia Reporting Workshop, to see six participants join the MediaStorm ...
9 Multimedia Projects You MUST Experience

9 Feb 2010 | 3:40 am

1. Highrise HIGHRISE, a multi-year, multi-media, collaborative documentary project about the human experience in global vertical suburbs. We will use the acclaimed interventionist and participatory approaches of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) project. Our scale will be global, but rooted firmly in the FIR philosophy — putting people, process, creativity, collaboration, ...
The Interview Project DavidLynch.com

9 Feb 2010 | 3:40 am

Click the here to see the interviews.
10 Sports Related Multimedia Projects Worth Watching

9 Feb 2010 | 3:40 am

First let start with this awesome video that reveals the future of magazines from Sports Illustrated. 1. Sports Illustrated - Tablet Demo 1.5 2.World Series Time-Lapse By the time the Yankees rushed the field to celebrate their 27th World Series victory, Robert Caplin had photographed the action — 12,000 times. The result ...

Robb Montgomery
Designing with the iPad in mind

Robb Montgomery

28 Jan 2010 | 8:04 am

How to travel with an iPad will be a real nightmare unless you have clothes with bigger pockets. Now we have a vest... { Robb Montgomery }
Poster design for Web workshop at KircherBurkhardt Akademie

Robb Montgomery

26 Jan 2010 | 5:56 am

Poster design for Robb Montgomery's "Writing for the Web" seminar at KircherBurhardt Akademie in Berlin, Germany. { Robb Montgomery }
Haiti: Visual data helps relief workers see hardest hit areas

Robb Montgomery

15 Jan 2010 | 10:47 am

Haiti: See this highly-detailed 3D post-earthquake image that Google is making available. Visual data helps relief... { Robb Montgomery }
Giant space photo reveals snow smothering Britain

Robb Montgomery

7 Jan 2010 | 8:04 pm

Tour this ginormous photo of a snow-blanketed Britain. Stunning to see. { Robb Montgomery }
Bad photos can tell a story, or at least odd ones can

Robb Montgomery

16 Dec 2009 | 2:04 am

Odd photos made by Robb Montgomery as he traveled overseas on a 80 day trip training journalists and filming scenes for... { Robb Montgomery }

Romenesko
Hoge to step down as Foreign Affairs editor at end of 2010

9 Feb 2010 | 10:11 am

Press release After Nearly Two Decades, James F. Hoge Jr. Steps Down as Editor of Foreign Affairs February 9, 2010 James F. Hoge Jr. has announced his decision to step down as editor of Foreign Affairs at the end of 2010 to pursue new opportunities in communications and international affairs. His activities will include chairing Human Rights Watch, starting in October, working with an international consulting firm, and teaching at New York Universitys Center for Global Affairs. Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations since 1922, is an independent magazine of analysis…
A lot of people claim they watch "NewsHour," but....

9 Feb 2010 | 9:02 am

Daily Texan Online Newsweek editor Jon Meacham was asked at a Texas Monthly event how to get the news media to return to delivering intelligent news. He used PBS's "NewsHour" an example, and said if the number of people who claim to watch the program actually did watch it, the show would have much higher ratings. "It's fundamentally a supply-and-demand problem. Theres an infinite demand for something and a limited supply for intelligent something."
"The Chronicle's not closing down anytime soon"

9 Feb 2010 | 8:03 am

SFGate.com "I don't say that because I make the decisions, that's just my belief and my observation," says former San Francisco Chronicle executive editor Phil Bronstein. "I want to make that clear. And anything I tell you could be completely wrong or change tomorrow."
Why did Goldman Sachs use Huffington Post to respond to NYT?

9 Feb 2010 | 7:39 am

True/Slant | Reuters.com"Why doesn't it tackle the Times on its home court [and] buy ads in the business section to tell its side of the story?" writes Claudia Deutsch. "A muddled PR response in the Huffington Post seems way below the fight-back level I've come to expect from the Bad Boys of Wall Street." || Felix Salmon: What Goldman did was very smart.
Morningstar acquires Footnoted for undisclosed sum

9 Feb 2010 | 7:02 am

Footnoted.org || Morningstar release

SeanBlanda.com
Daily shares [Jan 18, 2010]

Blanda

18 Jan 2010 | 10:00 am

Every day, I comb through over 300 blogs in search of media and journalism-related news. Below are my recommended links for today. For more, subscribe to the eMediaVitals Daily Buzz or follow me on Google Reader. New York Times To Begin Charging For Online Content With “Metered System”Make way for the metered model (and the wave of hacks).There's Not Much Football In Your Football - Television - DeadspinHow much actual football is played during a football telecast?
Daily shares [Jan 15, 2010]

Blanda

15 Jan 2010 | 10:51 am

Every day, I comb through over 300 blogs in search of media and journalism-related news. Below are my recommended links for today. For more, subscribe to the eMediaVitals Daily Buzz or follow me on Google Reader. Philadelphia lands bumper first-round haul - MLS - ESPN Soccernetunion! soccer! Woot!Mass. Murdoch paper begins charging for contentThis One Takes The Cakeconsumer whore....Internet Survival Guide for Traveling Where Privacy Isn't Respected"I always carry a few Linux live CDs with me. In a durable plastic case, they fit well in the pockets of cargo pants"How Time decided to…
BarCamp NewsInnovation 2, What should change?

Blanda

13 Oct 2009 | 2:28 pm

It’s been a little over five months since BarCamp NewsInnovation, and that has given us plenty of time to mull over the event’s successes and failures. BCNI Godfather Jason Kristufek has already weighted in, and I have a similar question to ask the BCNI community: what should change from last year’s event? Last year’s BarCamp in Philly was wonderful from a networking and the “Hey, I know you on Twitter!” angle. It was also fascinating to give attention to members of our community who don’t normally get to occupy center stage. CoPress presented to…
Introducing eMedia Vitals: your media textbook

Blanda

13 Aug 2009 | 10:30 am

Its high time I explain what I have been up to. I, along with Rob O’Regan and the rest of Vital Business Media, have been busy launching the first editorial product of the company: eMedia Vitals. In short, eMedia Vitals is a site dedicated to helping online publishers and I think most of readers of this blog will find something of value there. The idea is not to cover layoffs or daily media gossip. Instead we aim to aggregate and report on the topics that can make your media product better and more profitable. Less chatter about what to do in this ever changing media landscape, and more…
I got a job + Technically Philly update

Blanda

10 Jun 2009 | 9:18 am

I swear there is a reason why I have been so quiet. Well, actually make that “reasons.” One, TechnicallyPhilly is doing as well as any of us could hope when it comes to traffic and community response, so we are making our first moves towards monetization with the slow rollout of our advertising infrastructure. This has been both an exciting and frightening prospect as it is now time to see if we are all as smart as we hope we are. Of course, as we surmised at BCNI, ads are just the first and easiest baby step, and there are many more ideas in the pipeline that I will be certain to…

SteveOuting.com
Investigative reporting = premium paid content?

Steve Outing

5 Feb 2010 | 11:21 pm

Within reports of MediaNews Group about to institute a metered paywall at a couple of its newspapers by May is something disturbing. This excerpt is from a Bloomberg report about the newspaper chain’s plans: “The newspapers, in York, Pennsylvania, and Chico, California, will give users free access to as many as 25 ‘premium’ articles monthly, after which they’ll have to pay an undetermined fee unless they subscribe to the print newspapers, said MediaNews President Joseph Lodovic. Premium content may include certain columns and investigative reporting, he said.
NYT paywall quote of the week

Steve Outing

29 Jan 2010 | 5:16 pm

This is a quickie. … With all the fuss this week made over the New York Times’ decision to develop and implement a metered paywall on NYTimes.com in 2011, my favorite line comes from a colleague who shall remain unnamed: “Maybe the NYTimes is much more clever than we think. They say they are going to implement a metered paywall in 2011 in the hopes that some other news site will then do it first thinking that if the NY Times is going to do it then it must be a good idea, and the NY Times can see what happens while they sit out 2010.”
Personalized news and why the iPad is no savior

Steve Outing

28 Jan 2010 | 8:45 am

If any traditional news publishers are still thinking that the Apple tablet — finally, it has a (strange) name, iPad — points to their salvation by bringing a new business model, they’ll likely be proven wrong. No doubt, the iPad is an incredible, slick piece of technology. It’s not the “Jesus Tablet” that many of us hoped for (no camera?! no multi-tasking?! no Flash support?! it won’t answer my prayers?!), but maybe by version 2 or 3, it’ll get there. But even if the iPad fairly quickly evolves to be the kind of market pleaser that…
NYTimes.com’s decision: Preliminary thoughts

Steve Outing

20 Jan 2010 | 8:30 am

So the long-awaited (well, at least by many of us media geeks) decision by NYTimes.com has been announced. And the winner is: THE METERED PAYWALL! According to the Times’ own report, by Richard Perez-Pena: “Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.” That doesn’t sound like the more nuanced approach to a metered paywall that I espoused on this blog yesterday. Then…
If NYTimes.com does put up a metered wall…

Steve Outing

18 Jan 2010 | 10:46 am

“New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers,” said NYMag.com’s Daily Intel in a Sunday report. I’m not sure whether to believe the story or not, but since there’s no definitive word from NYT executives yet, let’s play along and pretend this is an accurate report: NYTimes.com this spring will launch a “metered” web payment system, where readers can sample X number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. If that’s true and the system is as simple as that — “Dear loyal Times reader: You’ve read 10 articles for…

Strange Attractor
links for 2010-02-09

Suw and Kevin

9 Feb 2010 | 5:03 am

Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! PeteSearch: How to split up the US Kevin: Pete Warden does a very interesting analysis of Facebook in the US and looks at who is connected to connect to whom. "Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster." He breaks the country into areas like Dixie, Stayathomia (the Mid-Atlantic, Ohio River Valley…
Time to sign up to Ada Lovelace Day 2010

Suw and Kevin

8 Feb 2010 | 9:06 am

Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! Last year, over 3500 people pledged to support Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Over 1200 people added their link to our map mash-up and we got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted…
Lessons in statistics

Suw and Kevin

7 Feb 2010 | 9:48 am

Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! This week brought two really fascinating insights into the world of statistics. The first was from a most unusual source: The Daily Mail (not my usual read – the link was posted to the Bad Science forum). They had run with the story Cracked it! Woman finds six double yolk eggs in one box beating trillion-to-one odds, which was then pretty rigorously debunked by the Mail’s own Michael Hanlon. In Eggs-actly what ARE the…
links for 2010-02-05

Suw and Kevin

5 Feb 2010 | 5:03 am

Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! 3. Live-update map from large spreadsheet (Fusion Tables Talks) Kevin: How to use Google Fusion Tables (Google Spreadsheets for large files) to update a map from a large spreadsheet. (tags: google maps tutorials) Is online news just ramen noodles? What media economics research can teach us about valuing paid content » Nieman Journalism Lab Kevin: My takeawy from this post is Iris Chyi's comments. She finds "Her research has…
Newspapers and Microsoft: Dysfunctional corporate cultures and the fall of empires

Suw and Kevin

4 Feb 2010 | 10:09 am

Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! Steve Yelvington flagged up a comment piece on the New York Times from Dick Brass, a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 until 2004. Brass worked on Microsoft’s tablet PC efforts, something I remember covering at Comdex in 2002. Despite a huge push by Microsoft, they never became mainstream outside of a few niche applications, and Brass blames it in part from in-fighting at Microsoft. Brass wrote: Internal competition is common…

Teaching Online Journalism
3,000 followers on Twitter

Mindy McAdams

31 Jan 2010 | 4:49 pm

Last March I had 1,000 followers on Twitter. Sometime earlier today, I reached 3,000: I’m sure many of those folks have not signed on to Twitter since the week when they opened their account. so I’m not going to throw a party or anything. And Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, has 31,488 followers on Twitter, so I’m not even in the big leagues. If by chance you want to follow me, I am @macloo on Twitter. For articles and blog posts about Twitter, see these bookmarks. I’m often asked if we should be teaching Twitter to journalism students. I don’t think…
Updating Flash Journalism (Part 2)

Mindy McAdams

20 Jan 2010 | 8:01 am

The other day I received an e-mail from someone with a programming background who’s interested in learning how to build journalism packages in Flash. He asked how to get started and whether I was planning to release a new edition of my 2005 book Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages. First I directed him to my December 2009 post about why I will not be updating my book. I am recommending Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book. It’s not directed specifically at journalists or news graphics reporters, but it’s easy to follow for the most part. Then…
Ideas for journalism educators

Mindy McAdams

9 Jan 2010 | 8:55 am

I gave a couple of presentations to U.S. journalism educators in St. Petersburg, Florida, yesterday and today. For each presentation I made a page of links to resources, examples, etc. The PowerPoint for each presentation is also online. Blogs and Journalism This presentation surveys the ways in which professional journalists are using blogs to enhance their reporting, reach wider audiences, extend their influence, and encourage two-way communication with the public. The implications for teaching journalism students about blogging are clear; students need to gain experience with writing,…
Thoughts about video editing software

Mindy McAdams

3 Jan 2010 | 10:13 am

One of the ongoing challenges in teaching journalism nowadays concerns the choice of software for video editing. I’m going to pump out a brief overview here and hope that lots of people will weigh in with their own experiences and suggestions. The more the merrier! First, an outline of the programs that generally dominate the conversation in most j-schools: iMovie (free) Windows Movie Maker (free) Final Cut Pro or Studio or Express (three different price tags) Anything else Second, let me note that those who teach students aiming at television news jobs have a different list (although…
Updating Flash Journalism

Mindy McAdams

6 Dec 2009 | 1:44 pm

This post is for anyone who teaches Adobe Flash to journalism students. It might also be useful for journalists (especially graphics reporters) who are learning Flash right now, or who might be intending to learn Flash over the holidays or sometime soon. In 2004 I wrote a book titled Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages. It was published in early 2005 by Focal Press/Elsevier. It sold pretty well. It was well received among working journalists. The book is now outdated. If you’re using Flash CS4, you cannot use the book. At all. It’s okay to use it with CS3, but…

The Evolving Newsroom
New journalism course, new students, new job

Julie Starr

25 Jan 2010 | 4:44 pm

For the past few months I’ve been working to make the National Diploma in Journalism, a New Zealand industry standard qualification, available for online study through Wintec. It’s a big project which has demanded a lot of work by a core group of people and which has also involved a lot of imagining – how the course will work, how long exercises will take to do, how students will interact with the material, with us, with each other. Just as with building a website, until you have users – in our case, students – you can’t really know how it’s going to…
Why I’ve launched allaboutthestory.com #1

Julie Starr

22 Dec 2009 | 8:05 pm

I wrote a few weeks ago to say that I was launching an online marketplace for news features and other stories. It’s called All About The Story, it’s in beta and it’s off to a great start. I said I’d write more about why we’re doing it and the people behind it. I can’t fit all my thoughts in a single post so here’s one driving idea for me, a starter for ten. Why am I doing it? I’m a lapsed journalist who wants to keep some skin in the game. I don’t want to be a salaried full-time journalist or a full-time freelance. I don’t want to…
Link wrap: ‘content farms’ and tweeting trials

Julie Starr

20 Dec 2009 | 12:43 am

A few things that crossed my radar recently. A rant about the failings of tech news and the (lack of) incentives causing it. From louisgray.com. I believe “fast food news” also can refer to the mass hysteria over making sure every site posts the news that a major browser or a major operating system has issued a point release, or when a popular site has an outage, that the incident becomes front page news for every blog. At some point, given the vast multitude of interesting tech stories, individuals and companies out there, one must take a deep breath and realize that being the…
Who loves Google, who doesn’t, and other stories

Julie Starr

9 Dec 2009 | 12:01 am

Axel Springer in Germany likes Google and wants to build a one-click option for readers to pay for news: Instead of separate pay walls around individual newspaper Web sites, Mr. [Christoph] Keese [Springer’s head of public affairs] wants publishers and Internet companies to work together to create a “one-click marketplace solution” for their online content. In that system, Google or other Internet gateways would display links to newspaper articles, videos and other content from a variety of providers, as search engines do now. But some of the items would include something new: a price…
Headlines in my inbox often tell me nothing

Julie Starr

7 Dec 2009 | 10:41 pm

I was struck the other day by the difference a good headline can make in a news email bulletin. Here’s a few from from my inbox in the past couple of days: I subscribe to more news than I can handle and am often in a hurry or tired when I scroll through these. I’ve noticed that I mostly only click on emails with a headline in the subject line. I have very little motivation to click on something that says: Afternoon News Direct, or BusinessDay Daily Briefing, or Today’s Headlines and Columnists. In other words, the subject line works just like a web headline does. I know…

Local Onliner
Zvents Sees 35% Growth; Touts Power of Newspaper Network

Peter

8 Feb 2010 | 1:52 pm

Zvents, the events lister, is reporting 35 percent year-over-year growth with over eight million unique visitors, largely due to its powering events for 285 local media brands, including major newspapers and the NBC owned-and-operated TV stations. CEO Ethan Stock cites Quantcast data showing Zvents Media Network as the 250th most used net on the Web, ahead of Citysearch (#267) and Local.com (#291). “We’re a very large local property by any measure,” he says. The company, which has raised $32 million over its five year history, also claims it has been averaging 12,000 monthly event…
Yelp Reaches Out to Apartment Managers

Peter

5 Feb 2010 | 5:03 pm

Yelp has been a roll, and is now reporting that it gets 29 million unique visitors a month. Given that, the company’s immediate challenge is to move beyond its core base of restaurant and shopping reviews and dive deep for Yellow Pages-arena services reviews, as well as reviews for classified categories, such as autos and real estate/apartments. Restaurants currently make up 29 percent of reviews, while shopping currently makes up 23 percent. Other major categories include beauty and fitness (9 percent); arts & entertainment (8 percent); home and local services (7 percent);…
Gannett’s Planet Discover Launches FinditNow

Peter

4 Feb 2010 | 2:30 pm

Gannett has always seemed to be a likely directory player. In fact, the world’s largest newspaper publisher owns a small group of print directories. It also provides a white-labelled online directory product to its media properties. But as directories, search and user generated content have become more commingled, Gannett has gone a step further with the launch of FindItNow.com, a new directory product from its Planet Discover division. Finditnow.com is national, but has been localized for specific markets. It is currently live in three markets: Rochester, Nashville and Burlington,VT.
All-Star Lineup at Marketplaces 2010, March 22-24, San Diego

Peter

3 Feb 2010 | 8:34 pm

Marketplaces 2010 takes place just 7 weeks from now in San Diego (March 22-24). We are putting the finishing touches on the program, and have added MANY exciting new speakers in just the past few weeks. The event is totally dedicated to the higher value/conversion/engagement ethos of vertical media. For sure, this isn’t one size fits all of newspapers and Yellow Pages anymore (but then again, these traditional media are rapidly verticalizing too). Featured sessions include 5 big keynotes; Mike Boland’s Mobile Vertical Superforum; a preconference session on the Tools of Marketplaces,…
Monster Buys HotJobs From Yahoo

Peter

3 Feb 2010 | 4:56 pm

Monster Worldwide has bought HotJobs from Yahoo for $225 million. It will also be in charge of Yahoo’s recruitment content in North America for the next three years, bringing in perhaps another $100 million for the life of the deal from home page traffic, etc. As part of the deal, which closes in 3Q 2010, Monster also gets exclusive rights to negotiate similar arrangements with Yahoo’s overseas properties. HotJobs has been on the market since Carol Bartz took over as CEO of Yahoo early last year (or even before). It hasn’t been clear if anyone would buy it for more than a fire-sale…

The Scoop
Using Geocoders with GeoDjango

Derek

24 Jan 2010 | 5:10 pm

Update: Simon has updated his library to make it easy to reverse the order of coordinates. Thanks! For a “15-minute project“, Simon Willison’s geocoders library is pretty handy if you’re doing geocoding with Python. It offers a common interface to the geocoding services provided by Google, Yahoo and other sources. When we were looking at replacing the home-grown geocoding system that Andrei Scheinkman built for Represent, Simon’s project seemed a natural choice. It was an easy drop-in, but there was one thing about it that was just slightly off. A successful…
The Gift of Data

Derek

25 Dec 2009 | 2:15 pm

One of the more challenging and interesting projects at work lately has been the work we’ve done on the “Toxic Waters” series by Charles Duhigg. Since the stories have explored water quality throughout the United States, the web component accompanying some of the stories have been national in scope as well. You can’t provide locally relevant information for a mass audience in a story, even one of Timesian length. That constraint – which still exists on the web, albeit it less so than for print publications – makes it easier to justify working with hundreds…
The Future of IRE Training

Derek

29 Nov 2009 | 6:38 pm

Anyone in journalism who knows me knows how much of a debt I owe to an organization called Investigative Reporters and Editors. Sure, I liked playing with data before I found out about IRE, but the knowledge and support that I’ve received from IRE training, conferences and members has been the single most positive influence on my career. The trouble is that IRE is a non-profit organization tied to an industry that increasingly has cut back on spending for training, travel and other “luxuries”. So while attendance at this year’s IRE conference in Baltimore was very…
Keeping It Simple(r)

Derek

25 Nov 2009 | 11:46 am

I haven’t mentioned Fumblerooski in awhile, but rest assured that work continues, especially during college football season. I’ve added more coaching information (still a long ways to go on that, though) and will be unveiling player rankings soon. But the biggest thing I’ve done lately has nothing to do with new features. Instead, as I’ve become a better coder in general, I’ve seen how bloat can really hinder a project. So I spent time last week reorganizing the Fumblerooski code to take advantage of some of Django’s strengths. This all started back at the…
A Question of Emphasis

Derek

21 Nov 2009 | 3:18 pm

The job cuts at the Washington Post on Friday have produced a round of comments, broadly summed up by Steve Yelvington earlier today. They certainly begged the question that occurred to me as a former employee of both the Post and WPNI, its soon-to-be merged online operation: “What explains this kind of decision?” First, let me say that my observations about the general history of WPNI and its relationship with the paper are colored by my own experiences, but I agree with folks like Jay Rosen who say that at one point, washingtonpost.com was clearly a national leader – not…

VideoJournalism
We’ve been pranked…

cyndygreen

8 Feb 2010 | 9:33 pm

There’s a lesson in everything. Today some of the seniors at my high school decided to “prank” the campus. Roll out the TP and chickens – whoa! Chickens? Yeah. Chickens. It’s that humdrum time of year before spring break but after the glory of winter break….kind of dull days with clouds and rain and everyone just slogging along. So this elite group pulls a late night decorating gig – and they used the soft double-sided stuff. Then before dawn they returned to hammer out their tag on the lawn with paper plates and plastic knives. The big old…
What does a VJ do when they don’t have a camera?

cyndygreen

7 Feb 2010 | 5:07 pm

They resort to words – the written language. VJ Kathleen Newell has an eye for the awesome and dreams that she, as most of us have, has only thought about… Until this week. I was surprised when I got an email from her explaining she was fulfilling one of her dreams – to see a night liftoff of a space shuttle. She left on Friday and sat it out last night (this morning) in the Florida winter, waiting for the countdown. It didn’t happen…but her description of the night is better than her ability to capture with a camera…she has the knack of creating visuals…
I’ve been splogged…

cyndygreen

24 Jan 2010 | 4:33 pm

I had an interesting experience this weekend. I found one of my videojournalism postings in its entirety on another site without attribution, although there was a link that just said basically to see original click here. When I emailed and requested that my work be taken down because I believed it was plagiarism without the citation, the site owner – Gideon Kimbrell of syragon.com – gave the following response: It’s not plagiarism. It’s content indexing, and you published your blog so we syndicated it. We nonetheless have removed it, out the goodness of our hearts.
The story beyond the still…

cyndygreen

17 Jan 2010 | 8:04 am

Contest, schmontest. Most contests today are “opportunities” to sell yourself out cheaply or for free. If the cause is worth it, go for it – but otherwise beware. So goes my thinking. However, I’ve found a contest that I do not even plan to enter, but I will watch closely: The Story Beyond the Still co-sponsored by Canon and Vimeo. The basic concept is to give a filmmaker (in this case Vincent Laforet) a still photograph and have him create a short movie that begins with the still. His movie ends with yet another still photograph – which a contest entrant must…
Students pushed to the edge…

cyndygreen

16 Jan 2010 | 9:01 am

UPDATE: 1/16/10 @ 12:47pdt Check out this link from Imarsat. They’re involved in a big way with first responders, but apparently are also taking the time (see below) to try to help a small group of students in Jacmel, south of the capitol. UPDATE: Inmarsat, the company that provides the Internet service to the Bgan Inmarsat is working with their distributors to try to get a unit to the Cine’ filmmaking students. In the meantime they suggest that any news crews in the area try to hook up with the students and allow them to use the news organization units. Original posting: Larry…

Virtual Economics
Hiring more Community Publishers

seamusmccauley

15 Jan 2010 | 8:35 am

My bit of DMGT - Localpeople - is hiring more Community Publishers to look after the next round of Localpeople websites that we plan to roll out, this time in London. We are once more hiring Community Publishers, this time mainly in London - if you know anyone who'd be up for covering Camden, Soho, Balham, Greenwich, Highgate or any of these places do pass them my way. Thanks.
Cats that look like David Cameron

seamusmccauley

6 Jan 2010 | 12:40 am

Spotted on Gray's Inn Road earlier this morning.
2010

seamusmccauley

24 Dec 2009 | 1:06 am

Almost ten years now since we sat in the Yew Tree watching the whole length of the Wharfe Valley lit up by fireworks and waiting slightly apprehensively for the world to end at midnight or a new millenium to begin. The fireworks over Otley that night were amongst the most beautiful things I've ever seen and better yet the world, it seems, did not end (though I have since read occasional claims that the risk from Y2K was real and we belittle it now only because the distinction between disaster imagined and disaster brilliantly averted is far from obvious once the disaster has not…
We did it!

seamusmccauley

21 Dec 2009 | 12:09 am

Delighted to see RATM made it to Xmas number one. I don't particularly care whether Simon Cowell is annoyed or enriched by the result. The important thing for me is the demonstration of the utter, deliberate fatuity of popular voting - the same fatuity that got the New York Mets rickrolled and caused Time magazine's top100 to publish in acrostic the debatable protest/obscenity "marblecake also the game". As the Guardian remarks today, "If showbiz operatives can no longer control popular opinion, those who have devoted their lives to serving their parties have no…
Suicide is virtually painless

seamusmccauley

18 Dec 2009 | 11:50 pm

Suicidemachine.org offers an automated way to delete your profile from the major social networks in a bit less than an hour. The pitch: "Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego." The idea is...oddly beguiling, like the strange attractiveness of civilisation collapsing or the egde of the cliff. Regain hours of your week that you could spend talking to the people you really like IRL? If you're tempted, you…

Waitin' On a Moment - by Tim Gruber | NYC Photographer
Photographers – The hardest part is starting something.

Tim Gruber

19 Jan 2010 | 3:19 pm

If you haven’t noticed my blog has taken a backseat to living life. I hate resolutions. I’d rather just act and do what needs to be done. So with that in mind I’ve made a point of making this a year of tangibles. Savoring human interaction, basking in afternoon light, watching the dolphins swim, walking til my calves ache, collapsing to the seductive smell of a new book, saying hello to strangers, a messy and well used kitchen and so much more. Basically a life with less noise. I’ve become a slave to technology and while I enjoy all the benefits it brings me the…
Happy Holidays

Tim Gruber

22 Dec 2009 | 3:52 pm

I hope you find yourself on the nice list this year and Santa and Rudolph make a visit to your rooftop. Happy Holidays and thanks again for joining me for another year. Freeport MN - My hometown in the famed Lake Wobegon region and The Dairy Center of the World Further Reading:Hello Married Life (4)On Assignment: The Bahamas (1)Stephen King: On Writing (or in our case photography) (1)Why are you a photograher? (2)A Few Things about your Photography Portfolio (10)
A Few Principles To Help With Your Photography

Tim Gruber

8 Dec 2009 | 7:44 pm

These principles might help in guiding your work. I know they gave me something to think about especially the few below. Read the rest of the principles here at 10 Principles That Might Make Your Work Better or May Make It Worse A few of the principles to get you thinking: 2. Consistent voice is more important than consistent style. Voice is about what you say. It’s content. Style is about what you’re wearing. It’s aesthetics. The prior informs the latter, not the other way around. Clothes don’t make the man. They don’t make your work either. 3. Does it have heart? If it does,…
Creating My Own Idea Box

Tim Gruber

2 Dec 2009 | 9:18 am

I’ve been a huge fan of Twyla Tharp and her use of project boxes for things she’s working on. Here’s a brief primer on the idea from Twyla if you’re not familiar with it: The Project Box. Everyone has his or her own organizational system. I start every dance with a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers…
Picasso and pricing your work

Tim Gruber

16 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am

Keep this in mind the next time you’re pricing your work. Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him. “It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.” So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art. “It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?” “Five…

yelvington.com
Review: 'Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery'

yelvington

6 Feb 2010 | 9:45 am

Let's start with a confession: I don't like JavaScript. I don't like object notation and I don't like programming languages where whitespace (line enders) is significant. I cut my teeth on C, and I am suspicious of any deviation from its spartan truth. I also don't trust power windows and think the Volvo 240 was the pinnacle of automotive engineering, just to put it all in context. And I already have a book on JavaScript: "Programming JavaScript for Netscape 2.0." It's on the dusty, rarely visited end of my bookshelf, right next to "Internet Starter Kit" with a floppy disk containing…
Looking for journogeeks

yelvington

2 Feb 2010 | 11:01 am

Life is change, and we've had some great people change their lives by leaving Morris DigitalWorks to take on new challenges in the Web consulting and development world. We're sad to see them go, but excited when they wind up working on cool projects like Whitehouse.gov. So we're looking to grow a new crop of wizards, and in the mix we're going to be recruiting some journogeeks. A journogeek is someone who loves Web technology, is a creative problem-solver, and has an aptitude for growth but also brings a commitment to our journalistic mission. We've made a commitment to change how we work.
Blows against the empire: iPad, Chrome, HTML5 and Android

yelvington

31 Jan 2010 | 11:03 am

It hasn't been a good month for Microsoft. First Google with its Nexus One, then Apple with its iPad, have highlighted how its empire is in risk of falling, replaced by a new mobile world in which Microsoft is irrelevant. Most revolutions fail because the revolutionaries can't stay united. This one is no different. And there is plenty of skirmishing among the revolutionaries. Apple and Adobe are engaged in a battle in which Apple seeks to use HTML 5 to snuff out Flash. Google and Apple, once lovey-dovey to the point that Google's CEO was on Apple's board of directors, are squared off over…
Regarding the iPad, I am Dr. Buzzkill

yelvington

27 Jan 2010 | 5:35 pm

It's here. And I'm disappointed. It's not just that the iPad failed to live up to its hype (which was just short of ending world hunger, curing disease and raising the dead). It's that the iPad doesn't change the world, no matter how many times Steve Jobs says "advanced," "revolutionary," "magical" and "unbelievable." It's certainly no savior for newspapers. What are you going to do, kill your website and sell your "publication" in the App Store? Nonsense. The iPad doesn't change the economic equation. You aren't prevented from selling your content by lack of technology and tools; you're…
Drupalization of Augusta

yelvington

27 Jan 2010 | 11:15 am

The new Augusta Chronicle website is now live, the latest in a series of conversions of Morris websites to a Drupal-based system. Before and after As I mentioned last week, there's a companion mobile-optimized site for smartphones, and if the browser detection is working properly, you'll go to http://m.chronicle.augusta.com/latest-news/2010-01-27/apple-introduces-s... automatically if you request http://chronicle.augusta.com/latest-news/2010-01-27/apple-introduces-sin... with a Blackberry, iPhone, Droid, et cetera. But it's not just about technology. The reason we're moving to Drupal is to…

The Innovation Journalism Blog
InJo TV Series Wins "Brand of the Year"

David Nordfors

30 Jan 2010 | 11:19 am

InJo is a concept for successful journalism. I have been saying it since I coined the concept, and I have often had to argue for my case.SAMAA TV in Pakistan embraced the Innovation Journalism journalism concept and started the series "INNOVATION" in 2009. That InJo series has now been awarded "Brand of the Year", beating +500 innovation brands from all industries, winning both the consumer vote and the expert panel ranking. It's the first time a journalistic product wins the award. On top of that, SAMAA won the Corporate Social Responsibility award, an achievement SAMAA says happened due to…
Future Talk TV Show on The Future of Journalism

David Nordfors

13 Jan 2010 | 5:12 pm

The future of journalism in light of the new electronic media. Host Martin Wasserman interviews David Nordfors, director of the Center for Innovation Journalism, and Tony Deifell, director of Q Media Labs.David Nordfors is co-founder and executive director of the VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University. He coined the concept of "Innovation Journalism" in 2003.
HOLD THE DATES 7-11 JUNE 2010. JI@ST Conference Cluster at Stanford: IJ-7 + JTM

David Nordfors

8 Jan 2010 | 9:50 am

(The original, always up-to-date, version of this page is here)JI@ST - A Conference Cluster about Journalism and Innovation:IJ-7: The Seventh Conference on Innovation Journalism, June 7-9 2010JTM - Journalism That Matters, June 9-11 2010Both conferences are held at Stanford University.These back-to-back conferences will take a thorough look on journalism in the innovation economy. The conferences are open for all types of participants with an interest in journalism and innovation. We are looking forward to an active, results-oriented discussion between people of different professions and…
Prisoners Dilemma at COP15 in Copenhagen; Meanwhile in Mei Lin's Kitchen

David Nordfors

31 Dec 2009 | 9:45 am

(This blog post was published by Huffington Post 31 Dec 2009)On December 9, world leaders debated global climate in Copenhagen and Obama was in Oslo to accept his Nobel. I was sharing a glass of wine with Doug Engelbart, father of personal computing as we know it, in the kitchen of Mei Lin Fung, Doug's long-time friend, in Palo Alto. It was a potluck dinner, shoes off, sparing Mei Lin's floors. I sensed links. Half a world away, people were commemorating the world's biggest problems, preparing for gala dinners, while we toasted the birth of perhaps the most powerful tool in human hands,…
Slovenian InJo-InCo 2009 Manifesto

David Nordfors

11 Dec 2009 | 3:27 pm

Violeta Bulc's Vibacom have released the InJo-InCo 2009 Manifesto, the project is lead by Estera Lah P0ljak. The publication is in Slovenian, there is a summary in English here. It starts like this:"Identifying significant events and projects, becoming aware of their importance in time and space, critically assessing their advantages and challenges, capturing responses of different stakeholders, proposing initiatives and future activities. These were our guidelines in draftingthe second issue of our annual publication, the InJo-InCo Manifesto 2009. All of the above is also included in the…

Reporters Committee News
Colorado court says shield law protects unaired Dateline footage

A Colorado district court has denied an insurance marketing company's motion to compel NBC's Dateline to hand over unaired camera footage. Insurance marketer Brokers' Choice of America sued NBC and . . .
Texas attorney general says no constitutional rights for cities

Four Texas cities that filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the state's open meetings law infringes on their right to free speech must withdraw as plaintiffs because government agencies cannot have . . .
Wisconsin committee passes bill restricting access to court records

A Wisconsin state assembly committee has passed a bill that would restrict public online access to court records, WQOW (Eau Claire) reported. The proposed bill limits public access to cases where . . .
Kansas high court allows reporter subpoena to stand

The Kansas Supreme Court yesterday ruled that prosecutors may force Dodge City Globe reporter Claire O’Brien to testify about her news gathering activities and materials in a murder . . .
Kentucky's Senate passes two transparency bills

The Kentucky Senate unanimously passed two bills today that would require all government agencies -- including public colleges and universities -- to disclose financial data online, The Kentucky . . .

Journalism.org:
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4 Dec 2010 | 7:55 am

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Lost Remote
Super Bowl becomes most-watched TV show ever

Steve Safran

9 Feb 2010 | 9:54 am

So much for the articles that said the numbers for the 1983 finale of M*A*S*H would never be topped. Sunday’s broadcast of the Super Bowl on CBS scored 106.6 million viewers, a new record for a TV audience. Writes the Huffington Post: Compelling story lines involving the city of New Orleans and its ongoing recovery from Hurricane Katrina and the attempt at a second Super Bowl ring for Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning propelled the viewership. It didn’t hurt that the game went right down to the fourth quarter, too. The M*A*S*H finale scored 106 million viewers. (HuffPo…
Bay Area station mobile page views jump 300%

Steve Safran

9 Feb 2010 | 9:47 am

San Francisco/Oakland TV station KTVU has seen a 300% increase in page views on its mobile platform from a year ago. The San Francisco Peninsula Press Club correctly notes “the biggest headline doesn’t deal with TV viewership at all.” KTVU’s mobile effort saw 1.6 million page views in January. That’s three times what it scored in Janury 2009. Go to where the growth is. (via @vhernandezcnn) Related posts:Fwix moves into mobile with local news aggregators RunRev moves into mobile space with revMobile Notes:Dec. video views, Murdoch’s pay wall, FB news
Was Leno-Letterman-Oprah ad a big deal?

Steve Safran

9 Feb 2010 | 9:13 am

It didn’t really occur to me at the time that there’d be much ado about the Leno-Letterman-Oprah ad, but it seems to be getting some debate time. Seems pretty inside-baseball to me, but the debate keeps coming up – was this a smart move for NBC. As far as I’m concerned, funny is funny. But there’s enough discussion out there for me to ask the LR Faithful – was this a good move for NBC or not? Related posts:AP signs deal with Yahoo; deal with Google uncertain Notes: iPad & publishers, USC in LA Times deal Foursquare inks deal with Bravo TV
Google Maps making recommendations

Mark Briggs

9 Feb 2010 | 3:50 am

Late last week, Mashable writer Samuel Axon observed that Google Maps is now making recommendations based on the places users are searching. This could potentially be useful if the restaurant you are meeting at has a special event and you can’t get in. Or you’re just ready to look for somewhere new in the neighborhood. But Axon isn’t all that excited that it’s Google bringing the service to the market first. Google has beaten location-focused services like Foursquare to the punch with this. That’s too bad, because we imagine Foursquare could in theory use your…
Borrell Local Online Advertising Conference underway

Steve Safran

8 Feb 2010 | 12:24 pm

Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference started today in New York, and we’re already learning plenty. paidContent reports that Jeff Jarvis kicked things off with “an extensive report about the revenue possibilities presented to hyperlocal sites.” McClatchy VP Chris Hendricks spoke of his company’s hybrid strategy that attacks hyperlocal content from amateurs and pros. And Chris Jennewein, president of U.S. Local News Network, talked about how using “old” media such as billboards and radio can help build a hyperlocal community. Follow…

National Press Photographers Assoc.
New Tuition Grants Available For NPPA Events

9 Feb 2010 | 8:25 am

NPPA's board of directors voted to use funds received from the Authors Coalition of America to create tuition grants for NPPA's line-up of 2010 educational events, and executive director Jim Straight says applications for the grants are now being accepted from photographers who meet ACA's guidelines, whether or not they're NPPA members.
NPPA To Spend ACA Funds On Advocacy, Education, Information

5 Feb 2010 | 2:33 pm

NPPA will use funds it received from its membership in the Authors Coalition of America to increase its advocacy work, provide tuition grants to educational workshops, and to improve the public information aspects of its Web site. NPPA will also donate a portion of their ACA funds to the PLUS Coalition and the National Press Photographers Foundation (NPPF), two organizations that serve professional photographers.
Magnum Photos Collection Bought By MSD Capital, Moved To University Of Texas

2 Feb 2010 | 4:27 am

The Magnum Photos archive collection, which contains nearly 200,000 original prints of photographs taken by Magnum photographers over the last 50 years, will be preserved, digitized, catalogued, and made accessible to the public now that it's been purchased by computer mogul Michael S. Dell's investment firm and trucked to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
National Press Photographers Foundation Announces $16,500 In Scholarships

1 Feb 2010 | 6:15 am

The National Press Photographers Foundation Inc. will award seven $2,000 scholarships in 2010 including the new Jimi Lott Scholarship, NPPF treasurer Frank Folwell announced. NPPF's new Web site has a downloadable PDF application form, and the deadline for entry is March 1, 2010.
NPPA-PhotoShelter Marketing Strategies Webinar On February 16

1 Feb 2010 | 4:31 am

The fifth in a series of free Webinars for NPPA members sponsored by PhotoShelter in partnership with NPPA is coming up on February 16, 2010, and members can register online now for the event.

Online Journalism Blog
Micropodcasting – an overview through the eyes of two practitioners

Paul Bradshaw

9 Feb 2010 | 5:17 am

I’m kicking off the second semester of my MA in Online Journalism this week with a session on audio. As part of the preparation for that I’ve been looking at ‘micropodcasting‘, speaking to Mark Rock, the founder of Audioboo, and Christian Payne – better known as Documentally - who is a great user of the micropodcasting form. I thought it might be useful to post their thoughts here: I asked Mark Rock what sort of boos (recordings) proved popular on the site. He listed the following: “Celebrity boos are the biggest here – witness @bobbyllew, who got…
Help Me Investigate and The London Weekly

Paul Bradshaw

9 Feb 2010 | 1:28 am

Since the middle of last week a group of people on crowdsourcing platform Help Me Investigate* have been asking questions about The London Weekly, a new freesheet that was due to launch in the capital. The team behind the publication – ‘Global Publishing Group’ – had boasted £10.5m investment and a 50-strong team. But the public face of The London Weekly, the lack of advertising for those jobs, and lack of registration for the company, raised some eyebrows. The paper did indeed launch on the Friday, although the distribution was limited (despite a promised circulation…
Technology is not a strategy, it’s a tool – part 2

Paul Bradshaw

8 Feb 2010 | 3:55 am

A couple weeks ago I blogged about how people often confuse using technology as a tool with using technology as part of a broader strategy. While that post focused on the objectives of news organisations in using UGC, I thought it might be useful to write a short follow-up post about strategies. It’s very simple. Often, I find that people will say their strategy will be to ‘use Twitter’ or ‘use Facebook’ or ‘use Flickr’. They are then surprised (or, for the sceptics, vindicated) when they ‘get no results’. The following is a simple list of…
Property Week takes magazine online

emilybraham

6 Feb 2010 | 10:46 am

Property Week has launched what it claims to be the first online, interactive business magazine, Property Week Global Interactive. PWGi, which is is free to read, will be published four times a year alongside the original Property Week Global, and emailed to its newsletter subscribers. The publication is dependent on advertising, but publishers have not ruled out exploring other revenue-raising options in the future. Property Week editor Lucy Scott said the launch is part of a long-term strategy. “I think digital magazines will be a major part of publishing in the future,” she…
Online journalism lesson #9: Audio slideshows, community and wikis

Paul Bradshaw

5 Feb 2010 | 2:28 am

The penultimate session in my 10-class module in Online Journalism from last year covered a range of areas. There’s a little bit on audio slideshows, a lot on community, and related to that, I covered wikis too. I’ve split them into 3 presentations for ease of use. This year (the module starts again on Monday) I’ll probably take an axe to all of this… Online journalism: Community View more presentations from Paul Bradshaw. Online Journalism: Wikis View more presentations from Paul Bradshaw. Audio slideshows View more presentations from Paul Bradshaw.

Common Sense Journalism
Bad Heds: Did he actually want to be there

Doug Fisher

9 Feb 2010 | 9:57 am

The poorly worded headline of the week, so far, comes from the U.K.'s Press Association. One wonders, was he sad he missed it?
Danger: Journalists reporting science/engineering

Doug Fisher

8 Feb 2010 | 2:47 pm

Well, the problem here may be that there was no reporting. So complains Daniel Grossman in an e-mail and at his blog. And he's right. CNN, especially, went a little ga ga over this diamond-shaped airship concept from design firm Seymourpowell (beware, the site is entirely in Flash), which ever so helpfully provided high-res images on its Web site for folks to grab.A look at the CNN story shows how much outside reporting -- aside from talking to someone at Seymourpowell? Lets' see. Oh. ... None. But there are some really sweeeeeet images.Not to fear. Grossman slices, dices and dissects what he…
First thing we'll do is kill all the obit traffic ...

Doug Fisher

4 Feb 2010 | 5:57 pm

OK, it might not be as prosaic as kill all the lawyers, but I was struck by Paid Content's report that one of Journalism Online's first clients to go public, the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, planned as one of it first tests to put its obits behind at least a partial paywall: In Lancaster, publisher Steinman Enterprises will charge readers outside the circulation area for access to obits, starting with a certain number free and then requiring a fee.It's an interesting move, since obits are one of the most popular landing points at many smaller papers. But I'm not sure they are one…
What do readers really want from papers (and copy editors?

Doug Fisher

4 Feb 2010 | 5:53 pm

David Sullivan, in one of his usually well-done essays at "That the Press, Baby," has a well-considered and thoughtful answer to that question:So I have to admit that the most important function of what I do is not the stuff I most enjoy doing -- the "honing" of stories, the subtle word choices, the playing with nuance, the oh-so-clever headlines. If people are interested in a story and believe it, they'll read it even if it's lazily written. What's most important about my job is to look at a story and say -- is the typical person going to find anything wrong with this story? ...Newspapers…
What, no square or rectangular people invited?

Doug Fisher

22 Jan 2010 | 1:32 pm

Ah, what a difference a comma can make.We're not talking the comma of million dollar (Canadian) fame, but just the same, one that would have saved a little snickering here at CSJ central.This one is from the New York Times (which seems in the past couple of days to be the mega-mart of editing errors -- see my previous two posts) and the post "A Bomb Squad for Wall Street" by William D. Cohan. Take a look:The sentence in question is the lede: Gather round people, today we are going to discuss the highly opaque but hugely important topic of "O.T.C. derivatives" ...Now, at a svelte 280 - OK, 300…

CyberJournalist.net
Parody Google ad: Is Tiger feeling lucky?

Jon

8 Feb 2010 | 5:25 pm

As Tiger Woods recovers from a car accident and contends with reports of philandering, Slate V imagines what the golfing great might be typing into that familiar white search bar.
Real-time reactions to Super Bowl ads on Twitter

Jon

7 Feb 2010 | 2:09 pm

BrandBowl2010 — a new Super Bowl advertiser tracking site from Mullen and Radian 6 — offers near real-time analysis for an immediate look at pre-, post- and in-game Twitter reactions to the Super Bowl spots everyone will be watching, Mashable reports.
Tag the Super Bowl: #SB44

Jon

7 Feb 2010 | 7:35 am

The NFL has created a hashtag, #SB44, for the Super Bowl and a cool site that let’s you easily explore photos and tweets from fans from Twitter and Flickr.
Facebook overtakes Google News as media site traffic driver

Jon

5 Feb 2010 | 8:09 am

Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn, according to Hitwise. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits to News and Media websites, and Facebook accounted for 3.52%. That’s a big shift since last April, when they were about equal.
How Americans use social media

Jon

3 Feb 2010 | 7:13 pm

Since 2006, blogging has dropped among teens and young adults while simultaneously rising among older adults, according to a new report on Social Media and Young Adults from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Some other highlights: Both teen and adult use of social networking sites has risen significantly: 73% of wired American teens now use social networking websites, 72% of online 18-29 year olds use them, and 47% of online adults use them. Among adult profile owners 73% have a profile on Facebook, 48% have a profile on MySpace and 14% have a LinkedIn profile.

Editors Weblog
Trinity Mirror buys Guardian's regional business

Elizabeth Redman

9 Feb 2010 | 8:39 am

The Guardian Media Group (GMG) today sold its regional media business to Trinity Mirror in a £44.8 million deal, it was widely reported. Of the price, £7.4 million comes in cash and Trinity Mirror is releasing GMG from a £37.4 million print contract. The deal is due to be completed by March 28. The Guardian, which was previously known as the Manchester Guardian before moving its main office to London in the 1960s, will still have a Manchester-based reporter. GMG Regional Media publishes 32 newspapers including the Manchester Evening News (MEN). The group is made up of two operating…
Study looks into what news articles you share and why

Maria Conde

9 Feb 2010 | 8:14 am

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have extensively studied The New York Times list of most e-mailed articles, checking every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles, and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page, The New York Times reports.Results from the study show that NYTimes readers have exalted tastes - seeking to inspire awe in their friends, colleagues, and family by choosing to e-mail positive articles over negative ones, and long, intellectually challenging articles over short and shocking…
Video cameras for reporters as newspaper moves into the digital age

Elizabeth Redman

9 Feb 2010 | 7:15 am

All reporters at the Journal-Register Co. (JRC) will get video cameras, under an ambitious plan to bring the newspaper into the digital age, the company's 3,100 employees have been told. The company's new CEO John Paton has also told staff that they now work for a 'media company', not a 'newspaper company'. Appropriately enough, he announced the news in a seven-minute slideshow, emailed companywide, the New Haven Independent reports."We're not looking to make any cuts," Paton told the Independent. "We need to improve [local coverage]. We don't need to make it worse." The company, which runs…
Guardian's Rusbridger: 'iPad could produce significant revenue streams'

Maria Conde

9 Feb 2010 | 6:09 am

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger told Reuters that "if we get the right functionality and design," the iPad could "produce interesting, significant revenue streams," according to PaidContent.Because developing an application for the iPad will not require any different skills from the ones required to launch an iPhone app, news publishers that have had success with iPhone apps, are now looking to cash in on the iPad. Guardian met much success with its paid-for iPhone app that debuted last December. By January, the £2.49 app had been downloaded 69,000 times. At that rate, income from…
Scotland: Edinburgh Herald & Post relaunches

Elizabeth Redman

9 Feb 2010 | 5:18 am

The free weekly newspaper in Edinburgh will relaunch next week with a greater focus on shopping and local listings, All Media Scotland reports. The new-look Edinburgh Herald & Post, produced by The Scotsman's publishers, is expected to focus on the shopping and services sector in the city with consumer news and features. It will also include local listings and a picture gallery to focus on community events. The newspaper will be distributed free to households across Edinburgh from Thursday. The editor will be Helen Martin, who has previously worked as features editor at sister title the…

Media news, UK and world media comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk
Tories: we'll block regional TV news plan from becoming law

Chris Tryhorn

9 Feb 2010 | 10:01 am

'This is a redline for us', says shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt of plan for independently funded news consortiumsThe shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has ratcheted up his opposition to the government's plan for regional TV news consortiums by promising to block the proposal's passage through parliament in the digital economy bill.Hunt has consistently opposed the idea of independently funded news consortiums (IFNCs) using a public subsidy to provide replacement news services for ITV in the English regions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.Last month he said that, if the…
Channel 4's Royal Mail witch hunt | Roy Mayall

Roy Mayall

9 Feb 2010 | 10:00 am

Monday's Dispatches programme was an exercise in one-sided journalism. Where was the coherent analysis?The opening lines of Monday evening's Dispatches programme on Channel 4 set the tone for the next 40 minutes. "Once Royal Mail was your friend," it said. "Not any more."We were then subjected to a barrage of negativity about the culture of the Royal Mail. Rude managers. Incompetent staff. People not knowing where they were going. Inadequate training. Lax security. Mishandled packages. Late mail. Bad industrial relations. Theft and laziness.Most posties would recognise elements of this. We…
Toyota dealers pull ads from ABC

Andrew Clark

9 Feb 2010 | 9:55 am

Franchises take business to rival networks after ABC reporter helped break story of 'runaway Toyotas'More than 170 Toyota dealers in the US have withdrawn advertising from one of the country's biggest television networks, ABC, in protest at "excessive stories" on news broadcasts about the Japanese car brand's difficulties.ABC reporter Brian Ross was among the first journalists to pick up on complaints about Toyota cars and began covering the phenomenon of "runaway Toyotas" last November. But as Toyota undertakes its third mass recall in little over two weeks, frustration among dealers about…
Accelerating towards crisis: a PR view of Toyota's recall

9 Feb 2010 | 9:09 am

The Japanese carmaker has seen its reputation for quality take a serious dent. It could have been so different, says a specialist in reputation managementToyota has done many things right in responding to its current crisis: its spokespeople have filled the media with messages of reassurance, its PR people have blogged and tweeted non-stop to fill the information vacuum, its website is full of details about the recall and its call centre is working flat out to deal with customer enquiries. So why is its hard-won reputation still facing the biggest challenge in its corporate history?Analysis…
TV ratings: Hustle edges ahead of Law & Order UK

Chris Tryhorn

9 Feb 2010 | 9:05 am

BBC1 con artist show ends sixth series with 5.6 million viewers, 200,000 ahead of ITV1 rivalThe final episode of BBC1 con artist drama Hustle scored a narrow ratings victory over ITV1's Law & Order UK last night, Monday 8 February.Hustle ended its sixth series with 5.6 million viewers and a 22% share in the 9pm hour, while Law & Order: UK, which still has another week of its second run to go, followed closely behind, with 5.4 million and a 21% share, according to unofficial overnight ratings.The next best performance in the slot was for Channel 4's reality show Tower Block of Commons, in…

Depth Reporting
With a mule, a pickaxe and a pan, you can find your fortune online

Mark

2 Feb 2010 | 8:07 am

This week Mashable posted ads seeking an editor, an investigative reporter and an editorial assistant, all full-time. I looked at their current staff list, and it's long, with 17 names, although some have other gigs as well. This for a site that, while I've read it many times, was barely on my radar. For all the lamentations about what journalism has lost in recent years, not enough attention is paid to what's been gained. Mashable is just one example of what is now a thriving online news and information ecosystem. And it's a self-sustaining one too, one where you can carve out a living. All…
I'm assuming Alan Mutter's check to me is in the mail

Mark

1 Feb 2010 | 7:31 pm

The Newsosaur, Alan Mutter, says journalists are too promiscuous giving away their work so he's constructed a spreadsheet to calculate their true worth: It’s time for journalists to stop participating in their own exploitation by working for a pittance – or, worse, giving away their valuable services for free. Apart from the sheer righteousness of being paid an honest dollar for an honest day’s work, journalists need to stand together – and stand tall – to reassert the stature of their profession. The reason is simple: If they don’t put a value on what they do, then no one else…
News libraries are dying

Mark

31 Jan 2010 | 11:22 am

… says this article in the Columbia Journalism Review, which gives examples of how they can reinvent themselves to survive: According to data collected by Michelle Quigley, a researcher at the Palm Beach Post, over 250 news librarians (sometimes called news researchers) lost their jobs in the U.S. since 2007. Membership in the Special Libraries Association News Division, an organization for news librarians, has fallen to below 400 from over 1,000 in the 1990s. Entire news libraries have been shuttered and replaced by consultants or outside vendors. Last year, the Detroit Free Press got rid…
John Tierney: You can't judge the quality of a researcher's work by who paid for it

Mark

31 Jan 2010 | 11:00 am

John Tierney of The New York Times says accusing researchers of having conflicts of interest because of their industry ties is a cheap and easy way to avoid serious debate: Why are journalists and ethics boards so quick to assume that money, particularly corporate money, is the first factor to look at when evaluating someone’s work? One reason is laziness. It is simpler to note a corporate connection than to analyze all the other factors that can bias researchers’ work: their background and ideology, their yearnings for publicity and prestige and power, the politics of their profession,…
How to Report the News

Mark

29 Jan 2010 | 8:15 am

[via Patrick Beeson]

mymediamusings
3D Printing Primer – Catch Up Before You Are Passed By

admin

9 Feb 2010 | 10:10 am

That’s all changing. The reason for all the buzz these days is that costs have gone down considerably. It’s now possible for the individual hobbyist to buy a 3D printer for as little as $750, and there are build-it-yourself kits that can be purchased on the cheap as well. via thenerfherder.blogspot.com Great little intro post to the quickly growing world of 3D printing – a personal conceptual obsession of mine. The ramifications of enormous. Posted via web from My Media Musings
More Proof “Piracy” is Good for Business

admin

9 Feb 2010 | 9:15 am

So, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but some new research looking at the impact on sales of unauthorized files getting out found a “significant jump in sales” (found via Michael Scott): Brian O’Leary discussed his firm’s research on the effect on sales when a title finds its way into an unsanctioned online market. The findings — a significant jump in sales — have surprised many in the business. via techdirt.com It is less and less a question of how to “control piracy” than it is a question of how do we change and adapt to prosper in…
BNE Is Getting TRASH’d

admin

5 Feb 2010 | 7:53 am

Somebody has decided to go to war with the sticker graffiti "artist" behind the ubiquitous BNE and BNE WAS HERE stickers (read more about him here) that have popped up all over NYC. Check out these pics… See and download the full gallery on posterous Posted via email from My Media Musings
Iran Protests Demonstrate Citizen Journalism in Action

admin

27 Dec 2009 | 7:13 am

Protests have erupted again in Iran and once again the internet is the place for the most unfiltered look at the situation. While tracking Iran posts on Twitter I found this video: Beyond the utter immediacy of this video, posted only hours ago, the thing I am struck by is the number of people using cell phones and digital cameras to capture, and one assumes, disseminate these events. Everything is changing. Fast. Posted via email from My Media Musings
Dark Teen Reading

admin

26 Dec 2009 | 9:21 am

At Barns and Noble and taken by how dark and gothic nearly ALL the new releases are in the “teen” section. Feels like more than just the influence of Twilight. No “Sweet Valley High” for today’s teens I guess. Posted via email from My Media Musings

JOUR M02
The World's Most Generic News Report

JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media

29 Jan 2010 | 1:40 pm

h/t LAobserved.com
Will the iPad Save Journalism?

JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media

27 Jan 2010 | 3:42 pm

What Apple's iPad Means for Journalism Design, Multimedia & BusinessLiveblogging the new Apple tablet: What will it mean for journalism?The iPad: A Media Machine That Opens Up a New FrontThe Apple iPad: First Impressions
Miami News Reunion Recalls Good Old Days

JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media

18 Jan 2010 | 9:59 am

The Phone Caper Story and many others like it are surely being retold this weekend as 100 or so Miami News staffers gather in Miami for a remarkable, out-of-nowhere reunion -- 21 years after the demise of the spunky afternoon newspaper. [Click for MORE]Spunky newspaper cast a giant shadow over Miami
10 Years in 2 Minutes With 92 Covers

JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media

13 Jan 2010 | 11:29 am

ASME and MPA presents “Covering the Decade,” a fast-paced video that tells the story of the century’s first decade through the prism of magazine covers.
Early Times? Late Times? What Times?

JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media

9 Jan 2010 | 12:21 pm

For generations, newspapers have tried to cut the time between printing and delivery, giving readers the latest news — especially on big stories that often land on the front page. The Los Angeles Times is about to take a big step in the other direction. [Click for MORE]

OUPblog » Media
How Not to Tweet Twaddle

Rebecca

9 Feb 2010 | 8:25 am

Dennis Meredith’s career as a science communicator has included service at some of the country’s leading research universities, including MIT, Caltech, Cornell, Duke and the University of Wisconsin. His newest book, Explaining Research: How to Reach Key Audiences to Advance Your Work is the first comprehensive communications guidebook for scientists, engineers, and physicians. Meredith explains how to use websites, blogs, videos, webinars, old-fashioned lectures, news releases, and lay-level articles to reach key audiences, emphasizing along the way that a strong understanding of…
Freedom Riders: The Film Premiere

Rebecca

26 Jan 2010 | 7:20 am

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and co-director of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. His book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, is the full-length story of one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement. The book has recently been turned into a film which premiered at Sundance yesterday. Below Arsenault talks about the experience. It was an emotional experience to be at the first public showing of the American Experience documentary based on my book, Freedom…
Assessing Obama’s Nobel Acceptance Speech

Rebecca

15 Dec 2009 | 7:25 am

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here. By saluting “citizens of America” before “citizens of the world,” President Barack Obama’s…
From Garland to Zellweger: The Ten Best Musical Films

Rebecca

2 Dec 2009 | 5:37 am

Richard Barrios has lectured extensively on film, served as a commentator on numerous DVDs, and co-hosted a series on Turner Classic Movies. He currently lives outside Philadelphia. His book, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd edition, illuminates the origins of the movie musical from the smash hits of The Singing Fool and Sunny Side Up to bizarre flops like Golden Dawn and Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan. In the original post below, Barrios looks at the 10 best musical films ever made. Be sure to check out his 10 worst list here. Any art, naturally, is inherently…
Unconscious Sexism and Racism in New Moon

Rebecca

1 Dec 2009 | 5:41 am

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below, he looks at The Twilight Saga: New Moon. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here. Children are, if they are lucky, taught at home and in schools. But they are also taught with books and movies, where retrograde…

Principled Profit
A Fun Book About Marketing…A Great Strategy for Product Launch

Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

4 Feb 2010 | 3:59 am

I read a lot of business books, and too many of them are so dry you could use them for sawdust. Last year, I happened to meet Kevin Daum at a dinner party Sam Horn threw in Washington, DC (where neither of us live) and we connected quickly and personally. Kevin is a sales and marketing guy who has a similar approach to mine, and he’s also someone who can write. He’s even working on a book about Green business! Kevin’s latest book, Roar! Get Heard in The Sales and Marketing Jungle, is a classic business parable of the sort popularized by Ken Blanchard. I’ve read a lot…
If You Don’t Tell Them, How Will They Know You’re Doing the Right Thing?

Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

3 Feb 2010 | 7:49 pm

Tonight I was reviewing the PowerPoint for the talk on Green Marketing I’m giving next week in Davos, Switzerland. And I was struck yet again by the big case study in my talk: a company that has been producing products from recycled paper for 60 years, but only bothered to tell anyone within the last decade. What a marketing advantage they would have had, if they had made this commitment the centerpiece of their marketing–especially in the old days, when it was hard to find recycled paper goods at any price, and their pricepoint was competitive with non-recycled brands. Instead,…
Building Cooperative Marketing Relationships: Practicing What I Preach

Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

27 Jan 2010 | 7:33 pm

Cooperate with others to open new markets. It’s one of the key principles of my brand new book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), released this week by John Wiley & Sons. The book is a manual for thriving by doing the right thing, showing businesses that Green and ethical practices aren’t just a way to stay out of jail–they’re a success strategy–and cooperation is one of those practices. So–do we practice what we preach? Here are some of the things we’re doing to launch the book: We chose to partner with Green…
Recapping a Rough Week for Progressives

Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

23 Jan 2010 | 1:12 pm

Oy, a few more like this and we’re really in trouble: Death toll in Haiti climbed above 200,000, millions more injured and/or homeless. Supreme Court removed restrictions on corporate campaign contributions, and this could have severe consequences for our democracy (I particularly like Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s commentary on this). Not that they were using it anyway, but the Democrats not only lost their supermajority without passing very much important legislation, but they managed to lose it in my own state of Massachusetts. Since the Republicans have made very plain their policy of…
To Obama and the Dems: Wake Up, Move Left, Be Powerful

Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

20 Jan 2010 | 3:39 am

Following Martha Coakley’s loss in Massachusetts, Obama will no doubt get a lot of advice to move to the center, to compromise more, to give up any hope for the progressive agenda he was elected to deliver. But that advice is totally wrong-headed! If he wants to be remembered as anything other than an ineffectual one-term president, he and his weak-kneed party need to seize the debate, push the agenda, and present themselves once more as the party of change. Maybe they should even go back to Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativsim” and pin that label on the GOP.

Global Features
Coverage of Haiti Solidarity Efforts

8 Feb 2010 | 5:14 pm
Escalating violence against anti-mining capmpaigners

17 Jan 2010 | 6:46 pm
Radio Ñomndaa celebrates its Fifth Anniversary: the Word of the Water flows in music, solidarity ties and new proposals

31 Dec 2009 | 11:22 pm
Major Hotel Strike is Imminent in Puerto Rico

20 Dec 2009 | 6:41 pm
100,000 march for System Change not climate change in Copenhagen with mass arrests

13 Dec 2009 | 7:46 pm

Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk
Why the Guardian cutting historic link with Manchester is least worst option

Steve Busfield

9 Feb 2010 | 5:28 am

Its sale to Trinity Mirror is sad news – but may just give the Manchester Evening News the best long-term chance of survivalWhile gallows humour demands a comment along the lines of CP Scott shifting uncomfortably underground today, the sale of the Manchester Evening News is the least worst option for both the paper and for Guardian Media Group.Before I try to convince you of the benefits, it must be acknowledged that Guardian Media Group's sale of the Manchester Evening News is an historic moment that will disappoint many. Many northerners still refer to The Guardian as The Manchester…
US magazines' newsstand sales fall 9%

Mercedes Bunz

9 Feb 2010 | 5:02 am

US magazine circulation figures published by the Audit Bureau of Circulations yesterday will make grim reading for the industry. Total circulation for 472 titles was 328.4 million for July to December 2009, down 2.23% compared with the same period the previous year.Newsstand sales totalled 35.7m in July to December, down 9.1% compared with the same period a year earlier. So the downwards trend of the first half of 2009 and the second half of 2008 continues – in the first half of 2009 there was a year-on-year drop of 12%, continuing the 11% downturn in the second half of 2008. Paid…
Mirror rapped for Dannii Minogue pregnancy story

Stephen Brook

8 Feb 2010 | 11:00 pm

Press watchdog maintains tough stance on early reporting of celebrity pregnanciesThe Daily Mirror and Daily Record invaded the privacy of Dannii Minogue by reporting that she was pregnant before she announced the news, the press watchdog ruled today.The Press Complaints Commission said both papers made "a regrettable lapse in editorial judgment" and rejected their argument that news of the pregnancy was in the public domain because another newspaper and website had written about it.Minogue had not had her 12-week scan when the Daily Mirror ran its story, headlined "Look who's Xpecting!", on 9…
Another New Orleans super sale

Peter Robins

8 Feb 2010 | 11:20 am

We're still printing it this morning, promises Times-Picayune, as New Orleans Saints fans queue for Super Bowl victory splashWhen the New Orleans Saints got through to the Super Bowl, the Monday edition of their hometown paper still had queues of buyers on the Wednesday. Now that they've won it, the Times-Picayune could probably go on printing the same front page for a month. It was certainly still printing a couple of hours ago, at 11am CST. And it's a really lovely front page, complete with some of the largest headline type you've ever seen: I had to break our standard picture format just…
NYT's dilemma after son of Jerusalem bureau chief joins Israeli military

Steve Busfield

8 Feb 2010 | 9:25 am

An ethical riddle, wrapped up in a PR nightmare, inside a seemingly insoluble conflict is playing itself out in public at the New York Times.The 20-year-old son of the NYT's Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, has joined the Israeli Defence Force – and the relationship has been pointed out by the website Electronic Intifada.The paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, confirmed that it was true after the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting website suggested that it might pose a conflict of interest.Under the headline "Too Close to Home", the NYT's public editor, Clark Hoyt, then debated the…

blog maverick
Why Have So Many Internet People Lost Touch With Reality ?

markcuban

4 Feb 2010 | 9:16 am

Sometimes its hard to tell if people are trying to be funny, mean, interesting, provocative or are just plain stupid or completely out of touch with reality. I know I get accused of being all of the above all the time. The other day in New York I gave a speech at the AlwaysOn Conference which AdWeek summarized nicely here. The audience was primarily newspapers and people related to their business. So as I do when I speak to a group like this, rather than just shilling a product, service or position as many, if not most keynote speakers do, I try to put myself in the business shoes of the…
Why Google is Bad for the Newspaper Business

markcuban

3 Feb 2010 | 11:44 am

One of the key core competencies of a publication is the process of selecting “all the news thats fit to print”. No one can read every news story. Instead of even trying to consume everything, we all have a process we go through for discovery of news, information and topics of interest to us. We have sources we trust for our news and information. It may be a printed paper or magazine, a website, tv news, facebook or twitter updates, or some combination of everything we have access to. No matter how we get information there is one certainty, there is a finite number of sources…
The Simplicity Test: A Simple Policy Guide for Job Growth

markcuban

31 Jan 2010 | 9:04 am

The simplest way to create more jobs is to allow small business and entrepreneurs to spend less time and money on lawyers and accountants and redirect that intellectual and financial capital to the core competencies of their business. Any new government policy that requires the hiring of lawyers and accountants will not lead to new jobs, it will lead to time and money being wasted and fewer jobs being created. Like the administration before it, the current administration seems to have no concept of what it takes to start, run and grow a small business. None. Here is a hint. If you want to…
Talking the IPad, Kids, Making Money and Video

markcuban

28 Jan 2010 | 4:34 pm

I cant wait to get my hands on the IPad. Its going to be a HUGE hit. You can book it right now that it will be the product that kids of this generation grow up with and look back on with affection just like we did with the first video games. Video games changed how we grew up. The IPad will change how kids grow up. Apple was brilliant in how they cultivated apps for the IPhone and Touch. With so many apps for kids, any parent with young kids and either of these 2 devices will tell you that their kids use and love them. In fact, it was this very reason that I helped create Puzzle Palace…
Why are we condemning Jeff Zucker & NBC over Leno ?

markcuban

18 Jan 2010 | 1:11 pm

If you want to know why its going to take longer than people hope or expect to get out this great recession, look no further than media and corporate response to Jeff Zuckers move of Jay Leno to primetime. What Zucker and NBC did was the EXACT RIGHT MOVE. Business environments change. When they do, as broadcast network television has, and continues to, there are two basic choices. You can do it the way it’s always been done, or you can challenge yourself to change the game. In the case of NBC, Jeff Zucker chose to take a risk and move Jay Leno from late night television to primetime.

JOURNALISM.CO.UK
What format for the political leaders’ TV debates?

Judith Townend

8 Feb 2010 | 7:37 am

So what format will the first televised leaders’ debates take? The Guardian today reports that, amid lengthy negotiations, “some of the parties, notably the Liberal Democrats, have been pressing for a BBC Question Time format in which questions are not just asked by an experienced chairman, but also by the audience”. And it sounds like the BBC host David Dimbleby would prefer something more Question Time, than his Sky News counterpart Adam Boulton. In an interview with the Independent’s Ian Burrell, Boulton said: Some of the print comment is seeing this as a bear pit,…
StinkyJournalism.org: ‘Dubious Polling’ Awards 2010

Judith Townend

8 Feb 2010 | 4:06 am

US-based site StinkyJournalism.org has picked out its top ten ‘dubious polls’ for 2010. The winner…? Fox News Network for a poll that showed how 120 percent of the public were thinking – “and this did not include an additional 15 percent who weren’t thinking!” Full post at this link… Similar Posts: Top 10 ‘Dubious Polling’ Awards mark ‘risible and outrageous pronouncements’ Daily Mail gypsy/NHS poll on The Now Show Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail gypsy poll Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk –…
The Content Makers: How much are freelance journalists getting paid?

Judith Townend

8 Feb 2010 | 3:44 am

A useful exercise is taking place on the other side of the world: Margaret Simons, a freelance journalist, media blogger and lecturer is investigating freelance rates in Australia. So far she has gathered over 100 responses to her first post, ‘Journalists should not work for free – so tell me what they are paying’. She promises to write up the results soon – we’ll link to them on this blog, when she does. Full post at this link… Here was the original plea: [1 Australian dollar = 0.56 British pounds] I think it would be useful to find out what different…
Mashable: Slideshow on ‘the future journalist’ – what will they need?

Laura Oliver

8 Feb 2010 | 1:47 am

Great presentation from Mashable on ‘The future journalist: thoughts from two generations’. Created for Mashable’s NextUpNYC event the presentation was part of an on-stage discussion between Sree Sreenivasan, a professor and dean of student affairs at Columbia Journalism School, and his former student and Mashable contributor Vadim Lavrusik, which looked at the skills need by the journalist of the future, their approach to the business side of journalism and their use of social and multimedia: Similar Posts: Columbia Journalism School report proposes tax changes to boost US…
Guardian: Fair comment, the soul trio and a change for UK libel laws?

Laura Oliver

8 Feb 2010 | 1:10 am

A legal case dating back to 2006 involving a musical trio, the Gilettes, their agent and an Italian restaurant in Leeds could have a significant impact on the use of fair comment as a defence in UK libel actions. In the case, which will be brought in front of the Supreme Court, the Gilettes as claimants have had two applications for a defence of fair comment by their agent 1311 events struck out. Explains the Guardian: It will be the first study of the issue by the country’s highest legal authority since the law lords looked into it almost 20 years ago. Media organisations hope it will…

One Man & His Blog
When is a Blogger not a Blogger?

Adam Tinworth

4 Feb 2010 | 4:34 am

Isn't it interesting how the broadening of the communication channel causes gatekeepers of all stripes (in this case, the Tory press office) to tie themselves into knots trying to define who is "media" and who isn't? Incidentally, I think they'll live to regret that attitude on display here should the Tories win the election. (UPDATE: the linked post appears to have been pulled by Tory Politico in the last 45 minutes. It's still viewable in Google's cache)UPDATE 2: Perhaps he has more on his mind that a 6-month old post about daft PR decisions, given that he's…
On Blogging About The iPad

Adam Tinworth

31 Jan 2010 | 5:34 am

I have about three iPad-related posts in my head right now. One of them exists in partial form in my blog software.But I can't bring myself to publish them, and that's for much the same reason as I refused to blog about the Apple tablet before it was revealed. Let my illustrate by means of a pie chart:Never has so much been written by so many about one thing they have so little experience of...
The 4m Pageview Blogger

Adam Tinworth

29 Jan 2010 | 10:45 am

Flighblogger, one of our stable of blogs on Flightglobal, was just shy of 4m pageviews in 2009, from 2.3m visitors.Not bad for B2B. :-)Congratulations, Jon. A solid mix of work and skill there, mate.
Participatory Culture and Traditional Media

Adam Tinworth

23 Jan 2010 | 7:14 am

Kevin Anderson on why people participate in online communities and share content on them: I can tell you why I bother. A global culture of participation has been, for me, key in meeting one of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Belonging. Originally participatory culture was something I did in my spare time because their was no place for it in my professional work, but co-creation in journalism has been one of the most richly rewarding aspects of my career.charman-anderson.com, Generosity and post-scarcity economic media models: Why I love participatory culture, Jan 2010 Lots to think about in that…
Kodak, Disruption and Economic Inertia

Adam Tinworth

23 Jan 2010 | 5:52 am

From an article about Kodak's difficult decade: Even though they talked about being in imaging and memories - their financial base was still in film, and even though they could move conceptually, they could see no way to move economically (and I suspect that many of us sitting around the Kodak board table at the time would have come to similar conclusions).creativedisruption.net, Creative Disruption, Jan 2010 Much for publishers to learn here...

Beat the Press
Jingoism and the Budget Deficit: Using Any Tactic to Advance the Budget Cutting Agenda

8 Feb 2010 | 4:12 pm

The deficit hawks apparently believe that their case is so weak that they must resort to crass jingoism to push their agenda. NBC apparently intends to run a piece on the evening news on Tuesday that talks about the portion of the government debt that is owned foreigners, highlighting the role of China. This is incredibly dishonest. The extent to which foreigners hold U.S. assets is determined by the trade deficit, not the budget deficit. (Actually, the causation largely goes the other way. The decision of foreign governments and/or investors to buy dollar assets raises the value of the…
Social Security Benefits Will Be Paid, It is the Law

8 Feb 2010 | 6:08 am

Allan Sloan told listeners to Marketplace radio this morning that future retirees should be worried about their Social Security benefits because the program is now paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes. In fact, the program has accumulated more than $2.5 trillion on government bonds in its trust fund. The Congressional Budget Office projects that this fund will be sufficient to pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2044. Even after that date, if nothing is ever done to change the program, the projections still show that it will be able to pay close to 80 percent of…
Post Makes Things Up In Pushing "Free Trade" Deals, Again

8 Feb 2010 | 2:35 am

The Washington Post ran another appeal for congressional passage of trade agreements negotiated with South Korea and Colombia. It refers to these deals as "free trade" agreements even though an important part of both deals involves increasing protectionist barriers in the form of patent and copyright protection. This increased protection will raise costs and lead to increased economic distortions. The Post has a long history of making things up to promote trade agreements. For example, a 2007 editorial promoting NAFTA told readers that Mexico's GDP had quadrupled from 1988 to 2007. The actual…
Robert Samuelson Doesn't Know About the Social Security Tax

8 Feb 2010 | 2:14 am

I suppose that it is hard to get information about the federal budget way out in the outskirts of downtown Washington. This no doubt explains why Robert Samuelson doesn't seem to know about the Social Security tax. In fact, he doesn't seem to know much about the federal budget at all. Samuelson complains that the government: "the budget is mainly a vehicle for transferring income to retirees from workers, who pay most taxes." This complaint is based on the portion of the budget that goes to funding programs that largely support retirees, specifically Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Defense Spending Has Been Growing More Rapidly Than Social Security

7 Feb 2010 | 9:34 am

The NYT and every one else keeps saying that Social Security is one of the three most rapidly growing items in the budget. This is not true. Defense spending grew more rapidly over the last decade. We spent $655.8 billion on defense in 2009 more than double the $306.1 billion spent in 2001. $By comparison, Social Security spending rose by just over 50 percent during these years from $429.4 billion in 2001 to $677.7 billion last year. If we're looking forward, interest spending is projected to grow more rapidly. So it is simply inaccurate to list Social Security among the areas of most rapid…

College Media Matters
In the Spotlight: Cameron Henderson, Publisher, Northwestern Art Review

Dan

7 Feb 2010 | 11:43 pm

Eight Northwestern University students. A “cheap pizza joint.” Spirited conversation about a shared love of art and architecture. An idea for a publication whose aim would be nothing less than to “provide a forum for greater exchange among an expanding community of students who devote their time to studying, thinking and writing about art.” The Northwestern Art Review was born. – Cut to three years later. 2010. NAR 3.0. Two words on the cover of the current issue say it all, talking about both the art world and the publication’s future, “Now…
College Publisher Suffers from Malicious Hack Attack

Dan

7 Feb 2010 | 3:09 am

As undoubtedly many student newspaper staffers now already know, the main servers for the uber-influential and widely-used College Publisher online hosting service suffered a major security breach in the middle of last week. – As a trusted source confirmed to me, “The site was hacked Wednesday night and people started deleting database and archive files for lots of student publications. It was a huge attack that caused many problems for student publications. . . . The site is back up, their Web site redesign is back, but a lot of their recent improvements were wiped out…
Optimist Student Newspaper First to be iPad-Friendly: Huge Step or So What?

Dan

5 Feb 2010 | 4:09 am

The Optimist student newspaper at Abilene Christian University is promoting itself as the first campus publication worldwide that will be iPad-friendly. – As the U.S. News & World Report’s fantastic Paper Trail blog noted in the post that broke this story: “The gadget will be available in 60 days, and a team of faculty and student researchers is planning for the Optimist to be ready by then. The Optimist wants to expand its reach on campus, where it already publishes a print and an online product in addition to making content available via an iPhone application.”…
Huffington Post College News Section, Behind the Scenes, Part 2: A Chat with Jose Antonio Vargas

Dan

2 Feb 2010 | 11:32 am

Jose Antonio Vargas can claim one slice of a team reporting Pulitzer Prize. His j-work is credited with inspiring a documentary film on HIV/AIDS in DC. He has taught a university j-class called Storytelling 2.0. And as The Huffington Post’s technology and innovations editor he writes a blog on Technology as Anthropology. Simply put, this is a man who knows journalism and newmediatopia- cold. – In a seminal post on his blog last October, titled “Young Voices in The Future of News,” Vargas writes, “We are at a critical, all-hands-on-deck moment in the history…
Huffington Post College News Section, Behind the Scenes, Part 1: A Chat with Leah Finnegan

Dan

31 Jan 2010 | 11:22 pm

Leah Finnegan’s motto about the glasses she sports daily: Go big or go home. The former Daily Texan editor in chief has similarly large ambitions about impacting the college journalism scene nationwide. She has taken a leave of absence from j-grad school at Columbia University to spearhead the launch of a College News section for The Huffington Post. – As previously reported, the section aims to be a high-profile, one-stop site promoting student newswork and providing readers with a glimpse of what’s going down in the current campus zeitgeist. It will aggregate and promote…

You Don't Say
Snow day 5

John McIntyre

9 Feb 2010 | 7:29 am

Now it begins to get interesting. After two days of sunshine, the sky has clouded over, and Baltimore braces for the impending storm, which is forecast to bring another foot to foot and a half of snow by the end of the day tomorrow.* J.P. and I hoofed it to the nearest grocery, three-quarters of a mile, to get milk and other supplies yesterday afternoon. Hamilton Avenue was in indifferent shape, with about a lane and a half partially cleared, and people and vehicles sharing the street. We came upon a commercial van that had lodged in a snow bank, which a 70-year-old neighborhood resident was…
Snow day 4

John McIntyre

8 Feb 2010 | 5:49 am

The situation: Many of the neighbors were out in the sunlight yesterday afternoon, beginning to dig out their cars and clear sidewalks. But Plymouth Road remains largely impassable. Trucks and SUVs have shouldered through a rough path, but last night a smaller, lighter, lower car got stuck half a dozen times and had to be dug out before it could bounce down to the end of the street. I cleared the drive between the garage and the street — Roselawn — yesterday morning, but Roselawn is entirely untouched. There is no hope of getting a car from the garage to one of the main streets. Neighbors…
Snow day 3

John McIntyre

7 Feb 2010 | 6:47 am

Reports are trickling in of the existence of readers who profess to enjoy this Snowpocalypse journal and want more of it. Perhaps they are having me on, as the Brits say. Speaking of the Brits, You Don’t Say notes with sadness the death last week at age 89 of Ian Carmichael, the gifted British comedy actor who, in a long career on stage, in films, and on television, notably portrayed Bertie Wooster in adaptations of P.G. Wodehouse novels and Lord Peter Wimsey in adaptations of Dorothy Sayers’s mysteries. To have given innocent pleasure to so many for so long is one of the happiest of…
Snow day 2

John McIntyre

6 Feb 2010 | 7:00 am

Woke in the middle of the night to the sound of thunder amid the snowfall. No trace at 7.a.m. of the three shovelings from the night before. Easily two feet of snow on the ground — likely more, though drifting makes measurement difficult. Some permanent damage evident on the holly tree in the yard. Snow wet and dense, flung by periodic wind gusts. Second low system moving out of Kentucky and headed this way. Cleared a path from the front door to the street, and K. and I tunneled from the back door to the garage. Not that either car could proceed in snow this deep, and the prospects of…
Snow day

John McIntyre

5 Feb 2010 | 8:40 am

We have coffee and bourbon. The snow shovels are propped by the door, and J.P. is poised to spell me with them. I have picked up Alice and her cat, Diana, from Garrison Forest School. Scout and Graymalkin are dozing as the barometer falls. Kathleen is out picking up whatever last-minute things are on her list as we await THE WHITE DEATH FROM THE SKY. When she returns, the whole family will be here to ride out the storm. Snow hysteria is evident. As I was driving to pick up Alice and Diana, I saw a multi-car pileup on the inner loop of the Beltway at Perring Parkway — a multi-car pileup in…

Old Media, New Tricks
New Tricks: 3 Ways News Organizations Can Leverage Location-Based Social Networks

Daniel B. Honigman

8 Feb 2010 | 5:08 am

2010 really looks like the year of location-based social networks, and the news industry seems to agree. The Metro publishing group recently announced a partnership with Foursquare; once a site user says where they are (done via GPS), relevant articles from Metro’s Canadian papers will be pulled into the program, providing site users additional information about the neighborhoods, restaurants and stores near them. While this move may make some waves for Metro, and may drive some incremental traffic to the Metro group of sites, some may question the move’s overall value for the…
New tricks: Journalists and SEO – searching for the right balance

Robert Quigley

2 Feb 2010 | 11:52 am

This is from a social media newsletter that I send out to the American-Statesman newsroom. You can read previous newsletter entries about audience and responsiveness to the community. Searching for traffic Newspaper copy editors spend a lot of time crafting the best headlines for stories, with particular attention focused on the front-page headlines. The reason is obvious: to draw readers into our content. On the Web, writing a good headline is just as important. Thanks to detailed metrics, we can see exactly what draws people to our content, and we know that search engines bring in a sizable…
New tricks: Know your audience - whether you’re on Twitter or in print

Robert Quigley

28 Jan 2010 | 11:38 am

I recently started writing a social media newsletter for the Austin American-Statesman’s newsroom. I posted the first one, which was about responding to readers, here. Here’s the second one, edited slightly to make sense as a blog post. Got a great question last week from a staff member: “This may sound like trivia…. but, I’m wondering what posting on Facebook has received the most comments? People are always asking me…. what should they post to get a lot of responses?” It’s not trivial at all. The answer is a bit nuanced, though, so stay with…
Will the Apple iPad save newspapers?

Robert Quigley

27 Jan 2010 | 12:51 pm

It’s a little early to say any one gadget will save anything, but Apple’s new gadget, the iPad, at least makes that a serious question. The publishing industry has to be cautiously optimistic. Here’s why: It is built for displaying publishers’ content in an attractive way. The New York Times got a star demo at Steve Jobs’ big announcement, and the newspaper actually looks like an easy-to-read digital copy of a print newspaper. Based on the demo of the Times, it feels more like a print edition than any previous digital attempt at reproducing a newspaper. It has a…
New Tricks: Create a successful news vertical

Robert Quigley

27 Jan 2010 | 6:26 am

On a sunny, warm Wednesday afternoon in Newport Beach, Calif., surfers took in some waves in the cold Pacific Ocean waters, people shopped along the boardwalks and the lone content producer for Hookem.com was combing the beach for University of Texas Longhorn fans. Thousands of people decked out in the distinctive burnt orange clothing were in Southern California for the BCS championship game, and Hookem’s Dave Behr was on a mission to find, talk to, video and photograph as many of them as possible. He was to be the eyes and ears for the fans who couldn’t make the 1,400-mile trek…

Reportr.net
Bill Buxton on why technology is a cultural artefact

Alfred Hermida

30 Jan 2010 | 2:05 pm

Image by anikarenina via Flickr The CAJ Innovate News conference wrapped up with a different perspective from Bill Buxton, principal researcher for Microsoft. His prevailing philosophy is that everything is best for something and worst for something else. So it is important to think about when, what, why and for whom. He also argues that technology is not neutral – it can be good or bad. In his talk, he explores the discussion of the role of the citizen journalist, citing the Rodney King and Robert Dziekanski videos. He says we can’t ignore the role of the citizen journalist. But,…
Thoora real-time platform as an awareness system for news

Alfred Hermida

30 Jan 2010 | 9:16 am

Interesting presentation of Thoora at the CAJ Innovate. Thoora is a platform that aims to analyse, filter and aggregate content from news sources, blogs and Twitter and turn it into meaningful data. The platform is pitched as a solution for newsrooms to make sense of the wealth of content in social media and find meaningful ways of integrating it with traditional media sources. The aim is to reduce huge amounts of data to meaningful indicators in a flexible, real-time platform, as well as track trends and predict interest in stories. In some ways, it is similar to NowPublic’s Scan tool,…
CAJ Innovate talk on social media

Alfred Hermida

30 Jan 2010 | 8:09 am

The slides from my presentation at the CAJ Innovate conference in Toronto on social media principles and practice. Ann Hui, an intern at the Toronto Star, blogged the talk.
Jim Brady outlines new DC local news venture

Alfred Hermida

30 Jan 2010 | 6:32 am

The CAJ Innovate conference kicked off with a keynote by Jim Brady. He is the president of digital strategy at Allbritton Communications (owners of Politico.com) and the former executive editor of WashingtonPost.com. His theme was the potential of local news. He argued that in the early days of news online, many local newspaper sites were tempted by big waves of traffic from viral engines, picking up a national or international audience. “We were doing things to attract the wrong audience and ignoring the audience in our backyard,” he said. He described this as a drift away from…
Twitter links from CAJ talk on social media

Alfred Hermida

29 Jan 2010 | 9:05 am

The Canadian Association of Journalists is holding a one-day conference in Toronto on Saturday 30 January on the theme of innovating the news. The aim is to learn about “emerging techniques, technologies and models to transform journalism for the 21st century”. There is a great line-up and I’m honoured to have been asked to participate. I’ll be holding a session on social media principles and practice, which is a lot to pack into 45 minutes. I could spend all the time going through the dozens of Twitter sites, services and apps. But I am only going to mention a…

News After Newspapers
Singleton's next chapter: Can he steer MediaNews to a digital future?

18 Jan 2010 | 10:43 am

In August 2006, as part of a deal that netted MediaNews Group the Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Hearst Corporation agreed to make a $300 million equity investment in MediaNews. At that point, the peak of MediaNews’ company’s expansion and with revenue and cash flow at an all-time high, the holdings of the principal stockholders — the Singleton and Scudder families — net of debt, were arguably worth more than $500 million each. But last Friday, whatever was left of that equity, as well as Hearst’s stake (not finalized until a year…
California Watch: The latest entrant in the dot-org journalism boom

5 Jan 2010 | 6:08 pm

“Ten years ago,” says Mark Katches, editorial director of California Watch, “there were 85 reporters covering the California state house; today there are fewer than 25.” Katches sees California Watch, which officially launched yesterday after a soft launch period and months of preparation, as stepping into a “big void in doing investigative work in California.” Katches has assembled the largest investigative team in the state: seven reporters, two multimedia producers, and two editors. The site is focused on investigative watchdog journalism. It won’t cover the ins and outs of…
A roundup of media predictions for 2010

28 Dec 2009 | 5:44 pm

Besides offering my own 2010 predictions and revisiting my 2009 predictions to see how I scored, I've gathered (as I did last year) a set of media predictions for 2010 from bloggers and others. Here's what came up in their crystal balls: From Folio, a set of 115 mostly magazine-related predictions gathered from magazine and ad agency pundits. A prevailing theme there is that 2010 will be the year of the tablet. Social media guru Chris Brogan says, "2010 will see consolidations and foldups." Newser's Michael Wolff says, "Newsweek dies." (He doesn't say precisely when, or whether it's in…
Out on a limb again: Predictions for 2010

17 Dec 2009 | 7:38 am

Continuing a News After Newspapers tradition, here are my media predictions for 2010: Newspaper ad revenue: At least technically, the recession is over, with GDP growth measured at 2.8 percent in Q3 of 2009 and widely forecast in Q4 to exceed that rate. But newspaper revenue has not followed suit, dropping 28 percent in Q3. McClatchy and the New York Times Company (which both came in at about that level in Q3) hinted last week that Q4 would be better, in the negative low-to-mid 20 percent range. This is not unexpected — in the last few recessions with actual GDP contraction (1990-91 and…
Some hits, some misses: a look back at my 2009 predictions

14 Dec 2009 | 6:22 am

A year ago, in December 2008, I went on a limb with a raft of predictions for 2009. Here's my scorecard (send corrections if I've missed anything!): No other newspaper companies will file for bankruptcy. WRONG. By the end of 2008, only Tribune had declared. Since then, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Journal Register Company, and the Philadelphia newspapers made trips to the courthouse, most of them right after the first of the year. Several cities, besides Denver, that today still have multiple daily newspapers will become single-newspaper towns. RIGHT: Hearst closed the…

Recovering Journalist
Newsday's Unconventional Subscription Model

Mark Potts

28 Jan 2010 | 9:56 pm

When Newsday announced last spring that it was contemplating putting its Web site behind a paywall, I wrote a scathing critique of the idea. I was wrong.Newsday, as it happens, is in a unique position, and is taking advantage of it. Owned by Cablevision, the paper is circling the wagons around its core news and cable market on Long Island. Its online subscription plan goes like this: If you're a Cablevision cable-TV or Newsday print subscriber, you get access to Newsday.com site for free. If you're not, Newsday wants non-subscribers to pay $5 a week, or $260 a…
And Verily, Steve Jobs Came Down from the Mountaintop With a Tablet, and It Was Good (But Version 2 Will be Better)

Mark Potts

27 Jan 2010 | 8:43 pm

After all the fevered buildup, we now know the actual details of Apple's iPad tablet. Probably not surprisingly, it doesn't quite live up to all of the pre-release hype and speculation (including my own). But it still appears to be a remarkable device that, in its first generation, has the potential to change a few corners of the media world. And that's just the beginning.Out of the box, the iPad is a very interesting reading device. Lying flat on a desk or table, it can mimic a lot of the readability and convenience of print (and adds a lot of bells and whistles). It makes the…
Visionaries in Action

Mark Potts

21 Jan 2010 | 7:21 pm

Two of the smartest thinkers—and good guys—in new media just got important new jobs. John Temple, who's practically been born again as an advocate for new models for journalism and the news business since the Rocky Mountain News got shot out from under him a year ago, will be the editor of Peer News, Pierre Omidyar's budding online local news effort in Hawaii. And Jonathan Weber, a real pioneer in regional/local online news as founder/editor of NewWest.net, has been named editor-in-chief of the nascent Bay Area News Project, the $5 million project funded by entrepreneur Warren…
Apple's Tabula Rasa

Mark Potts

3 Jan 2010 | 7:16 pm

As the new year rolls in, the talk of the tech world is Apple's allegedly upcoming tablet computer. The New York Times has even dubbed 2010 as "the year of the tablet."Sites and publications that cover Apple and the tech industry are abuzz with the usual frenetic levels of speculation that always precede the secretive company's future product releases. Nobody really knows anything, but the guesses have taken on a life of their own, creating a froth of hype that Apple itself probably couldn't achieve if was being forthcoming. The consensus of speculation seems…
Rupert, The Grinch and Google

Mark Potts

28 Nov 2009 | 1:05 pm

This is frickin' brilliant. (Hat tip to Jeff Jarvis, and a deep bow to the author, AOL DailyFinance's Sam Gustin.) Then he got an idea! An awful idea! The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea! "I know just what to do!" The Grinch laughed in his throat. And he thought of old Microsoft, and disruptions to float. And he chuckled, and clucked, "What a great Grinchy thing! For a Google disaster, I'll hook up with Bing! You have to admit: There is an eerie resemblance...

Emily Ingram
ONA09: “What if I’m not going?”

The Online News Association's 2009 conference is about to kick off. ... And it's already taken over my Twitter feed. Not going to this year's conference? No worries. You can catch free livestreams of the conference's keynote speakers: Twitter CEO Evan Williams - Friday, 9 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. Central Technology journalist Leo Laporte - ...
Week 5: Add portfolio materials and install plugins

This post is the fifth in a weekly series that will take journalists through how to set up a professional-looking portfolio Web site. Find out more about the series and read the first, second, third and fourth posts if you missed them. Check back next week for more. It's Week 5 ...
Week 4: Put up your resume in HTML and PDF formats

Apologies for the delay, folks, but after a bit of a holiday break, I'm back. This post is the fourth in a weekly series that will take journalists through how to set up a professional-looking portfolio Web site. Find out more about the series and read the first, second and ...
Week 3: Write first blog post and About page

This post is the third in a weekly series that will take journalists through how to set up a professional-looking portfolio Web site. Find out more about the series and read the first and second posts if you missed them. Check back next week for more. This week you're going to ...
Week 2: Find a theme, install it and customize it

This post is the second in a weekly series that will take journalists through how to set up a professional-looking portfolio Web site. Find out more about the series and read the kickoff post if you missed it. Check back next week for more. So, now that you've done everything that's ...

Metaprinter
Not Exactly the 4th Estate

Robert Ivan

5 Feb 2010 | 8:03 pm

A TechCrunch intern( under the age of 18) was found to have accepted a MacBook Air in exchange for a blog post – He got fired. Here’s TechCrunch founder and co-editor Michael Arrington, “On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup.” 1. I’m stunned that TechCrunch, one of the most influential and widely read blogs in the world would allow someone so…
Non-newspaper site dealing with inappropriate comments

Robert Ivan

3 Feb 2010 | 1:32 am

The tech blog Engadget has temporarily turned off commenting for a bit “until things cool down”. Apparently the tone in the comments section has been completely out of control the last few days, it “has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable”. The comments section dust up started when certain Engadget regulars became offended over this spoof article (Do you Hate Apple News?) which pretty much mocks readers for whining about reading too much Apple news. Engadget is doing some cleaning…
Charlie Brooker Shows Us How to Report the News on Video

Robert Ivan

30 Jan 2010 | 6:24 pm

News video journalism 101 – catharsis
Who’s buying Amazon Kindles or any eReader for that matter?

Robert Ivan

24 Jan 2010 | 8:05 am

Way back in November 2008 I wrote a brief article The Kindle Needs a Bellows about the disconnect between the number of Kindle users and the push from newspapers to move their content onto such devices. It’s now January 2010, a little over a year later, and I still don’t know anyone who has purchased an Amazon Kindle or any eReader for that matter. So what’s the fuss? The big news at (consumer electronics show) CES this year was eReaders and Tablets, but aside from the push from magazine and newspaper publishers… where is the consumer demand? Are eReaders nothing…
Immersive Media powers Haiti:360 video on CNN

Robert Ivan

22 Jan 2010 | 10:24 pm

CNN’s 360 degree video footage from Haiti post earthquake provided by Immersive Media. You can pan the camera around as if you were the one controlling it at the time of filming. Crazy. My hat’s off to Immersive Media and their technological innovation. This is certainly taking communications to the next level.

Themediaisdying
themediaisdying: iPhone Magazines on the rise | PDA-247 http://ping.fm/43onZ (RT @ipadfrenzy)

9 Feb 2010 | 5:23 am

themediaisdying: iPhone Magazines on the rise | PDA-247 http://ping.fm/43onZ (RT @ipadfrenzy)
themediaisdying: PLEASE RETWEET! What topic would you like to see tackled by The Fire Brigade this week? Join TFB by emailing prweekblog@gmail.com

9 Feb 2010 | 1:05 am

themediaisdying: PLEASE RETWEET! What topic would you like to see tackled by The Fire Brigade this week? Join TFB by emailing prweekblog@gmail.com
themediaisdying: If you could ask @Mumsnet anything what would it be?

8 Feb 2010 | 3:31 pm

themediaisdying: If you could ask @Mumsnet anything what would it be?
themediaisdying: Azipan.com : http://bit.ly/acouZm -- a marketplace for writers and the vendors looking to hire them. (RT @tomforemski: RT @samwhitmore)

8 Feb 2010 | 2:46 pm

themediaisdying: Azipan.com : http://bit.ly/acouZm -- a marketplace for writers and the vendors looking to hire them. (RT @tomforemski: RT @samwhitmore)
themediaisdying: Nobody wants to buy a magazine from the newsstand anymore : http://bit.ly/a2fXjI (@sainsider)

8 Feb 2010 | 2:38 pm

themediaisdying: Nobody wants to buy a magazine from the newsstand anymore : http://bit.ly/a2fXjI (@sainsider)

The Media Manager
Tim McGuire: Twitter won't ruin journalism, journalists will

8 Feb 2010 | 1:35 am

Arizona State business journalism chair Tim McGuire takes on the view that Twitter is taking the craft down the wrong road. His latest post recognizes that Twitter, like all instant information services, can skimp on the discipline of verification.But he also notes that journalists have wanted exactly a tool like Twitter forever. "Twitter is a wonderful tool which, like any tool, can be used or abused," he notes.Now that journalists have it, they simply have to learn how to use it properly."What is crucial is that all the things journalists know about truth, accuracy, checking out…
Location-based social media and news organizations

7 Feb 2010 | 9:02 pm

The Old Media New Tricks site offers three tips for news organizations looking to enter the location-based social media sphere. They're basic, smart and compelling.1. Create multimedia tours with a raft of local landmarks and must-do things.2. Post links to reviews on location pages.3. Participate in sales initiatives on location-based sites.As location-based media develops in the months ahead, news organizations will need to examine how --- and not if --- they participate.
One Young World survey: What young people want

7 Feb 2010 | 6:50 am

A study being released this week at the One Young World conference in London aims to identify trends among young people.Some of them worth noting:1. Immediacy.2. Local trumps global and is intense.3. Transparency.4. Cheap or free for most things, but will pay a lot for what they want.5. Entertainment required in everything.6. Environmental authenticity.7. Not left-wing, just anti-multinational.8. Media savvy, suspicious of bias.9. Indulgent but aware of the value of altruism.
comScore: Online video continues its ascent

7 Feb 2010 | 6:25 am

The boom continues for online video in the United States. The audience measurement firm comScore says 178 million Americans watched video online in December.Some 33.2 billion videos were seen in the month. YouTube is the largest video outfit on the Web, with more than 13 billion viewed, but it was the first month in which Hulu served up more than one billion views.The math is astounding: The 178 million watched an average of 187 videos in the month.
Steve Buttry on managing Twitter for journalists

5 Feb 2010 | 2:22 am

The social media application, Twitter, is being treated little differently than the arrival of Facebook, the boom of the Web or the introduction of email. On the surface, without much experience, it appears to occupy, rather than nourish time.Journalist and consultant Steve Buttry has a good post on the challenge of making the most of Twitter in the least amount of time.He has some general principles:1. Don't drink the entire stream. Use some tools to filter it.2. Integrate Twitter into your day and ensure you stay disciplined in using it.3. Use it as a news source, with your cell phone, and…

Nieman Journalism Lab
From Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics”: How paidContent found its niche

Ken Doctor

9 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

[Here's another excerpt from Ken Doctor's new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, Ken's Q&A with Rafat Ali, who runs media-world must-read paidContent. —Josh] Rafat Ali is founder, publisher and editor of ContentNext Media. Reuters described its success well: “ContentNext’s flagship paidContent, founded in 2002, has quickly established itself as a must-read among executives in the media and digital media sector.” PaidContent has indeed a daily stop for those involved in the business of news, media, and entertainment…
Institutions, networks, and policy directions for a healthy journalism

C.W. Anderson

9 Feb 2010 | 8:00 am

Today I’m attending Making Media Work, a half-day panel in Washington, which is the kickoff event for the New America Foundation’s Knight Media Policy Initiative. (You may remember the announcement that they were hiring part-time fellows a few months back.) It should be an interesting discussion; for starters, the talk today is already starting to break down the cast of “usual suspects” we normally see at these sorts of events, but I also think the NAF initiative has the potential to become a big deal in the journalism policy world. I’ll be sure to let you know…
The other nonprofit journalism: Free-market groups hire reporters to uncover “wasteful spending”

Laura McGann

9 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

It’s been speculated that as newspapers’ decline leaves a void in watchdog journalism, nonprofit groups would come along to fill it at least part of it in. But not all those groups are going to share a newspaper’s approach to journalism. Last fall, the conservative Goldwater Institute hired a former newspaper reporter to “expose government corruption and abuse.” Now, at least two other conservative organizations — Americans for Prosperity, the libertarian organization backing the Tea Party movement, and the Yankee Institute, a free market think tank in…
From Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics”: What Phil Balboni learned about online journalism from cable news

Ken Doctor

8 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

[I'm very pleased to say that Ken Doctor, one of the smartest minds out there on the business side of journalism's digital future, is going to be joining us here at the Nieman Journalism Lab. You'll see his pieces on the economics of news here weekly. But at the moment, Ken is focused on the release of his new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, we'll be running three brief excerpts from the book, each a Q&A with a leading journalist whose career has been shifted by the Internet. First up is GlobalPost CEO Phil Balboni.
Why Wikipedia beats Wikinews as a collaborative journalism project

Zachary M. Seward

8 Feb 2010 | 7:00 am

When big news breaks, you can be sure that Wikipedia will cover the hell out of it. Not so much on Wikinews, the collaborative-journalism project that has faltered since launching in December 2004. For some insight on why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews, I talked to Andrew Lih, who teaches at USC’s journalism school and wrote The Wikipedia Revolution. As you’ll see in the video above, Lih said that Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects than the discrete articles found on Wikinews.

State of the Fourth Estate
Two Lessons to Learn from Sean Payton

Dave Levy

8 Feb 2010 | 9:17 am

The Saints win, and unless you are from Indianapolis, it was hard to cheer against them. These are completely rehashed story lines, but it’s a brief, Monday Motivation, courtesy of Saints Head Coach, Sean Payton. Two things he proved last night: 1) Play to Win. I’ll avoid going Nate Silver on everyone, but the 538 Genius/Sabremetrician is completely right. From a net point standard, the choice to go on 4th and 1 with the 2nd Quarter running down, mathematically, was always the right call. 2) Take a Chance. Going big has never been a trait of Super Bowl teams. Once the Saints got…
[Quote of the Day] The White House & The iPodization of News

Dave Levy

1 Feb 2010 | 4:59 am

One theory the White House is testing is that people are beginning to treat their news like they treat their iPod – they consume it on demand, in segments. If people weren’t able to watch [the State of the Union] at 9 o’clock on Wednesday night, they can watch it on YouTube whenever they want. Or if they don’t have an hour to watch it, we have cut it up into the section on jobs, the section on energy, the section on health care, and then you can just watch that part. And we’re tracking it to get a sense of how quickly we’re moving to on-demand media…
[Weekend Treat] The Legend of Apollo Anton Ohno

Dave Levy

30 Jan 2010 | 4:56 am

I took a cheap shot in my most recent Mediaite column at the Soul-Patched Speed Skater, and I don’t know if he really deserved it. In order to make up for that, I present the following comedy presentation of some of my old classmates at Boston College. The two-part series, “On Thin Ice: The Legend of Apollo Anton Ohno.” Enjoy.
NBC’s $250m Vancouver Loss [Now at Mediaite]

Dave Levy

29 Jan 2010 | 2:40 pm

My newest column is up over at Mediaite. The topic this time? How NBC could have seen that $250 million Olympic loss coming. Here’s a quick excerpt: [NBC Sports head Dick] Ebersol may hope that people have blocked out the downturn in 2006 thanks to the Olympic success in 2008 – but that credit should go to Michael Phelps and Michael Phelps’s Abs. The Summer Olympics have negligible competition when lined up near the February TV landscape, and there was also some really convenient scheduling: swimming events held in the morning in Beijing were live in American primetime, and brand…
[Quote of the Day] Gold Medal Value

Dave Levy

28 Jan 2010 | 7:00 am

“We told the people we’re not going to be involved anymore because there’s such financial losses associated with those TV contracts.” Dick Ebersol, September 2003, on why NBC was shifting their sports investments away from programming from the National Football League and Major League Baseball. Reports earlier this week indicate that NBC is set to lose close to $250 million. Look for a longer column on this in the next few days…

Nieman Journalism Lab
From Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics”: How paidContent found its niche

Ken Doctor

9 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

[Here's another excerpt from Ken Doctor's new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, Ken's Q&A with Rafat Ali, who runs media-world must-read paidContent. —Josh] Rafat Ali is founder, publisher and editor of ContentNext Media. Reuters described its success well: “ContentNext’s flagship paidContent, founded in 2002, has quickly established itself as a must-read among executives in the media and digital media sector.” PaidContent has indeed a daily stop for those involved in the business of news, media, and entertainment…
Institutions, networks, and policy directions for a healthy journalism

C.W. Anderson

9 Feb 2010 | 8:00 am

Today I’m attending Making Media Work, a half-day panel in Washington, which is the kickoff event for the New America Foundation’s Knight Media Policy Initiative. (You may remember the announcement that they were hiring part-time fellows a few months back.) It should be an interesting discussion; for starters, the talk today is already starting to break down the cast of “usual suspects” we normally see at these sorts of events, but I also think the NAF initiative has the potential to become a big deal in the journalism policy world. I’ll be sure to let you know…
The other nonprofit journalism: Free-market groups hire reporters to uncover “wasteful spending”

Laura McGann

9 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

It’s been speculated that as newspapers’ decline leaves a void in watchdog journalism, nonprofit groups would come along to fill it at least part of it in. But not all those groups are going to share a newspaper’s approach to journalism. Last fall, the conservative Goldwater Institute hired a former newspaper reporter to “expose government corruption and abuse.” Now, at least two other conservative organizations — Americans for Prosperity, the libertarian organization backing the Tea Party movement, and the Yankee Institute, a free market think tank in…
From Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics”: What Phil Balboni learned about online journalism from cable news

Ken Doctor

8 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

[I'm very pleased to say that Ken Doctor, one of the smartest minds out there on the business side of journalism's digital future, is going to be joining us here at the Nieman Journalism Lab. You'll see his pieces on the economics of news here weekly. But at the moment, Ken is focused on the release of his new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, we'll be running three brief excerpts from the book, each a Q&A with a leading journalist whose career has been shifted by the Internet. First up is GlobalPost CEO Phil Balboni.
Why Wikipedia beats Wikinews as a collaborative journalism project

Zachary M. Seward

8 Feb 2010 | 7:00 am

When big news breaks, you can be sure that Wikipedia will cover the hell out of it. Not so much on Wikinews, the collaborative-journalism project that has faltered since launching in December 2004. For some insight on why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews, I talked to Andrew Lih, who teaches at USC’s journalism school and wrote The Wikipedia Revolution. As you’ll see in the video above, Lih said that Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects than the discrete articles found on Wikinews.

Failure Magazine's Feature Articles
Naomi Klein, No Logo

jzasky@aol.com

4 Feb 2010 | 1:22 pm

Ten years after the initial release of “No Logo,” Naomi Klein continues to provide invaluable marketing advice to the corporate world.
The Playboy Book

jzasky@aol.com

30 Jan 2010 | 2:07 pm

Historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo methodically combed through hundreds of issues of Playboy magazine to write her book. Take a look at what she has to say about Playboy.
Fault-y Predictions

jzasky@aol.com

25 Jan 2010 | 10:06 am

In “Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction,” seismologist Susan Hough of the Southern California Earthquake Center explains why the ability to predict earthquakes remains elusive.
A World Without Ice

jzasky@aol.com

11 Jan 2010 | 11:06 pm

In the following Failure interview, geophysicist Henry Pollack talks ice, nature’s “most sensitive and unambiguous indicator of climate change.”
The Museum of Bad Art

jzasky@aol.com

10 Jan 2010 | 10:34 am

The Museum of Bad Art features the Mana Lisa and hundreds of other paintings too bad to be ignored.

Bonnier News
Bink: “It’s time to see Google as our biggest competitor for advertising money.”

Niklas Sessler

9 Feb 2010 | 2:00 am

Since the beginning of 2010 some 60 people from different Bonnier companies came together at Bink, a new web company in new offices in Stockholm. The company is the first under the new business segment Bonnier Digital. Martin Ahrend, CEO of Bink and Mats Göthlin, CTO Bink & Bonnier Digital are in charge. Photo: Magnus Skoglöf "The mission is to make profitable those Bonnier websites that are financed through advertising," says Ahrend. "But it is important to remember we are not a shared service center for the web. We work as partners and we have had different discussions with the…
Three SF films compete in the Berlinale

Niklas Sessler

3 Feb 2010 | 12:45 am

Three films distributed by SF Film have been chosen to compete in the 60th Berlin International Film Festival – the Berlinale. Babak Najafi's Sebbe will compete in the Generation 14plus competition, while Roman Polansiki's Ghost Writer and Noah Baumbach's Greenberg will show in the main competition. The festival runs February 11-21. "We are very proud to have two films as part of the main competition, as well as Babak Najafi's feature film debut Sebbe in the Generation 14plus competition," says Helena Stenberg, spokeswoman for foreign films for SF Film. "It's an impressive feature…
Nightline Story featuring Bonnier

Linnea Pontvik

29 Jan 2010 | 1:11 am

PopSci editor-in-chief Mark Jannot and R&D's Sara Öhrvall comments on iPad An estimated 4.15 million viewers tuned into ABC's Nightline last night featuring a story on Apple's new iPad with reaction from Bonnier. Nightline talked to Sara Öhrvall, head of Bonnier Research & Development, and Mark Jannot, editor-in-chief of Popular Science, on the reader experience and the device's potential impact on the publishing industry. See it here. In addition to the Nightline feature, both Wall Street Journal and New York Times reached out to Bonnier for reaction.
Swedish Cinema Record

Niklas Sessler

27 Jan 2010 | 12:48 pm

Swedish cinemas attracted a record audience during the past Christmas and New Year. Visits at SF Bio cinemas were up 32% compared to last year "The best thing is that the audience wanted to see a very large variety of films," says Jan Bernhardsson, CEO SF Bio. "We notice the desire of the audience to gather together in front of really good stories." Among the films that drew much public during the weekends are Avatar, both in 3D and conventional 35 mm film, Sherlock Holmes, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Bright Star and New Moon. During…
Twitter names Parenting.com a Suggested User in the Family Category

Linnea Pontvik

27 Jan 2010 | 7:00 am

The social networking site Twitter has listed Parenting.com among the best sites to follow in the family category in its newly-revamped official suggested user list. Fellow Bonnier title Saveur was also named to the list in the food & drink category. Read more about the suggestion list in the Twitter blog.When logged in to Twitter, you can see the Family list here or the Food & Drink list here.

Life At Bonnier
Ads Everywhere at the Movies

Niklas Sessler

8 Feb 2010 | 3:52 am

If you think movie theater ads are the short films shown a few minutes before the movie starts, think again. For the 70 percent of Swedish moviegoers who start their experience on the web at sf.se, the ad experience begins there already. Next, in the theater lobby along with the usual posters, advertisers also might have product samples, demonstrations (such as computer games), free candy or even a car that's been driven through the front doors. Once inside the actual theater, there can be advertiser-sponsored events — you could win a drawing with your ticket number. Then come the…
Books for the Soul

Niklas Sessler

4 Feb 2010 | 1:10 am

Interested in psychology, philosophy and life’s big questions? Bokförlaget Bonnier Existens, the newest addition to Swedish Bonnierförlagen, has all the books for your spiritual needs. "Bokförlaget Bonnier Existens is a merger of two previous imprints, Viva, which was a part of Forum, and LevNu, which was part of W&W," says Ann Pålsson, publisher of Bokförlaget Bonnier Existens. "When we went through a reorganization with Bonnierförlagen, we decided that we shouldn't compete internally, and since Viva and LevNu had a similar publication list, especially within…
Feber – the Modern Magazine

Niklas Sessler

1 Feb 2010 | 5:46 am

"Gas pedal problem bigger than expected", "Skarsgard in new movie", "Norwegian Cessna landing", plus a teaser on Italian fashion designer Valentino's spring and summer collection. Few magazines could succeed with such a broad mix of cover headlines – but Feber – which means Fever in English – can. This past week for the first time the magazine boasted 150,000 unique visitors Feber.se calls itself "Sweden's biggest news-related blog network." Since the beginning of 2010 it has been a part of Bonnier Tidskrifter's Digital Media apartment. The editorial staff of three…
BOOKyourlife with James Patterson and Liza Marklund

Linnea Pontvik

28 Jan 2010 | 7:24 am

Bestselling authors Liza Marklund and James Patterson met with Bonnier Creative's Carina Nunstedt in Stockholm to discuss their new novel Postcard Killers. 200 persons came to listen. This was the sixth seminar in BOOKyourlife seminar series.
Bonnier Creative Enters New Phase

Niklas Sessler

28 Jan 2010 | 12:46 am

Growing from a staff of two to about ten. Expanding from a basic Production agency to a combined Production and Event agency, with plenty of exciting assignments. Bonnier Creative’s Head of Creative, Louise Fallenius has a fully booked calendar for 2010 Photo: Christian Habetzeder "We're sitting on an editorial treasure here at Bonnier Tidskrifter, but sometimes advertisers don't simply want to buy the usual full- and half-page ads. They're looking for something else," says Louise Fallenius. "And that's where we come in." Bonnier Creative started almost exactly one year ago, in January…

R&D Blog
R&D Summary - week 5

Björn Jeffery

5 Feb 2010 | 11:52 am

As R&D goes West, they rant about trends, meet entrepreneurs and fall in love with Gowalla. What a week! Or two actually, since we skipped last weeks summary. The reason for that was that we were all busy in San Francisco, where we spent most of the last two weeks. Apart from visiting our office there (safely ensconced within Weldon Owen), we had a few workshops and met a bunch of inspiring people.A few days was spent planning our annual trend report Media Map - trends and post-it notes were flying all over the place. We had all done a lot of initial research and the time had come to make…
Best links - week 5

Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

4 Feb 2010 | 2:17 am

A random mix of things we have read and liked this past week. Is Amazon Building a Superkindle? (NY Times, via @benjaminglaser) In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits (Wired) Apple Pushing TV Networks To Slash Prices On iTunes (Business Insider) ITV Looks to Pay-Per-View to Restore Profits (The Telegraph) Brightcove Debuts TV Everywhere Solution (Brightcove) What do Indie Gaming's All-Stars think of Apple's iPad? (Boing Boing) Publisher Wins Fight With Amazon Over E-Books (NY Times) Is the Day of Tiny Ads Finally Here? (NY…
Recently written about the future of Mag+ in an iPad world

Björn Jeffery

29 Jan 2010 | 9:55 am

A few interesting press clips about Mag+ related to the launch of the iPad. Screenshot from ABC News Björn Jeffery, Bonnier R&D, giving his view on the iPad and Mag+ in Swedish TV4.Mark Jannot, Popular Science, and Sara Öhrvall, Bonnier R&D about the iPad future for publishers at Nightline, ABCDavid Carr, New York Times, interviews Sara Öhrvall, about the business potential for Bonnier, New York Times The iPad represents a cross road for media publishers, thoughts by Sara Öhrvall in Wall Street JournalMark Jannot is questioning the lack of focus on magazines in iPad presentation…
R&D Summary - week 3

Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

22 Jan 2010 | 8:25 am

This is what Bonnier R&D's been up to this week. Long lost Alexander Jamal is back from his paternal leave. He is currently deeply involved in some very interesting projects deriving from the Mag+-concept. He has also been busy meeting entrepreneurs, some of which had some very interesting proposals. Today Emil headed the first ever "R&D think tank", a great internal forum for launching ideas that we normally do not have time to discuss. In this weeks meeting, we discussed new ways of telling stories in a digital environment. Storybird is one example. Further, we covered topics…
Best links - week 3

Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

22 Jan 2010 | 6:22 am

A random mix of things we have read and liked this past week. EBay's Profit Rises Sharply, Aided by Sale of Skype EBay earnings soared in Q4 2009, fueled by growth in the PayPal business, the sale of Skype and holiday season shopping, writes NY Times. The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site Paywalls, paywalls, and even more paywalls. Now, NY Times is next, reports...NY Times. Jeff Jarvis has written a great blog post regarding his view on paywalls. Should we build relationships or charge for them is the main question. Kids Spend Every Waking Minute in…