Journalism

  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Columbia Journalism Review

  • Friday Links: Smart Money, Rodney King, Dilution

    20 Nov 2009 | 2:46 pm
    Remember that $500 million program for small businesses Goldman Sachs announced along with its apology earlier this week? It was splashed on C1 of The Wall Street Journal and A1 of The New York Times, which wrote that "the bank said Tuesday that it would spend $500 million — or about 3 percent of the $16.7 billion it...

  • Bloomberg Finds the Fed on Bubble Watch

    20 Nov 2009 | 2:31 pm
    Bloomberg gets a nice scoop that the Federal Reserve is apparently worried about the new bubble it's inflating. Federal Reserve officials are stepping up scrutiny of the biggest U.S. banks to ensure the lenders can withstand a reversal of soaring global-asset prices, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Global stocks are up 71 percent from March. At...

  • Comments of the Week

    20 Nov 2009 | 2:25 pm
    Every Friday, we excerpt some of the most insightful, articulate, interesting, and entertaining comments we receive each week. Think we’ve missed something? Well…comment! The Newest Trend: ‘Rogue’-ing Megan Garber’s decidedly defiant take on Sarah Palin’s “sexist” Newsweek cover generated a high volume of responses on everything from Palin’s reception in the media, to the evaluation of “sexism” in our...

  • Greg Craig and Transparency

    20 Nov 2009 | 1:43 pm
    Time’s Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf have a months long tick-tock chronicling the steps and missteps of soon-to-be-former White House Counsel Greg Craig. There’s too much good stuff in there to bother with a block quote. In essence, the article lays out how Craig, who thought that both the rule of law and Obama’s campaign rhetoric pointed...

  • Well, It May Deserve an Award in Something

    20 Nov 2009 | 11:12 am
    Memo to Sean Hannity, who is calling for James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Andrew Breitbart to get a “journalism award” for their video sting of ACORN: Generally, when in possession of what one believes to be newsworthy information, the journalistic thing to do is get it out to the public—not attempt to blackmail the attorney general. <script src="http://video.foxnews.com/embed.js?id=11754444&w=400&h=249"...
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Poynter Online

  • 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…

  • Outburst at Obama Prompts Discussion about Covering Cultural Divides

    16 Oct 2009 | 10:21 am
    Remember before the Summer of 2009, when we were still living in post-racial America? Between the arrest of Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates Jr. in July, and Joe Wilson's "You Lie" comment during Obama's health care speech last month, it's tough to figure out how to have a productiveconversation about race, whether in the news media or in a classroom.Philip Rucker of The Washington Post illustrated this idea recently when traveling along the road that divides Wilson's (mostly white) district and Democratic Rep. James E. Clyburn's (mostly black) district. Rucker found that views on…

  • Solo Operator of Native American Times Passes One-Year Mark

    9 Sep 2009 | 3:55 pm
    When Lisa Snell left her job as a graphic artist in 2007, she didn't expect that a year later she would become the managing editor and owner of a Native American paper. The job demands almost 100 hours of Snell's week and requires her to juggle the roles of designer, writer, editor, online publisher and more -- all without getting paid. But Snell, who just celebrated her one-year anniversary at the paper, says the experience has been both personally and professionally gratifying. Publishing the paper, she said, has been a meaningful way to give back to the greater Native American community.

  • What Does the Future of Diversity Look Like?

    14 Aug 2009 | 8:51 am
    Whither goes diversity in the age of layoffs?Even in this season of conventions featuring journalists of color, the question seems overshadowed by the rising ranks of the unemployed. People who have spent decades advocating for justice, fairness and accuracy in U.S. newsrooms are preoccupied with cutting staffs, rethinking coverage, or knitting their own parachutes.And in the enterprising universe of dotcoms dotting the landscape of journalism's uncertain future, the spirit of diversity is taking a beating. So we're left to ponder a different question with new urgency: What does diversity…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    BuzzMachine

  • Newspapers want enemies, not friends

    Jeff Jarvis
    19 Nov 2009 | 3:20 pm
    On today’s On Point, Michael Wolff, Steve Brill, and I talked about Murdoch and Google and the show’s blog quoted me thusly: But News Corp isn’t the only one making the mistake here. I think the mistake that Google has made in this – and I’m an admirer of Google, I wrote a book to that effect – but I think that Google thought that they could become friends with the newspaper industry. And the newspaper industry isn’t looking for friends. They’re looking for enemies they can blame for the problems that are actually their own from the last fifteen years of inaction in…

  • Gained something in the translation

    Jeff Jarvis
    19 Nov 2009 | 2:57 pm
    Tweet: A tweet paraphrased my link-economy line and showed me I’ve been saying more than I thought I have. ** In Twitter today, one @rpaskin paraphrased something I’ve been saying – and said again in my talk at Web 2.0 Expo Tuesday (generously covered in that link by Aneta Hall). My line has been that in the link economy, value comes from the creator of the content and from the creator of a public (formerly known as an audience). That is, Rupert’s wrong with he says that Google takes content; it gives attention. Anyway, @rpaskin tweeted this: “In a link economy,…

  • Podcast madness

    Jeff Jarvis
    17 Nov 2009 | 8:21 pm
    I had the privilege of being on This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, John Dvorak, and Baratunde Thurston right after appearing on This Week in Google with the aforementioned Leo, Gina Trapani, and Mary Hodder. Much fun.

  • The opportunity of bankruptcy

    Jeff Jarvis
    17 Nov 2009 | 7:50 pm
    Tweet: How bankruptcy can help a newspaper get theah from heah. Don’t squander it. ** I fear that Tribune Company – and other newspaper companies – will come out of bankruptcy having squandered the opportunity it presents to rebuild from the ground up. At the New Business Models for (Local) News Summit at CUNY last week, my friend and mentor Jim Willse, late of the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, asked us to create a model for an existing news organization to morph into what we proposed as the new structure. That’d be painful and thus controversial, I said, to which Willse…

  • ’nuff said

    Jeff Jarvis
    17 Nov 2009 | 7:28 am
    (Thanks, Ed Reading)
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Media Matters for America - Latest Items

  • Right-wing media put Obama on the couch for inch-deep analysis

    20 Nov 2009 | 12:45 pm
    Right-wing media figures, including Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and The Washington Times' Wesley Pruden, have in recent days attacked President Obama while discussing his mental state. While claiming, "I'm not asking you to psychoanalyze the president," Beck asked psychiatrist and Fox News contributor Keith Ablow, "Are we crazy for saying something is not right?"; Savage offered a psychological diagnosis of Obama, claiming that the president has "deep psychological problems" and "deep-seated inferiority feelings."Right-wing media figures discuss what's "wrong" with Obama, identify "deep…

  • Morning Joe repeatedly airs Lieberman's false claim on public option

    20 Nov 2009 | 12:19 pm
    On November 20, MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough uncritically repeated Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I-CT) claim that "if you look at the campaign last year, the presidential, you can't find a mention of public option. It was added after the election as a part of what we normally consider health insurance reform." In fact, both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed a public health insurance plan during the Democratic primary, and Obama continued to campaign on a health care reform plan that included a public option through the November 2008 election.Morning…

  • Rove memory loss: Op-ed accuses Obama of "unusual" use of Friday news dumps

    20 Nov 2009 | 11:44 am
    In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, former Bush official Karl Rove criticized the "degree" to which the Obama administration has released "news on contentious issues late on Friday," adding that "such tactics ... can look disingenuous if they undercut public debate on substantive policy changes"; later on Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade cited Rove's column and asserted that the administration's use of this tactic means it did not have to "confront the questioners." In fact, the Bush administration made numerous substantial and often controversial announcements on Fridays, including news…

  • Quick Fact: Palin links nonbinding mammogram guidelines to "death panels"

    20 Nov 2009 | 11:29 am
    On Laura Ingraham's radio show, Sarah Palin linked a task force's recent recommendations on breast cancer screenings to the widely debunked smear -- propagated by Palin -- that health care reform will include "death panels." Palin fearmongered about death panels despite the fact that the recommendations are not legally binding on health care providers or insurers. From the November 19 edition of Talk Radio Network's The Laura Ingraham Show: INGRAHAM: What's your take? PALIN: I think that you have been brilliant on this, because the mammogram recommendation -- this whole issue is demonstrating…

  • Quick Fact: Gateway Pundit claims Senate will vote on health care reform bill after "10 Hours" of debate

    20 Nov 2009 | 11:22 am
    Trumpeting a Drudge Report headline, Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft claimed that Senate Democrats "will only deliberate 10 hourson [sic] SATURDAY before they vote to nationalize one-sixth of the US economy." In fact, the Senate vote scheduled for Saturday is a vote on a cloture motion -- which would allow the full Senate to begin debate on the health care reform bill -- not a vote on whether to pass the bill, as Hoft suggested. From a November 19 Gateway Pundit post: Fact: Senate to vote Saturday on whether to debate the health care bill, not on whether to pass the bill As the Los Angeles Times…
 
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    NYT: Open

  • Behind the Code: Times APIs

    By MARCI WINDSHEIMER
    4 Nov 2009 | 12:36 pm
    NYTimes.com developer Nick Thuesen recently chatted with the Yahoo Developer Network about his work with Times APIs, TimesPeople and more.

  • First 5,000 Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud

    By EVAN SANDHAUS and ROB LARSON
    29 Oct 2009 | 1:07 pm
    Today we are pleased to announce the launch of http://data.nytimes.com and the release of 5,000 person name subject headings as Linked Open Data published under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.

  • Yahoo Open Hack NYC

    By NICK THUESEN
    13 Oct 2009 | 1:02 pm
    Yahoo's Open Hack Day NYC has come and gone. I'm happy to say it was one of the best "hack" conferences I've ever attended.

  • YQL + NYT = Easy Times APIs

    By MARCI WINDSHEIMER
    7 Oct 2009 | 10:56 am
    Now you can access Times APIs with Yahoo Query Language.

  • Show Me the Code: NYT Trender

    By CHRIS UTZ
    29 Sep 2009 | 11:25 am
    This is the first in a series of posts featuring demo applications that will help you learn how to use Times APIs. We'll look at NYT Trender, which showcases the Times Article Search API.
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    The Linchpen

  • New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit 2009 live blog

    Greg Linch
    9 Nov 2009 | 6:21 am
    I’m in DC today for the New Media Women Entrepreneur summit. Here’s a live blog that’s also pulling in tweets with the hashtag #nmwe. New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit 2009

  • Ideas for visiting Virginia Commonwealth University graduate journalism class

    Greg Linch
    22 Oct 2009 | 10:00 pm
    I’ll be trekking down to Richmond, the capitol of the commonwealth I now call home, to speak with a graduate-level online journalism class on Friday evening. My esteemed Publish2 colleague (and all-around awesome dude) Ryan Sholin was not able to attend and I’ve been invited to discuss what we do, how journalism is changing and whatever other topics can fit into the session. Maybe I’ll even throw in some of the ol’ tips. As would be expected, I posed a question on Twitter about what I should discuss. ckanal: @greglinch Awesome, congrats! Twitter, personal branding +…

  • Videojournalism brain dump: Some advice I’ve picked up over the past few years

    Greg Linch
    10 Aug 2009 | 5:02 pm
    Poynter College Fellows win again, this time on video. Seriously, that e-mail group is inspiring me. And, yes, I was asked directly. I don’t just randomly spout off like this. Ok, not THIS much. Thanks #pcf09 kids. This is in response to a request for advice on teaching a video workshop for high school journalists [Update: to clarify, they already have some video recording and editing experience]. One earlier point I made in the thread was about Web vs. TV. And with that... Ok, so in general, mostly big-picture tips for videojournalism. Quick follow-up, I shouldn’t have said…

  • Poynter fellows’ e-mail thread: Response to a “social media” question

    Greg Linch
    6 Aug 2009 | 5:11 pm
    One of my fellow former fellows asked our pcf09 Google Group about social media, singling me out near the end of her message. After I wrote this response (sent 6:33 p.m. CT), I thought “sharing is caring,” so here you go! Whoa, I kinda feel on the spot. Well, um… I’m going to cop out and defer to some smarter people/sites/articles except to say that I think some of the most important things to understand, for this group of already amazing storytellers and journalists, are the fundamentals of what’s changed/how things continue to change in news/media/journalism…

  • Dallas Morning News mid-internship recap and John F. Kennedy project introduction

    Greg Linch
    21 Jul 2009 | 8:34 pm
    I can’t believe my Dallas Morning News internship is more than half over.  It’s been great so far, specifically because of the freedom and opportunities I’ve been afforded. Here’s are some highlights so far (Update: now with links!): I'm standing outside the Dallas Morning News building. Working on a newsroom social media strategy, best practices and how-to guide with Travis Hudson (more on this in a future post) Reporting, including a front page story on the DTV transition and following the story of an abandoned newborn Managing the Facebook page Occasionally…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Blogslot

  • more lowercase silliness

    Bill
    20 Nov 2009 | 10:31 am
    Filter magazine's review of the Regina Spektor album "Far" begins:The lowercase 'f' in far is telling.No, it isn't.The review continues to lowercase the album title (and, in an extra added bonus blow to reading comprehension, uses neither italics nor quotation marks), presumably because that's the way it is on the album cover, while uppercasing "Regina Spektor" (also lowercase on the album cover) and "Begin to Hope," a previous Spektor album whose cover art also lowercases both title and artist. ("Begin to Hope" and the other pre-"Far" albums merit italics.)If you're going to be silly, at…

  • Downs and Ups

    Bill
    4 Nov 2009 | 7:43 am
    This sentence from my own paper contains an obvious problem:About 10 p.m. on July 9, Gary Condit and his lawyer met lead Detective Ralph Durant in the dimly lit parking lot behind the Giant supermarket on Wisconsin Avenue near the National Cathedral. Cooler heads had prevailed, and Condit had agreed to give a DNA sample.Durant's title is detective, and so he's Detective Ralph Durant, but in this instance the article was not using his title -- it was simply pointing out that he was the lead detective on the case. The discrete units here are lead detective and Ralph Durant, not lead and…

  • You Can Write, but You Can't Edit

    Bill
    2 Nov 2009 | 9:54 am
    Not Regina Spektor's best effort by a long shot, but, hey, she was nice enough to attempt a theme song for us. Off-topic, she has some truly amazing stuff.

  • If You Libel, You May Be Liable

    Bill
    29 Oct 2009 | 8:09 am
    A publisher says -- and news outlets are repeating -- that the release of a tell-all book about the NBA by Tim Donaghy, the former referee who ended up in prison after a betting scandal, was canceled because of "concerns over potential liability."The concept that the Triumph Books representative had in mind, I believe, was "libel."Because "liable" and "libel" sound a lot alike, people seem to confuse them, or at least think they're related. It's not uncommon to hear a copy editor say something like "If we say he was arrested for murder, we'll be liable!"The words are not related,…

  • Say, Say, Say

    Bill
    28 Oct 2009 | 8:16 am
    You can't say something outrageous. Well, you can, but that would mean something else. You can say something is outrageous, or you can call something outrageous. Or, in the headline shortcut that someone at Reuters or Google or somewhere abused, Iraq bombings can be 'outrageous,' Obama says.And as for the pirate headline, well, that degree of "says" abuse is a new one on me.As we tweet and RSS and SMS and MMS and try to broadcast news to ever-tinier devices, of course, every character is sacred, but there is a baseline of literacy below which reputable publishers should not stoop, and the…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    PBS: MediaShift

  • 5Across: Social Media Marketing 101

    19 Nov 2009 | 2:41 pm
    There's a new series of demands being made in company meetings everywhere: "What is our social media strategy? What are we doing on Facebook and Twitter? I want followers and fans, and I want them now!" But before companies large and small -- as well as non-profits and charities -- jump into social media, they need to take a deep breath and think about it. What are their goals? What kind of return on investment will they get? Even though it's free to set up fan pages and feeds, there's a time investment that may or may not pay off. On this episode of 5Across, I convened a group of social…

  • Profiles in Courage: Social Media Editors at Big Media Outlets

    19 Nov 2009 | 10:00 am
    During a recent trip to see an editor I work with at The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper in Canada, I passed by the newspaper's cafeteria. My editor looked in and pointed at a man who was sitting with his back to us. "There's Mathew Ingram, doing his office hours," he told me. Ingram is the Globe and Mail's communities editor, a job he took on after being a technology reporter, columnist and blogger for the paper. My editor explained that Ingram's "office hours" consist of him making himself available in the cafeteria so that anyone can come see him and talk about Twitter, user comments,…

  • The Shutdown of UWIRE and the Implications for College Media

    18 Nov 2009 | 12:04 pm
    Last month, UWIRE.com, an edited college media newswire, mysteriously vanished from the Internet. "UWIRE, a popular service that aggregated articles from student newspapers across the country, promoting student journalism both within higher education and to the outside world, has disappeared," wrote Simmi Aujla for the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month. Today, visitors to the site receive an error message, and the people running the service have had little to say publicly. As a result, there has been intense speculation about the site, along with complaints from student editors…

  • Young Political Candidates Confronted by Digital Past on Facebook

    17 Nov 2009 | 12:42 pm
    Last spring Emanuel Pleitez, 26, ran for California's 32nd Congressional seat in a special election to replace Hilda Solis, the new secretary of labor. During the campaign, one of Pleitez's opponents, California State Sen. Gil Cedillo, discovered photos from Pleitez's Facebook profile that showed Pleitez hanging around with various women at parties. The Cedillo campaign used the photos as the basis for a mailer that was sent to homes in the district. The mailer presented Pleitez as a partier, drinker and womanizer, among other smears. Pleitez admits the negative attack probably cost him some…

  • DigiFest Examines DIY to Big Budget Special Effects for Films

    16 Nov 2009 | 1:39 pm
    Apocalyptic visions and alien invasions descended upon Hollywood earlier this month, to the collective delight of the digital media industry. At the American Film Institute's DigiFest, which was produced by the AFI Digital Content Lab, attendees experienced two days of presentations and screenings focused on new media platforms and creative storytelling using digital innovations. The event spotlighted advanced productions from digital artists, as well as groundbreaking efforts from unknown content creators that are pushing the boundaries of what we perceive as big-budget effects. The Purchase…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    E-Media Tidbits

  • Testing CUNY's New Business Models with Adjusted Assumptions

    19 Nov 2009 | 7:29 am
    Amid the rhetoric over how to support the business of journalism, the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism has taken a plunge by creating models of what a news network on the Web might look like with hard, if optimistic, numbers.Broad and multi-tiered spreadsheets filled with detail build upon each other until at the bottom, they predict handsome profit margins for small, medium and large blogs, as well as a larger network that might aggregate them and have its own editorial and business staff. In the main cases, the sites are supported by advertising supplemented with…

  • Don't Give Up on Online Video Yet

    18 Nov 2009 | 3:34 am
    Poor video. For a while, he was the hot boyfriend of the online world. His buddy, pre-roll advertising, was touted as the way to save the industry. Now, like a guy who dumped us, people are trashing-talking video content on news sites and telling all their girlfriends that video on the Web fails to perform.I think it's time for some relationship counseling. While clearly there are video efforts that have failed or been abandoned, declaring it all a failure doesn't accurately reflect what's going on in the industry. CNN.com is dropping its live online-only newscasts, but has also said that…

  • CUNY Conference Shows Journalists Must Understand Business

    13 Nov 2009 | 3:02 am
    What a chasm to overcome. One journalist tweeted that the financial spreadsheets being shown were overwhelming, that "I don't do numbers." Someone else in the room quipped that business isn't as much fun as journalism. A third admitted, while watching a spreadsheet presentation, that he didn't understand EBITDA, a key financial term being used.All of them, if they want to run a news business, need to get to work. The gathering was the third annual "New Business Models for News" conference at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, and the goal was, well, to try to…

  • Google Latitude Adds Features with Potential for Journalists

    11 Nov 2009 | 11:14 am
    Google Latitude, a service that works with your mobile phone to enable people to see where you are, has launched 2 new services with interesting potential for mobile journalism: Location History and Location Alerts. RELATED "Google Latitude Comes to the iPhone," Lifehacker Location History (shown above) allows you to "store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations. You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order."There are obvious possibilities here to add editorial information to this map. If you're covering a parade, a marathon or a…

  • News Sites Must Use Alerts and Tools to Help Readers Find Content

    10 Nov 2009 | 7:24 am
    I used to cover tennis, was in the stands as Andre Agassi teared up after his final tennis match as a pro, and can be a bit of a fanatic about the sport. So when I learned recently that The Times newspaper in the U.K. was going to carry excerpts of Agassi's revelatory autobiography "Open," I immediately logged on.The Times had a story, based on the book, about his admission to using crystal meth while playing, but hadn't yet posted the excerpts. Nor was there a link or any alert system to push information to me about  when the excerpts would go live. That, for The Times, was a missed…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Eat Sleep Publish

  • 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.

  • The Pitch is tomorrow – Freelance edition

    Jason Preston
    26 Oct 2009 | 1:21 pm
    Tuesday, October 27th, from 7:30 – 9:30pm, we’ll be gathering at Lucid Jazz Club in the U-district in Seattle for drinks and good conversation. The topic of tomorrow’s Pitch is simple: Will all journalists become freelancers? New organizations are already finding it much harder to justify full time staff for what amounts to part-time profit. As our industry-wide dive into digital continues, and news organizations learn to compete with leaner, meaner content producers, something’s gotta give. It might well be the career. I can see a future where very few people land…

  • Free Book Experiment

    Jason Preston
    22 Oct 2009 | 11:18 am
    Have you seen Cory Doctorow’s Free Book experiment (redux)? Cory is offering another free book, with an interesting philosophical approach: For this project, I’ve taken an oath to lose no money. That means that my capital expenditures have to be as low as possible. In the ideal world, every object I make available will either cost nothing to produce or will be physically instantiated only after it has been ordered and paid for. The question is: would he make more money if he just sold everything? Probably not.
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Editor and Publisher

  • 40 Years Ago Today: Photos of My Lai First Appeared But Photographer Often Forgotten

    19 Nov 2009 | 4:00 pm
    Helped turn a war.

  • McClatchy Launches Digital Editions on the Kindle

    19 Nov 2009 | 4:00 pm
    The McClatchy Co. announced today -- on Facebook -- that five of its papers are now available on the Kindle: The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram in Texas, the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska and the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.

  • As 'NYT' Chicago Pages Debut, Local Papers Deliver 'Exclusives'

    19 Nov 2009 | 4:00 pm
    The first pages of content from the non-profit Chicago News Cooperative appeared in the Chicago edition of The New York Times Friday, featuring an investigative piece on the city's controversial lease of its parking meters -- and seeming to spur the hometown Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times to show off some exclusives of their own.

  • UPDATE: AP Layoff Count Hits 90, Meets Goal

    19 Nov 2009 | 4:00 pm
    The count of Associated Press union employees laid off this week has risen to 90, which, according to the news cooperative, meets its goal of cutting annual payroll costs by 10%. It is the AP's largest cut in newsroom layoffs in memory, roughly 2% of its workforce.

  • 'Indy Star' Leads Fight for Lobbying-Laws Reform

    19 Nov 2009 | 4:00 pm
    Indiana's largest newspaper is leading a statewide media campaign aimed at tightening rules governing how much lobbyists can spend on gifts for lawmakers and to make the giving more visible to the public.
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    contentious.com

  • links for 2009-11-19

    Amy Gahran
    19 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    Facebook sql vulnerability | __–::: Deepquest :::–__ More technical background on the Facebook app privacy problem I noted earlier. Again, go into Facebook Privacy -> Applications to adjust what info gets shared from your Facebook acct via apps. (tags: facebook social+media privacy applications problems programming) Facebook | Application Privacy Your private Facebook info can be made public to friends thru apps you do NOT use. Go into Facebook Privacy -> Applications to adjust what info about you gets shared through apps. I was appalled to see this. (tags: facebook…

  • How Facebook Apps Can Compromise Your Privacy, & How to Fix (Maybe)

    Amy Gahran
    18 Nov 2009 | 10:40 am
    I never liked Facebook, and I still don’t, which is why I don’t use it much. My main gripe has always been its badly designed interface which always leaves me confused about where to look and what to do. But now I have an even bigger gripe about Facebook: How it compromises your privacy via its application programming interface (API). For example, I sort my Facebook friends into groups so I can selectively view and share Facebook content. I use Facebook notes to create private blog posts to share with people who are interested in my personal updates. That’s where I posted…

  • links for 2009-11-17

    Amy Gahran
    17 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model | Magazine Demand Media is a database of human needs, and if you haven’t stumbled on a Demand video or article yet, you soon will. By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Demand is already one of the largest suppliers of content to YouTube, where its 170,000 videos make up more than twice the content of CBS, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, Universal Music…

  • links for 2009-11-13

    Amy Gahran
    13 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    Follow your waves – Google Wave Blog "We've received lots of feedback from Wavers that the public waves they read were clogging up their inboxes. Today, we've introduced a new concept to Google Wave–"following" waves. Now, clicking on a public wave no longer causes it to appear (and stay) in your inbox; you have to explicitly choose to "follow" the wave." (tags: Google-Wave) Apple Claims Drawings of Public Figures Are “Obscene, Pornographic or Defamatory” — Sunlight Foundation Blog "Apple’s rejection letter notes that the app…

  • links for 2009-11-12

    Amy Gahran
    12 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    eMarketer Cuts Through the Mobile Penetration Hype – eMarketer Because some people have more than one phone line, they end up being double-counted. This results in overstated audience figures and penetration rates that approach and eventually exceed 100% of the population. For marketers, the number of mobile users is a more useful figure because it more accurately describes the audience, and thus potential reach. How big is the actual US mobile audience? Taking into account people of all ages, eMarketer estimates that mobile penetration is 76.5% in 2009, or 235 million people. This is…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    DigiDave - Journalism is a Process, Not a Product

  • Don’t Save Journalism – Save Honest Communication

    Digidave
    15 Nov 2009 | 10:51 pm
    (Funny that my last post was on having bloggers block and tonight this is pouring out of me. I guess I needed to clear my throat. I don’t want to be an annoying pontificator. As I said in my last post – I want to be on the front lines of all this. I’m a grunt, at best a squad leader. But to do so – I often need a clear vision of where and why I’m doing Spot.Us. If anything – this is an invocation to myself). Clay Shirkey is a wise sage in this era. If the revolution we are going through is akin to that of Gutenberg’s Clay Shirkey is a Martin Luther. I…

  • Breaking the Bloggers Block

    Digidave
    15 Nov 2009 | 10:26 am
    I’ve had bloggers block lately. I received several suggestions on how to break it. So here I am, trying to follow up on all of them. First: Write about something. Lower your standards and just write. Perhaps the bloggers block also comes from my new Posterous blog aptly subtitled “Digidave’s Quickies: Not exactly a blog post. Too long for Twitter.” I used to write personal blog posts here. This is space both for my professional thoughts but it is also my personal journal. Something I can use to remember funny moments and sad memories. From my Thanksgiving in Atlantic…

  • Lessons in Web Development – Good, Fast and Cheap: Pick Two

    Digidave
    12 Oct 2009 | 11:15 am
    Whenever people ask me about the process of building a website, here’s how I explain their choices: “There is good, fast and cheap — you get to pick two.” Spot.Us has quietly started development again. I’ll be putting up sketches of a much needed re-design on the Spot.Us blog soon, but you can see a sneak peek at the bottom of this post, courtesy of Lauren Rabaino. Looking back at what has almost been a full year of work, this is the part of building something from the ground up that plays to one of my strengths. It comes down to project management, weighing…

  • Video Roundup Cause I Can’t Sleep

    Digidave
    5 Oct 2009 | 10:25 pm
    What do you do when you can’t sleep? Clay Shirky on Internet Issues Facing Newspapers Clay Shirky describes the changing news landscape that has put accountability journalism at risk, and outlines a “journalistic ecosystem” that is needed to preserve essential watchdog role. Tina Brown On The Future Of Journalism Tina Brown, founder of The Daily Beast, tells Katie Couric she expects a new golden age of journalism as the era of online media matures. Watch more at @KatieCouric on CBSNews.com. Governor in ads promoting newspapers Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is featured in a…

  • Dear Warren Hellman

    Digidave
    25 Sep 2009 | 11:58 am
    Dear Warren You already know the setup: Today the Bay Area media scene just gained an 800lb gorilla. The news broke last night by the Bay Guardian was known by some a little earlier and had been expected for months. Details from The New York Times and Paid Content. Steve Katz and Alan Mutter chime in as well. Let me be the first blogger to tip my hat to you. Major kudos. There are a lot of folks with as much money as you – but they don’t give it back to their community the way you have. Nobody can argue that giving 5 million to start a nonprofit news organization is anything but…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Newspaper Death Watch

  • Detroit Gets a New Daily

    paulgillin
    19 Nov 2009 | 8:44 pm
    After nearly losing its two daily newspapers a year ago, Detroit is actually adding one to the stable. The Detroit Daily Press will launch next week with daily newsstand distribution at first and home delivery scheduled to begin in about a month. This is actually the title’s second appearance; it originally appeared in 1964 and lasted for about four months before folding. The owners, who said they came out of retirement to take another shot at the Detroit market, plan to distribute 200,000 daily copies and charge a fraction of what their competitors charge for newsstand sales and…

  • Murdoch Takes on Google

    paulgillin
    16 Nov 2009 | 6:22 am
    The debate over whether search engines are friend or foe to the newspaper industry continues to grow and become more complex. Rupert Murdoch says he will really go ahead with his stated plans to remove his portfolio of publications from Google’s search index. Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, told the Monaco Media Forum on Friday that the company would begin blocking Google’s search spiders within a few months. Miller said Google brings in an army of one-click visitors who are “the least valuable traffic to us…You can survive without it.” He…

  • Signs of Life in Online Ads

    paulgillin
    12 Nov 2009 | 5:49 am
    There are more signs that the advertising environment is improving. IDC says global online ad spending just 1% to $14.6 billion. While that’s still down, it’s an improvement over the negative 5.6% growth registered in the second quarter and the smallest drop since the ad market started going south a year ago. IDC expects the US market to decline another 1% or so in the fourth quarter, but now foresees growth by the first or second quarter of 2010. IDC says search advertising will lead the industry out of its slump, but that the big winner is Microsoft’s Bing, not Google.

  • East Valley Tribune to Shut Down

    paulgillin
    5 Nov 2009 | 11:36 am
    Nearly a year to the day after announcing a radical strategy to cut back from daily to four-times-per-week frequency, the East Valley Tribune of suburban Phoenix is finally pulling the plug. Unless a buyer emerges with a reasonable bid, the paper will shut down at the end of the year, publishing its last print edition on December 30. About 140 employees will lose their jobs. We’ve covered the Tribune’s twists and turns in previous entries, and there’s nothing particularly new to say about the situation. The Tribune has been operating under a cloud since it cut 40% of its…

  • The Future of Journalism, Part IV

    paulgillin
    3 Nov 2009 | 6:19 am
    Implicit in the hand-wringing over the death of news organizations (one guest on last week’s Hobson & Holtz Report podcast wondered if PR professionals should even bother tracking newspaper coverage any more) is the concern that good journalism will vanish from the Earth. We’ve always argued that the problem with newspapers today isn’t that they have no value, it’s that they no longer have a sustainable business model. The need for good journalism hasn’t changed but good journalism needs to find new ways to support itself. Check out two new resources in this area. Jeff Jarvis…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Wired Journalists

  • Unknown diseases is hunting the displaced people around near Mogadishu

    Daud Abdi Daud
    Unknown diseases is hunting the displaced people around near Mogadishu Unknown diseases affected the displaced Somali people from one person to another where there is no single person not affected, while the doctors did know what the disease is but they said it is skin disease. Dr. Hawa Abdi the administrator of the Hawa Abdi hospital located in the around near area of Mogadishu told to the National Association of Somali Science and Environmental Journalists (NASSEJ) that the surprised diseases are not yet know while she said the diseases was caused by the smoke of the bullets. She added that…

  • World's largest humanitarian network to meet for first time in Africa

    Daud Abdi Daud
    World's largest humanitarian network to meet for first time in Africa Nairobi/Geneva – Delegates from the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement will gather in Nairobi from 18 to 25 November to address today’s most pressing humanitarian challenges. It's the first time ever that the world's largest humanitarian network will hold a Movement-wide meeting of its leaders in Africa. From 18 to 21 November, the 17th session of the General Assembly of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) will address several key issues, starting with the adoption…

  • Sun bears make a fashion statement

    Jeanette McDermott
    Spoon+Fork, a New York City based creative service agency, is promoting sun bear conservation awareness and raising funds through a new line of tote bags it helped launch for the fashion and eco conscious consumer. The idea for the tote bags came about after sun bear expert and UFP member Siew Te Wong spoke before an audience last summer and answered someone's question, "How can people help the sun bear?" Wong replied, “if you are rich, you can donate fund to us. If you are a writer, please write about sun bears and our work. If you are a filmmaker, please make a film about sun bears and…

  • Raw Avocado Lettuce Wraps

    Gardenia Coleman
    http://gmcolem1.personal.asu.edu/wordpress/?p=35

  • Science and Environment Journalists Association launched in Somalia

    Daud Abdi Daud
    Science and Environment Journalists Association launched in Somalia Somali journalists recently lauched the National Association of Somali Science and Environmental Journalists (NASSEJ) to ensure the reporting of science news and the plight of Somalia environment in general. NASSEJ is the legitimate and representative organ and voice of science and environmental journalists in Somalia and is a member of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists (IFEJ), Arab Science Journalists Association (ASJA) and Global Network of Civil Society Organizations for Disaster Reduction. Apart…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    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…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Innovation in College Media

  • Lessons from last month’s Pacemaker

    JennaStaul
    20 Nov 2009 | 2:25 pm
    I spent some time talking to winners of last month's Pacemaker online awards to get their take on what makes a effective Web news outlet. If there was any consensus among these three student media leaders (the other two interviews from KentNewsNet and IowaStateDaily.com will be posted next week) it was that coordination is key to making it all work. The Daily Kansan. Editor Brenna Hawley. Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence, Kan. Hawley said a multimedia course at the University of Kansas is helping prepare print students to engage in mulitmedia reporting and has led to the incorporation of Google maps…

  • Stuff I’ve been reading

    Bryan
    19 Nov 2009 | 7:02 am
    Photo by GoodImages via Flickr I'll be traveling for a few days, so likely won't be updating much over the Thanksgiving holiday. In the meantime, here are some things I've been reading that you might find interesting. I usually do these with a social bookmarking service (Publish2), but this is a little more personal, so here goes: Post a vulgar comment at work, lose your job: Stltoday social media director Kurt Greenbaum turned over an IP address to a school after a commenter posted a vulgar comment. The reaction has been mostly negative. This is one of those ethical dilemmas you can use as a…

  • InsideVandy basketball previews

    Bryan
    17 Nov 2009 | 10:27 am
    via Twitter, @katherinemiller points to a couple of basketball season previews from InsideVandy that are worth noting for their multimedia prowess. Check out the men's and women's previews. If you click on a player's photo, you get an audio breakdown of the player's strengths, along with a breakout box of pertinent stats. The design is clean, the navigation simple, and the topic worth the effort. A couple of minor issues: if you click on the players, you get audio that starts automatically, which is kind of annoying. Better to let the user decide to click the play button and hear the audio…

  • Future of News grapples with journalism’s future

    Bryan
    16 Nov 2009 | 7:27 am
    American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio are sponsoring a meeting focused on the Future of News. You can watch a live stream here. From the intro: The decline of journalism in America is reaching the point of crisis. Newsrooms around the nation are shrinking while the need for high-quality, objective news, information, analysis and insight has never been greater. The Future of News summit is an interactive day-long discussion that will define the role regional organizations play in the solution to the news crisis. Local, regional and national leaders—in journalism, commercial and…

  • Summer multimedia travel opportunity

    Bryan
    16 Nov 2009 | 5:51 am
    Rachele Kanigel at San Francisco State U. passes along the following multimedia opportunity. See details below the fold. Learn more about SFSU's summer multimedia study-abroad programs in Urbino, Italy (June 3-July 2, 2010) and Perpignan, France (June 24-July 23, 2010) at http://ieimedia.com. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Summer Multimedia Programs in France and Italy Now Accepting Applications Applications are now available for the summer multimedia programs in Perpignan, France and Urbino, Italy co-sponsored by San Francisco State University and the…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Institute for Analytic Journalism

  • Roll-your-own choropleth map with free tools

    analyticjournalism
    12 Nov 2009 | 2:59 am
    Nathan, honcho at FlowingData,  has put together a fine tutorial on making a choropleth map using free tools.  This is one bookmark you will want to save. How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools Posted: 11 Nov 2009 10:57 PM PST There are about a million ways to make a choropleth map. You know, the maps that color regions by some metric. The problem is that a lot of solutions require expensive software or have a high learning curve...or both. What if you just want a simple map without all the GIS stuff? In this post, I'll show you how to make a county-specific…

  • Philip Meyer Awards - Call for Entries

    analyticjournalism
    15 Oct 2009 | 10:24 pm
    The deadline for applications for the Philip Meyer Award is approaching. Established in 2005, the award was created to honor Philip Meyer’s pioneering efforts to utilize social science research methods to foster better journalism.  The postmark deadline for entries is October 31, 2009. The contest recognizes stories that incorporate survey research, probabilities and other social science tools in creative ways that lead to journalism vital to the community. Three awards are given annually:     * $500 for 1st place     * $300 for 2nd place…

  • Could World of Warcraft be the new War and Peace?

    analyticjournalism
    2 Oct 2009 | 2:18 pm
    From the Nieman Foundation "Storyboard": Could World of Warcraft be the new War and Peace? Whether Pacman or Halo first introduced you to video games, calling them “high art” might stretch the sensibilities.  But boardwalk nickelodeons led to movies like The Godfather—could a similarly radical transformation be underway with games? Narrative journalism draws many of its core principles from novels, films, and short stories. Elements like character development, scene-setting, and a narrative arc work whether the tale is true or made up. Games, however, are different. “There…

  • UPDATED: Inflation Conversion Factors for Dollars 1774 to Estimated 2019

    analyticjournalism
    30 Sep 2009 | 5:08 pm
    Here at the IAJ, we have long been a fan -- and user -- of Prof. Robert Sahr's "Inflation Conversion Factors" web site and tools.  We were snoozing at the switch a bit and didn't notice that Sahr updated the site in early June 2009.  Check it out: it's filled with both PDF and Excel data/tools to calculate the comparative costs of most anything from 1774 to 2019.  The site also includes some fun data: The charts on the following topics are available either by scrolling down or by selecting the appropriate link:           Price levels…

  • More insights into how and why journos can't deal with data

    analyticjournalism
    30 Sep 2009 | 12:26 pm
    This tip comes from our friend Stephan Russ-Mohl, of the European Journalism Observatory. Darned Statistics by Stephan Russ-Mohl    European Journalism Observatory, September 26, 2009 Many journalists face difficulties in dealing with statistics, and frequently lack the competence to present quantitative information to their publics in easy-to-grasp language. This is nothing new, as most journalism textbooks contain tips on how to deal adequately with numbers and percentages. Thus far, these remain rules of thumb. Three U.S. researchers – Coy Callison, Rhonda Gibson and Dolf…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Invisible Inkling

  • Yankee debriefing

    Ryan Sholin
    9 Nov 2009 | 3:37 pm
    Last week, the Yankees won the World Series. You may not know this about me, but I, yes, I am a fan of baseball’s New York Yankees. After weeks of Paying Attention To Baseball, which I haven’t done with any real passion or regularity since Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS, it’s been over for days now, and I’ve gone back to spending free time in the evenings (after the toddler is asleep) puttering around, doing little bits of work, or obsessively playing games on my phone, among other distractions. But I’m still paying attention… So, here are a few links and notes to…

  • My advice to journalism students

    Ryan Sholin
    23 Oct 2009 | 12:26 pm
    I’ve been through most of this before, either in blog posts or in person, whenever I get the chance to talk with journalism students, but it’s worth repeating. A few tweets this week seem to have proved that, so I’m putting this updated compendium of my advice together for posterity. My advice to journalism students starts with this: Blog. That doesn’t mean you have to blog about journalism, or build a rabid political audience, or chronicle every step the Googles and Twitters and Apples of the world take. It just means that you maintain a Web site where you write on a…

  • The diaspora of information

    Ryan Sholin
    13 Oct 2009 | 8:32 am
    Given: Dan Gillmor famously stated (and I’m paraphrasing from memory): “My readers know more than I do.” I like to take it an order of magnitude up into the branches of the tree, along these lines: “The diaspora of information (having been set free by the Web, mostly) knows infinitely more than I do.” So here are a few links to some of the latest advances in what I think of as the tools, techniques, and tricks to surfacing the valuable information out there in the diaspora. How Yelp deals with everybody getting four stars (on average) Published at…

  • Grad school update

    Ryan Sholin
    12 Oct 2009 | 4:02 am
    Remember when I went to graduate school at San Jose State University to get an M.S. in Mass Communications? Well, I finished. Here’s the proof, which arrived in the mail a few days ago: PreviouslyGrad school update: I think I’m doneSpartans, you rock my worldSuzanne Yada recommends you grow a pair

  • ONA09 debrief and the swagger

    Ryan Sholin
    6 Oct 2009 | 12:24 pm
    Well, it’s been a pretty awesome week. I spent most of last Thursday through Sunday at the 2009 Online News Association conference in San Francisco, and if you follow me on Twitter or spotted a short post on my blog over the weekend, you know that Publish2, my current employer, was honored with a rather pleasant award on Saturday night at the Online Journalism Awards. And earlier that day, I helped lead an unconference session on “Context and the Coming Link Economy,” which turned out to be one of my favorite conversations of the weekend, with help from Matt Thompson, Elaine…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Random Mumblings

  • From gatekeeper to "sense-maker"

    Jack D. Lail
    19 Nov 2009 | 10:00 am
    Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, discusses the future of journalism. The gatekeeper role may be gone, but there are other roles for the Press to play, like "sense-maker." (via Reportr.net)

  • Training and focusing on content quality even in tight times

    Jack D. Lail
    17 Nov 2009 | 3:30 am
    E.W. Scripps CEO Rich Boehne is getting some kudos for focusing on editorial quality and training even as the economics of the media business have forced painful cutbacks.A large training program focused on storytelling has launched amid the media industry recession for the company's 10 TV stations."It's very deep and broad training in storytelling," Boehne told the Cincinnati Business Journal. "It's an out-and-out investment in the quality of the content, training hundreds of people, with no other aim than to increase quality."Boehne said it is part of a strategy to ensure the company…

  • Your cell phone is Big Brother (but which one?)

    Jack D. Lail
    15 Nov 2009 | 11:05 am
    Fascinating blog post from Jeff Jonas about all the data that little cell phone you're carrying is collecting:.The data reveals the number of co-workers that join you Thursdays after work for a beer, and roughly where you all go. It knows where these same co-workers call home, and just exactly what kind of neighborhood they come from (e.g., average income, average home price) ... information certainly useful to attentive direct marketing folks.As with most technologies there some good as well as bad aspects to it. For example, just today, we have a story about authorities locating a murder…

  • Scripps Twitter list

    Jack D. Lail
    11 Nov 2009 | 1:17 pm
    I recently created a Twitter list of E.W. Scripps folks. If you're with Scripps and want to be added to the list, fill out the form. Either way, consider following it.

  • Comment management draws lots of comments

    Jack D. Lail
    6 Nov 2009 | 4:58 am
    I had a great time doing a Webinar at the Poynter Institute on Thursday with Howard Finberg and a big assist from Elaine Kramer, who manages the Associated Press Managing Editors' Online Credibility Roundtables. Our topic was management of online comments and Michele McLellan has some thoughts about it.Coincidentially, online comments on the knoxnews.com Web site and the APME Roundtable on Comments are the focus of a long piece by Frank Carlson in Wednesday's edition of Metro Pulse, an alternative and entertainment weekly in Knoxville. Knoxville area blogger Say Uncle has some thoughts about…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Journerdism

  • Copy Editor's Lament (The Layoff Song) [Music video]

    20 Nov 2009 | 11:12 am
    Chris Ave, the genius behind the Politifact Song, has a new video for his song, "Copy Editor's Lament." Check out the all-star dance scene.

  • Official Google Blog: Automatic captions in YouTube

    19 Nov 2009 | 9:57 am
    "Since we first announced captions in Google Video and YouTube, we've introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation. Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because I'm deaf. Today, I'm in Washington, D.C. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions. Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our…

  • YouTube Direct Gives News Orgs A Way To Accept User-Submitted Videos

    16 Nov 2009 | 9:46 pm
    "Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage. The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites. Of course, news organizations will still be responsible for actually curating the content to ensure that it’s accurate, which is a task that will…

  • Let’s Reinvent the Game Story

    16 Nov 2009 | 9:24 pm
    “The new fan experience involves Twitter and YouTube and has made the game story even more obsolete than it was five years ago,” says Jason McIntyre, founder of the blog The Big Lead. “I usually hunker down for the NFL on Sunday or College Football on Saturdays with the TV on two games and the computer by my side. Twitter is open. If you want to toss ESPN 360 into the mix, you can follow so many games at once it can become dizzying. The last thing you want to do is wake up the next morning and read a reaction to games and events that happened 12 hours ago.”

  • Hulu's backers bicker as Web video soars

    16 Nov 2009 | 6:48 pm
    "Dasari said Web video's growth is being stifled by the lack of content available at Hulu and other sites. For example, there are only a handful of feature films available at Hulu. Crackle.com, Sony Pictures' Web service, only posts a fraction of its vast library of films on the Internet, but there's not another studio even offering that. So what? What does it mean if the studios hobble Hulu? Consumers have watched TV for over half a century. They can still go back there. Right? Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland, whose company tracks traffic on peer-to-peer sites--where most…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    sans serif

  • CAMPAIGN TO FREE LAXMAN CHOUDHURY

    churumuri
    19 Nov 2009 | 11:22 pm
    India’s war on Maoists, described by prime minister Manmohan Singh as the “gravest internal threat” facing the country has begun to ensnare journalists too. Laxman Choudhury, a stringer with the Oriya daily Sambad, picked up eight weeks ago because eight leaflets of Maoist “literature” addressed to him were found with a bus conductor, is still in jail. Newspaper facsimile: courtesy The Indian Express Also read: BBC journalists secure abducted cop’s release There’s a new ism in town, Arnab-ism Speak out. Sign the petition. Free Maziar Bahari Posted in…

  • The best editor The Pioneer, Delhi, never had?

    churumuri
    17 Nov 2009 | 3:03 am
    The writer Rudyard Kipling was once on its rolls; the former British prime minister Winston Churchill served as its war correspondent. Now, The Pioneer, New Delhi, has announced its best editor who wasn’t: Eric Arthur Blair In a front-page story, the right-wing paper reports that the left-wing novelist and political thinker (born in Motihari, Bihar) received a letter from The Pioneer offering him a job as editor. And on February 12, 1938, Blair wrote to the India Office in London: “My object in going to India is, apart from the work on The Pioneer, to try and get a clearer idea of…

  • Former journalist falls to death trekking in China

    churumuri
    12 Nov 2009 | 3:12 am
    sans serif records the sad demise of Arun Veembur, a former journalist in Bangalore who went trekking to China “on a whim” to escape the humdrum of routine journalism. According to a report in The Hindu, Arun, 28, suffered serious head injuries after a fall while hiking in the mountains of southwest China on Monday. Arun, son of a DRDO scientist, who worked at Deccan Herald and Mid-Day, had to moved to Yunnan after hearing the story of the Stilwell Road built by the Allies during World War II to ship supplies from India to China, and was working on a book. The road runs from Assam…

  • Letters modern-day authors no longer write

    churumuri
    11 Nov 2009 | 6:51 am
    From the superb blog Letters of Note, a dream letter from the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that every editor would love to dream of. Visit the blog: Letters of Note Posted in A bit of fun, For the record, People

  • The brave last words of Prabhash Joshi. RIP.

    churumuri
    9 Nov 2009 | 2:36 am
    The full text of the press release issued by the Foundation for Media Professionals (FMP) of the address made by Prabhash Joshi at a seminar held in New Delhi on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, on the blurring of the line between editorial and advertisements in the Indian media. Joshi, a former editor of the Hindi daily Jansatta, passed away last week, nine days after the address. Also read: Pyramid Saimira, Tatva & Times Private Treaties Times Private Treaties gets a very public airing SUCHETA DALAL: Forget the news, you can’t believe the ads either Does he who pays the piper call the…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Adrian Monck

  • WSJ Has The Richest Readership Among Print Pubs | Business Insider [del.icio.us]

    amonck
    20 Nov 2009 | 12:43 am
    The Wall Street Journal has the wealthiest readership among print readers according to a new survey from Mediamark Research & Intelligence, by way of BtoB Online.

  • University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive | Chronicle of Higher Education [del.icio.us]

    amonck
    17 Nov 2009 | 3:17 am
    "[C]ould universities do better work in teaching and research because faculty members and students in journalism help them become more attuned to how their work plays out in public? Already, faculty members in law schools, medical schools, political science, sociology, and other fields assign the writings of journalists in their classes because these works inform, inspire, and raise vital questions in accessible ways. With universities more engaged with the work of journalism, and journalism schools motivated to engage with other parts of their universities, there are opportunities for…

  • L'information ne s'est jamais mieux portée | Le Devoir [del.icio.us]

    amonck
    14 Nov 2009 | 12:23 pm
    «Ma consommation médiatique a complètement été transformée en très peu d'années, dit le journaliste-blogueur. Ainsi, je ne suis abonné à aucun journal, mais je reçois sans cesse des articles sur mes écrans, des informations que j'ai sélectionnées dans une multitude de sources et pas seulement des nouvelles traditionnelles que je reçois de l'agence Associated Press sur mon iPhone. J'ai maintenant remplacé les éditeurs de contenus et je ne vais plus jamais les laisser s'introduire dans cet aspect de ma vie.»

  • What Is the Future of Television? | Historians.org [del.icio.us]

    amonck
    14 Nov 2009 | 1:13 am
    From 1945: "Television is faced with a vicious circle as far as entertainment is concerned. Until enough sets are sold, important money-spending national advertisers will not be too interested in buying time or sponsoring costly television programs. But until such programs are telecast, entertainment on television will be mediocre, and television sets will be slow in selling. As time goes on, more people will become interested in television, however, and the entertainment you will be able to pick up will gradually improve. Are the independent theater owners farsighted in their standon…

  • The Science of Success | The Atlantic [del.icio.us]

    amonck
    13 Nov 2009 | 12:03 am
    The less-numerous orchids, meanwhile, may falter in some environments but can excel in those that suit them. And even when they lead troubled early lives, some of the resulting heightened responses to adversity that can be problematic in everyday life—increased novelty-seeking, restlessness of attention, elevated risk-taking, or aggression—can prove advantageous in certain challenging situations: wars, tribal or modern; social strife of many kinds; and migrations to new environments.
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Random Mumblings

  • From gatekeeper to "sense-maker"

    Jack D. Lail
    19 Nov 2009 | 10:00 am
    Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, discusses the future of journalism. The gatekeeper role may be gone, but there are other roles for the Press to play, like "sense-maker." (via Reportr.net)

  • Training and focusing on content quality even in tight times

    Jack D. Lail
    17 Nov 2009 | 3:30 am
    E.W. Scripps CEO Rich Boehne is getting some kudos for focusing on editorial quality and training even as the economics of the media business have forced painful cutbacks.A large training program focused on storytelling has launched amid the media industry recession for the company's 10 TV stations."It's very deep and broad training in storytelling," Boehne told the Cincinnati Business Journal. "It's an out-and-out investment in the quality of the content, training hundreds of people, with no other aim than to increase quality."Boehne said it is part of a strategy to ensure the company…

  • Your cell phone is Big Brother (but which one?)

    Jack D. Lail
    15 Nov 2009 | 11:05 am
    Fascinating blog post from Jeff Jonas about all the data that little cell phone you're carrying is collecting:.The data reveals the number of co-workers that join you Thursdays after work for a beer, and roughly where you all go. It knows where these same co-workers call home, and just exactly what kind of neighborhood they come from (e.g., average income, average home price) ... information certainly useful to attentive direct marketing folks.As with most technologies there some good as well as bad aspects to it. For example, just today, we have a story about authorities locating a murder…

  • Scripps Twitter list

    Jack D. Lail
    11 Nov 2009 | 1:17 pm
    I recently created a Twitter list of E.W. Scripps folks. If you're with Scripps and want to be added to the list, fill out the form. Either way, consider following it.

  • Comment management draws lots of comments

    Jack D. Lail
    6 Nov 2009 | 4:58 am
    I had a great time doing a Webinar at the Poynter Institute on Thursday with Howard Finberg and a big assist from Elaine Kramer, who manages the Associated Press Managing Editors' Online Credibility Roundtables. Our topic was management of online comments and Michele McLellan has some thoughts about it.Coincidentially, online comments on the knoxnews.com Web site and the APME Roundtable on Comments are the focus of a long piece by Frank Carlson in Wednesday's edition of Metro Pulse, an alternative and entertainment weekly in Knoxville. Knoxville area blogger Say Uncle has some thoughts about…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Telegraph: Shane Richmond

  • Ten alternatives to the Webby awards internet moments

    Ian Douglas
    19 Nov 2009 | 6:26 am
    The Webby awards list of the 10 most influential internet moments is a reeling-off of the same old faces: the launch of Wikipedia, Google’s IPO, the use of Twitter during the Iranian election and so on. There have been plenty of online events in the last ten years that deserve our attention just as much. Webby [...]

  • The Beatles never broke up – at least, not in every universe

    Shane Richmond
    18 Nov 2009 | 9:31 am
    You wait years for The Beatles to be available in MP3 and then two come at once. First we had the BlueBeat Beatles, in which the band’s performances were recreated using “psycho acoustic simulation”, and now we have The Parallel Universe Beatles. Yes, you read that right. James Richards (not his real name) was chasing his [...]

  • Digg CEO: People won't pay for online news

    Shane Richmond
    18 Nov 2009 | 5:28 am
    Consumers won’t pay for news online, says Jay Adelson, chief executive of Digg. As a man who runs a news aggregator, Adelson clearly has an interest in ensuring that news remains freely accessible. Instead, Adelson wants to interest newspapers in Digg’s advertising system and share revenue that way. Adelson told Fox News: “First off, don’t expect [...]

  • How Buildings Learn, a lesson for technology

    Ian Douglas
    17 Nov 2009 | 4:47 am
    Stewart Brand’s 1997 television series, How Buildings Learn, has become something of a classic. Not so much for architects – they really hate being told what to do – but for software engineers. Episode 1: The basic thesis, that a building is never finished but changes and grows with the requirements of the inhabitants, applies just as [...]

  • Readers will/will not pay for online news (delete as applicable)

    Shane Richmond
    17 Nov 2009 | 2:53 am
    Up to 48 per cent of British and American readers would pay for online news, according to a new survey by the Boston Consulting Group. The survey of 5,000 people in nine countries found that those who would pay for news favoured a monthly subscription and would be prepared to pay anything from £1.80 per month [...]
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    MediaShift Idea Lab

  • SochiReporter Launches with Time Machine, Wiki Guidebook

    20 Nov 2009 | 10:20 am
    I'm proud to say that SochiReporter, my Knight-funded project, launched on October 27. This was a very important day for me, and for our team. In the days before the launch, I didn't sleep a wink. But this is natural. The less you sleep, the less you want. I was very excited about the launch, and did my best to convey how cool and innovative SochiReporter is to the journalists and students that gathered on launch day in the hall of one of the best schools in Sochi. Generating Content We have been working on this project for a long time, but we started generating content a few months back. At…

  • Citizen Media Law Project Gives Free Legal Help to Online Publishers

    19 Nov 2009 | 7:55 am
    I am delighted to announce the public launch of the Berkman Center's Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review…

  • 4th Programmer-Journalist Scholarship Winner Learns to 'Think Like a Journalist'

    18 Nov 2009 | 2:20 pm
    Manya Gupta, a software engineer for telecommunications companies in her native India, is the fourth winner of a Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarship. She's now in her second quarter studying journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern University. She blogs occasionally at http://manya-myvoice.blogspot.com/. Learn some more about Manya from the following edited Q&A. Tell us about your background. I am from India. I received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from JSS Academy of Technical Education in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.. While working on projects I…

  • Why it Matters that Pierre Omidyar is Launching a News Startup

    18 Nov 2009 | 11:45 am
    Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he's involved. A few months ago Pierre and Randy Ching founded Peer News. Their first project was a Twitter-related experiment called Ginx, which didn't get critical mass and is being closed. Now they've announced Peer News' more important move -- a project aimed at creating the kind of local journalism that brings accountability and value to a community. Pierre, in a note on the company blog, says he and his team are launching -- they…

  • Gearing up Citizen Journalism in Grahamstown, South Africa

    16 Nov 2009 | 6:01 am
    Low literacy environments, and multi-lingual areas, like Grahamstown, South Africa, face particular challenges when it comes to encouraging citizen journalism. More than 80 percent of the population speaks English as a second language. While most people are able to speak and understand English, writing is not always a comfortable experience (and some are unable to read or write). That's partly why we've launched Izwi Labahlali (The Voice Of The Citizens), Grahamstown's first radio show with content that's largely produced and presented by citizen journalists and transmitted mainly in…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    MultimediaShooter

  • The Best Camera Is The One You Have With You: The Art of iPhoneography

    The Best Camera Is The One You Have With You I heard someone say this recently and the voice inside my head yelled, AMEN! Most professional photographers, despite the $5,000 camera hang'n around their neck knows this to be true: Photography is not about the tool, it's about the photographer. More ...

  • 5 Things Your News Org Should Check Out

    First let's start with a few links to some fascinating articles I've read recently, Promising Practices In Online Engagement By Scott Bittle, Chris Haller and Alison Kadlec Don't Give Up on Online Video Yet Posted by Regina McCombs 1. Managing News About Managing News RSS/Atom based news tracker with search, republishing and mapping. Features Aggregate RSS/Atom news Show ...

  • 9 Killer Things I Saw This Week

    1.The Quentin Tarantino Guide to Creating Killer Content Don't forget that great writing in the form of narration or strong title cards is an essential part of awesome multimedia, see this post for some tips. 2.LivingGalapagos.org UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism & Mass Communication announces the release of http://LivingGalapagos.org, a collection of student-produced ...

  • 10 Projects you MUST see, NOW!

    In no particular order as they all kick major ass. 1.THE COAL WAR: FIGHTING TO SAVE A MOUNTAIN AND ITS PEOPLE by Chad A. Stevens One woman. One mountain. One last chance. Set among a backdrop of one million acres of decapitated mountains blown up by the coal industry, one woman fights to save one of ...

  • Stories from the Aftermath of Infamy

    Face to Face from [I]ndependentLens This is just a beautiful presentation. Powerful portraits and strong interviews. Thanks for the inspiration. December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001: two days that changed the world forever. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, people of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were ...
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    News Videographer

  • 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?

  • Where the hell have I been?

    Angela Grant
    17 Oct 2009 | 10:10 am
    Regular readers may have noticed recently I haven’t been writing regularly. You may be wondering what’s going on! Or maybe not. But I’ll tell you anyways. For the past month, I’ve been getting accustomed to my new job! I was hired on Sept. 21 at Neighborhood Media, a company that runs online-only hyper-local news publications. I am fully responsible for all of the content on two of the sites: InstantnewsWestU.com and InstantnewsBellaire.com. I’ve been getting accustomed to my new beat and trying to figure out the best time management strategies to get out all the…

  • News, sports videos driving hits at Miami Herald

    Angela Grant
    17 Oct 2009 | 9:18 am
    Here’s my second tidbit of the week, drawn from the Yahoo NewspaperVideo Group. Someone asked whether other newspapers had scaled back their video offerings. Chuck Fadely talked about what he and his colleagues have done at the Miami Herald: Hard news and sports drive our video traffic. We’ve abandoned the feel-good features that used to be the newspaper stock-in-trade. Never in a million years did I expect (or want) to be emulating TV, but that’s what we’re doing and that’s what works to get traffic. Depressing but whatever keeps us alive at this point is good…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Newspaper Next

  • Mark Contreras receives Lifetime Service Award from API

    Mary Peskin
    19 Nov 2009 | 1:17 pm
    Donna Barrett, Peter Horvitz and Steven Swartz also cited for contributions The American Press Institute has awarded its Lifetime Service Award to Mark Contreras, senior vice president/newspapers for The E.W. Scripps Co. The award, presented at the API board of directors meeting Nov. 9, is given to those who have made life-long contributions to the newspaper industry and recognizes individuals who have significantly supported and promoted the professional advancement and leadership training of newspaper executives. Contreras becomes only the 15th recipient of this award during API's 60-year…

  • Thomas Silvestri elected chairman of American Press Institute

    Mary Peskin
    19 Nov 2009 | 1:00 pm
    API announces new officers and directors Thomas A. Silvestri was elected chairman of the American Press Institute at the organization's board of directors meeting, held here Nov. 9-10. The gavel was passed to Silvestri from outgoing Chairman Mark Contreras, senior vice president/newspapers for The E.W. Scripps Co., who was honored with the API Lifetime Service Award. Silvestri is publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He has also served as president of Media General Inc.'s community newspaper division, Media General director of news synergy, deputy managing editor and senior editor for…

  • An interview with Google's Josh Cohen

    Mary Peskin
    18 Nov 2009 | 1:00 pm
    Josh Cohen is responsible for global product strategy, marketing and publisher outreach as senior business product manager for Google News , a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide. He has a background as vice president of business development for Reuters Media and as director of business development for SmartMoney.com, a joint venture between Dow Jones and Hearst. As a facilitator at API's Newsmedia Economic Action Plan Conference in September, Josh was asked about Google's relationship with newspapers and online business strategy. Here's what he…

  • Packer Insider

    Mary Peskin
    17 Nov 2009 | 12:19 pm
    This article is second in a series of paid online content profiles. Each case will be posted on this site as well as included in a list of Paid Content Profiles that you can download by clicking the link MARY PESKIN | When newspaper publishers look around for a pay model for premium online content, Packer Insider is often at the top of the list. Since 2001, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee, Wis., has offered extended Green Bay Packers content to "Insiders" who currently pay subscription fees for specialized content they can't find elsewhere. For $6.95 a month or $44.95 a year, avid…

  • API initiatives continue to provide tools for transformation

    Mary Peskin
    10 Nov 2009 | 11:46 am
    Newspaper Next, API's groundbreaking research initiative, provides the industry with new business models, non-traditional ways to see opportunities that produce sustainable growth, and ways to reshape organizations for consistent innovation. Since its launch in September 2006, N² projects have explored and discovered strategic and practical guidance for an industry that's struggling to create a brighter future. Because of Newspaper Next, API has become a leading catalyst for industry-wide change by investing in new research, special conferences, seminars, white papers and regional workshops…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    paulconley

  • A tale of two audiences

    Paul Conley
    5 Nov 2009 | 6:05 am
    I visited the campus of Northwestern University a few weeks ago to do some recruiting for a client. Things worked out OK. I met a few interesting students. And at least one of them may get a job out of it.But the overall experience of my day on campus was a bit disconcerting, as has often been the case when I visit with academics and students.And, with one notable exception, things were disconcerting in the same way they've been for years now.The more things change ...First, let me mention the exception.For the first time in the five years or so that I've been visiting with students, every…

  • Is the revolution over?

    Paul Conley
    21 Sep 2009 | 9:51 am
    I've written a few times this summer about my growing sense of Web 2.0 ennui -- this feeling I have that as B2B publishing bounces back from the recession, things just aren't as interesting as they were a year or so ago.And I'm beginning to get a sense of why:The revolution is ending.For a decade or so now the world of journalism has been one of ceaseless change and challenge. Consider, if you will, just some of the major technologies and practices we've adopted: external links, blogging platforms, mobile delivery, slideshows, podcasting, database reporting, RSS, email newsletters, Webcasts,…

  • A little bit about writing very little

    Paul Conley
    16 Sep 2009 | 1:54 pm
    I've been so busy lately that this blog has gone without an update for weeks at a time.I apologize to anyone who is still taking the time to check this site or their RSS reader for something new from me.Today is no different. I'm swamped...working far from home at a client's office, living in a hotel and missing my family.But earlier today someone asked my thoughts for an article about creating content for mobile devices. I responded via email. And it occurred to me that this was an opportunity to do two things.1. Suggest that people check out the most interesting new site in the media world…

  • People, Prophets and Publishing

    Paul Conley
    3 Aug 2009 | 2:00 pm
    Twice last week I learned about developments that sent me into frantic, obsessive pondering about the future of B2B media.Odds are you saw those same stories. Odds are you too have contemplated their significance.Both of these developments are about the technology of how news makes it way to us. And these particular stories made their way to me through other people using technology -- just as is often the case these days. Technology flagged the news. A person then used technology to notify me directly. And I used technology to discuss what I'd heard.But somehow the experience left me feeling…

  • New-Wave News

    Paul Conley
    26 Jun 2009 | 9:24 am
    I'm having one of those moments where I need to blog as a way to organize my thoughts. Longtime readers know that much of what I write here is less than perfectly organized. In a sense, blogging has become part of the act of thinking. This blog is less a place to share my opinions than it is a place to explore them.So with that said -- bear with me.I have no idea where this blog post is heading.Earlier this week I found myself obsessing over a single line in a lengthy post by fellow B2B blogger Dan Blank. Dan was writing about how his company, Reed Business, was using Twitter. It's a good…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Photojournalism From A Student's Eye

  • A New Way of Life

    Daniel Sato
    12 Nov 2009 | 7:26 pm
    A New Way of Life is a non-profit organization based in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. They work to help formerly incarcerated women reintegrate into society. As their web site explains: In a system more interested in punishing than in actually addressing the problems of poverty, addiction, and physical and mental illness, close to 70% of those released in California will go back to prison within a year of their release…At A New Way of Life we boast the opposite statistics–more than 70% of the women who come to stay in our sober living homes and participate in…

  • Life after Journalism: Chad Pilster

    Daniel Sato
    4 Nov 2009 | 5:30 pm
    When I was in my first semester at San Jose State, I was given an assignment to interview a photojournalist and learn a bit about their background and how they broke in to the field.  I had always meant to continue to add interviews of other photographers, but hadn’t gotten around to it (except for one interview, which was later lost when the recorder I used blew up).  Today, I pick things up where I left off, literally, with a second interview with Chad Pilster. In the time between posts, Chad has left Daytona Beach News-Journal.  Like many journalists, Chad has used the skills that…

  • Linda Vista Hospital

    Daniel Sato
    25 Sep 2009 | 1:50 am
    Though I grew up in Los Angeles, I never really explored it.  Sure I went up and down the beach and hiked through the Santa Monica Mountains, but I can count on one hand the number of times that I explored Los Angeles east of Koreatown (aside from Dodger games and interning at the Rafu Shimpo).  Now that I am back, I have been making a point of exploring more of the city I call home. One of my latest excursions was to the Linda Vista Hospital in Boyle Heights.  Why visit a hospital you ask?  Because it is abandoned of course. The hospital was closed in 1990, but is used as a filming…

  • Job Search Tools

    Daniel Sato
    4 Sep 2009 | 9:33 am
    Two days ago, Angela Grant wrote a post about her favorite job search tool, Indeed.com. Having been on the job hunt for some months myself (though no longer, I am happy to say), I thought I would share how I went about canvassing the job market. Similar to Angela, I did make use of the advanced searches on Indeed. However, instead of signing up for email alerts, I subscribed to the RSS feed for that particular search. I repeated this process for searches on Journalism Jobs, Idealist.org, Craigslist and a few other job boards. I found this to be easier than email alerts because my inbox does…

  • AAJA 2009 Photos

    Daniel Sato
    15 Aug 2009 | 7:33 am
    Photos by Derek Sijder and Daniel Sato
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    PJNet

  • Future of the News Conference Livestreaming Now

    Leonard Witt
    16 Nov 2009 | 7:25 am
    I am at the Future of the News: Creating a New Model for Regional Journalism in America at Minnesota Public Radio. It is being livestreamed here. Lots of people in the forefront of the journalism change movement are here. I will be Tweeting bits and pieces at #LeonardWitt and the hashtag for the symposium is #tfon. See you there. They are producing a Future of the News white paper for tomorrow. Watch for it.

  • Jay Rosen Provides Journalism Support List

    Leonard Witt
    14 Nov 2009 | 11:35 am
    This from Jay Rosen: I was asked to speak recently at a conference organized by Yale University with the title “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?” This irritated me. The question should have been “who will subsidize news production?” because news production has always been subsidized by someone or something. Here’s my list of possible sources of subsidy. What I have left out please put in the comments and I will edit the list. If you have link to add as an example, please provide that too. 1. Government can subsidize, through general tax revenues.

  • At Yale, Who Will Pay for the Messenger?

    Leonard Witt
    13 Nov 2009 | 7:23 am
    I am at the Yale University Law School for the Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger? conference. I have my Flip camera with me and will be doing some, I hope, brief interviews with some of the key people trying to figure out the future of journalism. Then, if things work out, I will play these videos here in the next couple of weeks. It is being live streamed here. See Twitter posts at #kmedia. Update: Here are some key conference papers.

  • Want to Save Journalism? Go to a Conference

    Leonard Witt
    11 Nov 2009 | 9:27 am
    Today as I write this, Jeff Jarvis is running his livestreamed NEW Business Models for (Local) News conference at CUNY. On Friday I will be at Yale for the Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger? conference and then on Monday I will be in St. Paul at the The Future of News: Creating a new model for regional journalism in America symposium at Minnesota Public Radio. I want to hear what others are doing, plus I want to exchange our own community supported journalism ideas that we are developing at the Center for Sustainable Journalism, including one on civil rights…

  • SoCon10 Social Media Conference Registration Open

    Leonard Witt
    21 Oct 2009 | 2:19 pm
    SoCon10, our annual social media, social networking unconference scheduled for January 29-30, 2010, is now open for registration. Our conference space maximum at Kennesaw State University is 300 participants and last year we hit that number and had to shut down registrations early. Don’t miss out, register now. Here are some details or go here for the complete program: For only $99.90, you get the whole SoCon10 experience, plus three meals. First you get a Big Eating, Big Thinking Networking Dinner on Friday night at Maggiano’s from 7:30 – 11:30pm. On Saturday, you get an all day…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Publishing 2.0

  • High-End Brand Publishers Need to Sell Scalable Premium Ad Solutions, Not Commodity Ad Space

    Scott Karp
    26 Oct 2009 | 9:26 am
    Newspaper online advertising has not benefited greatly from the recent upswing in online ad spending, according to the New York Times and most of the recent newspaper company quarterly results. This is no surprise because most newspaper websites sell SPACE for commodity advertising — display ads and classifieds — and thus are hard pressed to compete with ad networks that specialize in selling commodity ad space by the megaton (or giving it away for free, in the case of Craigslist). Back when newspapers where the only game in town for ad space, they could charge whatever they…

  • Content Doesn’t Matter Without the Package

    Scott Karp
    16 Sep 2009 | 8:25 pm
    In response to the launch of Google’s Fast Flip, I observed that Google is correctly focused on creating a new user interface for news, when most media companies are not. A lot of people responded that Fast Flip is not an innovative or effective UI for news — which may be true, but that misses the point entirely. It doesn’t matter so much whether Google succeeds or fails with this particular experiment. What matters is that they are trying to solve the right problem. The challenge for media companies is not to figure out what to do with their content — content in and…

  • What Google Understands About the Future of News and Publishing That Publishers Do Not

    Scott Karp
    14 Sep 2009 | 5:37 pm
    Google knows a lot about the future of news — more than many publishers. It’s evident in Google’s new product, Fast Flip, which allows news consumers to “flip” through news stories. What’s striking about Fast Flip is that Google is innovating precisely where publishers used to lead innovation. Fast Flip is a new package for news. The publishing business has always been about packaging content. Newspapers. Magazines. Newsletters In digital media, on the web, the news package is now a function of software — which is why Google is innovating precisely…

  • The Briefing: Start at Y Combinator, finish at EveryBlock

    Ryan Sholin
    17 Aug 2009 | 1:54 pm
    It was a busy Monday morning in two corners of the hacker journalist community: EveryBlock is acquired by MSNBC, and Y Combinator announces a “request for startups” to address that whole “future of journalism” question hanging out there in the open air. Want to catch up? Start here: Msnbc.com acquires local news Web site MSNBC.com | August 17, 2009 Ryan Sholin says: MSNBC acquires Everyblock. This brief includes a reminder that they bought Newsvine some time ago. Not a bad stable of news sites to have around. Tags: Media & Journalism, EveryBlock, msnbc, Adrian…

  • What I Read Today: Facebook Buys FriendFeed Edition

    Scott Karp
    10 Aug 2009 | 5:17 pm
    Why Facebook Wants FriendFeed GigaOm | August 10, 2009 Scott Karp says: Om Malik calls it “the problem of plenty.” Facebook is trying to solve it by acquiring FriendFeed. Will news orgs compete? Facebook Takes FriendFeed To Take On Twitter TechCrunch | August 10, 2009 Scott Karp says: M&A, as always, is driven by startups building what incumbents should have but couldn’t. karaswisher: Now That There’s FaceFeed, Does That Make Twoogle More Inevitable?: http://bit.ly/fET9I Twitter | August 10, 2009 Scott Karp says: Winner – Best FF/Facbook Post Title mathewi:…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Recovering Journalist

  • When Presses Roll Less, Execs Spin More

    Mark Potts
    27 Oct 2009 | 9:08 am
    Newsosaur Alan Mutter calls the double-digit drop in the latest newspaper circulation figures "devastating." Content Bridges' Ken Doctor's adjective of choice is "breathtaking." Poynter's Rick Edmonds goes with "extraordinary."Meanwhile, at the San Francisco Chronicle, whose 25.8 percent daily circulation drop over the past year was more than double the rest of the industry's and the steepest of all major papers, publisher Frank Vega says things are going according to plan.Huh?Vega can spin all he wants—something about the remaining…

  • Twitter and Breaking News

    Mark Potts
    18 Oct 2009 | 4:44 pm
    Twitter can be maddening in many ways, a cacophony of voices with a lousy signal-to-noise ratio—does anybody really care what somebody else had for breakfast?But one thing that Twitter excels in is breaking news. Its broadcast, real-time, 140-character headline nature makes it a perfect vehicle for the latest news, whether it's being generated by on-the-spot observers (or participants) and retweeted far and wide, or whether it's being used by news organizations to blast out their latest headlines.The latter seems a slamdunk use of Twitter by news organizations—it's just a…

  • Wise Words, Worth Reading

    Mark Potts
    1 Oct 2009 | 12:00 pm
    I haven't blogged much lately because, well, I got tired of repeating myself. How much more can be said about how the media landscape is changing, and how traditional media companies are missing the boat? At this point it seems better to just let the situation play out. So I've been holding my fire. Besides, I've been busy with GrowthSpur, trying to find solutions to the problems with the media that I've been railing about for years.But there are a couple of great pieces today from other commentators about what's going on in the media business, and I wanted to point…

  • World Wide Whoops

    Mark Potts
    8 Sep 2009 | 8:54 pm
    Tip for media sites: If you start a new feature, be sure to lock up the URL for it before you launch it. That prevents domain squatters from grabbing away the newly named feature's Web address, and that in turn makes it harder to defend a trademark or to promote the feature under its own domain name. Pretty elementary stuff, and this sort of thing is standard operating procedure at most Web companies (who also know to grab the xxxsucks.com variant of any trademark or URL). But media sites, always casual about trademarking new features, often seem to miss this little detail.Case in…

  • Bill Wyman Speaks Truth to Power

    Mark Potts
    13 Aug 2009 | 3:08 pm
    Millions of words have been spilled over the past couple of years about what's wrong in the news business (many of them on this blog). But if you want to read a few thousand words that explain the state of play with superb clarity and brutal frankness, check out Bill Wyman's just-posted two-part series exploring why the news business is in the mess it's in today. It's thoughtful and probing and justly critical of the people who lead (and work in) news organizations.Among many other things, Wyman explains well why many of the more simplistic proposed fixes (charging for…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Reflections of a Newsosaur

  • Polls apart on charging for content

    Newsosaur
    18 Nov 2009 | 9:29 am
    <!--StartFragment--> With the issue of charging for online content the hottest topic in publishing circles, polls are popping up everywhere purporting to divine consumer sentiment. But they unfortunately are all over the map. Thus, the surveys are providing neither guidance nor comfort for publishers as they agonize over whether or how to charge for the valuable content they have been giving

  • Health, wealth and sex sell best on web

    Newsosaur
    16 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    <!--StartFragment--> Health, wealth and sex are what sell the best on pay sites on the web, says the author of perhaps the most comprehensive survey to date of interactive revenue strategies. After systematically surveying 550 subscription and membership sites, Anne Holland, who is best know as the founder and former proprietor of the popular Marketing Sherpa website, reckons that American

  • Newspaper epitaph: ‘Who else is doing it?’

    Newsosaur
    10 Nov 2009 | 5:30 am
    A year ago, Alan Jacobson, a talented and indefatigably innovative newspaper designer, came up with an idea for a highly targeted, efficient-to-produce and effortlessly viral website that is exactly the sort of thing newspapers need to strengthen their online franchises. After spending many frustrating months trying to interest publishers in his idea, he got a piece of advice from a friend. “

  • Ugly ethnic profiling tarred Ft. Hood coverage

    Newsosaur
    9 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    The news media succumbed to ugly ethnic and religious profiling in their coverage of the shooting last week at Fort Hood. Shame on them. Media executives ought to closely review their coverage of the Fort Hood massacre to develop sufficient organizational discipline to avoid spreading in the future the sort of inflammatory information they irresponsibly aired and published as the tragic

  • Chicago news co-op starts on a shoestring

    Newsosaur
    6 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    While the editors of some notable non-profit news startups pull down hefty six-figure salaries, the founding editor of the Chicago News Cooperative says his pay will be a single digit for the next 12 months: $0. That low, low introductory salary in part is testimony to the dedication of co-op founder James O’Shea, a lifelong Chicago newsman who had a brief tour as editor of the tempest-tossed
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Ricochet by Chrys Wu

  • Thought for the Day

    Chrys
    19 Nov 2009 | 12:44 pm
    Jack Cheng, where have you been all my life?

  • Help Populate My Hack Day Project

    Chrys
    10 Oct 2009 | 12:46 am
    I came up with a Yahoo Hack Day idea that I hope will be fun and useful. To get it to work well, I need sample data. Could you take this survey and ask others to do so, too? Thank you. If I can stay awake long enough, I may have the seed of my project ready to submit by the noon deadline. If not, I’ll continue chopping at this in the days and weeks to come until I do have something viable. Loading…

  • Evan Williams’ Keynote at ONA09

    Chrys
    5 Oct 2009 | 9:59 am
    Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams opened the Online News Association 2009 conference with a discussion about the service, how it’s changed and what plans the company has in store. Watch the livestream: You can also watch Leo Laporte’s keynote and the ONA Online Journalism Awards ceremony. Video from ONA09 panel sessions are free for members, $25 for non-members. Details on how to watch those are here.

  • Online News Association Conference Tag Cloud

    Chrys
    2 Oct 2009 | 10:18 am
    ago collected conversation darthcheeta data david de decisions depardieu english ev follow google govt grmadryn help hide http important install journalism katpowers leolaporte minutes mobile norsk ona09 onadata panel query reply results rt se search sf shines story sunshine suomen talking tigerbeat translate tweet tweetdeck twitter view web williams wish created at TagCrowd.com Updated at 2:53 p.m. PT.

  • How to Follow the Online News Association Conference

    Chrys
    29 Sep 2009 | 11:17 am
    The sold-out annual convergence of digital journalists begins this week in San Francisco, with a career summit/job fair and pre-conference workshops on Thursday, and formal proceedings Friday and Saturday. Once again, I’ll be acting as control tower on Twitter @ONA09, directing you to discussions of note, posts, articles, and relevant links. The conference hashtag is #ONA09. Keynotes and individual sessions will have their own hashtags for easier filtering. They’ll be posted to the conference website and available in the printed program you’ll receive on-site. If you plan to…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    20 headlines from the reading list

  • ‘Copy Editor's Lament (The Layoff Song)': The video!

    20 Nov 2009 | 5:29 am
    It's finally here! The video for “Copy Editor's Lament (The Layoff Song)” by my friend and colleague Christopher Ave. You have to see it. You can also buy the song on iTunes. So far, the 2009 newspaper layoff total stands at 14,571+ jobs. ShareThis

  • Copy Editor's Lament (The Layoff Song) [Music video] [del.icio.us]

    20 Nov 2009 | 5:12 am
    Chris Ave, the genius behind the Politifact Song, has a new video for his song, "Copy Editor's Lament." Check out the all-star dance scene.

  • Schurz Invests in Rural Broadband Supplier

    19 Nov 2009 | 11:27 pm

  • The Best Camera Is The One You Have With You: The Art of iPhoneography

    19 Nov 2009 | 11:43 am
    The Best Camera Is The One You Have With You I heard someone say this recently and the voice inside my head yelled, AMEN! Most professional photographers, despite the $5,000 camera hang'n around their neck knows this to be true: Photography is not about the tool, it's about the photographer. More ...

  • 5Across: Social Media Marketing 101

    19 Nov 2009 | 8:41 am
    There's a new series of demands being made in company meetings everywhere: "What is our social media strategy? What are we doing on Facebook and Twitter? I want followers and fans, and I want them now!" But before companies large and small -- as well as non-profits and charities -- jump into social media, they need to take a deep breath and think about it. What are their goals? What kind of return on investment will they get? Even though it's free to set up fan pages and feeds, there's a time investment that may or may not pay off. On this episode of 5Across, I convened a group of social…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    robcurley.com

  • Pacquiao-Cotto fight: Twitter, live blogs, multimedia and general wiliness as a part of beat coverage

    Rob
    17 Nov 2009 | 5:00 pm
    For a kid who grew up in Kansas with beef, basketball and Bob Dole, things like boxing and UFC are a little out there for me. But I have to admit that I enjoy them. And it’s obvious that a whole lot of lasvegassun.com readers love them, as well. As I have written about before, UFC seems very much like Las Vegas’ major-league sports franchise to me. And though its relationship is different with the city, boxing absolutely has the same vibe to it. I know that with just about 18 months under my belt I’m very much a newbie to Nevada, but I still love to go to the Strip on Fight…

  • Using evergreen databases and guides with weekly narrative content

    Rob
    13 Nov 2009 | 12:29 pm
    Our team has always been known for building lots and lots of databases. Or at least we get asked about them a lot. Though we’re probably best known for our sports databases, some of my favorites from the past have been things like our restaurant health-inspection reports and state legislature voting records from our time at The Topeka Capital-Journal in the early part of this decade. Don’t try to find those DBs — they’re long gone from cjonline.com. I’ve long said that five things really push traffic on the web: content that people are passionate about, practical…

  • How a ‘traditional print journalist’ can become a great new-media journalist and still not know Flash or how to edit video

    Rob
    9 Nov 2009 | 11:50 am
    When I originally started writing this blog entry, I typed “U2 comes to the desert: Covering a mega-concert via new media” as the headline in the WordPress title box. And that’s what this post was going to be about — how John Katsilometes covered U2’s recent concert in Las Vegas. To say I was impressed with how Johnny Kats covered it is a huge understatement. As I have written before, this guy impresses me a whole lot of the time, and I literally think he represents a major facet of how local journalism can/will survive. But as I looked at his coverage of the U2…

  • Sin City Halloween coverage shows how print brand can work well — and even expand — on the web

    Rob
    7 Nov 2009 | 11:23 am
    Halloween in Las Vegas is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be — both the relative normalcy of the haunted holiday for the locals who live here and the overkill craziness that happens on the Strip. Sarah Feldberg helped lead our team’s coverage of the edgier parts of the haunted holiday in Sin City. She is our team’s editor for lasvegasweekly.com — Greenspun Interactive’s entertainment site for Las Vegas and the web companion to the Las Vegas Weekly print edition. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Sarah dating back to our team’s time…

  • World Series of Poker coverage from the Las Vegas Sun

    Rob
    5 Nov 2009 | 12:31 pm
    I’ve started and stopped writing probably five or six blogs over the last few months, but just couldn’t find the time or focus to finish them. Lots of reasons for that, but the bottom line is that I sure wish I would have. I have always prided myself on being a “glass-half-full” kind-of-guy — and any way you slice it, the Las Vegas Sun, Las Vegas Weekly and Greenspun Interactive crews have created some of the coolest and most interactive new-era local journalism I’ve ever seen over the last few months. Because of that, someone needs to not only be…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Romenesko

  • Poynter's Times Publishing Co. sells Governing magazine to company big on Scientology

    20 Nov 2009 | 2:15 pm
    St. Petersburg Times | The Hollywood Reporter e.Republic was chosen from among six bidders for the magazine. Several of the principals of the California media company are members of the Church of Scientology, and the St. Petersburg Times has been running stories critical of the church. "It's a business deal," says Times Publishing veep Andrew Corty. "We didn't want to exclude anybody because of their personal or religious beliefs." || Related. > Sacramento News & Review: "Executives at e.Republic are so close to Scientology that they don't understand where the [company] 'training' ends and…

  • Publisher apologizes for screaming at college football coach for not playing his son enough

    20 Nov 2009 | 1:15 pm
    Times West Virginian Times West Virginian publisher Andrew Kniceley (left) used his newspaper to apologize for yelling at a football coach because his son played only three plays in a game. "I regret any embarrassment or discomfort that I have caused FSU [Fairmont State University], my newspaper and my family -- especially my son Josh," writes the publisher, who is also chairman of the FSU board.

  • What alternative media need to do to survive

    20 Nov 2009 | 12:46 pm
    The Kojo Nnamdi Listen to Thursday's WAMU discussion of the state of alternative media. The guests: Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism; former Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff; Richard Karpel of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies; and Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple.

  • Brill's Journalism Online pitch has changed over time

    20 Nov 2009 | 12:25 pm
    Nieman Journalism Lab One of the tweaks that Zachary Seward has noticed: Steve Brill used to use the term "wall" to describe subscription content, but he's now abandoned that language. "We're not putting up any kind of a paywall," hes been saying.

  • How do you review a medical-marijuana dispensary? Pretty much the way you would a restaurant

    20 Nov 2009 | 11:46 am
    Westword That's the approach William Breathes takes. He describes the decor ("like that hippie kid's hangout in high school -- complete with a boom box and thrift-store furniture"); the service ("employees didn't seem particularly interested in ... even helping me"); and what he ordered ("I'd settled on a gram of hash and two grams of herb"). The only thing missing is the number of stars he'd give the place. > Earlier: Over 200 apply to be Westword's pot critic
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Megan Taylor: Web Journalist

  • Live By Request: John Fogerty / PBS

    Megan Taylor
    7 Nov 2009 | 8:11 am
    Live By Request: John Fogerty My credit line for Live By Request: John Fogerty I worked with Connect Infinity to handle Twitter, Facebook and YouTube postings and requests for 3 weeks up to and including the show. October 13 – November 7 Skills: Community Development Medium: Social Media Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistLive By Request: John Fogerty / PBS

  • Harris Field Contaminated / Norwood News

    Megan Taylor
    22 Oct 2009 | 12:06 pm
    Harris Field Contaminated Heavy metals have been discovered at Harris Field in Bedford Park during the park’s reconstruction, the Norwood News has learned. Published October 22, 2009, front page of the Norwood News. Skills: Reporting, Writing Medium: Text Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistHarris Field Contaminated / Norwood News

  • Can Programmers, Journalists Get Along in One Newsroom? / PBS MediaShift

    Megan Taylor
    19 Oct 2009 | 7:01 pm
    Can Programmers, Journalists Get Along in One Newsroom? How do you merge the culture of the programming environment with the culture of the newsroom? “You need to go do what you’re being asked to build,” he [Matt Waite] said. “Spend a night on the sports copy desk taking high school football scores and you’ll get an idea of what a football score taking app should do, no matter what the editor is telling you.” Similarly, journalists would do well to sit with a programmer and watch their ideas get turned into an app. Published October 19, 2009. Skills:…

  • Harris Field Contamination Slows Construction / Bronx News Network

    Megan Taylor
    9 Oct 2009 | 5:54 pm
    Harris Field Contamination Slows Construction The discovery of heavy metals contamination during construction at Harris Field in Bedford Park has slowed progress and put the project over budget, according to city’s Parks Department. Published October 9, 2009. Skills: Reporting, Writing Medium: Text Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistHarris Field Contamination Slows Construction / Bronx News Network

  • The Art of Attraction / MediaStorm Workshop

    Megan Taylor
    8 Oct 2009 | 8:07 pm
    The Art of Attraction New York street performers Tic and Tac began their careers at the age of seven, break-dancing in the subways. In The Art of Attraction, Tic and Tac catapult themselves into New York’s iconic home of street-artists, Washington Square Park, where they pull crowds and big money with their neck-crushing acrobatics. My role in this project was as a volunteer, transcribing all the audio. Produced September 19 – 25, 2009. Skills: Transcribing Medium: Text, Audio Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistThe Art of Attraction / MediaStorm Workshop
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    SteveOuting.com

  • Kachingle beta goes live (Kachingle me, please!)

    Steve Outing
    15 Nov 2009 | 11:54 am
    One of my strongest interests this year has been news and content business models, and how to pay for content that’s given away free online. As a blogger (and my professional interest as a writer, researcher, and consultant on news business models), I’m especially interested in the wave of new solutions for websites and blogs to attract money from volunteer contributors. This weekend, Kachingle, one of the first of this new wave of voluntary-pay solutions I heard and started writing about in early 2009, debuted its service in beta. (Disclaimer.) I’m excited to finally see…

  • A better Newsday.com model

    Steve Outing
    10 Nov 2009 | 1:12 pm
    I’ve been getting some pushback on my previous blog item about Newsday’s decision to put up a subscription wall to its website content except for Newsday print subscribers and subscribers of Optimum Online cable/Internet service (same ownership). This actually is a good business model for Newsday because of its unique position, though it probably could not be duplicated elsewhere, the critics suggest. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Consider this: Instead of a “no trespassing, freeloaders!” subscription wall, what if Newsday.com had instead come up with a special Newsday…

  • Newsday’s pay wall: From bad to worse

    Steve Outing
    9 Nov 2009 | 8:29 pm
    What’s wrong with this webpage I encountered the other day? Besides the lack of wisdom of a general-interest newspaper (Newsday) putting a pay wall on its website for non-unique content (my opinion, shared by many other media experts), the worse part is that Newsday.com is leaving money behind. Double-dumb. Here’s my experience: I saw a Twitter post linking to this article; clicked through. Got to Newsday.com teaser page with intro to story and a link to “VIDEO: See the Droid in action.” Video seemed interesting, so I clicked. Got to the page above, which gave me ONLY…

  • Why I think ‘block level’ news, data is important

    Steve Outing
    6 Nov 2009 | 9:22 pm
    Earlier today Howard Weaver tweeted the following, which I can’t answer in 140 characters (!) so I’ll respond here. … “Why do people (@steveouting et al) keep saying ‘block level’ info is best premium opportunity? Seems *most* likely to be citizen generated.” –@howardweaver I don’t recall saying it’s the “best” premium online content opportunity, though I think it’s important. Why? Because I don’t know what’s going on with my neighbors, other than the ones I know or who are friends. No business, media,…

  • So what exactly is newspaper web ‘premium’ content? Please tell me

    Steve Outing
    5 Nov 2009 | 9:12 am
    So, it appears that we’ve passed the point within the newspaper industry of utter panic and all the publishers will not be colluding (ahem… I mean cooperating) to put most of their websites’ content behind pay walls. At least that CEO/publisher-group insanity is over — I hope. Image: istockphoto.com Instead, the meme within the industry is something I’ve long supported: Let’s keep most of our news content online free, so that we don’t lose advertisers and high reader numbers, and maintain our “googlejuice,” but let’s create more…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Strange Attractor

  • Killing straw men

    Suw Charman-Anderson
    8 Nov 2009 | 1:30 pm
    Paul Carr has written a post for TechCrunch about citizen journalism and social media entitled After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth. Normally I ignore TechCrunch alone, but so many people I know were impressed with the post that I had to read it. Sadly, it’s riven with poor logic, straw men and factual inaccuracies. Paul starts with a straw man: …after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support…

  • Cars: There’s an app for that

    Kevin Anderson
    4 Nov 2009 | 6:12 am
    Suw and I are taking two weeks off. Most of the time, we’ll be here in London enjoying a holi-stay. I might engage in some deep-thought blogging after recovering from a really too busy 2009. In the meantime, I’ll just engage in a little light coolhunting. Someone recently was picking my brain about the future of in-car technology. I think that one of the knock-on effects of the iPhone is that people will expect apps and add-on services in a wider range of consumer electronics. Cars will not just have on-board computers to manage the engine but also on-board computers to navigate,…

  • Playful 09

    Suw Charman-Anderson
    30 Oct 2009 | 1:16 pm
    I’m at Playful ‘09 today. I’m not going to be taking verbatim notes, as is my usual habit, but instead just jotting down a few random notes. Roo Reynolds Films based on games, often not very good. Minesweeper film trailer (from College Trailer). The only good film from a game is Tron. Leila Johnston Wrote Enemy of Chaos, adventure book written for the aging nerd market, not many books for that demographic. Character believes “Obsessive regulation might stave off decay” [sounds like our government]. Kareem Ettouney How do large teams collaborate? Given bands, with…

  • Researchers determine mainstream online journalism still mainstream

    Kevin Anderson
    30 Oct 2009 | 6:04 am
    In a shocking (possibly only to the researchers) conclusion, a study of major media online journalism newsrooms in the UK has discovered that they follow a relatively narrow mainstream agenda. I think that is a fair summary of an interview on Radio 4 with Dr Natalie Fenton from Goldsmith University Media Research Centre in London speaking about her book New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age. From the synopsis on Radio 4, “Dr Natalie Fenton from Goldsmith’s University in London, … argues that instead of democratising information, the internet has…

  • Plain English fail

    Suw Charman-Anderson
    25 Oct 2009 | 9:17 am
    I wrote a post about jargon the other day, and in the comments someone asked me what I thought the worst bit of social media jargon was. I realised then that individual terms, even quite jargon-y ones, can be used in such a way that they can easily be understood because of the context. Equally, terms that by themselves don’t seem too bad can be brought together in a such a concoction that they immediately lose all meaning. I discovered such an example today, via John Moore (via someone who Tweeted it). John blogs about the Dachis Group’s attempt to explain what they mean when they…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Teaching Online Journalism

  • Journalists’ use of social media

    Mindy McAdams
    11 Nov 2009 | 11:51 am
    The Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) has put out a very simple list of social media guidelines for its journalists and staff to follow: Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute. Do not undermine your effectiveness at work. Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views. Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work. – Posted Nov. 5, 2009 These seem sensible to me. They’re so straightforward, you might think no self-respecting journalist needs guidelines such as these. But they are also valuable for what…

  • Rethinking journalism education

    Mindy McAdams
    31 Oct 2009 | 8:00 am
    A new journalism concentration at New York University promises to take an innovative approach to j-school: Studio 20 expects all applicants to have a keen interest in journalism and improving it, a strong command of written English, a devotion to high standards in reportage and verification, and a familiarity with creative uses of the World Wide Web. It also requires applicants to have obtained competence in at least one of the following three skill sets: Capturing audio and editing it, or Video recording, production and editing, or Web skills (which could be production, design and coding, or…

  • Augmented reality apps: A business model

    Mindy McAdams
    7 Oct 2009 | 7:04 am
    One key to selling advertising is your ability to assure the advertiser that people will see his or her ad. One of the problems with Web sites — especially news Web sites — is that they have so many pages. The chances that someone will see an ad (if it appears on just one page) are lousy. One key to news and information in the 21st century is user participation. Think YouTube. Think Wikipedia. Augmented reality lets you hold up your phone (or other mobile device) and see information about what is right in front of you in the world. So I was thinking about advertising, audience…

  • RGMP handout server outages

    Mindy McAdams
    5 Oct 2009 | 7:27 am
    A number of you e-mailed me (thank you!) about difficulties in accessing the PDF of the complete Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Profiency. I am happy to report that the guide is definitely online and available. There have been a couple of server outages (the Web server went offline), but rest assured, this will always be corrected within a day or two at the most (on a weekend, it might not be fixed until Monday).

  • Playing with dynamic mapping

    Mindy McAdams
    3 Oct 2009 | 12:07 pm
    Above you should see a map of the location of the ONA09 hotel. It is fully zoomable — it’s a full-feeatured Google Maps embed. Try it out. This was done with the WP-Geo plug-in for WordPress, which we learned to use in the session titled “Dynamic Content Mapping.” Here is the PowerPoint for this session.
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    The Evolving Newsroom

  • Got any stories to sell over the silly season?

    Julie Starr
    19 Nov 2009 | 6:41 pm
    I’m launching an online marketplace shortly where you can sell and buy news features, profiles, reviews and other stories. It’s called All About The Story and the idea is to use the web to make it easier for writers to sell their stories, test the market for new kinds of storytelling, and to make it easy for editors to find new talent and pick up content that will inspire them and help plug gaps in their pages. We have big plans but we’re starting out with one simple goal: to give newspaper editors a stack of interesting content they can fill their pages with over the slow…

  • Got a digital news project that needs funding?

    Julie Starr
    8 Nov 2009 | 12:40 pm
    Got a great idea for an open-source, digital, local news project? Need some money? It’s not too late to apply for this year’s Knight News Challenge in the US. The deadline for entries has been extended until December 15 and Knight does sometimes fund projects outside the US. They are looking for projects that: Use digital open-source media To distribute news and information In a geographic determined community (local community) There are two categories of entry: open and closed. If you enter in the open category ‘the public will be able to review, rate and comment on your…

  • Links: data.govt, temporariness, paywall wait

    Julie Starr
    8 Nov 2009 | 12:15 pm
    Data.govt.nz launches Great to see that the government, via the Ministry of Internal Affairs, has launched data.govt.nz, a website that aims to pull together all manner of non-personal government data in formats suitable for developers to work with. This is what the people at Open.nz.org were pushing for and it looks like the site is off to a good start with some useful datasets and a discussion area for developers to talk to the site owners about what they need.  Here’s Jason Ryan on the NSPC blog, and Nat Torkington gives it a first appraisal on Open.nz.org. Twitter is not only…

  • ‘Your main newspaper can’t dictate the future’

    Julie Starr
    7 Nov 2009 | 1:55 pm
    John Temple, formerly editor and publisher of the now defunct Rocky Mountain News in Denver, the US, wrote a great post discussing the lessons he learned from the experience of the Rocky. (Thanks to Mirko for pointing me to it.) Temple talks a lot about missed opportunities and not understanding at first that the web is a different beast to print and can’t be approached in the same way. He offers up ten lessons: Know what business you’re in. Know your customers. Know your competition. Know your goal. Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it. Measure, measure, measure. Keep new…

  • Keywords in blue – adding usability to print

    Julie Starr
    5 Nov 2009 | 1:49 pm
    Interesting to see what web designers come up with when they tackle a newspaper redesign. I liked this post from the people at Information Architects. They talk about pitching to redesign a German newspaper and some of the ideas they came up for it. They didn’t win the job, but learned a lot from the exercise. Their pitch focused on taking the web concept of usability and using it in print. Their aim was to: “Make the paper more usable, think cross media instead of separate media, while using the strength of the paper (pictures, info graphics, nice text) to the max… Make a…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Local Onliner

  • ‘Final’ ILM:09 Speakers Added (Twitter, AT&Ti, Euro Directories +++)

    Peter
    19 Nov 2009 | 1:11 pm
    The ILM:09 conference Dec. 9-11 in LA is now just around the corner. We’ve handpicked 60 cutting-edge speakers, and we think we are onto something that is really important. I can tell you that signups have been great, too. Recent adds to the speaker roster include Twitter’s Anamitra Banerji and AT&T Interactive’s Greg Issacs, who will be joining Facebook’s Tim Kendall and Citysearch’s Kara Nortman on our “Social/Local” panel. We’ve also added Trinity Ventures’ Patricia Nakache, who joins Canaan Partners’ Warren Lee and Comcast Interactive’s Michael Yang on our…

  • Public Radio: A Local Media Competitor?

    Peter
    18 Nov 2009 | 11:34 am
    National Public Radio has been recently getting more aggressive in promoting sponsorship packages in advertising industry trades. Indeed, NPR has positioned itself as an advertising alternative to other news outlets – positioning that hyperlocal sites such as Sacramento Press are also assuming. How far can NPR and the local public radio affiliates go as an alternative news and advertising source? Former Knight Ridder Exec Ken Doctor has an excellent take on it, inspired by last week’s “Future of News” summit held by Minnesota Public Radio. Doctor talks to MPR head Bill Kling, who…

  • Comcast Beefs Up Local Sports Sites

    Peter
    17 Nov 2009 | 4:26 pm
    Following in the footsteps of ESPN Local and CBS, Comcast will develop local sports sites on the back of its existing TV properties. Comcast has already launched Comcast SportsNet News England, which it calls “the most comprehensive and dedicated online local sports destination.” The site features local media celebrities and has added 40 new positions – a remarkable investment. ESPN and CBS have only added a few new positions at this point. The New England site is acting as the template for similar upgrades in San Francisco, DC/Baltimore and Chicago. Philadelphia, which upgraded…

  • Yahoo News Pumping Up Local Efforts

    Peter
    16 Nov 2009 | 3:16 pm
    Yahoo News is bolstering its local efforts and building “a staff of editors around the US who will improve the local news experience on the frontpage,” according to a Tweet from Anthony Moor, who was recruited from Dallasnews.com, per Lost Remote. The Yahoo News effort is probably at least partially motivated by revamped local efforts at both MSN and AOL. Yahoo is building on an area where it has already had some success. Local news modules on the Front Page have been in place for a couple of years, but they are currently automated and based on RSS feeds from local news sites,…

  • CBSi’s Quincy Smith: TV’s Future is Secure

    Peter
    16 Nov 2009 | 11:24 am
    Outgoing CBS Interactive head Quincy Smith, in a New Teevee Live interview conducted by Om Malik, said he continues to have confidence in the future of TV, which is unlikely to suffer the same disruptive fate that many people are assuming for the music and newspaper businesses. “The future of TV is video, wherever you watch it,” said Smith. “Two minutes of CSI (on the Internet) might have more impact than any 44 minutes of CSI on the network or its (local) affiliates.” It’s not the same as a pirated MP3 of a three minute Beyonce song killing off potential album sales. The…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    The Scoop

  • Buying Into Computational Journalism

    Derek
    9 Nov 2009 | 7:02 pm
    Update: Duke’s Sarah Cohen responds in the comments. The intriguing title of a recent report from scholars at Duke is “Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism“. Semi-related to CAR, Computational Journalism is defined as “the combination of algorithms, data, and knowledge from the social sciences to supplement the accountability function of journalism.” I take each of those – algorithms, data and knowledge from the social sciences – as separate elements, because while journalists do have plenty to learn from…

  • The FEC’s Disclosure Data Catalog

    Derek
    28 Oct 2009 | 7:44 am
    The good folks at the Federal Election Commission launched a disclosure data catalog recently, continuing the federal government data catalog trend. And while there are few (if any) people better at explaining campaign finance data than the FEC’s Bob Biersack, the data catalog is a work in progress and has room for improvement. It should be noted that the FEC has been giving away campaign finance data in bulk form since 1979, and has remained admirably consistent in its approach. Text files stored on FTP servers still work quite well, thank you, and while that system could use some…

  • One Way to Encourage Innovation

    Derek
    24 Jul 2009 | 8:02 am
    Innovation. We’re told over and over (often by people who don’t actually do much more than talk, but that’s another story) that our industry needs it. So, you ask, how I can get me some of that innovation stuff? In my experience, there’s only so much that a single person (or a small group of people) can do inside a larger organization to develop new ideas and see them thrive. You need help, often from the very structures that new ideas might seem to be challenging. So here’s an idea: reward innovation with concrete responses. Yesterday, J-Lab at American…

  • IRE’s Role in a National Data Catalog

    Derek
    15 Jul 2009 | 3:45 pm
    The folks at Sunlight today announced an effort to build a catalog for national and state datasets, going beyond what Data.gov is doing at the federal level. It’s a worthy effort, and as Clay Johnson notes in the blog post, they’re inviting participation because they are definitely going to need the help. I say that not to denigrate the good folks there, but because the universe of data is so varied that it makes Data.gov’s organizational system look like the Library of Congress. That’s where Investigative Reporters and Editors can help, I believe. For those who read…

  • The Fundamental Training Need

    Derek
    25 Jun 2009 | 6:45 pm
    It’s good to see recent writings on the importance of training and skill development for journalists. One of the common responses to such entreaties is exemplified in this comment, which includes this plea: “I understand the need to bolster one’s skill set. But what happened to the days when we actually, you know, worried about reporting rather than slavishly trying to master every piece of technology?” If only that was the real problem. The real problem is the way that we as journalists manage information, because that determines so much else: the kinds of stories…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Virtual Economics

  • Actually, I will pay for online content...

    seamusmccauley
    18 Nov 2009 | 11:15 pm
    A few days ago I argued that News Corp was ill-advised to put its newspaper websites behind a paywall and beyond the reach of Google. I as reminded today - as the Times announces a date for its paywall to go up - that personally I must concede one exception to this argument. As I have mentioned here before I buy the Times on Saturday to read Giles Coren's "restaurant review" (in which he does now seem to visit and comment on a restaurant every single week, a submission to restaurant reviewing orthodoxy which I regard mostly with scepticism) and for that reason alone. If the…

  • King's Cross caters for both gentlemen and Daleks

    seamusmccauley
    18 Nov 2009 | 10:02 pm
    King's Cross caters for both gentlemen and DaleksOriginally uploaded by vigornianFrom my friend Vigornian - signage indicates that King's Cross caters for both gentlemen and Daleks. "I couldn't help admiring the station's fine cross-species tolerance. Ood, Judoon etc must hold it in until they get home, obviously".

  • Who Stalkin?

    seamusmccauley
    17 Nov 2009 | 7:26 am
    Maybe you've all seen this one already but I only came across it today - http://whostalkin.com. (HT: j4.) Best vanity search I've ever found, far more interesting than bunging your own name into Google. (Well, my name anyway. Your mileage may vary - maybe Google knows more interesting things about you). But I found a bunch of stuff I'd somehow missed the first time around (on which subject, Hi Grant! Thanks!). Recommend.

  • Making money from your own clicks

    seamusmccauley
    16 Nov 2009 | 12:48 pm
    Scott Adams - who regular readers will know I admire to the point of considering automatic first choice for world president, should such a position become magically available - pointed out yesterday that shopping broken. The Internet expands choice beyond utility; confusopolies render much of the choice meaningless; advertising is mostly just noise obviating the signal. He proposes a "hunter becomes the prey" solution in which instead of being bombarded with misleading advertisements for products people get to post up the details of the thing they want ("two weeks in…

  • Box office records sans frontiers

    seamusmccauley
    16 Nov 2009 | 11:44 am
    Very taken today by @kevglobal's point that "The new Call of Duty game made $310m in 24 hrs. Largest grossing movie of all time (Titanic) made $600m in 2 months". This blog and your newspaper and Twitter and Cormac McCarthy's The Road and going for a walk in the rain and playing the piano are all competing asymmetrically for the same finite, dwindling pool of attention and today Call of Duty is coming out on top - no surprise there really though since, per hour of entertainment, a good video game is ludicrously underpriced compared to a film and only a long book is really in…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Waitin' On a Moment - by Tim Gruber | NYC Photographer

  • 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…

  • To all aspiring photographers

    Tim Gruber
    12 Nov 2009 | 8:31 pm
    Came across this neat letter dating back to 1973 from Disney legend Ward Kimball to a young fan who wanted to be an animator. Some solid no frills advice in there. A few highlights: What I am trying to say is that becoming an animator is a growth process that involves basic curiosities for all things, because man, animation is just not making things move, it is THINKING, THINKING, THINKING! You can’t know enough about everything. Curiosity is the key word. See everything! Do everything! Learn from others, BUT DON’T COPY THEM! Try to retain your individualism while learning the…

  • Communication Arts Photography Annual – Served Out

    Tim Gruber
    9 Nov 2009 | 7:36 am
    By now I know well enough that you can’t put a lot of weight in contests, but we all know they’re good for keeping our name out there. I was happy to be included in the Communication Arts Photography Annual for my Served Out: Aging and Dying Behind Bars project. Communication Arts dedicated a full two pages to the project and the reproduction was spot on. Contest season is practically upon us again and this will be the first year where I no longer focus my efforts on photojournalism contests and make the shift towards contests seen by more art buyers and magazine photo editors.

  • A New Website for this NYC Photographer

    Tim Gruber
    6 Nov 2009 | 9:20 am
    For awhile I’ve had a redesign of my website NYC Photographer Tim Gruber in mind. I’ve spent the last couple weeks working to make it happen. In studying my website analytics I realized I needed to improve my average time on site and my bounce rate. The bounce rate is the number of people who land on your website and then quickly bounce off again. Not what you want. You want your viewers to stick around and get to know you and your work. So in this latest redesign I wanted the design to aide in making the site stickier. Meaning making it easier for a visitor to stick around. On my…

  • Scream of a Surfer

    Tim Gruber
    3 Nov 2009 | 10:14 pm
    Jenn and I love to go on walks. For us walks are therapeutic. It gives us time to hash out a lot of ideas. Sometimes those ideas die quickly(our minds cook up some crazy ideas) and other times we have ideas that actually stick. Most of all it’s nice to get away from the computer and just give your mind a little time to recharge. Depending on my mood I’ll bring a camera with me or if I’m lazy I’ll just wing it with my iPhone. On Saturday I was feeling lazy but Jenn brought her camera and of course the day you don’t bring your camera you come across a kid with a…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    yelvington.com

  • Some advice to designers of news websites

    yelvington
    15 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    This morning I ran across a note at drupal.org from a beginning designer asking for a critique of his attempt to design a news site. The attempt led me to focus on some weaknesses that are common to many professionally designed sites. There are too many "redesigns" of news sites, and the typical redesign process is set up for failure. It goes like this: A new entity takes over the site. Maybe there's a restructuring that places the site under the control of the newspaper editor. Maybe it's a change in new-media directors. Maybe it's a designer. The goal of "make this work for the user" is…

  • Keller's list of 7 priorities should be every newsroom's list

    yelvington
    3 Nov 2009 | 6:54 am
    I often point out that the New York Times is in a very different business than the typical local/regional daily newspaper in the United States. But listening to Bill Keller tell the NYT Digital crew his list of seven "questions that loom largest to us at the moment," I'm struck by how perfectly it aligns with the key newsroom issues at every daily newspaper in America. If you're not acutely aware of all of these, you have some homework to do. Keller's list: Where are we going with topics pages? What is the best strategy for community? How to spread the gospel of integration more fully in the…

  • Government-supported journalism

    yelvington
    1 Nov 2009 | 6:53 am
    Writing for the Washington Post, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols advocate a renewed government effort to support journalism. This has sparked a predictable round of mild paranoia (government support can become government control). But it might be useful to take a look at the many ways in which government already contributes to journalism, through funding and policy, in ways that benefit the citizenry of the United States. The big obvious examples are broadcasting. Public broadcasting, US-style: The federal government funds about one out of every eight dollars spent on public TV and…

  • Slate's ill-informed pageview whoring

    yelvington
    28 Oct 2009 | 7:49 am
    Isn't Slate supposed to be above the level of "random Internet troll?" One wonders after reading the anti-Drupal rant by Slate Washington correspondent Chris Wilson, who first claims to explain "Why running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster waiting to happen," then fails to do so. Wilson's complaints about Drupal are universally wrong in fact, but the kicker is that he finishes up with this quip: "As a cautionary tale, the WhiteHouse.gov administrators might look to Recovery.gov, which is devoted to tracking stimulus spending. The site originally used Drupal but soon…

  • Technology wants to be used (a look at the Nook)

    yelvington
    21 Oct 2009 | 5:55 am
    I have seen the future, or more precisely, little pieces of the future protruding into the present. Barnes &Nobel has unwrapped its e-reader, dubbed "Nook," which is intentionally crippled by its corporate masters. But it won't stay that way. Here's how it's crippled: There's no Web browser. I get it. The Nook connects to download books and periodicals from B&N's online store through AT&T's 3G digital wireless phone network. The cost of that service is included in the purchase price (and in B&N's bookselling business model). AT&T is already hurting from high 3G usage by…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    The Innovation Journalism Blog

  • IAMCR Conference 2010: The Role of Journalism in Innovation Systems

    David Nordfors
    2 Nov 2009 | 6:10 pm
    Innovation Journalism and the concepts of innovation communication systems and attention work are being addressed by the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) World Conference in Braga Portugal (2010) on “Communication and Citizenship: Rethinking Crisis and Change".IAMCR is the worldwide professional organisation in the field of media and communication research. It was founded in 1957 and is present in 40 countries today.The Journalism Research & Education Section of the IAMCR is inviting people to submit research papers to the conference within five…

  • Innovation Journalism Course at the University of Jyväskylä

    David Nordfors
    20 Oct 2009 | 10:35 am
    The University of Jyväskylä in Finland is running a course in Innovation Journalism this autumn. The course is headed by Turo Uskali, fmr visiting researcher at the Injo center here at Stanford:JOUS026 
Innovation Journalism and Innovations in Journalism University of Jyväskylä, Finland10.9.-1.12.2009, ToB 216Turo Uskali, Ph DThe course is all about innovations and innovations in journalism. In these challenging financial and environmental times, new ideas, concepts, tools, methods, and innovations are needed in societies in many different levels; also in news business and…

  • Innovation Journalism Fellowships 2010

    David Nordfors
    15 Oct 2009 | 4:03 pm
    We are now in the process of launching the Innovation Journalism Fellowships 2010. Read more about it on the Stanford Injo web.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.

  • 1st Nordic Conference on Injo, Helsinki 25 Sep

    David Nordfors
    17 Sep 2009 | 8:48 am
    The 1st Nordic Conference on Innovation Journalism will be taking place at the Communications Research Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland on Sep 25. It is supported by Helsingin Sanomat Foundation and Sitra, who are funding the Finnish Innovation Journalism initiative. These are the funding organizations who have made it possible for Finnish journalists and researchers to come to theVINNOVA-Stanford research center of innovation journalism.I will be keynoting the conference, so if you are going I will see you there! The conference program and registration is available on the conference…

  • Innovation Journalism Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia - Sep 3

    David Nordfors
    25 Aug 2009 | 10:10 am
    The yearly regional innovation journalism conference in Slovenia takes place on Sep 3. There are are grants for covering the participation for journalists from the Balkan region. Others are welcome to the conference, but need to cover their own costs.The conference is co-organized by Vibacom, who are running the Slovenian Innovation Journalism initiative, and EJC, the European Journalism Center in Maastricht.I will be participating in the conference over video, I hope to see you there!See the call below for applicants to the funded spots:Journalists, editors, communicators and media employees…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Lost Remote

  • "The highlight for me was seeing the founder and editor of West Seattle Blog, Tracy Record,..."

    19 Nov 2009 | 4:44 pm
    “The highlight for me was seeing the founder and editor of West Seattle Blog, Tracy Record, positioned on stage next to msnbc.com president Charlie Tillinghast. Two years ago, who would have believed that a neighborhood news site would warrant the same consideration as one of the giants in the online news world.” - Mark Briggs blogging about a local panel at the MIT Enterprise Forum in Seattle.

  • Twitter lights up its geolocation API: It’s here, but it...

    19 Nov 2009 | 4:16 pm
    Twitter lights up its geolocation API: It’s here, but it only works 1) if you turn on geotagging in your account settings on Twitter.com and 2) you’re using a Twitter mobile application with the geolocation feature, like Foursquare. Both these factors will combine to make this a rather specialized use case, but as Twitter says, “These are only the beginning.”

  • Fox Sports launching local sites, too: Joining the ranks of ESPN...

    19 Nov 2009 | 3:58 pm
    Fox Sports launching local sites, too: Joining the ranks of ESPN and Comcast, Fox Sports is quietly rolling out a network of a dozen local/regional sports sites, like FoxSportsArizona.com. In less than a year, local sports has suddenly become an incredibly competitive field, with local media feeling the squeeze from both national players and the sports leagues themselves.

  • AOL hiring journalists, laying off just about everyone else

    19 Nov 2009 | 2:22 pm
    AOL hiring journalists, laying off just about everyone else: AOL announced today that it’s planning to lay off 2,500 employees — about a third of its staff — but the company is still hiring journalists in a plan to beef up original content. That’s a change.

  • "What’s happening?"

    19 Nov 2009 | 12:10 pm
    “What’s happening?” - What Twitter now asks you, instead of “What are you going?” — a subtle change to try to encourage more newsy Tweets. “People are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more,” explains co-founder Biz Stone.
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    National Press Photographers Assoc.

  • Documenting Hunters Point: Alex Welsh

    20 Nov 2009 | 11:26 am
    Photojournalist Alex Welsh, a 2009 San Francisco State University photojournalism graduate who last week won gold in the 64th annual College Photographer of the Year contest for his work in Hunters Point, has written a blog entry about his experience in NPPA's new student Web blog, "The Visual Student."

  • Documenting Hunters Point: Alex Welsh

    20 Nov 2009 | 11:26 am
    Photojournalist Alex Welsh, a 2009 San Francisco State University photojournalism graduate who last week won gold in the 64th annual College Photographer of the Year contest for his work in Hunters Point, has written a blog entry about his experience in NPPA's new student Web blog, "The Visual Student."

  • AOL Axing A Full Third Of Its Employees

    Donald R. Winslow
    20 Nov 2009 | 6:21 am
    AOL's CEO has told employees that he's looking for up to "2,500 volunteers" to be fired in December, hoping that fully a third of the company's payroll will step forward and take buyouts. Otherwise the AOL will have to ax people on its own. At this point it's too early to tell how many of AOL's photography department employees, as many as 40 people in the States and overseas and headed by Cathaleen Curtis, may leave.

  • WSB-TV Journalists Survive Truck Mast Hitting High-Voltage Wires

    19 Nov 2009 | 5:52 am
    Two Atlanta television journalists are recovering from injuries received Wednesday when the microwave mast of their news truck struck overhead powerlines and caused an explosion. The electricity traveled through the truck and deep into the ground, destroying a water main. A spokesman for Georgia Power said that he was surprised that anyone in the truck survived.

  • AP Layoffs Include Photographers, Texas Legend Harry Cabluck

    Donald R. Winslow
    18 Nov 2009 | 6:35 am
    Making good on an earlier promise to cut at least 10 percent of their payroll by the end of the year, the Associated Press has started a round of layoffs that included some legendary names in the photography staff. Harry Cabluck, 71, a four-decade AP veteran and Texas legend, was included in those who have been let go so far.
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Online Journalism Blog

  • Presentation: Law for bloggers and journalists (UK)

    Paul Bradshaw
    20 Nov 2009 | 4:23 am
    Yesterday I hosted a session on law for my MA Online Journalism students, which I thought I would embed below. Some background: I teach all my sessions in a coffee shop in central Birmingham – anyone can drop in. This week I specifically invited local bloggers, and so the shape of the presentation was very much flavoured by contributions from The Lichfield Blog’s Philip John; Nick Booth from Podnosh and BeVocal; Talk About Local’s Nicky Getgood; Hannah Waldram of the Bournville Village Blog; Gavin Wray, Matthew Mark, and Mike Rawlins of Stoke’s Pits N Pots. The…

  • What if a newspaper was designed using principles of user experience design?

    Paul Bradshaw
    20 Nov 2009 | 2:23 am
    What if a newspaper was designed using principles of web user experience design*? That’s the question that design agency Information Architects asked themselves when they put together a pitch for Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. They lost the pitch, but the blog post about their ideas is fascinating reading for anyone interested in usability and reinventing the print package for a multiplatform world. Their innovations included making the text scannable with blue text for key words (see above), high contrast, and being limited to two fonts. They cleaned up the logo (optimising it,…

  • The fall of a news site: the Spanish case of Soitu.es

    Mauro Accurso
    20 Nov 2009 | 1:28 am
    Like in the music or art fields, we, the Spanish-speaking people, allways look to the Anglo-American world to see what the new trends and innovation about digital journalism are (and laugh when Rupert Murdoch opens his mouth). But now we can show our own example of a news site that tried to survive in this ecosystem and… died. But it’s all about trial and error! I’m talking about Soitu.es, which closed its highly-regarded doors after 22 months of life. Of course, its demise had a strong impact in the blogosphere, its increasing traffic more than 10% in the last month. This…

  • 2 videos: How social media changed the journalist’s day; and making money from content

    Paul Bradshaw
    19 Nov 2009 | 1:48 pm
    Here are 2 very interesting videos from a recent talk by Karl Schneider, Head of editorial development at B2B publisher Reed Business Information, at UCA Farnham. In the first Schneider takes a look at how the typical journalist’s day has changed – I particularly like the concept of previously only ‘20%’ of a journalist’s activity being visible, and 80% invisible, but that equation being reversed with the arrival of collaborative social media. The journalist’s day from Stop.Frame on Vimeo. In the second video Schneider likens online publishing to…

  • What I was told when I asked about blogs joining the PCC

    Paul Bradshaw
    19 Nov 2009 | 1:15 pm
    Following recent coverage of the PCC’s Baroness Buscombe’s Independent interview where she possibly mooted the idea of the PCC regulating blogs, I thought I would share some correspondence I had with the PCC recently over the same issue. In a nutshell: blogs can already choose to operate under the PCC anyway. I asked Simon Yip of the PCC whether a hyperlocal blog could opt in to the PCC Code and self-regulation. These are his replies: “They can decide to adhere to the PCC Code if they choose. To fall formally within the system overseen by the PCC, they would have to…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Common Sense Journalism

  • The disconnect over paywalls

    Doug Fisher
    13 Nov 2009 | 7:42 am
    You just wonder, some days, if anyone pays attention to the research being done about this business, especially online payments.Some recent:Readers will consider micropayments - but only pennies, from the UK.News execs, readers split on how likely it is the readers will shift to print or pay online if paywalls are erected. Get the entire report at API. (David Sullivan takes a bit more sanguine view, arguing that even a 10 or 20 percent bump in usage of the paper would be a good thing.)Another survey of a few days ago says less than half of online readers would pay for content.At least the…

  • Justice's broad subpoena

    Doug Fisher
    13 Nov 2009 | 6:15 am
    Is it just me, or does it bother you, too, that the Justice Department earlier this year subpoenaed an online news site's "logs of the Internet addresses of all the site's readers -- as well other available information including visitors' e-mail and home addresses, Social Security Numbers, and credit card numbers, for June 25, 2008."And then the department issued a gag order telling the folks at Indymedia.us not to talk about it.Details at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

  • "15 items or less"? It's OK, Al, really.

    Doug Fisher
    9 Nov 2009 | 11:04 am
    This video from Weird Al Yankovic is making the rounds and being praised in places like the Linked In Editors and Writers forum.But you know what, Al's poking fun, methinks, not at the less/fewer conundrum but at those who would get all upset over it because you know what -- "xx items or less" is not wrong.In this case, the phrase serves as an inflection point, really a binary condition, not a count situation. Listen to Wendalynn Nichols' podcast on this ill-advised rule (go to Stupid Rules 11 of Oct. 12). Or you can read it at her Copyediting tip of the week.There is a lengthy discussion…

  • AP Style: Cross-country, the sport

    Doug Fisher
    9 Nov 2009 | 7:12 am
    This is one that got by me at the time, and I was reminded the other day I needed to post this.In 2008, AP changed style on the running sport to a hyphenated version, cross-country, instead of its long use of cross country, which conformed to the sport's governing bodies but not Webster's New World.I'm not sure why AP changed (and did not even mention it in the updates section of its book - I went back and checked), but from what I've seen, it's being often ignored in the real world, as this example from our last weekend's cross country/cross-country high school races here.So I guess you'll…

  • Worth reading over at "That's the Press, Baby"

    Doug Fisher
    8 Nov 2009 | 8:55 pm
    David Sullivan, a longtime journalist and fine thinker on matters of the press who doesn't get enough recognition, has picked up the digital pen lately and is on a roll on his blog.His Nov. 3 A death in the desert about the announced closing of Arizona's East Valley Tribune is an insightful look into newspaper "mashups," which were all the rage in the 1990s and why they likely fall apart in an age when we can be so much more worldly because of the Internet but also can drill down to the hyper-local level.Two days later, in What if ... again, he introduced me to a blogger I have already…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Editors Weblog

  • Connecticut daily sued for plagiarism by competitor

    Betsey Reinsborough
    20 Nov 2009 | 8:11 am
    The Hartford Courant, Connecticut's largest daily, is being sued for plagiarism by local competitor The Journal Inquirer of Manchester, reports the Associated Press.  The suit was filed this week in Connecticut Superior Court in Hartford.  It accuses the Courant of lifting 11 articles, both in full and in pieces, from the Inquirer during August and September.  The Courant, which is America's longest continually published newspaper, began using the other paper's stories last summer when it launched a new "aggregation policy" on its website.  Stories of local interest from…

  • BBC joins growing list of media outlets using SEO

    Helena Humphrey
    20 Nov 2009 | 6:35 am
    Search engine optimisation, the process of creating content for the web that will easily fall under the radar of search engines and therefore draw in more readers, has become an integral part of newsroom life. Many media outlets have been in on the act for a good few years, but only today has the BBC decided to latch on to this newsroom trend, increasing the length of its headlines on its news website, in the hope that this will generate more unique visitors to the site, the Guardian reported.  Many people may wonder why it has taken the BBC until now to join the media masses employing…

  • Stone urges Murdoch to rethink paywall plans

    Helena Humphrey
    20 Nov 2009 | 2:42 am
    Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, said that he would "love to see what happens" if Rupert Murdoch goes ahead with his plans to block News International titles from Google's search index and implement his proposed paywall. Speaking at an event organised by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) in London, Stone described the media mogul's schemes as futile and likened them to an attempt at putting "the genie back in the bottle", the Guardian reported. In light of Murdoch's recent accusations that Google and other web companies are "stealing" content from his…

  • New York Times launches Chicago edition today

    Betsey Reinsborough
    20 Nov 2009 | 2:40 am
    The New York Times is launching its new Chicago edition today, reports Editor & Publisher.  The new edition, which will be included each week in the Friday and Sunday New York Times, will be composed of two additional pages of local news, policy, sports, and culture as well as a regular column by former Chicago Tribune columnist James Warren.The edition will be produced in conjunction with the Chicago News Cooperative.  The non-profit Cooperative was launched in October in part by Jim O'Shea, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune,…

  • Associated Press confirms total of 90 layoffs this week

    Emma Heald
    20 Nov 2009 | 1:47 am
    After much speculation in the past few days about exactly how many staff were being laid off, the Associated Press has announced that a total of 90 employees worldwide have been let go this week, and that the company has thus reached its goal of cutting annual payroll costs by 10 percent. A press release specified that this target had been set in October 2008 and that most of the reductions had been achieved through a continuing hiring freeze and attrition, and buyouts. The total number of layoffs this year has not been confirmed, and the AP said that the figure did not necessarily equate to…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Media news, UK and world media comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk

  • Treasury financial secretary defends online piracy plans

    Richard Wray
    20 Nov 2009 | 5:45 am
    Stephen Timms claims piracy powers necessary to 'future-proof' government proposals to safeguard the UK's creative industriesRead the government's statement on the billRead the digital economy billStephen Timms, the Treasury secretary, has defended the government's controversial plans to give ministers sweeping powers to combat online piracy as necessary to "future-proof" its proposals to safeguard the UK's creative industries.The digital economy bill, published today, introduces a new system to combat online piracy on peer-to-peer sharing services. Persistent unlawful file-sharers will…

  • Digital divide over piracy proposals

    Richard Wray
    20 Nov 2009 | 9:03 am
    Digital economy bill proposals receive welcome from music and film, but anger from ISPs and privacy campaignersThe government's planned crackdown on unlawful online filesharing has been attacked by privacy campaigners and internet service providers but welcomed by executives and artists in the music business.Earlier today, the government published the digital economy bill, the result of more than a year's consultation and debate, which includes plans to send warnings letters to persistent unlawful file-sharers and paves the way for persistent illegal sharers to have their broadband cut off…

  • C4 plans more standalone web content

    Sarah Hartley
    20 Nov 2009 | 3:40 am
    Broadcaster to create web content unrelated to its TV shows – could charge online for shows such as Peep Show and SkinsChannel 4 is looking to extend its brand online with more standalone web content – unrelated to its TV shows – and is considering content charging models.Kevin Lygo, the director of content and television at Channel 4, outlined changes to the broadcaster's public service remit that will be published in full in today's digital economy bill. These include the introduction of a commitment to film production.Speaking at The Media Festival in Manchester earlier today, he…

  • 20m people on News Int UK database

    Sarah Hartley
    20 Nov 2009 | 6:33 am
    Times and Sun publisher says database of 20 million people enables it to assess which are the most valuable customersA third of the UK population - around 20 million people - have a direct relationship with News International thanks to the publishers' customer database, a senior executive revealed today.Katie Vanneck-Smith, the managing director of News International's Customer Direct division, told the Manchester Media Festival that the company had been compiling the database for the past three years.Vanneck-Smith said that as a result one in three people in the UK are on a database from…

  • Media Talk: ITV, paywalls and 5 Live

    Matt Wells, Ben Green, Paul Robinson, Jane Martinson
    20 Nov 2009 | 12:00 am
    It's a bumper edition of Media Talk this week, as Matt Wells and guests Jane Martinson and Paul Robinson analyse a busy seen days across the industry.We begin with broadcasting, where – after months of dilly-dallying – ITV has finally named its new chairman. We look at the job awaiting Archie Norman. Also in the podcast, we head to glorious Essex, where the Times editor James Harding outlined his grand plan to rewrite the economics of online journalism at the Society of Editors conference.Plus, we discuss the squabble between the Guardian and the PCC, and yet more controversy over BBC…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Depth Reporting

  • What Can a President Learn from the News Media?

    Mark
    19 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    Former President Richard Milhous Nixon rarely watched TV news or read the newspaper and instead relied on a daily summary typed up by his aides, a recently released study says. The study, “What Can a President Learn from the News Media?,” (PDF) says Nixon’s reliance on the daily news summary is a cautionary tale for future presidents. Nixon’s solution to the problem of news consumption was noteworthy: he avoided direct exposure to newspaper, television or radio reports almost entirely. Instead, he instituted an elaborate system of media monitoring that substituted for almost all…

  • Calendar heat maps

    Mark
    18 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    The Joint Statistical Meeting’s bi-annual Data Expo invites contestants to graphically analyze a data set. This year it was airline on-time performance. The winning entry (PDF) used SAS to visualize various aspects of air traffic, including stylish calendar heat maps showing the number of flight departures delayed or cancelled. The heat maps break each year into blocks for months, rows for the days of the week and squares for the days. Each square is colored from red to green depending on the intensity of some value, allowing you to spot patterns over time. The Revolution Computing blog…

  • Overcoming PDF apoplexy

    Mark
    17 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    Like many shallow, thoughtless people, my first response to something that annoys me is to condemn it rather than understand it. And so it is with PDFs, which have always pissed me off me because of the difficulty I've had extracting data from them. It's a good thing, then, that the Open Government Data wiki has a page, “The good and the bad of PDFs,” with some realistic scenarios on why people would choose to store information in PDFs, and suggesting that more understanding may be in order, rather than outrage. In my experience reporters tend to think the worst of government bureaucrats,…

  • The last words of condemned Texans

    Mark
    16 Nov 2009 | 6:11 am
    I was fascinated to learn last week that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice puts the last statements of the people it executes on its Web site. That’s 444 people as of this writing, dating back to December 1982. I extracted the statements and uploaded them as one large file to Many Eyes, which has some great tools for visualizing, analyzing and playing with text. Here are the statements displayed as a tag cloud:   The most frequently used words of those about to die were “love” and “family.” You can also see the most frequently used two-word phrases. Here “stay…

  • Predicting rare events

    Mark
    15 Nov 2009 | 7:00 am
    JASON, "an independent group of scientists which advises the United States Government on matters of science and technology," was asked by the Defense Department to look at the feasibility of predicting rare events. The “rare event” of interest is an extreme, deliberate act of violence, destruction or socioeconomic disruption, such as an attack of 9/11 scale or greater. It is not a realistic goal to anticipate and prevent all rare events, but it may be possible to make rare events rarer, and to reduce their effect. Their report released last month (PDF) looks at detecting the motivations…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    mymediamusings

  • I Want the iMake!

    admin
    20 Nov 2009 | 9:41 am
    via boingboing.net I adore this dream product conceived by BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder. I can’t wait until this is on every desktop in country. And I don’t think we’ll be waiting all that long, either. Posted via web from My Media Musings

  • News You Can Use: It Costs Money to Charge for Stuff

    admin
    20 Nov 2009 | 9:30 am
    Charging can be expensive. It takes quite a bit of effort to charge, to take money, to manage the money, to set up the accounting and bureaucracy for managing each transaction. And, even worse, if you’re working with third party distributors, like news agents, then you have to handle financial relationships with them as well. Getting rid of the per paper price changes the economics not just on the revenue side, but on the cost side as well — something that’s rarely discussed at all. via techdirt.com The always insightful TechDirt has a great little post on the apparent…

  • Hey Old People, Remember When MTV was Cool?

    admin
    20 Nov 2009 | 8:07 am
    via boingboing.net BoingBoing brings a rare example of a time long past when MTV was cutting edge, providing exciting and challenging programming for a generation tired of the mainstream. These days, when I hear MTV is struggling to keep their audiences around once they tire of THE HIILS, all I can do is shake my head and wonder why they lost all faith in original programming. Posted via web from My Media Musings

  • LED Tattoos are this week’s “The Future is NOW” Winner

    admin
    20 Nov 2009 | 8:05 am
    via wired.com Ray Bradbury’s ILLUSTRATED MAN was a fantasy that, like some many other sci-fi dreams, can now be a reality. We are coming closer and closer to the point where many of us will have the opportunity to take on certain cyborg properties and I suspect a lot of people will be excited by the opportunity to add moving tattoos or enhanced AR retinas. We’re just getting started with self-hacking. Posted via web from My Media Musings

  • Fantastic TED Talk on Wearable AR Device

    admin
    13 Nov 2009 | 9:06 am
    Check out the video below from a recent TEDTalk event.  It is a demonstration of some very cool emerging tech  out of MIT.  Aside from being another example of "the future is now," the best part of this video is the way the crowd breaks in joyous laughter and even applause just by witnessing the technology in action. It is similar to the way an audience might respond to a very good magician but in this case the magic is real. </object> Posted via email from My Media Musings
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    JOUR M02

  • Warren Beatty gets OK to sue TribCo over Dick Tracy

    JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media
    9 Nov 2009 | 4:48 pm
    Academy-award winning actor Warren Beatty can go ahead with a California lawsuit against a unit of bankrupt Tribune Co. over rights to comic strip detective Dick Tracy, a federal judge ruled on Monday. According to court papers, Beatty bought the motion picture and television rights for Dick Tracy in 1985. He went on to star in and direct the 1990 film by the same name that won three Academy awards and also starred Dustin Hoffman, Madonna and Al Pacino. Tribune has said an agreement that granted rights to Beatty had lapsed because the actor-director had not started work on a new project based…

  • Harold Evans on the Colbert Report

    JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media
    7 Nov 2009 | 4:29 am
    The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30cHarold Evanswww.colbertnation.comColbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical HumorU.S. SpeedskatingHarold Evans, former editor of the Times of London and the Sunday Times, talks about being married to Tina Brown, getting knighted by the queen and exposing spies in the British government.

  • The L.A. Herald Examiner -- 20 Years Gone

    JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media
    2 Nov 2009 | 12:26 am
    Nov. 2 is the 20th anniversary of the closing of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. See http://herex0.tripod.com/See also 20 years ago: 'So Long, L.A.!'

  • Sam Zell: No Newspapers Can Survive

    JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media
    28 Oct 2009 | 6:02 pm
    When posed with the question of whether or not he regrets his Tribune deal, Sam Zell admitted, "It's certainly the most amount of money I ever lost in a single deal." He goes on to say that the entire newspaper industry, including Tribune, has seen a crash in revenue, and that "nobody can survive." -- Silicon Alley Insider

  • Video: Inventing LA -- The Chandlers and their Times

    JOUR M02 Writing and Reporting for the Media
    23 Oct 2009 | 5:09 pm
    The film chronicles the epic saga of the most powerful family in Los Angeles history: the Chandlers. For four generations, they wielded unique influence through their newspaper, the Los Angeles Times. [Click to VIEW]
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    OUPblog » Media

  • National Book Award Contest: Winners!

    Rebecca
    20 Nov 2009 | 8:02 am
    Way back in October the OUPblog announced that in honor of the National Book Awards we were hosting a friendly contest, to see who could predict the most winners. Well, now that the National Book Awards winners have been announced, and congratulations to all the winners, it’s time to share which lucky OUPblog readers will be getting free books in the mail! In first place with five points was Shawn Miklaucic who gets the big prize, the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. In second place with two points was Jilly Dybka who will receive a Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. In third place…

  • 8 Reasons to Unfriend Someone on Facebook

    LaurenA
    19 Nov 2009 | 10:00 am
    Lauren, Publicity Assistant If you haven’t already heard, unfriend is the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year. In honor of this announcement, I surveyed Facebook users across the country about why they would choose to unfriend someone. 1. They’ve turned into a robot. “People send me Green Patches all the time,” said Jane Kim, a television research assistant in NYC. “It’s annoying. And that’s all I ever get from them. Clearly, they’re not interested in actually being friends.” That’s because your friends are robots, Jane. Marketing robots. These are the friends…

  • Ponytail Pulling is Bad (but awfully good for women’s sports)

    LaurenA
    19 Nov 2009 | 7:25 am
    Lauren, Publicity Assistant Laura Pappano, co-author with Eileen McDonagh of Playing With The Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal, is an award-winning journalist and writer-in-residence at Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. She blogs at FairGameNews.com . In the original post below, Pappano discusses  Elizabeth Lambert’s hair-pulling and sportsmanship in women’s athletics.  Read Pappano’s previous OUPblog posts here. Outrage over New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert’s dirty play – including her ponytail-yanking an opponent to the ground – is justified…

  • Historical Thesaurus: On dealing with the press interest

    Kirsty
    18 Nov 2009 | 11:41 pm
    Our Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary expert, Professor Christian Kay, blogs about the numerous press enquiries and interviews in the wake of the HTOED’s publication. To read more about the HTOED click here. An unexpected outcome of the publication of HTOED was the interest it generated in both UK and overseas media. On the whole, encounters with the press have been an enjoyable experience, and they’ve done us proud with articles, reviews, and interviews, but sometimes I find myself conning over the less flattering words for members of the journalistic profession…

  • On whether KSM deserves Vengeance or Justice

    SarahN
    17 Nov 2009 | 5:29 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 examines our nation’s concepts of vengeance and justice in light of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s forthcoming trial in New York City. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Principled Profit

  • Palin’s Book Trashes Alaska Republican Former Ally: “The Falafel Lady”

    Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert
    20 Nov 2009 | 4:09 am
    Is it possible for Sarah Palin to get any more distasteful? Here’s another example of her viper-like turning on old allies when they cross her, as Geoffrey Dunn writes in Huffington Post: But perhaps the nastiest and most duplicitous passages of all in Going Rogue are those directed at Andree McLeod, the longtime Republican watchdog out of Anchorage who filed many of the Alaska Ethics Act complaints that, by Palin’s own admission, hounded her from office. Because McLeod has some Lebanese heritage, Palin dubbed her “the falafel lady.” And claimed she’s some sort…

  • FAIR: Interlocking Directorates Could Influence Media Reportage on Healthcare

    Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert
    18 Nov 2009 | 3:25 pm
    Just stumbled on this article from a few months back. Never afraid to be controversial, the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) examined the boards of directors of nine major media companies–and found that some of those directors also sit on boards governing health insurance companies. Media properties with interlocking directors with the insurance industry included the Washington Post, Gannett (publishers of USA Today and other papers), NBC, and several others. Hmmmm, wonders FAIR, might this conjunction have something to do with the refusal to discuss…

  • World Wildlife Fund Teleseminar on Climate Change/Corporate Partnerships

    Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert
    13 Nov 2009 | 4:52 pm
    I received the following letter to the editor about the good work 22 corporations are doing, partnering with WWF on climate change and offering a teleseminar November 18. I haven’t checked into it other than to visit the link. Not the sort of thing I usually run, but something about this just felt very sincere. Thanks for your blog. I’m writing to you today to let you know that JohnsonDiversey is one of 22 leading corporations partnering with the World Wildlife Fund to establish ambitious targets to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. I’m thrilled to…

  • A New Low in Anti-Obama/Anti-Muslim Propaganda?

    Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert
    9 Nov 2009 | 2:16 pm
    Last night I saw a video that shocked me: A spliced-together out-of-context montage from Barack Obama’s speeches and media appearances to create the illusion that he is a radical Muslim extremist (and disparaging Islam generally in terms that would be quite familiar to the Jews who were victimized by similar descriptions throughout history. I will not dignify this filth with a link. Nor will I call, as some of my liberal friends might, for it to be taken down, all copies destroyed, etc. In the marketplace of ideas, I like to think the good ideas will win, eventually. It may take 100…

  • Breaking: No Vote to be Taken on Medicare-for-All

    Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert
    6 Nov 2009 | 4:43 pm
    This just in: Proponents of single-payer health care, a/k/a Medicare for All–the system used by almost every developed country in the world–will not get our promised floor vote after all. If I were in Congress right now, I’d vote no. The bill has gotten weaker, more complicated, and more expensive with every turn. As I understand it, it is a giveaway to big insurers and might actually leave fewer people insured than we have now. A travesty! President Obama–WHERE is the “change” you promised so loudly one year ago? As The Who sang in my very favorite song,…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

  • Roy Greenslade: James Murdoch sees TV, not papers, as key to future

    Roy Greenslade
    20 Nov 2009 | 5:31 am
    James Murdoch's speech to investors in Barcelona yesterday revealed the direction that News Corporation plans to take in the coming years. His key quote:In the business of ideas, which is the business that we are in, we do think journalism plays a role, and we do think there are business models there that will make a lot of sense, albeit perhaps not at the scale of some of our broadcasting businesses and other entertainment businesses.Is it going to be as big a role? No. Structurally, television is vastly more profitable and a big opportunity.First, notice that he views "ideas" as the…

  • Roy Greenslade: South African newspapers suffer circulation falls

    Roy Greenslade
    20 Nov 2009 | 4:00 am
    Daily and weekly newspapers in South Africa have just suffered some of the worst circulation figures in living memory. With the exceptions of the Afrikaans daily Die Son and the Zulu daily Isolezwe, all titles reported third-quarter year-on-year losses.Witwatersrand j-school professor Anton Harber said the country's newspapers are showing the strain experienced by papers elsewhere in the world. "It has hit dailies, weeklies and weekend papers, serious broadsheets and racy tabloids, English, Afrikaans and Zulu," he said "No sector has been spared. It is not huge, but it is strikingly…

  • Roy Greenslade: Cumberland News keeps its head above water to report flooding

    Roy Greenslade
    20 Nov 2009 | 3:25 am
    The Cumberland News and its sister papers are rising (please forgive pun) to the occasion today in their online reportage of the floods in Cockermouth. Its live webchat service, Cumbria under water, is keeping everyone informed about developments with minute-by-minute updates from readers, police and reporters.It also provides links to video clips uploaded to Youtube, such as this view of the River Kent at Kendal, another that shows the flooding in Keswick, and the one above that shows the high street in Cockermouth.Now staff at the CN group's Times & Star are engaged in producing a special…

  • Roy Greenslade: Why Twitter is not to blame for creating storms

    Roy Greenslade
    20 Nov 2009 | 3:07 am
    Joanna Geary, web development editor for The Times and one of the most thoughtful of journalistic bloggers, has an interesting take on Twitter storm controversies.Stimulated by Stephen Fry's defence of his own so-called influence during the Jan Moir episode, Geary raises a couple of pertinent points.Her second is about libel, but I'm dealing here only with her first. This is what she wrote:If a newspaper with a circulation twice the size of The Times (or 3.5 times the size of The Guardian) joined a campaign (even it it was late in the day), how much influence would you credit them with having…

  • Roy Greenslade: Michael Heath picks up a well-deserved award

    Roy Greenslade
    20 Nov 2009 | 2:32 am
    Congratulations to Michael Heath, who last night won a lifetime achievement award at the Cartoon Art Trust awards. It is well deserved. Throughout his lengthy career, which stretches back to the early 1950s, he has been entertaining newspaper and magazine readers with brilliantly funny cartoons.His success stems from combining the twin talents of fine artistry with great gag-writing, and his output has always been phenomenal. His work can regularly be seen in the Mail on Sunday, Private Eye, Sunday Times and The Spectator (where he has been cartoon editor since 1991). You can see a sample of…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    blog maverick

  • Google, Murdoch, Madoff

    markcuban
    13 Nov 2009 | 2:58 pm
    Hows that for a title.  Just thought it would be a fun day to rehash some old posts that made me look a little prescient Today the feds arrested 2 programmers that worked for Madoff. I wrote this in January: Jan 18th 2009 10:11AM Im taking a flyer here, but if they were to put me on the case, the first people I would talk to are the software developers.  Somewhere along the line there was a software program written or modified that allowed Madoff to enter the numbers he made up, who they were paying out cash to and would print the checks and  statements.  Its very unlikely that it was off…

  • Rupert Murdoch and Google Part 2

    markcuban
    10 Nov 2009 | 1:05 pm
    Im going to simplify this as much as possible. I probably should have just included this in the first post. Here are the best and worst cases of Newscorp opting out of the Google Index 1. Best Case: They opt out and see an increase in revenues and commitment to their sites because people choose to go directly to their sites. For those sites behind a paywall, they generate more revenue than when the site was free.   Other sites notice their success and copy Newscorp, choosing to opt out of the Google index. The opt out choice turns out to be the better business move for any and all sites…

  • Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart = Twitter has changed it all.

    markcuban
    9 Nov 2009 | 8:40 am
    Rupert Murdoch has said that his Newscorp sites are going to block Google indexes.  Of course, all the netizens freak out when this happens. Which I love. I love to tweak all the internet information must be free bigots. They get so damn religious about information on the net that they lose what little objectivity and awareness of the real world they had in the first place.  First a little enlightenment for all of you that think Murdoch is making a mistake. This is not 1999, nor is it 2004, nor is it 2006, nor is it 2008.  The calendar is about to turn to 2010.  What worked and made sense…

  • Adding Facebook and Twitter Followers – A Little One on One ?

    markcuban
    6 Nov 2009 | 8:39 am
    I was thinking of ideas on how to add twitter and/or facebook fan page followers. I dont have a real need to have to do so. I was just curious about ways to do so. Think of it as one of those things my minds wanders off to while Im working out. One thing that poppedup as what I thought was a decent idea was the idea of  rewarding those who refer and/or generate followers to my pages on twitter (@mcuban), or on FAcebook (/markcuban) a unique page where they were the only person approved to have access and for some period of time, they would have exclusive access for questions and answers. So…

  • Keyboards, Phones and NetBooks

    markcuban
    6 Nov 2009 | 8:23 am
    Some people wondered why I stayed with my Sidekick despite still not getting my contacts back and all the troubles the network had. The answer is easy. They keyboard is so above any beyond any other phone, I can type a good 50 words per minute on it. (Its amazing how fast my thumbs are on this thing)  Which in turn allows me to answer emails quickly and accurately.  I dont lose any productivity when Im on my Sidekick compared to sitting  in front of my desktop or full sized laptop.  To me, thats money in the bank. Thats not to say I never stray and try new phones and alternatives. I do. …
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    JOURNALISM.CO.UK

  • Why did one blogger keep Belle’s identity secret for eight years?

    Judith Townend
    20 Nov 2009 | 8:30 am
    As noted by Journalism.co.uk yesterday (and before that, by the Guardian on its front page) LinkMachineGo [LMG] blogger Darren deduced Belle de Jour’s real identity as early as 2001. But he kept quiet. Journalism.co.uk asked Darren why – and what he thinks of blogging anonymously. “I protected [Brooke] Magnanti’s identity because we were both early bloggers,” he says. “I respected her blogging and realised that her real life and career might be ruined if I did not keep her identity a secret. Discovering her identity started out as a fun game but turned…

  • Online tribute to global journalism trainer Russell Lyne

    Judith Townend
    20 Nov 2009 | 7:50 am
    Journalism trainer and former journalist Russell Lyne has died aged 65, the Thomson Foundation reports. Lyne, who had been in poor health for two years after suffering a stroke, joined the global training foundation in 1995, and later became a full-time project manager and training consultant, and eventually head of regional development. He was ‘a cornerstone of the Foundation’s international success,’ the organisation said this week. He worked in numerous countries: South Africa, Botswana, India, Vietnam, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain, Qatar, Latvia, Estonia,…

  • Twelve new editorial and media jobs at Journalism.co.uk

    Ed Martin
    20 Nov 2009 | 6:08 am
    Twelve great new editorial and media job opportunities this week on Journalism.co.uk’s jobs board: Senior financial journalist Senior financial journalist or analyst with a keen passion for researching and writing on companies listed on the LSE and AIM. Salary: DoE Proactiveinvestors Limited Bournemouth, England >>more Acting editor – Horse Magazine Horse Magazine is the UK’s fastest growing equestrian magazine, and is now looking for a talented and motivated acting editor to cover the editor’s maternity leave. Salary: DoE IPC Media Ltd. London Bridge, United Kingdom…

  • Live coverage of the National Union of Journalists ADM

    Laura Oliver
    20 Nov 2009 | 4:41 am
    A team of student National Union of Journalist (NUJ) members are providing live coverage of the union’s ADM today and tomorrow. Reporters will be covering key speeches and debates from the event on nujadm.org.uk complete with a section of liveblogs, motions news and speeches. You can also follow the team’s tweets at the hashtag #nujadm or below: Similar Posts: Quiz the candidates: Ask the NUJ editor candidates a question #AOP3C: Coverage from the AOP annual conference 2009 BJP documents Terrorism Act photography event NUJ Release: Thousands of BBC journalists to strike over…

  • New meet-up group organised to discuss the future of news

    Laura Oliver
    20 Nov 2009 | 3:54 am
    Freelance journalist Adam Westbrook has set-up a new meeting group (online and offline) for UK-based journalists interested in where their industry is headed. As the UK Future of News Group website explains: “We’re undergoing a digital revolution. The value of news has disappeared, and with it, the revenues of papers and TV stations around the world. But from all the turmoil new opportunities are emerging, if you look in the right places. “The UK Future of News Group is for anyone interested in the future of journalism. Whether you’re a journalism student, a young…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    One Man & His Blog

  • NUJ Moving With The Times

    Adam Tinworth
    20 Nov 2009 | 6:20 am
    Credit where credit's due time. The NUJ has come a long way since the kerfuffle earlier in the year.How so?NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear has finally found his blogging mojo this month.The Annual Delegate Meeting is being robustly covered using a range of social media.  We have a new editor of The JournalistOK, there's some worrying, but unsubstantiated allegations going around about NUJ Left. But I'd go as far as to say that the NUJ is beginning to get social media. Blimey. 

  • Cargo Cult Blogging: Still Going Strong

    Adam Tinworth
    19 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    I like Countryfile on TV, and I like Countryfile the magazine (I'm a rural chap at heart). Buy it every issue, in fact, and how many magazines can I say that about any more? But I do find their blogs page profoundly depressing. Too many blogs launched in a burst of enthusiasm, and then quickly left to subside into abeyance. And no proper index page of any of the blogs. They sorta look like blogs, but aren't really. Cargo cult blogging.Competitively speaking, I'm glad so many publishers are still getting the fundamentals of blogging wrong. Personally, I find it disappointing. 

  • Postgraduate Passion

    Adam Tinworth
    19 Nov 2009 | 5:55 am
    One of the Cardiff postgraduate students:In one blog post, This is a Bad Time to be a Journalist If.., he lists all the wrong attitudes to have when trying to conquer the journalism world. Basically it highlights the fact that you have to be ready for change, have passion, talk to others and link to what other people are doing. I think this is all true, and despite the fact that it's a pretty bad time to be entering into the world of work, I am desperately excited about it all. I realise it will be hard but I am ready to give it my all and hope for the best. More signs of hope, I…

  • Journalism From the Ashes?

    Adam Tinworth
    19 Nov 2009 | 5:39 am
    In March, Hearst closed the 146-year-old Post-Intelligencer newspaper and dumped 140 of us onto the street in the depths of the recession.What happened next? For the majority, the story is pretty depressing. The majority of those journalists are not working in journalism any more. But, I note, a handful are starting their own businesses or are involved with start-ups. There's some hope in that.

  • #1pound40 - The Ubiquity of Reporting

    Adam Tinworth
    14 Nov 2009 | 6:28 am
    One of the things that struck me at this week's 1pound40 event was this:Wherever you looked, be it in the breaks or during the sessions, somebody was blogging, recording, uploading, twittering or otherwise recording or sharing the conference. In other words, people were reporting it. This is not a new phenomenon, of course, and it's one to be expected at an event discussing the future of news and politics. But this massive upswing in information availability amongst so many things that were once the preserve of a handful of journalists is something that still only a handful of the industry…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Zero Percent Idle

  • “Aren’t you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you?”

    Tim Windsor
    8 Nov 2009 | 2:11 pm
    Elizabeth Gilbert at TED, talking about the fear that lingers behind the nagging need to write, the curious nature of genius and what happens when you keep showing up to do your job. Bonus points for using Tom Waits as a positive role model.

  • NaNoWriMo: Back on the horse

    Tim Windsor
    8 Nov 2009 | 2:00 pm
    After taking a few days off post-TEDx, I’m back on-course, at 13, 339 words. And today is not yet over (though the finale of Mad Men looms, with a giant time-sucking sound.)

  • MICA’s Brown Center was a great venue for TEDx MidAtlantic

    Tim Windsor
    5 Nov 2009 | 4:53 pm
    I’ve driven past, or under it nearly a hundred times, but today was the first time I had the opportunity to spend time inside The Brown Center, the glass-curtained building with the thrusting overhang that opened on the MICA campus a few years back. All I can say is: Wow. Modern spaces can often be cold and odd and, while The Brown Center is certainly quirky, it fits in nicely on MICA’s semi-urban campus, reflecting from the outside and providing amazing vistas from the inside. The building sometimes appears mirrored, sometimes clear. Clouds and church reflected in the glass wall.

  • Tom Stoppard on writing, via Scott Simon at today’s TEDx MidAtlantic

    Tim Windsor
    5 Nov 2009 | 4:27 pm
    It had been years since I’d thought of this beautiful passage about writing until I heard Scott Simon quote it this morning at TEDx MidAtlantic. It comes from the amazing play The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard: “Words… They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more… I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones…

  • NaNoWriMo inspiration: Laura Lippman

    Tim Windsor
    3 Nov 2009 | 5:27 pm
    Maybe it’s because we used to work for the same newspaper. Or maybe it’s because she nails the details of Baltimore in her books. Or maybe it’s because the woman can write the hell out of a book and leave you wondering how she does it. Whatever, I’m a fanboy, a homer. So here’s summa Baltimore’s pride and joy, Laura Lippman.
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Beat the Press

  • CNN Money Takes Strong Editorial Stand on the Budget in News Section

    20 Nov 2009 | 11:22 am
    CNN Money decided to highlight the fact that when the debt increases, interest payments will rise. While those familiar with basic arithmetic probably already understood this fact, CNN Money decided that this is big news. To make this fact more newsworthy, CNN Money decided to say some things that were untrue and some that were meaningless. In the untrue category we get the shocking fact in the subhead that: " the interest Americans will have to pay to keep the country running over the next decade will reach unheard of levels." Actually, those of us old enough to remember back to the 90s have…

  • The People Who Missed an $8 Trillion Housing Bubble and Thought Iceland's Economy Was Thriving Oppose Auditing the Fed

    20 Nov 2009 | 3:26 am
    That is what Alan Blinder tells us in a Washington Post column today. Blinder tells us that the vast majority of academic economists and people in the financial industry oppose efforts to make the Fed more accountable to Congress. (He also bizarrely asserts that "very, very few" people support more congressional control of the Fed. This would seem to be inconsistent with the support for the Paul-Grayson bill to audit the Fed.) Blinder tells us why more congressional input into monetary policy would be a bad thing. He notes that the Fed will start to raise interest rates at some point when the…

  • Good NYT Piece on Effort to Bankrupt the FHA

    20 Nov 2009 | 3:12 am
    The NYT has an excellent piece on how the increase in FHA mortgage limits have made it a subsidy program for relatively affluent families, speculators, and frauds. --Dean Baker

  • David Brooks Has Not Noticed the Recession

    20 Nov 2009 | 2:59 am
    David Brooks pronounces the government's bailout of Wall Street a huge success. This is an interesting assessment. It is true that the financial sector profits are at a record high as a share of all corporate profits and the financial sector has reached a new record share of private sector income, and the industry stands to pay record bonuses this year, but these may not be the best measures of success to people other than Mr. Brooks. There is little doubt that if the government gives enough money to the Wall Street banks that they can stay afloat and prosper, as they have shown. However most…

  • TARP Money Cannot Be Used to Pay Down the Debt!

    19 Nov 2009 | 2:49 am
    Arghhhhhhh! TARP is a loan program, not a spending program. Let's explain the difference so that even a Washington Post editor can understand it. A loan is expected to be paid back. When Congress appropriates money for a loan, it does not add to the deficit. The government lends out money, but it owns a loan that it expects to be paid back. The only cost to the government is either any subsidy implicit in the loan or the losses on loans that are not repaid. The Congressional Budget Office expected the bulk of the TARP money to be repaid, therefore it was never scored as spending. Only the…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    College Media Matters

  • College News Network: The New UWIRE?

    Dan
    19 Nov 2009 | 3:38 am
    It is the story of the student press so far in fall 2009: UWIRE’s vanishing act.  It happened without warning- and lots of questions remain.  What happened (and is happening) behind the scenes?  Is its MIA status temporary or long-term?  What does it mean for oft-shared-never-shy student press content previously featured and available for poaching on the site? – In a new MediaShift piece, Center for Innovation in College Media director Bryan Murley provides a nice summary of the stoppage situation, including pulling together all the scattered quotes and posts (even one of…

  • Northern Kentucky Student Newspaper Drops Resistance Ad

    Dan
    18 Nov 2009 | 4:48 am
    The Northerner has apologized for running the Resistance. The Northern Kentucky University student newspaper issued a mea culpa for featuring an advertisement in two recent issues for Resistance Records, which sells “white supremacist music” (I’m putting that in quotes because I do not know and do not even want to know what that might entail). – The Louisville Courier-Journal: The paper’s editor “found out there was a problem with the advertisement . . . when he got a voice mail from a reporter at a local television station. He quickly researched the…

  • “University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive”

    Dan
    17 Nov 2009 | 4:02 am
    As the professional press compresses and its original content wanes, student journalism will rise to a place of uber-importance, a new Chronicle of Higher Education report confirms.  As the piece quotes a professor recently telling his journalism students, “We are surrounded by people who say that the world is coming to an end, but it is just beginning for you.” – The article- co-written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. (now at Arizona State) and Columbia University Grad. School communication professor Michael Schudson- outlines a few of the…

  • Fairfield Student Newspaper Faces Harassment Charge

    Dan
    16 Nov 2009 | 3:35 am
    The student newspaper at Fairfield University is being charged with harassment by the school’s student conduct board for a satirical sex column published in late September- the first time this charge has been levied against an organization instead of an individual at FU. – A Boston Herald report: “The controversy erupted over a satirical column in the Sept. 30 edition of The Mirror that poked fun at female students who agree to one-night stands. The ‘He Said’ column described a female’s ‘walk of shame’ leaving a male’s dorm, and used words…

  • Memphis Student Newspaper Copies “Absolutely” Trashed

    Dan
    14 Nov 2009 | 4:20 am
    Well, I will give her credit for clarity.  The sister of a University of Memphis student suspected of burning the rainbow flag outside the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center said she “absolutely” trashed hundreds- possibly thousands- of copies of the The Daily Helmsman that featured a story on her brother’s misdeeds. – But of course, alas, that is the last thing clear-cut about the incident.  Since the student newspapers are free, it is “legal gray area” time!  As one report noted, “The woman didn’t litter with the newspapers . . . and…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Old Media, New Tricks

  • Use Twitter lists to build your personal news brand

    Daniel B. Honigman
    16 Nov 2009 | 6:45 am
    NOTE: I originally posted a version of this on the Personal Branding Blog. For reporters on the social web, the strength of their personal brand can gain them readers or, more importantly, sources. Twitter lists are just one way you can introduce people to your work and get that one source you need to follow you on Twitter. (Of course, you can always pick up the phone and call them, but that’s besides the point.) Here are some easy things you can do to brand yourself through your Twitter lists: Thank every person who lists you. While it may take only a second to add someone to a Twitter…

  • The Google Wave news community

    Robert Quigley
    3 Nov 2009 | 1:38 pm
    If you are one of the lucky few who scored a Google Wave account, you’ve probably logged in, fumbled around a bit, probably were impressed by the instant nature of it — and you probably got annoyed relatively quickly at Wave’s slowness. If you have enough friends or colleagues who have invites, you might have gotten a peek at Wave’s potential as a collaboration tool. For journalists, collaboration with the public on news events is the (Google) wave of the future. I wrote about Wave’s potential for journalism for Media Bullseye. If you don’t know what Wave is,…

  • Video: On the importance of content curation

    Daniel B. Honigman
    2 Nov 2009 | 6:05 am
    Here’s a quick video I did for Bryan Person at LiveWorld when I was at the BlogWorld Expo 2009 (#bwe09). It’s geared mostly at brands curating their streams, but there are some ideas journalists can take away from it, I think. Enjoy: - Daniel B. Honigman

  • Talking Lifestreaming on ‘The Kevin Sablan Show’

    Daniel B. Honigman
    18 Oct 2009 | 8:53 am
    I was hanging out with Jon Lansner out at BlogWorld a couple of days ago when we decided to, as an homage to our mutual friend Kevin Sablan, record a podcast in his honor. We talked lifestreaming and storystreaming, but didn’t make fun of Kevin as much as I would have liked. Go figure. Kevin: This one is for you. - Daniel B. Honigman (with Jon Lansner)

  • New Tricks: Storystreaming addressed in my lifestreaming white paper

    Daniel B. Honigman
    14 Oct 2009 | 11:42 am
    I recently wrote a white paper on lifestreaming for Weber Shandwick. In it, I discuss what a lifestream is, how brands can take advantage of lifestreaming platforms, but also how journalists and editors can take advantage of storystreaming and eventstreaming, and what types of newsy content can be streamed. In addition to the Austin American-Statesman’s recent storystreaming efforts, the St. Paul Pioneer Press has also been using Posterous in some recent crowdsourced journalism projects: “Minnesota Sports Heaven” and “Snow Shots.” The journalism-related portion…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Reportr.net

  • BBC News website adds SEO friendly headlines

    Alfred Hermida
    19 Nov 2009 | 8:01 pm
    The BBC has made changes to its news website to make its headlines more SEO friendly. The headlines appearing on index pages are short and concise as usual, but clicking through to the story reveals a longer headline with search keywords. For example, the index headline on the story on Google’s Chrome browser is “Google previews operating system”, which lacks search keywords. But click on the story page, the headline becomes “Google previews Chrome open source operating system.” And the report on the Fort Hood killings has an index headline of “Killings…

  • Tom Rosenstiel on the future of journalism

    Alfred Hermida
    19 Nov 2009 | 9:38 am
    Director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, on the future of journalism at Minnesota Public Radio. He talks about the potential to produce better journalism now then ever before. His concerns: the unbundling of content and the challenge of monetising civic news. (Via Project for Excellence in Journalism)

  • YouTube Direct to channel citizen journalism to news outlets

    Alfred Hermida
    17 Nov 2009 | 9:24 am
    With the launch of YouTube Direct, YouTube is positioning itself as a key intermediary between the media and the public. YouTube Direct is described as “a new tool that allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users.” Or as Mashable put it, “YouTube is letting anyone launch their own iReport-type site.” Several news organisations are already using the service: ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. It clearly provides a way for media organisations to collect,…

  • Listed in the top 50 blogs about journalism

    Alfred Hermida
    12 Nov 2009 | 9:48 pm
    This list of top 50 journalism blogs offers a good starting point for tapping into current trends in the media. It includes: Blogs that focus on citizen, or grassroot, journalism, personal blogs from professional reporters, journalism school-supported blogs, blogs on a new media focus, organizational blogs and self-professed bipartisan resource blogs that provide primary resources for investigative writing. There is a broad cross-section, from Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog to the Nieman Journalism Lab. Some of the categorisation of the blogs is a little strange. Jon…

  • Why journalists are uneasy talking about Twitter as journalism

    Alfred Hermida
    11 Nov 2009 | 11:03 am
    Putting the words Twitter and journalism into the same sentence seems to provoke a spasm from professional journalists. At a “curated unconference” hosted by Reuters Thomson in London, the value of Twitter in journalism was once again under scrutiny. The report in The Guardian suggests there was a deep-seated level of unease in talking about Twitter as journalism. The head of the BBC’s global news division, Richard Sambrook, argued: Twitter is good at gossip, promoting people’s interest, and entertaining, but it is also good in some news-related fields. It isn’t…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    News After Newspapers

  • Texas Tribune: an impressive launch that feels web-native

    3 Nov 2009 | 6:42 am
      The Texas Tribune lifts off this morning in Austin — there’s an election today — offering not only a slew of innovative features but also a unique content-sharing plan, by which the state’s legacy media can freely publish any content generated by the Tribune and dip into its multi-faceted information databases. Tribune CEO and editor Evan Smith took me on a tour through the site last night, showing off what he and a staff of just 16 (plus some outside help from Austin design group FlashBang) have put together in just three months of ramp-up time. Smith points out that Trib (as…

  • Newspapers take a bus plunge: circulation plummets 10.6 percent

    26 Oct 2009 | 3:02 pm
    It’s hard to put a good face on this kind of news; in fact, it reminds me of the old “bus plunge” meme. The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) reports that newspaper circulation for the six months ending Sept. 30 dropped 10.6 percent from the same period in 2008 (7.5 percent on Sundays). And this is an accelerating trend. Here are the results for the three previous six-month reporting periods (in each case, versus the same period one year earlier): — Oct. 1, 2008-Mar. 31, 2009: down 7.1 percent on weekdays, down 5.3% on Sundays— Apr. 1, 2008-Sept. 30, 2008: down 4.6 percent on…

  • Has newspaper advertising reached rock bottom? Probably not.

    22 Sep 2009 | 10:59 am
    During the last few months, as newspaper stock prices rebounded somewhat from their lowest points, and as newspaper execs suggested, in conjunction with second quarter results, that having made all the cuts they did, they would be in good shape “once advertising rebounds,” I found myself nevertheless thinking the same thoughts as the crystal ball-gazers consulted by the New York Times who said that the bottom, for newspaper advertising revenue, had not yet been reached.The good news is that the third quarter of 2009 won’t be quite as bad as the second: the consensus is that revenue will…

  • Can newspaper publishers survive this revenue freefall? Perhaps, if they embrace a digital future.

    31 Aug 2009 | 9:41 am
    Without the fanfare that accompanied the recent release of its online readership data, the NAA quietly posted last week its latest compilation of quarterly revenue data for U.S. daily newspapers, in a data set it has maintained for 50 years. The latest figures, for the second quarter, show an alarming drop of 30.15 percent in print revenue and 15.90 percent in online revenue versus the same period in 2008. Despite signs elsewhere that the recession may have bottomed out, these figures are even worse than the first quarter results (declines of 29.70 percent in print and 13.40 percent online).

  • NAA/Nielsen stats show newspapers own less than 1 percent of U.S. online audience page views, time spent

    5 Aug 2009 | 6:04 pm
    The NAA has issued another of its regular updates on the state of the U.S. daily newspaper Web audience. As usual, the numbers, sourced from Nielsen Online, sound impressive: Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 70.3 million unique visitors in June (35.9 percent of all Internet users), according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America. Newspaper Web site visitors generated 3.5 billion page views during the month, spending 2.7 billion minutes browsing the sites over more than 597 million total sessions. NAA mentions that Nielsen has changed…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Recovering Journalist

  • When Presses Roll Less, Execs Spin More

    Mark Potts
    27 Oct 2009 | 9:08 am
    Newsosaur Alan Mutter calls the double-digit drop in the latest newspaper circulation figures "devastating." Content Bridges' Ken Doctor's adjective of choice is "breathtaking." Poynter's Rick Edmonds goes with "extraordinary."Meanwhile, at the San Francisco Chronicle, whose 25.8 percent daily circulation drop over the past year was more than double the rest of the industry's and the steepest of all major papers, publisher Frank Vega says things are going according to plan.Huh?Vega can spin all he wants—something about the remaining…

  • Twitter and Breaking News

    Mark Potts
    18 Oct 2009 | 4:44 pm
    Twitter can be maddening in many ways, a cacophony of voices with a lousy signal-to-noise ratio—does anybody really care what somebody else had for breakfast?But one thing that Twitter excels in is breaking news. Its broadcast, real-time, 140-character headline nature makes it a perfect vehicle for the latest news, whether it's being generated by on-the-spot observers (or participants) and retweeted far and wide, or whether it's being used by news organizations to blast out their latest headlines.The latter seems a slamdunk use of Twitter by news organizations—it's just a…

  • Wise Words, Worth Reading

    Mark Potts
    1 Oct 2009 | 12:00 pm
    I haven't blogged much lately because, well, I got tired of repeating myself. How much more can be said about how the media landscape is changing, and how traditional media companies are missing the boat? At this point it seems better to just let the situation play out. So I've been holding my fire. Besides, I've been busy with GrowthSpur, trying to find solutions to the problems with the media that I've been railing about for years.But there are a couple of great pieces today from other commentators about what's going on in the media business, and I wanted to point to…

  • World Wide Whoops

    Mark Potts
    8 Sep 2009 | 8:54 pm
    Tip for media sites: If you start a new feature, be sure to lock up the URL for it before you launch it. That prevents domain squatters from grabbing away the newly named feature's Web address, and that in turn makes it harder to defend a trademark or to promote the feature under its own domain name. Pretty elementary stuff, and this sort of thing is standard operating procedure at most Web companies (who also know to grab the xxxsucks.com variant of any trademark or URL). But media sites, always casual about trademarking new features, often seem to miss this little detail.Case in…

  • Bill Wyman Speaks Truth to Power

    Mark Potts
    13 Aug 2009 | 3:08 pm
    Millions of words have been spilled over the past couple of years about what's wrong in the news business (many of them on this blog). But if you want to read a few thousand words that explain the state of play with superb clarity and brutal frankness, check out Bill Wyman's just-posted two-part series exploring why the news business is in the mess it's in today. It's thoughtful and probing and justly critical of the people who lead (and work in) news organizations.Among many other things, Wyman explains well why many of the more simplistic proposed fixes (charging…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Topix Weblog

  • Stay Connected with the Topix Toolbar

    amy
    3 Nov 2009 | 4:00 pm
    Today, Topix launched its new community toolbar, powered by Conduit. Never miss a reply to your comments. Stay on top of the latest news for your town. Grab the most popular headlines and Top Stories. Right in your browser. Already...

  • Sparta Tennessee Cop Investigated for Fake Subpoena

    tolles
    25 Sep 2009 | 4:32 pm
    We really love local news. We see ourselves at Topix as part of the local ecosystem of news and community, especially in towns which have a lot of usage (We have nearly a million daily page views in Tennessee, mainly...

  • Topix launches local news iPhone app

    amy
    11 Sep 2009 | 11:35 am
    Today, Topix launched its first iPhone app, the Topix Aura. With in-depth coverage nationwide, Topix Aura dynamically updates local information based on your GPS location or saved ZIP code. You can easily browse a stream of the latest local information,...

  • Thumbs Up for Topix at SXSW

    amy
    20 Aug 2009 | 12:42 pm
    It’s that time again. Time to cast your vote, make yourself heard, and decide the agenda for the 2010 SXSW Interactive Conference. Last year, Chris Tolles moderated a lively panel on User Generated Content. LA Weekly wrote a great...

  • "Daily Telegraph" Modern as Namesake

    tolles
    19 Aug 2009 | 4:16 pm
    An article in the Daily Telegraph, making the "what's all this, then?" argument that the "social media revolution is going nowhere". came my way on Twitter via Andrew Keen. The author makes a bunch of vaguely arguable points, damns the...
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    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 ...
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Metaprinter

  • When the Money is Gone, It’s Time to Move On

    Robert Ivan
    16 Nov 2009 | 2:04 pm
    Found via @ehelm on Twitter

  • Number of Murdered Journalists in Mexico Hits New Record

    Robert Ivan
    15 Nov 2009 | 11:44 am
    “Censorship increases as killings become routine. “I don’t want to die young,” says one reporter.” – By Ioan Grillo – GlobalPost Published: November 14, 2009 09:46 ET Read The entire story on their site.

  • Free Webinar via ComScore – State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy through Q3 2009

    Robert Ivan
    5 Nov 2009 | 8:55 am
    As it pertains to media news, the following is a great way to learn more about consumer sentiment and economic trends. I tune in to better gauge how e-commerce can help my customers and where they should be directing their ad spending (print, web, mobile, direct mail, etc..). State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy through Q3 2009 Date November 12, 2009 Location United States Speaker comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni Session Time 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EDT Description You are cordially invited to join comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni as he presents a quarterly review of the state of the U.S.

  • Columbia Journalism School Prizes and Programs 11-2009

    Robert Ivan
    4 Nov 2009 | 9:35 am
    Here are some prizes and continuing education programs at Columbia that I would like to alert you about. 1.   When Veterans Come Home: A Workshop for Working Journalists The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism is collaborating with the Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma and the Carter Center Mental Health Program to offer a workshop on “When Veterans Come Home: A Workshop for Working Journalists” on Jan. 7-9, 2010 at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Ga.  The workshop will address the special challenges facing local and regional news organizations seeking to improve their coverage of…

  • Columbia J-School Presents Advanced Google Docs & Cloud Computing for Journalists

    Robert Ivan
    15 Oct 2009 | 7:09 am
    Columbia Journalism School presents a new webcast/call-in show on Thursday, noon-1 pm ET. You can listen live via phone or web; you can also catch the recording via the web and iTunes – details below and at http://bit.ly/columbiajdocs see local time around the world: http://bit.ly/2cOTeG Advanced Google Docs, Cloud Computing for Journalists: Get the latest tips and tricks about Google Docs, the suite of web-based, collaborative computing services that many journalists are using these days – http://docs.google.com. Learn best practices as well as new features. We will also address…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    The Media Manager

  • Robert Niles: Newspapers need Walt Disney or thereabouts

    19 Nov 2009 | 9:23 pm
    In the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles argues that the news business needs the 21st century equivalent of Walt Disney to inject vision and imagination.Niles decries the existence of the "no, because" manager and suggests there needs to be more "yes, if" managers. Mainly, though, his complaint is with the lack of way-out-of-the-box thinking.As for principles to reconnect the business, Niles has three:1. Divest and diversify. He thinks companies should sell some properties to new, more creative owners to shake up the business.2. Call the pioneers home. Niles believes the industry isn't…

  • Apple tablet reportedly delayed

    18 Nov 2009 | 7:40 pm
    The Digitimes technology site is reporting that Apple's much-anticipated new tablet will have to be much-anticipated much longer. Its March release is now more likely to be pushed back to the second half of 2010.And the price tag is taking some shape: about $1200-1500 U.S., which is a slight cry from the earlier notions of an iPod-priced, iMac-powerful device.The indications are there will be two versions, one with a 9.7-inch screen and one with a 10.6-inch screen. The device is Apple's entry into the e-reader market, and given its shrewd marketing history, it is expected the company's thrust…

  • Robin Brown: 30 free Web tools for journalists

    18 Nov 2009 | 7:32 pm
    Technology has arrived in great measure in the last two to three years to permit a vast new array of techniques for journalism. Unquestionably it requires a lot of focus to keep up and learn, but British freelancer Robin Brown has smartly assembled a list of 30 such tools and some primers on using them.The usual suspects are there: Twitter, Flickr, Digg Delic.io.us and the like. But there are also some good off-to-the-side tools for mashups and other work. It's a good resource that serves a core curriculum for the student of new media.

  • How mobile will help newspapers

    18 Nov 2009 | 4:15 am
    The respected technology consultant Rob Durst is of the belief that mobile can save the newspaper industry from rampant decline. Durst talks of the industry's "Tarzan" syndrome --- of swinging to the next branch without losing the grip on the first vine --- and believes it's possible to transform in time. But it requires a new thinking.Mobile is the central concept. He thinks newspapers need to stop thinking of themselves as "broadcast" models and move to "interface" models."Magazines and newspapers should stop treating their publications as fixed products and start thinking about them as…

  • U.S. newspaper readership stays strong

    18 Nov 2009 | 3:10 am
    IIn the United States newspapers and their Web sites continue to hold their audiences well in the face of competition for attention.The Scarborough Research study of readership --- distinct from reports on actual circulation --- suggests some 74 per cent of Americans (about 171 million people) consumed the print or online content of a newspaper in the last week.The report suggests 79 per cent of white collar workers, 82 per cent of those in households earning more than $100,000 and 84 per cent of those with post-secondary degrees were among that readership.
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Nieman Journalism Lab

  • How Steve Brill has adjusted his pay-for-news pitch

    Zachary M. Seward
    20 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm
    Because it’s my job, I’ve followed pretty much everything Steve Brill has said in public about Journalism Online, the pay-for-news firm he launched in April with Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindrey. From the start, they’ve been offering infrastructure and consulting for news organizations that want to charge for access to their websites. But as you’d expect with any new venture, the pitch has changed over time. Here are some tweaks I’ve noticed: Ditching the term “paywall” Brill has always been clear that he isn’t advocating a subscription-only…

  • The FTC should give nonprofit news a closer look

    Jim Barnett
    20 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    You know the old saying about how we’re from the government and we’re here to help you? That’s what came to mind as I read the Federal Trade Commission’s notice for its workshop on journalism in the digital age. The notice makes the case that “news organizations,” which it notably does not attempt to define, are suffering at the hands of aggregators and other online actors that have drained the fun and profit from news gathering. Among the solutions the FTC wants to examine are some that would seem to support nonprofits — tax treatment and greater…

  • Links on Twitter: MSNBC may develop EveryBlock independently, what happens when NPR.org breaks, Techmeme adds more humans

    Twitter
    19 Nov 2009 | 2:50 pm
    MSNBC may develop EveryBlock, the local-info aggregator, on its own instead of folding it into MSNBC.com http://tr.im/Fjb6 » Intelligent failure: “What Happens When Stuff Breaks On NPR.org” http://tr.im/FjIK » Congrats to MinnPost on raising $18,000 yesterday. Key: They’ve partnered with a statewide “giving portal” http://tr.im/FdFD » New York Times is ditching Times Extra, which nobody used, and rethinking the best way to link out http://tr.im/Ff8d » Techmeme, the invaluable tech-news aggregator, adds three more human editors, doubling its…

  • Linking watchdog journalism and nonprofit accountability

    Mac Slocum
    19 Nov 2009 | 10:00 am
    Nonprofit business models often pop up in our coverage, and in recent weeks we’ve run a series on the relationship between non-governmental organizations and the news ecosystem. But here’s something we’ve only touched on in passing: the decline of investigative journalism and its impact on nonprofit accountability. Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, explores this issue in the Fall 2009 edition of Carnegie Reporter. It’s interesting to see concerns about journalism’s watchdog role addressed through a different perspective.

  • Need a lawyer? New network gives web publishers a line of defense

    Mac Slocum
    19 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    If you’ve gone the entrepreneurial route you know that first flush of enthusiasm often dampens when nitty-gritty decisions need to be made. There’s accounting, taxes, incorporation, insurance — and that’s the clear stuff. Toss in murky issues around trademark and branding and it’s easy to see how dreams of independence get squelched. The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center doesn’t want those entrepreneurial instincts to wither on the vine. It’s just launched an ambitious collection of free legal resources called the Online…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    State of the Fourth Estate

  • College Newspapers as a Non-Profit Journalism Example

    Dave Levy
    19 Nov 2009 | 8:36 am
    Name a major college; now, quickly, if you’re a journalism type, name its paper. Student Weekly/Daily geekery aside, I do owe a lot of my interest in media to my history of writing and tracking my campus papers. I did my first writing as a high school student in Phoenix for Brophy Prep’s Roundup, where, in 2000, I wrote a 1,200 word feature on Napster and the rise of social sharing of media. Maybe I’ll get that up on Scribd over the holidays when I’m home. For four years at my alma mater, I also contributed on occasion to Boston College’s Heights (congratulations…

  • Mid-week treat: Dilbert edition

    Dave Levy
    17 Nov 2009 | 3:49 pm

  • Interconnected Media Win: How I Met Your Mother

    Dave Levy
    16 Nov 2009 | 6:49 pm
    I’ve never been one to shy away from the crutch of my own life that is pop culture. Monday nights are no different, yet, today I get to let it all collide. The winner of broadcast media today is the production crew of How I Met Your Mother. No fewer than five separate social media properties were created – including a fake Wikipedia page – to promote a small bit on the show in the name of a fake character, Lorenzo von Matterhorn. You don’t mess with Wikipedia, though. Within an hour of the show’s conclusion, the fake page has been replaced with the more factual…

  • The future of media business models

    Dave Levy
    15 Nov 2009 | 8:14 am
    I turn back to a point I came across a few months ago: when it comes to understanding online media, tradition is not a business model. Which is why I was more than delighted this morning to read a piece (not shockingly from the Knight Foundation) that at least broke the mold of square peg/round hole suggestions for pay walls. I said I wasn’t surprised it was from Knight for two reasons. 1) I usually hold them in high regard because of my own work with my Syracuse’s Knight Chair while a graduate assistant a few years back; 2) they are usually on the leading edge of driving…

  • Less about media, more about communication

    Dave Levy
    12 Nov 2009 | 1:47 pm
    I just guest posted today over at Authenticities, the blog for Edelman Digital (my employer). It’s something I’m proud of, but a little more about communication than media, so I won’t put it all here. However, it was a good jaunt through that history as I inch toward understanding Google Wave: …While nearly instantaneous from a reaction standpoint, social media is still generally anchored by the history that forces us to look at communicating as the gerund that it is. Even Twitter, the shiniest among the digital channels of communication – and each of its footprints…
 
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    Nieman Journalism Lab

  • How Steve Brill has adjusted his pay-for-news pitch

    Zachary M. Seward
    20 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm
    Because it’s my job, I’ve followed pretty much everything Steve Brill has said in public about Journalism Online, the pay-for-news firm he launched in April with Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindrey. From the start, they’ve been offering infrastructure and consulting for news organizations that want to charge for access to their websites. But as you’d expect with any new venture, the pitch has changed over time. Here are some tweaks I’ve noticed: Ditching the term “paywall” Brill has always been clear that he isn’t advocating a subscription-only…

  • The FTC should give nonprofit news a closer look

    Jim Barnett
    20 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    You know the old saying about how we’re from the government and we’re here to help you? That’s what came to mind as I read the Federal Trade Commission’s notice for its workshop on journalism in the digital age. The notice makes the case that “news organizations,” which it notably does not attempt to define, are suffering at the hands of aggregators and other online actors that have drained the fun and profit from news gathering. Among the solutions the FTC wants to examine are some that would seem to support nonprofits — tax treatment and greater…

  • Links on Twitter: MSNBC may develop EveryBlock independently, what happens when NPR.org breaks, Techmeme adds more humans

    Twitter
    19 Nov 2009 | 2:50 pm
    MSNBC may develop EveryBlock, the local-info aggregator, on its own instead of folding it into MSNBC.com http://tr.im/Fjb6 » Intelligent failure: “What Happens When Stuff Breaks On NPR.org” http://tr.im/FjIK » Congrats to MinnPost on raising $18,000 yesterday. Key: They’ve partnered with a statewide “giving portal” http://tr.im/FdFD » New York Times is ditching Times Extra, which nobody used, and rethinking the best way to link out http://tr.im/Ff8d » Techmeme, the invaluable tech-news aggregator, adds three more human editors, doubling its…

  • Linking watchdog journalism and nonprofit accountability

    Mac Slocum
    19 Nov 2009 | 10:00 am
    Nonprofit business models often pop up in our coverage, and in recent weeks we’ve run a series on the relationship between non-governmental organizations and the news ecosystem. But here’s something we’ve only touched on in passing: the decline of investigative journalism and its impact on nonprofit accountability. Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, explores this issue in the Fall 2009 edition of Carnegie Reporter. It’s interesting to see concerns about journalism’s watchdog role addressed through a different perspective.

  • Need a lawyer? New network gives web publishers a line of defense

    Mac Slocum
    19 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am
    If you’ve gone the entrepreneurial route you know that first flush of enthusiasm often dampens when nitty-gritty decisions need to be made. There’s accounting, taxes, incorporation, insurance — and that’s the clear stuff. Toss in murky issues around trademark and branding and it’s easy to see how dreams of independence get squelched. The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center doesn’t want those entrepreneurial instincts to wither on the vine. It’s just launched an ambitious collection of free legal resources called the Online…
  • add this feed to my.Alltop
    UWIRE College Media Beat

  • College Media Beat Temporarily On Hold- Check Out College Media Matters

    Dan
    27 Oct 2009 | 3:30 pm
    College Media Beat is temporarily on hold. Check out the latest news from Dan about all-things college media at College Media Matters.

  • Editor Reflects on Recent Battles with Student Government

    Dan
    19 Oct 2009 | 2:57 am
    In a reflective new post on her personal blog, Whit editor in chief Emily Kostic at Rowan University outlines her seesaw mentality toward the paper’s recent gung-ho coverage and editorializing about the school’s student government. – In her words: Over the past month, The Whit . . . has published several controversial stories about our Student Government Association. It got heated. The Montclarion (the college newspaper at Montclair State University who has been in legal battles with their SGA over similar issues as ours) published an editorial supporting us.

  • Daily Californian: “Let’s Talk About Sex”

    Dan
    19 Oct 2009 | 2:40 am
    In a recent editorial, the senior editorial board of The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper at UC-Berkeley, tsk-tsked both parties involved in Towson University’s Towerlight sex column controversy. According to the write-up, student press freedom, not sex, was the real issue at stake in the “Bed Post” dispute- and the Towerlight editor’s resignation and the Towson president’s financial threats undercut that freedom dramatically for the entire country to see. – One portion of the editorial stated: – Though the pressure on [the former…

  • Pulitzer Winner: Michigan Daily is the Best Journalism Education Anyone Can Have

    Dan
    11 Oct 2009 | 12:32 pm
    In a new video clip, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary, reflects on his Michigan Daily days.  According to Robinson, who served as a co-editor in chief of the paper 35 years ago: “I’ve always said The Michigan Daily is the best journalism education that anyone could ever have.  It was the certainly the best I could ever have.  I learned about the craft of journalism, but I also learned about the passion and the commitment and the sense of a mission that ultimately drew a lot of us into journalism and sustained us throughout…

  • College Media Links: Anger Over Sex and Call for Equality

    Dan
    8 Oct 2009 | 11:49 am
    Student editor resigns over sex column: The Towerlight at Towson University is in serious flux because of Lux, the pseudonymous writer behind the sex column “The Bed Post.” Recent columns have divided the editorial team, incensed the  university president, and is causing a media ruckus now that the editor in chief has quit (?!) in the wake of increasing administrative anger.  This Baltimore Sun editorial especially says it all: “There may indeed be little journalistic value in “The Bed Post” . . . Aside from its questionable taste, it violated many of the…
Log in