Journalism

• Most Topular Stories

• The truth about the price of investigative journalism online | The Editorialiste [del.icio.us]

  Adrian Monck

  amonck

  7 Mar 2010 | 12:23 pm

• Best links - week 10

  R&D Blog

  Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

  10 Mar 2010 | 5:54 am

• 9 Tools to Help Live-Stream Your Newsroom

  PBS: MediaShift

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:12 pm

  When you think about internships at media companies, you probably picture people fetching coffee, running errands, or worse. But some internships have taken a different tack, setting up specialized blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages for their interns to help them understand new technology and spread the word about their programs. At NPR, the 40-plus interns put together a special 30-minute multimedia and audio presentation for the rest of the staff each term. The special "Intern Edition" -- run mainly by interns themselves -- has morphed into a regular blog with daily updates. At…

• 5 tips for making better video reports

  Robb Montgomery

  Robb Montgomery

  10 Feb 2010 | 5:11 am

  Media Development training and consulting visits to Egypt media houses. { Robb Montgomery }

• Methodology

  Journalism.org:

  dpage

  4 Dec 2010 | 7:59 am

  read more

• 

  Columbia Journalism Review

• Comments of the Week

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:59 pm

  At the end of each week, we excerpt some of the most insightful, articulate, interesting, and entertaining comments we’ve received that week. Think we’ve missed something? Well… comment! Rahm, Off the Record This week’s “News Meeting’ question noted that the author of one of the many recent stories on Rahm Emanuel wrote that the chief of...

• Audit Notes: Google "Grandeur," Toxic Pet, Stop the Presses?

  12 Mar 2010 | 2:28 pm

  Valleywag's Ryan Tate hammers Google about its "Six Delusions of Grandeur." Tate points to this stunning quote in Fortune from CEO Eric Schmidt: "All this information that you have about us... Does that scare everyone in this room?" The questioner asked... "Would you prefer someone else?" Schmidt shot back... "Is there a government that you would prefer to...

• How to Cover a Non-Story

  12 Mar 2010 | 11:55 am

  On Thursday afternoon, Gawker reported that Scott Brown—the Republican whose victory in a special election in Massachusetts has cost Democrats their Senate super-majority and complicated their legislative agenda—was named as a defendant in a 2000 defamation suit by a female campaign worker, who alleged in court papers that he had harassed her during his 1998 campaign for state...

• The Lehman Scandal Breaks Wide Open

  12 Mar 2010 | 10:38 am

  Will Repo 105 be the Chewco and JEDI of this crisis, and are we finally about to see some people on Wall Street go to jail? Yesterday's blockbuster 2,200 page report on Lehman Brothers by a court-appointed examiner shows Lehman Brothers executives moving $50 billion in toxic assets off-balance-sheet to deceive investors about its financial health. Finally it seems...

• If Democrats do not contribute to the Greg Marx Retirement Fund, midterms will be costly

  12 Mar 2010 | 9:37 am

  I’m not going to attempt to dissect each of the arguments made by Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen in their Washington Post op-ed about why Democrats should abandon their push for comprehensive health care reform. But the headline on the piece—“If Democrats ignore health-care polls, midterms will be costly”—is simplistic to the point of being misleading. That's because...

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  Poynter Online

• As Hollywood Prepares for Oscars, a Final Word on Colorless Vanity Fair

  4 Mar 2010 | 12:29 pm

  Gold statuettes, red carpets and blue Na'vi will mark this weekend's Oscars, but the top-nominated films and actors unfortunately have something in common with a recent controversial Vanity Fair cover: They lack color.Outside of the nominations connected to "Precious: Based on a Novel by Sapphire," and Morgan Freeman for "Invictus," the awards ceremony will be business as usual for Hollywood. Similarly, when Vanity Fair's annual Hollywood issue hit newsstands in February, its "A New Decade, A New Hollywood" fold-out cover was classic VF: An Annie Leibovitz-photographed fold-out portrait of…

• Media Call Out Women's Hockey Team for 'Debutante Ball'

  2 Mar 2010 | 12:53 pm

  Journalists who are dismissive of women's sport, or who treat it like a slightly humorous oddity (kind of like water-skiing squirrels and other kicker stories) often rely on hackneyed sexist stereotypes. Cheap shots are easy, so it's no surprise when the old boys of sports rely on them. It's the journalistic equivalent of the empty net goal. But what's surprising, and considerably harder to take, is when "objective" journalists and commentators fall into the trap of using the same limiting language.American readers, I understand that you don't cover every moment of Canada's national game the…

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

  29 Jan 2010 | 8:14 am

  I've been writing and teaching about diversity, race and ethnicity for more than 15 years -- about as long as Keith Woods has been at The Poynter Institute. His "Untold Stories" seminar shaped the way I reported on undercovered communities, and became the model on which I built a class on covering race issues. I know many journalists and educators share similar stories about Woods' work at Poynter. In the wake of controversial layoffs at National Public Radio, Woods recently accepted a new gig as NPR's vice president of diversity in news and operations. Today marks his last day at Poynter. I…

• Events, Not Enterprise, Drive Most Stories about Hispanics

  14 Dec 2009 | 12:05 pm

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

• Reporters' Views Differ on Treatment of Race in Woods, Salahi Coverage

  11 Dec 2009 | 9:33 am

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

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  the nytpicker

• Worst Lede Ever? "Everything Is New In New York Save For That Which Is Old..."

  10 Mar 2010 | 7:07 pm

  "Everything is new in New York save for that which is old, and when something goes from one to the other, the transition can be sudden and surprising: a wet foal that’s suddenly distinguished and large, a horse that rides with the weight of history on its back."--from "A Steakhouse Mellowed By Age," by Sam Sifton, page D8, March 10, 2010

• NYT Caught In Bed With High-Priced Models!

  9 Mar 2010 | 7:25 pm

  For the last several weeks -- maybe longer -- the NYT has been involved in an expensive relationship with a group of very high-priced models.The man supplying these models to the newspaper of record has a past history that includes accusations of sexual harassment and financial improprieties.None of this has been disclosed by the NYT. Quite the opposite, in fact: the NYT expects its readers to support this alliance -- and even pay dearly for it.The models in question are patent models -- tiny replicas of devices invented in the 19th century, made as part of patent applications to show what…

• Why The Weaknesses In The NYT's Coverage of the David Paterson Story Matter.

  7 Mar 2010 | 5:57 am

  It wasn't until May 19, 1973 -- nearly a year after the Watergate break-in, and well into the revelations that would eventually bring down a president -- that the NYT first referenced, in a meaningful way, the possible resignation of Richard Nixon.That day, under the headline, "HAS A LOT TO DO," NYT political reporter R.W. Apple Jr. declared on page one:The White House said today that President Nixon had no intention of resigning. Ronald L. Ziegler, the White House press secretary, made the statement in response to a torrent of questions about resignation and impeachment at his regular…

• The NYTPicker Is Experiencing Technical Difficulties. Please Stand By.

  6 Mar 2010 | 5:22 am

• NYT Quietly Changes Yet More Facts In Paterson Narrative, Discrediting Its Own Sources -- And Itself.

  5 Mar 2010 | 5:47 am

  In its page-one story about David Paterson today, the NYT yet again quietly added new wrinkles to its narrative of the governor's actions in the domestic violence case at the core of his troubles -- altering yet again the timeline of events, and contradicting its own previous reporting of the case.Today's story also moved to impose an outrageous new reportorial standard on the story -- that the governor must submit to its reporters a regular update on his plans to remain in office, or else justify its speculation that he will soon resign."Asked by reporters if he would still be governor on…

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  BuzzMachine

• TEDxNYed: This is bullshit

  Jeff Jarvis

  8 Mar 2010 | 4:50 am

  Here are my notes for my talk to the TEDxNYed gathering this past weekend. I used the opportunity of a TED event to question the TED format, especially in relation to education, where — as in media — we must move past the one-way lecture to collaboration. I feared I’d get tomatoes — organic — thrown at me at the first line, but I got laugh and so everything we OK from there. The video won’t be up for a week or two so I’ll share my notes. It’s not word-for-word what I delivered, but it’s close…. This is bullshit. Why should you be…

• Where the TV fight goes

  Jeff Jarvis

  7 Mar 2010 | 3:29 pm

  My first bit of advice to pissed-off Cablevision customers in New York — who’ve just lost WABC right before the Oscars — I do recommend that you switch to Verizon Fios. You won’t get it in time. It’s not perfect. But for me, it has been a helluva lot better than Cablevision: more channels, better service, better broadband, good phone service, impressive installation. Switch. It will feel good. It will feel just. I spent years sparring with Cablevision to get what I paid for and I’m glad to be rid of them. This doesn’t mean I side with ABC in this…

• Get your PSA checked, men

  Jeff Jarvis

  5 Mar 2010 | 4:08 am

  Here’s audio of an appearance on The Takeaway on public radio this morning about the American Cancer Society’s new prostate (PSA) screening guidelines, telling doctors to discuss the test and its implications first — the moral equivalent of the breast-cancer-screening shift of a few months ago. I disagree. As the n in a hundred whose cancer was caught by screening, I caution that the interest of the individual are not aligned with the interests of the aggregate — that is, it may not seem worth it to statisticians to save just one more life … unless that life is…

• Buffett on “terrible journalism”

  Jeff Jarvis

  4 Mar 2010 | 4:34 am

  Warren Buffett — owner of one newspaper and director of another — complains in his letter to shareholders (PDF) about his quote being mangled and misused by sound-bite journalism: Last year we saw, in one instance, how sound-bite reporting can go wrong. Among the 12,830 words in the annual letter was this sentence: “We are certain, for example, that the economy will be in shambles throughout 2009 – and probably well beyond – but that conclusion does not tell us whether the market will rise or fall.” Many news organizations reported – indeed, blared – the first part of…

• Operational transparency

  Jeff Jarvis

  26 Feb 2010 | 6:18 am

  I am in Tampa waiting to fly back home to New Jersey and, thanks to the snowicane but rather than sitting in the usual information vacuum to which airlines subject us, I am watching as Continental shows us the status of the flights that were supposed to bring our jet in from LA to Cleveland to Newark to Tampa. I saw the flight to Cleveland canceled, then the one to Newark canceled, and I figured we were doomed when I saw the aircraft number for my flight erased. But then I saw us assigned a new jet, one that flew into Tampa from Houston last night. That’s simply amazing. Continental is…

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  Media Matters for America - Latest Items

• Quick Fact: Perino falsely claims health care benefits would take years to start

  12 Mar 2010 | 8:35 pm

  On March 12, Fox News contributor Dana Perino falsely claimed that people would "not see benefits for four to five years after" the health care reform bill passes. In fact, numerous benefits contained in the Senate bill would become available in the first year after the bill is enacted.Perino falsely claims benefits will take years to begin Perino: People would "not see benefits for four to five years after" bill is enacted. On the March 12 edition of Fox News' On the Record, Fox News contributor Dana Perino said of the health care reform legislation, "people are going to be taxed for the…

• Beck attacks social justice

  12 Mar 2010 | 5:50 pm

  Glenn Beck has repeatedly attacked the concept of social justice and churches that promote it, asserting that it is "code language for Marxism" and warning that "when you see those words, run." In fact, numerous churches and religious faiths, as well as prominent religious scholars, espouse social justice, including the Catholic Church, the Conservative and Reform movements of Judaism, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.Social justice is a tenant of mainstream faiths and has been promoted by respected religious scholars The Catechism of the Catholic Church deals specifically with "Social…

• Media Matters: In which Glenn Beck hosts talk of tickle fights

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:49 pm

  This may forever be remembered as the week when "tickle fight" entered the political lexicon. The story stretches back to last week, when Eric Massa (D-NY) announced his resignation from the House of Representatives. It took many people by surprise, including conservative commentators, who initially reacted to the story by trumpeting ethics allegations against him to tarnish Democrats. Sean Hannity compared Massa to disgraced Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), and Rush Limbaugh sounded enthusiastic that Speaker Nancy Pelosi could lose a vote for health care reform. But the story took an unexpected turn…

• Karl Frisch: Gone fishin': Right-wing media hook another dubious Obama conspiracy theory

  12 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

  After Robert Montgomery wrote in an ESPNOutdoors.com column that the federal government had a strategy in the works that "could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters," it was only a matter of time before the conservative media took the bait -- hook, line, and sinker. Easily made puns aside, the story was tailor-made for "conservative journalism." After all, Montgomery had no evidence for his claims. Another week, another wild, right-wing-media-driven conspiracy theory centered on the Obama administration. Conservative blogs…

• Doocy falsely suggests Byrd opposes reconciliation to finalize health care reform

  12 Mar 2010 | 2:12 pm

  Fox & Friends' Steve Doocy falsely suggested that Sen. Robert Byrd opposed using reconciliation to pass health care reform, citing comments Byrd made in 2001. However, Byrd recently defended use of reconciliation to complete passage of health care reform legislation already passed by both the House and the Senate.Doocy suggests Byrd would oppose reconciliation to finalize health care reform bill Doocy: Dems are "trying to do essentially what [Byrd] spoke out against." During the March 12 edition of Fox & Friends, Doocy discussed comments Byrd made in 2001 critical of using…

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  Topix: Journalism News

• Military unveils memorial for slain journalist at Kandahar Airfield

  13 Mar 2010 | 8:38 am

  A memorial for the first Canadian reporter killed in Afghanistan will now greet every journalist working out of the Kandahar military base.

• Ethiopia reinstates hefty fines against publishing houses

  13 Mar 2010 | 4:09 am

  Ethiopian Supreme Court reinstated fines on Monday against four newspaper publishing companies over their coverage of the disputed 2005 national election.

• Movie Review: Intelligence failure

  12 Mar 2010 | 11:50 pm

  Their thriller about the futile search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a visual and visceral knockout thata s utterly deflated by a story as common, coarse and unappetizing as Army field rations.

• McLaren's romantic trials as a London scribe "loosely" adapted for TV movie

  12 Mar 2010 | 7:30 pm

  Yes, the romantic trials of a young Canadian newspaper columnist swept up by foppish London lads in the CBC-TV movie, "Abroad," are loosely based on the experiences of Globe and Mail writer Leah McLaren.

• Mandela's ex-wife denies interview in UK paper

  12 Mar 2010 | 3:06 pm

  Nelson Mandela's ex-wife denied Friday that she had given an interview to a British newspaper in which she was quoted sharply criticizing the anti-apartheid icon.

• 

  Big News Network

• Slain Journalist Honoured With Kandahar Plaque

  13 Mar 2010 | 9:30 am

  A memorial plaque at the Canadian military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, honours Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang, killed by a roadside bomb in December.

• Slain Journalist Honoured With Kandahar Plaque

  13 Mar 2010 | 9:30 am

  A memorial plaque at the Canadian military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, honours Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang, killed by a roadside bomb in December.

• Slain Journalist Honoured With Kandahar Plaque

  13 Mar 2010 | 9:30 am

  A memorial plaque at the Canadian military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, honours Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang, killed by a roadside bomb in December.

• Forces Unveil Kandahar Memorial For Journalist Slain In Afghanistan

  13 Mar 2010 | 9:19 am

  Two soldiers huddled in the gloom of the Canadian media tent at Kandahar Airfield, quietly sorting and packing away the personal effects of slain journalist Michelle Lang. The belongings of a life cut...

• Nuggets Press On Without Karl In Memphis

  13 Mar 2010 | 8:24 am

  (Sports Network) - The Denver Nuggets continue their push to the postseason without head coach George Karl tonight against a desperate Memphis Grizzlies team. The Nuggets played without Karl, who is u...

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  NYT: Open

• What We're Reading

  By MICHAEL DONOHOE

  10 Mar 2010 | 6:38 am

  It's time for another roundup of links from NYT developers and Open blog readers. This week features lots of JavaScript-oriented links (not that there's anything wrong with that).

• Introducing Version 3 of the Congress API

  By DEREK WILLIS

  23 Feb 2010 | 10:25 am

  Version 3 of the Congress API offers many additions and revisions, making the API easy to use and more useful.

• What We're Reading

  By MICHAEL DONOHOE

  19 Jan 2010 | 11:24 am

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

• More Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud

  By EVAN SANDHAUS and ROB LARSON

  13 Jan 2010 | 11:21 am

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

• Article Search API Enhancements

  By DEREK GOTTFRID

  12 Jan 2010 | 1:53 pm

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

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  The Linchpen

• Bringing journalists and coders together for #wjchat, Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. ET

  Greg Linch

  17 Feb 2010 | 7:37 am

  The second Web Journalist Chat on Twitter (#wjchat) will be Wednesday (tonight) at 8 p.m. ET and I’ll be the guest moderator. (Sidenote: #wjchat is not affiliated with Wired Journalists, the Ning network I administer for Publish2.) Here’s a preview of what we’ll be discussing: The relationship between programmers and journalists in your newsroom Beyond coding skills, what journalists and developers can learn from each other General resources to learn skills and specific tips Elsewhere, Emily Monacelli posted a Q&A she did with me about the topic. As the guest moderator,…

• Linkbaiting, thinking while linking and why link journalism requires more than just a URL

  Greg Linch

  5 Jan 2010 | 12:16 pm

  Sections: Context, How to investigate, What to do, Other examples, Conclusion, Epilogue If you see a blog post titled “10 Iconic Journalists Every J-Student Should Study” and want to share it, please consider what you’re attaching your name to on the interwebs. At the time of posting, more than 70 people have tweeted the link. That’s fine. Some, most or maybe all of them think it’s worth sharing. No problem there. But I’ve wondered since last night, when I first saw the link, if people realized what it was: linkbaiting. Thus, I’m consciously not…

• 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…

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  PBS: MediaShift

• 4-Minute Roundup: The Rising Buzz of Location Services at SXSW

  12 Mar 2010 | 1:53 pm

  This episode of 4MR is brought to you by the Knight Digital Media Center, providing a spectrum of training for the 21st century journalist. Find out more at KDMC's website. It's also underwritten by GoDaddy, helping you set up your own website in a snap with domain name registration, web hosting and 24/7 support. Visit GoDaddy to learn more. Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the growing interest in geo-location services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, especially as the South by Southwest conference begins in Austin, Texas. Now, Twitter and…

• NPR, SiriusXM Internships Steeped in Multimedia, Social Media

  12 Mar 2010 | 8:35 am

  When you think about internships at media companies, you probably picture people fetching coffee, running errands, or worse. But some internships have taken a different tack, setting up specialized blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages for their interns to help them understand new technology and spread the word about their programs. At NPR, the 40-plus interns put together a special 30-minute multimedia and audio presentation for the rest of the staff each term. The special "Intern Edition" -- run mainly by interns themselves -- has morphed into a regular blog with daily updates. At…

• 9 Tools to Help Live-Stream Your Newsroom

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:12 pm

  "We'd like to write blog posts, but don't have time." That's the oft-heard lament in newsrooms. More and more traditional journalists recognize the benefits of blogging and social media, but many just can't figure out how to add them to their existing workload. I have a solution that seems to work in our newsroom. When faced with this issue, I recommend colleagues do everything they usually do, such as have brainstorming sessions, take part in editorial meetings, do research and collect web links -- except now they should do it publicly. So now, for example, brainstorming can be done with a…

• Witness Creates Sophisticated Evaluation Tools for Video Impact

  11 Mar 2010 | 10:25 am

  Last month, Jessica Clark and I explored how various Public Media 2.0 projects are measuring their level of success in informing and engaging publics. We found that many public media organizations are struggling to measure impact -- and some are relying only on traditional indicators of reach, as opposed to other elements of impact such as relevance, inclusion, engagement or influence. Some projects, however, are taking a more holistic approach that is matched closely to their mission. The international human rights group Witness, which provides training, support and visibility for local…

• Public Media Twitter Chat Aims to Foster Collaboration

  10 Mar 2010 | 11:07 am

  Public media workers and aficionados have a new routine: Every Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, they log on to Twitter for Public Media Chat, which is using the #pubmedia hashtag. The chat, which started about a month ago, is the result of a discussion between a group of public media professionals at PublicMediaCamp in Washington, DC. "Public Media Chat is something of a passion project for me; for some time now I've recognized the need among people who work in public media organizations to have a way to learn, share, and collaborate with each other," said Jonathan Coffman, a PBS product…

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  E-Media Tidbits

• Danish Magazine Publishes Collaboratively Using Google Wave

  13 Mar 2010 | 3:54 am

  One of the big questions in online journalism is how to engage users. A small Danish experiment on Google Wave may provide some hints.In the last 10 years, we have learned that subtle changes in format on the Web can create vastly different products and user habits. Although they're both based on the simple article format, newspaper Web sites are vastly different from Wikis when it comes to the level of participation.So what happens if you launch a magazine on Google's collaborative tool "Wave"? That's the question consultant Bjarne Tveskov, a former LEGO designer, wanted to answer. He named…

• Msnbc.com Uses Slide Show for In-Depth Narrative Story

  11 Mar 2010 | 2:09 pm

  Like most investigative reporters, the culmination of Bill Dedman's reporting is generally an article or a package of articles. As he worked on his latest project, he collected images and documents that helped tell the story of a wealthy, elderly heiress who owns several expansive homes but doesn't appear to live in them.When he was ready to write, he decided that, rather than craft a 2,500-word story, he'd rely on the images he had shown to his family and coworkers, accompanied by captions. The slide show would be an experiment, a way to see if in-depth reporting could be presented in a way…

• Can Informal, Explanatory Videos Increase Engagement on News Sites?

  9 Mar 2010 | 3:44 am

  When I look up a word on Merriam-Webster OnLine, I'm usually in a hurry. But I've stumbled across something that could get me to stick around longer.A few months ago, I noticed a video player labeled "Ask the Editor" in the top right corner of the site. It seemed interesting, but not enough to slow me down, until I noticed one day that the video was entitled "Slang." I'm always interested in slang -- who isn't? -- so I watched it. The video is what you'd expect: An editor explains why the dictionary includes slang. Interesting enough, if you're into words. But in the process, the editor…

• Gearing Up to Build an iPad App? Consider a Mobile Web App First

  8 Mar 2010 | 6:57 am

  The iPad is being heralded as both a savior and enslaver for newspapers. It may finally provide the kind of futuristic, multimedia newspaper experience so often depicted in sci-fi. Unfortunately, playing with Apple carries heavy restrictions on what code can be used to build native applications, a significant revenue split, and serious, perhaps capricious, content restrictions.For most news companies, getting a native app on the iPad will mean:Hiring an outside firm to do the application development because nobody in-house works in the Objective-C language used on Apple devicesGiving away 30…

• News Orgs Challenged in Covering Live Events Like Health Care Summit with Immediacy and Depth

  4 Mar 2010 | 12:53 pm

  A Flickr image of a dual-screen setup at a Superbowl party this year shows the game on the big screen and a second screen for the Twitter conversation. The headline: "This is the future."Now, let's look at the present: online media coverage of President Obama's health care summit last week. Many news sites streamed live video of the summit, and some created innovative presentations that added value and context and engaged audience via social networking.  Here's what I saw as I surfed around some sites covering the live event: Yes, video quality and the online social space have come a…

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  Editor and Publisher

• CEO of 'Tampa Tribune' Parent Co. Took Pay Cut in '09

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:00 pm

  At Media General, the pain of pay cuts and the effect of mandatory unpaid furloughs extended to the executive suites, according to the company's annual proxy statement released Friday.

• In '09, New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson Again Out-Earned Her Boss

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:00 pm

  For the third year in a row, New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson made more money than Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., according to a Security and Exchange Commission proxy filing. Like union employees, top executives took a pay cut -- but got big bonuses.

• 2010 EPpy Awards Entry Deadline Extended

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:00 pm

  The entry period for the 15th Annual EPpy Awards, which honor the best Web sites presented by media-affiliated companies, has been extended to midnight on March 31. Entries are accepted online only, via the EPpy Awards Web site, www.eppyawards.com.

• Hundreds Laid off at 'Honolulu Advertiser'

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Layoff notices have gone out to 600 employees of The Honolulu Advertiser, following Gannett's sale of the paper and its related assets to Oahu Publications Inc., owner of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. A merger of the two papers is expected this spring.

• 'Manning (S.C.) Times' Staff Departs to Start New Paper

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:00 pm

  It's one thing for a newspaper's staff to get laid off, as is happening in Honolulu today. But having your whole staff walk out on you to start a new publication is something else entirely.

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  contentious.com

• links for 2010-03-13

  Amy Gahran

  13 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

  Oh Get A Grip!: Three-Part Harmony The three of us are no spring chickens, and I would venture to say it’s entirely possible that is one of the reasons our polyamorous relationship works as well as it does. I believe that security and self-esteem increase with age. The insecurities of youth, the self-doubts of many people who are still “finding themselves,” and peer and societal pressures, make relationships difficult at the best of times. As we grow older and, one hopes, wiser, it becomes clear that not everything is as cut and dried as we were led to believe when we were much younger.

• links for 2010-03-11

  Amy Gahran

  11 Mar 2010 | 6:01 am

  Google's YouTube Adopts Mobile Ads Cautiously | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD "While you may see banner ads on YouTube’s mobile home, search and browse pages, you won’t see ads on the clips themselves. Those will come eventually, Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s director of monetization, told Advertising Age, but in the near term, it’s too difficult for the company to pull off. That’s because there are too many handsets, with different standards and requirements, to support." (tags: video sharing social+media services advertising business+models Google) UPDATED: All…

• links for 2010-03-10

  Amy Gahran

  10 Mar 2010 | 6:01 am

  Introducing Homer: The Blogware-agnostic Feed-based Homepage Creator for the 'News Blob' | Shhhaw "From a news point of view, getting story data from a writer and keeping it in a database is a solved problem. There is excellent free software out there that does this much better than I could ever hope to. What blogware does not do well is arrange stories hierarchically. Where Holovaty is right is that these blobs (and 99% of news on the web now is in blob-form) need to be repurposed, because blogware isn’t designed with news judgement in mind. This is why I wrote Homer. Homer…

• links for 2010-03-09

  Amy Gahran

  9 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

  BroadbandBreakfast.com: Digital Impact Group: Persistent Digital Divide Among Low-Income Individuals "The conclusion of our study is that, summing the conservative, low-end estimates of 11 categories of economic impact yields an aggregate estimate of the current costs of digital exclusion at over $55 billion per year. Furthermore, over time, the costs of digital exclusion are likely to increase, as technological advances in key sectors enhance the efficiencies enjoyed by digitally included populations and therefore magnify the costliness of being excluded." (tags: digital+divide…

• The Onion: How will the end of print journalism affect old loons who hoard newspapers?

  Amy Gahran

  8 Mar 2010 | 9:08 pm

  Pretty much says it all. It may be the only market they have left: How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

• 

  DigiDave - Journalism is a Process, Not a Product

• At South by Southwest and Updates

  Digidave

  13 Mar 2010 | 1:06 am

  Today I am at South by Southwest. Yes, you can tell I’m a noob because I didn’t refer to it as just “South by.” Perhaps when this event is done I’ll write a bit of a contrarian post about SXSW. The quick takeaways are. 1. Spring break for the internet: W000! Show me your A.P.I.! 2. The Ikea of tech conferences. Regardless of that – it’s always a blast to see folks like Matt Thompson, Patrick Thornton, Sean Blanda, Will Sullivan, Dan Gillmor, Tristan Harris, Joe Edelman, Matt Mireles, Raines Cohen, Scott Rosenberg, Jonathan Berger Scott Hocker, and…

• Interview – Jason Barnett from The Uptake

  Digidave

  2 Mar 2010 | 11:57 am

  I have been a fan of The Uptake since the beginning. In this video Jason Barnett discusses what The Uptake is, how they organize contributors, bias in the media, the “collaboration in Copenhagen” and what that means for the Media Consortium. I’ll let him take it from here….

• The Shift Newspapers Use When They Discuss “Citizen Journalism”

  Digidave

  1 Mar 2010 | 9:56 pm

  The following was originally published on my Posterous blog “Digidave’s Quickies” – where I often collect my brain musings. I thought it was too good to just leave it there and wanted to see if others had thoughts on this conversation. OJR had an interesting post out today that is making the rounds. But I see a big problem with it. Their headline: “The pros and cons of newspapers partnering with ‘citizen journalism’ networks.” The post was an aggregation of quotes from different newspaper people. All the quotes had good points. The basic…

• Spot.Us: New Designs and Features and What Comes Next

  Digidave

  23 Feb 2010 | 8:08 am

  Since Spot.Us first launched in late 2008 as a simple wiki, I’ve wanted this to be a learning and growing endeavor both for myself and for  journalism as a whole. There are so many lessons in starting a non-profit news project, especially one that is unique in its scope and mission like Spot.Us. I hope to share some insight below, but first the news. Today Spot.Us takes a huge step forward with a new design and new features. This was made possible by lead designer Lauren Rabaino and the excellent development team of Erik Sundelof and Dan Newman. Please join me and Anh Do, managing…

• The Connection Between Communities and Small Business

  Digidave

  26 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

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

• 

  Newspaper Death Watch

• Not Yet Time To Burn the Boats

  paulgillin

  9 Mar 2010 | 10:32 am

  TechCrunch has an interview with Marc Andreessen in which the Internet boy wonder advises media companies to “burn the boats,” an analogy to the instructions Cortés supposedly gave his army upon landing in Mexico nearly 500 years ago in order to insure that the soldiers pressed on. Print newspapers and magazines will never get [to new online business models], he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and…

• Johnston on Journalism’s Future

  paulgillin

  4 Mar 2010 | 9:13 am

  David Cay Johnston We don’t get a lot of e-mail from Pulitzer Prize winners, so we were pleased and intrigued when David Cay Johnston sent a lengthy response to our recent comments on the shortcomings of American journalism schools. Johnston is a reporter’s reporter in the classic mold of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” In his career, Johnston has certainly done plenty of afflicting. Starting with a staff writer job at the San Jose Mercury in 1968, he progressed through reporting positions at the Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times, and…

• Research Dramatizes Changing Practices

  paulgillin

  2 Mar 2010 | 7:47 am

  Three new studies document the changing way in which journalists practice their craft, for better and for worse: New research by the Society for New Communications Research and Middleberg Communications finds that seven in 10 of journalists are using social networking sites for research and reporting, a 28% increase over the previous year. Twitter use was up 25% and two in three journalists read blogs. Maybe more importantly, 80% of the journalists surveyed “believe that bloggers have become important opinion-shapers in recent years” and more than 90% “agree that new media and…

• Interview: Young Journalist Makes Online Transition

  paulgillin

  24 Feb 2010 | 2:36 pm

  Melissa Massello is the 31-year-old “Stealfinder in Chief” at Shoestringmag.com, an online magazine for people who want to live a frugal but socially responsible and healthy life. She manages a loose federation of freelance contributors, many of whom barter their services, while writing more than 5,000 words each week and also handling the business affairs of the bootstrap operation. With 140,000 monthly visitors, Shoestring is beginning to turn the corner toward profitability. Melissa’s background is in newspaper journalism, but she has successfully navigated the transition…

• Plagiarism’s Murky New Rules

  paulgillin

  19 Feb 2010 | 9:22 am

  This week’s sorry tale of a New York Times reporter being forced to resign for plagiarizing content from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources, apparently over a long period of time, raises questions about how traditional practices can survive the pressures of the online age. Zachery Kouwe (right) walked the plank after editors at the Wall Street Journal complained that passages in a post on the Times’ DealBook blog substantially duplicated material published in the Journal a couple of hours earlier. The Times published a correction and later suspended Kouwe. He resigned…

• 

  editor on the verge

• Wanted: Interns who won’t fetch coffee or open mail

  Yoni Greenbaum

  21 Feb 2010 | 3:08 pm

  Philly.com Sports is looking for an intern to start immediately. The candidate will be expected to work on production of the site, make important editorial decisions and contribute original content. Previous experience in the field of sports journalism is strongly preferred. Knowledge of Photoshop, Final Cut and/or an online content management system a plus. The candidate will be expected to start immediately and stay on board through the summer. Evening and weekend hours likely to be required. Philly.com Sports, the home of the Inquirer and Daily News was recently named one of the top 10…

• How Do You Make Money?

  Yoni Greenbaum

  3 Jan 2010 | 4:40 pm

  All too often when I ask a colleague at another media company what their monetization strategy is (in general or regarding a specific product) the response I’m given is akin to “that’s not my station.” To me, that answer epitomizes the problems we’re seeing at too many media companies – too many people passing the proverbial buck. Now, for those of you who have previously read my blog, you know that I’m a proponent of transparency and when it comes to an issue like monetization, I think companies need to increase transparency to lessen the impact of employees who believe that…

• Awesome Philly Internship Opportunity!

  Yoni Greenbaum

  9 Sep 2009 | 4:17 pm

  PAID and ACADEMIC sports  internships available for the fall at Philly.com. Whether your interested in writing, video production, web design, online marketing or mobile applications this is your opportunity to get top-quality experience working with the proven Philly.com Sports team. Our internships are not about opening mail, fetching coffee or answering phones. You’ll be in the driver’s seat right along side our full-time team developing a portfolio that will make your friends jealous and that you’ll be able to leverage for that full-time job. We’re flexible with…

• Is it too late for an intervention?

  Yoni Greenbaum

  23 Nov 2008 | 9:57 am

  I spent part of my Sunday morning visiting dozens of newspaper websites and by the time I was done I found myself wanting to scream. WAKE UP! LOOK AT WHAT YOU ARE DOING! Too many of the sites I visited looked as if they’re frozen in time or, at the very least, not working with any sense of urgency. When I tweeted my observation: “Where’s the innovation? Where’s the experimentation? Don’t see most newspaper sites doing anything different or new. What happened?” Steve Yelvington came back with this on-point response: “Biggest risk of organizational (i.e., newsroom)…

• Your content is not rotisserie chicken

  Yoni Greenbaum

  21 Oct 2008 | 8:12 am

  Recently, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Ron Popeil. An American inventor, Popeil is responsible for such gadgets as the Chop-O-Matic, the Veg-O-Matic, Hair in a Can Spray and the Showtime Rotisserie Oven which he hocked on many late night infomercials. It was this last product that has been on my mind much of late. Popeil claimed that it was so easy to cook whole chickens in the Showtime Rotisserie Oven that all you had to do was “set it and forget it.” This phrase popped into my head recently while I was trying to explain my approach to website management. Too many online…

• 

  Endemic

• Why and how I’d use an iPad and similar tablets

  pat

  24 Feb 2010 | 11:58 am

  Instead of pontificating on whether or not the iPad is a failure or how it will change computing forever, I thought that I would spend some time thinking about how I would actually use an iPad or similar tablet. 1. My commute to work and walking around the city Doing work on the train — I do work on my Marc train trips to and from Union Station. I don’t do any heavy duty work. I’m mostly checking my e-mail and responding to messages before I arrive at work and getting a jump on our social media for the day (on the way home, I mostly concentrate on Twitter, Facebook and our…

• Bill Gates wants to create a zero carbon emission future

  pat

  18 Feb 2010 | 4:32 pm

  This is a must watch TED Talk from Bill Gates. He thinks our ultimate goal as species should be to emit zero carbon emissions. He believes the best way to get there is through technology, investment and innovation. He shares several promising ideas in this video.

• The people need the iPad and simpler computers

  pat

  12 Feb 2010 | 11:08 am

  A lot of technologists don’t realize how broken the current computing experience is for so many people. Desktop computers (with desktop-metaphor OSes) are really work machines, but many people — if not most — spend the majority of their computing time these days doing non-work stuff on their computers. Desktop computers with desktop-metaphor OSes will be around for years to come and will continue to work well for people using them at work. Power users get a lot out of the current computing arrangement, but how many computer users are really power users? A lot of people…

• On knowledge

  pat

  14 Jan 2010 | 7:44 am

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

• It’s not about the perfect Pepsi but rather the perfect Pepsis

  pat

  20 Dec 2009 | 7:08 pm

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

• 

  Wired Journalists

• Have any of the other startup online-only newspapers overtaken the circulation of their print competitors?

  Darrell Todd Maurina

  I've been focusing almost entirely on local issues for a number of months and therefore haven't been as active on this board as I should have been. So here's my question: two months ago (Jan 2010), my average daily readership at the Pulaski County Daily News surpassed the local print daily newspaper which covers the urban areas of our county, and last month (Feb 2010) my average daily readership surpassed the local print weekly newspaper which covers the rural northern part of our county, as well as the two main cities of our county. Granted, we're not talking huge numbers here: according to…

• More advice for small-school journalists

  D. Cecelia Martinez

  How student journalists can make the most out of a small college or journalism program, in response to today's Ask the Recruiter column. http://www.dcecelia.com/blog/more-advice-for-small-school-journalists/

• Tsumami Watch

  Alan Minskoff

  Tsunami Watch Honolulu-- On the last Saturday in February, the islands of Hawaii were placed on tsunami alert after the massive 8.8 earthquake struck Chile. My wife Royanne and I were sleeping soundly on the fourth floor of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel when the electronic buzz from her iPhone awoke us at 5:25 a.m. My mother-in-law texted us that a tidal wave was expected to hit Oahu around 11:30 that morning. After this initial jolt to the senses, things moved quickly. We turned on local television and watched the Saturday news team—in their rare moment of high anxiety—alert their viewers…

• Bylines and extensive editing

  D. Cecelia Martinez

  Reader question: Is it okay to change the byline of an article if it requires a lot of editing? http://shar.es/m01QK

• reinventing microfinance in Pakistan3

  Farhat Abbas Shah

  Reinventing Microfinance in Pakistan 3 By: Farhat Abbas Shah Changing economic environment always calls for more innovative response. We, of course , are living in a time where hosts of events have crowded a comparatively short time span, particularly in the world of finance. Despite an incorporated world economy, the tools and methods needed in the so-called third world would definitely be different from those of implied in the developed world. For instances fighting poverty in the countries like Pakistan needs certain changes to suit a constantly aggravating economic situation. The main…

• 

  Holovaty.com

• EveryBlock acquisition and me

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

• The definitive, two-part answer to "is data journalism?"

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

• Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering

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

• Looking toward EveryBlock’s future

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

• Announcing the Django Book, second edition

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

• 

  Innovation in College Media

• Curated links for March 9, 2010

  Bryan

  9 Mar 2010 | 10:00 am

  A few things that have popped up in my RSS feeds lately that might be of interest: Research Dramatizes Changing Practices\: The ever-inciteful Paul Gillin links to some interesting research about how social media is being used extensively by journalists in their reporting (even Wikipedia!). Lots of other substance in the post as well, so read the whole thing. Can Informal, Explanatory Videos Increase Engagement on News Sites? - Steve Myers asks the pertinent question, and gives a good breakdown of the difference between a transactional visit and an exploratory one. Wide Web of diversions gets…

• YouTube auto-captioning for video

  Bryan

  9 Mar 2010 | 7:59 am

  Several people have asked in the past about transcriptions/closed-captioning for video. It's a pain in the butt, but YouTube has just rolled out a promising new time-saving feature called auto-captioning. Like any machine-generated transcription, some words get garbled. But if you have a video that has good audio from an interview (external mics!), and there's not a lot of background noise, it's useful. You can also use it on videos that have already been uploaded to the service. In your account, under "Captions and Subtitles" download the English machine transcription file (it will be named…

• Video example from boston.com

  Bryan

  9 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

  I came across this story from the Boston Globe about an MIT student whos inventing a new type of wheelchair that is more usable in less wheelchair-accessible areas. The story itself is inspiring, the interactive graphic is interesting, but the video really tells the story of how it works, and illustrates some of the advantages of Internet-based video. Students working with online video, note: It's short (1:44 minus title slide) It's told entirely by the subject of the story It presents a single topic There is a lot of b-roll footage (many close-ups) The video matches the sound It has a…

• Blogging specific links

  Bryan

  8 Mar 2010 | 1:23 pm

  Here are a few links to some "meta" discussion specifically about blogging - blogs about blogs - that I've come across recently. And all were recommended by one blogger. They contain some excellent advice and tips if you are interested in the topic, or looking for ways to improve your own blogging skills. Remarkablogger Blog for Profit Chris Garrett on New Media Via John Haydon Also, Problogger.net

• Tagging & subcategories: organizing online content

  davehon

  4 Mar 2010 | 7:33 am

  A sample of a tag cloud A major problem with any news site is the search engine. If users have troubles locating a specific story that isn’t a few clicks away, chances are they won't revisit your site. So what’s the best way to please your visitors who want to find that story that never appeared on the front page? The answer is tags. The second best search engine, Youtube, uses the system of tags. Look at any video, the more hits/pageviews, the more diverse the tags are. But tagging can be a time killer. Here are some steps you can take to save time on tagging and make your tags more…

• 

  Institute for Analytic Journalism

• How 'bout a new term: "NewsViz"?

  Tom Johnson

  27 Feb 2010 | 11:10 am

   Many of us are commonly using the term "data visualization" or "dataviz" or even "infoviz."  Perhaps we should add to the lexicon "newsviz."  If so, you saw it here first.  Maybe.  In any event, check out this interesting page at Slate. News Dots: The Day's Events as a Social NetworkAn interactive map of how every story in the news is related, updated daily. By Chris Wilson Like Kevin Bacon's co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as ...

• Open Source Maps Are Helping the World Bank Save Lives in Haiti

  analyticjournalism

  20 Feb 2010 | 12:39 pm

  From FastCompany: Open Source Maps Are Helping the World Bank Save Lives in Haiti BY ANYA KAMENETZFri Feb 19, 2010 An aid worker from the European Commission holds a PDF printout from OpenStreetMaps. The humanitarian relief effort underway in Haiti is proving the true potential of open source map building. Don't take my word for it, follow the Tweets and blogs of my friend Schuyler Erle. He's on the ground in Port-au-Prince along with Tom Buckley, a developer of mapmaking program GeoCommons Maker. The pair are advising the World Bank on ...

• "2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners Announced"

  analyticjournalism

  20 Feb 2010 | 12:17 pm

  Press Release 10-028 2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners Announced http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=116369&org=NSF Winning entries appear in the Feb. 19 issue of Science "Branching Morphogenesis" aims to reveal--through abstraction--the unseen beauty and dynamic relationships that exist between endothelial cells and their surrounding extracellular microenvironment. Movies of networking endothelial cells cultured on a 3-D matrix were analyzed to generate computational tools that simulate this process. Next, large-scale templates from simulations were…

• "2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners Announced"

  analyticjournalism

  19 Feb 2010 | 7:37 pm

  Press Release 10-028 2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners Announced http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=116369&org=NSF Winning entries appear in the Feb. 19 issue of Science "Branching Morphogenesis" aims to reveal--through abstraction--the unseen beauty and dynamic relationships that exist between endothelial cells and their surrounding extracellular microenvironment. Movies of networking endothelial cells cultured on a 3-D matrix were analyzed to generate computational tools that simulate this process. Next, large-scale templates from simulations were…

• Review: The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics

  analyticjournalism

  18 Feb 2010 | 4:42 am

  From FlowingData:   Review: The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics Feb 18, 2010 / Infographics, Reviews / Add your comment Add another book to the growing library of guides on how to make information graphics the right way. Dona M. Wong, former graphics director of The Wall Street Journal and now strategy director for information Design at Siegel+Gale, provides the dos and don'ts of data presentation in The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics. First Impressions Given Wong's background, you can make a pretty good guess about the examples used. They're not…

• 

  Invisible Inkling

• When all I have left is my Fun folder, I win

  Ryan Sholin

  6 Mar 2010 | 10:19 am

  If you don’t use Google Reader or Bloglines or some other feed reader, you can stop reading now. OK, still here? Months ago, after at least a couple years of just throwing all my feeds in Google Reader and sorting by newest, reading from the top down and marking all as read when I felt full of information or short on time, I went back to folders. Back to the folders with the sort of labels I used when I first started with Bloglines in 2005, which predated my use of Newsgator, which predated the existence of the great and powerful, albeit Buzz-infected as of late, Google Reader. Labels…

• Back to the Internet’s Future

  Ryan Sholin

  24 Feb 2010 | 4:32 am

  Once in a while, I take a look through some of the links I’ve been saving, sharing, and publishing in the sidebar of my blog, Twitter, and a few other places, and try to scrape the pixelly cream off the top to immortalize (until the links break, anyway) a little bit of the Web, hung in blog post with care, framed neatly by a theme. This is one of those onces in a while. If you like what you see here, follow me on Twitter to get ‘em while they’re fresh. The Internet? Bah! Published at Newsweek on February 27, 1995. Clifford Stoll’s 1995 predictions included…

• Epistemology and sources

  Ryan Sholin

  2 Feb 2010 | 7:16 pm

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

• Five

  Ryan Sholin

  1 Feb 2010 | 4:45 am

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

• A Newsstand for the Tablet that might work

  Ryan Sholin

  29 Jan 2010 | 4:59 am

  “Newsstand” by triin on Flickr. Mario Garcia probably believes the lifespan (halflife?) of print newspapers will stretch out ever so slightly longer than I believe, but I’m constantly inspired by his original thought about the problems associated with sustaining any version of the existing structure of journalism, assuming for the moment that it’s a good idea. And of course, he’s thinking about the Tablet. (I’m going to try to avoid focusing on any single product here, instead using the word “Tablet” as code for: multitouch slab of glass with…

• 

  Random Mumblings

• Engel Stadium: Down in the last inning

  Jack D. Lail

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:12 pm

  It is great to see a group of people are trying to save Chattanooga's historic Engel Stadium, the second oldest minor league baseball stadiums in America and one that is on the National Register of Historic Places.It's an 80-year-old, 5,997-seat monument to baseball history that seems to be locked in a "Twilight Zone" episode of ownership.I was there in 2008 and took the above HRD photos. It was in bad shape then; I can only imagine what it's like with two more years of  no maintenance and being a haunt of the homeless.A story in the Chattanooga Times Free Press today offers a glimmer of…

• Gabe's gaze into media

  Jack D. Lail

  12 Mar 2010 | 12:45 pm

  Image by Thomas Hawk via FlickrI'm finding mediagazer really useful. It launched March 8 from Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera.Thoughts?Related articles by ZemantaMediagazer is to Media as Techmeme is to Tech (Gabe Rivera/Techmeme News) (techmeme.com)Techmeme's creators introduce Mediagazer (vator.tv)Mediagazer: Techmeme Launches Memetracker for Media News (readwriteweb.com)Thanks, Gabe, there goes another chunk of my day (RexBlog.com)Mediagazer: Yet another Techmeme property for The Inquisitr to be blacklisted from (inquisitr.com)New Vertical Coming From News Aggregator Techmeme: Mediagazer…

• Knoxville video has gone viral

  Jack D. Lail

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:39 pm

  TV reporter Gordon Boyd's unfortunate "technical difficulties" have gone "randomly viral" on YouTube.The big social media blog Mashable linked to it today and the YouTube video has topped 137,000 views since being posted on March 5, 2010. Here is the take of the News Sentinel's Terry Morrow and also of Metro Pulse.

• Make it a talker

  Jack D. Lail

  10 Mar 2010 | 1:55 am

  I want to give you more, not less. I don't think McDonalds will assume that as long as you keep it in a yellow box, people will buy a smaller, drier Big Mac. Yet our industry seems to think people are so obligated to buy it, we can make something smaller and drier and people will still buy it. It's crazy. You have to create something that, whatever's in it, people in town are all going to be talking about. That's the edge that we've lost.Newspapers used to be seen as a utility. People used to ask, "Do you take the newspaper?" What we have to produce now is a product backed by marketing…

• If we could only get you to screw off more at work

  Jack D. Lail

  9 Mar 2010 | 6:29 pm

  ... and at home, too, for that matter.However, visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day. Not surprisingly, advertisers are willing to pay more for their share of readers' attention during that 25 minutes of offline reading than during the 70 seconds of online reading. So even though online advertising has grown rapidly in the last five years, it appears that somewhat less than 5% of newspapers'…

• 

  Journalistopia

• Facebook Users Prefer Broadcast Sites, Hitwise Analyst Says

  Danny Sanchez

  3 Mar 2010 | 9:37 am

  Facebook users tend to prefer broadcast to newspaper media sites, according to Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins. Check out her post containing plenty of metrics trends charts. [via Editor's Weblog] Share:

• Survey: How Twitter Has Influenced Political Journalists’ Coverage

  Danny Sanchez

  3 Mar 2010 | 8:41 am

  Australian professor Julie Posetti has a fascinating post on how Twitter has shaped the thinking and workflow of political journos. From her post: “Twitter is becoming a vehicle for participatory democracy in Australia thanks to its ability to create unmediated interaction between political journalists, engaged citizens and politicians.” “In the race to tweet, journalists are knocking down the walls that have in the past segregated media outlets within the Press Gallery. This is happening via content-sharing and cross-pollination between fiercely competitive commercial and…

• How To Sell Ads On Low-Traffic Sites [Smashing Magazine]

  Danny Sanchez

  2 Mar 2010 | 5:51 pm

  “But though it may feel like putting the cart before the horse, there are many good reasons and ways to sell ad space on low-traffic websites. What you need to always keep in mind is that, while advertisers are drawn to high traffic numbers, they desire something else even more: high conversion rates. There are plenty of success stories of websites that have limited traffic but sell a ton of advertising. These websites succeed because they do one thing well: they deliver the right type of customer to the right type of business.” Read the whole post at Smashing Magazine Share:

• Pew Study Says Internet Overtakes Newspapers For News

  Danny Sanchez

  2 Mar 2010 | 4:02 pm

  “The internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio. Getting news online fits into a broad pattern of news consumption by Americans; six in ten (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.” See the study here Share:

• The Future of User Interfaces [Six Revisions]

  Danny Sanchez

  1 Mar 2010 | 10:55 pm

  “In this article are than a dozen potential future user interfaces that we’ll be seeing over the next few years (and some further into the future).” Read more… Share:

• 

  Journerdism

• FCC comes through with a Consumer Broadband Test app for iPhone, Android and the home -- Engadget

  12 Mar 2010 | 9:52 pm

  "FCC is getting involved directly with its own Consumer Broadband Test app, designed to probe network latencies and download speeds on your home connection or mobile device. Part of the hallowed National Broadband Plan, this will furnish the FCC will useful data to show the discrepancy between advertised and real world broadband speeds, and will also -- more importantly perhaps -- serve as a neat way for users to directly compare network performance in particular areas."

• All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement

  9 Mar 2010 | 6:24 am

  "The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market. Software developers who want Apple's approval must first agree to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. So today we're posting the "iPhone Developer Program License Agreement"—the contract that every developer who writes software for the iTunes App Store must "sign." Though more than 100,000 app developers have clicked "I agree," public copies of the agreement are…

• KnightBlog SXSW Interactive: Picks for Journalists

  7 Mar 2010 | 5:12 pm

  Sheesh, that 11 a.m. Sunday time slot is triple booked with awesome sessions.

• ONA Nashville: Smart Phones for Smart Journalists - Online News Association

  2 Mar 2010 | 8:49 pm

  This looks like a pretty cool training event coming up for the midwestern/midatlantic folks. (via Jack Lail)

• New Canon 5D Mark II firmware scheduled for March, updates video features

  2 Mar 2010 | 8:42 pm

  "In addition to fixing the main frame rate to capture at 29.97 frames per second--though typically rounded to 30fps in discussions, that's not the actual standard--the firmware update adds 24fps (and 25fps for PAL) capture for film-like recording. Semimanual exposure modes will also become available in movie mode. Finally, audio sampling rate increases to 48kHz from 44.1kHz, and you'll be able to adjust levels on the LCD."

• 

  sans serif

• How Arun Shourie became the Express editor

  churumuri

  12 Mar 2010 | 10:49 pm

  Magsaysay Award-winning former Indian Express editor turned BJP ideologue, Arun Shourie, in conversation with Mahesh Sarma: How did you get the Indian Express editor’s job? Emergency had passed [in 1977]. I had got to know [Express proprietor] Ramnath Goenka through many episodes. And the Janta Party had come to power. We were staying in Mr Goenka’s house in Bangalore. He asked what I was doing and I said, “What do you mean what am I doing? I can’t find a job, I am writing a book. He said, ‘Stupid, who is going to read your book? No one is going to read it. You…

• 10 media barons in India Today power list of 50

  churumuri

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:55 am

  Ronnie Screwvala of UTV, and Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy of NDTV, are the three prominent media names missing in India Today magazine’s annual ranking of the 50 most powerful people in India for the year of the lord, 2010. Otherwise, this year’s list comprise the usual barons: Samir Jain and Vineet Jain of The Times of India group at No.8; Kalanidhi Maran of Sun TV at No. 16 (up eight places from last year); Raghav Bahl of TV18 at No. 17 (down from No. 15); Subhash Chandra of Zee at No. 22; Ramesh Agarwal and Sudhir Agarwal of Dainik Bhaskar and DNA at No. 30 (up five places from…

• GOOGLE: Experiment. Experiment. Experiment

  churumuri

  11 Mar 2010 | 6:16 am

  Stop cribbing, start innovating, Google economist-in-chief Hal Varian’s advice to newspapers. Varian arrives at some stunning conclusions: 1) Newspaper ad revenue is where was it ws in 1982 in inflation-adjusted dollars. 2) The medium with the largest increase in ad revenue since 1995 is cable TV, not the itnernet. 3) Online readership is only 3% of total readership in terms of time or pageviews. 4) Online revenue is only 5% of total newspaper revenue. 5) Time spent per online newspaper is a bit more than one minute per day, compared to 25 minutes per day for offline reading. Filed…

• The barbs that resulted in a Rs 500 crore lawsuit

  churumuri

  11 Mar 2010 | 5:40 am

  Udayan Mukherjee of CNBC-TV18 letting fly at rival channel “No. 4″, in other words Bloomberg, on the latter’s claims of its showing on budget day. Bloomberg has now sued the CNBC-TV18 managing editor, but not his employers CNBC TV18, for a round figure of Rs 500 crore. Mukherjee’s lawyers, clearly aurally challenged,  deny any “direct or indirect” reference to Bloomberg by their client. Also read: Business journalism or business of journalism? Filed under: A bit of fun, People, Television Tagged: Bloomberg, Churumuri, CNBC-TV18, Sans Serif, TV18, Udayan…

• Now, who could this honourable minister be?

  churumuri

  9 Mar 2010 | 11:38 pm

  A gossip item appearing in the columns of the New Delhi-based tabloid, Mail Today, owned by the India Today group, two days in a row. Also read: When a politician weds a journalist, it’s news Filed under: A bit of fun, Newspapers, People Tagged: Churumuri, India Today, Mail Today, Sans Serif

• 

  Adrian Monck

• The truth about the price of investigative journalism online | The Editorialiste [del.icio.us]

  amonck

  7 Mar 2010 | 12:23 pm

  Say you get 200,000 pageviews on a great investigative story, but it takes you a solid two weeks (not very long in investigative journalism land) of work to do. You've given up whatever pageviews you would have made during those two weeks -- and even if you break even, your site has been silent for two weeks. (Unless, of course, you have a big enough staff to do so. Most online-only publications do not.) See the problem? Investigative journalism is extremely expensive no matter which way you cut it, but it's impossibly expensive for an online publication. When you can get 100,000…

• George Orwell: The Sporting Spirit [del.icio.us]

  amonck

  3 Mar 2010 | 11:31 am

  Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

• Facebook Users Prefer Broadcast Media | Hitwise Intelligence [del.icio.us]

  amonck

  1 Mar 2010 | 10:27 pm

  Do Facebook users prefer Broadcast Media? I ran a correlation analysis to try to figure out if the amount of traffic Facebook sends a site is related to the number of fans a brand has on its Facebook page. I found no such correlation. (For the analysis, I used downstream visits from Facebook to 23 top News and Media websites excluding news aggregators and compared this to the number of fans on the associated Facebook page.) A colleague pointed me to an article in the New York Times suggesting that social networks are creating a water cooler effect and actually boosting viewership of broadcast…

• Foreign Arabic-Language TV: An Exercise in Futility? | Magda Abu-Fadil [del.icio.us]

  amonck

  13 Feb 2010 | 11:59 pm

  "Arabic-language foreign channels: millions squandered on a non-responsive audience," headlined a feature in the Lebanese daily An-Nahar's youth supplement.

• Public diplomacy: U.K. 1, U.S. 0 | Checkpoint Kabul [del.icio.us]

  amonck

  13 Feb 2010 | 10:47 am

  "[T]he London conference was a model of public diplomacy. It was made for television, literally, and had the appearance of being a co-production with the BBC, which broadcast hours of it live on its World Service... The only problem with the production was that BBC effectively became a participant and promoter rather than a detached reporter of news. That’s the way “public diplomacy” works, a reason governments need it — and news organizations should keep a distance."

• 

  Random Mumblings

• Engel Stadium: Down in the last inning

  Jack D. Lail

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:12 pm

  It is great to see a group of people are trying to save Chattanooga's historic Engel Stadium, the second oldest minor league baseball stadiums in America and one that is on the National Register of Historic Places.It's an 80-year-old, 5,997-seat monument to baseball history that seems to be locked in a "Twilight Zone" episode of ownership.I was there in 2008 and took the above HRD photos. It was in bad shape then; I can only imagine what it's like with two more years of  no maintenance and being a haunt of the homeless.A story in the Chattanooga Times Free Press today offers a glimmer of…

• Gabe's gaze into media

  Jack D. Lail

  12 Mar 2010 | 12:45 pm

  Image by Thomas Hawk via FlickrI'm finding mediagazer really useful. It launched March 8 from Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera.Thoughts?Related articles by ZemantaMediagazer is to Media as Techmeme is to Tech (Gabe Rivera/Techmeme News) (techmeme.com)Techmeme's creators introduce Mediagazer (vator.tv)Mediagazer: Techmeme Launches Memetracker for Media News (readwriteweb.com)Thanks, Gabe, there goes another chunk of my day (RexBlog.com)Mediagazer: Yet another Techmeme property for The Inquisitr to be blacklisted from (inquisitr.com)New Vertical Coming From News Aggregator Techmeme: Mediagazer…

• Knoxville video has gone viral

  Jack D. Lail

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:39 pm

  TV reporter Gordon Boyd's unfortunate "technical difficulties" have gone "randomly viral" on YouTube.The big social media blog Mashable linked to it today and the YouTube video has topped 137,000 views since being posted on March 5, 2010. Here is the take of the News Sentinel's Terry Morrow and also of Metro Pulse.

• Make it a talker

  Jack D. Lail

  10 Mar 2010 | 1:55 am

  I want to give you more, not less. I don't think McDonalds will assume that as long as you keep it in a yellow box, people will buy a smaller, drier Big Mac. Yet our industry seems to think people are so obligated to buy it, we can make something smaller and drier and people will still buy it. It's crazy. You have to create something that, whatever's in it, people in town are all going to be talking about. That's the edge that we've lost.Newspapers used to be seen as a utility. People used to ask, "Do you take the newspaper?" What we have to produce now is a product backed by marketing…

• If we could only get you to screw off more at work

  Jack D. Lail

  9 Mar 2010 | 6:29 pm

  ... and at home, too, for that matter.However, visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day. Not surprisingly, advertisers are willing to pay more for their share of readers' attention during that 25 minutes of offline reading than during the 70 seconds of online reading. So even though online advertising has grown rapidly in the last five years, it appears that somewhat less than 5% of newspapers'…

• 

  Telegraph: Shane Richmond

• SXSW 2010: The ins and outs of conference sessions

  Shane Richmond

  13 Mar 2010 | 8:29 am

  The most notable thing about the SXSW sessions I attended yesterday was the number of people who got up to leave in the first few minutes. It doesn’t stop – people steadily stream away throughout the session and the occasional newcomer arrives to keep the numbers up. That might be because the conference is so big [...]

• SXSW 2010: The monster tech conference begins

  Shane Richmond

  12 Mar 2010 | 12:41 pm

  South by Southwest (SXSW), the vast festival in Austin, Texas, covering music, film and interactive technologies, is slowly grinding into life. Over the next few days representatives from the likes of Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Spotify and hundreds of other companies of all sizes will address the tens of thousands of attendees. There will be film stars [...]

• Does Sarah Beeny's free property website herald the end for estate agents?

  Mike Butcher

  12 Mar 2010 | 12:00 am

  Sarah Beeny is best known for her Property Ladder TV programme, but she’s also turning into something of a web entrepreneur. As well as founding MySingleFriend.com, last year she bought into the online world with Tepilo, a site where you can list your house for sale. For free. There are a number of property portals out [...]

• The mobile camera that can tell you're on Twitter

  Mike Butcher

  11 Mar 2010 | 8:40 am

  If you’ve ever wondered when we’ll be living in a world similar to that portrayed by the film Minority Report, where shops greet you by name as you walk in and you pay for a tube ticket by having your iris scanned, then wonder no more. It’ll be arriving in a few weeks’ time. Swedish mobile [...]

• Kobo banks on openness for e-book success

  Shane Richmond

  9 Mar 2010 | 4:30 am

  “A reader should always be able to choose what to read on,” says Michael Tamblyn of online bookshop Kobo. He believes that Amazon, which is currently the most high-profile player in the e-books market thanks to its Kindle e-reader, is taking its customers into a dead end. When I wrote about Kobo a couple of weeks [...]

• 

  MediaShift Idea Lab

• Freedom Fone Promotes Information for All in Africa

  12 Mar 2010 | 8:53 am

  Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) strategies are viewed in many contemporary business circles as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. BoP refers to the 2.6 billion people who live below the $2 a day breadline and many business strategists argue that if targeted correctly, these consumers can offer businesses access to one of the fastest growing markets. Even if the price of products and services has to be reduced, profit can be made up in volume. A more neutral view of BoP strategies is that they are not simply a means to make millions. Instead, they involve a pragmatic appreciation that,…

• Top 5 Lessons from the Failure of The Zonie Report

  11 Mar 2010 | 8:20 am

  Last week, I wrote a blog post on The Zonie Report (TZR), my Arizona news blog, that I was temporarily shuttering it to spend more time working on CityCircles, a Knight Foundation News Challenge project. Since most of you probably haven't heard of TZR, here's a quick recap of my post: In my digital farewell, I talked about why I did what I did, outlined a few things I learned, and shared what I planned to do next. Since then, I realized I should have elaborated more on my lessons learned because I feel they have been misinterpreted. I could do that on The Zonie Report, or I could do that here…

• Hacks and Hackers: A New Community for Technojournalists, Journotechnologists

  10 Mar 2010 | 6:26 am

  Last June, at the annual Center for Future Civic Media Conference, I got to talking with Aron Pilhofer (an old friend, leader of the New York Times news applications team and a Knight News Challenge winner for the DocumentCloud project) about the growing number of people who are now doing computer programming to serve news organizations or the larger goals of journalism, such as informing the public about what government is doing. The conference featured a small grant competition to reward new forms of collaboration. Aron and I put together a winning proposal to create a a new organization…

• Printcasting Adds Partners in Philadelphia, Puerto Rico and Perú

  9 Mar 2010 | 11:54 am

  Do niche print magazines still have a role to play in the digital age? Media outlets in five different cities around the world are using the Printcasting publishing network to try and answer this question.We've added three partners in two weeks. They are:La República, one of the leading newspapers in Lima, Perú.El Nuevo Día, the dominant newspaper in Puerto Rico.Philadelphia Neighborhoods, a hyperlocal news site run through the Temple University Urban Publishing Lab. And in a purely technical sphere, we're also working with HP on a Printer app.These new local tests will accomplish several…

• How Virtual Street Corners Fits with History of Art-Telecom Projects

  8 Mar 2010 | 10:28 am

  Below is a guest post from George Fifield, director and founder of Boston Cyberarts Inc., an organization that is a fiscal sponsor of Virtual Street Corners. He and I are working closely together on the project, and here he helps contextualize Virtual Street Corners from a curator's perspective. Fifield is a distinguished curator in new media, a writer about art and technology, and a teacher at Rhode Island School of Design and Massart. Read more about his work and view more of his writing here. Art and Telecommunication Throughout time, Artists have greeted new communications technologies…

• 

  MultimediaShooter

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

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

• 9 Multimedia Projects You MUST Experience

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

• 10 Sports Related Multimedia Projects Worth Watching

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

• 7 Free Firefox Extensions For Journalists

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

• 8 Projects I’m Thankful For Seeing This Week

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

• 

  News Videographer

• I shot entire video using Flip camera

  Angela Grant

  9 Mar 2010 | 10:03 am

  I published a true multimedia story today about firefighters practicing fire drills in a home donated by a couple that was about to tear down the house. I call it a “true” multimedia story because it has several elements that all work together, doing a different but complementary job. The text explains the meat of the information. The video shows the action (it was pretty exciting and fun to be there). The photos capture moments in time that you don’t see in the video, and the captions highlight and underscore important bits of information about the story. By the way, I used…

• I have new respect for my readers

  Angela Grant

  31 Jan 2010 | 4:44 pm

  When I started this blog and committed to it in a serious way, I was a full-time videographer at a major newspaper in Texas. Even though I had to self-teach a lot of my video skills — Which was very hard — I had it easier than a lot of my readers because I was able to spend all hours of all days devoting myself to my studies. The idea of this blog was to share my lessons, as I learned them, with others who were struggling to learn the same things. Well, I have a whole new respect for those readers now because of my new job. The time constraints that my current responsibilities…

• My dirty little secret: I have no tripod

  Angela Grant

  30 Jan 2010 | 3:40 pm

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

• links for 2009-11-12

  Angela Grant

  12 Nov 2009 | 1:03 am

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

• One door closes, another opens

  Angela Grant

  11 Nov 2009 | 8:06 pm

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

• 

  Newspaper Next

• Nominate your favorite vendor

  Mary Peskin

  5 Mar 2010 | 10:22 am

  Which vendors are America's favorites? API wants to know and we bet you do too. Increasingly, newspaper companies are embracing third-party digital products and technologies that enable new business models, deliver content and advertising across platforms, maximize efficiencies and enable sustained innovation. API is launching a nationwide survey to find out which vendors are truly delivering quality solutions to meet our industry's needs -- and we want to make sure your favorite vendors are on the list. Would you help us design the survey? Here's how you can help: Step 1: Nominate up to 10…

• API reveals huge revenue opportunities through Sales Resource Optimization

  Mary Peskin

  19 Feb 2010 | 2:07 pm

  Newspaper organizations can increase revenues by as much as 15% by consistently targeting the best sales opportunities with the right type and amount of sales resource. This revelation is one of many identified in a new American Press Institute white paper report, Sales Resource Optimization: Bringing Science to the Sales Force. The free report, written in cooperation with global sales and marketing consulting firm ZS Associates, covers topics including: Seven obstacles that inhibit newsmedia companies from optimizing sales resources Key questions for sales executives Essential drivers of a…

• Find your path to paid online content

  Mary Peskin

  18 Feb 2010 | 2:10 pm

  Paid Content. It's the most hotly-debated news industry topic in 2010. It could be the most important decision you'll make for your organization. Don't base your business decision on opinionated debates and speculation. Join us for this important discussion on monetizing content, March 8-9. "15 Paths to Paid Online Content" draws on original API/ITZBelden research to provide actionable data and real-life case studies so that you can compare your online strategies to those of the most successful paid-access sites. Join your peers in face-to-face discussions with industry leaders who'll share…

• API, Poynter team up for seminar

  Mary Glick

  14 Jan 2010 | 12:51 pm

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

• Paid Access: Practices and Profiles

  Mary Peskin

  12 Jan 2010 | 7:37 am

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

• 

  paulconley

• Psst. Hey Kid. You want a job?

  Paul Conley

  9 Mar 2010 | 9:21 am

  Ahh March.You're my favorite month of the year. It's within your few brief weeks that I celebrate my birthday, watch as winter turns to spring, as Lent leads to Easter and as the clocks spring forward.It's a month of beginnings and youth.And, as longtime readers of this blog know, March is the month when my earnings take a tumble as I trade billable days for time spent with college kids.Every year at about this time I find myself visiting campuses, attending college media conventions, etc. It's become a tradition for me. And, like many traditions, I find it both comforting and…

• Penton goes under

  Paul Conley

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:07 am

  Penton is bankrupt.The B2B publishing giant announced today that it is filing Chapter 11.And as near as I can tell, the entire industry responded with a great, big yawn.Because no one who pays any attention to B2B publishing could possibly have been surprised by the news.Penton's announcement comes nearly a year to the day after I wrote that "I have no faith that a company that has a debt load the size of Penton's and is dependent on a troubled business model for cash flow, can ride out the economic downturn."Well, now it appears that -- despite some desperate measures taken by Penton last…

• Beware of geeks bearing gifts

  Paul Conley

  26 Jan 2010 | 6:16 am

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

• Predictions old and new

  Paul Conley

  10 Jan 2010 | 1:14 pm

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

• Happy Birthday, dear blog. Happy birthday to you

  Paul Conley

  22 Dec 2009 | 11:44 am

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

• 

  Photojournalism From A Student's Eye

• Photoshop for Reporters – Color Balance

  Daniel Sato

  11 Mar 2010 | 6:24 am

  In my last multimedia meeting, it was suggested that reporters could benefit from a few basic photoshop tutorials. The following is the first in a series of screencasts on basic photoshop techniques for reporters, this one covering the use of the Color Balance tool to color correct images. Below I have included links to the playlists for the screencasts I have completed so far. I expect to add a new photoshop tutorial at least once a week, and hope to finish my intro to Final Cut screencasts next week. Photoshop for Reporters Final Cut Tutorials GarageBand Tutorials

• Intro to Final Cut Tutorials

  Daniel Sato

  10 Mar 2010 | 11:14 pm

  More screencast tutorials made for my staff. This time on the basics of Final Cut. Importing into Final Cut General Layout and Tools Creating subclips Importing to the timeline

• Working with GarageBand

  Daniel Sato

  1 Mar 2010 | 3:01 am

  This post will cover the basics of editing audio in GarageBand. Click on the images to enlarge. You can also click on Video Screencasts in the Table of Contents below to jump straight to the screencasts. Table of Contents: The basics Initial steps Importing audio Getting familiar with the interface Editing audio Adjusting volume Exporting Video screencasts When you first open GarageBand and create a new project, you will see the following: Your first steps will be to close out the Grand Piano window, and go up to Track in the menu options, and select New Basic Track. This can also be done by…

• A little bit of everything

  Daniel Sato

  17 Feb 2010 | 1:26 am

  Last Wednesday I took part in a chat on Twitter about web journalism. One thing that became clear early on, even within “web journalism” many roles and responsibilities are highly specialized. Answers to questions regarding what a web journalist is, what responsibilities people have, and what titles people hold varied greatly depending on their role in their organization. There were back-end tech people who manage databases and work with code, reporters who were starting to use Twitter and still cameras, editors who help to produce packages and train staff, etc. This may have been…

• Photo a Day Project

  Daniel Sato

  13 Feb 2010 | 8:46 pm

  Though I didn’t start on January 1st, I have been diligent in keeping up with my photo a day project. Yesterday, I made it to day 31. Here are some that I have liked so far: (day 1) The first photo of the project: (day 4) My brother on his wedding day: (day 18) Going hunting with some war veterans: (day 25) DIY photo studio:

• 

  PressThink

• News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the News: What I Will Say at South by Southwest

  7 Mar 2010 | 2:00 pm

  Suppose your laptop continually received updates to software that was never installed on your laptop. If you can imagine a situation that absurd, then you are ready to partake in the Future of Context panel that I’ll be part of at the South by Southwest festival in Austin next week. Here are some of my ideas, questions and puzzlers in advance of that event. I am posting them today in hopes of generating a discussion I can use to improve my performance in Austin. (It’s already happening, see the comments.) 1. Why are we serving people the news without the background narrative…

• Explaining The Local: East Village, NYU's Collaboration with the New York Times

  22 Feb 2010 | 10:01 pm

  The New York Times and NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute announced yesterday that they will collaborate on a news site serving the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. It will be called The Local: East Village, and it will appear on the nytimes.com. The site will be edited and produced at NYU. In this post, I will explain what we’re up to and why we’re doing it. I don’t speak for the editors of the Times, but I have been discussing the East Village project with them for over a year and I have some sense of what brought them to this collaboration. And it is…

• The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism

  21 Feb 2010 | 2:19 pm

  This is a post about a single line in a recent article in the New York Times: Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right. Before I get to the line that interested me, I need to acknowledge that the investigation the Times undertook for this article is wholly admirable and exactly what we need professional journalists to be doing. Reporter David Barstow spent five months—five months!—reporting and researching the Tea Party phenomenon. He went to their events. He talked to hundreds of people drawn into the movement. He watched what happens at their rallies and the smaller meetings…

• He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User

  12 Apr 2009 | 9:46 am

  There I am, sitting at the breakfast table, with my coffee and a copy of the New York Times, in the classic newspaper reading position from before the Web. And I come to this article, headlined “Ex-Chairman of A.I.G. Says Bailout Has Failed.” I immediately recognize in it the signs of a he said, she said account. Quick definition: “He said, she said” journalism means… There’s a public dispute. The dispute makes news. No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the…

• Introducing the new Huffington Post Investigative Fund (And My Own Role in It)

  29 Mar 2009 | 11:37 pm

  The news broke Sunday: The Huffington Post announced today that it is launching a new initiative to produce a wide range of investigative journalism — The Huffington Post Investigative Fund. It is being funded by The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and will be headed by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project, which will be folded into the Investigative Fund.The full press release is here. I will have a role:Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, will serve as a senior advisor to the…

• 

  Reflections of a Newsosaur

• Andreessen’s not-so-hot idea for publishers

  Newsosaur

  11 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

  Marc Andreessen had a really good idea when he invented the first popular browser for the web, but his latest notion – that newspapers should walk away from a business grossing more than $30 billion a year – is just plain nutty. Evoking Hernan Cortes, the 16th Century conquistador who legendarily destroyed his fleet so members of his expedition to the New World would not be tempted to return

• Publisher profits dive 1.7x faster than sales

  Newsosaur

  9 Mar 2010 | 7:00 am

  While sales have fallen an average of 27.4% at newspaper companies in the last two years, profits have plunged 1.7 times faster, according to an analysis of the financial statements of the publicly held publishers. The average 45.9% dive in profitability at the publicly traded newspaper companies since 2007 represents not only serious financial challenges for the companies but also threatens

• Murdoch’s grumpy agenda in N.Y. news war

  Newsosaur

  5 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

  George H.W. Bush, who parachuted to safety when his Navy aircraft was shot down in World War II, marked his 75th, 80th and 85th birthdays by jumping out of planes for the fun of it. In celebration of their milestone birthdays, other octogenarians and near-octogenarians have been known to take a world tour, take up with a tootsie or take a nap. If you get that far and you have a couple of

• First web copyright crackdown coming

  Newsosaur

  4 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

  A coalition of traditional and digital publishers this month will launch the first-ever concerted crackdown on copyright pirates on the web, initially targeting violators who use large numbers of intact articles. Details of the crackdown were provided by Jim Pitkow, the chief executive of Attributor, a Silicon Valley start-up that has been selected as the agent for several publishers who

• Are hyper-local programs fair to j-students?

  Newsosaur

  2 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

  Some people think journalism students are ill served by being encouraged to pay hefty tuition to take classes aimed at creating free content for the New York Times and certain other prominent commercial outlets. Some people think those classes give students invaluable professional experience and valuable clips that will equip them to launch their careers in the increasingly treacherous

• 

  Ricochet by Chrys Wu

• What Are Your Favorite Online Tools for Reporting?

  Chrys

  18 Feb 2010 | 9:24 am

  Reporting has always been about digging for facts, finding people to talk with, and gathering visual and aural accounts. Now that broadband is widespread, the tools have changed. This Saturday, I’ll be in South Florida teaching an Online News Association workshop on where to go and what to use to mine, crowdsource, and distribute stories. It’s part of ONA’s free all-day Parachute Training program. Today’s the last day to register. As I put the finishing touches on my talk, I’d like to know: Which tools and methods are most effective for you? Twitter and Facebook…

• 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.

• 

  20 headlines from the reading list

• What’s Next in Web Design?

  13 Mar 2010 | 4:39 am

  I've been asked by the Italian magazine L'Espresso to write an article on The Future of Web Design. Here is the (longer) English text. Thinking about what’s next online is fun because everything you wish to come true will come true. While commercial products obey to the laws of the market, ...

• Meet Big Bang, Our Next Trend Map

  13 Mar 2010 | 4:39 am

  It's one year since our last Web Trend Map. A lot has happened, but there are not enough changes in the landscape of domains in the last 12 months to create another domain based Web Trend Map. The big changes happened one level higher, on the social layer, that is: ...

• iPad Stencil for Omnigraffle

  13 Mar 2010 | 4:39 am

  This is the first version of an OmniGraffle template for folks designing iPad apps. It's not complete; we plan to update it as we're working on our own designs. Contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors, and other iPhone UI elements Based the iPad PSD GUI by Teehan+Lax. Text is fully editable on ...

• API for News? Reuters, NYT & iA Inc.

  13 Mar 2010 | 4:39 am

  Last week at Media2010, Marc Frons (Chief Technology Officer, Digital Operations, New York Times), Nic Fulton (Chief Scientist, Thomson Reuters) and me were asked to answer several questions on the future of news: When and how should news organizations release copyright-free material? What are the key points of design that ...

• iA’s 2006 Facebook Designs, Redesigned

  13 Mar 2010 | 4:39 am

  From December 2006 to February 2007 we were in touch with the product manager of facebook. The prospective: Redesigning facebook. Eventually. Since the contract was never signed, we kept our designs in the drawer. Until now... As you might have noticed already, the following two screens are not the exact ...

• 

  Robb Montgomery

• Creating a Facebook presence for a non-profit

  Robb Montgomery

  8 Mar 2010 | 3:03 am

  Is it time to revisit your Facebook strategy? Should you have Groups vs. Pages. Fans vs. Members? { Robb Montgomery }

• Will Apple ban newspaper iPhone apps for nudity?

  Robb Montgomery

  21 Feb 2010 | 11:53 am

  Apple enters "content filtering" with vague policy towards nudity in iPhone apps. Should newspaper and magazine... { Robb Montgomery }

• Cairo: 3 weeks of multimedia workshops for journalists

  Robb Montgomery

  11 Feb 2010 | 5:17 am

  Media Development training and consulting visits to Egypt media houses. { Robb Montgomery }

• 5 tips for making better video reports

  Robb Montgomery

  10 Feb 2010 | 5:11 am

  Chicago Filmmaker Robb Montgomery shares quick tips to avoid some common mistakes of shooting and editing video. { Robb Montgomery }

• Designing with the iPad in mind

  Robb Montgomery

  28 Jan 2010 | 8:04 am

  How to travel with an iPad will be a real nightmare unless you have clothes with bigger pockets. Now we have a vest... { Robb Montgomery }

• 

  robcurley.com

• Commode convergence

  Rob

  11 Mar 2010 | 7:07 pm

  Sometime in the future, I’ll probably look back at this post and wonder what I was thinking when I wrote it, and maybe even regret that it’s in my blog’s archives, but who cares? Live a little. Big-time convergence doesn’t have to be reserved for just big-time stories. (If you’d like to see examples of convergence/multimedia journalism that will warm the cockles of your favorite journalism professor’s heart, there is definitely some here.) A few weeks ago in one of our editorial meetings for lasvegasweekly.com, our nightlife reporter — Deanna Rilling…

• The evolution of lasvegassun.com’s homepage strategy — more importantly, does a nice design negatively impact traffic?

  Rob

  2 Mar 2010 | 5:45 pm

  Dating back to our online team’s time in Lawrence, I’ve always had a nice friendship with John Temple. And shortly after our decision was made to come to Las Vegas to work with the Greenspun family of publications, John gave me lots of advice. His advice that keeps proving to be correct time after time is that we should track and benchmark everything. About 15 or 16 months ago, I blogged about how we used that advice to keep tweaking our content strategy. By watching what our readers really do on our site — as opposed to what they might say in some formal reader survey…

• Weekend in Vegas: Some nifty examples of converged cross-platform/multimedia journalism

  Rob

  26 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

  This past weekend was interesting here in Las Vegas as a lot of very different types of stories were swirling around us — President Obama was in town, a new Cirque du Soleil show opened, a huge new section was launched on our site, the city’s hot-and-cold Rebels played basketball and a massive multimedia joint effort to explain Nevada’s budget woes ran across all of the Las Vegas Sun’s platforms. Convergence wasn’t a buzzword this past weekend — it was the type of journalism the Sun was actually committing. Even though this blog post is mostly about our…

• Covering high-school recruiting. On a Sunday afternoon. Please meet Ray Brewer.

  Rob

  10 Jan 2010 | 9:06 pm

  I’m a huge fan of Las Vegas Sun preps writer Ray Brewer and I love the way Brewer leads our coverage of high school sports in this valley. Plus, his enthusiasm and drive are contagious. Other than Brewer, what also makes the Sun’s high-school sports coverage so unique is that it is online-only. As I’ve written numerous times before, because of the JOA in Las Vegas, our print edition only has eight pages each day — with no daily sports or entertainment content, except on rare occasions. Before the fall sports season began, I posted a blog about our company’s high…

• Real-time news in Las Vegas: The Federal Courthouse shooting

  Rob

  8 Jan 2010 | 2:10 pm

  Sorry about the lack of posts lately. Any way you slice it, there have been lots of things going on … with our company, with the holidays, and lots of huge events and big breaking news here in Las Vegas. I’m eventually going to try to write about all of those things. But for today, I want to quickly focus on how our week began at the Las Vegas Sun. On Monday morning, a gunman opened fire at the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse. I found out about this story as I was getting ready to head in to work. An alert came across my iPhone via the CNN app. My first response was something…

• 

  Romenesko

• Fowler: I became the kind of journalist I once despised

  12 Mar 2010 | 3:54 pm

  Los Angeles Times At the end of the 2008 presidential campaign, the Huffington Post was treating Mayhill Fowler as a star, paying expenses that one month reached $15,000. "I was becoming more than a prima donna," she writes in her self-published book, and "in some surreal twist of circumstance I was turning into what I had once mocked."

• Bart: 'I don't think I'd call Murdoch today for another sitdown'

  12 Mar 2010 | 3:16 pm

  Variety.com "For one thing, we would get into a Roger Ailes argument and neither of us would like that," writes Peter Bart. "Murdoch, through Ailes, a former Nixon aide, has effectively polarized the political dialogue in this country, and Ailes knows the firestorms he systematically sets off." > Fox News issues one-sentence response to Raines' attack

• ABC News exec: 'We're spending a lot of time discussing pay vs. free' on our Web site

  12 Mar 2010 | 1:15 pm

  paidContent.org At ABCNews.com, "no one is talking about putting content behind a paywall and no one is talking about making everything free," says Paul Slavin. The digital division senior veep says he'd like to have "the basic answer about the paywall strategy by June."

• Mom isn't surprised son won Kristof's travel contest

  12 Mar 2010 | 11:40 am

  Lincoln Journal Star "Whenever he goes after something, he goes after it all the way," says Kelley Smith, whose 19-year-old son Mitchell was selected to accompany New York Times columnist Nick Kristof on a reporting trip to Africa. "I think this is an opportunity for him to really see how people live, things they have to overcome, because he really hasn't been exposed to that" growing up in Overland Park, Kan. || Smith's winning essay.

• Additional items for March 12, 2010

  12 Mar 2010 | 11:20 am

  > Shafer to Denton: Restore Gawker Media's full feeds! > How Fox News will probably respond to Raines' op-ed > California Watch rewards great comments with iPods > Ken Doctor: News brands have waned in their reach > NYT's Kocieniewski moves to Business to cover taxes > Ifill on the squirrel that reporters chased this week > East Valley Tribune lays off dozens of employees > Entire staff of small SC paper quits, starts new paper > Hearst has 70 apps under LMK banner, more coming

• 

  SteveOuting.com

• Overpriced 14-year-old book (mine) on eBay?!

  Steve Outing

  10 Mar 2010 | 1:43 pm

  Queue up the “eBay Song” by Weird Al Yankovic. … An eBay oddity landed in my inbox today in the form of a Google Alert e-mail that I have set to watch for when my name turns up in articles, blogs, etc. Included was a link to this page on eBay where an online bookseller has two copies of my 1996 trade book, “Newspapers and New Media,” for sale with a Buy-It-Now price of $118.64. The amusing thing to me (well, actually, it’s just sad) is that the small advance and piddling royalty checks I received over the years from the publisher for that thin (67-page)…

• iPhone app business models improving

  Steve Outing

  1 Mar 2010 | 2:09 pm

  Recently, I’ve been noticing new iPhone apps coming to market that are adopting interesting business models. Generally, they can be categorized as using the “freemium” (or semi-freemium) model; i.e., they give away some valuable content and entice you to upgrade for more and better features. 1. This American Life iPhone app. … This app costs $2.99 to purchase, and what that gets you is well worth that small amount of money if you’re a fan of the public radio show (as I am): All of the This American Life radio broadcasts from the most current to the…

• Report from my latest gig: Digital Media Test Kitchen

  Steve Outing

  21 Feb 2010 | 1:19 pm

  While I’ve mentioned it a time or two on Twitter, I haven’t written much about the Digital Media Test Kitchen, which the University of Colorado School of Journalism & Mass Communication and I are building. Recently, I got the go-ahead to open up the website and blog for the Test Kitchen and start to spread the word. Please do take a look around and tell me what you think of our mission and early research and development projects. The simplest way to describe what the Test Kitchen is about is to emphasize how we are bringing together Journalism students and faculty with their…

• A new way to comment: Like it? Don’t? …

  Steve Outing

  20 Feb 2010 | 12:38 pm

  I’m fond of trying out new technologies and digital services, and I’m often willing to use this blog as a sandbox. So today I’ve installed a new add-on to my blog called Insight App, which allows readers to highlight text and then easily rate it or comment on it, for everyone to see. With photos, like the sample one I’ve included with this blog item, you can click on the little blue icon added to the photo and then you’ll get the various options for rating or leaving a comment. You probably recognize this photo. Use yourmouse to hover over the photo, then click…

• Investigative reporting = premium paid content?

  Steve Outing

  5 Feb 2010 | 11:21 pm

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

• 

  Strange Attractor

• links for 2010-03-13

  Suw and Kevin

  13 Mar 2010 | 5:08 am

  Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! Scorecard ‘09: UK’s Top Regional Papers Have Lost Half A Billion In Sales | paidContent:UK Kevin: Robert Andrews writes: "Total annual revenue at just five of the UK’s leading regional newspaper groups fell from £2.05 billion to £1.54 billion through 2009, according to our calculations now that the results are in. That’s £509.7 million wiped off our local publishers during the downturn year." They responded by…

• Two weeks to ALD10!

  Suw and Kevin

  10 Mar 2010 | 1:07 pm

  Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! From the Ada Lovelace Day blog… There are just two weeks to go until Ada Lovelace Day 2010, and we still have a fair few bloggers, Twitterers, podcasters, web comic artists, and videocasters to recruit. We have 1114 pledgers and need 1958 more people to sign up. That’s a challenge with only 14 days to go, but if everyone recruits just two more people, we’ll still make it! There’s loads of stuff going on around…

• links for 2010-03-10

  Suw and Kevin

  10 Mar 2010 | 5:05 am

  Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! Google’s Hal Varian to newspapers at FTC confab: “Experiment, experiment, experiment!” » Nieman Journalism Lab Kevin: This is a great summary of Google's economist-in-chief, Hal Varian's presentation on newspapers. There is so much good stuff packed in this presentation. I'll just highlight this one quote in terms of new devices for news consumption. Varian says: "The iPad, Kindle and other tablets introduce a…

• links for 2010-03-09

  Suw and Kevin

  9 Mar 2010 | 5:05 am

  Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! Zooming the news: Is Seadragon a new news interface? » Nieman Journalism Lab Kevin: Joshua Benton has a great blog post on new possibilities in terms of news site interfaces. There has been very little interface innovation in terms of news sites. Most of the work for the last five years on news sites have been about social functionality. I strongly agree with Benton's last point: "The main problem with contemporary news…

• links for 2010-03-08

  Suw and Kevin

  8 Mar 2010 | 5:06 am

  Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you! The Public Editor – Journalistic Shoplifting – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com Kevin: The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, looks into instances of plagiarism by Zachery Kouwe, a blogger with the business blog Dealbook. Kouwe was caught lifting passages from other blogs and news sources. Quoting and linking is part of blog culture and is acceptable. However, lifting others writing shouldn't be a part of journalism or…

• 

  Teaching Online Journalism

• 21 examples of Flash journalism

  Mindy McAdams

  10 Mar 2010 | 7:25 pm

  These are interactive news packages I’ve selected to show to journalism students as we discuss some of the capabilities of Adobe Flash. Many are very recent. 1. Motion The first thing students learn to do in Flash is animation. Although a lot of animation is merely eye candy, it can help to tell the story more effectively. The motion in Super Stadium (2010) is window dressing, but there’s nothing wrong with that. In this segment, there’s a zoom on each level of the stadium as it flies out. In other segments, we see an alpha fade. These animation effects are easy to do on the…

• Spending time with Los Angeles homicides

  Mindy McAdams

  28 Feb 2010 | 1:02 pm

  Have you seen the L.A. Times homicides map? I’m sure you’ve marveled at the New York Times homicides map, and perhaps you have also admired the Boston Globe homicides map. The L.A. map, however, has a lot (a lot!) of fine features that the others lack. One of my students wrote a critique of the L.A. map for an assignment, and that led me to go deeper into it than I had before. Turns out that it’s probably the best implementation I’ve ever seen of Adrian Holovaty’s 2006 call to action, A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change. I’m particularly…

• Recommendation for a low-end video camera

  Mindy McAdams

  25 Feb 2010 | 8:16 am

  Read the review of the Kodak Zi8 by Derrick Jeror — at Amazon.com. Then read the 69 comments on his review (or at least scan them). This is an extremely helpful review — it explains how to get the best sound quality for interviews and the best battery life, etc., from this under-$200 video camera. Derrick recommends a lavalier microphone and provides other good tips too. In one of the comments, he explains why the Flip Mino is better for some applications.

• 3,000 followers on Twitter

  Mindy McAdams

  31 Jan 2010 | 4:49 pm

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

• Updating Flash Journalism (Part 2)

  Mindy McAdams

  20 Jan 2010 | 8:01 am

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

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  The Evolving Newsroom

• Curation, news in Manga and original research

  Julie Starr

  7 Mar 2010 | 1:22 pm

  A few things that have caught my attention in recent weeks, in no particular order. 1. I see curation as a big part of journalism online, so I bookmarked this piece from Mike Masnick on Techdirt (and the Google Newsroom piece referred to here). Jay Rosen points us to an article out of France that takes a stab at presenting what a modern internet-era newsroom should look like. The point that I find most interesting, that helped clarify a few different ideas for me, is that it splits “journalism” into three distinct categories, all of which have a role in the newsroom: Reporters…

• Iceland journalism haven, Wikileaks needs cash

  Julie Starr

  16 Feb 2010 | 11:16 am

  This could turn out to be interesting. In a post on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog the editor of Wikileaks Julian Assange talks about how Iceland could become a journalism haven. I’m excited about what is happening in Iceland, which has started to see the world in a new way after its mini-revolution a year ago. Over the past two months I have been part of a team in Iceland advising parliamentarians on a cross-party proposal to turn it into an international “journalism haven” – a jurisdiction designed to attract organisations into publishing online from Iceland, by…

• New journalism course, new students, new job

  Julie Starr

  25 Jan 2010 | 4:44 pm

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

• Why I’ve launched allaboutthestory.com #1

  Julie Starr

  22 Dec 2009 | 8:05 pm

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

• Link wrap: ‘content farms’ and tweeting trials

  Julie Starr

  20 Dec 2009 | 12:43 am

  A few things that crossed my radar recently. A rant about the failings of tech news and the (lack of) incentives causing it. From louisgray.com. I believe “fast food news” also can refer to the mass hysteria over making sure every site posts the news that a major browser or a major operating system has issued a point release, or when a popular site has an outage, that the incident becomes front page news for every blog. At some point, given the vast multitude of interesting tech stories, individuals and companies out there, one must take a deep breath and realize that being the…

• 

  Local Onliner

• Living Social Raises $30 Million; Goes Head-to-Head with Groupon

  Peter

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:13 pm

  The “Flash ecommerce” space got hotter today, as Washington, D.C.-based LivingSocial announced a new $30 million round led by U.S.Venture Partners. Grotech Ventures and Revolution (Steve Case’s company) are also participating. The fund will be used to launch deal-a-day coupon sites in Chicago, Denver/Boulder, Raleigh Durham and San Diego. These cities are actually live today, along with Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, Mineeaspolis-St. Paul, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington D.C. Living Social got its start with Visual Bookshelf on Facebook, and has launched some…

• MerchantCircle Index: Mixed Awareness Levels for Local Players

  Peter

  11 Mar 2010 | 12:01 pm

  MerchantCircle’s Merchant Index tracks merchant confidence in the economy (low). But it also yields some unexpected “real world” insight into merchant awareness and use of their local online marketing options. The Index is based on 11,000+ email respondents , so there is likely to be an online bias in the results. Of its 1.1 million registered SMBs, MerchantCircle also has a strong base of rural and exurban members, but MerchantCircle officials don’t believe these businesses are disproportionally represented. We’re most drawn to the low recognition accorded to many local mainstays…

• Bay Area News Project Envisions $12 Million in Revenue

  Peter

  10 Mar 2010 | 5:27 pm

  Local news cooperatives are now in development in San Diego, Chicago, Hawaii and San Francisco. The latter, known as The Bay Area News Project , is building up with a $5 million investment from philanthropist Warren Hellman, who apparently thought it would be a better idea to start fresh than buy The San Francisco Chronicle. According to an article by James Rainey in The Los Angeles Times today, the 15 person BANP (a placeholder name) envisions potential revenues of $12 million a year with a four-pronged strategy developed by CEO Lisa Frazier, a former McKinsey consultant who is getting paid…

• Red Beacon Teams with BigTent, Adds ‘Friendly Advice’

  Peter

  10 Mar 2010 | 4:43 pm

  Red Beacon, one of the new breed of social/local leads providers for SMBs, said it is now available throughout the entire Bay Area and teaming up with BigTent, a mega-moms network in the Bay Area with more than 100 local cells. BigTent will receive a revenue share carved from Red Beacon’s 10 percent commission. The deal between BigTent and Red Beacon positions the company not only against Yellow Pages and other newbreed leads providers (i.e. ServiceMagic, AlikeList, HelpHive, ThumbTack and Sears’ ServiceLive) but also against other sites that specifically tailor to moms (and women…

• Local Mobile Coupons: Analog Analytics Pushes Publisher Solution

  Peter

  9 Mar 2010 | 3:23 pm

  Coupons are hot in a down economy, and printable online coupons –and even mobile coupons –are gaining share in the coupons business. But local SMBs aren’t always in on the game, as coupon sites frequently gravitate towards one stop national accounts. Now, Analog Analytics, a San Diego based vendor, is pushing a clever mobile solution that allows online local publishers to feature display ads that have SMS promotion codes built in. Consumers show the coupon on their phones to retailers for conversion. Use of the mobile coupon provides complete analytics (impressions, click-thru…

• 

  The Scoop

• 2010 CAR Conference

  Derek

  7 Mar 2010 | 5:24 pm

  The 2010 CAR Conference begins on Thursday, and here are some of the sessions I’m trying not to miss: Thursday, March 11 Big Data: Analyzing legislation with machine learning. Always good to hear what Chase Davis has been up to. Open Source GIS. Now that mapping is more and more accessible, it pays to stay on top of what people are using. Juice up your stories with advanced methods. After a few months in the academy, Sarah Cohen should have some good stuff to share. Some lightning talks! Friday, March 12 Semantic tagging and DocumentCloud. Really need to get more in-depth on this. New…

• A Gentle Introduction to Google App Engine

  Derek

  23 Feb 2010 | 12:41 pm

  As part of our roll-out of version 3 of the NYT Congress API, I was tasked with coming up with a sample application that uses the API to do something mildly interesting, or at least functional. I had gotten a book on Google App Engine for my birthday and was pretty excited to see that some of the basic philosophies of Django were either incorporated directly into GAE or were easy to adapt to it. So when I started on the sample app, I picked GAE and dove in. App Engine’s Python runtime, unsurprisingly, sticks pretty close to the language’s core tenets: it uses YAML files for…

• Lightning Talks at NICAR

  Derek

  18 Feb 2010 | 2:08 pm

  This year’s computer-assisted reporting conference in Phoenix has a couple of new sessions on the schedule. One of them is an idea a couple of us have been pushing for a few years: lightning talks. A staple of technical conferences, lightning talks are based on the notion that while 45-50 minutes presentations are good, sometimes you only need about 5 minutes to express an idea or show off an example of something interesting or useful. And I’m pretty sure, based on sessions at the hotel bar at past conferences, that there are plenty of ideas out there. Attracting and organizing…

• Fumblerooski and Raw SQL in Django

  Derek

  15 Feb 2010 | 5:52 am

  Over the weekend I was able to make some upgrades to Fumblerooski (the off-season being a good time for that), and to do so I took advantage of some of the new features in Django’s development version (with the 1.2 release being just around the corner). (Yes, I know I shouldn’t be running beta software in production, but even I have to say that Fumblerooski isn’t “mission-critical” software. Not yet, at least.) Awhile back, Jeff Self suggested that he’d like to see head-to-head records for head coaches – how one person has fared against another. Me…

• Using Geocoders with GeoDjango

  Derek

  24 Jan 2010 | 5:10 pm

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

• 

  Finance Information

• GETTING TO KNOW ABOUT FINANCIAL PORTFOLIO

  admin

  8 Mar 2010 | 10:34 am

  GETTING TO KNOW ABOUT FINANCIAL PORTFOLIO With many types of investment opportunities and assets now available, it is common for institutions and private individual to hold a variety of different types of investments at one time. A finance portfolio is a collection of investments held by an individual or institution. Owning a portfolio of assets is part of an instrument strategy known as diversification. A finance portfolio that is properly diversified will limit the investors exposure to loss as a result of market fluctuations. A finance portfolio can include different investments of the…

• BEST MONEY MANAGEMENT TIPS

  admin

  6 Mar 2010 | 9:39 pm

  BEST MONEY MANAGEMENT TIPS Personal money management is on the minds of many people today. While managing your success is a good idea at any time, the task becomes especially important during rough economic times. If you are not sure how to take proper care of your finances, or want to fine tune your current processes, here are some basic money management tips that will help. The effective management of money begins with the creation of a realistic budget. Far too many people tend to forget this important tool, choosing instead to simply pick a few bills to pay out of each paycheck as they…

• GETTING TO KNOW ABOUT CASH ADVANCES

  admin

  5 Mar 2010 | 12:50 am

  GETTING TO KNOW ABOUT CASH ADVANCES How can you use cash advances to solve imminent financial problems? Before you go down to an office to cash your paycheck or log in online to a site that handles cash advances, consider other ideas for how to finance your bill or promissory note. Can you get money from a friend or relative? Can you countenance over drafting your checking account? Can you borrow cash from savings or even deal with a late fee? Finally, can you go after another loan thats not as risky as a payday loan? If the answer to the above question are all no? Then search for companies…

• THE FUNCTIONS OF A FINANCIAL EXECUTIVE

  admin

  3 Mar 2010 | 1:59 pm

  THE FUNCTIONS OF A FINANCIAL EXECUTIVE A financial executive holds a position of responsibility within an organization. He or she is typically provided with access to department budgets, expense approvals and project budgets. It is important to note that there are two types of financial executive positions: an executive position in the financial industry and a financial industry and a financial management position in a different industry. In the financial industry, a financial executive can be responsible for a range of departments from marketing to sales. The qualifications required to hold…

• THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

  admin

  27 Feb 2010 | 9:09 pm

  THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT There are two types of financial management: business and personal. Both types are centered on the effective management of income, expenses, debt, and investments. The type of education required to learn financial management differs between the two types. Business financial management is learned through post-secondary education accounting, business, or commerce. The courses offered in these programs provide the foundation of knowledge required to manage the finances of a company over the long term. There are also wide ranges of specialized courses…

• 

  VideoJournalism

• Converting from .asf…

  cyndygreen

  10 Mar 2010 | 4:56 am

  fileinfo.com is turning out to be a wonderful resource. A month or so ago I bought a couple of Aiptek isdv2.4 video cameras – very low end little plastic cameras. The price was right (about $70 each) plus I wanted to see how well they would work or not work with the older eMacs and iMovie 6 my students use. They were kept on the back shelf until this past week when the rush of project deadlines hit and I discovered that they shoot to yet another file format I hadn’t run into (not that I’m a file format guru) – .asf or Advanced System Format File, which is described as…

• Looking it up…

  cyndygreen

  7 Mar 2010 | 3:01 pm

  As usual I was looking words up in my Random House Dictionary (unabridged, 1966) when I realized that the book was forty-four years old and might not contain certain everyday words from the current year…such as “google” (the noun or the verb). Took a peak – and yeah – no “internet.” A “computer” was a mechanical machine used for calculating payroll. Forget “USB” or “hard drive.” But the words I want to spell correctly and use with discrimination are in there. Acumen was my target at the time (keen and pentrating…

• Don’t knock problems…

  cyndygreen

  2 Mar 2010 | 6:33 pm

  …or problem solving. I’m exploring the realm of video files and compatibility with older computers, operating systems, and editing programs. And there are some serious issues which must be researched before purchasing anything. But the entire problem solving issue is a wonderful learning tool. Too often folks take it for granted that when they buy something it will work. Hey – they even ask the salesman, will this work – can I edit with it on my computer. I’ve found that most salesfolks will give the simple answer: YES. The trick is knowing the follow-up…

• Incompatible…

  cyndygreen

  2 Mar 2010 | 6:17 pm

  The saga continues… My senior with a new Sony hard drive camcorder reported back (as mentioned in the update below) that he could not import and edit with his new camera on his older computer with Windows Vista. After trying to open and convert with QuickTime Pro (four year old version) we opened up iMovie9 and had success. Seems his camera shoots to Blue Ray ACHVD…DVD files of all things it seems (yeah, more research). Then after school one of my senior’s wandered in with a similar sad story. She had a Panasonic still camera that shot to Quicktime, but could not open the…

• Prepping for Portland…

  cyndygreen

  28 Feb 2010 | 9:38 am

  The two lighting workshops I don’t need to prep much for…and Kathy Newell will carry me through. We pretty much agree on light – it should be natural. But there are times you need to add light and times (we may disagree here) where you want a professional look. That takes care of the basic (use what you’ve got) and advanced (how to use stand light kits) workshops. My research is focused on the compatibilty issues between computers (PC/Mac), editing software, and the file formats that flash and hard drive camcorders shoot to. Generally there are few, if any, problems…

• 

  Virtual Economics

• Mencius on the future of search

  seamusmccauley

  12 Mar 2010 | 9:09 am

  Unqualified Reservations - which, since it describes itself with only moderate flippancy as a neo-fascist hate blog you probably don't read (although if you still believe in democracy you really should) - has some excellent speculation on the future of search this week. It is, by UR's standards, quite short, and it predicts the end of Google in a way that seems perfectly plausible anf far better than the search experience we have now. 

• Presence priority

  seamusmccauley

  11 Mar 2010 | 8:46 am

  Some people think it's rude in lots of social situations to check emails on a Blackberry, text someone who isn't at the table or take a phone call. Over dinner with friends, for example. In the middle of a face to face conversation. Lots of situations.I've never really got that. People think it's rude, yes I get that bit, but I've never really got a sensible answer as to why. If I was having dinner with a friend and a third friend turned up unexpectedly it would be normal to greet them and even invite them to join us. Indeed, it would be weird to blank them. Really weird.

• This too shall pass

  seamusmccauley

  10 Mar 2010 | 9:46 pm

  Astonishingly wonderful Rube-Goldberg machine in the video to Ok Go's "This Too Shall Pass". Seriously, this is worth four minutes of your day. (HT Laurie Pycroft)

• Boots Opticians is running a laughably blatant bait and switch scam

  seamusmccauley

  10 Mar 2010 | 6:51 am

  Times must be getting desperate at Boots Opticians if the bait and switch nonsense I just had to endure is anything to go by. I had an appointment at the Holborn branch at lunchtime and duly got my eyes tested, found they'd got a bit worse as they do with mildly worrying regularity, and was advised to invest in some new glasses with a stronger prescription. So far so fair enough. Every year or so I need, and therefore buy, stronger glasses. I picked some frames and was told that since I was buying a full-priced pair of glasses I could have any second pair for just £50 (a local variation,…

• Advertising to yourself

  seamusmccauley

  8 Mar 2010 | 10:59 pm

  Take Back Your Brain is a website that advises visitors to pull a simple but effective psychological trick on themselves. Create an advertisement for something you positively want to do - take more exercise, drink less coffee, be nice to your mum, whatever it may be - and then print it on a mug or a poster or whatever you're going to see every day to advertise that positive association to yourself. It probably works, in the sense that - like most affirmations techniques - if you can be bothered to go to the effort of writing down the outcome you want to achieve, matching it with a photo,…

• 

  Ackerman Gruber Images - A Visual Duet » Blog

• Ackerman Gruber Images – Our New Home

  14 Feb 2010 | 9:58 am

  Ackerman Gruber Images is the start of something new and exciting for Jenn and I. There’s a level of excitement in starting something new. New expectations and new dreams. In grad school, our friends called us the Grubermans (Gruber+Ackerman=Gruberman). Today, a few years out of grad school, we finally decided to take the plunge and do away with our individual sites and fully commit to going about this as a team. Much like going about it alone we will have our challenges, but are beyond excited to be forging ahead as one. Mobile Friendly and Flash Free :: If you haven’t yet –…

• Photographers – The hardest part is starting something.

  Tim Gruber

  19 Jan 2010 | 3:19 pm

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

• A Few Principles To Help With Your Photography

  Tim Gruber

  8 Dec 2009 | 7:44 pm

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

• Creating My Own Idea Box

  Tim Gruber

  2 Dec 2009 | 9:18 am

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

• Picasso and pricing your work

  Tim Gruber

  16 Nov 2009 | 6:00 am

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

• 

  yelvington.com

• Online separation? Newspapers have been there and done that

  yelvington

  13 Mar 2010 | 8:29 am

  I was reading Alan Mutter's spot-on Andreessen’s not-so-hot idea for publishers and once again ran across some comments of the "newspapers need to set up separate online operations and give them freedom" variety. Here's the problem: It's been done, over and over. It's being done right now. It's happening in ways you don't see, and I promise you won't like the outcome. Let's take the biggest, and least visible, part first. For years, investors have been pulling their money out of newspaper stocks and putting it elsewhere. Much of it has gone into pure-play Internet companies like Google.

• Why blog and comment spam isn't going away

  yelvington

  7 Mar 2010 | 8:11 am

  Every one of us who opens up a website to public conversation faces a daily annoyance: blog and comment spammers. Cleaning up after them becomes a morning ritual. Google, a mix of scammers and legitimate businesses, and global economic inequities all play a role in creating a system that guarantees this problem will not go away any time soon. The result is a mix of overt and covert spam. Overt spam is easy to spot; it's usually just a set of links to e-commerce sites, often peddling fake merchandise. Covert spam is disguised. Here's an example: Several characteristics stand out: It's not from…

• Continuing the participatory revolution

  yelvington

  1 Mar 2010 | 11:44 am

  For years I've been pushing the idea of participatory journalism. If you've been thinking this is just theory, some more data has emerged that ought to get your attention: "According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites." (San Francisco Chronicle) "Facebook was the ­#4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn. ... Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media…

• Review: 'Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery'

  yelvington

  6 Feb 2010 | 9:45 am

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

• Looking for journogeeks

  yelvington

  2 Feb 2010 | 11:01 am

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

• 

  Reporters Committee News

• States push to exempt 911 calls from records laws

  A decade ago, reporters could expect to have access to 911 calls to file accurate stories, gain insight into crimes and monitor emergency response time -- but more and more states are pushing for . . .

• Georgia rushes to pass crime photo exemption to records law

  Hustler magazine's request for photos of a slain hiker has prompted a push by Georgia lawmakers to quickly pass a bill that would block the release of certain crime scene photos without the . . .

• Students' key evidence excluded from defendant's new trial

  An Illinois man who has spent more than 30 years in prison on a murder charge will receive a new trial — but his attorneys won't use some of the strongest evidence that supports his . . .

• Federal agencies to award prizes for open government compliance

  The Office of Management and Budget released a memorandum on Monday that outlines ways federal agencies can use prizes and competitions to increase compliance with its December Open Government . . .

• Reporters Committee names new Freedom of Information director

  Mark R. Caramanica has been named Freedom of Information Director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Executive Director Lucy A. Dalglish announced today. Caramanica is a former . . .

• 

  Journalism.org:

• Topline

  dpage

  4 Dec 2010 | 8:19 am

  read more

• Methodology

  dpage

  4 Dec 2010 | 7:59 am

  read more

• Differences by Media Sector

  dpage

  4 Dec 2010 | 7:55 am

  read more

• Lead Newsmakers

  dpage

  4 Dec 2010 | 7:54 am

  read more

• Immigration and Hispanics

  dpage

  4 Dec 2010 | 7:53 am

  read more

• 

  Lost Remote

• SXSW: Mirror worlds are the next web, may redefine local

  Mark Briggs

  13 Mar 2010 | 11:34 am

  Mok Oh, Founder and CTO of Everyscape, says mirror worlds are the next web and his company is positioning itself to be a part of this coming goldrush. What are mirror worlds, you ask? It’s a direct representation of our actual world replicated in the digital world. He pointed to Google Earth as the best example, but noted how poorly it does on the street level. That’s why so many companies are driving around with cameras attached to cars taking lots of pictures. Everyscape is one of those companies. It is constructing a replication of cities to create an immersive, 3-dimensional…

• SXSW: Work smarter, and more social media strategy

  Mark Briggs

  13 Mar 2010 | 11:04 am

  Jason Fried and Erik Qualman anchored a packed morning at the Day Stage for book readings at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin this morning. Fried, CEO and co-founder of 37 Signals, likes to dish out straight talk on business. So much so, he wrote a book about it, called ReWork. He highlighted some his favorite lessons from the book, including: - Planning is just guessing: So just call it strategic guessing, financial guessing, etc. - Interruption is different than collaboration: Don’t let your workday become work chunks by cluttering the schedule with too many meetings and…

• Notes: All SXSW “Spring Break for…” edition

  Steve Safran

  13 Mar 2010 | 5:09 am

  Noted, while wondering how you’d pronounce “SXSW.” SXSW is “Spring Break for nerds,” writes CNN. Don’t be ridiculous. Nerds wouldn’t go on a road trip. SXSW is “Spring Break for music lovers,” counters The Atlantic. SXSW is Spring Break for conference badge lovers. All you’d ever want to know about the event’s attendee badge, including proper badge etiquette in bed. You heard me. SXSW is Spring Break for Hipsters, declares Gather. No wonder I’m not there. Related posts:Forget SXSW – Come to NXNE! Location-awareness…

• Forget SXSW – Come to NXNE!

  Steve Safran

  12 Mar 2010 | 3:53 pm

  Yeah, all the hipsters are at SXSW. But forget Austin and come to Boston! LR Friend and Social Media Goddess Rachel Happe (@rhappe, whom you should follow) is putting on NXNE, a Tweetup in nearby Cambridge. If you’re in the area and want to hang with the real cool nerds, sign up. From the invite: Come enjoy a drink with the cool kids… you know, the ones hanging out in Boston while the social lemmings flee in droves to #SXSW (OK, so we love them and are jealous but really have things to do!) And no, we don’t eat a lot of BBQ here in New England, so come join us for fried…

• SXSW: Social media marketing for business

  Mark Briggs

  12 Mar 2010 | 1:59 pm

  Chris Winfield (@chriswinfield) kicked off a packed breakout session at the South By Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin by promising to not mention Facebook and Twitter. Easier said than done. The “T word” and the “F word” (no, not that one) were mentioned numerous times but Winfield and fellow presenter Tony Adam (@tonyadam) did offer some good strategies for businesses looking to enhance their marketing efforts through social media. Local media companies should be doing most, if not all of them. The key lessons: - Find out where your customers are: Use…

• 

  National Press Photographers Assoc.

• The Kalish Workshop Is Accepting Applications

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:13 am

  Jason Reed, a globe trotting Reuter’s photographer, describes The Kalish visual editing workshop as “much more than just a workshop for picture editors.” The Kalish will be held June 4-8, 2010 at Ball State University in Muncie, IN, and the application deadline is May 15.

• Photojournalist Louis Psihoyos Wins Oscar For "The Cove"

  Bruce Young

  8 Mar 2010 | 6:29 pm

  Award-winning photojournalist Louis Psihoyos has won an Oscar for his film “The Cove,” the first time a still photojournalist has made the leap to the highest movie award since 2004 when Zana Briski won for “Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids.”

• Photojournalist Louis Psihoyos Wins Oscar For "The Cove"

  Bruce Young

  8 Mar 2010 | 6:28 pm

  Award-winning photojournalist Louis Psihoyos has won an Oscar for his film “The Cove,” the first time a still photojournalist has made the leap to the highest movie award since 2004 when Zana Briski won for “Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids.”

• Photojournalist Louis Psihoyos Wins Oscar For "The Cove"

  Bruce Young

  8 Mar 2010 | 6:28 pm

  Award-winning photojournalist Louis Psihoyos has won an Oscar for his film “The Cove,” the first time a still photojournalist has made the leap to the highest movie award since 2004 when Zana Briski won for “Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids.”

• Photojournalist Louis Psihoyos Wins Oscar For "The Cove"

  Bruce Young

  8 Mar 2010 | 6:28 pm

  Award-winning photojournalist Louis Psihoyos has won an Oscar for his film “The Cove,” the first time a still photojournalist has made the leap to the highest movie award since 2004 when Zana Briski won for “Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids.”

• 

  Common Sense Journalism

• Journalists turn to social media sites for stories

  Doug Fisher

  15 Feb 2010 | 12:03 pm

  A survey by Cision and Don Bates of George Washington University finds journalists, especially those at online sites, turning increasingly to social media sites for story ideas. That includes blogs.MediaPost story.Survey results.

• It's time for the AP to listen

  Doug Fisher

  15 Feb 2010 | 7:24 am

  Daniel Hunt has penned an open letter on the American Copy Editors Society site to AP and its numerous style changes.I don't get quite so lathered up about it (explanation follows), but I will repeat what I have said many times -- AP needs to start listening more formally to editors and desks. I'm hoping the appearance of the stylebook editors at the upcoming Philadelphia conference is a good first step.Anyhow, my reaction to Daniel's open letter (that I also posted there):While I have long agitated for AP to get together a users' panel, I simply can' get so agitated at these things. I think…

• Happy Presidents ... er ... Washington's Birthday

  Doug Fisher

  15 Feb 2010 | 6:34 am

  Intrepid American Copy Editors Society member and San Antonio copy desk stalwart Dan Puckett reminded us on the ACES discussion board that today is really Washington's Birthday, if you want to be correct as to the federal holiday.His explanation from a few years ago.The AP weighs in on it, too:Presidents Day: Not adopted by the federal government as the official name of the Washington's Birthday holiday. However, some federal agencies, states and local governments use the term.So pick your stance: Accurate or ecumenical -- or, depending on where you live, perhaps both.

• Congrats to Deirdre Edgar

  Doug Fisher

  11 Feb 2010 | 9:28 am

  Been meaning to post a congrats to fellow American Copy Editors Society member Deirdre Edgar, with whom I've had the pleasure of working with as a presenter at several ACES conferences.Edgar was named the new readers' representative at the L.A. Times last month. (A Q and A on Andy Bechtel's blog reminded me how slothful I'd been on that.)I did get a kick out of one of her early posts -- how the Times is dropping the use of "today" because who knows when you'll read this in the Internet age. How wire service of them (ha!).Good luck, Deirdre.

• Copy desk consolidation chronicles

  Doug Fisher

  11 Feb 2010 | 9:14 am

  The massive consolidations of copy desks continues.The latest, from L.A. Observed, is that deskers at Scripps' Ventura County Star have been told the desk functions are moving to Corpus Christi, Texas.Earlier we had: Media General rumors confirmed.It's going to continue as long as copy editors allow their jobs to be defined as more mechanical, get-the-paper-out-the-door skills. Those parts can and probably should be consolidated. But that's manufacturing.If you want to talk quality, that's a whole different area - and as I've said before, the only ones going to make that case for copy editors…

• 

  CyberJournalist.net

• Rob Glaser: Superphones are the future of media

  Jon

  11 Mar 2010 | 5:40 pm

  RealNetworks Chairman Rob Glaser thinks that the future of media is in information consumed on “superphones” on the go. In this world he sees five big opportunities: People want digital persistence: They have an expectation that their content will be available everywhere at any point in time. People want universal access to content across all devices. The industry needs to make discovery easy, which means once people have access to digital content, they need to be able to find their stuff and new stuff they will like using semantic data. There will be new ways to empower social…

• Google: “Online news is…a labor time activity”

  Jon

  10 Mar 2010 | 5:30 pm

  Hal Varian, Chief Economist for Google, says, “online news reading is predominately a labor time activity while offline news reading is primarily a leisure time activity. One of the big challenges facing the news industry is increasing involvement with the news during leisure hours, when readers have more time to look at both news content and ads.” “In my view, the best thing that newspapers can do now is experiment, experiment, experiment. There are huge cost savings associated with online news. Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and…

• Shorty Awards given for best Twitterers

  Jon

  3 Mar 2010 | 9:21 pm

  The second annual “Shorty Awards” were announced Wednesday night honoring the best producers of “short real-time content” on Twitter. Winners included Haitian radio host Carel Pedre, who used Twitter to inform the world about the recent earthquake, and Janis Krum, the ferry passenger who uploaded a picture on Twitpic of the US Airways plane that landed in the Hudson River in January 2009: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

• Seth Meyers jokes about social media

  Jon

  3 Mar 2010 | 4:48 pm

  Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers shared some great social media zingers on Tuesday night in NYC at a special private event hosted by social marketing company Buddy Media. Some of the best one-liners included: “Magazines are what people used to advertise in.” (via zetgem) “Social media is how a 12 year old can call my vacation photos gay.” (via @fredwilson) “Only thing good about Google Buzz is it’s the first social network that doesn’t distract people at work.” (via @cyberjournalist) Myspace is “the Internet’s Bronx” and…

• Chart Porn

  Jon

  2 Mar 2010 | 5:46 pm

  Chart Porn is a cool collection of interesting charts, tables, maps, and interactive data toys — with a focus on economics and graphic design – as the site says, “data visualizations you just gotta love.”

• 

  Editors Weblog

• Dealing with disaster: Chile's newspapers in the aftermath of the earthquake

  Maria Conde

  12 Mar 2010 | 9:20 am

  The 8.8 earthquake that ravaged central Chile on February 27 has also wreaked havoc on the newspapers that operate in the region. While some continued to print with borrowed electric generators and improvised newsrooms, some were forced to halt publishing for a number of days. Most of the local newspapers websites' in the most affected areas were down in the aftermath of the quake. But, even though the worst seems to be over for this battered nation's newspapers, damage to the country's largest paper factories could become a big problem for not only Chilean but also other south American…

• Chinese censor orders journalists to take communist exam

  Trafton Kenney

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:39 am

  Journalists in China will have to brush up on their communist history if they hope to continue reporting the news. China's print media censor is planning to introduce a new qualification exam for journalists as the government tries to exert further control over news outlets, the South China Morning Post reported yesterday.Li Dongdong, the deputy director at the General Administration of Press and Publication confirmed on Wednesday that that qualification exam would resemble the test taken by civil servants, and that all aspiring journalists would be required to take it before applying for a…

• Huffington Post Investigative Fund has produced 50 stories since September

  Trafton Kenney

  12 Mar 2010 | 3:00 am

  The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, the journalism nonprofit launched by Ariana Huffington in September 2009, has produced roughly 50 stories since its inception.Nick Penniman, executive director of the fund, estimated that his editorial staff of nine publish between three and five stories a week. Some are "deep-dive" pieces, requiring months of reporting, while others are "quick-strike" articles that are less in-depth.The fund's articles are posted on their website and can be distributed by other news outlets free of charge under a Creative Commons license. Most stories have focused on…

• Reuters adds social media rules to its handbook

  Emma Heald

  12 Mar 2010 | 1:20 am

  The surge in social media has benefited journalists globally by offering them a world of information at their fingertips with powerful social networking tools and news aggregator sites. But this opportunity comes along with some risks as well. To lessen these risks, Reuters has added social media guidelines and principles to its handbook, Dean Wright, global editor for ethics, innovation and news standards at Reuters, announced yesterday in the Reuters Blog.While Reuters embraces social media as a powerful informative tool and encourages its usage among journalists, they must ask permission…

• Al Jazeera English teams up with YouTube for Iraqi elections coverage

  Maria Conde

  11 Mar 2010 | 9:15 am

  Al Jazeera English - the English-language arm of the Qatari news channel - has teamed up with YouTube to cover a wide range of Iraqi voices and their opinion on their country's democracy on the day of Iraq's first nationwide parliamentary election since 2005, according to the Official YouTube blog. The short videos give us an insight into the Iraqi voices that are rarely heard in news coverage coming from that area. One video shows one Iraqi who showed up for voting, but found out his name was not on the list. Another one shows another Iraqi complaining that not all candidates are honest. The…

• 

  Media news, UK and world media comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk

• Observer hit by overseas cut in relaunch month

  Stephen Brook

  12 Mar 2010 | 7:31 am

  Paper's sale dips to 342,467 as every quality Sunday except Sunday Times suffers a double-digit year-on-year declineThe Observer's circulation dipped 3.41% month on month in February, as a reduction in overseas distribution cancelled out gains from the paper's relaunch towards the end of the month.Last month the Observer, which relaunched on 21 February, had an average weekly sale of 342,467 according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures published today.Year on year the paper was down by 20.42% in a month in which the Sunday Times was the only title in the Sunday quality sector…

• Winnie Mandela denies giving interview

  Adam Gabbatt

  12 Mar 2010 | 8:55 am

  Winnie Mandela claims 'he let us down' story in Evening Standard was 'fictitious' but paper stands by storyNelson Mandela's ex-wife has denied criticising the former South African president in a newspaper interview over his decision to accept the Nobel peace prize.The Evening Standard ran an interview with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela on Monday in which she accused Mandela of having "let us down".She went on to condemn his decision to accept the 1993 Nobel peace prize alongside FW de Klerk, the president of South Africa in 1990 who took the decision to release Mandela.The remarks were noted in…

• Print publishers show off iPad ideas

  Mercedes Bunz

  12 Mar 2010 | 9:33 am

  Print publishers are hopeful the iPad will hit the streets next month. There are already several test examples out there. Some blend print and online as BERG's version for the innovative Swedish publishing house Bonnier shows, others ues a more online approach as the video of De Telegraaf shows. Publishers are hoping the iPad will encourage people to read digitally with users willing to pay for content. It is also hoped that the iPad will be used more in people's leisure time so it will attract different advertisers.A question which isn't answered is if publishers are ready to serve another…

• Facebook calls on Mail man to name site

  Charles Arthur

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:29 am

  Source of Daily Mail story refuses to divulge 'well-known social network' where he posed as girl of 14 and received sexual approaches from menFacebook defends safety policyFacebook has called on the ex-detective who posed as a 14-year-old girl online on a "well-known social network" and said he was approached by men making sexual suggestions within minutes to name the site he used.But Mark Williams-Thomas, whose experiences were described by the Daily Mail in a contentious story this week, declined to name the site today. He suggested that it would not be helpful to the site's users – and…

• Media Talk

  Matt Wells, Ben Green, Steve Ackerman, Stephen Brook

  12 Mar 2010 | 12:00 am

  Another week, another Media Talk.Matt Wells is joined by Stephen Brook and Steve Ackerman to discuss brand extensions and digital spin-offs as the BBC plans to offer a sweetener for culling 6 Music by repackaging its DAB radio offering. What is Tim Davie up to?Also in the podcast, we bring you the latest on Alexander Lebedev's purchase of the Independent. As Noel Edmonds might say, deal or no deal?Plus, Charles Allen's got himself a new job – EMI: you have been warned – and we have all the highlights from the inaugural Abu Dhabi Media Summit, where Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch have…

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  Depth Reporting

• New York City taxi fare fraud uncovered by GPS

  Mark

  13 Mar 2010 | 9:23 am

  The city's Taxi and Limousine Commission found that taxi cabs charged passengers $8 million more than they should have: Using G.P.S. technology installed in cabs, the commission discovered more than 1.8 million trips where passengers were charged the higher rate. The total amount of the overcharge was $8,330,155, or an average of $4.45 per trip, the agency said. The agency said that drivers manually switched the meter from the standard rate of 40 cents per fifth of a mile to the 80-cents-per-fifth-of-a-mile rate that cabbies are allowed to charge in Westchester and Nassau Counties, but not in…

• This remark about data has it just about right

  Mark

  12 Mar 2010 | 10:29 pm

  BusinessJournalism.org quotes Anu Narayanswamy of the Sunlight Foundation "summing up her fascination with data": “Most of this is slightly dull. But some of it can be interesting.”

• Scott Berkun on "The cult of busy"

  Mark

  12 Mar 2010 | 10:08 pm

  He says that "to let the mind wander, that perhaps is the true sign of time mastery, for when the mind returns it's often sharper and more efficient": When I was younger I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise why would they be so busy? I had busy bosses, busy parents, and always I just thought they must have really important things to do. It seemed an easy way to see who mattered and who didn’t. The busy must matter more, and the lazy mattered less. This is the cult of busy. That simply by always seeming to have something to do, we all assume you…

• Journalism and quackery, two great flavors that go together

  Mark

  28 Feb 2010 | 8:47 pm

  David Colquhoun sighs because yet another journalist wants to put quackery -- in this case, homeopathy -- on an equal footing with science-based medicine. "Homeopathy seeks to stimulate the body's ability to heal itself by giving very small doses of highly diluted substances," says the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (itself a nod to quackery). Colquhoun is bored with the subject in Great Britain, where there's a debate over whether the National Health Service should fund homeopathy. He writes: Around 1800, when homeopathy started, conventional medicine…

• "Stamen Design doesn't do user research"

  Mark

  28 Feb 2010 | 8:14 pm

  So says Michal Migurski, the technology head of Stamen Design, which does some of the best interactive data work on the Web: User research, to me, is an attempt to mitigate and control astonishment by determining what an audience believes or expects, and where possible delivering on that belief and expectation. User research promises stability and predictable outcomes, and I think that we're at a curve in the road where the idea of stability is just not all that interesting. I'm not arguing for chaos, but a kind of targeted novelty that probes out the edges of our expectations and helps us…

• 

  mymediamusings

• Will Bubbly Be the Next Twitter? Not in Tech-Lame North America

  admin

  12 Mar 2010 | 12:36 pm

  In rolling out Bubbly, Mr. Clayton plans to skip North America and Europe and focus on fast-growing, mobile-savvy markets such as India, Japan and Brazil. via businessinsider.com A sort of spoken version of Twitter is taking India by storm but what’s more interesting is that the Silicon Valley based makers have no interest in sharing it with North America or Europe because, well, we can’t handle it. We like to think of the US as being on the cutting edge of technology but all you have to do is spend ten minutes in South Korea to realize just how far behind the times we have…

• Printing Entire Buildings – Amazingly Organic Results

  admin

  12 Mar 2010 | 11:46 am

  via blueprintmagazine.co.uk Although still in very early stages, this complete stunning 3D printer hopes to eventually be able to print, on-site, entire structures. Via the excellent Make.com, check out the whole article at Blueprint. Posted via web from My Media Musings

• Reggie Watts – Remember the Name, Enjoy the Video

  admin

  12 Mar 2010 | 11:37 am

  via thecomicscomic.typepad.com If you are at all a part of the NYC comedy scene, you know Reggie Watts. He is that guy everyone has tapped as “the next big thing” for years. Now he is going to be opening for Conan O’Brien on his live tour and it might finally be time for that meteoric leap – similar to what happened with Zack Galifianakis – after which everyone will mistakenly call him an overnight sensation instead of a guy that has been working hard at his craft for over a decade. Anyhow, Reggie Watts is awesome and you should tell your friends about him…

• As Record Sales Die New Ways to Monetize Live Music Emerge

  admin

  12 Mar 2010 | 11:33 am

  Tonight and tomorrow, March 12th and 13th, The Drive By Truckers will be live streaming two nights from Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse, courtesy of iClips.net. The concerts are being streamed to drive interest in their new album, “The Big To-Do,” which will be released on Tuesday, March 16th. Prices for the live broadcast are $6.99 per show or $9.99 for both. For those that purchase the live broadcast can also purchase their new album, The Big To-Do for $7.00 as a digital download at a later date from the Drive-By Truckers website. All pre-orders will receive an immediate Premium DRM-free…

• What Fox Should Learn From Being Most Pirated on YouTube

  admin

  11 Mar 2010 | 12:53 pm

  via businessinsider.com As the chart above show, Fox is by far the most pirated network on YouTube. Sadly, Fox will see this and say, “hey, who do we need to sue to get this to stop?!” Instead, they should say, “hey, how can we give these eager viewers what they want when they want it, since they clearly want it a lot?!” Sigh. Rupert Murdoch was a genius of the industrial age but listening to him try to wrap his lizard brain around the seismic shifts of the digital age just makes me sad. Posted via web from My Media Musings

• 

  OUPblog » Media

• China Marine: A Son’s Perspective

  Rebecca

  11 Mar 2010 | 10:07 am

  John Sledge is an architectural historian with the Mobile Historic Development Commission and Books editor for the Mobile Press-Register. He is the author of three books on Mobile history and architecture.  His father, E.B. Sledge, was a World War II veteran and the author of two memoirs, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, and China Marine: An Infantryman’s Live After World War II.  On Sunday, HBO will premiere a ten-part miniseries based on the lives of three U.S. Marines who fought in the Pacific rim in World War II called The Pacific. Part of the series is based on…

• Off With Their Heads!

  Rebecca

  10 Mar 2010 | 8:28 am

  John Ehrenberg and J. Patrice McSherry are Professors of Political Science at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus.  Jose Ramon Sanchez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University. Caroleen Marji Sayej is Assistant Professor of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College. Together they wrote The Iraq Papers, which offers a compelling documentary narrative and interpretation of this momentous conflict. In the post below we see how Alice in Wonderland mirrors our own political world.  Read other posts by these authors here. That is what the…

• An American Aristocracy

  Rebecca

  9 Mar 2010 | 8:56 am

  Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at American aristocracy. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here. Decades ago, Louis Hartz wrote an opus on American exceptionalism – the idea that America is special because we were never marred by…

• And the Oscar goes to “Up,” of course.

  LaurenA

  9 Mar 2010 | 5:37 am

  Lauren, Publicity Assistant Kathryn Kalinak is Professor of English and Film Studies at Rhode Island College. Below, she reflects on Sunday’s Oscar (Original Score) presentation, and her own predictions from Friday, presented both here on OUPBlog, and on WNYC’s Soundcheck. And congratulations to Joseph Brown! In last week’s contest, he correctly predicted both Oscar Music category winners. Joseph will be receiving a copy of Kathryn’s most recent book, Film Music: A Very Short Introduction. If there was a surprise in the Original Score Oscar race Sunday, it was only the break…

• How To Fight Obesity

  Rebecca

  8 Mar 2010 | 5:15 am

  Health Behavior Change and Treatment Adherence: Evidence-based Guidelines for Improving Healthcare, by Leslie Martin, Kelly Haskard-Zolnierek and M. Robin DiMatteo, synthesizes the results from more than 50 years of empirical research, resulting in simple, powerful, and practical guidance for health professionals who want to know the most effective strategies for helping their clients to put long-term health-relevant behavior changes into practice.  In the original post below, Leslie Martin Professor of Psychology, LaSierra University., looks at Michelle Obama’s fight against obesity.

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  Principled Profit

• Obama is Timid, But Not Progressive

  Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:16 am

  Yesterday, conservative commentator George Will called Barack Obama a “timid progressive.” Will is an interesting writer. He’s far more thoughtful and articulate than the bloviators who dominate the talk channels, and he will criticize both the Right and the Left as he sees fit. I’ve often said that one of my secret fantasies is to be “a George Will of the Left.” And I’d agree with him about Obama’s timidity. Obama talks a big, bold line, but when it comes to action, his moves are for the most part tiny little reforms, and even those don’t…

• Come Meet Me at the Go Green Expo in New York

  Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

  10 Mar 2010 | 6:15 pm

  I’m speaking in NYC Friday 3/19 at GoGreenExpo’s Business Day. Business buyers get in free on Friday. If you’d like to attend Saturday and/or Sunday, here’s a discount code (gets you into the Architecture Fair also): visit http://www.gogreenexpo.com and use promo code NYSPEAKER when registering for tickets. My brief speech on Green Marketing is at 12:30, followed immediately by a book signing of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson). Please say hi if you’re attending.

• Great Ad…Missed Opportunity to Increase Effectiveness

  Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

  28 Feb 2010 | 4:10 am

  In the Great Advertising Debate, branding vs. direct response, I’ve always come down on the side of direct response. Every marketing message (not just ads) should have a call to action, a way of moving the reader/viewer/listener forward. With the Internet making it very easy to remove material from its original context and share it, I see a lost opportunity in this spoof ad by an environmental group attacking Royal Bank of Canada for its funding of highly polluting and environmentally destructive oil extraction from Canadian tar sands. Here is this stunning video, as flawlessly produced…

• People’s Victory: VT Senate Says NO to VT Yankee

  Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

  25 Feb 2010 | 7:35 am

  Some good news on page one of my morning paper: In Vermont, the only state that gives the legislature a voice in nuclear plant licensing, the state Senate has rebuffed an attempt by Vermont Yankee to relicense the aging and long-troubled N-plant for another 20 years, after its license expires in 2012. The vote was 26 to 4—not exactly close, and to me, living less than 40 miles from the plant, that big margin provides substantial comfort. The plant’s owner, Entergy, would have to work pretty hard to get a majority. All the way back to the 1970s when it was new, Vermont Yankee was named…

• Even More Questions About the Google Book Settlement

  Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert

  21 Feb 2010 | 8:29 am

  I don’t think I’ve blogged about it before, but I’ve had serious concerns for years about Google’s placement of access to content far above creators’ rights and copyright, have followed the Authors Guild/National Writers Union court case and settlement, and ended up after some internal debate choosing to remove my own works from the settlement terms. I see the potential for abuse all over this, but a new article opened my eyes up to even more ways it’s troublesome. Rather than repeat them here, I’ll give you the link:…

• 

  Global Features

• European Day of Action to Ban Nuclear Weapons

  2 Mar 2010 | 7:40 pm

• Activists getting ready for Vancouver 2010 Olympic games

  10 Feb 2010 | 5:38 am

• Coverage of Haiti Solidarity Efforts

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:14 pm

• Escalating violence against anti-mining capmpaigners

  17 Jan 2010 | 6:46 pm

• Radio Ñomndaa celebrates its Fifth Anniversary: the Word of the Water flows in music, solidarity ties and new proposals

  31 Dec 2009 | 11:22 pm

• 

  Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

• Tribune company attempts to ban "newsspeak"

  Stephen Brook

  11 Mar 2010 | 8:15 am

  Randy Michaels, chief executive of US media company Tribune, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, has banned 119 words and phrases from the troubled media company's talk radio station WGN-AM.He is attracting flak from bloggers in the US, including Robert Feder, but it seems an admirable exercise to me, even if he seems to have gone overboard in the execution.Feder slams the exercise as being "petty and insulting micromanaging of subordinates" but quotes WGN news director Charlie Meyerson, who supports the list:"The real goal here is to avoid using words that make you sound…

• China orders journalists to retrain in communist theory

  Stephen Brook

  11 Mar 2010 | 3:49 am

  China wants to crack down on press freedom and introduce a new training system that requires journalists to train in Marxist and communist theories of news.Li Dongdong, deputy director of the General Administration of Press andPublication, told the South China Morning Post that some mainland reporters were giving Chinese journalism a bad name because they were not properly trained. Under communist theories of journalism, media should support the leadership rather than operate as a watchdog.The initiative seems to be aimed at mainland journalists only.Chinese officials already routinely censor…

• Kate Middleton wins apology and damages from Rex Features

  Stephen Brook

  11 Mar 2010 | 2:39 am

  Photographic agency pays out for invading Kate Middleton's privacy by syndicating pictures taken at ChristmasPhotographic agency Rex Features has publicly apologised and agreed to pay damages to Kate Middleton, the girlfriend of Prince William, for invading her privacy. Middleton complained through her solicitors Harbottle & Lewis after a photographer who did not work for Rex took pictures of Middleton on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day last year during a private holiday in Cornwall.No British publication published the pictures, but Rex syndicated the pictures overseas where some were…

• Further cuts loom at Johnston Press

  Stephen Brook

  11 Mar 2010 | 12:43 am

  Publisher of the Scotsman and Yorkshire Evening Post says more job losses are likely as it reports profits fell 56% in 2009More job losses are likely at regional publisher Johnston Press, which today reported a 56% fall in pre-tax profits last year to £43m.The publisher of the Scotsman and Yorkshire Evening Post said like-for-like ad revenues fell by 26.5%, while total group revenues plunged by almost 20% to £428m. But an improving trend in the market meant in the first nine weeks of the year like-for-like ad revenue declined 7.3%.The company, which was reporting year-end results for the 53…

• Who designs for the designers?

  Peter Robins

  10 Mar 2010 | 8:05 am

  Design Week magazine has had a redesign, led by its art director, Sam Freeman. Delicate operation, that. As the magCulture blog notes, if you're a design mag, "your audience always think they know better". There are good galleries of pages at both of my links – but as one of the changes is a new, coated paper stock, looking at it on a website can only tell you so much.Trade magazinesMagazinesNewspapers & magazinesPeter Robinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

• 

  blog maverick

• If Free Works on the Internet, Can It Work for Health Insurance ?

  markcuban

  27 Feb 2010 | 2:20 pm

  As best I can tell, Health Insurance for the average family costs about 13k per year. For individuals, its about $6k per year. For some, employers pay a big chuck of that. For others, the deductibles and other charges are super high so that the monthly premium is lower.  For many,  its a health arbitrage. You pray you don’t get sick while you can’t afford the insurance. What we have is a product, health insurance, that everyone seems to need. And if you pay attention to the political world, its a product that our government wants everyone to have.  Which got me thinking. $500…

• Senator Al Franken is Requesting User Caps on Internet Bandwidth ?

  markcuban

  24 Feb 2010 | 11:29 am

  According to the LA Times, “In written questions to Comcast and NBC Universal regarding their $30-billion proposed marriage, Sen. Franken — who has been one of the harshest critics of the deal — wants Comcast and NBC Universal to promise that it will put all its television shows online. He also wants assurances that shows that the companies put online be made available to every one and not just people who get their Internet service through Comcast.” Also in the Times article: “As Franken notes in his questions to the two companies, “The Internet is the…

• How to Get Rich Part 1a

  markcuban

  23 Feb 2010 | 8:48 am

  I wrote a post a while back about How to Get Rich.  The no shortcuts version. It is posted below. I wanted to repost it because its been so popular in the archives. Plus, with the advent of some new banking laws, I wanted to update it with a quick note. On July 1, laws for banks change so that they can not charge you overdraft fees UNLESS YOU OPT – IN. In other words, if you want your bank to give you cash at an ATM, or cover a debit charge on your debit card when there isn’t enough money in your account to cover it, you have to give the bank permission to do so. When you give…

• The NFL, FCC, CBA, Start Up Leagues, Sub-Prime Mortgages and You

  markcuban

  21 Feb 2010 | 3:39 pm

  Is it possible that the future economics of the NFL could be influenced by the FCC ? Absolutely.  Does the NFL and all professional sports leagues have something in common with the Sub Prime mortgage mess and the collapse of home prices. Absolutely.   Could both of these, along with the recession impact whether or not you will be able to watch your favorite professional sport in 2011 ? Absolutely. Sports fans probably are not paying attention to what is happening with broadcast television.  The over the air broadcast networks, all of which are the biggest customers of the NFL (CBS, NBC,…

• Seth Godin Should Read His Own Book

  markcuban

  10 Feb 2010 | 3:56 pm

  I was really surprised to see an entry in my icerocket.com feed from Seth Godin saying that “ Mark Cuban Is Completely Wrong About Aggregators I was particularly surprised because I am in the middle of reading his new book LinchPin which actually makes my point about why its a poor business move for newspapers and many others to be indexed by Google. I love Seth, but in this article he is simultaneously wrong and hypocritical.  In the article, he makes my point very well when he says ” The person who chooses that information has power.” What does he think newspapers do ?

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  JOURNALISM.CO.UK

• Independent apologises for ’seriously defamatory’ headline

  Judith Townend

  12 Mar 2010 | 9:51 am

  Independent News & Media has apologised for a “seriously defamatory” headline on a comment piece by blogger and writer Zoe Margolis published in the Independent on Sunday [see background here]. In a correction published on its site today, the newspaper said: On 7 March 2010, we published an article by Zoe Margolis. In part of the first edition of the newspaper and online, this article carried the headline, “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt”. This was written by the newspaper not Ms Margolis. We accept that Ms Margolis is not and never has been “a…

• AFP: Online pay model will be ‘critical second revenue stream’ says Sulzberger

  Joel Gunter

  12 Mar 2010 | 8:10 am

  New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger says that charging for the paper’s online content will provide a “critical second revenue stream”. Speaking at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 2010 Media Summit, Sulzberger also reassured readers that the print edition of the paper will continue for many years to come: It’s a critical part of today, it will be a critical part I think for many years to come (…) The iPad is also going to be a critical part just the way the Kindle’s a critical part. At the end of the day we can’t define ourselves by our method of…

• Poynter: MSNBC narrative slideshow garners 78m page views

  Joel Gunter

  12 Mar 2010 | 8:08 am

  After researching the strange story of a very wealthy, elderly American heiress,  veteran MSNBC investigative reporter Bill Dedman decided to experiment with the presentation of his article. Rather than turn in a few thousand words of copy as usual, Dedman put together almost 50 photographs in a slideshow and accompanied them with captions. The result, The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery, is not groundbreaking in its approach to storytelling, but the response to the story is a powerful testament to the power of visual reportage. Dedman reported that he received 500…

• Beta design for new BBC homepage offers more personalisation

  Laura Oliver

  12 Mar 2010 | 8:05 am

  New navigation, a ‘media zone’ showcasing the best in BBC content online, and a ‘topic tracker’ for following your favourite subjects are being trialled as part of a new beta design for the homepage of bbc.co.uk. There’s a full breakdown at this link of what has and hasn’t changed – the movable widgets for different sections, such as sport and weather, brought in for the last redesign are still a feature – many of the changes will be fairly subtle. Current look Beta design Similar Posts: News of the World launches website redesign in beta FT…

• Video: Why the Guardian is pushing for more open data

  Laura Oliver

  12 Mar 2010 | 7:36 am

  Stephen Dunn, who heads up the Guardian’s technology strategy, talks to Beet.tv in the video below about how opening up and making better use of data can provide journalistic and business opportunities for publishers: Similar Posts: Online video: FT’s Stephen Pinches on opportunities for publishers with connected TV Charles Arthur: New to journalism? Learn to code Beet.tv: Conde Nast streams 5 million video views a month AP pushing 250 stories a week through its newly launched YouTube channel Wired.co.uk: A future without journalists?

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  One Man & His Blog

• OK Gone

  Adam Tinworth

  11 Mar 2010 | 8:43 am

  Love this: OK Go ditches record label because they won't allow embedding of music videos.If you publisher won't promote you properly, why should you stay?

• So, About That Journalistic Fact-Checking Thing...

  Adam Tinworth

  11 Mar 2010 | 5:22 am

  So, the thing that seperates journalists from the blogger pack is reliability, accuracy, research and fact-checking, right?So, how come this happens?"Girl with a One Track Mind" blogger and author Zoe Margolis has said she is taking legal action against the Independent on Sunday after she was referred to as a "hooker" in a headline.Note to subs: Girl with the One Track Mind and Belle de Jour are different blogs...Still, that sort of mistake is a one off, right? Wrong Despite us patiently explaining who we were and why we were there ITN's "journalist" and idiot Phil Reay-Smith went on to…

• Afternoon Coffee Reading - 9th March 2010

  Adam Tinworth

  9 Mar 2010 | 5:52 am

  Let's start with something that's as much a public information message for the blogosphere as a link:Why Blog and Comment Spam isn't Going AwayOnwards to linkorama:News has become a social experience - The news business is still collective underestimating how important social news sharing is to its trafficBut then, too much of the news media hasn't got the hang of linking, eitherAnd this is because they still don't comprehend the basics of bloggingAnd talking of not "getting" linking - the Royal Mail has an, um, interesting policy on in-bound linksArs Technica starts the fight back against…

• The Future of Newspapers - In Video!

  Adam Tinworth

  9 Mar 2010 | 5:04 am

  Print journalists of a sensitive disposition might want to look away now...How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

• OR318

  Adam Tinworth

  8 Mar 2010 | 3:23 am

  Read more about the campaign and the man.

• 

  Beat the Press

• Wrong Surprise on Retail Sales

  13 Mar 2010 | 9:16 am

  The media reported on a 0.3 percent rise in retail sales in February, which was described as a surprisingly strong result compared with the consensus expectation of a 0.2 percent decline. However, the news was not as good as this may appear, since January's sales data was revised down by 0.4 percent. In other words, the sales volume reported for February was almost exactly in line with the consensus estimate, even though the January number is less than had previously been believed. (There does appear to be some upward movement in non-auto sales.) --Dean Baker

• The Dollar, the Deficit, and Accounting Identities

  12 Mar 2010 | 3:39 am

  It would be great if people who reported on the budget deficit for major news outlets could be required to know the basic accounting identities that get taught in every introductory economics class. The key one that almost none of them seem to know is that the trade deficit (X-M) is equal to the sum of public and private savings (T-G)+(S-I). This identity means that if the United States is running a trade deficit, then the sum of public and private savings must also be negative. That has to be true -- it is an identity. It's just like 2 + 2 = 4. It is always true. This matters for all the…

• Post Pulls Out the Stops In Pushing Its Trade Agenda

  12 Mar 2010 | 1:45 am

  The Washington Post is a huge supporter of trade agreements like NAFTA that put non-college educated workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while largely protecting the most highly educated workers like doctors and lawyers. They push this selective protectionism by calling it "free trade." They also call anyone who disagrees with their agenda of selective protectionist, which is designed to redistribute income upward, a protectionist. The paper really outdid itself today with a front page editorial that used the term "free trade" in the headline and 7…

• The Washington Post Is STILL Missing the Housing Bubble

  12 Mar 2010 | 1:31 am

  The Post had a front page article with a headline warning readers that a "new round of foreclosures threatens housing market." Yes, well actually a huge oversupply of housing created by the bubble-driven construction boom is virtually certain to push prices back down to their trend level. This one really is not hard. Nationwide, inflation-adjusted house prices rose by more than 70 percent during the bubble. Over the hundred years from 1896 to 1996 they had just kept pace with the rate of inflation. Prices must fall by another 15 percent or so to get back to their long-term trend. Given this…

• NYT Joins Efforts to Scare Public About the Size of Government Debt

  12 Mar 2010 | 12:24 am

  Peter Peterson, the billionaire Wall Street investment banker, is devoting more than $1 billion to a campaign to whip up fears about budget deficits in order to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare. It almost looks as though the NYT has joined the effort. It printed an article today that uses a measure of government debt that is explicitly designed to be misleading. The article reports on the debt of Greece, but then adds in a discussion of the debts of other countries, including the United States. The calculations are misleading because they compare future obligations over many decades…

• 

  College Media Matters

• Student Editor: Campus Paper Newsroom “Like an Antarctic Research Base”

  Dan

  13 Mar 2010 | 3:44 am

  The outgoing operations manager of The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia has penned an excellent goodbye editorial worth a glimpse, if nothing else, for its opening comparison.  In a piece headlined simply “Tundra-tested,” Wm. Hunter Tammaro writes: – The Cavalier Daily office is a lot like an Antarctic research base.  No, really. Although a student newspaper and the least-inhabited place on Earth might seem like polar opposites- no pun intended- they actually do share a great many traits. Each is a remote location where few dare to tread. Each has a dedicated…

• Kansas Student Body President: Cut Daily Kansan’s Funding

  Dan

  11 Mar 2010 | 2:59 am

  Mason Heilman, the student body president at the University of Kansas, is publicly calling for a cut to the campus media portion of the school’s student fees, a move that would shed $83,000 from the budget of the The Daily Kansan As the Kansan itself reports with admirable objectivity and restraint, his proposal is not motivated by economics, but ideology. – As Heilman declares about students’ partial support of the Kansan: “To me, this is one of the most inappropriate relationships Student Senate has with any other outside group. . . . The parallel to me would be if…

• Eternal Ethical Question: A Student (Journalist’s) Identity

  Dan

  9 Mar 2010 | 12:43 am

  One of the oldest student journalism ethical tightropes unfurled with a bit of a new media twist recently at Cornell University. As Cornell Daily Sun public editor Rob Tricchinelli explained in hsi excellent write-up on the situation: – Mike Wacker ‘10 is a Sun columnist whose ‘Wack Attack’ column appears alternate Wednesdays. Wacker recently arranged to speak with Andrew Brokman ‘11, an at-large representative in the Student Assembly, to discuss something that came up during an S.A. meeting. During their conversation, Wacker started taking notes; Brokman then…

• Daily Californian Staffer Arrested at Protest, But Gets Story

  Dan

  7 Mar 2010 | 3:28 pm

  Student journalist Cameron Burns was recently manhandled by police, handcuffed, tossed to the ground, and bussed off to jail. But he got the story. Late last week, the eighteen-year-old multimedia producer for The Daily Californian at the University of California, Berkeley, joined a large group of anarchists marching roughly eight miles from Berkeley to Oakland to protest public education funding cuts. His mission: capture video and eyewitness observations for a Daily Cal report. – At one point, without warning, a splinter faction of protesters veered onto an interstate highway,…

• University Football Coach: Newspaper Theft by Players a “Team Building Exercise”

  Dan

  6 Mar 2010 | 3:23 am

  Guy Morriss, the football coach at Texas A&M University-Commerce, is expressing pride at his players’ recent involvement in the theft of almost 2,000 copies of The East Texan, the school’s student newspaper. According to the coach, “I’m proud of my players for doing that.  This was the best team building exercise we have ever done.” – The late February issue of the paper that allegedly riled the gridiron squad contained a front page story headlined, “Football Player Arrested in Drug Bust.” According to the East Texan, most of the team was involved in the roughly…

• 

  You Don't Say

• It just don't add up

  John McIntyre

  12 Mar 2010 | 6:06 am

  Before you go all peevy on me about the headline, you should be reminded that it is a direct quotation from a Warner Bros. cartoon of my youth. I will offer a public salute to the first reader who accurately identifies the source.* What is does indicate is that we live in a world in which many things simply make no sense. Item: Mattel is producing a series of Barbie-style dolls based on characters from Mad Men. But the dolls will not have drinks and cigarettes as accessories. What next, a Glenn Beck doll that doesn’t cry? Item: A lawsuit has been filed claiming that the E-Trade commercial…

• The world turned upside down

  John McIntyre

  11 Mar 2010 | 7:50 am

  Two propositions worth considering:Item: Glenn Beck is a satirist employed by the sinister left-wing media to subvert conservatism by making it look ridiculous. Evidence: Jon Stewart’s Daily Show simply runs excerpts of the Beck interview with Eric Massa. Commentary is hardly necessary. Item: The Onion is not a satirical publication, but a factual one.Evidence: Yesterday’s article, “Nation Shudders at Large Block on Uninterrupted text”: WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans…

• It's good to be the king

  John McIntyre

  10 Mar 2010 | 7:47 am

  Memories have not yet faded of the pleasure derived from being the benevolent despot of The Baltimore Sun’s copy desk, so I took a natural interest in learning that Randy Michaels, the CEO of the Tribune Company, has issued a ukase forbidding the use of 119 words or phrases on WGN-AM.Some of his preferences merit hearty endorsement. I was rolling my eyes at giving 110 percent from the mouths of blowhard coaches at mandatory school assemblies forty years ago. Anyone on television or radio who refers to snow as white stuff should be sent to a re-education camp in Thunder Bay, Ontario, for the…

• Those who can't, teach

  John McIntyre

  9 Mar 2010 | 5:09 am

  Geoffrey K. Pullum, the celebrated linguist, laid down a full barrage yesterday, directed at a Web site called The Apple, which proclaims itself to be “Where Teachers Meet and Learn.” The object of Professor Pullum’s artillery was a post, “11 Grammar Mistakes to Avoid.” As he brought each gun to bear, the target disintegrated in a cloud of smoke and smithereens. Some of the eleven “mistakes” were not even about grammar but about subjective stylistic preferences, and the ones that were about grammar and usage were manifestly defective. You owe it to yourself to click on the link…

• Curse you, Microsoft Word

  John McIntyre

  8 Mar 2010 | 6:52 am

  A couple of readers have complained that the ¾ symbol is showing up in these blog posts, and one suggests that they are occurring where I use the em dash. That surmise is correct. The em dash is the one on Microsoft Word’s insert symbol menu -- Word 2007, not the earlier version I had been using -- and apparently the Blogger software does not recognize it. (I realize just now that Microsoft Word has used its symbol for the 3/4 fraction, and God knows how that will appear to you.) So now I am reduced to typing in two hyphens if I want a dash, as if I were still working on a damn typewriter.

• 

  Old Media, New Tricks

• New Tricks: Using social media to listen

  Robert Quigley

  18 Feb 2010 | 7:01 am

  For those of us in the publishing industry, it’s kind of a “no kidding” statement to say that the vast majority of what we do is gather content and then push it out there through print and online means. However, there’s another side to being a journalist: listening. We listen to what members of the community are saying. We listen to city officials. And we listen to the competition. One of he little-known benefits of social media is that the tools can be used to listen. You can use social media effectively even if you’re pretty sure you’ll never tweet a…

• New Tricks: Set up a Google Buzz profile for your news organization

  Robert Quigley

  11 Feb 2010 | 1:54 pm

  The buzz on the Internet this past week has been the unveiling of Google Buzz, the search giant’s serious bid to become a player in social media. Whether it can pry people away from Twitter and/or Facebook, which it will have to do to be successful, remains to be seen. Either way, if Buzz turns into a powerhouse — or not — now is the time to establish your presence. Not sure what Buzz is? It’s a hybrid between Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. Check out this demo video from Google: Here’s what you should do: If you don’t have a Gmail account, get one. It’s…

• New Tricks: 3 Ways News Organizations Can Leverage Location-Based Social Networks

  Daniel B. Honigman

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:08 am

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

• New tricks: Journalists and SEO – searching for the right balance

  Robert Quigley

  2 Feb 2010 | 11:52 am

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

• New tricks: Know your audience - whether you’re on Twitter or in print

  Robert Quigley

  28 Jan 2010 | 11:38 am

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

• 

  Reportr.net

• Swedish prototype reimagines print on Apple iPad

  Alfred Hermida

  13 Mar 2010 | 6:41 am

  One of the most innovative ideas on how to reimagine print for Apple’s iPad comes from Sweden. The Swedish publisher Bonnier worked with design firm BERG to rethink how traditional magazine content could work on the iPad. The result, Mag+,  is an innovative prototype, that goes beyond just reproducing text on a screen with some video next to it. Explaining the ideas behind the prototype, Bonnier R&D said: The concept uses the power of digital media to create a rich and meaningful experience, while maintaining the relaxed and curated features of printed magazines. It has been…

• links for 2010-03-12

  Alfred Hermida

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:42 pm

  3 Tools to Analyze the Sentiment of Your Brand Social Mentions | Search Engine Journal New ways to get a sense of the public conversation on Twitter. (tags: Twitter, journalism, media, social media) Teaching Online Journalism » 21 examples of Flash journalism A great roundup of the many uses of interactives to bring stories to life. (tags: Flash, journalism, media, online, internet)

• Twitter as ambient journalism paper available online

  Alfred Hermida

  12 Mar 2010 | 6:55 am

  Image via CrunchBase My paper analysing Twitter as a system of ambient journalism has just been published online by Journalism Practice. In it, I approach that services like Twitter that allow for the instant dissemination of fragments of news and information as awareness systems. I suggest that these broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on systems are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them, giving rise to awareness systems that I describe as ambient journalism. Here’s an excerpt from the conclusion: The emergence of ambient journalism through…

• Word cloud of BBC review highlights licence fee worries

  Alfred Hermida

  5 Mar 2010 | 11:54 am

  Using IBM’s ManyEyes, I did a word tag visualisation of the BBC Strategy Review (PDF), to reveal the most commonly used pair of words. The most common by far was “licence fee” mentioned 116 times. Next was “public space” with 60 mentions and “public service” at 47. As for the two digital stations facing closure, 6 Music was mentioned 21 times and Asian Network 13. Click on the image for an interactive version of the graphic on the ManyEyes’ site.

• BBC insists it still believes in digital

  Alfred Hermida

  4 Mar 2010 | 10:02 am

  Image via Wikipedia The BBC has sought to address the discussion over whether it is still committed to digital. In a direct response to the column by Forrester’s Nick Thomas on whether the BBC still believes in digital, Kerstin Mogull, says the simple answer is “yes.” On the BBC Internet blog, Mogull, Chief Operating Officer for BBC Future Media & Technology, says: The proposals (PDF) announced this week are about providing clear focus in key priority areas to provide greater long term value to audiences and a more open approach to a wider online market. Doing fewer…

• 

  News After Newspapers

• Google’s Hal Varian to newspapers at FTC confab: “Experiment, experiment, experiment!"

  9 Mar 2010 | 10:10 am

  Google’s economist-in-chief, Hal Varian, was the keynote speaker this morning at the Federal Trade Commission’s second round of hearings on the future of journalism. (The study is entitled “How will journalism survive the internet age?” Round 1 was held in December; transcripts and other material are linked here — scroll down. Not to be outdone, the Federal Communications Commission also has a project studying pretty much the same thing. Here’s the slide deck from Varian’s presentation, entitled “Newspaper Economics, Online and Offline”: Click through to slide deck and full…

• iPad strategies for publishers

  7 Mar 2010 | 6:01 pm

  This is a white paper based on and expanded from my earlier post on the same topic, prepared for the Digital Publishing Alliance meeting at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri on March 7-9, 2010 iPad is not a linear, incremental development. It’s not a simple next step after everything that has preceded it (even iPhone); it’s a new direction that will have unpredictable impacts on digital behavior. One potential impact: iPad will bring a huge increase in mobile shopping (assuming we consider iPad to be a “mobile” device). There was only…

• Earnings season, Part 2: Intel from the quarterly filings of Scripps, Belo, WaPo, and Journal Communications

  2 Mar 2010 | 12:48 pm

  As a followup to my report on fourth-quarter 2009 earnings reports from most of the major public newspaper firms, we now have earnings releases from E. W. Scripps, A. H. Belo, the Washington Post Co. and Journal Communications (leaving only Gatehouse Media without a report). The releases from this group followed the script set by the earlier reports: Newspaper ad revenue and total revenue were down (as noted, for the 14th quarter in a row), online revenue was a mixed bag, and quarterly profits were up due to repeated rounds of aggressive cost-cutting during the year. Here are the particulars…

• The iPad business model for news: Strategies publishers must embrace

  18 Feb 2010 | 7:09 am

  There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in the journosphere about what newspapers ought to be doing vis-a-vis the iPad. If publishers adopt their usual defensive stance and take a slow approach, they’ll miss the iPad boat. Or the iPad rocketship, as the case may be. Kenneth Li of the Financial Times reports that “Newspaper and magazine publishers are stumbling over key issues such as sharing subscription revenues as they consider deals to offer digital versions of their products on Apple’s upcoming iPad digital media device.” Apple’s 30 percent take of any subscription revenue is a…

• Earnings season: Newspapers finish 14th straight revenue-losing quarter; some intel from Wall Street filings

  12 Feb 2010 | 2:47 pm

  When revenue is still seriously down, but profits are up, is that good news? The U.S newspaper companies that have reported fourth quarter 2009 results so far would have you believe it is. But based on their reports, it’s clear the industry as a whole is still in deep trouble, with no strong indication that better days are ahead. Five of the ten publicly-owned U.S. newspaper companies have reported their fourth-quarter 2009 results; five more to go. (Those reporting so far are Gannett, New York Times Co., Media General, Lee Enterprises and McClatchy. We also have results from News Corp.,…

• 

  PressThink

• News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the News: What I Will Say at South by Southwest

  7 Mar 2010 | 2:00 pm

  Suppose your laptop continually received updates to software that was never installed on your laptop. If you can imagine a situation that absurd, then you are ready to partake in the Future of Context panel that I’ll be part of at the South by Southwest festival in Austin next week. Here are some of my ideas, questions and puzzlers in advance of that event. I am posting them today in hopes of generating a discussion I can use to improve my performance in Austin. (It’s already happening, see the comments.) 1. Why are we serving people the news without the background narrative…

• Explaining The Local: East Village, NYU's Collaboration with the New York Times

  22 Feb 2010 | 10:01 pm

  The New York Times and NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute announced yesterday that they will collaborate on a news site serving the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. It will be called The Local: East Village, and it will appear on the nytimes.com. The site will be edited and produced at NYU. In this post, I will explain what we’re up to and why we’re doing it. I don’t speak for the editors of the Times, but I have been discussing the East Village project with them for over a year and I have some sense of what brought them to this collaboration. And it is…

• The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism

  21 Feb 2010 | 2:19 pm

  This is a post about a single line in a recent article in the New York Times: Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right. Before I get to the line that interested me, I need to acknowledge that the investigation the Times undertook for this article is wholly admirable and exactly what we need professional journalists to be doing. Reporter David Barstow spent five months—five months!—reporting and researching the Tea Party phenomenon. He went to their events. He talked to hundreds of people drawn into the movement. He watched what happens at their rallies and the smaller meetings…

• He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User

  12 Apr 2009 | 9:46 am

  There I am, sitting at the breakfast table, with my coffee and a copy of the New York Times, in the classic newspaper reading position from before the Web. And I come to this article, headlined “Ex-Chairman of A.I.G. Says Bailout Has Failed.” I immediately recognize in it the signs of a he said, she said account. Quick definition: “He said, she said” journalism means… There’s a public dispute. The dispute makes news. No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the…

• Introducing the new Huffington Post Investigative Fund (And My Own Role in It)

  29 Mar 2009 | 11:37 pm

  The news broke Sunday: The Huffington Post announced today that it is launching a new initiative to produce a wide range of investigative journalism — The Huffington Post Investigative Fund. It is being funded by The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and will be headed by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project, which will be folded into the Investigative Fund.The full press release is here. I will have a role:Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, will serve as a senior advisor to the…

• 

  Topix Weblog

• Topix Clears 100,000,000 Comments

  tolles

  4 Mar 2010 | 3:38 pm

  Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one A.J. Liebling We launched our commentary system at the end of 2005, by giving people not only the ability to comment on the headlines we aggregated here at Topix,...

• Welcome to the Neighborhood, Redux.

  tolles

  23 Dec 2009 | 12:57 pm

  I'm always happy to see media attention being paid to hyperlocal news. But who the hell decided that Suburban New Jersey was the reference standard for local news? Just because you live nearby, Mr. New York media guy, does NOT...

• 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,...

• 

  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 – Friday, 1 p.m. PDT/3 p.m. [...] No related posts.

• 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 of the blog series, and [...] No related posts.

• 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 third posts if you missed [...] No related posts.

• 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 get comfortable with the basics [...] No related posts.

• 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 covered in Week 1, you [...] No related posts.

• 

  Metaprinter

• Jobless America- A New Paradigm?

  Robert Ivan

  3 Mar 2010 | 10:54 pm

  How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come. read the entire article on The Atlantic…

• 2010 America East Newspaper Conference – Exhibitors List

  Robert Ivan

  27 Feb 2010 | 10:21 pm

  The Following 2010 America East Newspaper Conference list is correct as of February 28, 2010. Please check www.america-east.com for updates. ABB Inc. Accraply AdMall Advance Diagnostics Computer Services Agfa Graphics alfaQuest Technologies Anocoil Corporation Anygraaf USA, Inc. Aragon System Products Atex Bluefin Technology Partners Brainworks Software Development Corp. Bridgemont Community & Technical College formerly the Community & Technical College at WVU Tech) Brock Solutions, Inc. Central Ink Corporation Data Sciences, Inc./DSI DENEX, Inc. Digital Technology International (or…

• NPR News with three 2010 Gracie Awards for outstanding series, documentary and podcast

  Robert Ivan

  27 Feb 2010 | 9:55 pm

  February 24, 2010; Washington, D.C. – The American Women in Radio & Television (AWRT) is honoring NPR News with three 2010 Gracie Awards for outstanding series, documentary and podcast, it was announced today. Earning awards are the documentary series “The Science of Spirituality” from religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty; a two-part report from Kabul correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson on wide-spread drug addiction in Afghanistan; and the Culturetopia podcast, hosted by arts reporter Neda Ulaby and blogger Linda Holmes. The Gracie Awards recognize and encourage the…

• Wednesday Sessions – 2010 America East Newspaper Conference

  Robert Ivan

  27 Feb 2010 | 9:36 pm

  2010 America East Newspaper Conference Schedule – Wednesday: America East is sponsored by 13 state and regional press associations, News&Tech, Suburban Newspapers of America and Editor & Publisher. “We close the show with educational opportunities for editorial, packaging and press production.” Monday Sessions | Tuesday Sessions | Twitter users track and utilize #ae2010 for updates Wednesday, MARCH 17 7:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Attendee Registration Desk Open 8:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Private Demonstrations with Exhibitors 8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. SNA Advertising Symposium…

• Tuesday Sessions – 2010 America East Newspaper Conference

  Robert Ivan

  27 Feb 2010 | 9:05 pm

  2010 America East Newspaper Conference Schedule at a Glance: America East is sponsored by 13 state and regional press associations, News&Tech, Suburban Newspapers of America and Editor & Publisher. A value-packed day of sessions for advertising, marketing, production and circulation. Monday Sessions | Wednesday Sessions | Twitter users track and utilize #ae2010 for updates Tuesday, MARCH 16 7:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Attendee Registration Desk Open 8:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Private Demonstrations with Exhibitors 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. Continental Breakfast 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. BONUS…

• 

  Themediaisdying

• themediaisdying: Great dataviz on how the BBC spend the UK license money : http://bit.ly/bGkf4M

  13 Mar 2010 | 4:21 am

  themediaisdying: Great dataviz on how the BBC spend the UK license money : http://bit.ly/bGkf4M

• themediaisdying: Why asking should media companies charging for content is the wrong question : http://bit.ly/aZGtZB (via @eacastel)

  13 Mar 2010 | 4:07 am

  themediaisdying: Why asking should media companies charging for content is the wrong question : http://bit.ly/aZGtZB (via @eacastel)

• themediaisdying: Who are the online publishers that matter? Now you know. http://bit.ly/b1onuT (via @Permuto)

  13 Mar 2010 | 3:24 am

  themediaisdying: Who are the online publishers that matter? Now you know. http://bit.ly/b1onuT (via @Permuto)

• themediaisdying: @utneReader creates 'The Dead Magazine Club' : http://bit.ly/aK1bN2 via: @ferndiaz / neyorkist)

  13 Mar 2010 | 3:22 am

  themediaisdying: @utneReader creates 'The Dead Magazine Club' : http://bit.ly/aK1bN2 via: @ferndiaz / neyorkist)

• themediaisdying: Are we connected on LinkedIn? http://bit.ly/4v2dVc

  12 Mar 2010 | 12:57 pm

  themediaisdying: Are we connected on LinkedIn? http://bit.ly/4v2dVc

• 

  The Media Manager

• TechCrunch's Erick Schoenfeld on media dinosaurs

  12 Mar 2010 | 4:38 pm

  Earlier this week Marc Andreessen was encouraging old media publishers to burn the boats, to just move into digital and leave the printing presses behind. Commentators like Alan Mutter weighed in and said the idea was ill-informed.But the debate isn't going away. Today Erick Schoenfeld of TechCrunch has added his voice, but it's more of an emotional than rational pitch. He asserts that it's necessary for media companies to get on the new wave before it's too late.What he uses as evidence isn't all that meaty. He somehow thinks the $30-billion business will diminish to $20 billion and then to…

• Twitter: Social network or news service?

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:42 pm

  The Web security firm Barracuda Networks has surveyed Twitter use and determined that only about one-quarter of registered users are active. The suggestion is that Twitter is more of a news feed than a social network.The study found that 73 per cent of users had Tweeted fewer than 10 times. And only 21 per cent had Tweeted 10 times, followed 10 and been followed by 10.The study's author concludes that many on Twitter simply signed up to follow their favourite celebrities. Now that most celebrities have started Tweeting, the service doesn't have the same growth potential.

• OJR's Robert Niles: News managers need to lead in technology

  10 Mar 2010 | 2:45 pm

  The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles has an exhaustive list of advice for today's newsroom managers. It largely amounts to: Get with the program.Niles continues to see a lag between the technology and the media leader. He believes it's only a matter of time before newspapers outside the U.S. suffer what they have inside the country, so he has delivered a speech in Singapore and delivered notes from it online.Among his prescriptions:1. Management should consume technology.2. Require everyone to blog and have social media accounts.3. Managers should Skype and chat instead of sending…

• News Corp. digital executive: Dual revenue streams necessary

  10 Mar 2010 | 10:28 am

  Jonathan Miller, the chief digital news executive for Rupert Murdoch's press empire at News Corp., believes the time has come to recapture what was lost: Two revenue streams for news sites from the Internet.He doesn't see any other way. The opportunity to drive revenue was lost some time ago by free offerings.“The choice between paywall or free is not mutually exclusive. They can co-exist based on quality of content and geography,” he told an elite media conference in Abu Dhabi.

• Google chief economist to newspapers: Experiment

  9 Mar 2010 | 3:16 pm

  Hal Varian, the chief economist for the world's largest search engine, doesn't believe Google has the answer to what ails newspapers. But he notes the decline began long before the Internet.What he outlines in his post to the Google Public Policy Blog is an even-handed overview of the debate over paywalls, of shifting to an exclusive online operation, and on the uncoupling of editorial and advertising and its consequences for the economics of news. He notes that news hasn't made much money historically; rather, it's the access advertisers have to audiences."In my view, the best thing that…

• 

  Nieman Journalism Lab

• Links on Twitter: iPads for sale, iPods for comments, toxic assets for NPR

  12 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

  Participation, incentivized: @CaliforniaWatch will reward its site’s outstanding comments with free iPods http://j.mp/bf25Dt » During the first two hours of its pre-order period, Apple sold an estimated 51,000 iPads http://j.mp/bpgr3R » NPR buys a toxic asset so you don’t have to: another fantastic @planetmoney explainer, via @jayrosen_nyu http://j.mp/bWcCqj » Multimedia murder mystery: Who rubbed out a muckraker…in 1945? The latest from @niemanstory http://j.mp/cAysVQ » The number of unique viewers of online video increased 10.5% between Feb 2009 and Feb 2010…

• This Week in Review: Plagiarism and the link, location and context at SXSW, and advice for newspapers

  12 Mar 2010 | 7:00 am

  [Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh] The Times, plagiarism and the link: A few weeks ago, the resignations of two journalists from The Daily Beast and The New York Times accused of plagiarism had us talking about how the culture of the web affects that age-old journalistic sin. That discussion was revived this week by the Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, whose postmortem on the Zachery Kouwe scandal appeared Sunday. Hoyt concluded that the Times “owes readers a full…

• Links on Twitter: Latte analytics, hypergrowth, the economics of abundance

  11 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

  What Buzz should have been? Aol launches Lifestream as a standalone product http://j.mp/aWYzxa » Latte analytics: Foursquare and Starbucks join forces http://j.mp/aQB7Uq » Startups and hypergrowth: How much success is too much success? http://j.mp/9AgWco (via @nytimesbits) » “Google obviously thinks that providing the best local results possible is the future for a large number of its services” http://j.mp/aUWmuS » The latest episode of “Breaking the New News” is up: @cshirky on scarcity and abundance in journalism http://j.mp/aBkgWT »

• The Newsonomics of new news syndication

  11 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

  [Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.] It’s tough to get the printer’s ink out of news people’s veins. For many, journalism = printing, and in printing, each copy costs extra. It’s an analog, manufacturing mindset, and one to finally bid goodbye. Of course, we all know how freely we can fling stories about on the web, but second copy value — and cost — has an evolving business model implication, as the news industry looks for new pillars…

• What makes a nonprofit news org legit? Three other questions to separate journalism from advocacy

  11 Mar 2010 | 7:00 am

  Last week, Jim Barnett raised a question about nonprofit journalism: What makes it legit? How do we know if a nonprofit news outlet shares the ideals and culture of traditional journalism, and how can we make sure we don’t get fooled by advocacy groups disguised as objective journalists? It’s a difficult question — the Internet makes publishing wide open to everyone — and at the end of his post, Barnett lays out a list of what he thinks we should use as a starting point when deciding what is and isn’t a legit nonprofit news outlet. He lists various IRS and accounting…

• 

  State of the Fourth Estate

• [Weekend Treat] What 24-Hour Cable News Really Covers

  Dave Levy

  12 Mar 2010 | 5:59 am

  Gotta love the Onion for never backing down from satire. Slightly profane, but you’re adults:

• [Quote of the Day] Publisher Perspective

  Dave Levy

  11 Mar 2010 | 12:15 pm

  “I’m more worried about the 500 million or so people on Facebook versus the 2 million on Fox.” ~Jon Klein, CNN President In a Q & A with BusinessWeek editor Josh Tyrangiel, the executive noted that the sharing of media across social channels is something he’ll be watching closely from a competitive stand point. So, is he right? Should 24-hour cable news channels look at other media forms as their main threats instead of each other?

• [Pet Peeves] Gawker Cuts the Feed

  Dave Levy

  11 Mar 2010 | 4:45 am

  Digging out of my feed yesterday, I noticed this: Not obvious what’s disconcerting here? Alright, here’s the story: In the last 48 hours, anyone watching their RSS feeds may have noticed a slight change in the content produced by the Gawker Network (which includes many sites beyond the Gawker blog itself, including Deadspin, Valleywag and Lifehacker, to name a few). Whereas in the past, Gawker has served it’s entire article content into the RSS feed, they have started cutting the cord on what goes through the pipe to just a stub of the piece. Now, with the change, RSS…

• [Geekmetrics] Giant Google Infographic Edition

  Dave Levy

  10 Mar 2010 | 4:18 am

  I’m working on a longer piece (maybe a two parter) on privacy, digital media and cognitive dissonance. So, while I’m working on that, enjoy this completely unrelated, giant infographic on Google. H/t Jenna K

• [Everyone's a Reviewer] Variety Razzies Full-Time Movie Critics

  Dave Levy

  9 Mar 2010 | 5:17 am

  In a memo that first circulated on Romanesko yesterday, Tim Gray, editor of inside-Hollywood industry pub Variety, announced to his staff that their main entertainment reviewers would no longer be kept on as full-time writers. As he penned: It doesn’t make economic sense to have full-time reviewers, but Todd [McCarthy], Derek [Elley] and [David] Rooney have been asked to continue as freelancers. Along with these full-time reductions, several other reviewers, most notably TV critic Brian Lowry, will be adding new responsibilities to their current review duties as to, assumingly, offset…

• 

  Nieman Journalism Lab

• Links on Twitter: iPads for sale, iPods for comments, toxic assets for NPR

  12 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

  Participation, incentivized: @CaliforniaWatch will reward its site’s outstanding comments with free iPods http://j.mp/bf25Dt » During the first two hours of its pre-order period, Apple sold an estimated 51,000 iPads http://j.mp/bpgr3R » NPR buys a toxic asset so you don’t have to: another fantastic @planetmoney explainer, via @jayrosen_nyu http://j.mp/bWcCqj » Multimedia murder mystery: Who rubbed out a muckraker…in 1945? The latest from @niemanstory http://j.mp/cAysVQ » The number of unique viewers of online video increased 10.5% between Feb 2009 and Feb 2010…

• This Week in Review: Plagiarism and the link, location and context at SXSW, and advice for newspapers

  12 Mar 2010 | 7:00 am

  [Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh] The Times, plagiarism and the link: A few weeks ago, the resignations of two journalists from The Daily Beast and The New York Times accused of plagiarism had us talking about how the culture of the web affects that age-old journalistic sin. That discussion was revived this week by the Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, whose postmortem on the Zachery Kouwe scandal appeared Sunday. Hoyt concluded that the Times “owes readers a full…

• Links on Twitter: Latte analytics, hypergrowth, the economics of abundance

  11 Mar 2010 | 3:00 pm

  What Buzz should have been? Aol launches Lifestream as a standalone product http://j.mp/aWYzxa » Latte analytics: Foursquare and Starbucks join forces http://j.mp/aQB7Uq » Startups and hypergrowth: How much success is too much success? http://j.mp/9AgWco (via @nytimesbits) » “Google obviously thinks that providing the best local results possible is the future for a large number of its services” http://j.mp/aUWmuS » The latest episode of “Breaking the New News” is up: @cshirky on scarcity and abundance in journalism http://j.mp/aBkgWT »

• The Newsonomics of new news syndication

  11 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

  [Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.] It’s tough to get the printer’s ink out of news people’s veins. For many, journalism = printing, and in printing, each copy costs extra. It’s an analog, manufacturing mindset, and one to finally bid goodbye. Of course, we all know how freely we can fling stories about on the web, but second copy value — and cost — has an evolving business model implication, as the news industry looks for new pillars…

• What makes a nonprofit news org legit? Three other questions to separate journalism from advocacy

  11 Mar 2010 | 7:00 am

  Last week, Jim Barnett raised a question about nonprofit journalism: What makes it legit? How do we know if a nonprofit news outlet shares the ideals and culture of traditional journalism, and how can we make sure we don’t get fooled by advocacy groups disguised as objective journalists? It’s a difficult question — the Internet makes publishing wide open to everyone — and at the end of his post, Barnett lays out a list of what he thinks we should use as a starting point when deciding what is and isn’t a legit nonprofit news outlet. He lists various IRS and accounting…

• 

  Failure Magazine's Feature Articles

• Quirkiest Basketball Failures III

  jzasky@aol.com

  13 Mar 2010 | 11:18 am

  More notable failures—some well known and some obscure—from college and professional basketball.

• The Viking in the Wheat Field

  jzasky@aol.com

  10 Mar 2010 | 1:47 pm

  How much do you know about Ug99 and other threats to the world’s food supply?

• Smile ’Til It Hurts

  jzasky@aol.com

  5 Mar 2010 | 12:10 pm

  Did you know that Up With People was funded by corporate America, supported by the government, and a propaganda tool of the religious right?

• Quirkiest Basketball Failures II

  jzasky@aol.com

  2 Mar 2010 | 9:21 am

  More notable failures—some well known and some obscure—from the NBA, WNBA and college basketball.

• The Edge of Physics

  jzasky@aol.com

  27 Feb 2010 | 12:46 pm

  Extreme science meets extreme travel/adventure in Anil Ananthaswamy’s “The Edge of Physics.”

• 

  Bonnier News

• Bonnier Tidskrifter Launches Yourlife

  Bert Menninga

  12 Mar 2010 | 12:09 am

  Bonnier Tidskrifter launches Yourlife - a new website, seminar series and magazine with every aspect of your life in mind. Bonnier Tidskrifter has introduced a new concept, Yourlife - website, magazine, seminar series and more - that is the brainchild of magazine entrepreneur Carina Nunstedt, founder of Bonnier magazines mama and Family Living (as well as Passion for Business, from another publisher).Yourlife  is a unique wholistic concept that includes a website, a niche network and seminar series, plus a magazine with "deeper and bigger…

• Finalists for Biggest U.S. Magazine Awards

  Bert Menninga

  11 Mar 2010 | 5:46 am

  Field & Stream and Popular Science are short-listed for the National Magazine Awards. Two Bonnier Corporation titles are finalists in the 45th annual National Magazine Awards, Field & Stream and Popular Science. Commonly known as the Ellies after the prize itself, an elephant sculpture by Alexander Calder, the awards are the biggest magazine prizes in the U.S. The contest is sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The winners will be announced on April 22. Field & Stream, which won in 2009 in the…

• First iPhone App from Teknikens Värld

  Bert Menninga

  10 Mar 2010 | 4:46 am

  The Swedish Teknikens Värld is the first Bonnier Tidskrifter magazine to create an application for the  iPhone/iPod Touch. Swedish technology magazine Teknikens Värld has launched an iPhone/iPod Touch application, the first from a Bonnier Tidskrifter title. The latest car news, tests and video clips from Teknikensvarld.se can be viewed directly in subscribers' iPhones with the app. Some 3 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple's App Store since it opened in July 10, 2008. The apps can be used both with the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The app from…

• Swedish App for Wine Lovers Gets an Upgrade

  Bert Menninga

  9 Mar 2010 | 7:04 am

  An upgrade of an iPhone application for Swedish wine lovers will be the first within Bonnier companies to charge for service. About a year ago Vinvin.se, the Swedish wine site shared by the food magazine Allt om Mat and the afternoon daily Expressen, launched what has become a very popular iPhone application. The app allows users to search through all the wines of Sweden's state liquor store, Systembolaget, and see reviews from Allt om Mat's wine experts, who do a yearly comparison of all the wines available at the store. Furthermore, you can see whether the wines are…

• Weldon Owen Takes It Further

  Bert Menninga

  9 Mar 2010 | 2:28 am

  Weldon Owen expands from producing and packaging books for others into a publisher in its own right. For more than 20 years, Weldon Owen has produced and packaged books, selling publishing rights to a third party. Now in an effort to get closer to its markets and take control of the sales and marketing of its books, Weldon Owen has taken the publishing process in-house. First up: Weldon Owen becomes the official publisher of the highly successful Williams-Sonoma branded book titles. This expands its 18-year alliance of packaging books for Williams-Sonoma. “Given our long and successful…

• 

  Life At Bonnier

• Bonnier Hack Day Ends With A Bang

  Bert Menninga

  12 Mar 2010 | 8:06 am

  Eleven promising business ideas emerge from Bonnier Hack Day, with one clear winner. After 24 hours of solid creativity, Bonnier Hack Day ended with a round of three-minute pitches from the 11 teams that made it through the night, still fired up despite the long hours of work. A team from Sydsvenskan won the day, with their "Citypedia" concept, which combined data on any city from gowalla/4sq, Twitter and Google along with users' own ratings to create a city wiki with an app for iPhone and advertising. Team members included Per-Olof Bondesson, Johannes Fosseus and Sara Johannesson.

• Bonnier Hack Day, Part One

  Bert Menninga

  11 Mar 2010 | 8:25 am

  Bonnier Hack Day started at noon, and by 4:30 p.m. with some 21 hours to go, the hacker teams are hard at work. Some 15 teams kicked off Bonnier Hacker Day with a sandwich, a cola and a bit of networking before sitting down to a two-hour open-mic session with a range of developers. Each team will be developing a business concept or technical solution over a 24-hour period, starting at 2 p.m. "The goal of Hack Day is not just to inspire those taking part, but to provide a chance for people to network within Bonnier in a unique way and come up with new ideas," says Paulina Modlitba…

• Hack Day Begins

  Bert Menninga

  11 Mar 2010 | 2:51 am

  At 12 noon CET an open mic session kicks off Bonnier Hack Day, with among others Chris Thorpe of the Guardian, Per Åström of TV4 and Ted Valentin of 24 Hour Business Camp. Bonnier Hack Day is here at last. The day starts with an open mic session – speakers include Chris Thorpe (the Guardian), Per Åström (TV4),  Jyri and Ulla-Maaria Engeström (Thinglink), Saplo, Jayway and Ted Valentin. At 2 p.m., the competition begins in earnest. Read more about the competing teams at Bonnier Hack Day blog and follow in realtime on Twitter or at the event's…

• Meet Niko Misic

  Bert Menninga

  11 Mar 2010 | 12:07 am

  Niko Misic credits his working with all his heart for his nomination as a finalist in the Bonnier Sales Awards. Niko Misic, is not just an expert at selling, having worked in sales at TV4 since 2003. The Borås, Sweden native has also studied media and communications at Halmstad University, giving him extra insight into the industry. But as a finalist for the Sales Representative of the Year in the Bonnier Sales Awards, he says his nomination is due to other factors. "I've always worked with all my heart, joy and passion to deliver top results to the company," he says. "It's my way of giving…

• Meet Kayse Gundram

  Bert Menninga

  10 Mar 2010 | 12:01 am

  The art of selling is a true craft, says Bonnier Sales Awards finalist Kayse Gundram. When Kayse Gundram interviewed with Liam Ferguson for a position at TransWorld Media in 1999, little did she think some ten years later she'd be nominated for a Bonnier Sales Award. "I am honored not only to have been nominated," she says, "but to be recognized by the very individual who was responsible for welcoming me to the TransWorld team."   It shouldn't surprise anyone that the California native is a finalist for Field Sales Representative, though, considering Gundram has generated over 25…

• 

  R&D Blog

• Best links - week 10

  Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

  10 Mar 2010 | 5:54 am

  A random mix of things we have read and liked this past week. Rapid Rise of Children With Cellphones (NY Times)   Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Bullish (Media Week)   Google 'Trialling TV Search Service' (The Guardian)   Technology Vs. Design--What is the Source of Innovation? (Business Week)   Internet TV: the Goggle Box Gets Googly (Times Online, via @Andreas_Wiss)   How the Internet is Changing Advertising   What Your iPhone Apps Know About You (Vancouver Sun, via @svartling)   Is Google Search Coming to Your TV? (Mashable)   WPP: Digital Will Be…

• Best links - week 9

  Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

  5 Mar 2010 | 2:04 am

  A random mix of things we have read and liked this past week. Facebook Revenues For 2010 Could Hit Between $1.2 To $2 Billion According to a recent WSJ article, Facebook executives have mentioned that "revenues for 2010 could hit between $1.2 to $2 billion", reports TechCrunch.   First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad paidContent:UK comments on one of the latest tablet prototype demos: Penguin Books' CEO John Makinson shows how their children's books may look and be used on the Apple iPad.   E-Readers' Price May Fall to $150 With New Chip, Freescale Says Freescale…

• Paid digital content

  Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

  1 Mar 2010 | 4:08 am

  Guess what? Paid content isn't about the content, after all. Last Thursday, Bonnier R&D invited a couple of guest speakers, e.g. Forrester Analyst Nick Thomas, Sapient AD Cassian Opara, SSE researcher Henrik Sjödin, and a large number of colleagues to discuss and exchange experiences regarding the popular topic of "consumers' willingness to pay for digital content". The event was internal, so the exact conclusions can't be revealed. However, the following four public sources were referred to during the seminar and are highly recommended: Forrester Research - People Will Still Pay for…

• Best links - week 8

  Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

  26 Feb 2010 | 3:12 am

  A random mix of things we have read and liked this past week. Facebook Announces Credits Terms For Developers (via @jaggeree) Facebook will soon roll Facebook Credits out to even more application developers, so it has publicly announced that it will take 30% of the revenues earned for goods sold via Facebook Credits, reports All Facebook and Mashable.   Long Tail iTunes Book Apps Are More Expensive O'Reilly Research has put together animated graphics that trace the evolution of prices in the iTunes Book category. In Q3-2009 the book category exceeded 10,000 paid apps. Long tail book apps…

• R&D Summary – week 7

  Jonas Olofsson

  19 Feb 2010 | 1:51 pm

  This week, the Media Map trend report project went into its production phase. All members of the R&D team were given chapters or cases to write, which resulted in several late night working sessions. We've also hired some brilliant minds from the outside, who will contribute with cases and additional perspectives on the trends. They presented a first draft today, and it looks very promising. Paulina continued her preparations for Bonnier Hack Day. The event went public this week, and Paulina describes it as an unconference. She also revealed that 30-40 participants have accepted the…