links for 2009-04-15

  • Kevin: The Washington City Paper, my old hometown free alt-weekly, has news of a shake-up at the Washington Post. It looks like the Post will be 'flattening' their editorial structure and offering buy-outs to editors. It's the fourth round of buy-outs at the paper since 2003, the City Paper reports
  • Kevin: The Guardian's Martin Belam blogs about how the video of London police attacking Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests. Tomlinson died shortly after the attack of a heart attack. The video has prompted an inquiry into the incident. Martin shows how the video 'spread The Guardian brand across media', and talks about how novel this is in terms of British media. Before this, the BBC, Sky or ITN would be the only news organisations with exclusive video. The video, taken by an American who works in financial services, was offered to the Guardian after investigative work by Guardian reporter Paul Lewis.

    Martin does a great job showing how the video spread and how Guardian branding on the video on YouTube was carried far and wide, although some outlets tried to minimise the branding with video-player overlays. He also highlights the differences in use and attribution between online and print. Print often failed to attribute the video.

  • Kevin: A relatively easy way to combine Google Maps and Street View with Microsoft's Virtual Earth in one embed. However, unless I'm missing something, this is only for a single point. But a nice quick and dirty mashup if you want to see quite a bit of information about a location.
  • Kevin: Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN correspondent in Asia, interviews a group of young Chinese behind a site called Anti-CNN.com, which was launched to counter what they felt was a distorted and inaccurate picture of their country presented in Western media.
  • Kevin: This is a really thorough tutorial Matthew Stoff and David Durrett of The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches Texas on how to not only use Twitter for breaking news from the field but also how to easily display it on your site. This was written in the US where Twitter works on SMS, but they show how it can be used with a service called TwitterMail so that someone can easily use this with a Blackberry even if it's not possible to install a Twitter app for the Blackberry such as Twitterberry. However, by using a mail-based system, they are correct in saying that you'd want to be careful who you share the account details with.