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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Yearly Archives: 2009
links for 2009-04-15
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
links for 2009-04-15
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
links for 2009-04-14
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Kevin: A list of open-source and closed-source content-management systems. The list has a cursory look at strengths and weaknesses of the systems. Open-source systems WordPress and Drupal are given good reviews, especially on the strength of their development communities. Expression Engine is one of the closed-source options that is given good marks. For those looking to create their own social news networks ala Digg, check out Pligg. It's useful as a basic comparison of various options out there.
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Kevin: A great collection of Firefox add-ons to help developers and designers.
links for 2009-04-10
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Kevin: Danny Sullivan is a journalist and has some straight talk for newspapers complaining about Google. The whole post is worth reading but can be summed up succinctly: "Fix your problems; don't look for scapegoats."
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Kevin: Robert Thomson, the Australian-born editor of The Wall Street Journal, calls internet aggregators who don't pay a fee to content companies "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet".
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Kevin: Anil Dash looks at the arguments being made by the Associated Press as it battles 'misappropriation' of its content (members content if we're being absolutely honest) and how their arguments differs from some of the values expressed by bloggers. "If the Associated Press made its argument on the basis of credibility and reputation, transparency and accountability, as the web-native publishers have, it would be far easier to defend their desire to share in the business model developed by the aggregators."
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Kevin: Andy Baio, a journalist and programmer (creator of Upcoming.org), looks at some of the differences and different assumptions pertaining to attribution amongst journalists and different types of bloggers in conjunction with how the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital is excerpting content from bloggers. All Things D is making the effort to engage with the bloggers that have been excerpted, but there is a pattern of traditional news organisations taking bloggers' content, sometimes entire posts without payment, and then criticising for quoting news stories. Mainstream media can't have it both ways.
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Kevin: Dave Cohn defines his terms, and it's incredibly useful for those unfamiliar with some of the terms he uses including citizen journalism, stand-alone journalism, pro-am journalism, networked journalism and open-source journalism.
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Kevin: "Joe Rospars, the man behind President Barack Obama's new-media effort during his election, said the campaign didn't win because it used the latest technology. Rather, its secret was a holistic approach — one easily copied by regular marketers — that integrated digital tools into the overall strategy. "
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Kevin: Heather Dougherty at Hitwise looks at data showing referrals for News & Media websites. Search tops everything by a healthy amount. Also, another important take away from the data is that aggregators send traffic to news sites. "Although several of the online aggregators are at the heart of the content distribution argument, they do successfully send visits to news properties rather than keeping them upon their own websites."
What content will people pay for?
Four years ago, I went to the Web+10 conference at the Poynter Institute in Florida. It was an honour to meet some of the pioneers in digital journalism, many of whom I had corresponded with online for years but never had the opportunity to meet. It was 2005, long before the depth of the crisis in newspapers was obvious to all, but everyone was asking the same question: How do we pay for professional journalism? Contrary to popular belief in the industry, newspaper websites were profitable, some quite profitable, but those profits could not sustain the size of newsroom that big-city metros in the US had at the time, newsrooms that dwarfed the size of the British national newspapers.
The crisis has been coming for years as newspapers have seen circulation declines for decades, but the Great Recession is amplifying pressures on newspapers. You read blog posts and articles from journalists and editors who say that the public should pay, must pay for ‘quality journalism’. We hear arguments that they will pay as content becomes scarce with the decline in the number of journalists and the number of newspapers. Leonard Witt, the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University in the US, says in this post:
So will people pay for high quality journalism and information? I do think so because I know one person intimately who already has. And trust me that person is very tight with his money.
Keep in mind, I am saying high quality news and information. Run of the mill junk is a worthless commodity. High quality journalism is scarce and will be more so in the future, and that’s when everyone who loves great journalism will begin to pay.
But I tend to agree with David Kohn, of spot.us, who says this in the comments:
I think this is right on Lenn – as you know, I tend to agree with you. But more and more I’m realizing that certain types of news and information that journalists think is priceless have less value than others.
David elaborates on his point back on his blog citing lessons he’s learned from various citizen journalism and crowd-sourced projects.
Increasingly I’m of the belief that the newspaper industry is relying far too much on its values in its estimates of what readers value enough to pay for. We need some solid facts and figures on what people will pay for. I might be hoping for concrete data that just doesn’t exist right now, but I think we as journalists have to move from asserting what people should pay for and do a little reporting and research to find out what people will pay for and the types of services that might be able to subsidise professional journalism.
Technorati Tags: newspapers, revenue, business models
links for 2009-04-09
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Kevin: Tom Glocer, chief exec of Thomson Reuters, had some harsh advice for the New York Times. "Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices? Does The New York Times do a good job covering sports? So-so. Do they do a good job covering business? No. How about The New York Times on Israel, FT on Germany and France, which is really good, ESPN on sports and other smaller things coming together on a style sheet every morning?"
Coming to San Francisco
I’m going to be in San Francisco between 15th and 23rd April, although up in Sebastopol for the weekend. I have two projects running at the moment that I’d like to explore with anyone who’s interested.
The future of the social web
What might the future of the social web look like? What trends and developments in technology, demographics, etc. might influence how things could change? If you had to ask “What if…?”, which “if” would you ask?
Books and publishing
How do you write? What are the challenges to finishing a long-form piece? If you’re an agent or a publisher, what are the missing pieces in your publishing puzzle? What tasks or processes are clunky and awkward?
If you want to meet up with me to talk about either the social web or books, let me know.
And if you just want to meet up for a chinwag, then I’m holding a bit of a do on the evening of Tuesday 21st. I’ve tried to do an event thingy on Facebook, but again, ping me by email or @suw me on Twitter if you fancy coming. The location is to be decided – please leave a comment if you have any suggestions for somewhere nice and relatively quiet (big noisy venues aren’t my style; I like to be able to hold a conversation without shouting).
links for 2009-04-08
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Kevin: Newspaper co-operative, the Associated Press, is relying on a 1918 ruling to root out 'misappropriation' of its content. Julian Sanchez of Ars Technica does a great job of going through the relevant case law, the 1918 US Supreme Court decision International News Service v. Associated Press. Just as we had with music and sharing sites, grey areas of the law will become less grey over the next few years as cases make their way through court.
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Kevin: It's clear. The newspaper industry is steeling itself for a fight, for some newspapers it might be a last stand. Dean Singleton, AP's chairman and vice chairman of MediaNews, and AP SVP Sue Cross are talking about content pirates. Tim Windsor hopes that all of this talk doesn't lead to New Century Network 2.0.
links for 2009-04-07
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Kevin: An excellent overview of the powerful RegEX (Regular Expression) function in Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo Pipes can do so much, and it's visual approach might just help many people (including me) get their head around programming and scripting. Very useful guide for journalists who want to do powerful analysis on web sources.
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Kevin: Patrick Smith, now of paidContent:UK but previously of the Press Gazette, writes about why the UK journalism's 'Trade Bible' failed. It's a good list of not only why the Press Gazette failed but why other publications are failing. Editorial lost out to publisher Wilmington's other goals. The latest business model didn't work and like so many other print publications there are a list of failed online strategies.
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Kevin: A great column from (North Carolina) News & Record Editor John Robinson providing real world examples of how social media has enhanced their coverage. John says: "Everyone who spends any time on Facebook or blogging or Twitter knows that they are valuable informational tools, which makes them valuable journalistic tools. It's not rocket science." John walks the talk.
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Kevin: People think I'm a little crazy about geo-tagging, but it's a small bit of fundamental work that opens up a world of value-added location-based services that could be sources of revenue for news organisations. Dan Gillmor highlights how easy this is to do with his class. As Dan says: "The point is that some events take place over time and space, and are made to order for this kind of treatment. Journalists are actually quite late to the party. Flickr and other sites are displaying crowd-sourced such events via user-created tags."
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Kevin: Some great tips from the ultimate innovator: Thomas Edison. Be passionate. Question your assumptions. Change things up. Learn to collaborate. Don't forget the customer.
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Kevin: To sum up Kinsley's view, look to the last sentence: "If General Motors goes under, there will still be cars. And if the New York Times disappears, there will still be news."
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Kevin: A good quick list on how journalists should respond to comments. The first tip is essential. Responding to comments is part a journalist's job. Period. There are also good tips on how to deal with negativity or even makes a racist comment. Also, one of the key points that I make is that the journalist sets the tone. If you're aggressive in the post and aggressively defensive, prepare for a very unpleasant experience, one which you've helped create.
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Kevin: Tip of the hat to Alf Hermida and Mindy McAdams for highlighting this brilliant collection of video tips and best practices from The Digital Journalist. The collection has articles on workflow, how to improve videojournalism stories and how to make the transition from stills photography to video.
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Kevin: MOBVIS is a new mobile service that will compare images in its database to landmarks as seen by a mobile phone camera. It's an interesting project that builds on some of the augmented reality projects that have been in academia for a while. However, I am always a bit sceptical with these projects seeing as one obvious application – tourism information – become very expensive with data roaming charges. But whereas the augmented reality projects in the past relied quite heavily bespoke technology, it's nice to see this kind of thing filtering down to consumer tech.