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Virtual Economics
Mencius on the future of search
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......
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......
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
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,......
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......
Spoke Digital social media consultancy launches
Ealier today my old friends and colleagues Holly and Ilana launched Spoke Digital, offering social media training and consultancy. Once upon a time I sat one desk away from Holly and Ilana at the old Associated New Media offices in......
Megan Taylor: Web Journalist
Jay Rosen’s Explainthis.org Would Have Journalists Answer Users’ Questions / Poynter E-Media Tidbits
ExplainThis has two parts. One is an open system through which anyone can ask and answer questions and vote on them. The second part involves "journalists standing by."Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistJay Rosen’s Explainthis.org Would Have Journalists Answer Users’ Questions / Poynter E-Media Tidbits...
RSS readers reviewed / BeatBlogging.org
No, I’m not going to try to explain how a feed is tracked in terms my mother would understand. Instead, let’s look at some different RSS readers and some more recent players in RSS-land.Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistRSS readers reviewed / BeatBlogging.org...
How Programmer/Journalists Craft Their Own Study Programs / PBS MediaShift
I spoke to six college students who are combining self-taught programming with elements of journalism education. Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistHow Programmer/Journalists Craft Their Own Study Programs / PBS MediaShift...
Journalists use RSS to track rivals, news, tweets & other info / BeatBlogging.org
I spoke to three journalists about how they use RSS for research and reporting. They also each gave one really good tip for diving into RSS.Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistJournalists use RSS to track rivals, news, tweets & other info / BeatBlogging.org...
Rambly Rambles, Updates, and Stuff
Django, the future of journalism, new gadgets, podcasts, Orson Scott Card, reading, linking and the truth.Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistRambly Rambles, Updates, and Stuff...
Live By Request: John Fogerty / PBS
Handled Twitter, Facebook and YouTube postings and requests.Post from: Megan Taylor: Web JournalistLive By Request: John Fogerty / PBS...
Photojournalism From A Student's Eye
Photoshop for Reporters – Color Balance
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
This post was written for an internal blog that I have been keeping for my work and was written for reporters with no video experience: We all know the basics of what goes into a typical tv news piece: Interview and/or voice over narration Lots and lots of b-roll (footage to lay over...
Adrian Monck
The truth about the price of investigative journalism online | The Editorialiste [del.icio.us]
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...
George Orwell: The Sporting Spirit [del.icio.us]
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]
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...
Foreign Arabic-Language TV: An Exercise in Futility? | Magda Abu-Fadil [del.icio.us]
"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]
"[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...
Speaker recalls life during Nazi Germany | Sioux City Journal [del.icio.us]
In every situation, Leviticus said, there are three types of people: a small number of perpetrators, a small number of victims and a large number of bystanders. He said people must educate themselves, stand up for what they believe in and teach their children to do the same. "In the end it...
Latest Activity on Wired Journalists
Amir Kurtovic replied to Bill Bennett's discussion 'The paperless journalist'
Amir Kurtovic replied to Bill Bennett's discussion 'The paperless journalist'This discussion seems to oddly long for a simple question. If you don't want to use paper there are two methods: 1. record everything 2. type everything. On the go: type into your phone. Having a phone with a full keyboard helps. Most smartphones…...
Katy J Burnell joined Ryan Sholin's group
Katy J Burnell joined Ryan Sholin's group PhotographyYou're a reporter. Something on the scanner is on fire. The photographers are all busy and there's a point & shoot in the cabinet. What do you do, hot shot, what do you do?...
Katy J Burnell joined Ryan Sholin's group
Katy J Burnell joined Ryan Sholin's group BloggingNew to blogging? Been at it since Jorn Barger? Drop in here and give each other a hand, a comment, or a feed....
Nancy Raskauskas replied to Nancy Raskauskas's discussion 'Simplicity'
Nancy Raskauskas replied to Nancy Raskauskas's discussion 'Simplicity'Thank you all so much for these ideas! I'm checking out the links you've suggested....
Paul Balcerak replied to Nancy Raskauskas's discussion 'Simplicity'
Paul Balcerak replied to Nancy Raskauskas's discussion 'Simplicity'Great advice. I still think the Spokesman does a great job of thinking outside the box, but I highly endorse what Tom said....
Tom Davidson replied to Bill Bennett's discussion 'The paperless journalist'
Tom Davidson replied to Bill Bennett's discussion 'The paperless journalist'Bill - I use it mostly for in-person meetings. Sometimes, I'll use it for phoners, but if I've got to take heavy-duty notes from a phone discussion, I'll keyboard 'em. As for the paper size - I'm not bothered by the 8.5x11,...
WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS
TIM COOK, THE NEXT STEVE JOBS, GETS A ONE-TIME $5MILLION BONUS
Tim Cook, the Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, will receive a one-time bonus of $5 million and 75,000 in restricted shares for running the company during Steve Jobs’ medical leave last year. A regulatory filing submitted by the company on Friday says that he stock units will be vested on March 10,...
THE MALOFIEJ AWARDS, BETTER THAN EVER
A few hours ago in Pamplona, the International Jury of the 18th Edition of the Malofiej Infographic Awards announced the list of the winners. Congratulations to them and to Javier Errea and his fantastic team that every year improves tone of the finest journalistic competitions of the world. Visual journalism at its...
APPLE SELLS 50,000 IPADS IN TWO HOURS. YES, IN TWO HOURS!
Phillip Elmer-DeWitt reports the big news: Apple sells 50,000 iPads in two hours. Compare this with the First week of Nexus One sales: 20,000. The first pre-orders show an amazing interest for the new Apple iPad. The US Apple store says: iPad pre-order limit: two per customer. If Saturday delivery is not available in your...
It’s official. Organizers: INNOVATION International Media Consulting Group with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and the International Newspaper Marketing Association (INMA) Where: St. Anne’s College, Oxford University (UK). When: May 17-18, 2010. Program: • Tablets and the implications for the news publishing industry. • Best concepts, prototypes, new digital narratives, new journalistic grammar...
THE GOOGLE ADVICE TO NEWSPAPERS: EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT!
Martin Langeveld reports about the presentation made by Google’s economist-in-chief, Hal Varian this morning at the Federal Trade Commission’s second round of hearings on the future of journalism. His main advice: “The three things newspapers should do is experiment, experiment, experiment!”...
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MediaShift
4-Minute Roundup: The Rising Buzz of Location Services at SXSW
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...
NPR, SiriusXM Internships Steeped in Multimedia, Social Media
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...
9 Tools to Help Live-Stream Your Newsroom
"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...
Witness Creates Sophisticated Evaluation Tools for Video Impact
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...
Public Media Twitter Chat Aims to Foster Collaboration
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...
Turkish Reporters Unite to Protest YouTube Ban
The Turkish courts banned YouTube in May 2008, and now a new protest campaign launched by the editorial team of the Milliyet newspaper is drawing attention to how long the country has been prevented from using the website. The initiative, which was was launched on February 19, is not the...
Old Media, New Tricks
New Tricks: Set up a Google Buzz profile for your news organization
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...
New Tricks: 3 Ways News Organizations Can Leverage Location-Based Social Networks
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,...
New tricks: Journalists and SEO – searching for the right balance
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...
New tricks: Know your audience - whether you’re on Twitter or in print
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...
Will the Apple iPad save newspapers?
It’s a little early to say any one gadget will save anything, but Apple’s new gadget, the iPad, at least makes that a serious question. The publishing industry has to be cautiously optimistic. Here’s why: It is built for displaying publishers’ content in an attractive way. The New York Times got...
New Tricks: Create a successful news vertical
On a sunny, warm Wednesday afternoon in Newport Beach, Calif., surfers took in some waves in the cold Pacific Ocean waters, people shopped along the boardwalks and the lone content producer for Hookem.com was combing the beach for University of Texas Longhorn fans. Thousands of people decked out in the distinctive...
Diversity at Work
As Hollywood Prepares for Oscars, a Final Word on Colorless Vanity Fair
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,"...
Media Call Out Women's Hockey Team for 'Debutante Ball'
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...
Woods: 'We Miss the Normal Part of People's Lives' When Covering Diversity
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...
Events, Not Enterprise, Drive Most Stories about Hispanics
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...
Reporters' Views Differ on Treatment of Race in Woods, Salahi Coverage
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...
When is Fort Hood Suspect's Faith Relevant in Media Coverage?
On Friday morning, Minhaj Hasan, editor-in-chief of The Muslim Link in College Park, Md., checked local headlines on the shooting at Ft. Hood, Texas, that had taken the lives of 13. They rang all too familiar.A Washington Times' headline read: "Army: Suspect Said 'Allahu Akbar!' Before Shooting." Meanwhile, a Washington...
NYT > David Carr
A Lawman, Polite and Ready to Shoot
“Justified,” a modern-day western beginning on FX on Tuesday, is the latest in a long line of series and films based on Elmore Leonard stories....
Reporters have always kept an eye on other reporters. But in the Internet age of instant publishing, what if watching your competitor becomes your whole story?...
A Column That Lost Its Social Graces
The Washington that Sally Quinn covers, one governed by convivial elites who battle by day and clink glasses at night, no longer exists....
Tiger Woods’s public apologia was the latest installment in his love/hate relationship with the media. But even then he managed to enforce Tiger Rules....
Vice magazine’s libertarianism and cultural literacy brings to mind Playboy in its prime, mixing nudity with in-depth reports from the world’s most troubled spots....
Demand Media pays $15 to $20 on average for an article -- videos are about $30 -- but the company has no trouble finding steady contributors....
Global Features
European Day of Action to Ban Nuclear Weapons
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Activists getting ready for Vancouver 2010 Olympic games
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Coverage of Haiti Solidarity Efforts
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Escalating violence against anti-mining capmpaigners
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Major Hotel Strike is Imminent in Puerto Rico
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mediabistro.com: GalleyCat
Hilary Duff YA Series, Radiohead Meets Murakami, and Star Trek Zombies: Weekend Reading
As we head off into the weekend, check out that excellent video about the making of a book cover. If you want more weekend reading, here are our favorite headlines from the week. In an interview, author Dr. Lynn Kern Koegel discussed writing books about autism--explaining how publishers can better serve...
How to Choose a Font for Your Book
As more writers explore self-publishing options and digital editions re-create print books, the time has never been better to brush up on book fonts. If you have to pick a font for your book, why not consult with the experts? After the jump, we've embedded a video from the talented designers...
Working into the wee hours one night this week, this GalleyCat editor accidentally uncovered the next addictive online trend for the publishing set--Vanity Google Book-ing. All literary folk should take a shot at Vanity Google Book-ing before the Google Books settlement is decided. It's simple. Go to Google Books and...
NBCC Winners Reviewed by NBCC Reviewers
At the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awards last night, each winner was introduced by a critic--the only literary award to include a free book review along with the prize. GalleyCat Reviews has excerpted choice passages from each of these literary essays....
Marvel Comics Writer Criticizes "Trumped-Up Outrage" Over Amazon Graphic Novel Glitch
As we reported yesterday, Amazon.com (AMZN) temporarily pulled the buy buttons on many graphic novels from comic book publishers like Marvel, IDW, Dark Horse, and Image Comics. The move followed a database error that listed incorrect prices for many titles handled by Diamond Book Distributors. As of this 12:23 p.m....
Novelist Jason Pinter Gets Two-Book Deal for YA Series
Today thriller novelist Jason Pinter (pictured) announced he sold a new YA series, Zeke Bartholomew: Superspy! in a two-book deal. The book sold to Jabberwocky senior editor Daniel Ehrenhaft, and the deal was negotiated by Joe Veltre at The Veltre Company. Here's more from Pinter: "Zeke is just like me and...
Online Journalism Blog
Must user-generated-content threaten quality journalism?
The BBC’s User Generated Content (UGC) Hub does not further meaningful civil participation in the news, and the routine inclusion of UGC does not significantly alter news selection criteria or editorial values. So concludes Jackie Harrison’s study on audience contributions and gatekeeping practices at the BBC. The study found many of...
Online Journalism lesson #10: RSS and mashups
RSS and mashupsView more presentations from Paul Bradshaw. This was the final session in my undergraduate Online Journalism module (the other classes can be found here), taught last May. It’s a relatively brief presentation, just covering some of the possibilities of mashups and RSS, and some tools. The majority of the...
The BBC and linking part 2: a call to become curators of context
A highlight of my recent visit with MA Online Journalism students to the BBC’s user generated content hub was the opportunity to ask this question posed by Andy Mabbett via Twitter: ‘Why don’t you link back to people if they send a picture in?’ (audio embedded above and here). The UGC...
The Human Journalism project in Spain
The journalist and photographer Javier Bauluz is the only Spanish winner of the Pullitzer. He has published a preview of his next project, focused on journalism and human rights, at periodismohumano.com. “The responsibility of the crisis: the greed of a few and the lack of controls from whom should control them,...
Video journalism in Africa – guest post
Ruud Elmendorp, a video journalist in Africa, writes about his experiences in the job “Monsieur le journaliste? Votre interview avec le ministre est a deux heure.” Mister journalist? Your interview with the minister is at two. Thank you, I say to the lady on the phone. Finally I managed to arrange an...
The BBC and linking part 1: users are not an audience
Ben Goldacre is experiencing understandable frustration with the BBC’s policy on linking to science papers: Jane Ashley of the website’s health team, says that when they write an article based on scientific research: “It is our policy to link to the journal rather than the article itself. This is because sometimes...
Forbes.com: Media News
Can the mayor, a banker and a Harvard prof turn around the city's African-American weekly?...
Secretary of Financial Services expects to see strong demand ahead as China makes reforms....
Web ads to get a 10% boost in 2010. For the first time advertisers will spend more on digital than print....
Secretary of Financial Services and Treasury expects stimulus to keep growth on track....
A Hotelier's Charitable Mission
Peter Gautschi builds schools for Asia's poorest....
CMO on the insurance company's brand strategy and most famous campaign character....
Local Onliner
Living Social Raises $30 Million; Goes Head-to-Head with Groupon
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...
MerchantCircle Index: Mixed Awareness Levels for Local Players
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....
Bay Area News Project Envisions $12 Million in Revenue
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...
Red Beacon Teams with BigTent, Adds ‘Friendly Advice’
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...
Local Mobile Coupons: Analog Analytics Pushes Publisher Solution
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...
Citysearch Launches ‘CityGrid Complete’; Invests in Orange Soda
Citysearch announced today that it has shifted its ad model for small businesses, moving from the cost per click model that it pioneered several years ago to a new model that will drive consumers directly to their own websites. The new model provides advertisers with a complete range of SEO...
SteveOuting.com
Overpriced 14-year-old book (mine) on eBay?!
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...
iPhone app business models improving
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....
Report from my latest gig: Digital Media Test Kitchen
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...
A new way to comment: Like it? Don’t? …
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...
Investigative reporting = premium paid content?
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...
This is a quickie. … With all the fuss this week made over the New York Times’ decision to develop and implement a metered paywall on NYTimes.com in 2011, my favorite line comes from a colleague who shall remain unnamed: “Maybe the NYTimes is much more clever than we think. They...
PJNet
Geek Squad Founder: Homes Will Have Many Digital Tablets
Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens says anyone contemplating a journalism start-up should think of getting a mobile presence first and then think of a computer application that plays off the app, not the other way around. Indeed, if he were starting the Geek Squad today, it would not be providing...
SoCon10 January 29-30; Register Now, Don’t Get Shut Out
Each year about this time I tell people to register now for the our SoCon social media, social networking conference at Kennesaw State University because to wait is to risk getting shut out. And, of course, then when it is too late — we only have 300 seats — I...
Economist Lisa George: Journalism Survivors Will Earn More
Lisa George, an empirical economist and professor at Hunter College in New York City, says there probably will be “fewer journalists in the future. But those that remain in the market will probably earn much more.” Here is why, according to George: People who do read internet news focus on many fewer...
Schudson: Society must take responsibility for journalism’s future
Journalism historian Michael Schudson says government, philanthropy, public radio, nonprofits and universities all should have a role in advancing the future of journalism. Schudson, who recently co-authored The Reconstruction of American Journalism for Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, adds: We need a mixed model of funding streams and we need society...
Jay Rosen Not Optimistic about Cloistered Media Elite
Jay Rosen, like Clay Shirky in an earlier Future of Journalism interview, says people will be better informed in the future because: “We don’t have to depend on a single elite for our information,” and he adds, “I’m not optimistic about the survival of this cloistered elite that once monopolized...
Clay Shirky in Journalism Things Will Get Weirder
Clay Shirky’s prognostication for the future of journalism: “Things are going to get weirder before they get saner.” And he adds: “In real revolutions things get worse before they get better. .. One of the bad things I think is going to happen is, I think civic corruption...
Technology
SXSW 2010: Can you copyright a tweet?
Last year, Mark Cuban, the web entrepeneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, was fined $25,000 by the National Basketball Association after he posted a message on Twitter questioning the competence of a referee. His tweet was shown on ESPN and the NBA decided to fine him. Cuban...
SXSW 2010: Google and Facebook failed on privacy, says Danah Boyd
Google and Facebook have both violated the privacy of their users with recent software developments, Danah Boyd argued in her Opening Remarks keynote at South by Southwest this afternoon. Giving a talk entitled ‘Making sense of privacy and publicity’, Boyd referenced Google’s introduction of its Buzz social network and Facebook’s changes...
SXSW 2010: The ins and outs of conference sessions
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...
SXSW 2010: The monster tech conference begins
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...
Does Sarah Beeny's free property website herald the end for estate agents?
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...
The mobile camera that can tell you're on Twitter
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...
Holovaty.com
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...
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...
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...
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...
Online News Design
Magazine sites editorially sync with traffic
The trend of giving weightage to traffic stats while making content-related decisions has caught up with magazine websites. This is just one of the things that caught my attention when I read the recent Columbia Journalism Review survey of standards and practices at magazine websites. I guess that this trend holds...
BBC offers glimpses into site design changes
From the glimpses we have been offered of the ongoing BBC website redesign, the changes in the offing are going to be perhaps the most significant in recent years, but well short of being radical. The grid composition is going to change. "The new grid is based on 31 sixteen pixel columns...
Reinventing newspapers with design; what about web sites?
I was just listening to what newspaper designer Jacek Utko said at a TED conference a few months ago; and it seemed to me that the most important part of what he said came towards the end - his description of design as part of a process of ‘not chaning...
Improving search quality on news sites
Most news sites don’t generally pay much attention to developing internal search; though search, after navigation, is perhaps the important tool visitors use to find content. And here, the quality of a news site’s internal search is an important factor and there’s no point in having search that offers no better...
Incremental vs radical redesign of news sites - which is better?
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen had in an Alertbox column last year said that "users hate change, so it’s usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually." The reason - users have spent long hours using a site, even the few mintues they spend adds up to a lot of...
Yahoo, New York Times among top news sites in India
Yahoo News and New York Times occupied the top two slots among news sites in India, according to a comScore study, which looked at the most popular news sites in the country and the growth they had achieved during the past year. The ascent of Yahoo News is not that...