September 25, 2003
Google News creator reflects on success
Staci Kramer's latest in OJR: Google News Creator Watches Portal Quiet Critics With 'Best News' Webby. A year after its launch, the computer-generated aggregator is still taking flak for how it defines news. But Krishna Bharat has had the satisfaction of seeing growing acceptance of his news site. In a Q&A with OJR, he explains how things work behind the screens, and why he calls the site "a force for democracy."
September 24, 2003
Gannett's missing archives
Remember the U.S. Supreme Court's Tasini v. New York Times ruling, which required newspaper publishers to negotiate archiving rights with free-lancers or purge their databases of unlicensed freelance material? The ruling came down June 25, 2001.
I just learned today that a number of Gannett newspapers have had their archives down for more than two years now. The kicker is they are not being allowed to filter out the infringing material so that the archives could go live again, thanks to orders from Gannett corporate. So at the estimable AZCentral, for example, all stories disappear into the ether after two weeks.
This is what happens when lawyers run your company.
Uncle Bob said:
And this is what happens when a handful of corporations are allowed to take over virtually all of the country's newspapers. It's another sign (as if we hadn't figured it out already, duh) that the big corporate chain owners don't give a damn about the communities they "serve."
However, if Michael Powell has his way over at the FCC, I'm sure it'll all get a *lot* better.
Not.
Drudge hijacked?
Wot the heck? I just typed in www.drudgereport.com and was transferred to Web Money Transfer. Was Drudge hijacked? Or is this a new revenue stream for him?
RSS entrepreneurs offer online publishing alternatives
Steve Outing's latest in E&P: Startups Offer Online Publishing Alternatives. It's a fascinating look at a half-dozen RSS entrepreneurs, most of whom I'd never heard of. Excerpt:
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada-based Toolbutton Inc. is run by Dale Janssen, who hails from the technical-education industry -- where he published several hundred e-mail newsletters and says his previous company sent out about 20 million opt-in e-mails a month. "About a year ago," he says, "I saw the inevitable decline of e-mail as a content-delivery method on the Internet. So I set out to find a replacement -- and as the story normally goes -- I did not find anything, so I built it."Janssen liked what he saw with RSS, and he's especially enthusiastic about the RSS 2.0 specification, which adds some capabilities that support more sophisticated publishing. He points out that RSS 2.0 supports adding attachments to feeds. So, future RSS feeds could include audio or video clips and they can deliver actual content to subscribers, rather than simple text links to it, as is now the most common practice.
September 23, 2003
September 19, 2003
A look at AOL News
The new AOL News page looks pretty good. But then, Gary Kebbel and his crew are pretty talented. (Thanks to Susan M. for the pointer.)
September 18, 2003
A chat with the guys behind Word Pirates
Sarah Lai Stirland, who's writing the new Corante blog Connected: nodes & networks, has an entertaining and instructive interview with Dan Gillmor and David Weinberger over their new site Word Pirates.
Tracking Isabel
Poynter has a package on Hurricane Isabel, including Jon Dube's Wireless Hurricane Tracking and a look back at the Charlotte Observer's use of a weblog to cover Hurricane Bonnie in 1998.
September 17, 2003
The Digital Revenue Shock Tour
Andrew Nachison, director of the Media Center/NDN, sends along word of the Digital Revenue Shock Tour coming to San Francisco on Nov. 4-7:
Our seminar opens with an after-dinner conversation with Larry Kramer, founder and chairman of CBS.Marketwatch.We'll be focused on revenue strategies, innovation and lessons that you may want to emulate or translate to enhance the online bottom line in your markets. The CBS.Marketwatch headquarters is one of the stops during our seminar, along with PCWorld.com and SFGate/ The San Francisco Chronicle.
News sites, linking, and opening the doors
Mark Glaser in today's OJR: News Sites Loosen Linking Policies. News sites that once staunchly refused to link offsite -- especially to competitor sites -- are now testing the waters with offsite links in blogs and e-mail newsletters.
Among those whom Mark interviewed are Jeff Jarvis, Adrian Holovaty and Jonathan Dube, all of whom posted transcripts of their interviews -- in at least one case (Jarvis') before the article came out.
Jarvis uses the Online News Association (not OJR) as the taking-off point for a rant about insularity vs. openness. I'm a member of ONA (which he called the Online Schmooze Association), but I think his points are well-taken.
What an "Online News Association" should be doing is expanding its worldview to incorporate and learn from new definitions of news and new challenges to old views of how news is gathered and how it is used.
That's pretty much the view I tried to get across five years ago in covering the ONA's formation: "Online News Association needs to open the doors." Things haven't changed much, alas.
September 16, 2003
A soup-to-nuts online publishing system
Barbara in Mass. writes about a new blogging/RSS venture:
I follow your writing with interest, and this may be a concept for mainstreaming blogging and RSS which you might find of interest. I have been working with some friends who have put together a system which could make email irrelevant for anything but personal ommunications. We have launched this week ...The system is called Quikonnex. It is a turnkey, soup-to-nuts online publishing service. Their idea is to handle the technology so that folks with good writing skills and something important to say can just get it out there. Quikonnex channels are media-rich and they use a channel viewer which does not strip tags, so publishers can deliver text, audio or video, right in their channels. Items can be published immediately, or set on a timer for later publication.
Each channel comes with both an open chat and a private messaging system, plus links to the most popular Instant Messaging services, so there are several options for publisher/subscriber interaction. Quikonnex can also provide statistics on how many discrete visitors look at each channel, either in an open browser, or using the channel viewer, how many have subscribed to each channel, and item-by-item click-thru rates. It is completely spam-proof, and publishers no longer have to worry about email newsletters getting caught by tightly constrained email/ISP filters.
It is based on blog and RSS/XML technologies, but the interface has been made simple so as to facilitate publishing good content and relieving
the writers/publishers of the burden of having to be programmers as well as good writers. Quikonnex has also developed a simple way to assist subscribers with downloading and installing a channel viewer, and subscribing to the channels which interest them, so they don't have to be rocket scientists, either.If you are interested, please take a look at this subscriber page for my friend's channel. This page will give you all the information about how the service works, as well as a chance to see a sample channel.
The main page for Quikonnex is still being tweaked.
I have a number of projects I'm juggling right now so I don't have time to dive it and check out whether their execution works, but it sounds very interesting.
John Garside said:
I took a look at this - a fairly esy RSS reader with a nice interface.
I still use Website Watcher - much more functionality and certainly not limited to RSS.
Gallup bypasses the media
Paul Grabowicz in E-Media Tidbits points to polling organizations such as Gallup circumventing the news media to get their message out directly to researchers, academics and others.
James Clifton, CEO of the Gallup Organization, said in a Q&A with MediaBistro last week: "We used to just do our polls and then hand the data over to media. ... And the media do a terrible, terrible, terrible job with polls." Absolutely true.
(Side note: Media Bistro calls him "Jim Clifton" in the headline. At one of my first jobs in newspapers, the executive editor decreed that we should never use nicknames for officials or executives because journalists shouldn't be chummy with the people we interview.)
I knew about Gallup's move into subscription services, but I didn't know about The Gallup Brain, described as "a searchable, living record of more than 60 years of public opinion. Inside, you'll find answers to more than 125,000 questions, and responses from more than 3.5 million people interviewed by The Gallup Poll since 1935."
MSNBC.com takes innovative storytelling prize
MSNBC.com's dynamic Big Picture series on Monday won the first $10,000 Grand Prize in the Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism for cutting-edge storytelling that connected users to journalism with an array of new media tools.
Top honors also went to the Chicago Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio, each awarded $2,500 as runners-up. The awards were presented at the National Press Club.
Two community media efforts, at the San Francisco Chronicle and Maine's VillageSoup.com, were rewarded with Honorable Mentions. Both engaged their audiences in new ways and celebrated local news using groundbreaking techniques.
A list of nominees is available at J-Lab.org, with more information on the prizes here and here.
September 13, 2003
September 12, 2003
Pioneers of Web journalism, part 2
Mark Glaser in OJR has part two of his roundtable with Web news pioneers, including the value of blogs, business strategies for pricing content and what professionals and consumers alike can look forward to. In the lineup today: Chris Barr, Merrill Brown, David Carlson, Glenn Fleishman, Jim Romenesko, Scott Rosenberg, Rob Malda (all of whom I know and consider friends), Doug Weaver and Dale Dougherty.
September 10, 2003
OJR on the Guardian and the recall
New in OJR:
A Q&A with Guardian UK editor in chief Emily Bell, who says the success of the Guardian Unlimited didn't happen overnight. Britain's second most popular source of online news matured through consistent investment, international word-of-mouth and a commitment to innovation.
Mark Glaser on the top sites and weblogs covering the California recall election. The election has been a multimedia circus of sniping, legal action and online organizing. With nearly a month to go until the vote, here are OJR's awards for the best online efforts so far.
Blog news: built for speed
In his latest E&P column, Steve Outing has another good read about how online newspapers can outpace TV outlets. "It's time to stop thinking of blogs mostly in the realm of feature and opinion content, and move the concept into breaking news."
September 09, 2003
API's Media Center and NDN merge
The Media Center at the American Press Institute and New Directions for News, an independent media research think tank, are combining their organizations.
September 08, 2003
Expert help sites
A year ago I wrote about expert help sites. It's time to take another look:
• Allexperts.com, the oldest and largest free Q&A service on the Internet. Ratings help you find the right expert.
• Askearth, a site created "so that people could be paid to give good-quality, in-depth answers to the really tough questions about life, business, technology and hundreds of other subjects." Post a question and indicate how much you're willing to pay for the answer. Then the service's experts send you their answers.
• The Abuzz knowledge network from the NY Times Digital. 60% of questions are answered in 4 hours and only 10% are never answered. One reviewer said they have the smartest experts and most active community.
• Google Answers: Google's expert site originally leveraged its wide user base but now relies on 500 paid experts.
• Keen.com: SF site offers advice over the phone for a fee.
• Expertcentral.com uses thousands of volunteer experts.
• Quickcomputerhelp.com and GeekHelp are different brands of the same service. Two free minutes and $2.79/minute after that. Call (toll-free) 888-733-2463. No membership needed, unlike Speak With a Geek, which requires a monthly or yearly membership.
Looks like many other expert sites have imploded or left the consumer end of the business. Here's a roll call of sites that were once on my list and now appear to be out of commission: Askme.com has turned into a company that manages employee knowledge networks; Expertcity.com has gone corporate; Yahoo Advice replaced Yahoo Experts, then was farmed out to Liveadvice, which itself has gone belly up and now forwards visitors to Keen.com; Sevant.com made computer house calls in the SF Bay Area; Aveo.com was a guide to explaining error messages, and more; Exp.com was an experts site out of Menlo Park, Calif.; Ask-a-tech.org was a site that let users submit questions and wait for responses from online experts; Epeople.com has gone corporate; Inforocket.com went kaput and forwards visitors to Keen.com.
One reason for the collapse of most expert-help sites may be the proliferation of weblogs. I can think of a dozen times where I've posted a query on my blog and received an answer without having to fork over any dough on the expert advice sites.
Don't know if readers have used any of the above sites, but if so and you'd like to share your experience, post it here.
Tracking the candidates' latest moves
Gary Price has a new item on his Resource Shelf about a new service offered by Factiva that should be of interest to journalists:
Factiva Offers (Free) "Media Visibility Index" for High-Profile California CandidatesThis is a new index that might be of interest to the many members of the media who read ResourceShelf. Access to the index is available by sending contact info to the person listed in the news release or via Business Newswire. Here are a few details:
* "...a new media visibility metric, the Factiva Index. The index provides a quantitative snapshot of the media's most widely covered people, places, events or companies within a given time frame."
* The Factiva Index launches with weekly updates tracking the print media visibility of 10 candidates in the California recall election. Each week, the Factiva Index will provide a ranking and a brief explanation of the election's high-profile candidates - including Cruz Bustamante, Gary Coleman, Mary "Mary Carey" Cook, Gray Davis, Larry Flynt, Leo Gallagher, Arianna Huffington, Tom McClintock, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Peter Ueberroth - based on individual and collective mentions in the national and local print media. The first update covers the individual candidates' national and local print media mentions during all of August.
* Future Factiva Index topics will include a monthly snapshot of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, with the first installment on October 21, 2003.
Correspondent.com goes belly up
Another content syndication site has closed: EPN shutters Correspondent.com. Which is not to be confused with the still valuable Correspondences.org.
September 05, 2003
Business Week Online closes off website
I was going to point you to a new article in Business Week Online regarding The Underground Internet: Members-only "darknets" are popping up to protect file-sharing from prying eyes.
But this week apparently Business Week Online has put up a pay firewall so that only paying subscribers to its print publication can access articles such as this. (I just registered and still can't access the article.)
Why bother to have a website at all, if that's your policy?
Kynn Bartlett said:
That's some sweet irony.
--K
anthony said:
I'm with you on this, JD. What's the point of having the website in the first place?
Sheila said:
Hey, Business Week Online is a darknet!
On Internet news design
Phil Nesbitt in the American Press Institute's Media Center: News Design: The big, bold, static past, in print, is giving way to the digital, multimedia future.
I've also added Jay Small's Sensible Internet Design to the blogroll at the right.
September 04, 2003
Online news pioneers survey landscape
Mark Glaser in OJR begins a two-part series in which online news pioneers share their thoughts on where Web journalism has been, and where it's likely to go.
I happen to disgree with Bernard Gwertzman, retired editor of the New York Times on the Web, who says sites like the Times' should begin charging subscriptions, even though that would lead to a large dropoff in readers. This, despite the fact that NY Times Digital is millions of dollars in the black.
Besides Gwertzman, Glaser sits down at a virtual roundtable with Craig Newmark, Dave Winer, John Battelle and Ana Marie Cox. Some really interesting stuff here.
Cox: ... I think what's really revolutionary about Weblogs isn't their content, but the way that Weblog software has enabled technically unsophisticated people to produce aesthetically pleasing, well-organized Web sites. This is how blogs are different from personal home pages, and why blogging software could be to online journalism what PageMaker and Quark were to magazines: It may allow blogs to have the same effect on traditional journalism as zines did. Which is to say, a few big-name blog authors will get hired by major media publications to zing up their lame output. They will then become disillusioned and leave to write extremely mannered, hugely popular memoirs based on the experience of raising their orphaned little brother. (Is Glenn Reynolds destined to become the Dave Eggers of blogging? Discuss.)Also, as it was for the short-lived zine revolution, the simplicity of the new technology has enabled some talented people without formal training to be recognized for their intelligence and wit. I am for this; the rewards of reading something great are well worth the hours of slogging though warblogs, moblogs, etc. Two of my own favorite blogs -- The Major Fall, The Minor Lift and (excuse the language) Dong Resin -- are put together by proudly unprofessional journalists. I find their content much more reliably informative and hilarious than pretty much anything published by people who get paid to do so.
And this:
OJR: What's the most exciting new development in online journalism, and why?Winer: RSS. Because it levels the field. On the same page I read reports from BBC, The New York Times and my favorite Weblogs. I'm not more impressed by Glenn Fleishman, for example, when he writes for his Weblog, or when he writes for The New York Times. It makes online journalism more competitive and it desperately needs more competition.
Drudge makes $1.2 million a year
The Miami Herald has an interview with Internet bon vivant Matt Drudge, who discloses that he makes a cool $1.2 million a year. Perhaps there's a silver lining here for amateur journalists.
As usual, Druge makes a nonsensical distinction between covering the news and journalism:
''I'm a newsman and not a journalist,'' he said in a recent interview, ''nor a cyber this or that.''
I'll confess to having mixed feelings about Drudge's success. It shows the power of the Internert and independent publishing. But Drudge is such a flawed hero for this model. He won't even tarnish himself with the epithet journalist. But the distinction between newsman and journalist is just bullshit. A newsman is a journalist. Unfortunately, Drudge has shown little interest in what a real "newsman" does for a living: pursue the truth wherever it leads.
He also derides bloggers again, though this is more understandable, because he's tired of being called a blogger (he's not):
Since his site is primarily composed of links to stories on other sites and is a Web log, commonly called a blog, how about a blogger?''Nope. Sounds too much like booger,'' he said.
Drudge is still dismissed in mainstream news circles, but he remains a force in Internet news. On a typical day in August, Drudge's site had nearly 6.5 million visitors, and it had 163 million in the preceding 31 days.
Steve Rhodes said:
I question Drudge's numbers. First those are almost certainly page views, not visitors. Second, his site automatically refreshes if you have the page open for about five minutes (it just refreshed for me - still showing the same crappy AT&T ad).
And people basically come to the site because it is a collection of usefull links. If I want to go to a site with a URL that isn't simple to type like Ain't It Cool News or to read Roger Ebert, i just go to Drudge. And he sometimes has links to interesting articles (though none currently).
Still, he does have an audience and needs more scrutiny. When he does have "scoops" they are usually just articles from the next day's paper (which you can sometimes already find online). This is just one recent error.
September 03, 2003
Locking up content
Doc Searls, who subscribes to Business 2.0 magazine, can't log onto its web site. (Hey Doc, this free pass works: Go to this page, then enter this code in the subscription label field: 079751240X). Also, hasn't Biz2 ever heard of cookies? It bothers me majorly that I have to log on every time I want to access an article. Here's Doc's bottom line:
I'll say once again, to all the publishing folks who refuse to listen (and they are legion), What little you gain in subsriber leverage and sales of old articles by putting your "content" behind a costwall is far more than offset by lost authority. When none of your stuff can be found on the Web ó either by search engine crawlers or by the countless writers who are denied the chance to link to your good stuff, you fail to exist in the largest and most vital business environment civilization has ever known. Links are what make the Web a web. Preventing them is the height of folly.
Internet news likely to grow in influence
Gary Price of The Resource Shelf points us to a new whitepaper on First Monday by An Nguyen, a journalist from Vietnam: "The current status and potential development of online news consumption: A structural approach. Abstract: In reviewing the current pattern of online news consumption across the globe and modelling major structural factors influencing this adoption, the author argues that the Internet, already a very important source of news, will become a major news medium in the years ahead."
Michael Powell on the future of online media
In OJR, Staci Kramer has a Q&A with FCC chairman Michael Powell about the future of online media.
August 30, 2003
How Arnold's indiscretions made news
LA Observed has the back story of how Arnold Schwarzennger's indiscretions when he was 29, detailed in Oui magazine, bubbled up to the mainsteam media
John Garside said:
Matt Welch has cast bunches of aspersions on this: http://www.mattwelch.com/warblog.html
August 29, 2003
Google News gaining ratings respect
Mark Glaser in OJR: Google News draws more than 3 million unique visitors a month, but Nielsen and Media Metrix have excluded them from news site rankings. Now both say they are looking into ranking them with the other top news outlets.
Google News is not ranked in Nielsen//NetRatings' Current Events category along with other top media sites, such as CNN.com and MSNBC.com, and it isn't in comScore Media Metrix's General News category for July 2003. A recent Reuters report on aggregators noted Google News' omission but posited that it was because Google News doesn't have an original reporting staff -- something missing at Yahoo News and AOL News, too, though they are in both rankings. ...
I'm all for adding Google News to the net ratings services, but let's point out that Yahoo News and AOL News both have editors and editorial staffs, while Google News does not.
the head lemur said:
Tracking Google would be a slap in the face for the guys who buy these reports that you can get elsewhere(i.e. Netcraft,etc.) and a big hit in the pocketbook of Nielson/Media Metrix as they are not buying ratings to compare with other news outlets.
The fact that they are considering it is a positive for the web overall. It also points to news sites having to confront the connected nature of the web, hopefully as you point out, the staffs of writers and editors actually producing content rather than paraphrasing feeds from AP or Reuters.
The fact of Google's not having editors makes it a goldmine of direction in consideration of news, bias and paraphrasers in delivery of content.
Note that all one's personal biases apply.
Mark Glaser said:
JD, to clarify: The Reuters report said that Google News wasn't included in the ratings because they "don't have reporters producing stories." I would say the same about Yahoo and AOL. They have editors and producers but no reporters that I know of. But both have been in the ratings forever.
And the real reason Google News wasn't in the ratings was that both services didn't classify them as being a news site. It's a very arbitrary system, with input from clients and the media (for some reason).
The funny thing is I had no idea that Google News' traffic was such a deep secret. Both ratings companies gave me their traffic numbers with no qualms.
Mark
August 28, 2003
The BBC's digital revelation
Guardian UK: The BBC's director-general announced plans this week to embrace Napster-style file sharing to make its archives free for license payers.
August 27, 2003
CNN.com expands e-mail services
OK, I don't get this. CNET's News.com carried a story about CNN.com offering a new suite of e-mail alerts, and E-Media Tidbits today says that CNN.com's new service "allows people to pick news by subject and choose how frequently they receive the alerts." But the only subject e-mails I see on that page are weekly e-mails by topic, and those can't truly be called alerts.
John Garside said:
Tara's got some stuff on this: http://www.researchbuzz.com/news/2003/aug28sep303.shtml
August 26, 2003
The Onion is no joke
Business 2.0 investigates how the jokemeisters at the Onion have managed to build a serious business with its combination of sardonic, topical humor and diversified media model. Thanks to a management philosophy which owes more to its cheapskate alt-weekly roots than to go-go dotcom thinking, the Onionís annual revenues are now $7 million. Subscription or registration required to access the article.
August 25, 2003
BBC opening its archives to public
This is pretty interesting, and goes against the trend of subscriptions, walled-off archives and for-pay services: The BBC plans to open its full content archives -- television and radio, not just online -- to the public for free. PaidContent.org has the item here, as well as the full text of the speech Sunday by BBC director general Greg Dyke, who said, "I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion."
The BBC can afford to stake out that turf, as a public-funded entity, but other media outlets should take note. E-Media Tidbits weighs in as well.
Internet catches a wider segment of public views
The Florida News-Press: Local talk radio was once the public forum of choice, but many listeners are now turning to websites to express their opinions and exchange ideas. Excerpt:
Southwest Florida residents who used to air their grievances against local government on the radio airwaves have moved their forum to the Internet.Local talk radio used to be the forum of choice, but former listeners and some civic activists say Web sites provide a more democratic forum to express their frustrations and exchange ideas.
Two Web sites launched this summer with the intent to provide local residents that forum with even greater anonymity than radio.
SpeakOutSWFLA.com launched three weeks ago. FloridaSOUNDOFF.com launched in June. ...
Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.
Drudge on Internet news' credibility
IWantMedia has a new feature, One Question, in which a single question is posed to a media person. Today, Matt Drudge responds -- sort of -- to the question:
Do Internet sites such as Drudge Report contribute to a loss of public confidence in journalism?
August 22, 2003
Top news sites and directories
Rich Gordon pulled together data from Nielsen/NetRatings to create this chart of the top news sites and directories/local guides. He explains what he did in today's E-Media Tidbits.
August 21, 2003
A showcase for interactive journalism
Updated: A new site, Interactive Narratives, seeks to become a portal for the best interactive journalism on the Web, founded by Andrew DeVigal, professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. dotJournalism has the story.
Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.
Backpack journalism and moblogs
Speaking of Steve Outing, he has an interesting item in today's E-Media Tidbits:
Via Picturephoning.com, today I learned about the latest "moblog" (mobile weblog) service, mlogs. This one is nice, in that you can create your own weblog and use your mobile photo phone not only to send pictures from anywhere and have them post immediately to the web, but you also can use the phone to send in a text message or record a voice clip that attaches to an online photo. Nice.What I wonder (and I wonder about this frequently) is why the majority of news organizations don't pick up on innovative ideas like this sooner. I'll bet that in a year, journalists will be doing plenty of moblogging. But where are the audio-enhanced news moblogs (and I don't mean personal stuff) done by professional journalists? Hey, reporters and editors: You can create some great content with this new technology. There are thousands of possibilities, but here's one to get your minds around this concept: A sports reporter covering a golf tournament carrying a photo cell-phone snaps pictures while walking the course, sending them in along with a voice explanation of each photo. This rolling, live-coverage weblog would be a dynamite piece of content for a sport-news site. Why, I have to ask, is this sort of innovation left primarily to the hobbyists? Why don't more professional journalists jump on this idea now instead of waiting till the trend is old news?
I'm not so sure that we'll see lots of journalists moblogging a year from now -- never underestimate the power of inertia in the newspaper industry -- though a few enterprising early adopters will no doubt break from the pack and begin experimenting. This packs the idea of backpack journalism into one little device.
August 20, 2003
News sites slow to acknowledge errors
Mark Glaser in OJR: Newspaper Sites Are Slow to Fix Their Online Corrections Policies. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, papers should take advantage of their Web sites to improve reader interaction and make it easier to report errors.
August 19, 2003
10 Quick Steps
This from the TidBITS email newsletter:
Radio host David Lawrence (of Online Tonight and the new David Lawrence Show) has started a series of ebooks that he calls the 10 Quick Steps Guides. Each $10 guide follows a 10-step format that provides either a process or tips for accomplishing the task at hand. In an unusual twist, the 10 Quick Steps Guides are available both in PDF (formatted for reading onscreen) and in MP3 format for listening.<http://www.10quicksteps.com/>
Lawrence has written two 10 Quick Steps Guides, one on avoiding spam that offers a series of interconnected strategies for getting spam out
of your face, and another on how to make a Wi-Fi connection, using the information I gathered when writing The Wireless Networking Starter Kit.<http://www.10quicksteps.com/spam/>
<http://www.10quicksteps.com/wifi/>
<http://wireless-starter-kit.com/>
A nice idea for those who prefer a simple how-to guide.
Pay what it's worth to you
Peter Zollman at E-Media Tidbits points to a post-pricing concept introduced today on PaidContent.org, Rafat Ali's blog. Writes Peter: "It's an interesting concept that he describes as 'shareware-meets-EBay-with-a-dash-of-Priceline.' Essentially, you read or download something first -- articles, news, music, games -- and then decide to pay what you thought it was http://www.paidcontent.org/stories/postpricing1.shtmlworth. It could work. I've recently started reviewing micro-payment systems again for some client research, and this is an interesting variation thereon. You'd have to sign up first, so no random downloads by mickey@goofy.com would work."
This isn't a new concept, and someone must have tried this before -- so I'm not sure whether a patent is warranted in this case -- but it's a formula that seems well suited for amateur publishers on the Web. Fancy graphics aside, it strikes me as a sort of fancy tip jar.
August 15, 2003
Blackout links
Gothamist publishes a New York City Blackout Edition. NJ.com is publishing a Blackout Blog. Reuters has a blackout slide show. Fotolog is on the spot. (TakeTwo and Wolfey have some terrific shots.) And Amy Langfield has loads o' blackout links.
The One True b!X's PORTLAND COMMUNIQUE said:
Technically, as far as I know, it wasn't NJ.com so much as Advance Internet, the company which facilitates the websites of several newspapers across the country, including that of The Oregonian here in Portland. All of those sites went down due to Advance getting hit by the blackout.
More interesting, as I detailed yesterday, is that each site Advance handles was given a stopgap weblog, hosted on Blogspot, to which stories from the newspaper in question and relevant AP stories were posted in the interim.
LA Times walls off its entertainment section
Mark Glaser in OJR: The L.A. Times is hoping the time is right to monetize niche content. On August 4, LATimes.com walled off the online entertainment section, Calendarlive.com. Now people who don't subscribe to the paper will have to pay $4.95 a month, or $39.95 a year, to access Calendarlive.
What a terrible idea.
August 14, 2003
News sites and online communities
New in OJR: News Sites Still Figuring Out What to Do With Online Communities.
August 13, 2003
CBSNews.com comes late to online news game
Mark Glaser in OJR: CBS News' site undergoes reorganization and a redesign and wins two awards. Now its director of news and operations is setting his sights on getting more traffic.
Well, they've still got some catching up to do. I didn't even know they had a serious online news presence. I'll tell you this much: The site doesn't impress me, and I won't be back until it's redesigned and beefed up again.
Fuller, Sullivan to speak at ONA
Jack Fuller, President of Tribune Publishing Company, and Andrew Sullivan, social and political commentator and former editor of The New Republic magazine, will be the keynote speakers for the Fourth Annual Online News Association Conference and Awards Banquet. The conference will be held Nov. 14-15, 2003, in Chicago.
Fuller, who is the author of ìNews Values: Ideas for an Information Age,î will open the conference on Friday. Sullivan, now a senior editor at The New Republic and blogger for andrewsullivan.com, will speak during a luncheon on Saturday.
Early-bird registration is available until Sept. 12. I won't be attending this year.
August 12, 2003
Betting on the news
Newsweek has a Web exclusive that looks as Newsfutures.com -- that's right, a site (with 15,000 active users) where gamblers bet on the news. Last week, virtual speculators correctly wagered that John Poindexter would resign. This week, theyíre predicting that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be Californiaís next governor. How accurate are their predictions? Is this the future of interactive news?
God, let's hope not.
6 degrees of separation: True or not?
The NY Times reports on the research done by Columbia University researchers on the six degrees of separation theory.
I was contacted by someone involved with the Columbia study last weekend, and passed on the e-mail to Susan Mernit, who knew the party in question. So for us, at least, it worked.
marcoS said:
I think that, just by carefully reading the paper recently published on Science, the theory of six degrees of separation is far from being proved.
It is a interesting conjecture, but at the moment to me it is just a hypothesis that became an axioma because we would like to live in a world where this theory is true.
I' ve tried to summarise some ideas on this theory on my blog, but I usually wrote in Italian.
If someone is interested, I can try a translation.
Joe said:
well it works for most actors and actresses via the Oracle of Bacon... there are very very few (~100 out of 600K) with more than six degrees of separation.
The Power Vacuum: More news from the right
Discovered on Slashdot: The Power Vacuum, which the editor (he goes by RootPimp on /.) calls "a slash site that provides political news and conservative analysis." It's a community news and commentary site in the mold of Slashdot.
August 11, 2003
News burnout -- or saturation?
USC online journalism director Larry Pryor (who's on sabattical) had the same reaction I did to today's NY Times story by Jim Rutenberg: Suffering News Burnout? Rest of America Is, Too. Writes Larry on the online-news list:
[The story] notes that "the total evening news audience on the broadcast news networks has been lower this summer than it was during the summer of 2001." It uses a bunch of media and ad executives to reach the conclusion that "people are probably just taking a breath and saying, 'O.K., that's enough news for a while.'"He makes no effort to look at alternate explanations [such as] competition from other forms of electronic media. Instead of news burnout, it could well be online news satisfaction. Who needs the evening news?
John Engler said:
JD, while I like the idea that people aren't watching the evening news because they might be getting their news from other electronic sources, I'd like to see more data pointing to this rather than just suppose that it's true...
if you find anything useful, let us know.
JD Lasica said:
Good point, and will do. I think Larry and I are merely suggesting that because news consumption in one medium is down, it doesn't mean that news consumption across the board is down.
Jennifer Martinez said:
My .02, not that anyone asked, is we don't watch the news on TV in my home. I did have FOX News on day and night when the war was being broadcasted some months ago, but other than that, I get the news online. There's simply no point waiting on a specific time to get news when you have a computer. Another plus is not having to sit through commercials. Being able to seek out and find the news I WANT, vs. what some one else chooses to let me see. I could go on and on...
August 09, 2003
Photoshop gone awry
BoingBoing pointed on Thursday to this New York Times on the Web photo out of Iraq. Check out the car's front bumper.
A pretty, er, pointed mistake, which they haven't fixed yet.
August 07, 2003
Photojournalism and news sites
Just going up on OJR: Mark Glaser takes a look at news sites making greater use of still photography.
I wrote a related piece about photojournalism for OJR on the day the Iraq war began.
NYT News Tracker hits 20,000 subsribers
NYTimes.com announced today that it has surpassed the 20,000 subscriber mark for its paid News Tracker e-mail notification service. Times News Tracker is a personalized service that enables readers to follow coverage in The New York Times on specific topics that interest them.
No word on how many hundreds of thousands of readers abandoned News Tracker when it went to a pay-subscription model in June.
Paul Murray said:
Yahoo's is still free, and now Google has one too (http://www.google.com/newsalerts). Given that, is it worth paying for the NYT version? I guess I'm skeptical, but I never used the NYT one myself.
August 06, 2003
Ken Sands predicts you'll be blogging, too
In the latest E&P, Ken Sands, head of new media at the Spokane Spokesman Review (where he has helped introduce several blogs), answers five questions on the subject of newspaper weblogs.