E-Media Tidbits

• Fark, USA Today Deal Demonstrates Aggregation's Value in Link Economy

  RELATED
  Frat House Meets Debate Club When It's News and It's Fark A recent deal between a heavyweight newspaper Web site and a [...]
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  Posted: December 04, 2009, 1:22pm EST
  

• Price Tag for WSJ.com in Microsoft-Murdoch Deal Could be $8 Million Annually

  Everyone and their uncle, it seems, is weighing in on News Corp.'s reported talks with Microsoft to block Google from searching its sites and give the privilege to Microsoft's Bing' [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 1:20pm EST
  

• Knight News Challenge Reaches Out to Tech, Business Communities with Extended Deadline

  With two weeks left in an unexpectedly late deadline, the 2010 Knight News Challenge is still looking for a few (thousand) good ideas to help save journalism.

  The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, sponsor of the 5-year contest which awards up to [...]

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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 10:56am EST
  

• Power Struggles over Converged Newsrooms May Diminish Value of Web Sites

  When I heard that The Washington Post had let go two well-known video journalists, Steve Yelvington's tweet summed up my initial reaction: "WP online layoffs are sad and self-defeating, a step backward as printies seize power."

  While the Post isn't officially talking about individuals affected, I've confirmed that Travis' [...]

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  Posted: November 27, 2009, 2:10pm EST
  

• News Orgs Starting to Compete More with Marketers for Dollars, Audiences

  In marketing, executives talk of spending "above the line" and "below the line." Above the line is traditional advertising -- ads placed in publications and on TV, radio, Web sites and the like. Below the line relates to other ways that a product, brand or company message might reach a [...]
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  Posted: November 24, 2009, 2:27pm EST
  

• How Demand Media's Business Model Can be Applied to Niche Sites

  Demand Media has advertising-driven content down to a science. Instead of creating content for the Web and hoping that it generates revenue, the company works backwards by determining how much revenue each piece will generate before anything is produced.
  
  The company uses a series of algorithms to pick through keywords [...]
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  Posted: November 23, 2009, 8:57am EST
  

• Testing CUNY's New Business Models with Adjusted Assumptions

  Amid the rhetoric over how to support the business of journalism, the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism has taken a plunge by creating models of what a news network on the Web might look like with hard, if optimistic, numbers.
  
  Broad and multi-tiered spreadsheets filled' [...]
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  Posted: November 19, 2009, 10:29am EST
  

• Don't Give Up on Online Video Yet

  Poor video. For a while, he was the hot boyfriend of the online world. His buddy, pre-roll advertising, was touted as the way to save the industry. Now, like a guy who dumped us, people are trashing-talking video content on news sites and telling all their girlfriends that [...]

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  Posted: November 18, 2009, 6:34am EST
  

• CUNY Conference Shows Journalists Must Understand Business

  What a chasm to overcome. One journalist tweeted that the financial spreadsheets being shown were overwhelming, that "I don't do numbers." Someone else in the room quipped that business isn't as much fun as journalism. A third admitted, while watching a spreadsheet presentation, that he didn't' [...]
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  Posted: November 13, 2009, 6:02am EST
  

• Google Latitude Adds Features with Potential for Journalists

  Google Latitude, a service that works with your mobile phone to enable people to see where you are, has launched 2 new services with interesting potential for mobile journalism: Location History and Location Alerts.
  
  
  
  [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 2:14pm EST
  

• News Sites Must Use Alerts and Tools to Help Readers Find Content

  I used to cover tennis, was in the stands as Andre Agassi teared up after his final tennis match as a pro, and can be a bit of a fanatic about the sport. So when I learned recently that The Times newspaper in the U.K. was going to carry excerpts [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 10:24am EST
  

• Fort Hood Shooting Shows How Twitter, Lists Can be Used for Breaking News

  RELATED
  "Covering the Fort Hood Shootings, A Day Later," Al Tompkins  Days after Twitter Lists were introduced to the public, the shootings [...]
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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 2:22pm EST
  

• New Hampshire Suit Challenges Mortgage Blogger's Use of Anonymous Sources

  The New Hampshire Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit that calls into question the legal protections available to independent Web sites that cover news.
  
  The case involves mortgage lender Implode-Explode, a Las Vegas-based site launched in 2007 that publishes stories about the meltdown of the mortgage industry. The [...]
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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 12:30pm EST
  

• How The New York Times, Others Are Experimenting with Augmented Reality

  Journalists and publishers are exploring ways to use the emerging technology known as Augmented Reality in their work.
  
  Augmented Reality, or AR, is "layering digital information onto the physical world," in the words of New York Times Creative Technologist Michael Young. The most common AR apps today live on "smart" handheld [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 1:15pm EST
  

• New Google Analytics Tools Make it Easier for News Orgs to Track Metrics

  Just in time for the holidays, Google has announced some potentially valuable new additions to its free Web metrics suite, Google Analytics.
  
  Among the highlights: better metrics from mobile devices, more flexible goal setting and tracking, automated and custom metric alerts and more precise tracking of individual visitor behavior.
  
  The new [...]
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  Posted: November 02, 2009, 5:05pm EST
  

• How Journalists Can Use Twitter Lists to Customize, Discover and Curate

  Journalists, take note: Twitter is about to introduce a highly anticipated feature that will add a whole new experience to the social networking service. As early as this week, Twitter Lists will be introduced to the general public. They're now available only to a select group of beta users.' [...]
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  Posted: October 29, 2009, 9:07am EDT
  

• Online Publishers Should Watch Looming Battle over Online Privacy

  There's a freight train in Congress heading toward the Web that isn't getting a lot of attention in newsrooms, though it could have a huge effect on their ability to support themselves online.
  
  U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher (a Democrat from Virginia) is proposing legislation that could be introduced in the [...]
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  Posted: October 23, 2009, 3:43pm EDT
  

• Pew Survey on Twitter Users Suggests News Strategies

  As news organizations develop social media strategies, there's some interesting news from the Pew Internet & American Life Project with the release of a new report on Twitter and similar sites. The report shows a significant increase in status-update services among younger and mobile Internet users. It also' [...]
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  Posted: October 21, 2009, 5:20pm EDT
  

• High Cost, Low Quality Plague Newspaper Video Efforts

  Last week's demise of 702.tv in Las Vegas generated a lot of discussion about the quality and cost of newspaper Web site video. The jury's still out, but the verdict is not looking good.

  "I've never seen a newspaper-produced TV show on the Web that has ever been successful,"' [...]

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  Posted: October 20, 2009, 10:22am EDT
  

• News Orgs Make Gradual Progress in Site Navigation, Use of Social Networks

  Ask any news Web site manager about their site's current design (and state of continual redesign) and the desire to "simplify" is likely high on the wish list. Also near the top: making better use of social networking tools.
   
  Several recently unveiled redesigns show progress in both areas. First, though, a' [...]
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  Posted: October 16, 2009, 10:30am EDT
  

• What Journalists Can Learn from Gawker Network's "Dark Facebook"

  Nick Denton on Thursday revealed that his Gawker network of blogs is going to allow people to tag their comments so that related ones can be automatically sorted and appear together.
  
  Let's say you want to say something about Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour. You simply write' [...]
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  Posted: October 16, 2009, 8:41am EDT
  

• Vegas Newspaper Pulls Plug on 702.tv After Four Months

  In late June, Greenspun Interactive, the new media division of the company that publishes the Las Vegas Sun, launched a video Web site named 702.tv after the Las Vegas area code. The project, described as "a Las Vegas-based news and entertainment video Web site and television program," has [...]
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  Posted: October 15, 2009, 8:46am EDT
  

• The Unheralded, Beneficial Effects of Selling Online Content

  The debate over whether to charge for content is sometimes portrayed as an "either-or" discussion. Either you provide your content for free or you charge for it.
  
  Others talk of a "freemium" model in which 90-95 percent of users consume what you provide without paying for the privilege, but the [...]
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  Posted: October 13, 2009, 2:01pm EDT
  

• How Integrated Web-Sharing Tools Can Enhance, or Hinder, a User's Experience

  Sometimes relatively simple changes in site functionality make dramatic differences. Take, for instance, the Twitter-interface functionality at my two favorite newspaper Web sites, nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com.
   
  On nytimes.com, the share tools appear just to the right of the headline of the story -- very easy to find. When you [...]
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  Posted: October 12, 2009, 12:53pm EDT
  

• Restore Credibility in Online Ads by Targeting Bottom-Feeders of the Link Economy

  The overwhelmingly upbeat conversations from the recent meeting of the Online News Association haven't stopped even though the conference attendees have returned home from San Francisco. Of course, this is a group that has been chatting with each other one way or another since the early days when' [...]
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  Posted: October 07, 2009, 2:52pm EDT
  

• Journalism Online: Not Just a Pay Wall

  In the continued froth over paid vs. free models to support news organizations, the startup Journalism Online has taken a lot of heat before it even launches. Much of the reporting on the venture has been incomplete or has missed the nuances, and other details have gone unreported [...]
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  Posted: October 05, 2009, 1:53pm EDT
  

• Advertisers, Journalists Share Ideas about Need for Transparency, Truth & Authenticity

  As someone who's immersed in both journalism and advertising, I get to see how these two fields diverge and, increasingly, overlap.
  
  So it was with great interest last week that I went to the annual Advertising Week conference in New York City, where top executives at companies such as' [...]
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  Posted: October 02, 2009, 10:30am EDT
  

• Ad Week Conference Sparks Talk about Augmented Reality, Google Translation Engine

  During the course of the Advertising Week conference, a number of technologies were displayed and touted as new vehicles for marketing and communication. Though the conference was geared toward marketers, the tools presented there are just as applicable to journalists. Here's a small sampling of them:
  
  Augmented Reality is often [...]
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  Posted: October 02, 2009, 10:25am EDT
  

• BlackBerry or iPhone: Which is Better for Journalists?

  Earlier this week we told you about the 10 best journalistic apps on the BlackBerry and iPhone, now it's time to examine which is the better device for journalists.
  
  As you might expect, the answer really depends on the nature of your job. And with so many new' [...]
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  Posted: October 01, 2009, 6:15am EDT
  

• Washington Post's 'Post Alert' Offers Breaking News, Special Projects Updates to Users

  The Washington Post has released a site-wide notification system that delivers notices on breaking news and special reports to users of the Web site.
  
  Steven King, who is overseeing the project, told me in a phone interview that editors at the Post can choose to promote stories site-wide or within [...]
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  Posted: September 30, 2009, 3:37pm EDT
  

• 10 Best iPhone Apps for Journalists

  With more than 85,000 applications available for download, Apple's iPhone is a Swiss Army-like device for journalists to communicate, produce and consume media from wherever they are.
  
  As the commercials suggest, there really is an app for almost everything, even for specialized beats or topics. If you're a TV meteorologist, there's' [...]
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  Posted: September 30, 2009, 11:51am EDT
  

• 10 Best BlackBerry Apps, Features for Journalists

  The BlackBerry has long been the smart phone of choice for many newsrooms, particularly for large news organizations.
  
  COMING NEXT
  Wednesday: 10 iPhone Apps for Journalists
  
  Thursday: "iPhone or BlackBerry --" [...]
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  Posted: September 29, 2009, 11:06am EDT
  

• Google's SideWiki Distributes Conversation about News

  This week, Google announced the launch of SideWiki, a browser add-on that allows users to annotate Web pages with their own insights. "Wiki" is a misnomer; the tool doesn't let you edit content, only add to it. In practice, as others have noted, it resembles a comment thread' [...]

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  Posted: September 25, 2009, 1:29pm EDT
  

• Peeking at the Near Future of 'Out of Home' Technology

  Last week, I stood in front of an advertising billboard that recognized my gender, another that recognized my movements, and others that asked me to touch them, text them or otherwise interact, and offered everything from drink recipes to music and 50 percent-off coupons texted to my phone.
  
  The giant [...]
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  Posted: September 21, 2009, 1:00pm EDT
  

• 'Apps For America' Shows Innovative Ways to Display Government Data

  The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to greater government openness and transparency via the Internet, recently announced the winners of the "Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge" development contest. There is a lot to learn from the winners: Datamasher, GovPulse and ThisWeKnow.
  
  News organizations have [...]
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  Posted: September 21, 2009, 12:18am EDT
  

• Can Journalists Entrust their Data to Google?

  In one of its earliest SEC filings, Google's founders wrote an unusual letter saying one of the corporation's key tenets is: "Don't be evil" and to do "good things for the world." But it's not always easy to do good while following the law.
  
  The company has come under renewed [...]
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  Posted: September 15, 2009, 6:18pm EDT
  

• NASA's Spacebook Offers Lessons for Newsroom Collaboration

  NASA launched its own social network, Spacebook, earlier this year in an attempt to increase interaction among employees and foster more group collaboration. The network, which I describe in detail below, offers several lessons for how news organizations can embrace social media technology to develop a more open and collaborative [...]
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  Posted: September 14, 2009, 3:36pm EDT
  

• News Industry Must Innovate Marketing as Much as Journalism

  While it's heartening to see news executives grappling with how to make money from journalism and ensure the survival of the profession, I am sometimes left with the impression (no pun) that news people are working on business models that lag the way marketing is moving. For just as journalists' [...]
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  Posted: September 11, 2009, 12:48pm EDT
  

• Multimedia Magazine 'FLYP' Finds New Ways to Tell Stories Online

  There is no silver bullet for a journalism revenue stream or the struggle to reinvent storytelling for the Web. But there are fragments of a bullet that we can piece together.
  
  Jim Gaines, editor in chief of FLYP, an online magazine that combines traditional reporting and writing with animation, [...]
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  Posted: September 03, 2009, 1:29am EDT
  

• How to Develop the Facebook Strategy You Need

  You already know why news organizations need a Facebook strategy. Here's how that strategy works for some news sites and could meet your social media goals.
  

  The tech news and information site CNET.com, for example, "wants it to be as easy as possible to engage with our content and'" [...]

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  Posted: August 31, 2009, 6:59am EDT
  

• Top Five Tidbits in August

  In case you missed them earlier this month, these are the top five stories viewed in E-Media Tidbits in August:
  How Journalists Can Use Google Voice to Improve Their Reporting by Etan HorowitzWhy News Organizations Need a Facebook Strategy by Dorian BenkoilAmy Gahran Leaves Tidbits, with [...]
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  Posted: August 31, 2009, 6:47am EDT
  

• 20 Media Panels Journalists Should Vote to See

  Last week, the organizers of the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas opened up the voting for panels and presentations at next year's conference.
  
  Unlike most digital media conferences, South by Southwest, or SXSW, chooses its programming in a pretty democratic way. After soliciting suggestions a few [...]
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  Posted: August 25, 2009, 2:30pm EDT
  

• News Organizations, Bloggers Turn to 'List Journalism' to Drive Web Traffic

  Time.com has released its 2009 edition of the 50 Best Web Sites of 2009, even though we are not even through the third quarter of the year. (Sorry late bloomer startups!)
  
  The list is an interesting blend: Web services, platforms and tools, such as Flickr, Delicious and Twitter, dominate the [...]
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  Posted: August 24, 2009, 3:29pm EDT
  

• Geotagged Tweets Offer Promise and Peril for News

  Long awaited by many and feared by some, Twitter has announced that it will soon offer a geotagging service. Once it goes live, your tweet can be sent with the latitude and longitude of your GPS-capable transmitting device.
  The potential for journalism and crowdsourcing is significant, as The [...]
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  Posted: August 21, 2009, 3:11pm EDT
  

• Aspen FOCAS Reminds 'Information Also Wants to Be Expensive'

  Free or paid? Ads or subscription? And what about e-commerce? Everyone in the news business -- and many who aren't -- knows of the storm over how and whether news organizations can support themselves. One thing is clear: the people studying the models and trying to use them believe there' [...]

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  Posted: August 18, 2009, 4:01pm EDT
  

• Journalism Schools Introduce New Degrees Focused on Future

  A university in the United Kingdom is leading the way in 21st-century journalism education.

  Birmingham City University has added several master's degrees starting this school year.

  New degrees at the Birmingham School of Media are in:

  Creative Industries and Cultural Policy Freelance PhotographyFreelancing and Journalism EnterpriseOnline Journalism Social Media

  Next year, the university' [...]

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  Posted: August 18, 2009, 12:03pm EDT
  

• Why News Organizations Need a Facebook Strategy

  As Facebook ramps up its offerings and takes on both Twitter and Google, you may need a hefty presence there to capture an audience you might not easily reach other ways. The hugely popular and still growing social networking site this week made three big advances, interpreted as steps in [...]

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  Posted: August 14, 2009, 12:48pm EDT
  

• Birmingham Post Reaps Benefits of Responding to User Comments

  Newspapers are often criticized if they misattribute a quote or fail to acknowledge and credit the work of bloggers and members of the public when reporting a story.
  
  It was refreshing, then, to see my local newspaper quickly amended online reports following a corrective comment. Even more interesting was seeing [...]
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  Posted: August 13, 2009, 1:52pm EDT
  

• Amazon's E-Book Deletions Point to Digital Future of Book Banning

  Farhad Manjoo recently wrote a provocative piece for Slate that was pegged to Amazon deleting George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "Animal Farm" from customers' Kindles. It's not the first time Amazon has had to remove books because the Kindle versions of them were illegal.
  
  In his' [...]
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  Posted: August 12, 2009, 11:28am EDT
  

• Tr.im's Shutdown Shows Risk of Relying on Free Services to Drive Web Traffic

  Editor's note: This blog post was written and published before Tr.im announced that it had been restored. For more background, visit Tr.im's Web site.
  
  This week's demise of URL shortener tr.im may come as a bit of a needed wake-up call to bloggers and news Web' [...]
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  Posted: August 11, 2009, 11:19am EDT
  

• ESPN Looks to Create More Local Sports Sites

  Quickly after ESPN's successful launch of ESPNChicago.com, the multi-platform sports giant is planning to expand to the New York, Los Angeles and Dallas markets by playing off its large brand, network of content, news wires and a local team of reporters and bloggers.
  
  ESPNChicago.com currently reports on the city's [...]
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  Posted: August 11, 2009, 9:43am EDT
  

• Apple's Rejection of Google Voice App Points to Competition on Mobile Web

  The blogosphere was almost giddy with delight last week at the spectacle of Apple, AT&T and Google getting into a dispute over net neutrality.
  
  In truth it is the Federal Communications Commission picking the fight, which centers on a single iPhone application. Aggressive action [...]
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  Posted: August 10, 2009, 12:01pm EDT
  

• How Journalists Can Use Google Voice to Improve Their Reporting

  Even with e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and other tools, phones are still the primary reporting tool for many journalists.
  
  But with the exception of cell phones, reporting by phone today looks a lot like it did 20 years ago. And if the phones in your newsroom work anything like the ones [...]
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  Posted: August 10, 2009, 7:34am EDT
  

• Amy Gahran Leaves Tidbits, with Gratitude and an Apology

  After a long run with E-Media Tidbits, including several years as editor and wrangler for our great team of contributors, this is my final regular post on Tidbits. I'm moving on. I may contribute occasional Tidbits posts in the future, but for now I need to put this considerable chunk' [...]
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  Posted: August 07, 2009, 11:08am EDT
  

• How AP's News Registry Will (and Won't) Work

  The Associated Press's announcement of a news registry to "track and tag all AP content" to "assure compliance with terms of use" has stirred a lot of discussion. From techies to journalists, it's unclear how the registry will work, whether it will do what AP claims, and how it [...]
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  Posted: August 07, 2009, 7:36am EDT
  

• What If News Organizations Had Their Own Gawker-Like Sites?

  Doug Fisher, a journalism instructor at the University of South Carolina, shared a constructive and unconventional idea this week amid the furor over Ira Shapira's Aug. 2 Washington Post column in which Shapira bemoaned how Gawker had excerpted his July 9 article.
  
  

  Fisher wrote on his "Common" [...]

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  Posted: August 06, 2009, 12:22pm EDT
  

• Sunlight Foundation Uses Data Visualizations, Sharing Tools to Maximize Research Mileage

  One of the reasons health care reform has been so difficult to implement in the U.S. is the lobbying power that health insurance companies hold with Congress.
  
  The Sunlight Foundation recently began publishing a series of data visualizations that clarify the nature and power of those relationships.
  
  

  Here's how [...]

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  Posted: August 05, 2009, 11:13am EDT
  

• Athletes Use Twitter to Break Sports News, Media Try to Keep Up

  Twitter has had many "jump-the-shark" moments in the past year (think Ashton Kutcher v.s. CNN), but nothing says mainstream popularity like your favorite NFL player tweeting from training camp, and members of the national media reporting on it.
  
  "Had a six inch Sub for lunch and now I'm headed back'" [...]
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  Posted: August 04, 2009, 2:54pm EDT
  

• Google & YouTube 3-D Features Have Potential to Advance Multimedia Storytelling

  Chris Crum at Web Pro News recently pointed out an interesting YouTube experiment: creating stereoscopic video, or what's traditionally known as "3-D video," using the popular video provider.
  Crum wrote:
  
  "Today the CitizenTube Blog points to what it says [...]
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  Posted: August 04, 2009, 10:10am EDT
  

• Rice University Research Team Helps Make Sense of Housing Crisis Data

  Much of the housing crisis story comes down to numbers, but getting stories from data is often a messy and difficult process.
  
  A Rice University research group is working to make this task easier. Hadley Wickham, assistant professor of statistics at Rice University, wrote last week on the "Flowing" [...]
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  Posted: August 03, 2009, 10:25am EDT
  

• CrunchPad Touch Tablet Could Launch in November

  While the Web rumor mill has been buzzing over the Apple Touch Tablet (which Apple still has yet to discuss or show publicly), entrepreneur and founder of TechCrunch.com, Michael Arrington, has been busy building his own touch tablet called The CrunchPad.
  
  This new device, set to launch in [...]
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  Posted: July 31, 2009, 4:46pm EDT
  

• Ideas for How to Make Commenting Systems Work Better

  Many journalists complain that comment threads to their news stories represent the worst of online media. But it doesn't have to be that way.
  
  Check out this public conversation on the nature, role and tenor of online comments happening in the comment thread for "Why Comments Matter," a July' [...]
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  Posted: July 30, 2009, 12:50pm EDT
  

• Business Insider Looks at How People Share Content Online

  A recent Business Insider "Chart of the Day" broke down the various ways that people share content on the Web.
  
  Of those surveyed, 24 percent use Facebook as their primary content-sharing method. The "other" category accounted for 11.4 percent, followed by e-mail (11.1 percent), and Twitter (10.8 percent).
  [...]
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  Posted: July 27, 2009, 4:58pm EDT
  

• Why It's Important to Measure Engagement, Not Just Traffic, on News Sites

  RELATED Also from the recent Knight social media seminar: "How News Organizations Can Measure the Value of Social Media," by Amy Gahran
  
  Poynter's News University recently developed three Webinars [...]
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  Posted: July 27, 2009, 11:10am EDT
  

• The Printed Blog's End Speaks to Difficulty of Landing Venture Capital Funding

  Josh Karp, founder of "The Printed Blog," recently announced on the site that he was shutting it down:
  
  "Sixteen issues, 80,000 print copies distributed, another 100,000 or so copies downloaded, and countless new friends, fans, and collaborators all around the world later, I may still be nuts, but I have" [...]
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  Posted: July 24, 2009, 1:42pm EDT
  

• YouTube May Soon Drop Support for Internet Explorer 6

  Robin Wauters from TechCrunch reported that some Internet Explorer 6 users are seeing messages that YouTube will soon phase out support for Internet Explorer 6.
  
  YouTube, [...]
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  Posted: July 23, 2009, 4:03pm EDT
  

• How Early Newspaper-to-Web Technology Crippled News Industry's Thinking

  Last week on the "Online Journalism Review" site, Robert Niles offered an intriguing perspective on the history of online news. He suggested that perhaps "early online publishing technology affected [news] industry thinking in profound and ultimately tragic ways."
  
  

  Recalling his days as the sole news producer for the Rocky Mountain [...]

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  Posted: July 23, 2009, 11:25am EDT
  

• How to Specify Jump Frames for Online Videos

  In online video, highlights often are the best "hook" to get people interested enough to watch more. Inserting highlights into the start of an online video, however, requires more video-editing skills than many people, including journalists, possess.
  
  

  uShow, a free service that allows you to specify jump frames for online [...]

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  Posted: July 21, 2009, 3:51pm EDT
  

• Kindle Books: The Art of the Sample Chapter

  Many journalists write books and thus know how today's authors shoulder much of the marketing work for their books, even if they're working through a publishing company.
  
  An increasingly powerful tool in book marketing is the free "sample chapter," given away in electronic format to be read on a computer or' [...]
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  Posted: July 21, 2009, 9:46am EDT
  

• Deconstructing News Stories into Tweets

  Imagine if a journalist writing a breaking news story online tweeted each element of the story as soon as the information were verified.
  
  The work flow would look something like this:
  Check facts, write headline, tweet it.Check facts, write first paragraph, tweet it.Check facts, write second paragraph, tweet it.
  And so [...]
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  Posted: July 20, 2009, 2:15pm EDT
  

• How News Organizations Can Measure the Value of Social Media

  Through Tuesday I'm in Los Angeles helping out with a Knight Digital Media Center seminar, "Using Social Media to Build Audience."
  
  This seminar (the culmination of a Poynter's News University course of the same title) involves teams from several newspapers working to develop social media projects that they' [...]
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  Posted: July 20, 2009, 10:53am EDT
  

• Why You Should Automatically Route iPhone Users to Your Mobile Site

  When I praised National Public Radio's mobile site last week, I noted that unlike NPR, the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News did not automatically route me to the mobile version of its site on my iPhone. This week I confirmed that it did indeed auto-detect and route me [...]
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  Posted: July 17, 2009, 4:44pm EDT
  

• Online Audiences Watching More Long-form Videos

  As video adoption and bandwidth speeds increase, users are beginning to embrace longer-form video content.
  Brian Stelter of The New York Times reported, "The viral videos of YouTube 1.0 -- dog-on-skateboard and cat-on-keyboard -- are being supplemented by a new, more vibrant generation of online video. Production companies are now" [...]
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  Posted: July 15, 2009, 12:05pm EDT
  

• Gawker's New Tiered Commenting System Rewards Quality Commenters

  Is the Gawker Media site Jezebel making the right move in elevating some blog commenters above others? Tidbits contributors had a vigorous discussion -- part of a new experiment we're trying in which we, and anyone who's interested, debate timely, tech-related issues.
  
  Jezebel's editor last week announced the site' [...]
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  Posted: July 14, 2009, 3:33pm EDT
  

• How Online Community Benefits The Globe and Mail

  The skill set that journalists use to cover beats and network with sources and communities is not merely a means to an end (articles or other packaged stories). It's also the core of an emerging role: the community manager.
  
  News organizations have much to gain by taking this role more [...]
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  Posted: July 13, 2009, 3:54pm EDT
  

• University of Miami Class Launches New Multimedia Standards Project

  When training journalists to develop their multimedia skills, I often say something to the effect of, "We're laying the tracks as we shovel coal into the train's firebox."
  
  By that I mean the craft is constantly evolving, and its direction is sometimes unknown, so we need to keep "shoveling" and' [...]
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  Posted: July 13, 2009, 12:51pm EDT
  

• Parallels Between the Ways That Journalists, College Coaches Use Twitter

  ESPN.com's Graham Watson has written an interesting article about college coaches who are using social media platforms (specifically Twitter) to connect with fans and get news out to recruits.
  

  There are some key points from Watson's article that have parallels to journalists using the same tools:
  
  1. Ease of use
  
  

  People [...]

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  Posted: July 10, 2009, 12:54pm EDT
  

• Mobile Phones with Augmented Reality Applications Could Change News Experience

  A new bleeding-edge technology is being developed using advanced mobile phones that could drastically affect the way audiences interact with news and local information. It's called augmented reality.
  
  Very early applications using this technology were primarily built for gaming, but as the technology evolves it's being developed to deliver [...]
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  Posted: July 09, 2009, 12:33pm EDT
  

• Why National Public Radio's Mobile Web Approach Works

  Currently I'm on vacation by Lake Leelanau in northern Michigan. This area offers considerable beauty and fun, but generally spotty cell and broadband access.
  
  That's a steep challenge for me and my friend Susan Mernit, who invited me on this trip. We're both online/mobile media junkies and newshounds. This [...]
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  Posted: July 08, 2009, 5:07pm EDT
  

• Reporter Uses Twitter to Connect with, Provide Insight into Sources

  It used to be that journalists interviewed sources or otherwise gathered statements from sources and then worked those quotes into a story. With the advent of social media such as Twitter, there's a new way to let communities know what sources have to say: just retweet them.
  
  

  That's what Ken Ward [...]

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  Posted: July 07, 2009, 3:40pm EDT
  

• ProPublica Editor: Three Strategies for Developing Citizen Reporting Team and Using Their Work

  As ProPublica's new editor of distributed reporting, Amanda Michel has spent the past few months building a team of citizen reporters that is looking into how economic stimulus dollars are being spent. In a post that was published today, I interviewed her about how this type of reporting fits [...]
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  Posted: July 06, 2009, 11:49am EDT
  

• Entries for Online Journalism Awards Due Wednesday

  Did you publish what you believe is award-worthy online journalism between June 1, 2008, and June 30, 2009? The deadline to enter the Online Journalism Awards competition has been extended until Wednesday, July 8. (Here's the entry form.)
  
  This year the categories are: Knight Award for Public Service General [...]
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  Posted: July 04, 2009, 11:06pm EDT
  

• MinnPost Experiments with Real-time Ads

  MinnPost.com is experimenting with an interesting new self-serve ad system to give marketers the ability to change and post ads in real time.
  Joel Kramer, MinnPost.com founder, explained the project in an announcement, saying:
  
  "Imagine a restaurant that can post its daily lunch special in" [...]
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  Posted: July 03, 2009, 2:30pm EDT
  

• FTC to Investigate Bloggers Receiving Pay for Posts

  The Federal Trade Commission announced plans last week to monitor blogs for payments and claims.
  
  Deborah Yao of the Associated Press reported:
  
  "The practice has grown to the degree that the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications," [...]
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  Posted: July 03, 2009, 11:00am EDT
  

• Tribune Interactive Creates Photo Galleries Using Creative Commons Images from Flickr

  [UPDATE: Tribune Interactive has removed a photo in one of these galleries -- the image we used for our home page illustration -- because it appears to have been altered. Read more here.]
  
  Most newspaper Web sites have user-generated photo galleries, for [...]
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  Posted: July 02, 2009, 7:20am EDT
  

• Why Automated Tweeting Is a Bad Idea

  Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal posted this bit of breaking news on Twitter:
  
  WSJ, via Twitter Posted July 1 by The Wall Street Journal via Twitterfeed. Notice the bad cut-off.
  

  The Journal, like some other news organizations, uses a popular service called Twitterfeed to [...]

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  Posted: July 01, 2009, 5:36pm EDT
  

• Printcasting, a 2008 Knight News Challenge Winner, Goes National

  Dan Pacheco, creator of Printcasting and winner of $837,000 from the 2008 Knight News Challenge, announced last week that the project is going national with new partners from MediaNews Group.

  Announcing the development, Pacheco [...]

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  Posted: July 01, 2009, 11:54am EDT
  

• New Data Released on Latest Supreme Court Term

  For any court, but especially the U.S. Supreme Court, no decision truly stands alone. Each helps to weave a tapestry of legal context that informs our understanding of crucial issues. Yesterday the SCOTUS Blog released a super stat pack summarizing its statistics, charts, lists and observations about the Court [...]
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  Posted: June 30, 2009, 2:10pm EDT
  

• 5 Tips for Building a Successful Hyperlocal Site

  The official burial for MyTopiaCafe.com will be on July 1, 2009. That's the day the hyperlocal site for the Daytona Beach News-Journal will be defunct, dead, killed or otherwise terminated for future use. It goes the way of several other hyperlocal efforts by legacy media organizations that fielded development [...]
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  Posted: June 30, 2009, 10:44am EDT
  

• Mashable Publishes Ultimate Twitter Guide Book

  Mashable has published one of the best all-around guides to Twitter. If there ever was a reason to publish a printed book about a rapidly developing technology like Twitter, this would surely provide fantastic resources for a dead [...]
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  Posted: June 29, 2009, 2:07pm EDT
  

• In Social Media, First Be Where They Are

  It's always easier to join a conversation than start one from scratch. This is especially true in social media. Whoever you want to connect with online, chances are that some of the most influential people in those groups already have their favorite social media hangouts: Facebook groups or fan pages, [...]
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  Posted: June 29, 2009, 12:00pm EDT
  

• Congressional Bill Could Dampen Cookies, Impact Industry

  A congressional bill in the offing could severely limit the ability of Web sites to place cookies on computers and have a huge impact on both publishers and the advertisers who support them.
  
  Simulmedia CEO and industry veteran Dave Morgan, speaking at an Advertising Research Foundation
  conference this week, said [...]
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  Posted: June 26, 2009, 4:41pm EDT
  

• 702.tv Launches Crusade to Get News to 'Non-News' Consumers

  "News never looked so good," touts the tagline on 702.tv's promotional ads, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the show's non-traditional approach to news.
  
  On Thursday, June 11, the new Web and TV product from Greenspun Interactive soft launched with the first episode on the Web. Last week, it launched two [...]
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  Posted: June 25, 2009, 3:23pm EDT
  

• Breaking Tweets Web Site Helps Track Updates about Iran

  Craig Kanalley's Breaking Tweets mashup site helps highlight the central role that Twitter has played in revealing information about the election and protests in Iran. 
  
  In an e-mail exchange, Kanalley, who is a journalism graduate student at DePaul University, provided background on the site and its coverage of [...]
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  Posted: June 24, 2009, 11:23am EDT
  

• Guardian Crowdsources Information about Parliament Members' Expenses

  The Guardian has started an interesting project to crowdsource information about the expenses of Parliament members.
  
  The paper explained how it plans to tap into the community to help interpret the information, which Parliament just recently made available:
  
  "Join us in digging through the 700,000 documents of MPs''" [...]
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  Posted: June 23, 2009, 3:44pm EDT
  

• Robin Sloan Creates Iran Election Tracker for the Easily Overwhelmed

  It's easy to get overwhelmed by fast-moving international stories that roll through online and social media like wildfire. Which sources are worth paying attention to? When everyone sounds excited and urgent, how can you tell what's most important? How can you gauge accuracy and context?
  
  

  Current's Robin Sloan, the generalist [...]

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  Posted: June 22, 2009, 11:35am EDT
  

• Translate Persian to English in Google, Facebook, Twitter

  

  RELATED "Using Boolean Searches to Follow Iran Election and More on Twitter," by Amy Gahran
  
  "Twitter, Social Networks Deliver News of Protests in Iran," by Al Tompkins
  
  
  [...]

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  Posted: June 19, 2009, 2:32pm EDT
  

• Amazon Opens up Kindle Source Code, Considers New Delivery Formats

  Amazon may soon add functionality that would allow users to read more document forms beyond the Kindle e-book format.
  Saul Hansell of The New York Times reported that Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, dropped hints about these changes at the Wired Disruptive by Design conference [...]
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  Posted: June 18, 2009, 4:31pm EDT
  

• USA Today Publisher Says He Regrets Not Charging for Paper's iPhone App

  Once the genie is out of the bottle, it's hard to put it back in. That's a lesson newspaper publishers have learned when it comes to the Web and one that USA Today Publisher David Hunke recently addressed in regard to mobile news.
  
  [...]
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  Posted: June 17, 2009, 4:28pm EDT
  

• Add Context to Stories with Google Experimental Search

  When you want information, often the context of that information is as important as the content. That's why lately I've been playing with Google's Experimental Search options.
  
  

  Experimental Search launched in 2007, and since then Google engineers have kept expanding and tweaking these offerings. When you select one of these' [...]

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  Posted: June 16, 2009, 4:36pm EDT