[...]
The Print After Parties by from Jason Eppink are a series of unauthorized notional raves thrown in the abandoned distribution infrastructure of crumbling print institutions. (They’re pretend parties, not real ones.)
[...]
The promotional video [above] gives the flavour of this new news organization which launched this morning, while Martin Langeveld at Nieman Journalism Lab explores the Texas Tribune website.
Founder and chairman John Thornton writes about the Tribune’s mission and the reasons for its nonprofit approach.
[...]
Idea: Peter Bluijs, former newspaperman with Holland’s De Telegraaf
Video: Marcin Nowak and Artur Karda from Media Regionalne
Hat tip: Journalism.co.uk
Today, a roundup of some graphs related to yesterday’s release of newspaper circulation numbers in the United States.
Warning, these graphs may disturb anyone who believes printed news isn’t fading fast. Discretion is advised.
How much has newspaper household penetration [...]If you know some basic HTML, you should find this fairly easy to follow.
Click within the player to advance the presentation.
Thanks to Stuart Myles.
[...]
Life magazine has a nice gallery of photos they call When Newspapers Mattered.
The photo above, of NBC “columnist” Walter Winchell, caught my attention because of the semi-automatic telegraph key (commonly known as a “bug”) right next to the Life watermark.
These [...]
If you’ve ever wondered how to help your news stories rank higher in Google News, this video offers some ideas.
Things like: using large images, not breaking up story text or running stories onto multiple pages, providing Google-friendly URLs and making sure you have a site map.
It all sounds good, but [...]
In introducing the video, futurist Gerd Leonhard writes on his blog:
…this is mostly about media and the future of content: distribution is no longer the core business for media companies. Why open licensing platforms are so important. The move from selling copies to selling access - how will that [...]
Highlights of the projects presented during June’s Future of News and Civic Media conference at MIT.
[...]
Jon Friedman of the Wall Street Journal interviews Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, who says the future of online journalism is social, linked, and free.
[...]
John Temple mentioned this wonderful story a couple of weeks ago on his blog, and I thought it was well worth sharing.
The town of Silverton, Colorado has saved its weekly newspaper in an innovative way. Read John’s [...]
From digitaljournal.com:
Citizen media news outlet DigitalJournal.com is proud to announce it will be hosting a unique panel discussion featuring some of the most influential leaders in Canadian media. Dubbed “The Future of Media,” the live panel discussion will explore how the mainstream media are implementing user-generated content and what [...]
News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch may be keen to build paywalls around his websites, but Canada’s Globe & Mail is not looking to charge for access to online news.
“I think that horse has left the barn,” Globe publisher Phillip [...]
Back in March of this year, Australia’s Triple-J TV looked at the state of printed newspapers in that country. No prizes for guessing they’re losing advertisers and readers.
Hat tip: 93 Studios
[...]After two years of trying and failing to make a buck on its hyperlocal website LoudounExtra.com, the Washington Post will close the site next month.
Rafat Ali has the story at PaidContent.org, while former LoudounExtra blogger Tammi Marcoullier posts a few thoughts on the site’s demise.
As Rafat points [...]
J-Source has posted a memo from the Globe & Mail’s recently promoted Editor-in-Chief John Stackhouse outlining a reshuffle of senior managers.
There will be no deputy editor. Three masthead editors will take expanded responsibility for News and Sports (David Walmsley), Features (Jill Borra) and [...]
From the breaking news battleground in New Zealand…
One of the country’s leading news websites, stuff.co.nz, drew a crowd in downtown Auckland last Thursday, causing pedestrians to look up, grab their mobile phone cameras and start clicking.
The publicity stunt (click the video above [...]
The Wall St Journal moved into new premises in June, and Chris O’Brien at Next Newsroom published the above photos.
Find more info and photos on The Next Newsroom Project
[...]
Times may be tough for some newspaper owners, but Santa Barbara News-Press co-publisher Wendy McCaw appears to be getting by just fine.
Her helicopter-toting 193-foot motoryacht Calixe is in Toronto, drawing plenty of admiring looks.
Ms McCaw and her fiancé, Arthur von Wiesenberger, are [...]
The Washington Post has launched a new selection of mobile services, including an iPhone-optimized site, a BlackBerry application, and other variations to work on cellphones.
The services use a simplified navigation structure, comprising Politics, Business, Metro, Arts and Lifestyle, and Sports sections.
MediaPost reports that [...]
Advertising Age reports that stock car racing body Nascar has accredited 28 bloggers and non-mainstream websites to cover races this season.
It seems fewer newspaper sports writers have been turning up in the press boxes as a result of newspaper cutbacks, so Nascar decided it [...]
The Cato Institute’s Cato Unbound website this month features essays on the future of journalism.
Clay Shirky kicked things off on Monday reiterating a theme on which he blogged a few months ago - that this is a time of upheaval for traditional news media, with no [...]
Joe Marchese at MediaPost explains why it’s so hard to get brand advertising onto websites at prices that will appeal to publishers.
…the issue with bringing branding online isn’t with the marketers and agencies, it is with the publisher side, maybe with some help from the marketers, of course ;-). [...]
All of the Gawker Media sites have a new commenting system.
As explained on gawker.com, “we the editors are taking control back”.
As a site gets bigger, the comments tend to get busier — and sometimes more annoying. Our titles are no exception. Deadspin’s had to contend with a war between [...]
AOL Canada has launched its new portal front page, which I previewed a couple of weeks ago.
Pepsi is running full takeover ads on the new page, including the left and right gutters.
Media in Canada has a good rundown of the [...]
It’s fascinating to compare these two accounts of the sacking of washingtonpost.com White House Watch blogger Dan Froomkin:
From the Washington City Paper, full of juicy quotes from Post insiders From the Washington Post’s ombudsman, who got stonewalled by his own colleagues.Hat tip: Jay Rosen
Andy Plesser of Beet.TV quotes a statement by CNN that page views for its user-generated iReport site reached one million on Monday, driven by coverage of post-election protests in Iran.
To put this in perspective, iReport (which was launched in February 2008) averaged 316,000 page views per day in [...]
According to Editor and Publisher, the average “time spent per user was down for more than half the top 30 global news and current events sites” in May 2009 compared to May 2008.
But that’s only telling part of the story.
The data come from sites measured by Nielsen Online, [...]
CBC Radio launches a two-part series tomorrow on News 2.0: The Future of News in an Age of Social Media
What is now called the “mainstream media” has lost its control over the tools of its trade, and its importance as a [...]
Online video viewing has increased dramatically over the past year, according to US data from Nielsen Online.
The Nielsen chart above shows an increase in the number of viewers, but even stronger growth in the number of minutes that [...]
Not a bad report from CBC Ottawa on the rise of the social media communicator - except for the news anchor’s clumsy reference to how you could be “a professional tweeple”. Anyone know the singular form of “tweeple”?
[...]
From Anderson Cooper’s blog at CNN.com.
…senior officials say the State Department asked Twitter to refrain for going down for periodic scheduled maintenance at this critical time to ensure the site continues to operate. Bureau’s and offices across the State Department, they say, are paying [...]
Blogger Rachel Sklar admits to a pet peeve which I share: journalists who write disparagingly about Twitter while having no idea what it is or how it works.
I recall a freelance writer whose first tweet a few months ago was along the lines [...]
Citizen journalist Elisabeth Donnelly was the first to have her work published as part of a new program on The Local, a community website operated by the New York Times.
Responding to an invitation on The Local’s new Virtual Assignment Desk [...]
These charts, from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, really need no commentary and certainly won’t come as a surprise.
Of course “classifieds ads websites” is another way of saying Craigslist, which [...]
While Microsoft’s new search engine bing has been getting a number of positive reviews since its launch a few days ago, the TV commercial is being lambasted.
Just read the comments on this Advertising Age story. Comments such as this one from Robert in New York:
Noise and nonsense. [...]
It’s feeling a lot like 2005 again, as newspapers prepare to leap aboard the online user-pays bandwagon. The only thing that’s changed is the level of desperation.
Rick Edmonds, at the Poynter Institute, reports that a new whitepaper from the American Press Institute espouses five [...]
Web metrics provider comScore has announced an extension to its methodology that it says willl “account for 100 per cent of a website’s audience.”
The new Media Metrix 360 may well do that, and should mollify some comScore clients who feel they’ve been under-rated by the current system.
But there’s [...]
Interesting research about Twitter usage has been published on the Harvard Business Review blog.
Among the findings:
men have 15% more followers than women men have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other 10% of users account for 90% of tweets the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one over [...]
One of Canada’s two national newspapers, the Globe and Mail, is going after Toronto readers with help from local blog site Torontoist.
In an announcement on the Globe’s website late Friday night, Toronto editor Kelly Grant [pictured with the announcement] said the [...]
This is a nicely done video, even if it adds little to our understanding of the problems facing newspapers (repeating the old saw that newspapers shouldn’t have offered their content online free of charge and accusing them of doing too little with video to compete against television).
[...]
No sooner does the New York Times announce the appointment of a social media editor than bloggers wonder aloud why she has had such a low profile in the social media universe thus far.
The credibility of Jennifer Preston [pictured] has been called into question by [...]
I’ve been playing with the new Wolfram Alpha “computational knowledge engine” and I think one of the best terms to describe it is straight out of the 1960s: “mind blowing”.
Wolfram Alpha is not about searching for web pages (Google is still pretty good at that) but, rather, about getting [...]
The New Zealand Herald’s website nzherald.co.nz holds a narrow lead in domestic unique users over news portal stuff.co.nz, according to the latest data from Nielsen Online.
The two sites, owned respectively by rival [...]
Yesterday’s executive changes at the Globe and Mail are being described as “part of a broader set of changes to expand the newspaper’s digital strategy.”
Few hints of what that might mean are being made public at this stage, but statements [...]
There’s no question that the Global Positioning System is a great tool, although I confess I’ve never used it (unless you count sitting in the back of a taxi while the driver finds his way down unfamiliar roads via [...]
Further to my previous post about the NY Times considering selling memberships to help fund its journalism, Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher today posted some useful ideas on how to entice members with more than coffee mugs, t-shirts and tote bags.
Here are some of his most innovative [...]
When it comes to funding online news, most ideas revolve around either wringing more dollars from advertisers, or somehow convincing consumers to pay for access to content.
The New York Times continues to explore the latter approach, despite the disappointing returns from the [...]
As my special thank-you for reading this blog, please help yourself to a free computer screen cleaner.
And have a great weekend.
[...]MediaNews Group plans to reduce the amount of content from its 54 daily newspapers that it makes available for free on the papers’ websites.
The move was announced Wednesday and reported today on sltrib.com, a MediaNews website, which quoted company president Jody Lodovic:
“The strategy is about creating a different [...]
You must check out this amazing photo montage from the National Geographic’s Green Guide.
Just click on the photo, drag the box, and keep clicking through to … infinity. It’s hours of fun for the whole family!
And, you can upload your own photos to be [...]
Coming very soon, the Toronto Star will make its videos available for embedding, just like this one from November, 2008.
Note: May not work in Firefox
[...]
David Pogue of nytimes.com has a reminder about the fallibility of current data storage systems in this interview with Dag Spicer of the Computer History Museum.
To quote Spicer: “If Moses had gotten the Ten Commandments on a floppy disk, it [...]
I love this data visualization, which anyone from Toronto will immediately recognize as a map of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) routes.
As the clock moves through 24 hours, it’s fun to see how the TTC comes to life, with the buses and streetcars getting thicker on the roads as day [...]
OffTheBus was an alternative journalism project designed to cover last year’s US presidential campaign in a way that conventional journalists could not.
Based at huffingtonpost.com, OffTheBus recruited 12,000 citizen journalists, guided by a handful of professional editors.
Sometimes the amateurs were able to venture into events that were officially closed to [...]
The comments have been snarky, but it’s been a great couple of weeks for raising awareness of Twitter.
Jon Stewart on the Daily Show lampooned US lawmakers who thought twittering was more important than paying attention to President Obama’s State of the Union speech (above).
And Doonesbury’s ace reporter Roland Hedley [...]
The latest McKinsey Quarterly analyses the benefits to business of Web 2.0 technologies (see chart below)…
… and offers six tips on how to get the most from them:
The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top. The best uses come from users—but [...]Octopz is a growing Toronto company that not only builds 3D animations, but also the software that enables them to demo their models to clients via the net.
And they’re the latest exciting Toronto company to be featured on ByteClub TV, which recently moved to the Lifeforce [...]
There’s nothing like a long weekend (Monday being “Family Day” here in Ontario) to catch up on a bit of reading.
Among the nuggets I got to today was this Dec 3 item on why Frank Rich of the New York Times is such a prolific linker in [...]
Michael Cooke, editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun-Times has been named editor of the Toronto Star and thestar.com, replacing editor-in-chief J. Fred Kuntz who left the newspaper in December.
Cooke, who worked at the Star [...]
Research and development departments are not something one generally associates with newspaper companies - even those that have remodelled themselves as multi-channel news companies.
But at the New York Times, Nick Bilton leads a team designing technologies “that will become commonplace in a 24-48-month time frame.” Another sign that the Times [...]
Growing up immersed in the environmental movement of the 1970s, my thinking on economics was definitely shaped by concepts such as resource sustainability and limits to growth.
Then came the 1980s and 1990s, when western societies seemed to reject such ideas as hopelessly naive, assuming instead that [...]
One of the best things I’ve read over these recent holidays as been the Content Strategy feature published in mid December by A List Apart.
I particularly like Kristina Halvorson’s summary of content strategy as a discipline. Her suggestions are just [...]
Happy New Year everyone and, if you’re a reader of the Toronto Star’s print edition, yes it is 2009 even though this morning’s newspaper might have had you checking the calendar for a moment.
The front page of today’s Star features the iconic blue [...]
Although the Toronto Star is Canada’s largest newspaper (by circulation), it is not a national publication. Until now, that is.
Today, we unveiled a national version of thestar.com. So if you’d like to read great Star journalism without the Toronto focus, choosing the “National Edition” will give [...]
In another sign of the times, the Pew Research Centre reported today that, in the United States at least, the internet has “surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news.” [...]
Craig Silverman of Regret the Error has released his 2008 list of bizarre, alarming and downright funny corrections from newspapers and websites.
The entire list is worth a read, but this one caught my eye, pointing out the dangers of too much automation [...]
After a couple of weeks of blogospheric rumours, online news pioneer Rob Curley today confirmed on his blog that he’s leaving Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive to join the Las Vegas Sun. And at least nine of his colleagues will join him in the trip west.
Rob had been VP of [...]
— Video from the Peterborough Examiner
May 5th marked the end of an era in a small southern Ontario city, and brought back a few fond memories for [...]
Last year it was in Sydney. Now, it’s all over the world, including Toronto.
8-9pm, Saturday March 29 is Earth Hour.
It started with a question: How can we inspire people to take action on climate change?
The answer: Ask the people of Sydney to turn [...]
Six snow plows clear the westbound Gardiner Expressway at dusk yesterday, their rumbling audible through the falling snow 25 floors above.
[...]
The latest Nielsen NetRatings summary of newspaper and magazine websites in New Zealand shows the New Zealand Herald’s site, nzherald.co.nz, holding a slim lead over the Fairfax newspapers site stuff.co.nz in terms of monthly unique visitors.
Each site draws more than two million visitors [...]
I’m delighted to report that I have a new job, starting next Monday, at the Toronto Star.
As Assistant Managing Editor - Multimedia, my responsibilties will include editorial content on thestar.com, one of Canada’s most popular news sites.
The Star has an impressive commitment to digital publishing, and [...]
Toronto-based community videocasting site blogtv.ca is adding two channels: one for comedy and the other for news and politics.
The channels are scheduled to launch tomorrow [Friday].
Although blogTV.ca is a platform for anyone who wants to videocast [including some who are a long way from being [...]
Rocketboom host Joanne Colan talks with winners of the 2007 Webby Awards in a series of video interviews.
The 27 clips include Joan Walsh of salon.com, Joe Crump of Avenue A/Razorfish (designers of nytimes.com), Matt Thompson of [...]
Some US traffic trends from comScore’s report for last month:
Interest in online gaming increases traffic to sites in June
Both the online gaming information and online gaming categories gained in June, bolstered by significant growth among the under 18 [...]
These were the most-read stories this week on nzherald.co.nz
1. Alinghi man gestures with knife at Team NZ member
2. I was only doing my job, says VC hero
3. Tornadoes rip through New Plymouth, southeast Auckland
4. Motorists sideswiped on Harbour Bridge
Check out the Telegraph Media Group’s integrated newsroom, producing the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and telegraph.co.uk.
These were the most-read stories this week on nzherald.co.nz
2. Team NZ fight back to take Race 2
3. Barker leaves trademark on Alinghi
4. Man stabbed at McDonald’s counter
5. Powercut death more the fault of the family: poll
Source: New Zealand [...]
A couple of highlights from US research reported yesterday atAdvertising Age:
A whopping 96% of online tweens and teens connect to a social network at least once a week, according to a study and white paper being released today from Alloy Media & Marketing, a youth-oriented marketing firm. And nearly [...]
These were the most-read stories this week on nzherald.co.nz
1. Holmes’ daughter to contest drugs charges
2. Family devastated by Millie’s drug charges: Holmes
3. Vector Energy may seek compensation after blackout
4. Passenger describes emergency landing
5. Melbourne gunman ‘cool as cucumber’
Source: New [...]
The editor-in-chief of English-language news at the CBC, Tony Burman, has resigned and will leave the corporation July 13.
Burman has been with the the public broadcaster for almost 35 years, and for the past seven has overseen English news on radio, television and CBC.ca.
He told staff he was leaving because he [...]
At a time when national and international news is available just about everywhere online [including on portal sites, webmail services and news aggregators], in-depth local coverage is being recognized as a key competitive advantage for newspaper websites.
Even the New York Times, one of the strongest news “brands” globally, is emphasizing local news online. [...]
Mark Evans reports today that Globe & Mail marketing journalist-blogger Keith McArthur is to become Senior Director - Media Innovation at Veritas Communications, with responsiblity for social media.
