Here are a few things I’d like to see local news sites publish. I’d like to see them not just because they’re interesting, and not just because no news sites are publishing them now, but because publishing this information would:
Provide context about the exact place that I live. Context makes [...]Update: Sorry about the spam posted with this entry on the RSS feed.
Someone wrote this on an article about Sam Zell and newspapers: “The biggest single thing holding [newspapers] back right now is the monopoly mentality that pervades sales, marketing and editorial at most big papers.”
Do you agree?
Pageviews are easy. Visits are easy too. Bounce rates, return visits, time on site, return frequency, all pretty easy. Taken in the big picture they’re okay measurements, though what’s easy to measure isn’t usually what’s useful to measure.
More meaningful metrics would translate visitor interest, disinterest and loyalty into numbers [...]
Here’s a story about Google’s search engine ranking algorithm, Canadian health care, wholesale cut-and-pasting.
But wait, it gets better.
Two weeks ago I was talking with Dan Petty (our online intern at the Denver Post) about a Drudge Report link to our site from the week before. That link, [...]
I was reading Ryan Sholin’s piece Why we link: A brief rundown of the reasons your news organization needs to tie the Web together and the part where he wrote “Because we absolutely do not know everything, but we know where to find out most of what we [...]
This post about writing useful headlines for a local-news website started out last week as an email to my coworkers. They had all heard much of it before: “Headlines on the web work different. Labels don’t work. Place names are important.” This builds on those basics.
We don’t know where our [...]
…from a Poynter article, Commercial Appeal’s e-edition Leads to 40 Percent Circulation Increase, “[using the E-Edition in NIE] trains younger readers to grow accustomed to reading a digital replica of the newspaper as opposed to just reading the paper’s stories online.”
HP Networking had evaluated some company’s network, and this is what they said about it (at least, this is what the people in the meeting I was at said that they said): “We would have given [your network] an F, but we only give F’s to networks that aren’t working. [...]
‘Rather than have a coder/programmer on staff who can create, fix or modify things quickly, they’d prefer a “hands-off” system where to do much innovation they have to wait for the vendor to get to it, which could be months. Hell, using Drupal, say, a small newspaper could probably get [...]
As in, got any “charging-for-content” angles you think might work? Extra points if it has worked before. Extra extra points for market research.
I’ve got one angle, it’s not very good but it’s what I had in my head tonight: Find out who’s downloading and saving the articles you publish on [...]
This seven-step plan to get your local online news site off the ground is liberally paraphrased and outright cut-and-pasted from the excellent comment on the excellent Hacker News site that Brad Flora, editor of Chicago’s Windy Citizen, wrote. Read the full comment here.
Build an audience [...]People like recommending things. Linking — whether it’s done on a web site, via email, or word-of-mouth — is a fundamental activity. It’s an activity that gets rewarded. The Drudge Report does nothing but recommend news with their links.
When you hide your information behind a pay-wall or registration-wall, you’re penalizing [...]
Last week I put together a highlight package of links and blogs for the new boss of the Post’s online department, Kevin Dale. It’s worth sharing, and so I give it to you.
Hey Kevin,
Here are two articles most worth reading:
A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change Holovaty’s [...]“Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20% [with the increased load time]. … The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.”
These are the blog posts and articles people were clicking on off my online journalism-oriented reading list during January 2009.
Hyperlinking the Real World - ReadWriteWeb: “Welcome the dawn of the age of ubiquitous computing! Just wait until everything is rfid tagged so you can google search for your socks.” [...]The Rocky Mountain News has thrown some cheap shots at my employer The Denver Post these past two months. I’ve seen a little of the same from the Rocky’s online team, and that spirit of competition between newspapers is something I will miss when the Rocky goes out [...]
First, you have the lead: ” When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.”
Next, you have these two favorite paragraphs from Berners-Lee’s piece on Net Neutrality:
Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for [...]
This email was forwarded to me from a college student in another state… I thought it worth posting… the names have been changed to protect my job (I kid, I kid).
To Whom It May Concern:
I currently live in Springfield, Anystate. I work full time and am a part time student. [...]
In which I provide some tips for writers who have stories published online, don’t already have a portfolio site, and who think there’s a chance that the site that has all the stuff they’ve written might shut down and disappear from the internet.
In my college days back in the 90s [...]
These are the blog posts and articles people were clicking on off my online journalism-oriented reading list during December 2008.
Now You Can Sign Into Friend Connect Sites With Your Twitter ID CNN Pitches a Cheaper Wire Service to Newspapers - NYTimes.com The Media Equation - A [...]
This screenshot of cincinnati.com’s unfortunate remnant advertising placement came via someone who was connected with the woman who died.
[...]Chris Amico writes of the problems he’s had finding RSS feeds of news from a particular region from a particular newspaper-dot-com. He’s not alone. He uses Andrew Meyer’s post on finding a place-based feed to summarize the problem:
When I visit PressDemocrat.com, I go for one thing: [...]
These are the blog posts and articles people were clicking on off my online journalism-oriented reading list from November 2008.
Free our data: Plenty of ideas for freeing government data Community-funded news launches at Spot.Us the evolution of the front page: “These diagrams were a study related [...]The Onion’s not big on fact-based publishing. Their AV Club, an entertainment magazine of bands and movies and stuff, aimed at the markets they print the Onion in, is about all you get when it comes to this fact-based publishing. And the AV Club’s local information only lives in the [...]
These are the blog posts and articles people were clicking on off my online journalism-oriented reading list from October 2008. For some reason, seven articles got the exact-same number of clicks (15).
I’m no shrink, but there are a few blaring cries-for-help I see in newspaper and newspaper-dot-com land. This is a fun list of all the newsroom newspaper journalism patterns I could think of that don’t work so well on the web:
From a comment on Reflections of a Newsosaur’s post: $7.5B sales plunge forecast for newspapers
If ever there was clear evidence of the failure of bureaucratic journalism, this is it. We have created newspapers groaning with executive editors, editors, managing editors, assistant managing editors, city editors, desk editors, copy [...]
The Denver Post’s competition, The Rocky Mountain News, fell for a piece that came across the police wire today and posted a breaking news alert … without verifying their bit of “news” was true. Fail.
[...] Most newspaper-dot-coms, magazine-dot-coms, blogs — heck, anyone other than Editor & Publisher that publishes articles or blogs — allow folk to comment on the stuff they write. The online-only Salon is no different. They differ in the way they frame the bottom-of-the-article free-for-all. It’s not “Comment on this article,” “Post [...]
…observed from my experience working among the internet-inexperienced…
These are the online journalism-oriented blog posts and articles people were clicking on off my reading list from September 2008.
These are the online journalism-oriented blog posts and articles people were clicking on off my reading list from August 2008.
…and the only question to ask is: Who’s next? (well, that, and, “are they publishing to the web on Mondays?”)
Read the article from the Lexington Dispatch about the cease-publish here.
(via Otterblog, “Five Days a Week”)
These are the blog posts and articles people were clicking on off my reading list from July 2008.
Saw this question on the internets and couldn’t resist. So as not to taint your thought process, I will write my answer in white, below, and you can mouse over it to see it if you so choose.
A database is like a bunch of egg cartons stacked right on [...]
Austin Kleon, one of the few sharpie-based innovators in the newspaper world, got signed by Harper Collins to publish a book of his awesome newspaper black-out poems. These things, if you haven’t seen them, involve taking a news article and blotting out all but a few words. Choice words. [...]
This is what people were clicking on off my reading list from June 2008.
This is part two — read part one of What can go wrong with your web site here.
6. The CMS.This is the glue that, usually, publishes the actual pages, handles the interactions between the database and the front-end (the front end being the web site your visitors see). [...]
Bruno Giussani is a smart smart man.
Check out what he wrote about journalism and the internet, all the way back in 1999:
I do not consider the Internet - and generally the online medium - as a substitute to other media, but as a complement, a new channel of communication [...]
Read part 2 of What can go wrong with (the back end of) your web site
There were a few weeks at my last online news job where the CMS we used was consistently buggy. Sure, bugs happen. This bug happened because of a new RAM chip in one of [...]
This is what people were clicking on off my reading list from May 2008.
In day-job land, The Denver Post launched the Colorado Guide Friday. I put it together with Django, the design skills of Michelle Whitman, and lots of help from the newsroom. It’s a site that has a bunch of lists — lists of the best indian restaurants, [...]
Hey, so in Vegas not only did I get to be in the same room as Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who launched the first-ever web page back in 1990), double my cash at the blackjack table (twice), shoot a gun for the first time, and shoot a machine gun — [...]
I know I haven’t been writing much here in the past few weeks. Hey, that’s why RSS feeds rock — you don’t have to visit a site that isn’t updated just to see it isn’t updated. I hope you’re reading this in your RSS reader. If not, and if [...]
I did an email interview with journalism.co.uk about HappyJournalist last week, they published it this week. You can read the piece over there, or read my favorite bits below.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Well, it’s not a particularly useful site. Fun, yes. Useful, no.HappyJournalist is [...]
This is what people were clicking on off my reading list from March 2008.
It’s Sunday, and talking heads say maybe it’s time for papers to panic… one quote that struck me from that article was the Charlotte copy editor who said “We are all just kind of stuck in that old model and we haven’t figured out how to get out of [...]
KillTheCliche.com fell into my rss reader today (via delicious’ most-popular journalism-tagged links). It’s an idea I wanted to do myself, but, well, in the war of ideas many fall victim to Mr. Not-Enough-Time’s axe.
Anyway, Kill The Cliche measures cliches in articles from The Boston Globe, New [...]
This winter I upgraded the forum software that powers Neighbors (the Denver Post’s forum / blog / photo / article commenting system), started work on the Denver Post’s first Django-powered application, helped sheperd some Newsgator-based widgets out the door, launched HappyJournalist.com, and, well, and that’s about it. Here [...]
I read another baby-boomer hand-wring piece about the way newspapers used to be on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website tonight. It got me up enough to register for the site, click the activation link in the email and write a comment.
This is what the lady wrote:
Sure, the Internet [...]
This is what people were clicking on off my reading list from February 2008.
AngryJournalist launched a couple weeks ago as an anonymous confessional for, well, angry journalists. It asks the question: Why are you angry today?
Not all journalists are angry, and in the spirit of celebrating these dark times, I give you HappyJournalist, which asks the question, Why are you [...]
Last November I mentioned Foamee, the ‘Twitter Piggyback’ web site / service that allows you to keep track of beers you owe people.
Well, there’s another Twitter Piggybacker (hat tip to Adam Howell for the term and the link), this one with a local information bent: Commuter Feed. [...]
Ken Otterbourg, managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal (where I was working before I came to Denver), has a tale of an awesome photo of the lunar eclipse that a reader submitted:
A reader submitted that photo, which looks great. But, when the photo editor [...]
For valentine’s day, for love, and for the lack thereof.
Valentine’s Day: Before the 14thJanuary! 2008! This is what people were clicking on off my reading list from January.
I started writing this post Monday, and in the meantime Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock site launched, which is all about answering the “where” part of information.
It’s funny — I was talking with my coworker Doug today about how newspapers forgot to ask how the “Who / What / Why / [...]
These a a few local internet / hyperlocal web app ideas that have been stuck in my head:
The realy difficulty in coming up with something like [insert name of software program] is that it involves fundamentally rethinking all of your basic approaches. This is very difficult for humans to do. We attack any new problem we encounter with techniques we already know, and try small modifications if [...]
Online news organizations have plenty of opportunities to launch new products that build on their information, build on their community, or launch distinct information. Many of these products will be useful … not all of them will be successful. For newspaper-dot-coms not sure where to start, I recommend building an [...]
December, December, December 2007. This is what people were clicking on off my reading list from December.
December, December, December 2007. This is what people were clicking on off my reading list from December.
Hola. Welcome to the next installment of the these-are-the-links-from-my-reading-list-that-got-the-most-clicks-last-month. November, hey, take it away.
First, an announcement from the Department of Holiday Offerings: Happy Thanksgiving to you, you U.S.-living internet reader. For you other-country folk, well, no turkey.
Yesterday Flickr announced Flickr Places — new indexes for what looks like just about every place / city / town / state / province / country [...]
First, an announcement from the Department of Holiday Offerings: Happy Thanksgiving to you, you U.S.-living internet reader. For you other-country folk, well, no turkey.
Yesterday Flickr announced Flickr Places — new indexes for what looks like just about every place / city / town / state / province / country [...]
Hey, you never know, the World Series could come to your town next.
World Series: Before ticket sales startHey, you never know, the World Series could come to your town next.
World Series: Before ticket sales startRan across a couple fun quizzes today: “How many HTML elements can you name in 5 minutes?” and “How Many CSS Properties Can You Name in 7 Minutes?” (also on that site is the Booze Test, which sports the best online quiz interface I have ever ever [...]
Ran across a couple fun quizzes today: “How many HTML elements can you name in 5 minutes?” and “How Many CSS Properties Can You Name in 7 Minutes?” (also on that site is the Booze Test, which sports the best online quiz interface I have ever ever [...]
These are the links from my reading list that got the most clicks in October (along with any notes I wrote on the link, or sometimes a quote from the linked article).
Stumbled on this at Peter Van Dijcks weblog
[...]Sites that put community in a separate tab most likely think of community as an add-on to their business, not as core to their business.
I’ve seen it countless times: Reporter wants to help out online. Reporter gets the okay to start blogging. Reporter blogs for a few weeks. Without any comments, or any idea that anybody’s really reading, reporter quits the blog.
Or, there’s video. Or audio. Reporter shoots video, hands it off to online [...]
Okay, I know September was a pretty dead month, and that’s what these link-posts are for: to maintain some life on this blog until the next post strikes me.
These are the links from my reading list that got the most clicks in September (along with any notes I [...]
This summer I spent my time helping on a bunch of stuff, both standalone small stuff and stuff on top of existing stuff. If words like “stuff” pique your interest, here’s more of it:
Snark aside, my employer the Post is up for the Overall Excellence (medium site), Breaking News and something else relating to our business columnist Al Lewis. That’s terrific, and it comes from the work of our team and Al Lewis. On another Al Lewis-related note, he wrote an excellent [...]
These are the links from my reading list that got the most clicks in August (along with any notes I wrote on the link, or sometimes a quote from the linked article).
Howard Owens has a solid post about five attributes necessary for newspapers to continually cope with the changing information landscape. Number four is my favorite:
Fourth, measuring success wont be a matter of dollars and sense only. I think Hagel is right on this point: We need to develop metrics [...]
If I had any numbers on how many bloggers out there have filed a FOIA, well, that would make this post more interesting. No matter. The folk at the popular Boing Boing say they’re doing the FOIA-dance on behalf of some detained-by-TSA air-travelers. This will very likely make FOIA’s [...]
Christine Tatum, president of Society for Professional Journalists (and a co-worker of mine), is posting links to all SPJ member blogs on her blog. If you are, and you do, send her the link.
Now, I don’t think the current state of blogroll-style links is particularly useful (which is why [...]
Laura Carlson is a familiar name in my inbox. I’ve been reading the Web Design Update for at least five years, and Laura’s the one that puts that email together every week. She works for the Information Technology Systems and Services at University of Minnesota Duluth. The email keeps [...]
The Bivings Report ranked the top ten newspaper web sites in the United States. The Denver Post’s site (which I work hard on most every day) came in at number five. Five! Only the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Houston Chronicle ranked higher. Check out [...]
These are the links from my reading list that got the most clicks in July (along with any notes I wrote on the link, or sometimes a quote from the linked article).
Google announced this week it would allow people mentioned in news articles to address misquotes and add information to those articles. I wouldn’t call this a shot across the bow of newspapers, because Google’s been firing at local papers for a while. This would probably affect mid- and large-market [...]
I added a category to JoeThink just now, “Cool Jobs,” spurred by this posting from www.ThisAmericanLife.org. It’s not an awesome gig, but they tell great stories and you can work it from home.
We’re looking for someone to run ThisAmericanLife.org along with other aspects of our [...]
Newspapers have a significant opportunity to enhance their coverage. It’s called context, and it’s information that helps readers make better decisions and observations about the news and their community. The internet makes it possible to dynamically build context for the news that newspaper-dot-coms publish, which can make news matter more.
Much [...]
The job’s in Baghdad.
[...]The position will be in a secure location with all housing and food provided. Salary is very competitive with certain tax free benefits.
It’s cute that the Post wrote a story about its new ‘hyperlocal’ effort (
In Push for Local Readers, Post Unleashes LoudounExtra.com). But, in an article clouded by links on a page cluttered with them, nowhere is there a link to the site-in-mention, LoudounExtra.com.
[...]
Here’s a list of handy ideas newspapers are using or could use to save that all-important dough. I pulled these from personal experience and observation.
Backfence, the hyperlocal startup that couldn’t, is closing its doors. Some newspapers continue testing the interactive online-community waters. What’s the big picture here? “Action.” The action-oriented internet. One thing the internet does well is make previously difficult actions much easier. Newspaper-dot-coms haven’t quite clued into this, which is why articles [...]
These are the links from my reading list that got the most clicks in June (along with any notes I wrote on the link, or sometimes a quote from the linked article).
Spring’s not over yet, but that’s not gonna stop me from sharing the stuff I’ve been doing. Nope. Here it is:
These are the links from my reading list that got the most clicks in May (along with any notes I wrote on the link, or sometimes a quote from the linked article) … there’s a four-way tie for the fifth slot, so all are included.
