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Big paywall announcements in U.K.: As seems to happen pretty much every week now, a few more big paywall dominoes fell this week — two of the U.K.’s biggest papers, The Sun and The Telegraph, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle here in the States. The Telegraph’s pay plan is a metered model, which has become the standard in the U.S. and Canada. But as Roy Greenslade of The Guardian pointed out, The Telegraph is the first general-interest U.K. newspaper to adopt a metered model. (The British business paper The Financial Times pioneered the model.)
Econsultancy’s Graham Martin was skeptical about using the paywall for general content like The Telegraph’s, as opposed to The Financial Times’ specialized content. But Patrick Smith of The Media Briefing was optimistic about The Telegraph’s chances given the loyalty of its readership, but questioned why The Telegraph and others are moving so slowly toward pay plans. Digital media consultant Martin Belam said the pay plan is loose enough that it should only catch heavy users and industry types, both of whom will be likely to pay up.
News Corp.’s Sun, Britain’s largest paper, also announced plans for a paywall this week, though it’s not scheduled to come until later this year. The Guardian reported that it’s penciled in to start September, when the Sun’s valuable rights to show clips of English Premier League football/soccer kick in.
The San Francisco Chronicle also instituted a paywall this week, launching a second, paid site, SFChronicle.com alongside its longtime free one, SFGate.com. The two-site model is patterned after that of The Boston Globe, which has had its paywall in effect since 2011. SF Weekly’s Rachel Swan gave some historical context to the decision, while the San Francisco Appeal’s Rita Hao said the Chronicle is putting the wrong kind of news on its paywalled site: She’d rather pay for news she needs (like city hall coverage) than news she wants. (Meanwhile, Chronicle staffers have been protesting a cut to healthcare benefits.)
As all these paywalls go up, The Media Briefing’s Jasper Jackson outlined the various models being used, and his colleague, Patrick Smith, profiled the free model of Britain’s Mail Online, the most popular newspaper on the web. Journalism.co.uk’s Rachel McAthy, meanwhile, examined the influence of The New York Times’ paywall, launched two years ago this week.
PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy described these paywalls as an attempt to cling to high-cost, high-quality content as reality sets in that the online ad model just doesn’t work. And Reuters’ Felix Salmon described newspapers’ big-picture online strategy: “first get people used to the idea of paying at all, and then, slowly, raise the amount that you ask them to pay over time.” He predicted that newspapers, through consultants, would use each other for A/B testing how much customers will be willing to pay.
Yahoo’s deals in mobile and user content: Yahoo made (or is reportedly about to make) a couple of acquisitions this week that provide some clues to where it’s headed as a content company. The deal that was actually completed was the purchase of Summly, a news-reading app that summarizes long-form stories for mobile readers. The deal made headlines not so much because of Summly’s technology, but because of its founder, Nick D’Aloisio, who’s just 17.
Yahoo will hire D’Aloisio and two other at Summly, shut the app down and incorporate its algorithm into its own mobile technology. Kara Swisher of All Things D reported that the deal was worth $30 million, and while she called it a very high price, she said Yahoo is paying for D’Aloisio to become the face of its efforts to be seen as a mobile-first company.
Swisher wasn’t the only one who saw the price as high, or the move as a publicity grab. Slashdot’s Nick Kolakowski wondered if this was a sign of a tech bubble, and Origami founder Vibhu Norby said the deal made no sense to him. Kevin Roose of New York magazine, on the other hand, said that if you view the deal as a recruiting move rather than a technically strategic one, it makes plenty of sense.
Jack Shafer of Reuters cautioned that the image of Summly as sole work of a 17-year-old isn’t exactly an accurate one — the company’s gotten plenty of help from veteran executives and PR professionals and an all-star list of investors. Cornell prof Emin Gün Sirer downplayed Summly’s work, saying it was merely “bolt-on engineering” based on core technology licensed from another company. NPR’s Steve Mullis said that Yahoo is essentially paying millions for an algorithm — “It bought math” — and worried about an inflated value that kind of product.
The Wall Street Journal also reported last week (in a paywalled article) that Yahoo is in talks to buy Dailymotion, a Europe-based YouTube-esque site. Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson reiterated this week that the deal is as good as done, and reported that Dailymotion is part of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s plan to eliminate content creation costs and replace that material with user-generated content and partnership deals, focusing on personalizing consumption for users. Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily didn’t see that as cause for alarm, arguing that Yahoo’s always been more of an aggregation-based media company anyway. “Mayer isn’t dismantling some gem of original content. She’s turning her back on Yahoo’s long-unrealized potential,” she wrote.
Flipboard turns the user into editor: The social news app Flipboard introduced a major redesign this week that includes a few significant changes — a new bookmarklet that allows users to add any content on the web outside the app, commenting, and an extensive content search. The biggest development, though, is the ability for users to create and share their own magazines, turning Flipboard from a consumption tool to something more potentially creative. Walt Mossberg of All Things D has a good review of the new editing feature.
Jeff Sonderman of Poynter said the new Flipboard looks like it could drastically remake mobile news discovery. As Sonderman and Time’s Harry McCracken noted, the obvious comparison is Pinterest, though as McCracken pointed out, Flipboard is still distinct-looking. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM said that while the sharing isn’t new, the ability to edit content “picks up where Google Reader and other RSS services left off.”
Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed characterized Flipboard’s aims as much higher than that. It’s vying with companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to replace the traditional homepage as the gateway to the web. Austin Carr of Fast Company reported that Flipboard doesn’t see itself as a social network like those platforms, but as a “content network.” In a second article, Ingram suggested some innovative avenues Flipboard could go down with its new format regarding advertising and revenue-sharing deals. At The Guardian, Stuart Dredge also looked at the revenue factor, as well as several other aspects of Flipboard’s changes, including scale and the balance between humans and algorithms.
Who’s hurt by Google Reader’s death: A few lingering points being made from the now two-week-old plug-pulling of Google Reader: Ed Bott of ZDNet argued that the real victims in the Google Reader story are not its users, but the companies that Google has muscled out of the RSS market over the past eight years. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman and The Economist’s Ryan Avent both argued that the best way to treat Reader and many of Google’s other services may be as public infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the competitors continue to court Reader users — Digg hinted this week that its Reader replacement will go well beyond RSS — but TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wondered what will happen if RSS dies, particularly for the sites that depend so heavily on its traffic. Instapaper’s Marco Arment made a similar point, saying that RSS’s demise would most hurt smaller, low-volume sites in particular. “Without RSS readers, the long tail would be cut off,” he wrote. Dave Winer also proposed an open Twitter as an RSS replacement.
Reading roundup: Lots of other stuff going on in media and tech this week:
— The New York Times’ David Carr wrote a column detailing the almost absurd level of secrecy surrounding the trial of WikiLeaks informant Bradley Manning, though CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis said news orgs shouldn’t be let off the hook for not covering the case as extensively as they should. Meanwhile, some in journalism are expressing concern at the reports of impending indictments of top Obama officials for leaking information to the press. New Columbia j-school dean Steve Coll talked to Foreign Policy’s Thomas Ricks about the case, while AEJMC, the organization representing America’s journalism schools and professors, condemned the crackdown.
— One important story from late last week that didn’t make last week’s review: A federal judge ruled in the Associated Press’ favor in its copyright suit against Meltwater, a company that summarizes stories for corporate clients. PaidContent’s Jeff John Roberts explained the ruling, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation called very troubling.
— With the Columbia Journalism School announcing its new dean, Steve Coll, Michael Wolff ripped the school as irrelevant, calling instead for a system based on teaching entrepreneurship values and skills. Columbia student Jihii Jolly explained why she’s going there, and PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie defended the school, and also contended that its dean having never tweeted isn’t a strike against it. (Coll has since begun tweeting.)
— The New York Times’ Daniel Victor went after Twitter hashtags in a Lab post this week, arguing that they usually aren’t useful and are aesthetically damaging. Digital First’s Steve Buttry Storified some of the ensuing conversation about hashtags on Twitter.
— In a Q&A at the Lab, ProPublica’s Amanda Zamora discussed some her org’s innovative efforts to develop deeper participation and engagement across the web.
— Finally, a thoughtful, provocative piece from Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark, in which he argues that much of what we’re calling plagiarism isn’t actually plagiarism, and we need to quit getting so worked up about it.
Photo of Yahoo ice sculpture by Randy Stewart used under a Creative Commons license.
1. F.A.A. may loosen curbs on fliers' use of electronics (NYT)
2. What if the Google Reader readers just don't come back? (TechCrunch)
3. Michael Wolff on the new dean of the 'J-school': Columbia flunks relevancy test (USA Today)
4. Twitter snubs French court request for information on authors of hate speech - Updated (The Verge)
5. AP court win shows why content clipping on the web is not fair use (memeburn)
This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».
Mashable :: Google announced Wednesday that it plans to shutter its Labs department in an effort to focus more on its products. For years, Google Labs has been, to quote the company, “a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them.” That playground has birthed the likes of the Google Reader and Google Goggles — to name a very few.
That's a loss, really.
Continue to read Brenna Ehrlich, mashable.com
A year or two ago, as Twitter and FriendFeed in turn made headlines, much was made of how we were increasingly consuming information as a stream. Last January I blogged along those lines on why and how I followed 2,500 people on Twitter – why? I dip in and out rather than expecting to read everything. How? I used filters and groups for the bits I didn’t want to miss.
That behaviour now looks like a precursor to a broader change in my information consumption facilitated by new features in Twitter and Google Reader. And I wonder what that says about wider information consumption now and in the future.
The features in question are Twitter lists and Google Reader bundles.
Now that lists are integrated by Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck and Echofon, it’s easy to switch your default view of Twitter from ‘all friends’ to ‘List X’ – and from ‘List X’ to ‘List Y’ and ‘List Z’ and so on.
I have lists for my MA Online Journalism students, for my undergraduate online journalism students, for data geeks, for people I’ve met in person, for formal news feeds – and I’m switching between them like TV channels.
Likewise, as I start to gather my Google Reader subscriptions into some sort of order, I’m moving from a default behaviour of dipping into ‘all items’, to switching between particular bundles of feeds along the same lines: data blogs, technology news, my students’ blogs, and so on.
To continue the ’stream’ metaphor, I’m breaking that torrent into a number of smaller rivers – a delta, if you like. (Geographers: feel free to put me right on the technical inadequacy of the analogy)
Just as the order of things in a networked world has changed from ‘filter, then publish’ to ‘publish, then filter’, it strikes me that I’m adopting the same behaviour in the newsgathering process itself: following first, and filtering later
Why? Because it’s more efficient and – perhaps key – the primary filter is search. And you have to follow first to make something searchable.
In fact, Google itself is a prime example of ‘Follow, Then Filter’, following links across the web to add to its index which users can filter with a search. (another good example is Delicious – bookmarking articles you’ve not read in full because you may want to access them later).
When bandwidth ceases to become an issue – when storage ceases to become an issue – then we can follow as much as we like on the premise that, later, we can filter that information to suit our particular needs at that moment, for the one thing that does have a limit – our attention.
Google Reader’s ‘Bundles’ feature – which allows you to share a selected collection of your subscriptions in a range of ways – has been around for 10 months now, but as I’m asking my students this week to use it, I thought I’d blog a quick how-to and why-to.
Traditionally, to share your Google Reader subscriptions you’ve had to know how to export and import an OPML file. To share a specific selection of those subscriptions you had to know how to edit an OPML file (clue: use a text editor).
OPML also has the disadvantage of not making it easy to see at a glance what subscriptions it contains.
Bundles, on the other hand, make it pretty easy to do all of the above. It will also:
For my own purposes, it’s especially useful because I normally ask students to submit a screenshot of their RSS reader subscriptions for their Online Journalism assignments as evidence of their newsgathering (along with their Delicious URL and a logbook of sources). This saves them that process – and a bit of printing.
Frustratingly, it’s not the easiest feature to find and use. So here’s how you do it:
You’ll find it under ‘Your stuff’ (see image, left).
The main area should now change to ‘Discover and search for feeds’, with the ‘Browse’ tab selected. Look to the right of the suggested bundles to find the button that says ‘Create a bundle’ (normally on the right hand side).
Your feeds should be visible in the ‘Subscriptions’ box in the left hand column of the screen (under ‘Browse for stuff’, ‘People you follow’ and ‘Explore’. If it is hard to see your feeds under all of that, collapse those sections by clicking on the ‘-’ box next to them).
If you are dragging a folder of feeds, the title will be automatically filled in for you. Or you can choose your own, and add a description.
Click Save, and the main area will change again to give you some options to share your new bundle.
Having written this post I discovered another that would have saved me the time (and includes a nifty way to share folders by simply clicking on the drop-down menu to the right of a folder and selecting ‘Create a bundle‘ . Check it out to see more images while I bang my head on the desk…
This post sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
RSS is an incredibly useful way for journalists to keep track of beats by watching what is being published online, whether on news sites, blogs, Twitter, saved Google search terms, etc.
I spoke to three journalists about how they use RSS for research and reporting. They also each gave one really good tip for diving into RSS.
For those unfamiliar with RSS, Wikipedia has this to say about RSS:
RSS (most commonly expanded as “Really Simple Syndication” but sometimes “Rich Site Summary”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based.
Eric Berger has been a reporter at the Houston Chronicle for 10 years and has been covering science for the last eight years. He has been blogging about science since 2005, creating a community to discuss science at SciGuy.
“When I first started blogging I found science blogs and used RSS as a means to keep track of the flow of information,” Berger said. “It’s too difficult and time-consuming to visit 100 blogs a day.”
Berger uses Bloglines, a popular RSS feed reader, to follow around 80 Web sites and blogs. He estimates seeing 300 new items a day.
“Back in the dark ages (five -six years ago), if I was working on a story I might be solely focused on that and not seeing what else what happening in science,” Berger said. “Now it’s impossible to escape that.”
He follows scientists of various disciplines, so he can keep track of various scientific communities. He also collects news releases via RSS, which sometimes turn into blog entries.
“If that strikes a chord in the community, then you can spin it into a story for the newspaper,” he said.
One Tip:
“Just experiment with it [RSS] and put new feeds in and don’t be afraid to add or delete feeds. Your feed reader shouldn’t be static, your list of feeds should fluctuate with what you’re working on.”
David Brauer covers media and occasionally politics for MinnPost.com.
Using RSS became a critical part of Brauer’s job in March of 2008, when he started writing a aggregated morning briefing for MinnPost.com.
“You have to make sure to pay attention to local news sources,” Brauer said. “The only way to do it is with RSS. RSS makes it very efficient to know what’s going on in the area I cover.”
Brauer no longer does the morning briefing, but RSS has remained vital in more general work. He is subscribed to 138 feeds in Google Reader, primarily local media feeds such as public radio, tv stations, alt weeklies and of course, the local newspapers.
“It’s one of the tools I use most as a reporter. RSS and Twitter,” he said. “RSS is good for checking things I already know to check; Twitter is good for finding things I wouldn’t have known to follow.”
His feeds are organized with 24 tags, categorizing feeds into sections such as sports, tech, big, little and suburban, public radio, local aggregators, local blogs, local papers, college journalists, national and politics.
“I see over 1,000 new items a day, but experienced users know you can just mark all items as read and move on,” Brauer said. “Be somewhat aware of balance so you don’t spend all day in RSS.”
One Tip:
Brauer suggests that journalists look into the sync features offered by many RSS readers, and to make sure that your RSS reader of choice is available for multiple platforms. (Google Reader has Web and mobile versions that sync.)
Sean Blanda is an editor at Vital Business Media and a co-founder of Technically Philly.
Blanda started using RSS around 2005, with Bloglines.
“It was coolest thing in the world that I didn’t have to put up with email and could still get content sent to me,” he said. “When I figured out you could get feeds of Google Alerts (and now Twitter mentions) it really spiraled out of control.”
Most of his ideas for stories at Vital come from media news feeds he gathers. He also runs Technically Philly part time and uses RSS to gather information quickly and get a large cross-section of sources.
“Our readership is very active on social media and blogging, so I have alerts for people’s names, companies, locations in Philadelphia, etc.”
Blanda uses Google Reader instead of Bloglines now, attracted by the social tools Google has been adding recently. Users can follow friends, share stories and comment on content together.
“I can see what my friends think is important too,” he said. “Most of my college newsroom was using Google Reader and it became a better way to stay in touch and shoot story ideas back and forth.”
He keeps 377 subscriptions organized by purpose, so for Vital he has folders by industry and for Technically Philly he sorts by beat and general news.
“I check all of the feeds related to my job everyday, every story,” Blanda said. “The other stuff, I get to it when I can, if not, no big deal. And sometimes I declare bankruptcy and mark all as read.”
Blanda can’t estimate how many news items he gets in a day: “It [Google Reader] always says 1000+ (unread items). I’d say I check around 500-600 a day.”
One Tip
“My one tip would either be to get other people on your beat to share on Google Reader or to not forget Yahoo Pipes as a way to filter info…something I haven’t taken enough advantage of. With enough work you could always be sure to get relevant information.”
Do you use RSS to research and report? How do you organize your feeds and fight information overload? What creative uses do you put RSS to? Can you offer other tips?
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