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"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
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“People wring their hands over how to make science relevant and accessible, but newspapers hand us one answer on a plate every week, with the barrage of claims on what’s good for you or bad for you: it’s evidence based medicine. If every school taught the basics – randomised trials, blinding, cohort studies, and why systematic reviews are better than cherrypicking your evidence – it would help everyone navigate the world, and learn some of the most important ideas in the whole of science.
But even before that happens, we can feel optimistic. Information is more easily accessible now than ever before, and smart motivated people can sidestep traditional routes to obtain knowledge, and disseminate it. A child can know more about evidence than their peers, and more than adults, and more than their own teachers; they can tell the world what they know, and they can have an impact.”
via Kids who spot bullshit, and the adults who get upset about it – Bad Science.
College: What I Did Right and Where I Screwed Up. Reflections of a recent graduate including “bold, unwarranted advice for students and educators.” Really inspiring, fantastic insights on finding your passions and following them in and out of the classroom. Hat tip to Daniel Bachhuber for finding, sharing, and the epic comment thread at the end.
Summer Reading List: 10 Essential Books for Cognitive Sunshine: a cross-disciplinary selection of the 10 most essential cognitive fertilizers for a season of creative and intellectual growth.
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
Cuts and big changes for two papers: In the past week, two American newspapers have announced major reorganizations that, depending on who you read, were either cold corporate downsizing or fresh attempts at journalism innovation. First, late last week, Gannett’s USA Today announced that it would undergo the most sweeping change in its 28-year history, transforming “into a multi-media company” as opposed to a newspaper — and laying off 130 of its 1,500 employees in the process. The Associated Press and paidContent have pretty good explanations of what the changes entail, and thanks to the feisty Gannett Blog, we have the slide presentation Gannett execs made to USA Today’s staff.
Though there are some dots to be connected, those slides are the best illustration of what Gannett is trying to do: Push USA Today further into web content, breaking news and especially mobile content (by far its fastest-growing area) in order to justify a simultaneous move deeper into mobile and online advertising. The paper is hoping to become faster on breaking news, with a web-first mindset, fewer editors, and a strategy that focuses on flooding coverage on breaking stories and then coming back later for deeper features.
Gannett Blog’s Jim Hopkins, a longtime critic of the company, wasn’t thrilled about this move, either, pointing out the lack of newsroom experience in some of its key executives and saying that Gannett touted almost the exact same strategy four years ago, to little effect. He did say a few days later, though, that Gannett’s plans to encourage more collaboration among staffers — by flattening the “silos” of the News, Sports, Money, and Life sections — are long overdue.
News media analyst Ken Doctor was much more charitable, seeing in USA Today’s overhaul echoes of the new “digital first” mentalities at the Journal Register Co. and TBD. The best way to see this, Doctor said, is to “mark another day in which a publisher is acting on the plain truths of the marketplace and of the audiences, and trying to reinvent itself.” Newspaper Death Watch’s Paul Gillin called USA Today’s transformation a bellwether for news organizations and said its harmony between news and advertising is a bitter but necessary pill for traditionalists to swallow. And media consultant Mario Garcia said USA Today’s audience-driven approach is the key to survival in a multimedia environment.
The other newspaper to announce an overhaul was the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, a for-profit paper published by the Mormon Church. The paper is laying off 43 percent of its staff, though you wouldn’t know it from the News’ own article on the changes. In a pair of posts, Ken Doctor looked at the change in philosophy that’s accompanying the cuts — an attempt to become the worldwide Mormon newspaper of sorts, along with pro-am and local news efforts and a news-broadcast collaboration — and liked what he found. News business expert Alan Mutter examined the prospects for a slashed, print-and-broadcast newsroom and came out less optimistic.
A Twitter stunt gone awry: Twitter devotees are used to seeing untrue rumors and scoops occasionally get reported there (as Jeff Goldblum can attest), but this week may have been the first time a false Twitter report was knowingly started by a member of the traditional media as a stunt. Fed up with the more-breathless-than-usual Twitter rumor-reporting that’s been going on in the sports media this summer, Washington Post sports reporter Mike Wise decided to start a false rumor about the length of an NFL quarterback’s suspension to make a point about the unreliability of reporting on Twitter.
The stunt bombed; Wise admitted the hoax an hour later and was suspended for a month by the Post the next day. Such an ill-advised prank isn’t really news in itself, but it did spur a bit of interesting commentary on Twitter and breaking news. Numerous people argued that Wise’s hoax betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Twitter as a news medium — one that many others probably share. Even after the episode, Wise maintained that it showed that nobody checks facts or sourcing on breaking stories on Twitter.
Quite a few observers disagreed for a variety of reasons. Barry Petchesky of Gawker’s sports blog Deadspin said the whole incident actually disproved Wise’s thesis: The false story didn’t gain much traction, and the media outlets that did report the story credited Wise until it could be confirmed independently, just the way the system is supposed to work.
But the primary objection was that, as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, Slate’s Tom Scocca, and several others all argued, to the extent that Wise was trusted, it was because of the credibility that people give to The Washington Post — a traditional news organization — rather than Twitter itself. As TBD’s Steve Buttry pointed out, people would have run with this story if Wise had planted it in the Post itself or on its website; what makes Twitter any different? DCist’s Aaron Morrissey put the point well: Wise falsely “assumed that there weren’t levels of authenticity to Twitter, which, just like any other social construct on Earth, features some people who are reputable concerning whatever and others who aren’t.”
Rupert’s paywall runs into obstacles: Two months after the online paywall went up at Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London, The Independent (a competitor of The Times) reported this week that with a vastly reduced audience to sell to, advertisers are fleeing the site. In the article, various British news industry analysts also said The Times is killing its online brand and not adding any of the sort of value that’s necessary to justify charging for news. Stateside, too, Lost Remote’s Steve Safran saw the news as “mounting evidence that putting up a paywall is bad for business.”
It should be noted, though, that according to those analysts, The Times’ paywall is “more about gathering consumer information than selling content” — News Corp.’s primary intent may be getting detailed, personalized information on Times readers and using it to sell them other products within its media empire, including its BSkyB satellite TV. Francois Nel ran some possible numbers and determined that even with its relatively small audience (15,000 subscribers, plus day-pass users), News Corp. could be making more money with its paywall than without.
On the other hand, a new study reported by paidContent estimated that online subscribers to The Times and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal are worth only a quarter of their print counterparts. Getting rid of the print product, the study posited, wouldn’t even make up for the loss of income from those subscribers. The Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford detailed more of the research firm’s report — a rather depressing one for newspaper execs.
Google and the AP play nice: A quiet news development worth noting: Google and The Associated Press renewed their licensing agreement that allows Google (including, especially, Google News) to host AP content. The deal was announced on Google’s side via a one-paragraph post, and on the AP’s side through a short press release, and then a much more extensive article by its technology writer Michael Liedtke. The extension is significant because the two sides have had a consistently fractious relationship — their first agreement began in 2006 after the AP threatened to sue Google for aggregating its articles, AP executives have criticized news aggregators for misappropriating content, and the AP’s material briefly stopped appearing on Google News late last year.
The Lab’s Megan Garber noted that this new agreement might go beyond another truce and mark a change in the way the companies relate: “Us-versus-them becoming let’s-work-together.” Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan provided plenty of background, surmising that AP has learned its lesson that Google News can live on just fine without them.
Reading roundup: This week was an especially rich one for all sorts of web-journalism punditry. Here’s a sampling:
— The American Journalism Review’s Barb Palser tried to throw some cold water on the hyperlocal news movement, using some Pew stats to argue that people don’t go online for neighborhood news as much as we might think. (That use of statistics led to a frustrated response by Michele McLellan.) And the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles added his skepticism to the discussion surrounding Patch and large-scale hyperlocal news.
— NYU j-prof Jay Rosen can be a polarizing figure, but there are few media observers who are better at pulling thoughtful insights out of the often mystifying world that is journalism-in-transition. We got three particularly thought-provoking tidbits from him this week: A sharp interview with The Economist about the American press; a lecture at a French j-school about the changing dynamic between “the audience” and “the public,” with tips for new students; and a video clip from the Journal Register Co.’s ideaLab on news production and innovation.
— We spent some time this summer talking about the merits (and drawbacks) of links, so consider this a worthy addendum: Scott Rosenberg, who recently chronicled the history of blogging, issued a three-part defense of the link this week. A great examination of one of the fundamental features of the web.
— Finally, two cool reads, one practical and the other theoretical. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal listed five lessons from the publication of Longshot, the hyperspeed-produced magazine formerly known as 48HRS, and here at the Lab, Cornell scholar Joshua Braun talked about the way TV news organizations maintain the “stage management” of broadcast in their online efforts. “They continue to control what remains backstage and what goes front-stage,” he told Megan Garber in a Q&A, giving comment moderation as one example. “That’s not unique to the news, either. But it’s an interesting preservation of the way the media’s worked for a long time.”
The NYTPicker is one of my favorite media criticism blogs, and this post is a winner. Writer Joseph Epstein, who subscribed to the New York Times for 50 years, cancels his subscription because:
"...the Gray Lady is far from the grande dame she once was. For years now she has been going heavy on the rouge, lipstick, and eyeliner, using a push-up bra, and gadding about in stiletto heels. She’s become a bit—perhaps more than a bit—of a slut, whoring after youth through pretending to be with-it. I’ve had it with the old broad; after nearly 50 years together, I’ve determined to cut her loose."
Post from: Megan Taylor: Web Journalist
Link: 50-year Subscriber Calls NYT “A Slut, Whoring After Youth”
Fuck Yeah Journalism: Bringing you the good, the bad and the unintentionally funny things the journalism world brings us.
Post from: Megan Taylor: Web Journalist
Link: Fuck Yeah Journalism
I came across this comment today that really helped me solidify how I feel about Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and one of my favorite books, Atlas Shrugged.
I don't consider myself an Objectivist, but A does equal A.
Some day I will write a really long, tedious blog post about this that no one will read. :)
Post from: Megan Taylor: Web Journalist
Link: Ranting about Ayn Rand
Hilarious website with English translations for business jargon. Submit your own definitions if they haven't defined your pet buzzword, and find out what the hell your boss just said. Click the "I'm Feeling Douchey" button for a random word and definition.
This should be required reading for anyone with an MBA.
Post from: Megan Taylor: Web Journalist
Link: Unsuck It
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
The Times has the Pulse (briefly) pulled: Last week, I noted one of the more interesting iPad news apps: Pulse News Reader, designed by two Stanford grad students, is a stylish news aggregator. But on Monday, the app was pulled from the iTunes store based on a claim that it infringes on The New York Times’ copyright after some Times folks saw the paper’s own blog post about the reader. The app was reinstated the next day, but the debate over copyright, aggregation, and mobile apps had already taken off.
The central point of the Times’ argument was that the $3.99 app was an illegal attempt to make money off of the Times’ (and The Boston Globe’s) free, publicly available RSS feeds. (The paper also objected to app’s placement of the Times’ content within a frame on the iPad.) The Citizen Media Law Project’s Kimberley Isbell helpfully broke down the Times’ claims and the Pulse Reader’s possible fair-use defenses, noting the Times articles’ free accessibility and the relatively small article portions displayed on the reader.
Reaction on the web weighed overwhelmingly against the Times: Wired contended that every piece of paid software used to access the Times’ site would be outlawed by the paper’s logic, while Techdirt’s Mike Masnick argued that Pulse was selling its software, not the Times’ feeds. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wondered whether the Times was declaring war on news aggregators, and the Sydney Morning Herald reasoned that if the Times is offering its RSS for free, it can’t complain when someone designs a reader to view it. Blogging and RSS vet Dave Winer had the harshest response in a post arguing that the Times is in the business of news production, not distribution: “Look, if the Times is depending on stopping those two kids for its future, then the Times has no future.”
The app’s creators were just as baffled as anybody about why the app was reinstated, a Times’ spokesman apparently tried to pass off the complaint as a mistake, though that response doesn’t exactly square with the Times’ Martin Nisenholtz’s reiteration of the paper’s case to paidContent’s Staci Kramer. As for whether this claim would apply beyond the Pulse Reader, Nisenholtz said it would be handled “on a case by case basis.”
We had plenty of other iPad news this week, too — Jobs made a number of mostly iPhone-related announcements at Apple’s developers’ conference on Monday, and the Lab’s Joshua Benton explained what they mean for mobile news. A few highlights: Apple’s not providing much clarity about recent app-banning controversies, but it is moving decisively on ebooks and its iAd mobile advertising platform. The AP reported that publishers are seeing encouraging early signs about wringing advertising dollars out of the iPad, but Ken Doctor went on a wonderful little rant against publishers that are slow to take advantage of the iPad’s capabilities. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Thomson slammed news orgs’ repurposed “crapps” and talked, with the Journal’s Les Hinton, about his paper’s own iPad strategy. And the iPad faced its first major security issue, as the email addresses of at least 114,000 owners were exposed by hackers.
The purpose of the link: A Nicholas Carr post last week ignited a spirited discussion about the relative values of the link, and that conversation continued this week with twin Wall Street Journal columns by Carr and web scholar Clay Shirky debating whether the Internet makes us smarter. Carr said no, using a similar argument to the one he laid out in his earlier post (it’s also the central point of his new book): The Internet encourages multitasking and bite-size information, making us all “scattered and superficial thinkers.” Shirky said yes, arguing that the Internet enables never-before-experienced publishing and connective capabilities that allow us to put our cognitive surplus to work for a better society. (That’s also the central point of his new book.) Quite a few people, led by GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram, posited that both writers were right – Carr in the short term, Shirky in the long term.
Here at the Lab, Jason Fry weighed in on the delinkification debate, giving a useful classification of the link’s primary purposes — credibility, readability and connectivity. Credibility has become a vital function in today’s web, Fry said, though he conceded Carr’s point that the link adds to the cognitive load when it comes to readability. Based on Carr’s original post, the web design firm Arc90 added an option to its browser extension to convert hyperlinks to footnotes.
The Lab also ran a fantastic three-part series on links by Jonathan Stray exploring four journalistic purposes of the hyperlink (it’s essential, he says), examining the way news organizations talk about links (they’re a bit muddled) and studying how much those news organizations actually link (not a whole lot, especially the wire services). It’s a tremendously helpful resource for anyone interested in looking at how linking and journalism intersect.
Debate over Newsweek’s bidders: We found out about three bidders for Newsweek last Thursday, so last Friday was the time for profiles and commentary, much of it centered on the conservative news site and magazine Newsmax. Newsmax’s CEO, Christopher Ruddy, told the Washington Post that it has a number of non-conservative media projects, so Newsweek wouldn’t have to adopt a conservative viewpoint to be part of Newsmax’s plans. “Newsmax’s success is in its business model, not just its editorial approach,” Ruddy said. Newsweek employees were worried about the prospect of a Newsmax-owned Newsweek, but the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, himself a conservative, said Newsmax’s influence could be just the nudge Newsweek needs to hit its sweet spot in America’s heartland. Chicago magazine profiled another bidder, venture capitalist Thane Ritchie, while the Washington Post reported that audio equipment exec Sidney Harman is considering a bid, too.
Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz devoted a column to the publicly acknowledged bidders, exploring the question of why no major players have emerged as bidders and concluding that the lack of interest “amounts to a no-confidence vote not just on the category of newsweeklies, which have long been squeezed between daily papers and in-depth monthlies, but on print journalism itself.” Newsweek, via its Tumblr, ripped apart the work of its Washington Post Co. colleague, taking to task for a lack of evidence and disputing his claim that the re-envisioned Newsweek is a flop. (That Tumblr is written by Newsweek social-media guru Mark Coatney, who got a New York Daily Intel Q&A a couple of days later.) Meanwhile, New York Times columnist David Carr proposed eight ways to revive Newsweek.
A sports blog network goes local: ESPN has been making a well-documented and initially successful local sports media play over the past year, but this week, a very different sports media company is making a push into what used to be local newspapers’ territory. SB Nation, a network of more than 250 fan-run sports blogs founded in 2003 by Tyler Bleszinski and Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, began rolling out 20 city-specific sports media hubs. Until now, the company has focused on team-specific (or sport-specific, in the case of some less prominent sports) blogs, but the new sites will aggregate real-time sports news mixed with fan-generated conversation and commentary.
In a New York Times feature, SB Nation’s Jim Bankoff said that while his company is trying to provide a ground-up alternative to traditional sports coverage, he’d be happy to collaborate with local newspapers. Former ESPN.com columnist Dan Shanoff echoed that perspective, saying that SB Nation’s brand of sharp fan analysis is ripe for media partnerships because “it is something that local newspapers and local cable-sports networks can’t or won’t do well.” Shanoff proposed that SB Nation become a piece of a larger media company’s local media strategy, suggesting Comcast as an ideal fit.
Here at the Lab, Bankoff gave Laura McGann a handful of lessons media organizations could learn from the SB Nation model, including tightly focused subject matter and maximizing repeat visitors. SB Nation’s team-specific focus seems to be a major component in its success, and could have some ready implications for news organizations, as Bankoff noted: “We’re not fans of sports — we’re fans of teams. We’re not fans of television. We’re fans of shows.”
Reading roundup: This week, I’ve got two news items, a few interesting pieces of commentary and one set of tips.
— Advertising Age reported that AOL is planning to hire hundreds of journalists for a major expansion into news production. At the local media blog Lost Remote, Cory Bergman, who owns a local news network himself, noted that AOL’s hyperlocal outfit Patch is making 300 of those hires and wondered what it will mean for local news.
— Los Angeles Times media writer James Rainey wrote a piece on the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper that has poured legal resources into stopping people who use its content without permission. The Times’ Mark Milian also provided a quick guide to what’s OK and what’s not when reposting.
— Publish2’s Scott Karp wrote an intriguing essay on the concept of a “content graph,” in which media organizations collaborate through distribution to enhance their brand’s value.
— News business guru Alan Mutter sensed a theme among news startups — too much focus on news, not enough on business — and wrote a stiff wakeup call.
— Two journalism/tech folks, Jeff Sonderman and Michelle Minkoff, wrote a bit about what journalism school is — and isn’t — good for. Both are worthwhile reads.
— Finally, British journalism David Higgerson has 10 ideas for building good hyperlocal websites. Most of his (very practical) ideas are useful not just for hyperlocal journalism, but for online news in general.
“Links can add a lot of value to stories, but the journalism profession as a whole has been surprisingly slow to take them seriously. That’s my conclusion from several months of talking to organizations and reporters about their linking practices, and from counting the number and type of links from hundreds of stories,” writes Jonathan Stray.
Stray looks at the linking policies and strategies of BBC News, Reuters, Dow Jones, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Associated Press. There’s more to come from this research, but some initial conclusions suggest there’s a way to go when it comes to linking out:
Reading between the lines, it seems that most newsrooms have yet to make a strong commitment to linking. This would explain the mushiness of some of the answers I received, where news organizations “encourage” their reporters or offer “guidance” on linking.
Similar Posts:
The FTC’s ideas for journalism: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has spent much of the last year listening to suggestions about how they might change antitrust, copyright and tax laws in order to create the best possible climate for good journalism, and this weekend it posted its “discussion draft” of policy proposals to “support the reinvention of journalism.” It’s a 47-page document, so here’s a quick summary of their ideas:
— Expand copyright law to protect news content against online aggregators, including “hot news” legislation, further limits to fair use and mandatory content licenses.
— Allow antitrust exemptions for news organizations to put up paywalls together and develop a unified system to limit online aggregators.
— Enact direct or indirect government subsidies through a variety of possible means, including a journalism AmeriCorps, more CPB funding, a national local news fund, tax credits to news orgs for employing journalists, university investigative journalism grants, and newspaper and magazine postal subsidies. These subsidies could be paid for through taxes on broadcast spectrum, consumer electronics, advertising, or ISP-cell phone bills.
— Tax code changes to make it easier for news organizations to gain tax-exempt status.
— Pass various FOIA-related laws to make government data easier to access and search.
It’s worth noting that the FTC isn’t explicitly endorsing these proposals; the draft reads more as a list of possible proposals that might be worth exploring further. Still, j-prof and new media pundit Jeff Jarvis saw a perspective of old-media protectionism running through the draft, as he tore it apart point by point. The FTC is defining journalism through established news organizations and looking to prop them up instead of supporting visionary startups, he wrote. “If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here.”
Jarvis’ charges were seconded by two newspapermen, the Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott and the Los Angeles Times’ Andrew Malcolm, who likened the proposals to the government trying to save the auto industry by reviving the gas guzzlers of the 1960s. Steve Buttry of the new Washington news site TBD chimed in, too, homing in on the assertion that newspapers provide the overwhelming majority of our original news.
Free Press’ Josh Stearns responded by cautioning against “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” noting a few of things that he liked about the FTC’s proposals. And at the Huffington Post, Alex Howard praised the FTC’s open-government proposals. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen chipped in his own tweet-length proposal for the FTC: “Subsidize universal broadband; fight for sensible net neutrality.”
Steve Jobs’ proposal for paid news: The folks from the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital interviewed Apple chief Steve Jobs on stage this week as part of their D8 conference, and Jobs had a few words for the news industry: Yes, he wants to help save journalism, because, as he put it, ““I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself.” But if they’re going to survive, news organizations should be more aggressive about getting people to pay for content, Jobs said, like Apple did in helping raise e-book prices earlier this year.
As it turned out, there was something for everybody to pick apart in that exchange: Ex-Saloner and blogging historian Scott Rosenberg took issue with Jobs’ “nation of bloggers” jab, and Steve Safran of the local-news blog Lost Remote said that what Jobs really wants to save is paid, professional journalism. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram argued that an “iTunes for news” model that Jobs proposed might benefit Jobs, but probably won’t work for news outlets. And here at the Lab, Laura McGann pointed out a statement Jobs made elsewhere in the interview that rejected Apple app applicants (sorry, couldn’t resist) should simply resubmit their apps, unchanged.
Meanwhile, we got another diatribe about Apple’s app censorship from Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenco, and a few other interesting pieces of app news: Statistics showing just how big game apps are on the iPhone and iPad (though content apps aren’t doing bad on the iPad), lessons for iPad news apps from Hacks/Hackers’ recent app-creating binge, and a cool iPad news reader designed by Stanford students.
To link or not to link?: Author Nicholas Carr, who’s about to release a book about how the Internet is hurting our ability to think, highlighting one of the points from that book in a blog post this weekend: The link, Carr argues, hurts our ability to concentrate and follow an argument, and in some cases we may be better off without them. He calls links a high-tech version of the footnote, like little distracting textual gnats buzzing around our heads. “Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters.” Carr approvingly noted a couple of experiments in leaving links to the bottom of articles.
ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick responded with a thoughtful look at the purpose of links, wondering if they really might be better off at the end of articles, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum was sympathetic to Carr’s point as well: “It’s not a trivial question to ask what the Internet is doing to our attention spans,” he wrote. “I know mine, for one, is shot to hell.”
Carr, who’s had his runins with the Internet cognoscenti in the past, predictably caught some flak for his post too, including from Mathew Ingram, who argued that links are at least as much an intellectual discipline for the writer as the reader. The Scholarly Kitchen’s Kent Anderson noted that links are part of a long academic tradition that includes footnotes and inline citations: “Do they distract? Of course they do. … But it’s distraction through addition, if done well.” And author Scott Berkun brings up a few variables that others missed, including the skill of the author, web design, and the “open in new tab” function.
‘The Twitter of news’: The link-sharing site Digg gave a preview of its new version, which will implement some Twitter-like features and emphasize the news links that the people you follow have shared, rather than just the top overall links. The net effect is an attempt to become, as GigaOm’s Liz Gannes put it, “the Twitter of news.” That, of course, raises the question, “Isn’t Twitter already the Twitter of news?” But Digg’s advantage, founder Kevin Rose says, is that it does away with the status updates and Justin Bieber memes and gives you purely socially powered links and news.
Tech pioneer Dave Winer was intrigued by the concept, and The Next Web’s Zee Kane lauded Digg for integrating more deeply with Twitter. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, a competitor of Digg’s, bashed Rose for “just re-implementing features from other websites,” and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington knocked both Rose and Ohanian down a peg in response.
Bidders for Newsweek: Wednesday was The Washington Post Co.’s deadline for formal expressions of interest in buying Newsweek, and it received three offers: OpenGate Capital, a private equity firm that bought TV Guide for $1 in 2008; hedge fund manager and failed Chicago Sun-Times bidder Thane Ritchie; and conservative magazine and website Newsmax. On Twitter, Jeff Jarvis called the bidders “tacky” and wondered whether Newsweek would be better off dead.
Earlier in the week, The New York Times’ David Carr offered an explanation for why Newsweek and other magazines seem to be worth so little to potential buyers: “In the current digital news ecosystem, having ‘week’ in your title is anachronistic in the extreme, what an investor would call negative equity.” At its Tumblr blog, Newsweek responded by arguing that while everyone seems to have the perfect idea of what Newsweek should have done, no one can change the simple business reality that Newsweek is no longer alone in its niche for readers and advertisers.
Reading roundup: A couple of updates on stories from last week, plus a bunch of interesting articles and resources.
— There wasn’t much new said in the continuing argument over Facebook and privacy, but Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a couple more interviews defending its privacy policy and last week’s changes to NPR, All Things Digital and Wired, the latter of which included the revelation that Zuckerberg donated to Diaspora, Facebook’s open-source startup competitor. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein also defended Facebook’s privacy stance, and Jay Rosen took him to task for it.
— An addendum to last week’s Publish2 News Exchange launch: Publish2’s Ryan Sholin told the Lab’s Megan Garber that it only intends to disrupt the AP, not kill it. The exchange is aimed at the content distribution side of the AP, not the production end, he said. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds gave some more explanation of Publish2’s plans.
— The New York Times announced it will host Nate Silver’s political polling blog FiveThirtyEight, one of the web’s top operations at the intersection of data and journalism. Yahoo News’ Michael Calderone examined the fact that Silver’s been open about his liberal political views and asks how that will work out at the Times.
— Several smart, thought-provoking analyses here: journalism researcher Michele McLellan surveyed online local news publishers, news business expert Alan Mutter looked at Yahoo’s hints at a challenge to local newspapers, search guru Danny Sullivan examined a case of traditional media stealing his blog’s story; and media analyst Frederic Filloux explained why online advertising is so lousy.
— Finally, a ‘why’ and a ‘how’ for a couple of aspects of digital journalism: MediaShift’s Roland LeGrand gives journalists the reasons they should learn computer programming, and Poynter’s Jeremy Caplan has a great list of tips for crowdsourcing in journalism.
News reaches me via the newspaper video group about me about an excellent new project called Findingtheframe by Colin Mulvany, multimedia producer at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington.
According to Colin the site was set up as a website
for the sole purpose of connecting those who need feedback on their multimedia, to professionals willing to share some time and knowledge.
It came off the back of a post on his (excellent) blog Mastering Multimedia where he voiced his disappointment at the quality of the video being submitted to the NPPA Best of Photojournalism Multimedia Contest
The plan is to have onboard as many “expert” volunteers as possible that have solid foundations in video storytelling, audio slide shows or Flash projects. This pool of reviewers will peruse the submitted links of multimedia in the “Story Pool”. If they decide to comment on a story, it will then become public on theFinding the Frame home page where anyone else is free to give added feedback.
The site has already drawn in some great content and some lively debate. Well worth a look and if you are in that game then sign up to help review.
"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
"Basically the price of a night on the town!"
"I'd love to help kickstart continued development! And 0 EUR/month really does make fiscal sense too... maybe I'll even get a shirt?" (there will be limited edition shirts for two and other goodies for each supporter as soon as we sold the 200)