Saturday, July 4th, 2009
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Posted by Suw and Kevin
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Kevin: Dean Wright - Reuters Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards - writes about how the news organisation navigated the story of the disputed Iranian elections after authorities shut them down. "(I)t fell to citizen journalists — many of whom were among the protesters — to provide the images that the world would see, using such social media as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube." Here is the summary:
" The combination of citizen journalism, and the standards of news organizations of companies such as Reuters, has the ability to produce a richer flow of information around the world.
Provided we clearly flag the origin of material and put the relevant context around it, our subscribers, our viewers and our readers –- who are already immersed in social networking as consumers and contributors themselves –- are smart enough to evaluate this content, without challenging our core journalistic values."
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Kevin: It looks like a flip-chart diagram from an internal meeting. It looks at issues that prevent the BBC from sharing content with audiences, other companies, developers, start-ups and 'the UK media ecoystem'. As one of the person commenting on the picture, one missing element is rights. It's a huge issue, and it's impossible to discuss more open content without touching on a rights issue.
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Kevin: Newspapers serving southern suburbs of Dallas Texas shuts. Jeff Jarvis says that it's a good opportunity for local bloggers.
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Friday, July 3rd, 2009
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Kevin: Lyn Headley writes: "Relations between journalism and the web have always been tense, but things are getting nasty. A coalition of publishers, journalists and scholars is taking shape in opposition to "parasitic aggregators" in order to "protect" "original" content. Moral and political agitation is afoot which will challenge deeply held convictions about the nature of journalism and the web. These forces align well with a number of ventures aiming to lower the barriers preventing orderly payment in exchange for access to news. At the other end of the spectrum, a new crop of startups and ventures, recently profiled by Steve Outing, is working an angle some are calling micropatronage. Will either of these approaches encourage a sustainable, high quality journalism?"
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Kevin: * The 2009 categories are:
o The Knight Award for Public Service
o General Excellence in Online Journalism
o General Excellence in Online Journalism, Non-English
o The Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism
o Breaking News
o Specialty Site Journalism
o Investigative Journalism
o Multimedia Feature Presentation
o Online Topical Reporting/Blogging
o Online Commentary/Blogging
o Community Collaboration Award
o Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies
o Online Video Journalism
o Student Journalism
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Kevin: An overview of new attempts by newspapers in the US to build local blog networks around newspapers. Simon Owens looks at a blog aggregator in Chicago, ChicagoNow, which is linked to the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers will get a share of the revenue from the site. At the LA Times, their blog editor, Tony Pierce, wants to focus on 'posts, not blogs', linking to individual posts. Owens writes, "Pierce said he thinks blog networks are only the first step toward true engagement. Despite the hype over Web 2.0, not all content deserves to be highlighted for a newspaper's readership. To be truly innovative, he said, editors are going to have to roll up their sleeves and wade through drivel to find the gems."
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Kevin: "Google has eliminated an experimental feature that allowed people quoted in articles in Google News to post comments on those articles."
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Kevin: Will Bunch gives his thoughts on why newspapers didn't invent Google News. "The problem, Michael Nielsen argues, is not a story of failure but of success — newspapers had developed an elaborate architeciture to do the things they did well, and making changes to adjust to Internet start-ups would have done more harm than good. …To compete, a newspaper could lay off that award-winning photo talent — but at what cost to morale, to the paper's brand name, and to its internal way of doing business?" I think the other problem is that newspapers still are rarely part of the link economy. Linking to other sources is still an anathema to many journalists.
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Kevin: Twitter demographics are difficult and contradictory. Some of this is down to measuring traffic solely through the web interface, and a recent article showed that the vast majority of Twitter usage, 80%, comes through their API. Nick Burcher looks at statistics from Quantcast, Hitwise and and compete. The result is inconclusive at best.
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Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
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Posted by Suw and Kevin
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Kevin: "John Hartigan, the Chief Executive of News Ltd, the Australian arm of News Corp has joined in with his colleagues in the United States today in bashing Google and bloggers." He says of bloggers, "Almost anyone can start one of these sites, with very little capital, no training or qualifications. Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for - something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance."
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Kevin: The venture will be supported through donations and grants and will operate independently from the Union-Tribune.
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Kevin: Mark S. Luckie, which gives 30 simple activities journalism graduates could do to experiment and improve their online skills this summer.
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Kevin: Malcolm Coles suggests that with the low user base that UK newspapers should shut off their "hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts".
I disagree, but then I'm using an RSS reader, NetNewsWire to read this post so am in the minority. However, I would say that he misses broader points not just of RSS but of the broader issues of machine readable formats. RSS is an enabling technology that has much borader application than simply the small number of people who use them browsing large amounts of data.
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Kevin: Ken Doctor writes: "“Mobile.”
“Video.”
Usually, these are the rather dry one-world descriptions of What’s Next, items on to-do lists for anyone serious about building new digital businesses. Add “Social,” and you’ve got a trifecta."
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Kevin: Martin Langeveld thinks about how he would set up a new news organisation and concludes: "In other words, the viable business model they can glimpse — consisting, perhaps, of a weekend-only or twice-weekly printed byproduct of an online-first publishing operation — represents such a downsizing of the enterprise that it can’t possibly carry the company’s legacy debt load, so the only way to make the transition is first file Chapter 11."
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Kevin: Charlie Beckett writes: "People turn on news channels for news. Instant news, short news, live news. By all means create different programming but don’t waste your time trying to put it on a 24 hour TV news channel."
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Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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Posted by Suw and Kevin
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Kevin: "With the industry roiled with challenges, the Knight program is changing its focus. Instead of having mid-career fellows choose a subject to follow during the academic year, the new strategy centers on innovation."
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Kevin: "The Seattle Courant, an experiment in building an online-only newspaper in Seattle, has shut down. Keith Vance, who founded it, said it failed because he wasn’t able to get the project the funding it needed to survive."
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Kevin: Patrick Smith: "The relaunched Evening Standard still offers very little on a local, district level online. In a city made up of inter-connected but often distinct boroughs, it surely makes sense to offer Londoners something relevant to the specific areas they live in. The Standard should become an umbrella for local blogs and news start-ups—a platform for local people to write news about their area."
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Kevin: Amazing. "Inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service, a group of individuals from the technology, marketing and public sectors came together to build an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities. " Volunteer opportunities with an API. Think of the applications
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Kevin: "Today, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Vivek Kundra, the US national CIO, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov. The dashboards are designed to help Vivek and the CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending."
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Kevin: By Jim Finkle - Analysis BOSTON (Reuters) - "Cybercrime is rapidly spreading on Facebook as fraudsters prey on users who think the world's top social networking site is a safe haven on the Internet."
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Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
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Posted by Suw and Kevin
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Kevin: Erik Sass at MediaPost says: "The lack of interest among creditors could be a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, it may signal that creditors don't believe there is an immediate threat of McClatchy defaulting on its debt — a rare vote of confidence in the beleaguered newspaper business. On the other hand, they may have quietly arranged insurance for their debts in the form of credit swap defaults, in which case, it would mean the opposite — that they believe a default to be likely and are hoping to collect more money on their default insurance."
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Kevin: Anyone who looks at their site stats knows that aggregators - such as Google News, Yahoo News, the Drudge report, Newser, Digg etc - drive the vast majority of traffic to news sites. Rob Weir, the director of digital development at the Columbia Missourian in the US says the vast majority is more than 71%.
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis takes issues with more calls in the US to change copyright law to help save newspapers. I'm in full agreement with Jeff that the lawyers on the wrong side of the First Amendment. The desperate arguments would attempt to return us to not only a pre-internet news cycle but a pre-radio news cycle. Law should not be used in an attempt to turn back the clock. Furthermore, laws that attempt to do this fail.
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Kevin: As other news organisations cut staff during a recession, US political blog Talking Points Memo is adding staff, doubling their editorial staff. They are adding four reporters and three other editorial staff members.
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Kevin: John Timmer at Ars Technica writes: "Although attempts to formalize online codes of behavior have run into a buzzsaw of criticism, a survey of over 1,000 bloggers shows that most of them hold themselves to some standards of ethics. But they rate ensuring material is properly attributed ahead of any sort of personal accountability."
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Kevin: A service to see how many updates are being posted to Twitter. I used it to get a rough idea of how many updates were being posted to Twitter as news of Michael Jackson's death broke.
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Kevin: This is the power of an API, and it's one of the reasons that Twitter has seen such growth. Like Last.fm, Flickr, Delicious and other web services, it shows why building an API is key to fostering an eco-system. It is why content companies such as NPR, the New York Times and my employer, The Guardian, have made the effort to build an API.
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Kevin: Jon Donley writes about new developments in Web 3.0, aka the Semantic web. Key work is being done to build sites that are architected with machine-readable formats, but much work remains. And it's not clear what will motivate companies to do the work left. Both Yahoo and Google are building services that will accelerate that work whether it is Google's Rich Snippers or Yahoo's Search Monkey.
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Kevin: Rich Miller cites a Keynote Systems analysis of the internet traffic as news of Michael Jackson's death broke. "Advertising networks and widgets are being cited as the key factors in the performance problems experienced by major news sites during the crush of Internet traffic Thursday as news broke about the death of pop star Michael Jackson."
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Kevin: Google has launched a suite of mobile services in Africa that include SMS-based mobile search, an SMS-based marketplace and an SMS information service that includes topics such as agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports and health. This is something that Google is doing for obvious feel-good PR, but with the number of mobile phones available around the globe with nothing but voice and SMS service, this is a huge new opportunity not only for development in Africa but also for Google's development.
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Kevin: Intel shows off a prototype gadget to let you know when information that you might find on the internet is "contradicted by other information". Sign me up.
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Monday, June 29th, 2009
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Sunday, June 28th, 2009
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Friday, June 26th, 2009
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Posted by Suw and Kevin
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Kevin: Nieman Lab reports: "MinnPost, the non-profit news startup in Minneapolis, has rolled out a new form of advertising that looks a little bit like print classifieds, a lot like Twitter, and nothing like traditional marketing on the Internet. They’re calling the service Real-Time Ads, and it’s live in the left column of the front page right now.
The service aggregates tweets, blog posts, and other feeds from local business with timely messages to convey — an ice cream shop announcing the flavor of the day, for instance, or a clothing store offering a one-day coupon."
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Kevin: Martin Belam writes: "I think the Telegraph's bunkered attitude to their scoop, and their insistence that they alone determined what was 'in the public interest' from the documents is a marked contrast to the approach taken by The Guardian. The Telegraph are physically publishing a selection of their data on Saturday, but there is, as yet, no sign of it being made online in machine readable format." Disclosure: I work for the Guardian, and Martin Belam is information architect at the Guardian.
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Kevin: John Naughton, who writes for the Observer, looks at a report on trust in the media in the UK. John said this about the report and a debate hosted at the Guardian (my day job): "For me there were eerie echoes of the arguments about the Birt-Jay “mission to explain” in the 1980s, which in turn went back to Walter Lippmann and his view about the role of the press in early 20th-century America. Like Lippmann, Birt believed that the function of journalism was not to “pick at the scabs of society” but to convey to citizens the complexities of the decisions that have to be made by a sophisticated, industrialised society."
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Kevin: David Schlesinger, Editor-in-Chief Reuters News, tells the International Olympics Committee Press Commission: "Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more."
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Kevin: Topix looks at the kind of revenue necessary to sustain newspaper staffs, and finds that newspapers are still finding it difficult to make money online .
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Thursday, June 25th, 2009
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Kevin: Benji Lanyado, travel journalist and one of the journalistic innovators here at the Guardian, answers some of the questions that I posed in a post on the Guardian's digital content blog about augmented reality - applications that layer information over the physical environment that you're in. IBM is getting a lot of attention for its Wimbledon AR application, the Wimbledon Seer, which layers over match and venue information over the camera view from a Google Android phone. Very clever. Benji and I have talked about the possible applications for AR in travel. He expands on his ideas on his new blog. Worth a read.
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Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
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