Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
-
Kevin: I've sat in on user testing of a site that I work on, and it's a revelation. CX Partners blows away the idea that users don't look at content 'below the scroll', the digital equivalent of the fold on a newspaper front page. The forensic demolition of this myth is stunning to read. "As web professionals, we all know that the concept of the page fold being an impenetrable barrier for users is a myth. Over the last 6 years we’ve watched over 800 user testing sessions between us and on only 3 occasions have we seen the page fold as a barrier to users getting to the content they want." Excellent stuff.
-
Kevin: It's not impossible for news organisations to make money on the web. Talking Points Memo is seeing audiences skyrocket and revenues follow. "TPM has always had a deeply engaged and loyal audience. They are at the center of how we report the news everyday . But now they're using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg to share our reporting with new readers. And the new readers are sticking around. Over the same period that unique readers went up more than 50%, direct visits to our homepage went up almost 25%. That's new readers becoming regular readers. And they are turning out to be just as engaged as those who have been with us for years."
-
Kevin: Interview with Chip Oglesby Online Producer for The State Media Company, thestate.com, in South Carolina has some interesting observations about how to move from print to the web. He says: "Unless your top leaders are actually accountable for the success of your Web efforts, they're going to be sabotaging or at least undermining them. It's just too easy for them to give the Web lip service, and then stick to doing the same old thing." I found his comments about the semantic web even more interesting saying that structured data and machine readable formats can't be an afterthought. Agreed when he said: "…a fact without a context is simply noise."
Comments Off | Category: Links |
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
Comments Off | Category: Links |
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
-
Kevin: An excellent post by Alan Mutter that goes to the heart of the problem with the current paid content debate. He goes through a very reasonable list of what people are willing to pay for and what they are most likely not willing to pay for. For instance, he says: "1. You cannot charge for such commoditized content as world, national, business, sports and entertainment news." I couldn't agree with this point more. Alan goes on to say: "This suggests that newspapers and broadcasters who are keen on peddling content need to focus on creating saleable product before they begin trying to charge for it." Quite.
Comments Off | Category: Links |
Monday, October 5th, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
-
Kevin: From the University of Applied Arts in Vienna comes a new e-reader concept, the Infinite Book, which brings together a foldable colour digital screen with a novel form factor. The design tries to bring analogue reading concepts such as turning pages to a digital format. Juan Antonio Griner definitely thinks that this has potential.
Comments Off | Category: Links |
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
Comments Off | Category: Links |
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
-
Kevin: There has been an ongoing discussion about the Washington Post's new social media policy, and it's stirred up a rather predicable discussion about objectivity and credibility, which I'm still rolling over in my head. However, I think that Michele McLellan at the Knight Digital Media Center who says the basic message to journalists is not to try social media. "The Washington Post’s new social media guidelines seem destined to send this message to the newsroom: Social media - Don’t go there."
-
Kevin: What does it take to be a journalism entrepreneur? They should be great a research and networking, which should be skills that most journalists have, but Serra Media also suggests journalists finding success as entreprenuers "Can work cheap: Bootstrapping a company is a lot like journalism since it often means working for peanuts to pursue your calling." While I agree that's probably the reality, I might also suggest that journalists reeling from the recession probably don't want to hear this and don't want to work for cheap.
-
Kevin: An overview of how media organisations in the US including, ESPN, Politico.com and BusinessWeek, are struggling with how to deal with Twitter and social media. It's a good article looking at how several organisations are dealing with staff use of social media. Sadly, I fear, it will mean less use, when it really should be about better use of social media.
Comments Off | Category: Links |
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
-
Kevin: Nick Carr "Mainstream outlets who gag social media efforts are unilaterally disarming in the ongoing war for reader attention." Amen. It's as simple as that. The battle is not just for credibility but for credibility and readers' time and attention. Responsible journalists can do both.
-
Kevin: "While traffic is surging at the (Huffington Post), Hippeau told an audience at the OMMA conference earlier this week that rates for CPM-based advertising are nearing 'zero.'|" This is the contradiction of online content at the moment, large audiences don't necessarily mean large returns. Content and advertising opportunities are plentiful on the internet, which drives down the returns on both. It is the challenge of the Great Recession, but it also should be the last warning that models that worked in print - whether content models or commercial models - cannot be transferred without change to the digital world.
Comments Off | Category: Links |
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
-
Kevin: Ethan Zuckerman has an excellent overview of Clay Shirky's talk at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School. Clay focused on 'accountability journalism' and what will replace newspapers, which he says produce the vast majority of original journalism. "The coherence of newspapers is no longer logical.” Clay observes that we’d never create anything as strange as the newspaper online. “Someone who just wanted a crossword puzzle – why would you next tell them about news in Tegucigalpa?” The hybrid model of the newspaper evolved because “it’s what print is capable of.”
-
Kevin: David Weinberger live blogs Clay Shirky's talk at the Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy about the future of newspapers. It's another look at the talk. One point I noticed: "There are three ways to create things accessible to the public. Private companies. NGOs. Social/peer production where people get together and do it. #3 had been confined to picnics, etc. Now it’s becoming a big part of the ecosystem. E.g., Pro Publica. Wikileaks. Open source."
-
Kevin: Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard provides the entire talk that Clay Shirky gave this week at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It's well worth reading and digesting. He believes that advertisers overpaid for the services that they received from newspapers. Another observation: "he coherence of newspapers is not intellectual, it’s industrial." The big question: What replaces newspapers? Well worth reading and thinking about.
-
Kevin: Maria Schneider left mainstream publishing behind last year to start Editor Unleashed, a site covering writing, publishing and social media. She looks at five journalists and their start-up projects. She talks about costs, advertising and technology. It's a good brief overview.
-
Kevin: An excellent graphic that shows the growth and decline of Wall Street firms in terms of market capitalisation over the duration of the crisis. It elegantly captures a lot of information and shows the shift.
Comments Off | Category: Links |
Friday, September 25th, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
-
Kevin: I agree with Zachary Seward at the Nieman Journalism Lab, DocumentCloud is a project to watch. I would say it's not only a project to watch, but if you're a news organisation, I'd say that it's a project to join. The project to house primary source material has signed up 20 more organisations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the New Yorker and The Atlantic, just to name a few. The other interesting part of this announcement is that they have also partnered with Thomson-Reuters OpenCalais to generate meaningful meta-data across all of these documents.
Hats off to bloggers at Nieman Lab who have been doing some excellent original journalism covering developments like this.
-
Kevin: Dan Blank looks at how social media has changed the work of one of his colleagues, Wes Kennedy. He looks at how Kennedy uses social media, and he also explains "How to Leverage Social Media to Boost Your Career & Value". It's a useful post for why people do this. Those of us who use social media have found it valuable, but sometimes, it's important to explicitly make the case.
Comments Off | Category: Links |
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Email This Post
Posted by Suw and Kevin
-
Kevin: ProPublica is using money from the Knight Foundation to hire two companies to improve its abilities to raise fund online and through traditional means of institutional and foundation fund-raising.
-
Kevin: Dan Kennedy blogs about a Clay Shirky Presentation: With newspapers supplying about 85 percent of accountability journalism, Shirky said that what we need are a large number of small experiments to try to make up some of the gap. He divided those experiments into three parts:
* Commercial: The traditional advertising model for newspapers, magazines and broadcasters.
* Public: News organizations funded by money unconnected to commerce, the prime examples being public radio and non-profit news sites.
* Social: Journalism produced mainly through donated time, including certain pro/am crowdsourcing initiatives such as Off the Bus, a citizen-journalism project that covered the 2008 presidential campaign for the Huffington Post."
The entire post is well worth reading. There is a lot to digest in this discussion about "accountability journalism".
-
Kevin: This is definitely one of the posts where the comments are probably just as important as the post itself. Why? Emily Bell, the head of digital content at The Guardian, and Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger respond to comments. In response to the a commenter implying that layoffs at the Guardian are due to the amount of money spent on our internet operations, Alan says: "That's not actually right. Since 2002/3 our spending on guardian.co.uk (operational and capex) has exceeded revenue by just £20m. There's a crisis in the industry, and the Guardian is no more immune than anyone else, but it's a myth that we've plouged lunatic sums into digital."
-
Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick attempts to explain the real-time web in 100 words or less. He begins: "The Real-Time Web is a paradigm based on pushing information to users as soon as it's available - instead of requiring that they or their software check a source periodically for updates." He asks for input.
-
Kevin: Wendy Parker looks at a the possibilities of a one-man news operation taking over a local news site in Kansas City Kansas. "Nick Sloan, 24, purchased the Kansas City Kansan from Gatehouse Media and will be a one-man news operation, covering suburban Wyandotte County." She has a nuanced, pragmatic take on the project. "It’s important to outline the possibilities for hyperlocal news, and to offer words of caution. But it’s also unfair to fold any single effort either into insanely optimistic projections of success or into a dismissive argument that they are unlikely to reach their readership or earning potential.
Each project deserves to be looked at on its own merits, in the context of the unique community and niche it serves."
Comments (1) | Category: Links |
