Carolinebeavon : The new news deadlines -... Online Journalism Blog - Flock. Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living St. Posted by Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog] There's been no shortage of talk recently about the "future of news. " Should publishers charge for news online? How do they replace lost sources of revenue such as classified ads? How will accountability journalism endure? And, even more fundamentally, will news survive in the digital era? While we have strong ideas about how information is experienced on the web, we're not journalists and we don't create content. The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. This project sprang from conversations among senior executives at the three companies. Over the coming months, we'll refine Living Stories based on your feedback.
Libel Reform – Bad Science - Flock. Yesterday morning I helped to launch the libel reform campaign in parliament with Index on Censorship, English PEN and Sense About Science. To be fair, the best line came the day before at the celeb launch from Alexei Sayle, who explained that he was once sued for libel by someone, and it cost over £100,000 to defend: “it would have been cheaper”, he explained, “if I’d just stabbed the f*cker.” The report is extremely good and I encourage you to read it here: libelreform.org/our-report Libel is an issue close to my heart. I was sued by a pill salesman called Matthias Rath last year in a case which took 19 months to resolve, and cost the Guardian £535,000 to defend.
We got £365,000 reimbursed: that means the cost of winning was £170,000, slightly less than the cost of the average house. Then there is Simon Singh’s case. Our libel laws are a menace, but not to journalists, or even to doctors: they are a menace to you. Anyway, here is some news coverage: OnlineJournalism. Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried. I've been writing a lot about so-called 'content farms' in recent months - companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web. Both of those two companies are now firmly inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S., on a par with the likes of Apple and AOL. Big media, blogs and Google are all beginning to take notice. Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, recently published an article on how journalism can survive in the Internet age.
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington also riffs on this theme, mentioning AOL's "Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media" and quoting a Wired piece on Demand Media from October. I started my analysis of Demand Media in this August post. In November I explored more about how Demand Media produces 4,000 pieces of content a day, based on an interview I did with the founders in September.
See also: UK Aggregator NewsNow Dumps Newspapers After They Demand Payment. Back in October, we wrote about how various newspapers, under the auspices of the "Newspaper Licensing Agency" were threatning NewsNow, a UK news aggregator that is (in my experience) one of the more comprehensive aggregators out there, but which only shows headlines and links to full stories. It's difficult to see how that would be a copyright violation in anyone's definition of the term or why that should require any kind of license. The NLA gave NewsNow until last week to "comply" and according to the folks over at the Nieman Lab, NewsNow has decided to bid adieu to those sources rather than pay up: "Unfortunately, we have not been able to reach an agreement with the NLA. In spite of the NLA's claims to the contrary, we continue to maintain that what they are demanding of ourselves and our customers is unacceptable and of questionable legitimacy.
Irrespective of the lack of a legal basis, the NLA's licence is not fit for purpose. Online - E-Media Tidbits. Some time ago I was interviewed via e-mail for an article and, as I often do, after providing answers to the nine questions, I asked the following: “Mind if I republish these answers in full on my blog after the piece goes live?” It turned out that the journalist actually did mind. In fact, in the correspondence that followed, the journalist explicitly refused me permission to publish my own answers before changing her mind and saying I could — but without the accompanying questions she had supplied. So who owns the interview? It’s a curious question of an age in which the balance of power between interviewer and interviewee has shifted.
(Think of the footage of BBC documentary maker John Sweeney released by the Church of Scientology.) Enough time has passed that I can write about this while preserving the journalist’s anonymity. This makes it very difficult to write, and it means I will have to paraphrase what has been said. So here goes: Later, she sent me a link to the story.
An online journalist's 10 resolutions for 2010. We’ve talked often on this site over the past 12 months about what online journalists (and journalism entrepreneurs!) Should be doing to both prepare themselves for the changes coming to our field, as well as to take advantage of the changes already here. Now, at year’s end, let’s remind ourselves of 10 things that we can do in 2010 to help keep journalism vital in our readers’ lives… and keep our careers in journalism alive at the same time. 1.
Make your website more mobile-friendly Everyone I’ve spoken with in the industry this year about this has reported the same thing: The percentage of readers accessing their websites on mobile devices is increasing. Significantly. You don’t have to build a smart phone app, or even a separate mobile version of your website, to serve the mobile audience. 2. I couldn’t resist repeating this tip. Like the blink tag, framed navigations and scrolling tickers in the past, let’s ditch this lousy design idea in the new year. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Marian Salzman: 'Local will be the new global' - Online, Media - But Salzman, writer, advertising executive, global public relations guru, has every faith in her judgement, having spent her career spotting trends invisible to most of us until she gave them a name. She is the author of books with titles such as Next, Now and Buzz and The Future of Men and has championed such new breeds as the "Wigger" (suburban whites infatuated with black urban culture) and the "Metrosexual" (the sensitive, city-dwelling modern male). So she is not afraid to tell things as she sees them. On a brief visit to Europe, the Connecticut-based Salzman dares suggest a view that in most London media circles is tantamount to heresy; namely that Rupert Murdoch is overrated as a power player. "I don't know if it's geography or personal pull but a man is making a market here and I don't feel that influence," she says, referring to the way the British media breathlessly responded to The Times's online paywall plans and the attempted resuscitation of MySpace.
Ten things every journalist should know in 2010 | Journalism.co.
Online - E-Media Tidbits. If you’re like me, you first hear about a lot of news and information through your Twitter stream. It’s is an excellent way to tap into what the buzz is about at the moment. But if you follow more than 500 people who post frequently, it can be difficult to filter the stream and see what your most trusted sources have shared — especially if you’ve been away for awhile. Several desktop apps and Web sites, like TweetDeck and HootSuite, will help you manage your Twitter account. But there also are several services that will filter your stream and the collective content on Twitter so you can get the most important (or at least the most popular) news and information shared by users. Here are eight sites that can help you filter the signal from the noise. Filtered by Followers: Twitter Tim.es and MicroPlaza After you log in with your Twitter username, The Twitter Tim.es creates a page that displays stories by filtering through what the people you follow have tweeted the most.
The long and the short of media content | Emily Bell | Media | g. Is this article already too long? It's a question to which I'm sure many people already have a strongly affirmative answer, in which case – stop reading. But even if you aren't reading I have to carry on writing until the space is full. It's an uncontroversial model, an inevitable consequence of newspaper layout rules.
But in a digital world, and one where the cost of journalism is not falling as quickly as the revenues that support it, the opportunity arises to rethink what is "enough" in terms of good reporting, or commentary. In fact, online this article could be less than the 140 characters permitted on Twitter plus a link to the Atlantic Monthly article written by the journalist Michael Kinsley (theatlantic.com/doc/201001/short-writing), which posited that many newspaper readers are put off by most articles being too long and adding nothing to the value of the news.
The debates about "what is an article? " The idea that the internet looks like a computer screen is long over.
Twitter. NewsCred Relaunches, Looks To Become “Ning For Newspapers” Back in 2008, we wrote about a startup called NewsCred, which looked to help identify the most trustworthy news sources using a combination of community voting and algorithms. That didn’t really take off, so the company is now heading in a new direction: it wants to help users build their own custom online newspapers in a matter of minutes, offering a professional-looking site tailored to include the content you’re interested in. And using NewsCred premium features, you could potentially create a combination news aggregator/opinion site in the same vein as The Huffington Post.
Using the site is simple: you choose the title of your new virtual paper, then specify which topics you’re interested in following. The site includes a number of categories to choose from, including tech and politics, but you can also generate one based on a keyword if you’d like. Once you’ve chosen your topics, NewsCred will generate a virtual newspaper containing the latest stories from each area.