James Murdoch warns over the new technology challenges facing News Corp | Media. The shadows of "big beasts" such as Google and Apple hung over Cannes last week, and they were singled out by James Murdoch as one of the biggest challenges facing his company. News Corp's deputy chief operating officer said that his organisation needs to get to grips with digital technology in order to compete – a theme that dominated this year's Cannes International Festival of Creativity.
"How do we make sure we can compete at scale globally with these new players [such as Google and Apple] … and still be quick and creative and risk-taking? " he asked, in a keynote speech. "A big factor over how this plays out over the next five to 10 years is going to be how we do that. I think it is very much unresolved. " His concerns about how businesses adapt to the speed and impact of new technology resonated with the 9,000 delegates and speakers at the week-long event.
"The biggest problem is not competitors," he said. "This is a man who made a business out of being late," he said of Steve Jobs. Infomous. The Hamster Wheel. How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools. The Guardian takes data journalism seriously. They obtain, format, and publish journalistically interesting data sets on their Data Blog, they track transparency initiatives in their searchable index of world government data, and they do original research on data they’ve obtained, such as their amazing in-depth analysis of 90,000 leaked Afghanistan war documents.
And they do most of this with simple, free tools. Data Blog editor Simon Rogers gave me an action-packed interview in The Guardian’s London newsroom, starting with story walkthroughs and ending with a philosophical discussion about the changing role of data in journalism. It’s a must-watch if you’re wondering what the digitization of the world’s facts means for a newsroom. Here’s my take on the highlights; a full transcript is below. The technology involved is surprisingly simple, and mostly free. Data Blog posts are often related to or supporting of news stories, but not always. Population growth, urbanization, and the future of regional cent. On the weekend Australia’s freshly minted Prime Minister Julia Gillard said “I don’t believe in a big Australia,” in an about face from her predecessor Kevin Rudd’s vision of strong population growth for the country. As a futurist I have been increasingly drawn into this discussion, given that immigration is one of the most fundamental levers shaping the future of countries.
I have discussed the coming rise of gerontocracy, the uncertainties in Australia’s demographic future, and was interviewed on the social impact of population growth in ABC TV’s special series on Australia’s future. I was interviewed this morning about Gillard’s comment on ABC Ballarat, a town which is the hub of one of the largest regional centers in Australia. Non-urban regions have a particularly interesting perspective on population growth. On the one hand, in the face of the inexorable global trend of urbanization, regional areas are consistently losing their youth and talent to the allure of cities.
Chris Vognar: Twitter's character limit sparks new style of shor. EDITOR'S NOTE: After spending several months on Twitter, critic Chris Vognar is starting to think that those 140-character broadcasts might not represent the end of literature as we know it, as some have suggested. I was once quick to mock Twitter as yet another sign of society's incredible shrinking attention span. That was then. Now I find myself searching for the perfectly written tweet. And I'm not alone. Twitter, the social media site founded in 2006, still has its share of haters. But more and more serious writers have embraced it as a viable forum for short writing.
We're talking good, lean prose, the happy marriage between voice and format. Look at it this way. Twitterers count characters: 140, including spaces. In Hamlet, the long-winded Polonius tells us that brevity is the soul of wit. "One hundred forty characters in certain contexts is quite a lot," says Roy Peter Clark (@RoyPeterClark), senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. The end.
Wonder Woman, aged 69 and hitting Issue 600, gets a makeover.... Major newspaper groups put price on digital content. News Limited and Fairfax Media, are pushing ahead with plans to charge customers for access to their digital content. News Limited is gauging consumer demand for subsidised electronic readers such as Apple's iPad, while Fairfax will today launch the subscriber-only Sydney version of its Good Food Guide website to coincide with the launch of the 2011 print edition. Its Melbourne site, goodguides.com.au, has been up and running for more than a week. Customers who do not buy the print edition can buy 12-month access to the website for $9.99 -- the same price as Good Food Guide iPhone app. People who buy the book will get access to the website through a redemption code with content not available to the casual browser.
The websites have been developed by the company's retail sales and merchandise division, Fairfax Enterprises, and not the digital unit run by Jack Matthews. Mr McCarthy said Fairfax remained committed to print, but conceded digital audiences would continue to grow. Good journalism will thrive, whatever the format | Technology | The Observer. If I've learned one thing from watching the internet over two decades, it's this: prediction is futile.
The reason is laughably simple: the network's architecture and lack of central control effectively make it a global surprise-generation machine. And since its inception, it has enabled disruptive innovation at a blistering pace. This doesn't stop people making predictions, though. In fact, ever since the web went mainstream in 1993 there has been a constant stream of what computer scientist John Seely Brown calls "endism" – assertions that some new technology presages the termination of some revered practice, not to mention the end of civilisation as we know it. The prediction that online news means the death of newspapers, for example, is almost as old as the web. The problem with endism is that it's intrinsically simplistic. This confusion of format with function also applies to the debate about the future of journalism. Well, perhaps they do.
Who said the web was dead? The Content Makers. Bronwen clune. The Digital Wing. How to use Google Wave to engage readers. Most of Google's news tools are fairly self-explanatory. Fast Flip enables users to flick through different news sources. Living Stories collects all the developments about a single story on a single URL. And of course Google News aggregates news, and has been a source of ongoing conflict between Google and news publishers. But Google Wave notoriously confuses its first time users. There's even a gently mocking website dedicated to things that are easier to understand than Google Wave. First launched as an invitation-only preview, Google Wave is billed as both a conversation and a document. It can also be used for community building, and the blog Journalism 2.0 has offered one possible example of what this might look like.
Of course, one of the distinctive features of Google Wave is that conversations on the platform are not necessarily linear, so comments can be added higher up in the conversation window, out of sight without scrolling. Sources: Journalism 2.0, NewsCred. BuzzMachine. Everything Under Australia’s Media & Marketing Umbrella - mUmBRE. EditorandPublisher.com - Information Authority for the Newspaper. How to turn journalists into profit centers - Viewsflow. The Second Act: Boost your productivity with Hemingway’s hack. By Tessa Ivascu I have read many valuable "5 tips", "10 ways", "50 hacks" provided by productivity gurus to help you move forward when you have trouble being productive.
To my surprise, none of these lists mentions an easy to grasp rule Ernest Hemingway applied to his writing process. His hack is perhaps too nonconformist to be part of the "getting things done" gospel…The winner of the 1954 Nobel prize in Literature explains in simple words how to keep the momentum going and how to avoid writer’s block, a common affliction amongst authors. But his hack applies to any task related to an important goal. The quote : The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next.
Ernest Hemingway (You can find Hemingway's tips on writing in Ernest Hemingway on Writing and A Moveable Feast Roald Dahl’s comment : Let’s see what another famous writer, Roald Dahl, has to say about Hemingway’s hack (in The Roald Dahl Treasury ). My experience. THE DEATH OF THE CORPORATE WEBSITE: TOP TEN WAYS THEY WILL CHANG. Cartoon Credit: Dave Coverly @ Creators.com In the not too distant future static corporate websites will be replaced by their social equivalents. This will happen because more and more consumers are engaged in daily conversations, often involving brands, across multiple applications, platforms and networks, wholly independent of these sites. As these conversations become increasingly independent of these sites, falling traffic will render them ineffective in their current form. Instead, the online presence of each brand will necessarily expand out into the social space to stay in touch with their audience. As a result, the online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the web and not the website that many currently call home.
Corporate sites will change in many ways: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Steve Rubel tweeted this weekend that his big takeaway from CES was that “wireless and social are getting embedded into every device”.
Talk to The Times: Answers About Charging Online - Media Decoder. Senior executives of The New York Times Company are answering questions from readers about the company’s decision to charge for frequent use of NYTimes.com, which will take effect in 2011. (For more details, read the company’s announcement and this article about it.) Fielding questions is Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive of the company, with assistance Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations. (They have concluded answering questions, with the most recent additions at the beginning of this post.) Can’t Subscribe to the Newspaper I am in a difficult position. How will this differ from TimesSelect? We are very grateful for your dedicated and long-time readership.
The metered model differs from TimesSelect in that it is for the entire site, not just the columnists and archives. Gaming the System “Visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access.” Flat Fees Why Wait? Journalists Should Not Work for Free – So Tell Me What They are. One of the most depressing things about the present climate is the number of talented journalists who agree to allow mainstream media to publish their work for no payment. “But I quite enjoy it,” said one such to me the other day. Well, yes you are allowed to enjoy your work. But letting employers and publishers think they can get quality work for nothing merely speeds the decline of the profession, and undercuts your colleagues.
So it was with interest that I read this post by Silicon Valley blogger and media executive Alan Mutter, whose argument I entirely agree with. Mutter goes one step further and provides a spreadsheet for working out what to charge for a 600 word freelance journalism piece . The figures are relevant to the US, of course. Or is it? I think it would be useful to find out what different freelancers are getting paid by our mainstream publications. The Monthly still offers its $1 a word, which was princely when that magazine started, and still handsome. Journalists Using Social Media More for Story Research. Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University recently conducted a national survey of reporters and editors to gauge their usage of social media sources when researching stories.
This is a topic I’ve written about in the past, related to a separate survey that found 70% of journalists use social media for reporting, but I thought it was a more current look at the data and an interesting counterpoint to my recent post about whether or not journalists are on board with social media. The Cision survey found 89 percent of journalists turn to blogs for story research, 65 percent to social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, 61 percent to Wikipedia, and 52 percent to microblogging services such as Twitter. At first glance, it would appear as though the majority of reporters and editors are in face “on board” with social media. Is Social Media Important to Journalists? Reuters to Journalists: Don’t Break News on Twitter.
Debates: Financial innovation. Media Revenue Models Framework: 12 categories of income sources. As the world of media moves beyond its traditional boundaries, media operators need to broaden their thinking about potential revenue sources. In a connected world, the possibilities transcend the classic advertising, sales and subscription models. In my recent article Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities in Media Titles magazine I wanted to point to some of the possibilities. I brought together some of what we had been working on with clients to create a Media Revenue Models framework to show some of what is possible.
Of course a key aspect of potential revenue streams is the value creation that merits payment. While the general categories of value added by media have not changed, their relative importance definitely has. A few things to note. Here is the content in text form: Value added Reputation Timeliness Validation Format Visualization Analysis Ease of use Design Relevance Synthesis Tangibility Filtering Sense of community Customization.
Rules for writers.