The Open Notebook – Good Beginnings: How to Write a Lede Your Editor—and Your Readers—Will Love. Well begun is half done. Scratch that—no clichés. Um. Just as breakfast is the most important meal of the day, the beginning is the most important part of a story. Snore. But the second part is. “I urge you not to count on the reader to stick around. “A good lead beckons and invites. “It’s got to deliver on what you promise,” says New Yorker contributor John McPhee of ledes in an interview with The Paris Review. How do you write a lede that does all this? Make the Reader Smile Interstellar‘s True Black Hole Too Confusing by Jacob Aron for New Scientist Even black holes wear makeup in Hollywood. The editor’s take: “This is my favorite lede of any story I’ve worked on in the past year,” says Lisa Grossman, physical sciences news editor at New Scientist and award-winning writer. The lede should get to the point immediately, Grossman says, with the news nearly always in the first sentence.
Leave the Reader Hanging Mysterious Fairy Circles Are “Alive” by Rachel Nuwer for Science “Hi! Uh-oh. 'Every Company Is A Media Company' Is Fueling M&A. Posted by Tom Foremski - August 23, 2012 For many years I've been saying that every company is a media company and writing about what that means and its importance to business.
At first people were puzzled by that statement but these days it is much better understood. Its importance has increased tremendously and it is now fueling multi-million dollar acquisitions. This week, Fleishman Hillard, one of the world's largest PR firms, and GMR Marketing acquired Amos Content Group in a deal estimated at as much as $10 million, to create a new venture called Freshwire Tanzina Vega, in The New York Times, reported: Freshwire will be tasked with creating editorial-like content for brands, including videos, blogs, slideshows and more. Both Fleishman Hillard and GMR Marketing are part of the giant Omnicom Group. It's always gratifying to be ahead of the trends. However, it won't be an easy job for Freshwire.
It's one thing to realize that every company is a media company. Snsanalytics. By Lou FancherCorrespondent Posted: 08/01/2012 12:42:10 PM PDT | Updated: about a year ago The wildest dreams of Belva Davis made for a compelling hour's discussion at a recent Commonwealth Club event in Lafayette. The history of the first black TV journalist in the West, from the volatile 1960s to the upcoming presidential election, was told with astounding grace, bold assertions and an old-school reporter's dedication to craft, moderated by Bay Area News Group's Josh Richman.
"Belva Davis helped change the face and focus of television news," Richman declared. "The fact that a racist group pummeled her just made her more persistent to persevere. " Davis, a diminutive 5-foot-1 physical presence whose impeccable attire is a first indication of the detailed, exquisitely fine-tuned mind behind her honey-toned voice, dove into a chilling account of her introduction to journalism.
"He said, 'If you cry, I'll break your legs,' " she recalled. "The whole issue of gender started to strike me. Lessons From Cisco's 'the network' - The Corporation As A Media Company. Posted by Tom Foremski - June 29, 2012 Earlier this week I popped into the Grand Hyatt on Union Square (above) for Cisco's celebration of the first anniversary of publishing "the network" an online publication that employs a large group of top editors and journalists. Autumn Truong (below), Senior Social Media Strategist at Cisco, first told me about the imminent launch of the media venture back in September 2010.
But it took an additional nine months before it was ready. Many of my readers will know that I've been writing extensively about how every company is a media company--even if they make diapers or ball bearings, they are constantly publishing through a multitude of channels and today, those channels are publishing back to them.
Every company needs to be able to talk and listen, and to master our two-way media technologies and publication platforms. It was Cisco that was the inspiration for my "every company is a media company" credo. But allow me to back up a bit.
Worldwide, newspapers reach more people than the Internet, WAN-IFRA survey shows. WAN-IFRA At the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Vienna, Austria, a survey of 69 countries showed where print circulation, revenue and mobile use were rising for newspapers, and where they are declining. “Circulation is like the sun. It continues to rise in the East and decline in the West,” said Christoph Riess, CEO of WAN-IFRA. Newspaper circulation is rising in Asia and Latin America, but dropping in Europe and most steeply in North America, the survey found.
Newspaper revenue was down worldwide, except in Asia where it was up year to year. Details follow. Newspaper circulation The annual survey shows that newspapers reach 2.3 billion people daily, while the Internet reaches 1.9 billion. In the Asia Pacific region, circulations increased 7 percent from 2009 to 2010, and 16 percent over five years. Revenue In North America, newspaper advertising revenues were down 17 percent for the five-year period but increased 1 percent last year. Mobile. Marshall McLuhan at 100. New Media Business Models. Is print still king? Has online made a move? Updating a controve. A year ago, in a Nieman Journalism Lab post that garnered 88 comments and still has viral life out there, I maintained that just three percent of newspaper content consumption happens online; the rest of it happens the old fashioned way, by people reading ink on dead trees. Given the continuing attention being paid to that conclusion (it was cited just last month by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, in testimony to the Federal Trade Commission), let’s revisit the numbers and see whether anything has changed.
With updates or improved data on at least some of the numbers, the general conclusions still hold: U.S. newspapers have not pushed much of their audience to their websites, nor have they followed the migration of their readership to the web. Here’s how I arrived at the numbers this year (to follow this more closely, or check my math, you can view my worksheet here): Point of comparison: Pageviews First, a comparison of pageviews in print and pageviews online. AP’s ethnographic studies look for solutions to news and ad “fat. A new study by the Associated Press has come to the conclusion that consumers are “tired, even annoyed, by the current experience of advertising,” and that, as a result, they don’t trust very much of it.
But at the same time, AP found, consumers do want information relevant to their needs, as well as ways to socialize that information. Although it tends to move cautiously and deliberately, AP has been subtly and quietly introducing tools aimed at improving relevance and socialization, and may have plans for an ad-supported aggregation business that applies what it has been learning. I spoke about the study with Jim Kennedy, AP’s vice-president for strategic planning, about how the study’s findings will impact AP’s strategic thinking. “The future of information delivery needs to be quite different from current practices and quite different from the old packaged practices that we’ve had offline and online so far,” Kennedy said. “That’s the big deal for us now. Steps into social media. Burnham's Beat: Google Getting Gunshy on Traffic Referral Deals?
Burnham's Beat: The Algorithm Myth And Why Google Will Be Hated. « The Google Dependency Index: A List of Public Internet Companies That Must Kiss Google's, er, Ring | Main | Google Getting Gunshy on Traffic Referral Deals? » Google’s search algorithm, The Algorithm, is arguably the single most important computational routine in the world right now. As I outlined in my last post, for many companies The Algorithm literally controls their entire economic destiny and as Google’s traffic and market share grows, so too grows the power of The Algorithm. Traditionally, concentrating so much power in hands of one company has provoked great populist opposition, and while unease with Google’s power is clearly rising, this unease is nowhere near the level of wrath directed at the dominant companies of earlier generations such as Standard Oil, IBM, or Microsoft.
Ironically, it is the heart of Google’s power, The Algorithm, which has in many ways enabled Google to greatly mitigate the build-up of popular resentment. Dying you say? Google vs. War Over The Algorithm. Elevation has a lot at stake with Palm Therese Poletti's Tech Ta. By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Has Palm Inc. gone into an irreversible death spiral or can its recent moves broaden its customer reach and help save the company? Palm is pushing hard to get its smartphones in front of more customers.
On Monday, it pulled off another carrier deal, this time with AT&T Inc. /quotes/zigman/398198/delayed/quotes/nls/t T -0.03% . That move came days after shocking Wall Street with a dismal fourth-quarter revenue forecast and data showing inventories of its Palm Pre and Pixi phones are piling up in cell phone stores. See Palm and AT&T news here. Palm But the mood surrounding Palm on Wall Street is grim, as some investors believe its actions are too little, too late and its momentum is lost. "There is a 90% chance that they go bankrupt or get acquired within a year," said Whitney Tilson, managing partner of T2 Partners, a New York-based hedge fund. Digits: What's Next in Wireless? /quotes/zigman/398198/delayed/quotes/nls/t. Journalism.
Curation. Every company is a media company. News sites.