Unpublishing Requests Are on the Rise. As more content shifts from print to web, journalists are seeing rising requests from sources to remove stories I recently encountered a sticky conundrum as editor of a student-run digital news website at the University of Southern California. A woman, the centerpiece of a story on the continued plight of the architecture industry in California three years after the recession, contacted one of my reporters in a panic. The source was a Canadian citizen, and it became too expensive a few years ago for her California employer to sponsor her work visa. She was laid off. She took the only job she could find in Vancouver—at a 40 percent salary cut. Now, times are better. This article, she said, might be keeping her from getting a job, and she wants it removed.
That was when I realized our newsroom has no policy on what the industry has termed “unpublishing”—the removal of online news articles. “I think news organizations are moving toward figuring it all out,” English said. #.T1pfVSNhUsl. Poynter. After 18 months of work and countless pinky-shake vows of confidentiality, my colleagues at the Project for Excellence In Journalism have a fresh report out today on the newspaper industry’s search for a new business model. The report, “The Search For a New Business Model,” burrows inside newspaper organizations for fresh internal data and commentary by top executives. The PEJ effort drew six participating companies, providing data for 38 newspapers. Executives from seven more companies agreed to be interviewed on the findings, while keeping their data to themselves. Having contributed modestly to the planning with some suggested questions, I’ll leave it to others to summarize the findings.
What jumped out at me was a candid discussion of how difficult culture change within the business is proving. Plenty of people looking in from the outside have said that, but the executives themselves (who were promised anonymity) confirm the gravity of the problem, with an exclamation point. “John R. Newspapers Struggle to Lift Digital Revenue. Last year, researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism persuaded six companies that own 121 newspapers to share private data about the financial performance of many of their papers.
And the findings were grim. On average, for every new dollar the newspapers were earning in new digital advertising revenue, they were losing $7 in print advertising revenue. The papers seemed not to be diversifying their revenue streams or coming up with innovative products at a fast enough clip. “Some of those we talked to seem frustrated and even uncertain about how to proceed,” said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the project, which is part of the nonprofit . “But we also found signs that, if you can break out of old cultural patterns, there is another way.” A report that encapsulates the data and includes interviews with newspaper executives will be released on Monday. While not a scientific sample, the data comes from a diverse set of newspapers in the . Mr. How Startups Can Build Lasting Relationships With Journalists. Dmitry Dragilev is the marketing lead at ZURB, the interaction design firm behind ZURBapps, a suite of apps that helps people quickly design great products through rapid prototyping, iteration and user feedback.
It’s a week before launch and you’re hoping to score some awesome traffic from a well-known publication. Here is what usually happens: You send a PR release to a bunch of publications, you pay big bucks for PR agency representation, you tweet the day of the launch, and you hope your story gets picked up. Be honest — how well did this approach work for you the last time you tried it? Lots of effort, but my guess is you were probably disappointed with the return. Instead, approach reporter interactions as you would an actual relationship. 1. Most of us decide to pitch journalists right before a product launch launch or announcement, shooting out a press release and hoping to score great articles.
Here are some specific tips on how to build genuine relationships with journalists. 2. The Hardcore Guide to Media Relations — Schmitz Schmitz Marketing. Twitter Tool Will Help Journalists Break News. A new software tool will help journalists see breaking news tweets as they are happening. The program, called Seriously Rapid Source Review, is still under development — but will act like a sieve that pull tweets from key sources currently sharing reports, images and video from the ground. Researchers at Rutgers University and Microsoft developed Seriously Rapid Source Review to give journalists access to breaking news like never before. Reporters won't have to comb the web — or Twitter's 200 million tweets a day — for sources.
Nick Diakopoulos, one of the project's authors, stated in a blog post that the program was built to deal with how much news is breaking on social media these days. Its features should help journalists distinguish accurate and trustworthy sources. SRSR features include automatic identification of eyewitnesses with approximate 89% precision and will list users in various archetypes — journalists, bloggers, organizations or unaffiliated citizens.
[via Poynter] The NYT needs a lot more than just a paywall. If there was a bright spot in the latest quarterly results from the New York Times, it’s the fact that the newspaper’s metered paywall has attracted almost 325,000 subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee for the site. Despite all the celebrating from the pro-paywall camp, however, that bright spot was more than overshadowed by the other dark clouds in the numbers — including the fact that print advertising revenue continues to decline, and the paper’s former online jewel About.com got whacked by Google’s algorithm updates. Anyone who takes on the job of CEO at the media company is going to have to start thinking creatively about its business, because all the easy money has already been made.
Paywall revenue isn’t even close to making up the gap The New York Times didn’t provide any helpful charts that would make the reality of this situation more obvious, so one blogger decided to come up with his own. Which way will the new CEO go — towards the past or the future? Columbia and Stanford Creating $30 Million Institute to Bridge Journalism and Tech. Big news on the innovation front: Columbia Journalism School and Stanford's School of Engineering are teaming up to create an Institute for Media Innovation. The Institute hopes to bridge the gap between journalism and technology and encourage collaboration between the two disciplines.
The institute, officially called the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, is made possible by a $30 million gift from former Cosmopolitan magazine editor in chief Helen Gurley Brown in honor of her late husband. The gift will go towards funding two director roles — one in each university — as well as a physical space attached to Columbia Graduate School of Journalism complete with a high-tech newsroom. The money will also help support post-graduate fellowships and "Magic Grants" to further stimulate innovation. It is the single largest donation in the Journalism School's history. In that sense, the Institute won't be a traditional "school. " Image courtesy of Flickr, skinnylawyer. Press Freedom Index 2011-2012. Americas United States and Chile affected by protests, Brazil crippled by insecurity The worldwide wave of protests in 2011 also swept through the New World. It dragged the United States (47th) and Chile (80th) down the index, costing them 27 and 47 places respectively.
The crackdown on protest movements and the accompanying excesses took their toll on journalists. In Chile, where student protesters questioned the over-concentration of media ownership, violence against journalists included beatings, cyber-attacks and attacks on editorial staffs. Neighbouring Argentina (47th) barely moved in the index but two other southern countries registered a marked decline – Brazil (99th, down 41) and Paraguay (80th, down 26). This was also the case in Paraguay, where one journalist was killed. The physical danger in Brazil was comparable to that in Peru (115th), where three journalists were also murdered. Contrasting fortunes in Central America Download the full version.
5 Key Google Tools for Journalists Covering Politics. The Top 10 News Organizations That Attract the Most Engagement on Google+ A list published Tuesday reveals which news organizations on Google+ instigate the most reactions from their followers. Since Google+ brand pages launched in November, media outlets have been playing around with how to best use the 6-month-old social network. Based on +1s, comments and shares, The New York Times, Mashable and The Next Web appear to be finding the most success at roping in heavy engagement (see the top 10 and statistics in the gallery above). Adam Sherk, vice president of SEO and social media at Define Media Group, ranked the top 45 media outlets by using All My +, a tool that analyzes public Google+ data of individual users or pages to spit out engagement statistics, charts and most-popular posts.
SEE ALSO: Complete Guide to Google+ | Who Is the 1st Google+ User to Reach 1 Million Followers? Google's social network has naturally attracted news organizations that want to interact with readers or gain more eyeballs on their stories, photos and videos. Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante? Widely Cited In New Policy, The Times Forbids After-the-Fact ‘Quote Approval’ The Times is one of the first major news organizations to take a firm stand against a growing and disliked practice.
For Times Environmental Reporting, Intentions May Be Good but the Signs Are Not The Times has dismantled its environmental pod and discontinued the Green blog. Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test The public editor looks into a test drive of an electric car that caused a storm. Under Attack, Nate Silver Picks the Wrong Defense The statistical wizard's offer to wager on the outcome of the presidential race is a bad choice. Questions and Answers on How The Times Handles Online Comments From Readers How does The Times decide which comments to post on NYTimes.com?
Was Photo of Dead Ambassador Acceptable? Readers complained to the public editor over The Times's decision to display a photograph of the unconscious ambassador in Libya. Government Secrecy and Bradley Manning. NewsRight: a Game Changer for Online Journalism? The Associated Press, The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co. and several other news organizations banded together Thursday to launch a new company called NewsRight. Its goal: let news orgs see how widely their original reporting is being spread, and let them easily license content to interested partners. Following three years of planning, NewsRight's industry reach is already substantial.
It has 29 co-investors and 30 additional participating companies, representing more than 800 web sites of U.S. newspapers. David Westin, former ABC News president and NewsRight's founding CEO, hopes the company will help sustain original content production. "NewsRight is designed to address an issue in the marketplace of an increased appetite for news but some real challenges to supply," Westin told Mashable. The company provides publishers with strings of HTML code to insert in their stories' headlines and text, so they can track the spread of each piece of their content.
How journalists can use Google Refine to clean ‘dirty’ data sets. The first attempt at a lead for this post, it turns out, was pretty much the same lead I wrote five years ago when reviewing a book about dirty data. My lapse illustrates two things: First, that I have the memory of a goldfish and some bad habits to address. Second, that dirty data is a constant thorn in the sides of data journalists. Luckily, we now have a tool to address it. Google Refine bills itself as a “power tool for working with messy data,” and it does not disappoint.
While not a turnkey solve-all for data integrity, it makes this tedious task far less intimidating. In this tutorial, we’ll cover how to install and a take advantage of one trick that will make your work easier. Understanding the problem Before diving into what the tool can do, let’s take a minute to understand the problem it solves. Calling data "dirty" means that it’s unreliable for analysis. Names are a classic example of the variations that can happen. So clean we must. Refine to the rescue And if I make a mistake? 5 Things You Need to Know About Drone Journalism. How to Use the New Hipstamatic App for Protest Photos. Hipstamatic, a super-cool app designed to provide a series of custom "lenses" for the iPhone, has a new group feature that could come in handy for citizen journalists, photojournalists and protesters. Here's how it works: using the free Hipstamatic D-Series app, available in iTunes December 15, a group of people can snap "rolls" of pictures of 24 "exposures.
" (The set-up is a nostalgic wink to analog photo days and cheap disposable cameras still given to guests at weddings, says Lucas Allen Buick Hipstamatic founder and CEO.) Why would this be useful for reporting events? Let's say you're at a public rally you expect to get hot. You have a few friends on the ground, but want to make sure no matter what happens, all of your photos make it out. You can invite as many people as you want to participate via Facebook and anyone who accepts the invite will get the photos.
So if you have your iPhone taken away or lose it, the photos are still safe. 4 Simple Tools for Creating an Infographic Resume. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. As a freelancer or job seeker, it is important to have a resume that stands out among the rest — one of the more visually pleasing options on the market today is the infographic resume. An infographic resume enables a job seeker to better visualize his or her career history, education and skills. Unfortunately, not everyone is a graphic designer, and whipping up a professional-looking infographic resume can be a difficult task for the technically unskilled job seeker.
For those of us not talented in design, it can also be costly to hire an experienced designer to toil over a career-centric infographic. Luckily, a number of companies are picking up on this growing trend and building apps to enable the average job seeker to create a beautiful resume. 1. The company's vision is to "be the future of resumes.
" 2. 3. 4. Five Google tools journalists don't use but should. Google logo via reasonpad.com You may think you know Google, but here are lesser-known tools that can help journalists with everything from reporting on natural disasters to hunting for new sources. Google featured these tools in a recent digital media training session for Pakistani journalists hosted by the International Center for Journalists. The session was led by Sean Carlson, global communications manager, and Robert Boorstin, the director of public policy for the global search company. IJNet found these five tools that can simplify reporting and give stories a dynamic approach: Google Moderator – It’s the perfect tool for crowdsourcing story ideas. Public Data Explorer – After browsing through available stats found online, use this data visualization tool to find a story in the numbers.
Fusion Tables – When you’re dealing with intense heaps of data that took months to independently gather, you can use this tool to visualize and publish your data to find clear patterns.