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Business
Chicago News Co-op Hits Pause Button, Shares Lessons for Foundations
Chicago News Co-op, a 2-year-old non-profit news site, has announced it is suspending publication and re-evaluating its future. While some of the factors in play are complex and not particularly well-explained by the CNC (read editor James O'Shea's letter to readers), what we know so far about the suspension does appear to put into focus some key lessons for funders...
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Hyper-Local
10 Types of Foundation-Led Projects Changing the Local Media Landscape
Local foundations are becoming key players in the emerging local news ecosystem by funding news and information projects or creating their own. Knowing that, the Knight Foundation has distributed more than $16 million to 85 challenge winners to develop projects that inform and engage local communities. The Community Information Challenge focuses on community or place-based foundations because Knight believes these...
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Business
2012: Why the Web Is Not Dead and Other Flashpoints
First the easy predictions for the new year: In 2012 we'll see a rise of politics in the digisphere, along with reporting as if the phenomenon is a surprise; more strum over the Murdochs' drum; and a snazzy new iPad 3. But, there are bigger rumblings afoot in the year ahead, too. Here's my second annual round of predictions for...
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AdvertisingShift
6 Tips to Support Digital News Through Advertising
This is the first in a series of columns on new business models for news and other media. You'll be able to find other stories in the series by clicking on the Business Models tag. One of the toughest ways to support a digital news operation is via advertising. Over my years working in advertising, helping many and talking to...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #19: Bartz, Arrington Fired; Swisher Swoons; Google Grabs Zagat
The Mediatwits podcast is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry. Welcome to the 19th episode...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #10: Apple Backpedals on iPad Subs; GWU Study on Local News
Welcome to the tenth episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil, filling in for Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the changes in Apple's subscription plan for publishers, as they backpedal on the pricing. But still, Apple will take a 30% cut of subscription revenues and...
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Hyper-Local
Create or Die 2: Boosting Coverage of Underserved Communities
The Greensboro 52. That's the label a group of journalists, students, educators and community members adopted during the Create or Die 2 conference in Greensboro, N.C., which took place June 2 to 5. The label takes its inspiration from the Greensboro Four, African-American students at N.C. A&T University who sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth's in 1960. Others...
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Social Networking
Newsroom, Community Use Facebook as Key Hub After Joplin Tornado
When Joplin, Mo., was hit with a massive tornado, I knew my community would react. Even though we're nearly 250 miles away, many people in Columbia and mid-Missouri are either Joplin natives or have family there. My newsroom's normally local-focused Facebook page quickly became a clearinghouse for updates about how mid-Missouri could help the tornado-ravaged community. Fans are using the...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #3: HuffPost Lawsuit and Grading AOL; 'Write More Good' Author
Welcome to the third episode of "The Mediatwits," the new revamped longer form weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the recent $105 million lawsuit brought against Huffington Post for not paying its bloggers, as well as our grades for AOL's various business moves,...
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EducationShift
Blizzard Builds KOMU Community with Mobile Video, Facebook
I've always dreamed of a time when my community could come together with the help of our on-air and online collaboration. All it took was a blizzard to make it happen. Mid-Missouri was hit with a blizzard-like storm that dumped 17.5 inches of snow into Columbia, Mo., and even more south of the city. The entire viewing audience of KOMU-TV was home and stuck inside.
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EducationShift
NYU's Studio 20 Creates Innovative, Collaborative Hothouse
This week, three senior staffers from ProPublica will visit the second class of students enrolled in the Studio 20 program at NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. The reporters and students will begin formally collaborating on a question the non-profit newsroom has puzzled over since its founding in 2008: How can you quickly and clearly summarize the basic facts of the investigations ProPublica specializes in?
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EducationShift
Why We Gave Our Students Droid Smartphones to Capture News
This semester at Ryerson University in Toronto, thanks to help from Motorola and Telus, a major Canadian cell phone provider, my fellow third-year online journalism instructor Vinita Srivastava and I have been able to provide all our two dozen students with Android-powered Droid smartphones.
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Collaboration
Public Media Corps Takes on Broadband Divide for Minorities
If there was a reality show about the Public Media Corps (PMC), the intro might sound something like this: "Here's the true story of how 15 fellows, five public media institutions, three high schools, three community organizations, a library and a museum collaborate to bridge the broadband divide." Secretly, I wish there was a reality show about the project because...
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EducationShift
NYC J-Schools Take Divergent Paths on Training, Hyper-Local
Universities around the country have had to shift the approach of their journalism programs to accommodate a quickly changing media landscape. New York City's journalism schools, in particular, are working to rethink their offerings and adapt to the new world.
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5Across
What are content farms? If you've been reading our special series at MediaShift on the subject, you'd know that content farms or mills churn out massive amounts of content tailored to Google searches. But the approach to churning out that content varies from how-to articles (Demand Media), vertical topics (High Gear Media), hyper-local (Patch.com) and sports (Bleacher Report, SB Nation). And at some sites, writers get paid a small amount, while at others they toil for free.
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Philosophy
From a business perspective, traditional journalism is rather inefficient. Stories are chosen by a small group whose members often have similar experiences and outlooks. With little knowledge of true market demand, they assign the stories to a limited pool of writers and reporters who may not have the knowledge or contacts to quickly do a top-notch job. The stories...
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Hyper-Local
Writers Talk About Working the Hyper-Local Beat
In my first article for our special Beyond Content Farms series, I examined the opportunities available to writers at some of the biggest content farms. Today, I look at jobs covering hyper-local news. What hyper-local news organizations are aiming for is nothing short of revolutionary: AOL's two-year-old Patch network and established players like Examiner.com are attempting to recreate a...
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Business
Writers Explain What It's Like Toiling on the Content Farm
"We are going to be the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year," AOL's media and studios division president David Eun said last month in an interview with Michael Learmonth of Ad Age. Eun suggested that AOL could double its existing stable of 500 full-time editorial staffers in addition to expanding its network of 40,000 freelance...
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Hyper-Local
AOL Patch and MainStreetConnect Expand Hyper-Local News
It's difficult for media people to search any job site these days without running into an ad for AOL's Patch. It seems equally difficult to read media news sites without finding a feature story about Connecticut's MainStreetConnect. MainStreetConnect has appeared in recent days in both Columbia Journalism Review and Journalism.co.uk. Like Patch, the community news organization is hiring, though...
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Hyper-Local
Networks Aim to Solve Local Ad Puzzle for Hyper-Local Sites
Local advertising is back in style, at least among some big national media companies, and that attitude shift has fueled changes for hyper-local and micro-local news sites. While small independents might not yet feel the financial benefits of an increased focus on local advertising, some site owners are seeing increased interest in the content they generate and in the tools...
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NewspaperShift
Canwest Buyers, OpenFile Bet on Value of Local News in Canada
Two Canadians took a gamble that local news still matters this week. The two represent the hopes of both old and new media. One was a $1.1 billion buyout (in Canadian dollars) of Canada's largest newspaper chain, the Canwest newspapers, led by experienced news executive Paul Godfrey. The other was the launch of a hyper-local, participatory news start-up called OpenFile.ca,...
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Public MediaShift
CCTV Shows How Public Access TV Can Transition to Digital
In 2008, Mike Rosen-Molina wrote on MediaShift about public access TV's "fight for relevance" in the digital age: In an age when it's increasingly easy for amateur filmmakers, citizen journalists, and the general public to distribute videos online, is there any point in having a public-access cable channel? Some argue that public-access television has outlived its usefulness for this reason:...
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Philosophy
WikiLeaks, Bay Citizen, and Lessons from the Logan Symposium
Over the past two days, I had the pleasure of attending the 4th Annual Reva and David Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium. If you want a blow-by-blow account, check out the live blogs from Day 1 and Day 2. Now that I've had a chance to catch my breath, I want to reflect on what I heard (and what I didn't...
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Public MediaShift
Better Coordination Needed to Map Local Media Ecologies
Back in 2008, I co-organized a conference called Beyond Broadcast. That year's theme was "mapping public media," and was designed to both call out the rising importance of maps as a platform for sharing digital media, and to "map" the fragmented universe of public service media projects. The maps I found at the time underscored the siloed nature of news...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: iPad Mania; Yelp Scores $100 Million
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the hype and reality around the latest device from Apple, the iPad. While some have slammed it for what it's missing, it's too early to tell how media companies might use it to sell their content. Plus, Yelp gets up to $100 million from Elevation Partners, helping some employees cash out without an IPO. And I ask Just One Question to Google News' Josh Cohen about whether Google should have started working with publishers sooner.
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Hyper-Local
5 Recent Big Moves In Hyper-Local News
The pace of change for hyper-local news sites and related businesses is dizzying. It's hard to keep up, especially if you try to pay attention to business moves made by large players, as well as innovations that bubble up from local, independent news sites. This year already began with large companies and investors making moves into hyper-local news. At the...
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AdvertisingShift
5 Tools to Help Automate Local Advertising
Promises of whiter teeth, IQ quizzes, and digital dancing people clutter online ads these days. At the same time, experts at future-of-journalism conferences are declaring that news will never again be solely supported by advertising. Neither one tells the full story of the present and future of online advertising for hyper-local and other news websites. Experiments with new advertising technology...
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Hyper-Local
TheDigitel.com Brings Human Context to Local News Aggregation
Many news websites are working to refocus on local news, and often this means turning to automated aggregation. One hyper-local startup in Charleston, S.C., is blending links, community and visuals to try and redefine aggregation by giving it a human context. TheDigitel.com was launched by Ken Hawkins in June 2008, and recently received its first round of venture capital funding...
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