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Environment
Nobel Prize Winner on How New Media is Democratizing Science News
In his lab, scientist and Nobel prize winner Steve Running focuses on creating and confirming new facts and knowledge about climate change. Running leads the Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group lab at the University of Montana.
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Thought Leader Q&A
Shankbone's Wikipedia Photo Portraits Spread Like Wildfire
David Shankbone is arguably the most influential new media photojournalist in the world. He has taken over 1,000 portraits of prominent people across a variety of fields for articles on Wikipedia.org and its foreign language equivalents. Because the pictures are copyleft -- or free for reproduction, alteration, and distribution -- they are used by numerous non-profits, schools, authors, television programs...
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MusicShift
Silverman: CD Sales to Co-Exist with Cloud, Digital Downloads
There's a growing feeling in the American music business that the future will be in the cloud. No one will need physical CDs anymore, but will listen to music on streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, which will eventually merge into a grand digital jukebox. But industry veteran Tom Silverman, who founded dance music label Tommy Boy Records in...
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Social Networking
Social Media Grows at NY Times, But Home Page Remains King
Lately Facebook has been trumpeting its prowess in driving traffic to news sites. In a blog post a couple weeks ago, Facebook media guy Justin Osofsky crowed that Facebook was now the number one referral site to SportingNews.com and that the Washington Post saw Facebook referral traffic grow 280 percent year-over-year. That's certainly impressive, but the New York Times website continues to get the majority of traffic from its own home page.
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Thought Leader Q&A
Knight Fellows Switch from Sabbaticals to Hands-On Projects
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. For much of the past 40 years, the idea of a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University was a dream come true for mid-career journalists,...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Howard Kurtz Leaves Post for 'More Nimble' Daily Beast
Howard Kurtz is not only the dean of American media critics, but he has "walked the talk" of his obsession with media. He is a multi-platform juggler, having been in print at the Washington Post for nearly three decades, hosting CNN's weekend show, "Reliable Sources," and writing the Media Notes blog for Washingtonpost.com for 10 years. And he even does...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Examiner.com Execs Push for Quality, Refute 'Content Farm' Tag
Journalists love to categorize, generalize and put everything into easily digestible chunks of information. But in our quest to explain something in simple terms, we also can oversimplify things. That may have been the case with MediaShift's recent series, Beyond Content Farms, where we included Examiner.com in no less than three stories. Examiner.com does create massive amounts of content, with...
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Thought Leader Q&A
CrowdSpring Brings Crowdsourcing to Design, Writing
If you run any kind of business, large or small, you're always looking for ways to get quality work done at a low cost. And when it comes to contract jobs like web and logo design, or copywriting, you're caught balancing between quality and cost. A couple years ago, CrowdSpring launched as a way for small and medium-sized businesses to...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Facebook Launches Media Page But Resists Revenue Sharing
Facebook is the alpha dog of social networks, and it's also becoming a top dog when it comes to referring traffic to news sites. That became clear in February when Hitwise found that Facebook was referring more traffic to news and media sites than Google News. But for a long time, Facebook only had intermittent communication with media companies about...
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MobileShift
Gaming + Mobile + Social = 'Conspiracy for Good' from Tim Kring
Tim Kring, a long-time television writer and producer, is best known as the creator of the NBC show "Heroes." But he's rapidly expanding his media universe -- last week at Comic-Con he launched a new book project, "Shift," which will debut in August from Crown Books. He has also created a new transmedia project called "Conspiracy For Good" (CFG), which...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Kachingle Hopes 'Social Payments' Can Help Fund Content
If advertising alone isn't going to support all the online journalism and content sites, and pay walls will just turn readers away, perhaps there's another solution, a third way: Social payments. More than just simple donations, social payment systems such as Kachingle and Flattr simplify giving money to sites you visit. Both services set up a monthly payment system, with...
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Thought Leader Q&A
How Josh & Chuck Made 'Stuff You Should Know' a Hit Podcast
Perhaps you were hunting around iTunes one day and came across a list of the top audio podcasts. There in the top five among the usual suspects from NPR was something called Stuff You Should Know. And once you started listening, you were hooked on the congenial chit-chat between hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant, senior writers at HowStuffWorks.com (owned...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Barnett: Advocacy, Membership Groups to Push Non-Profit News
The erosion of the traditional business model for news has led many to go down the non-profit path. The result is a slew of new non-profit news websites. The Bay Citizen, which launched at the end of May, is the newest and joins the likes of ProPublica, MinnPost, and the Texas Tribune, to name just a few. But as the...
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Thought Leader Q&A
NBC's Ryan Osborn Wants to Use Social Media for Storytelling
Ryan Osborn's story at NBC is the prototypical tale of the young aspiring journalist going from a page on "The Today Show" in 2002 to becoming the first director of social media at NBC News. But what he'd like to do in that job is not exactly typical: Osborn wants NBC to concentrate on using Twitter and Facebook to extend...
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Thought Leader Q&A
PayPal Hopes to Lure Publishers to Its Micropayment System
With all the talk about paid content coming back into vogue (thanks, Rupert Murdoch!), it's a wonder that PayPal hasn't been part of the conversation. The tech startup that's now part of eBay has been dominant in handling online payment transactions and is projected to have $5 billion in sales by 2011, according to Bloomberg. But so far, a grand...
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Digging Deeper
California Watch Says 'Yes' to Open, Networked Investigative Reports
Some investigative journalists have been resistant to change in their profession, but hard times at newspapers have brought about a new sense of experimentation and collaboration. That is evident at the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and its new California Watch project, which attracted major foundation funding from the James Irvine Foundation, Hewlett Foundation and Knight Foundation. When I visited...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Stanford Program Breaks Down Walls Between Business, Tech Journalism
I am so used to hearing about innovation in journalism that when I first heard about the Innovation Journalism program at Stanford, I assumed that's what it focused on. Not exactly. The VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism actually focused on helping journalists cover the field of innovation. David Nordfors, a Swedish punk rocker-turned-molecular-physicist-turned-journalist, found that journalists were stuck in...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Harold Evans Sees Bright Future for Print-on-Demand Newspapers
Evans is the editor-at-large for The Week magazine. He has written numerous books, but his most recent is called "My Paper Chase," a fascinating memoir covering his early years as a cub reporter, copy editor and eventually editor and publisher over decades of distinguished work. He connects what happened in those early years to the changes wrought by technology and the Internet, and what he sees as he watches his wife, Tina Brown, co-found and manage The Daily Beast.
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Thought Leader Q&A
Daylife, Getty Give Aggregation Tools to Publishers (for a Price)
Upendra Shardanand re-focused Daylife from being a platform as well as destination site, putting the platform first and letting the site fall further into the background. Recently, Getty Images announced a partnership and $4 million investment in Daylife, with plans to sell Daylife services to its clients, including the SmartGalleries tool for showcasing photos online. Getty joins previous Daylife investors the New York Times Co., Craigslist's Craig Newmark and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.
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Thought Leader Q&A
Magazines Need to Embrace Multimedia Storytelling in Digital Age
This is one in an occasional series on MediaShift where I discuss issues in-depth with thought leaders in online media. The format has changed to give you a profile of the person, as well as more of our dialogue -- including audio clips. If you have suggestions for future Q&As or want to participate yourself, drop me a line...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Edelman's Steve Rubel Switches from Blog to Lifestream
I spoke with Rubel a couple months ago when he was visiting San Francisco for the Ad:tech conference. We met at B Restaurant near Moscone Center and I interviewed him with my Flip camera. We talked about his balancing act as a blogger/journalist/PR person, how PR is shifting with the advent of social media, and what lessons Edelman and Edelman's client Wal-Mart have learned from previous missteps online.
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Thought Leader Q&A
How Tech Publisher IDG Grows Revenues During Recession
Patrick McGovern, IDG: "[At InfoWorld.com] our audience numbers and frequency of visits soared. Even though we gave up 40% of revenues from stopping print, we actually had 10% more revenue growth absolutely. The online revenue didn't only make up for the missing print revenue, but we actually had absolute growth."
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Thought Leader Q&A
BlogTalkRadio Lets Anyone (Including the Pentagon) Start Talk Shows
BlogTalkRadio CEO Alan Levy: "Three or four months into doing this, we started broadcasting live from Afghanistan, with an embed there named Scott Kesterson. Every Friday morning he would be live from Kabul or from Kandahar, and people could listen in and ask him questions. And the soldiers were listening to what was going on...Now, the Pentagon has a network on BlogTalkRadio. Now you know the medium has arrived when the Pentagon is embracing it."
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Thought Leader Q&A
Productivity Guru Gina Trapani Balances Blogging, Coding, Community
This is one in an occasional series on MediaShift where I discuss issues in-depth with thought leaders in online media. The format has changed to give you a profile of the person, as well as more of our dialogue -- including audio clips. If you have suggestions for future Q&As or want to participate yourself, drop me a line via...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Rufus Griscom Mixes High, Low Brow on Babble Parenting Site
Rufus Griscom: "Online content, if it's not user-aggregated or user-generated, is seen as rather old and creaky. But I would argue that there are lots of shades of gray. All of the online content sites are becoming a hybrid of user-aggregated, user-generated and edited content, because feedback and citizen journalism and ratings and suggestions are becoming part of these sites."
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Thought Leader Q&A
Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride Puts Fans in Charge of Bands
The people formerly known as the audience (TPFKATA) are doing more than just fact-checking newspaper stories, time-shifting TV shows and capturing breaking news on their cameraphones. They are also helping run their favorite bands, designing and voting on concert T-shirts, mixing studio albums and even voting on which cities should be included in a band's tour. At the vanguard of...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Should Newspapers Become Online Ad Brokers for Local Businesses?
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that's where the newspaper business is right now. With profits slashed, unending layoffs, and online ad growth slowing, newspapers have to be open to new ideas that will help them deal with a media shift like no other. Last week I looked at the concept of crowdfunding, with people paying journalists directly for...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Current TV's 'SuperNews' Comedy Gauges Success on Web Views
I live about 7 minutes' drive from the headquarters of Al Gore's innovative Current TV in San Francisco, yet my cable system, Astound, still doesn't carry the channel. So when I was visiting my parents last summer in St. Louis, I made a point of checking it out. The first thing I saw was a cartoon spoof of social networking...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Gannett Pushes for More Tech Hires, Data Centers, Niche Sites
These are dark days for newspaper companies in the U.S. There are layoffs in print newsrooms, classified ad revenues are dwindling, and readership is shrinking. To combat these trends, Gannett introduced a bold initiative in 2006 to remake its 85 daily newspaper newsrooms into "Information Centers," making the web the primary platform for 24-hour news, with more video, databases, maps...
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Locative Media Project Aims to Collect Stories of Atlanta
The technology and journalism fields have long been dominated by men, especially in the upper management of big companies. But the J-Lab and McCormick Foundation want to shine the light on new ideas from women who work at mainstream media outlets but want to start something up on the side. That's why they started giving out grants in their...
more »Thought Leader Q&A
Young Newspaper Journalists Could Flee Because of Slow Pace of Change
As the layoffs and buyouts pile up in U.S. the newspaper industry, and Romenesko becomes a daily wake, there is one other troubling problem: Young journalists are less willing to stay at newspapers because the papers are so slow to change their culture.
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Charles Lewis Tries to Solve -- Not Bemoan -- State of Investigative Journalism
The state of investigative journalism in America is in its five-alarm fire phase, with newspaper staffs being severely pared down, and TV news going for flash and celebrity. But Charles Lewis, the godfather of non-profit investigative journalism as founder and former director of the Center for Public Integrity, would rather put out the fire than simply yell "fire!"
more »Thought Leader Q&A
NPR Considers Convergence for Next Generation of Radio Reporters
The younger generation will be our future leaders. We hear that a lot in politics, but it also applies to media companies wondering who will be leading them into a digital future. National Public Radio has two programs -- Next Generation Radio (NextGen) and Intern Edition -- aimed at training young folks to do quality radio reporting the NPR...
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Public Documents + Shoe Leather Reporting = The Smoking Gun's Staying Power
In a world of social network widgets, videoblogs and Web 2.0 gewgaws, sometimes it's the simple things that work best. That's the lesson of Web 1.0 startup The Smoking Gun, a simply designed site that relies on public documents and criminal mugshots to bring in boatloads of traffic. If a prominent politician or celebrity has run afoul of the...
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Front Porch Forum Makes Friends & Neighbors, But Can It Make Money?
We are a society that lives more and more in our technology-induced bubbles. When we go outside, we wear an iPod; we talk on cell phones while driving. In urban areas, we might never meet our neighbors unless there's a fire or earthquake. But can technology also help bring us together in our physical communities, and help us get...
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