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NewspaperShift
5 Ideas to Transform Newspaper Sites
I sometimes wonder whether we are held captive by old school thinking. At our newspapers at Mediafin, we are in the process of integrating web operations with the print publication, a move which I fully endorse. There's one major risk to this: that we might end up seeing the web as just another way to distribute newspaper articles rather than... more »
Section Authors
Who We Are
MediaShift tracks how new media -- from weblogs to podcasts to citizen journalism -- are changing society and culture.
Weblogs
Newspapers Try Again with Local Blog Networks
Recently, those who visited the front page of the Miami Herald's website began seeing a sidebar item labeled simply "Your Blogs." If you clicked on the link it would take you to a page containing a series of headlines and little snippets of opening paragraphs in a news feed format. If you clicked on one of the links, it would...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Michael Jackson's Death Rocks Web; Guardian Crowdsources
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the way Michael Jackson's death yesterday played out online, going from TMZ to Twitter to the LA Times blog. Yesterday was a record traffic day for Yahoo, and Google News reacted like it was under a hack attack from the huge jump in search queries...
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Social Media
Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter
Twitter's role in the Iranian election aftermath leaves no doubt about its power as a global, real time, citizen-journalism style news wire service, along with a tool for facilitating dissent, while countering the view of Twitter as simply a zone for egotistical banality. But it also highlighted Twitter's role as a platform and content generator for traditional media outlets,...
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Legal Drama
Criminal Cases Push Newspapers to Identify Anonymous Commenters
Anonymous comments on newspapers blogs are drawing attention from prosecutors seeking information about criminal matters, once again raising the issue of whether newspaper blog comments are protected under state press shield laws. Last fall, I wrote about two civil cases involving claims of defamation, where two separate courts refused to order newspapers to disclose information that would lead to the...
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NewspaperShift
5 Ways a Community Manager Can Help Your Media Outlet
Recently, the New York Times appointed its first ever community manager, someone to "concentrate full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers." Of course, the New York Times is a huge operation, and has an enormous community of print and online readers/users. Do we at...
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NewspaperShift
Being in the hospital on an I.V. for a number of days put me in touch with the suffering of newspapers. I was down but not out. I have polycystic kidney disease (PKD) and one of my cysts had ruptured, causing severe pain and the temporary loss of kidney functioning in my right kidney. Not fun. But while I was...
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Social Media
How Journalists Balance Work, Personal Lives on Twitter
Twitter is continuing to make headlines around the world as it amasses followers. But it's also making an impact on the newsmakers themselves. Journalists are invading the space at a rapid pace and learning to report live, crowdsource stories and engage with a whole new audience...in 140 characters or less. It may not be revolutionary -- many journalists view the...
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NewspaperShift
Laid Off Sportswriters Find New Life Online
Early last month, the Wall Street Journal reported on a dying breed of newspaper baseball beat journalists. "As newspapers cut budgets and payrolls, the press boxes at major league ballparks are becoming increasingly lonely places, signaling a future when some games may be chronicled only by wire services, house organs and Web writers watching the games on television," reported Russell...
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Social Networking
Journalists Should Customize Social Networks to Maximize Experience
Online social networks are essential tools for journalists. They make it possible to build extended networks, search for story ideas, build contacts and dig up information. But even more important, they help to shake up the relationship between the individual journalist and the people formerly known as the audience. But many journalists don't know how to get the full benefit...
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Legacy Media
WSJ's D Conference Fumbles Transition to Web 3.0
CARLSBAD, CALIF. -- The organizers of the tony, high-priced tech conference known as D All Things Digital, included a manifesto of sorts in the program guide titled "Welcome to Web 3.0." In that treatise, organizers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher define Web 3.0 as "the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple...
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Social Media
How Journalists Are Using Twitter in Australia
Twitter became big news once journalists realized its power as a tool for breaking stories during the Mumbai Massacre in 2008. In the aftermath of the micro-blogging platform hitting the headlines, there was an explosion of professional journalists in the Twittersphere. This growth has been fueled by increasing mainstream awareness of the importance of social media to the future of...
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Legal Drama
A Brief History of AP's Battles with News Aggregators
The news is information, and information wants to be free, as the saying goes. But for news organizations, the news is a product that is collected, recorded and sold for profit. And those profits are now under extreme economic pressure, threatening some news organizations with extinction. Both online and traditional news outlets are regrouping, retrenching and reconsidering their business models...
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NewspaperShift
QR Codes Connect Print to the Web
Point your phone at a printed page. Take a picture. Get taken to a website. That's the power of QR codes, codes embedded in print that can link cell phones to specific websites. They've been doing this for years in Japan, and now they are starting to do it in Europe. Sooner or later it will get to the States....
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Weblogs
Media Criticism Flourishes Online, Putting Legacy Media Under Microscope
In November 2007, Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote a piece for the magazine chastising House Democrats for wording in their version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Not long after the column hit the web, Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece arguing that "for the sake of its own credibility, Time Magazine needs immediately to prohibit Joe Klein...
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NewspaperShift
Kicking Ink: The Struggles of a Print Newspaper Unsubscriber
I knew the day was coming, but it was still a shock when the day came. Groggy-eyed in the early morning light, I slowly went down the four flights of stairs in the front of my building and looked down. Nothing. For 18 generally uninterrupted years, I had the San Francisco Chronicle delivered to me, except when neighbors stole...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: WSJ's Social Media Guidelines; NYT's Pay Plans
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the Wall Street Journal's code of conduct for reporters and editors, with guidelines for using Twitter and social media sites. Plus, the New York Times is considering two different plans for charging for online content -- a metering system and subscription system -- according to a report...
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NewspaperShift
PressTerra Tests Newspaper 'Printernet' on Iberian Peninsula
In my March 24 column, I talked about the "printernet," a system of networked desktop publishing where the desktops and printers are spread throughout the whole world. This is another way of describing the new printing model of "distribute and print," where you send a digital file via the Internet to the printing facility closest to the final distribution point...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Kindle DX; Google vs. Newspapers
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the unveiling of the new wide-screen Kindle DX aimed at newspaper, magazine and college textbook readers. Will people pay $489 for it? Plus, I look at the AP and News Corp.'s moves against Google, with the AP playing hardball for running content in Google News. Meanwhile, Google...
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NewspaperShift
Journalists Can Embrace Emotions and Remain Neutral
Very recently I did something weird. Normally, when moderating our online community at Mediafin, I first read the news articles before I read the comments left by community members. Feeling a bit bored, I reversed this. I started by reading the comments and tried to figure out what the articles were about. It was a weird (but rather subversive) sensation...
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NewspaperShift
Should Newspapers Create Consortium for E-Readers?
COLUMBIA, MO -- I am attending a half-day symposium here at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri's journalism school, this time a meeting of the "Digital Publishing Alliance," a group of newspapers and tech folks who are looking at how newspaper content might work on various e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. The timing of the meeting is...
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MagazineShift
Vanity Fair, New Yorker Fan Blogs Give Free PR to Conde Nast
The Twitter user who writes under the handle Vanityfairer would not tell me her real name. She began following me in December after I mentioned the magazine Vanity Fair in a tweet, and for the next few months we exchanged replies and direct messages about the magazine's content and its writers. Though she made no claims to be associated...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Swine Flu Online; Disney Joins Hulu
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the positive -- and negative -- way the Internet, blogs and Twitter have spread information about the swine flu. There are great resources, maps and tracking sites, but it's easy to get in a panic as well. Also, Disney joined up in the video site Hulu, putting...
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Digging Deeper
Building the Ideal Community Information Hub
Problem: Where can people find the local information they need, whether it's about a school board meeting, a new construction project or a nearby robbery? Solution: A community hub, with all the information aggregated in one online source and pushed out via libraries, in-person meetings, community radio, small run print publications and cable access TV. That's my conclusion after studying...
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NewspaperShift
The Fallacy of the 'Print Is Dead' Meme
Common sense tells us that print is not going away. If print is no longer an important part of your life, that is undeniable. But to extrapolate from personal experience to a statement about what is going to happen in the world doesn't work. But that's exactly what many of the people foretelling the death of print are doing. That's...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Pirate Bay Case; Oprah-geddon on Twitter
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the recent ruling in the Pirate Bay case, where four men at the file-sharing site were found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison -- but are asking for a retrial due to a conflict of interest by the judge. I also mention @Oprah's entry to...
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Guides
Your Guide to Local Watchdog News Sites
As each metro newspaper downsizes and cuts staff, those reporters are considering their next moves. These sites offer a temporary safe haven for reporters, a chance to not only continue to do reporting, but to do it online in new ways. Rather than write sparingly for the print newspaper, they can now blog more frequently about more subjects and write longer pieces. They might take photos and video to go along with their text stories.
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EducationShift
NYU J-School Students Unsure of Future in Changing Industry
I have no idea what I will do when I graduate. I am majoring in journalism at New York University -- a fantastic university in an incredible city -- but my confidence in what career I will pursue after graduation remains unclear. Should I go after my passion for writing? Should I take a crack at my web video skills?...
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NewspaperShift
Ohio Newspapers Share Content, But Don't Give Up Hope for AP
For many, last week's news that the Associated Press planned to begin to crack down on news aggregators that link and quote its content wasn't news at all. Media industry publications have long been reporting on the friction between the AP and aggregators -- a series of verbal swipes made at conferences and in news articles that perhaps reached an...
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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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EducationShift
How to Teach Yourself About Social Media When J-Schools Fail
Journalism is changing rapidly due to social media, and these changes can be bewildering as people wonder how to keep up. I recently gave a social media workshop for journalism students, and I soon realized that many students were still unaware of social media other than Facebook. They were shocked to hear about feed readers, blogs, or micro-blogging and asked...
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5Across
Everywhere you look there are dark signs for newspapers: bankruptcies, less print editions, the threat of closings in San Francisco and Boston, layoffs and pay cuts. But the journalism of newspapers will live on in digital form online. How will this after-life look? We brought together five people for the latest episode of 5Across who are working for newspapers...
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AdvertisingShift
MediaBids Could Help Solve Ad Sales Process for Hyper-Local Pubs
In a recent post, I argued that the problem facing newspapers today has nothing to do with the notion that news-on-paper is not viable -- instead the problem is a broken advertising sales process. Since then I've discovered MediaBids, which seems to have a good idea for how to fix that problem. According to their website: Since its online launch...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
ProPublica's ChangeTracker Lets You Watch Government's Moves
The Obama administration has already made strides toward greater transparency and better use of technology in government, but has promised even more. It's important to make sure that President Obama and his people act on those promises. One way to do that is to watch the government's footsteps online. ChangeTracker makes this possible, and not just for government sites -- it can be used to track changes on any website.
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Legacy Media
Collaboration the Key to Future of Investigative Journalism
BERKELEY -- The second day of the Logan Symposium at UC Berkeley is more of a half-day with one panel devoted to the future of investigative journalism and a brunch at the Frontline World offices near campus. Just like last year, I had trouble getting an Internet connection in the journalism school library so had to live-Twitter the panel and...
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NewspaperShift
Live-Blogging Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting at Berkeley
BERKELEY -- I am at the University of California-Berkeley for the 3rd Annual Reva and David Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium this weekend. It's an invite-only event run by Lowell Bergman, known for his work at "60 Minutes" (and being played by Al Pacino in "The Insider"). The theme this year is "Reporting on Corruption," and included a preview showing of...
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BookShift
Glaser & Son Consider Pros and Cons of Kindle 2
I am what you might call the late early adopter. Rather than live on the bleeding edge, I wait safely until Version 2 comes out with the bugs and problems fixed. I got Windows 98 in '99, waited for the iPhone 3G, and checked out the Kindle 2 rather than 1. But when my e-book reader from Amazon arrived in...
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Legal Drama
'Fox & Friends' Hosts Not Liable for Repeating Associated Content Parody
As newspapers are closing or abandoning their print editions, online news sources are growing in importance -- as are sites that rely on user-submitted news stories. But with so much unfiltered news content available online, how do you separate the accurate from the inaccurate and truth from parody? You might think that traditional news sources would be better able...
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NewspaperShift
Newspaper Cartoonists Engage Audiences (Including Haters) Online
I once worked for a daily newspaper, where there were two things guaranteed to generate letters to the editor: articles about cats and the comics section. Readers didn't have much to say about our coverage of local elections or big trials, but we were sure to receive letters if someone disagreed with the slant of an editorial cartoon or didn't...
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Digging Deeper
New Gatekeepers Twitter, Apple, YouTube Need Transparency in Editorial Picks
There was a time when all you needed was a good record review in Rolling Stone or a stellar book review in the New York Times to get a boost in sales and popularity. But as those old gatekeepers lose their cachet in the digital age, a new set of gatekeepers has sprung up and they don't have bylines. These...
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MagazineShift
'Printernet' Vision Brings Custom Print Publications to Masses
Imagine networked desktop publishing where the desktops and printers are spread throughout the whole world. Publishing means newspapers, newsletters, books and posters in mass market quantities, but versioned and personalized for specific communities and individual users. From the point of view of a writer, it would be easier than ever to see your story in print. If you're a publisher,...
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Public Relations
PR People Must Heed Digital Reality as Newspapers Fold
Last Wednesday morning, as the sun rose over the West Coast, newspaper delivery people in Seattle dropped off the final edition of the Post Intelligencer, one of Seattle's two daily newspapers. The struggling P-I was 145 years old and, by coincidence, 145 newsroom employees were left without jobs. Hearst, which owns the news organization, announced that it will retain 20...
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MagazineShift
Mother Jones Boosts Community in Site Revamp
As digital technology wreaks havoc on the business models of legacy media such as newspapers and magazines, they are now turning more often to the non-profit model. Can they raise donations, micropayments, or get grants? They might want to check out a magazine that's been a pioneer with the non-profit model, and first went online in 1993: Mother Jones. The...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Represent Helps New Yorkers Track Their Politicos
The New York Times' Represent is a data aggregator and sorter that points to information about elected representatives in New York City. If New Yorkers enter an address, they can see their political districts (Congressional, Assembly, Senate and City Council) and representatives. Represent will also track what their representatives have been doing through a recent activity feed from NYT articles and congressional votes.
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NewspaperShift
How Print Publications Can Help Hyper-Local Sites
The New York Times is going into the hyper-local news business, as reported by Zachary Seward at the NiemanJournalismLab. It is just one example of hyper-local -- also called community journalism, beat reporting, or representative journalism -- in action. Other instances include Kennesee State university Professor Leonard Witt's Representative Journalism in Georgia and community news site Patch.com. It's not clear...
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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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4MR
4-Minute Roundup: Hearst E-Reader; Boxee vs. Hulu
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I talk about how the New York Times launches hyper-local sites right as Google's Tim Armstrong launches Patch.com hyper-local sites -- both in New Jersey. Plus, Hearst says it will develop a new e-reader device like a Kindle, but with a larger, flexible screen, likely coming from E-Ink,...
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BookShift
5 Great Services for Self-Publishing Your Book
In past posts, we've looked at some of the questions a new writer should keep in mind when considering whether to self-publish her opus. But let's say that an author has made up her mind that pushing ahead without a traditional publisher is the way to go. With the rise of new print-on-demand (POD) technology, literally dozens of self-publishing companies,...
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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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Business
Read for Free, Pay for Print or Stuff
The discussion about micro-payments and "pay to read" goes round and round because it ignores a basic fact. Most people, most of the time, do not read newspapers. They view, scan and search newspapers. Selling words to viewers, scanners and searchers is hard, but since viewers and scanners are always background-searching for stuff they might need, selling them stuff is...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Laid-Off Arizona Journalists Start Online-Only Publications
What It Is The Arizona Guardian and Heat City are two examples of web-only news sites started by recently unemployed journalists. The Arizona Guardian is run by four Phoenix-based journalists who were recently laid off from the East Valley Tribune. The Guardian covers legislative issues and other aspects of the state capitol. Heat City is run by Nick Martin,...
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Digging Deeper
Reuters Closes Second Life Bureau, but (Virtual) Life Goes On
The sun shines brightly as I stroll along the curving pier above the water, looking out toward a beautiful island with trees swaying in the wind. There's a looming ampitheater festooned with signs for Thomson Reuters, and a series of concrete buildings that appear ready to hold important meetings. I stride in confidently through the doorway... You might think...
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EducationShift
5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them
When people talk about online innovation in college media, they tend to start big and stay there. And it's true that large circulation college newspapers (and big name journalism programs) have been doing some impressive things online, but the need to innovate extends to smaller journalism programs as well. And for them, the challenges can be daunting. So what are...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Washington Post's 'Web Ninjas' Build Map-Timeline Combo
TimeSpace, a Washington Post project, is a coverage mapping framework that displays content from multiple sources in space (via a map) and time (via a timeline). A display map, covering anything from a single city block to the world, is tagged to show viewers where news is being covered. Viewers can also view the news map as it appeared at different points over the preceding hours or days, giving them a picture of how the news events unfolded over time.
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Guides
E-books are electronic books, or books you can read on your computer or on handheld devices such as e-readers or smartphones. The first e-book was likely created by Michael Hart at the University of Illinois in 1971, when he typed in the text of the U.S. Declaration of Independence onto an early version of the Internet. Hart founded the Gutenberg Project, an online collection of e-books that are taken from public domain books.
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NewspaperShift
I am delighted to have the opportunity to be the new "print correspondent" for MediaShift. Every two weeks or so I will be reporting, discussing, opining and answering comments about how new print technology can help untangle some of the problems facing newspaper companies and the future of journalism. Newspaper companies are looking for ways to profit in a new...
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Weblogs
Can 'The Printed Blog' Succeed with Blogs in Newspaper Form?
If the entire media industry is a river that is slowly but persistently moving toward the Internet, then one could picture Joshua Karp as a canoeist paddling against the current, trying to take the online realm and solidify it into print. I first heard of his new business venture, The Printed Blog, from a colleague of mine who runs a...
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Embeds
7 Ways To Keep Costs Low, Content Fresh Using Social Media
Life is tough for the newspaper industry these days, and survival is not assured. Whatever strategy a newspaper takes, one thing is for sure: They need to keep costs low. Yet newspapers still need to compile compelling content that can engage their reading communities. Social media can help a great deal in solving this problem. Here are seven attention points...
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Public Relations
In Hudson River Landing, PR Pros Were Not First Responders
In times of crisis, communications professionals have an important -- and increasingly complicated -- role to play. We used to be the first to offer public responses to catastrophes, able to develop elucidating messages before much of the news media was on the scene. Nowadays, the type of media that will report on a crisis is often as unforeseen as...
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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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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
BronxRhymes Uses Locality, Maps to Track History of Hip-Hop
BronxRhymes is an attempt to raise awareness of the history of hip-hop in the Bronx, the northwestern borough of New York City where the musical style is thought to have originated. The history of hip-hop is illustrated through rhymes and plotted on an online map.
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NewspaperShift
How Niche Bloggers Fill Gaps Left by Local Newspapers, Alt-Weeklies
On December 11, Ben Tribbett checked his phone messages and found two waiting for him from Virginia gubernatorial candidates Terry McAuliffe and Creigh Deeds. And when he opened his inbox that same day he had received an email sent by another candidate, Brian Moran. All three messages were to wish him a happy birthday. The fact that three high-level politicians...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
ProPublica Puts Spotlight on Tracking TARP Money
ProPublica's Show Me the TARP Money is a simple map and chart reflecting the recipients of money provided through TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), a federal program that authorizes the U.S. government to buy assets from struggling financial institutions in an effort to remedy the subprime mortgage crisis. The site shows institutions that have been approved for assistance and keeps a running total of the number of institutions, the amount committed, and the amount invested so far. There is an RSS feed and a widget for the site as well.
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Digging Deeper
Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business
You've probably heard how much the micro-blogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social networking site Facebook can boost your company's profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these startups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren't familiar with...
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AdvertisingShift
College Newspapers Finally Hit by Economic Downturn
As the newspaper industry has struggled with declining revenue, some analysts predicted that college newspapers would weather the storms of the changing media environment better than their peers in the wider industry. (See also this Chronicle of Higher Education article.) Now the national economy indicates that the future might not be quite so rosy: The widespread economic pains in the...
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Embedded Report
The Big Video Debate: Rough or Slick?
Video is one of those new practices we have to get used to as newspaper journalists now working in a Web 2.0 world. One of the key issues is the quality of the video. Do we always need slick, television-style video, which require more specialized skills, or will our community accept "rougher" video, made by amateurs using less sophisticated cameras?...
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Business
Live Blog: RJI TalkFest on Serving Entrepreneurial Journalists
I am virtually covering the all-day sessions at the RJI TalkFest today, held at the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute. I will be watching in via Adobe Connect, where I can hear and see what's going on and chat in the chat room. The agenda includes sessions on community-building, advertising and marketing, news and information and mobile. The live-blogging...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Innovation in Inauguration Coverage
This week, instead of focusing on one innovative journalism project, I'd like to highlight some of the many projects that came up covering Barack Obama's inauguration. The first question I asked myself as I started collecting links was, "Well, this is a cool way to cover the event, but is it journalism? For example, I saw a lot of "official"...
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Online Video
YouTube Helps Video Journalists Get a Start
When discussing the travails of major news outlets online, it's not uncommon for someone to mention the effect that companies like Google and Craigslist have had. But seemingly overlooked in this debate is Google's own YouTube, which has become a breeding ground for unknown and upcoming filmmakers and broadcast journalists. In what way could the online video giant use its...
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Digging Deeper
Vodafone's Child Porn Filter Blocks Innocent Czech Tech Blogs
Last summer, the British cell phone carrier Vodafone announced it would be offering a new filtering service for its Czech customers. "Child pornography and promotion of racism [are] such socially dangerous content that we have access to it automatically blocked for all of our customers," said Philip Premysl, senior manager of corporate social responsibility of Vodafone in the press release....
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Embedded Report
More Time for Blogging! The Future Is Already Behind Us
At Mediafin, we started the year with some ambitious plans for our blogging activities. We want to create new blogs to involve more people, but we also want to become more active on our existing blogs. I'll tell you about what we're doing, the reasons behind it and how things seem to be working out at this early stage, as...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
California Schools Guide: Database of Scores With News Hook
California Schools Guide from the Los Angeles Times is a comprehensive data-based guide to private, public and charter schools in California. The guide includes test scores, enrollment, student-teacher ratios, demographics, teacher experience and reader comments. Schools can be searched by county, city or name, and ranked by each indicator.
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Digging Deeper
GlobalPost Aims to Resuscitate Foreign Correspondents Online
Mr. Powers: How would you like to cover the biggest story in the world today?
Johnny Jones: Give me an expense account and I'll cover anything.
There has always been a touch of glamour associated with foreign correspondents, able to live in far-away lands and report on wars and strife, as in the Alfred Hitchcock movie "Foreign Correspondent," quoted above. But today, Johnny Jones would likely be brought back from Europe in a round of cost-cutting at his newspaper.
MediaShift
Top 10 MediaShifting Stories of 2008
Once again, it's time to look back on the year that was, and consider the new media highlights. Overall, it's been a topsy-turvy year, with a deep recession and historic election giving us reason to despair and hope. The economic turmoil pushed people to read online news at historic levels this past fall, and econ blogs became required reading for...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Big Pictures Help Tell Big Stories at Boston.com
The Big Picture is a large-format photo-blog operated by the Boston Globe. Each entry focuses on one topic and presents around 30 images related to that topic: Recent posts have covered the 2008 Greek riots, the Hajj and Eid al-Adha, and scenes from Guantanamo Bay. The photos are collected from wire services and presented with captions at 990 pixels wide.
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Guides
Your Guide to Alternative Business Models for Newspapers
It's easy to see the problems plaguing the business of daily newspapers in America. The Tribune Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Christian Science Monitor said it would publish weekly instead of daily. Detroit newspapers announced they would be cutting home delivery to three days per week. Layoffs are rampant and newspaper company stocks are down in the dumps.
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TVShift
Public-Access TV Fights for Relevance in the YouTube Age
Public-access television is a sometimes bizarre world where anyone with the time and inclination can appear on television. It's where you find the rants of Colombus, Ohio, goth Damon Zex and the strange instructional videos of Let's Paint TV, where Los Angeles host John Kilduff taught viewers how to paint and make blended drinks all while exercising on a treadmill....
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Legal Drama
Can U.S. Laws Protect Online Speech from Foreign Libel Suits?
"...in cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance." That's a remark famously made in 1997 by John Perry Barlow, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow's complete statement is well worth re-reading but one implication of this particular remark is that the reach of American constitutional values may be limited by our country's physical borders. When...
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NewspaperShift
Pulitzers Open to Online-Only Entrants -- But Who Qualifies?
When it was announced earlier this year that Joshua Marshall, founder of TalkingPointsMemo, had become the first blogger to win a George Polk Award for his coverage of the attorney firing scandal, many recognized the news as a milestone for online journalism. A somewhat condescending New York Times headline read, "Blogger, Sans Pajamas, Rakes Muck and a Prize." Earlier this...
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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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Embedded Report
Wikis Still Slow to Catch on Internally, Externally
Our newsroom at Mediafin is transforming into an integrated multimedia operation. To prepare for this, we recently decided to create two wikis to stimulate talk and facilitate media training programs. At the same time we also created another wiki to encourage discussion amongst our readers. In this very early phase of the experiments, I learned that wikis are still an...
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Digging Deeper
Video Report from the Czech Online Media World
A funny thing happened on my way to Eastern Europe last week. I sent out a Twitter message saying I was heading to Prague and Berlin and wondered if there were any bloggers or online media people I could meet. I got a reply from Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association (MBA), telling me that Radim Hasalik in Prague...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Neighborhood Watch Puts Florida Home Sales on the Map
St. Petersburg Times' Neighborhood Watch is a database application that tracks weekly house sales in Pinellas and Pasco counties, Florida. Readers can search for home sales by county, ZIP code or neighborhood. Median price and sale count trends are tracked and graphed at one year, six month, three month, and one month intervals. On a neighborhood level, the site plots geographical data on Google Maps and suggests listings to prospective buyers by ZIP code.
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NewspaperShift
A Newspaper's Role in Bringing the Community Together
Modern newsrooms have to engage in a never-ending conversation with their community. This may sound self-evident, but it can be a tough sell in a newsroom working under high pressure. So how do you get reporters to buy into the proposition that they need to listen to their audience? They need to see for themselves the enthusiasm that the community...
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AdvertisingShift
Is Six Apart's 'TypePad Journalist Bailout Program' a Gimmick?
The vultures are circling. What was once a small trickle of layoffs at major newspapers has become a waterfall of lost jobs within the media business. One can almost picture the Poynter Institute's widely read journalism industry blog Romenesko sauntering up to Time Inc. and Conde Nast and screaming, "Bring out your dead!" But one advertising and blogging company is...
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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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EducationShift
College Media Has Come A Long Way Online
With the swift pace of change in the media landscape, it's easy to overlook how far college news media has come in a short time. There has been some great innovation in college media, even as some lag behind. I was prompted to reflect on this last month, after reading Going Digital, an Inside Higher Ed article by Brian Farkas,...
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MagazineShift
Pulp Magazines Struggle to Survive in Wired World
Every year Locus Magazine, "The Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field," publishes a year-in-review of the genre. This summation always includes a rundown of the circulation of the remaining speculative fiction magazines, sometimes referred to as the "pulps" because of the cheap wood pulp paper on which they used to be printed. In their heyday there were dozens...
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Embedded Report
How Newspapers Can Increase Their Google Juice
There isn't much difference between what appears in a small newspaper's print edition and online. Many photographs make it online that don't make it to print, and the AP stories are usually a widget feed from the AP. However, in order to maximize search engine traffic and the reader's satisfaction, newspapers need to rethink their approach to online content. Online...
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Digging Deeper
Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism Business?
Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. "It" is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger scale to help fund traditional journalism, which is being hit by the twin storms of readership and ad declines at newspapers and...
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Embeds
FriendFeed Widget Motivates Reporters to Use Social Media
Blogs should be conversations. At least, that is how we think about blogging at Mediafin, Belgium's leading publisher of business newspapers and websites. This last week, I have been busy reorganizing our major financial blog, Bear&Bull, adding FriendFeed widgets in hopes of encouraging more audience interaction. The results have been surprising -- although the audience has been slow to react,...
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Embeds
NYU Local Blog Connects a School with No Campus
The idea for NYU Local, the newest addition to New York University's list of publications, was born last year when founder and editor Cody Brown, 20, came up with the idea for a survey to be conducted by the Foundations of Journalism class. The survey question asked other NYU students: "Would you trade your right to vote for an iPod...
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Legal Drama
Judges Rule Anonymous Commenters Protected by State Shield Laws
Political campaigns often produce a blizzard of ancillary election-related litigation -- for an example, just look to the 2000 presidential campaign. When the press reports anonymous accusations during an election campaign, sometimes that litigation involves lawsuits by candidates or public officials seeking to learn the identity of those anonymous sources. In many states, newspapers and other media can protect such...
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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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BookShift
6 Ways Authors Can Succeed by Self-Publishing Books
When most authors write a book, they go the traditional route: pitch it to publishers, wait months for a reply, shop it around, wait some more, go through rewrite, and wait some more... But when blogger Sramana Mitra partnered with Amazon's BookSurge to self-publish her new book, she was taking a different route. For a book about web technology and...
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Digging Deeper
How 'Follower Spam' Infiltrated Twitter -- and How to Stop It
When using the micro-blogging service Twitter, by default you get email notices whenever anyone signs up to "follow" you (when you follow someone on Twitter, their Twitter posts, or "tweets," display on your main Twitter page, along with Tweets from everyone else you follow). A few weeks back, I noticed that I was getting inundated with new followers with names...
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NewspaperShift
How Audience Input Shaped Our Financial Crisis Coverage
It has been a while since I last reported about the changing work practices at Belgian business newspaper publisher Mediafin, but, as you may have noticed, something has gone horribly wrong in the financial services sector in the interim. In Belgium, our biggest bank, Fortis, was taken over by the French bank BNP Paribas. Another one of our largest banks...
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Guides
Your Guide to Political Polling Sites
We are an impatient nation. We can't stand waiting until election day to find out who will win an election -- we want to know who will win now. That explains the popularity of political polling simulations, aggregators and analysis blogs in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. Because we have such a fascination with winners and losers, we want to see the current state of the race on a daily, even hourly, basis, and the web can deliver that in spades.
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Embedded Report
How the Focus on Print Hurts Our Newspaper Site
I don't consider our print and online newspaper areas here at the Bowling Green Daily News to be Byzantine. But to an outsider it might appear that way. On paper, the hierarchy is pretty simple. Our newspaper's website is under the control of the online director. The online director reports to two different people: the managing editor and the general manager (which is me).
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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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Weblogs
Journalists Consider Risks, Conflicts of Running Personal Blogs
Implementing strategies developed by millions of office workers who have honed the practice of flipping from computer solitaire to spreadsheets at the first sign of a lurking supervisor, I hid my blog from my co-workers. I had been a blogger for nearly four years by the time I entered the newspaper industry in 2006, and when I later accepted a...
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Digging Deeper
Political Fact-Check Sites Proliferate, But Can They Break Through the Muck?
As the U.S. elections near the finish line, the presidential campaigns are throwing around enough verbal attacks and inflammatory advertising to make the average voter's head spin. Fortunately, there are now three excellent sources for fact-checking political discourse online: Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly's PolitiFact and the Washington Post's Fact Checker blog....
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Digging Deeper
NYU Professor Stifles Blogging, Twittering by Journalism Student
After New York University journalism student Alana Taylor wrote her first embed report for MediaShift on September 5, it didn't take long for her scathing criticism of NYU to spread around the web and stir conversations. Taylor thought that her professor, Mary Quigley, was not up to speed on social media and podcasting -- even though the class she...
more »Embedded Report
Does 'Web First' Strategy Make Sense for Small Newspapers?
The Bowling Green Daily News doesn't have a "web first" strategy in the way we run our newspaper. That means that we don't post articles to our website before they appear in print. Apart from some breaking local news, most major stories don't appear on the Internet until after the press is running. Right now, our readers aren't particularly...
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Legal Drama
Court Rules Print-on-Demand Service Not Liable for Defamation
Book publishers can be sued if they publish a book full of libelous statements because, the reasoning goes, a publisher should know what it prints. The publisher reviews the manuscript, edits and proofreads it, and distributes the finished book to retailers. It is involved in every part of the process. But the Internet has given rise to a new...
more »Digging Deeper
Lessons from Katrina Help Media, Volunteer Efforts in Gustav Coverage
When Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast, the evacuation of the area went much more smoothly than during Hurricane Katrina three years ago. This time, the local, state and national agencies were more prepared for a potential disaster. Similarly, online media outlets and volunteer efforts were also better prepared for this hurricane, having learned their lessons from the Katrina...
more »Digging Deeper
The Best 2008 Political Convention Coverage Online
In 2004, the major political conventions gave a few dozen bloggers press credentials, a historic moment for the new media outsiders. And this year, the political conventions have tried to be even more open to bloggers, video reporters, podcasters and new media. The Democratic convention credentialed 120 bloggers, and the GOP has credentialed 200 bloggers, according to Forbes. And the...
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NewspaperShift
Newspapers Can Do Online Video on a Modest Budget
I was as excited as anybody to be able to post video on our website. Our newspaper readers were turning more and more to their computer screen to read our news and it seemed logical that they would appreciate and enjoy seeing video enhancements for the print edition. My excitement soon turned to frustration as I started to run into hurdles.
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World View
How a Protester Pulled Off the Clandestine Radio Broadcast in Beijing
The voices of Chinese human rights activists can be heard on the radio. A former journalist describes the censorship she experienced, and a human rights activist explains the increasing crackdown on Chinese dissidents that has occurred these past few months. A former political prisoner complains about the appalling conditions in which he was held. Have the Chinese authorities gone wild and suddenly opened the airwaves?
more »NewspaperShift
Walls Tumble Down as Mediafin Integrates Print, Online Newsrooms
The company where I work is well-known in Belgium for its print publications. Mediafin is the publisher behind the Dutch language business daily De Tijd and its Francophone counterpart L'Echo. But in recent years, the company's Internet sites have grown to rival the popularity of its print editions. In July, Mediafin websites reached a new high of an estimated 160,000 unique visitors on one single day, an amount roughly equivalent to the average number of readers per day. But even as online journalism continues to reach more and more readers, journalists themselves continue to balk at putting their work online.
more »Thought Leader Q&A
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...
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Digging Deeper
Commenters Mix Conversation, Self-Promoting Links to Defeat Filters
There was a time not too long ago when you could spot spam comments on a blog from a mile away. There were too many links, the comment was off-topic, and they were trying to promote a pyramid scheme website. But as human and automated filters started catching problematic posters, their techniques became more sneaky. Soon, there were comments...
more »Embedded Report
How Outside Firms Like TownNews.com Can Help Small Newspaper Sites
I decided early on that the best strategy for our newspaper to grow its web presence was to not to hire people, but to find other firms to partner with.
This took us from working with a guy with a server is his apartment to working with a phone company and finally a newspaper-specific host/content management system. We gave up control over many aspects of our website in order to remain flexible.
more »MediaShift
MediaShift Looking for Embeds, Correspondents, Managing Editor
I just wanted to update readers on changes that are happening here at PBS MediaShift and Idea Lab. In early June, I put out a call for new correspondents and "embeds" to write for MediaShift. I want to add more voices to this blog besides mine, open it up to more ideas and diverse opinions, and get better coverage...
more »Digging Deeper
Will Code of Best Practices Help Video Mash-Up Artists Stay Legal?
You just created the best video mash-up ever, taking a speech given by John McCain broadcast on Fox News, remixing it with the song "Ol' Man River," and quick-cutting in clips from gangsta rappers. You upload it to YouTube and other video-sharing sites, and watch the views pile up. But have you run afoul of copyright law? Do you...
more »Embedded Report
NBC's Penguin Story Goes from Web to 'Nightly News'
It was a seemingly prosaic moment at the end of the "Weekend NBC Nightly News" program Saturday, July 5: Lester Holt wrapped up the show with one of those ever-popular cute animal stories. The piece was about a baby penguin rejected by its mother and now being raised by a zoo worker in Boston. But there was a lot more to this story than met the eye, as Holt hinted at with his introduction: "It's a story we first reported on our website. It got a lot of traffic there, so much in fact that we thought maybe we'd air it right here. So here's NBC's Clare Duffy with our report."
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.
more »NewspaperShift
The Newspaper Blurb That Complained to Me
In my daily perusal of the ever-shrinking San Francisco Chronicle print newspaper, I noticed a little blurb tucked away on the front page of the Technology and Business section. Then a weird thing happened. The newspaper blurb actually started talking to me.
more »Guides
The iPhone is the first cell phone offered by Apple Computer, combining its popular iPod MP3 player with a multi-touch-screen smartphone with web browsing. Apple CEO Steve Jobs played the tech world's wizard as he unveiled the iPhone on January 9, 2007 at the Macworld conference, where people lined up to gape at an early version of the phone behind glass.
more »MagazineShift
How PaidContent Succeeded in Mining Digital Media Niche
Rafat Ali was just another freelance journalist back in 2002, and wanted to strut his stuff on a blog, so he started PaidContent to write about his take on the business of digital content. Now he is much richer for his efforts, having expanded the blog into a mini-media empire with venture funding and last week selling it entirely to Guardian Media Group for about $30 million.
more »Digging Deeper
Who Killed the Online Journalism Review and Will It Live Again?
For more than 10 years, the Online Journalism Review was published by the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California as a place to follow the struggles and triumphs in the nascent field of online journalism. But on June 16, editor Robert Niles posted a note to the site titled, Goodbye, explaining that USC was suspending publication of OJR and that he would be leaving the school.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Quick Video Services Spark Conversations, Boredom
Online video has moved way beyond simple video-sharing on YouTube. A growing number of services are allowing users to make video on the fly and stream their material live or near live to the web or from mobile devices. Instant video content, often just conversations between the producer and his or her audience, or video comments back and forth, is much different from content that is recorded, edited and posted onto video-sharing sites like YouTube.
more »Digging Deeper
Online Video Ads Finally Find Their Niche
The numbers tell the story of the disconnect between online videos watched and online video ads sold: In December 2007, Americans watched 10 billion online videos, according to comScore. For the entire year of 2007, advertisers spent just $554 million on online video ads, according to Jupiter, while they spent $21 billion on all online ads. So many people are watching online videos, but so few advertisers are trying to reach them.
more »Open Source Reporting
Educational Centers for Journalism Experiments
Will print newspapers exist in 10 years? How will we fund investigative journalism in the future? How can journalists learn to do reporting, moderating communities, filtering content, building Google Maps and all the other technical and online duties they will need to know?
more »Thought Leader Q&A
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 »Legal Drama
AP Badly Mistaken on Drudge Retort
Last week, the Associated Press decided that the Drudge Retort was in violation of copyright laws because it excerpted parts of AP stories and linked to them. The AP legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Drudge Retort's owner, the technology book author Rogers Cadenhead.
more »MediaShift
MediaShift Looking for 'Embeds' at Newspaper, Radio, TV
As the redesign and revamp of the MediaShift site continues apace, I am looking for a few good folks to serve as correspondents for MediaShift, so I can get better insight into industries or worlds that I cover only occasionally. My hope is that with a group of 10 to 15 correspondents, I'll be able to give my community of readers and contributors more food for thought and interaction.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Slingbox Lets Me Take Live TV Abroad
Last month, I moved to Spain, and I took my TV with me. Not the actual TV set, but my shows. As I write this, I'm watching a live episode of "Larry King Live," where politicians and pundits are discussing the implications of the Obama victory. It's 9:00 in the morning here in Spain, and even though I'm having breakfast, late-night Larry King and everyone else is truly live, thanks to Slingbox.
more »Digging Deeper
'Technology Sabbath' Offers One Day to Unplug
Lately, I've been experimenting with taking one day each week away from work completely. You might think this would be an easy task as there's a "weekend" each week that allegedly offers up two full days of rest. And yet, as I work at home, the shiny big screen of the iMac beckons at all hours, and I am often in front of its white glow the first thing every morning and the last thing at night.
more »Digging Deeper
Newspaper Vet Malcolm Finds Blog Religion with 'Top of the Ticket'
If you have preconceived notions about political blogging, Andrew Malcolm is here to shatter them. Malcolm, 64, has decades of experience as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief at the New York Times, and later as an editorial board member and feature writer for the Los Angeles Times. He has ink in his blood, but when he was tapped by the L.A. Times to help write the new political blog, Top of the Ticket, Malcolm became a quick convert to the online religion.
more »NewspaperShift
Post-Mortem on the Multimedia Boot Camp
For five and a half days, a group of mostly newspaper journalists (with a few broadcasters and non-profit folks thrown in) took an intensive boot camp multimedia training at UC Berkeley through the Knight Digital Media Center. The idea was to learn as much as possible about shooting and editing video, capturing and editing audio, building Flash animations, doing...
more »NewspaperShift
Flash Techniques, and the Participatory Push by Current TV
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- The week-long training at UC Berkeley in multimedia has now moved to a new phase. After getting basic background on audio, video and photographic equipment, we went out into the field on our group's assignment. My group, Team Gecko, went to visit Professor Robert Full to learn about the work he's done in biomechanics. Full's lab...
more »NewspaperShift
Photography Training and Doing More with Less in El Paso
It's now Day 3 in the marathon week-long multimedia boot camp at UC Berkeley run by the Knight Digital Media Center. We have broken into groups to create various multimedia stories, and later today we'll go out to do our primary interviews and video shoots. My group will be meeting with Robert Full, a professor who studies robotics based on animal movements.
more »NewspaperShift
Hands-On Training with Videocameras and Shooting for the Web
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- After our long storyboarding sessions, it's now time to move into more hands-on training and seminars on doing video shooting, audio recording, digital photography and using Macintosh computers. So far, there's been a good mix of lectures, discussions and collaborative work on storyboards for our projects. The group is very inquisitive, and the instructors have done...
more »NewspaperShift
Storyboarding Basics and Finding Your Dream Job
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- It's Day 2 at the Knight Digital Media Center's week-long boot camp for journalists learning to do multimedia reports. On the agenda for the day is learning about doing "storyboarding," or laying out how a multimedia report will work. And there will also be some basic tutorials on using videocameras and techniques in video shooting. (Some...
more »NewspaperShift
Live-Blogging the Multimedia Boot Camp for Newspaper Journalists
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- With MediaShift, I've always had a plan to add video and audio along with all the text reports I do here. As I want to "walk my talk" about media outlets using multimedia, I felt it made sense to do them myself. This week, I'll be auditing a week-long boot camp in multimedia training at the...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Are Print Newspapers Alive and Well in Spain?
From a picture window in an office from where I am writing in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona, I can see the same sights I could see from a similar window in my former neighborhood in San Francisco: pedestrians, taxis, cafes and bookstores. But there is something different about my view here: I can spot three different storefronts specializing in newspapers and magazines, all on one block and on one side of the street. A couple of yards away, there are more newsstands. A visit to the corner cafe reveals something else that's rather curious: the room full of coffee drinkers is full of people reading the news -- not on laptops or iPhones -- but on good old-fashioned pulp.
more »NewspaperShift
Fear and Loathing (and Bad Hooker Jokes) at the Old Media Corral
LAS VEGAS -- When Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek magazines presented the recent Interactive Media conference, it seemed like the perfect time for traditional media execs and managers to examine the interactive landscape and consider innovative approaches to the web. The idea was a good one, and timely, but the execution was sorely lacking. Everything about the conference had...
more »MobileShift
Learning the Limits of Locative Media
Once our "LoJo team" finalized our locative story idea, we had to decide which format and technology worked best. We debated the advantages of driving tours versus walking tours. Driving tours are particularly attractive when tour locations are miles apart, which is the case with some of Chicago's planned Olympic venues. But a driving tour would limit our story to people with cars and to locations with available parking. We ultimately decided on a hybrid driving and walking tour.
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...
more »Citizen Journalism
This Reporter Becomes a Participant at an Unconference
Are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution? That's a question you hear a lot when people complain about something that's gone wrong in our modern world. And there's a lot of hand-wringing about the future of journalism and whether it will survive its painful transition in the digital age. But the conference...
more »Digging Deeper
9 Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
With search engines ranking as a top traffic driver for many blogs and content sites, optimizing a site for search engine exposure is an increasingly critical component of any online marketing effort. Search engine optimization, or "SEO," means using technical and not-so-technical techniques to make sure that people searching for topics you write about will find your site. Over...
more »NewspaperShift
Are Veteran Media Execs the Ones Who'll See the Future?
BERKELEY -- We are midway through the first day at the conference, "Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Reporting?" [You can read my earlier post from the conference here.] One thing that struck me here is that we have some serious bigwigs and executives at major media companies, like the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR,...
more »NewspaperShift
State of Investigative Reporting at Newspapers, Broadcasting
BERKELEY, CA -- I am blogging live from the conference, "Crisis in News: Symposium on Investgative Reporting," at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. It is perhaps the most beautiful day outside here, with glorious blue skies, but investigative journalists are like vampires, hiding out in dark spaces when it's warm and sunny outside. So here we are in...
more »NewspaperShift
Examples of Online Investigative Journalism
This weekend I'll be attending "The Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Journalism?" hosted at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. There will be a lot of old school journalism types who have been plying the trade of investigative work for decades. Most of these folks work at big news...
more »Thought Leader Q&A
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...
more »TVShift
CBS Considers 'Loyalty Index' Over Pay for Page Views
With so many ways to track a writer's popularity online, should that popularity be tied to a journalist's or blogger's pay? That is a question that's come up quite a few times over the years, and last week I took Gawker Media to task for paying writers based on page views. My basic point was that there should be...
more »PhotoShift
Cheap Editing Tools a Boon for Media Makers
Video, photo and music editing used to be only accessible through complicated and expensive hardware, and software programs such as Avid for video, Photoshop for images and ProTools for audio. But now a vast array of online tools and cheaper software are letting amateurs and pros polish up their work without spending any money. In addition to being free,...
more »Digging Deeper
Net neutrality or network neutrality means that Internet service providers (ISPs) such as cable and telephone companies must treat all traffic equally that travels across their networks. That means that your broadband service provider couldn't block you from seeing a particular site or using a high-bandwidth service arbitrarily.
more »Digging Deeper
The Social Press Release: Multimedia, Two-Way, Direct to the Public
Silicon Valley journalist/blogger Tom Foremski had had enough. Two years ago, he wrote a poison pen letter to the PR industry in a blog post titled Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!, in which he exhorted publicists to break down press releases into sections, tag the information and provide links to more sources. "Press releases are nearly useless," he...
more »Philosophy
It's Time for Newsrooms to Walk the Talk of Change
Seems like nearly every day I get a notice in my in-box about a new conference, a new initiative, a new working group that will be looking at ways that traditional media can change with the digital times. For the most part, these programs have thoughtful people who sincerely want to help news organizations change. My worry is that they...
more »Thought Leader Q&A
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...
more »Digging Deeper
The mobile web, or mobile Internet, is the experience of browsing the Net or using Internet functionality such as online maps and web search on your cellular phone or personal digital assistant (PDA). The promise of the mobile web is to let you do things like check email or news headlines, find good local restaurants, and get driving directions while you are on the move.
more »Your Take Roundup
Newspapers Should Focus on Local News -- But Not Forget Bigger Picture
Recently, there was a healthy discussion on Poynter's Online-News email list on the topic of the importance of local news. So I decided to put the question to MediaShift readers as well: Should traditional media outlets start focusing more on local news and leave the national and international stories to other outlets? How far should they go? Before I...
more »Digging Deeper
Semi-Pro Journalism Teams Give Alternative View of U.S. Elections
Elizabeth Gotsdiner got Joe Biden's errant spittle in her mouth. Shantel Middleton got to ride on a Ron Paul blimp. Mayhill Fowler was following Obama canvassers and ended up helping them carry brochures for the candidate. Each of these folks represents a new class of semi-pro journalist tasked with covering the U.S. presidential election in innovative, more personal ways....
more »Digging Deeper
Politico 2.0: Ruffini Blogs, Twitters, Crowdsources Obama Donations
Patrick Ruffini is the epitome of the new breed of political consultant. He's a numbers wonk who swears by Microsoft Excel. He's a tech geek who's had his own political website since the mid-'90s, and he writes for various big-name group blogs such as TechPresident and TownHall.com -- as well as his own blog. And though he has worked...
more »Digging Deeper
Distinction Between Bloggers, Journalists Blurring More Than Ever
The time-worn debate of Bloggers vs. Journalists has finally run its course. For years, traditional journalists scoffed at bloggers as pajama-wearing screamers, while bloggers have pointed to MSM (mainstream media) as secretly biased and obsolete. While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly (and it continues to this day), what has happened...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Lately, it seems everybody's a video producer. From YouTube to BlogTV to Seesmic –- it's as if everyone's doing something with a videocamera. Last year, I wondered if the transition from blogger to video producer and host might not be the best route for everyone. It seemed that bloggers were eager to jump formats and just "do video," and the...
more »Digging Deeper
With the advent of the Internet and a growing number of security breaches, people worry that their personal information can be seen and exploited around the world in an instant. If you have incriminating photos online, a potential employer or love interest might find them and make snap judgments. If you shop online with a credit card, a merchant might steal your information and run up charges on your card. If you surf online around major media sites, publishers might use your "data trail" to target advertising to you.
more »Your Take Roundup
Kindle, E-Readers Must Be Cheap, Flexible to Supplant Books
Are e-readers like the Amazon Kindle going to make print books obsolete, or will people's undying love for the printed book continue on in the digital age? While the Sony Reader didn't catch fire, the recent release of the Amazon Kindle has brought another round of debates over the future of the print book.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
5 Reasons I Won't Give Up Books
Last month at the highly anticipated MacWorld conference here in San Francisco, Apple honcho Steve Jobs said some words that left many agape. Those words weren't "Macbook Air" but "people don't read anymore." He was predicting a doomed future for Amazon's new Kindle e-reader. Shocked, I've been going over this for weeks now, trying to cut through the punditry...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Why I Left Print Media for Digital
In new media circles, one of the hottest topics of recent years has been the print-to-digital shift. People pundit about it, shout "print is dead" and wallow in the sadness sparked by nostalgia for a day when this wasn't a question. We've also begun speculating on whether a device like the Kindle will really ever take our attention away...
more »Digging Deeper
In Digital Age, Journalism Students Need Business, Entrepreneurial Skills
The traditional path of a journalism career has clearly shifted. In the past, a journalism student would learn about being a newspaper reporter, then take a job at a small-town paper, eventually moving up to a medium and then larger paper. Now, the reporter might launch a blog, an audio podcast or video reports as a one-person operation, handling editorial and business duties simultaneously.
more »Your Take
What might entice you to use e-books or e-readers like Kindle?
It seems like every few years a new e-book device comes out that promises to revolutionize our reading experience, hoping we'll throw out our book collection and read everything electronically. Recently, the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle have been the contenders in e-books, but many people complain that they are not open enough for different types of books and that...
more »Digging Deeper
BusinessWeek.com Pushes into Aggregation, Video, Participation to Stand Out
Business news is often about numbers. And when you check the audience numbers on the various top financial news sites online, the portals such as Yahoo Finance and MSN Money come out on top, followed by a jumble of online magazines such as Forbes.com, wire services such as Reuters, and online-only pubs like TheStreet.com. As of last August, BusinessWeek.com...
more »Digging Deeper
Traditional Media Ready to Elevate the Conversation Online -- with Moderation
Major media sites have started to get the religion of audience participation, but there's been one big hitch: How do you harness the audience's knowledge and participation without the forums devolving into a messy online brawl that requires time-intensive moderation? Over the years, traditional media sites have tried forums, killed them, and tried them again, this time with more...
more »Digging Deeper
Anti-Piracy Dragnet Could Hurt 'Fair Use' of Copyrighted Video
All the lawsuits and rhetoric around people uploading copyrighted material on video-sharing sites such as YouTube make it seem like a black-and-white situation: either you're shooting your own original video or stealing it from someone else. But what's lost in that simple either-or interpretation is the more gray area in copyright law known as fair use, which protects people...
more »DVR
The New Etiquette for Our Time-Shifted Culture
Do you remember the old days back when we sat around and watched a sports event or TV show with people in real time with commercials? You might have even called up a friend far away to share your thoughts on what was happening in the game or who had won which Academy Awards. But with time-shifting and DVRs...
more »MediaShift
10 MediaShifting Moments of 2007
As the year 2007 sets in the distance, we can take some time to consider the year that was. I'm not a huge fan of year-end lists, but sometimes they help us get a grip on what transpired -- and ponder what's to come. What's perhaps most amazing about 2007 is that two distinct phenomena -- the iPhone and...
more »Digging Deeper
When Will Google's 'Big Project' YouTube Bring in Profits?
In its brief 22-month history, video-sharing site YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon. The Iraq War has been called the "YouTube War" because of the videos that are regularly uploaded by soldiers and insurgents. The upcoming U.S. presidential race has been called the "YouTube Election" with its own "YouTube Debates" thanks to the questions for candidates uploaded by the...
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Hyper-Local News
Hyper-local news is the information relevant to small communities or neighborhoods that has been overlooked by traditional news outlets. Thanks to cheap self-publishing and communication online, independent hyper-local news sites have sprung up to serve these communities, while traditional media has tried their own initiatives to cover what they've missed. In some cases, hyper-local sites let anyone submit stories, photos or videos of the community, with varying degrees of moderation and filtering. Pioneers such as "Northwest Voice" in Bakersfield, Calif., and "YourHub", which started in Denver, actually reverse publish select material from their websites in print publications. Both of them are run by mainstream newspaper publishers.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
6 Reasons I'm Not Hooked on Podcasts
A year ago, Mark wrote about the factors that were limiting the growth of podcast adoption. Some of the problems include the difficulty in finding quality content, a lack of understanding of the medium, and a general impatience in getting podcasts to work. I can relate. Try as I might, I haven't been able to make podcasts a part of...
more »Digging Deeper
Hype and Backlash for Second Life Miss the Bigger Picture
In May 2006, BusinessWeek ran a cover story on the virtual world Second Life (SL) by Robert Hof called My Virtual Life. The tagline breathlessly said, "A journey into a place in cyberspace where thousands of people have imaginary lives. Some even make a good living. Big advertisers are taking notice." It didn't take long for other mainstream media...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Last.FM, Jango, Pandora Trounce Music Discovery via Radio
Back before the Internet, listening to the radio was a one-sided experience. Beyond the occasional call-in request, music radio was about listening to whatever the DJs decided to play whenever they decided to play it. But a new breed of online music services are giving listeners access to music content on demand, and most are for free. Can these...
more »Digging Deeper
TechPresident, 10Questions Put Spotlight on 'Voter-Generated Content'
Just as the Internet and technology have shifted the playing field in media, allowing bloggers and podcasters to help set the news agenda, so has the realm of politics been disrupted by technology that gives voters more power to inject their own issues into the fray. And in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, that disruption has been strongest in...
more »Weblogs
Losing the Journalistic Security Blanket
Here's the quiz of the day for 21st Century Journalism 101: What makes news critics howl, able reporters swoon and strong editors weep? (Hint: The great unwashed and untutored of the blogosphere consider them pure manna.)
more »NewspaperShift
Rethinking the Mercury News...with Community Participation
When I was clicking through the website of the San Jose Mercury News metro newspaper, I noticed the navigation bar had the usual tabs for News, Tech, Sports, Business, and finally, Help. But this time, rather than consider this Help tab as a way for readers to get help, I could hear the Mercury News calling out to readers...
more »Your Take
What's the role of unions in the digital age?
Unions have had a long history representing media workers at traditional media organizations. But now they are being tested, as those very same traditional media outlets are creating more and more non-union digital jobs while eliminating union jobs. Unions have always had a role in helping workers vs. the media companies, but now they must figure out how to...
more »Digging Deeper
Traditional Media Evolves for Wildfire Coverage, But Hyper-Local Still Lacking
When people think of community or hyper-local neighborhood news, they typically think of bake sales, petty crime and development catfights. But when a disaster strikes, the stakes for community news are raised, and lightning-quick news updates online can save lives and help residents cope. That was the reality in San Diego and Southern California during last week's series of...
more »Media Usage
California Wildfire Coverage by Local Media, Blogs, Twitter, Maps and More
The last few days have shown that online resources, social media, and collaboration on the Net can make a huge difference in a natural disaster. As the wildfires have spread in Southern California, the evacuees and local residents have utilized the Internet not only to connect and get updated information; they have used it to tell their stories, share...
more »Digging Deeper
MarketWatch Turns 10, But Can It Evolve for Another 10?
As the financial news site MarketWatch celebrates its 10th anniversary next week, the stalwart Web 1.0 company stands on the precipice of change. It has launched a community initiative that lets people comment on stories, rate stories, and compete for points by making market predictions. As part of Dow Jones, MarketWatch will become part of the News Corp. empire...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Even in U.S., Bloggers Get Little Protection
Earlier this year, there was a debate in journalism circles and in the general public about who could be considered a journalist, as San Francisco videoblogger and media maker Josh Wolf was jailed after refusing to turn over video footage to federal authorities. After spending 226 days in jail, Wolf was dubbed the "longest-jailed journalist in American history." But...
more »Digging Deeper
BBC Trains Iranian Journalists through ZigZag Online Magazine
Iran has a thriving blogosphere and a large educated and Internet-savvy class of people. But because it's a closed society, most journalism training does not address the importance of objectivity and balance in reporting, nor does it stress the importance of online journalism. The BBC World Service Trust has been quietly trying to change that, training 150 journalists in...
more »Citizen Journalism
MediaShift Launches Idea Lab Group Blog
A few weeks back, I heard gunshots outside my window. It was pretty scary, and reminded me of my urban environment here in Potrero Hill, San Francisco. But where could I turn to get the story on what happened? Was someone killed? Do police know what happened? In the past, I might have heard something about it on the...
more »Your Take
Should bloggers and newspapers make peace?
Everywhere you turn, newspaper websites are getting the blog religion. They're either adding new blogs from reporters or community members, or setting up an alliance to share advertising, or just buying up big-name bloggers, as the New York Times has done with Freakonomics and by hiring TVNewser's Brian Stelter. Alana Semuels counts all the ways newspapers and bloggers are working...
more »Digging Deeper
Virtual worlds are online three-dimensional spaces where you can interact with other people, collect items and build structures, and communicate via a virtual representative of yourself called an avatar. These worlds have been influenced by various science fiction writers such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, along with the movie, "The Matrix."
more »Digging Deeper
6 Maxims for Music Promotion in the Digital Age
Not too long ago, there was an established route for promoting musical talent. The music would go into heavy rotation on the radio and MTV, the artist would play in a record store, and promotion might include an advertisement in a music magazine. But the old formula has been updated with the advent of digital distribution, social networking sites...
more »Your Take Roundup
People Will Pay for Niche Content, Ad-Free Newspaper Sites
With the end of the TimesSelect pay service for New York Times editorialists and archives -- and the possible end of the Wall Street Journal Online's paid wall -- I wondered if anyone would pay for content on newspaper sites. Most of the stories there are timely news, meaning they don't hold value for very long, and much of...
more »Digging Deeper
Henry Blodget, Silicon Alley Look for Resurgence
When I mentioned the name "Henry Blodget" to a friend from the old dot-com daze, she wrinkled her nose with disgust. "How can anyone trust what he has to say, when he was the one who caused the bubble in the first place!" she said. Blodget was a financial analyst who mightily predicted Amazon's stock would hit $400 --...
more »Your Take
What content would you pay for (if any) on a newspaper site?
Newspapers online have always struggled with a consistent business model. There have been registration walls, paid content behind walls (including columnists and archives), and various ad schemes from paid search ads to classifieds to interstitial ads that bar entry. Many of the paid content ideas have fallen aside lately, with the boom in online advertising. NYTimes.com dropped its not-so-popular TimesSelect...
more »Digging Deeper
Business 2.0 Closed Due to Corporate Neglect, Ad Woes
When the dot-com boom fizzled, the business magazines that covered that huge story similarly flamed out. The Industry Standard closed, Red Herring went south, and Business 2.0 was on death's door. But in 2001, Time Warner bought Business 2.0 and combined it with its own eCompany Now magazine. Though Business 2.0 finally reached break even after years of struggle...
more »Philosophy
Why We Love (and Hate) Print Publications
In the course of any dinner conversation with friends or colleagues, the subject of media usually comes up, soon followed by The Question: When will print publications become obsolete? If the Internet gives us access to publications from around the globe on topics so diverse they couldn't possibly fit in a newsstand or our mailbox, why bother reading them...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Bloggers Make Jump to TV Shows -- But Should They?
It wasn't that long ago that I was marveling over the fact that mainstream media was paying attention to blogs, particularly for culling public opinion on hot button political issues. I remember being shocked when CNN started featuring a segment quoting bloggers on "The Situation Room" -- shocked and wondering how it all happened. When did blogs suddenly become...
more »Digging Deeper
News21 Improves Multimedia, Still Lacks Audience Involvement
The News21 initiative had grand designs to provide fellowships to 44 bright journalism and political science graduate students, and have them create innovative, cutting edge -- and sellable -- work. In the first year, the Northwestern University fellows broke ground with a Flash-based story on Digital Data Trails and the UC Berkeley fellows had their work featured on a...
more »Your Take Roundup
Internet Offers Unlimited Time for Presidential Debates
One of the complaints most people have about televised politics and debates is the prevalence of the sound bite. There's never enough time for candidates to discuss issues in-depth or argue their point for more than a minute. Instead, we are stuck with the tyranny of zingers and one-liners, perfectly fit for highlights on SportsCenter, uh, I mean the...
more »Digging Deeper
Can Citizen Journalism Make a Difference in Jordan?
Ramsey Tesdell would like to bring the concept of citizen and community journalism to Jordan, an Arab country that has a long history of state-controlled media. Tesdell, 23, along with three other early 20somethings, launched the site 7iber in May as a place for "people-powered journalism," hoping that average folks would tell the stories overlooked by mainstream media in...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Online Video Sites Scratch Your Niche
In my post about online television a few weeks ago, I wrote about why I don't enjoy watching television on the Internet. One of the reasons is that a big video-sharing site such as YouTube has thousands of different kinds of content jumbled together in one place, making it hard to find the content I want. Why should I...
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Social Networking Online
Social networking websites help people connect with others who share their interests, build online profiles and share media such as photos, music and videos. The idea of social networks has been studied by sociologists for decades as they analyze the ties between people in families, organizations and even in towns or countries. According to "Wikipedia", "Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals."
more »Online Video
The Tangled State of Archived News Footage Online
A couple of weeks ago a video of Vice President Dick Cheney from 1994 came up on YouTube, with Cheney saying that invading Baghdad would invite a quagmire. I investigated this on my own and discovered that, while I could find it today via the C-SPAN archives, it wasn't clear that someone in 2003 during the run-up to the...
more »NewspaperShift
The Difficulty of Putting a Number on Journalism Jobs
My story on the shift of journalism jobs from traditional to new media has been causing a stir among media folks, who either see the same shift happening in front of them or think I'm being overly optimistic. Leading the charge against my story was author and blogger Nicholas Carr, who titled his critique, Mark Glaser's dubious silver lining,...
more »Digging Deeper
Traditional Journalism Job Cuts Countered by Digital Additions
If you follow the world of traditional journalism, you can't help but notice the seemingly constant stream of layoffs and buyouts at news organizations. But media observers don't often emphasize the flip side: As newspapers and broadcasters slice their senior-level workforce, they are also quietly building their digital and online teams. For example, when I heard about job cuts...
more »Your Take Roundup
Google News Comments a 'Fabulous Step Forward'
For an experimental feature that barely registers a blip in reality, the idea of letting sources of stories comment on Google News has stirred up a hornet's nest in journalism circles and the blogosphere. Two software engineers at Google News said they would be adding limited comments to news stories that are linked from the news aggregator, giving quoted...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Free Newspapers Lead Way Online in Europe
As big newspapers struggle with shifting business models, a new breed of free newspapers have have found their niche in many parts of the world. According to the Newspaper Innovation blog, 36 million free papers are distributed daily in 49 countries. As newspaper subscriptions lag, advertisers turn to these papers that have a captive audience of commuters desperate for...
more »Digging Deeper
Hearst Uses Startup Mentality in Revamp of Magazine Sites
Hearst Corporation has a long and storied history as a media conglomerate, starting from the days of old-school media baron William Randolph Hearst and his twin inventions of the penny press and sensational journalism, all the way through its current form as a diversified private media company. In the online arena, it has been more successful as an investor...
more »NewspaperShift
Why WSJ.com Should Open (or Keep) Its Pay Wall
Should he or shouldn't he? Ever since Rupert Murdoch finally wrangled his way into a buyout of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, there has been rampant speculation on whether Murdoch will lift the pay curtain at WSJ.com, making it a free site. While I've begged The New York Times to end their TimesSelect pay wall for op-ed...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Is the Future of Television Online? Not Yet
Late last month the BBC announced that it would be offering up a large part of its television content free of charge on its website. And back in May, ABC announced it would stream some of its primetime shows in HD online for free. As networks begin to put more of their content online -- either on their websites...
more »Philosophy
New media have certainly changed the landscape of communications and education in an even more dramatic manner than electronic mass media did as was documented and analyzed by "Marshall McLuhan" in 1964. I had the good fortune to collaborate with Marshall back in the 1970s and have tried to carry on his tradition, as have others, by focusing on the impact of media independent of their content. McLuhan's pithy way of describing this approach was through the use of his one-liner "the medium is the message," which he made famous in his '64 book "Understanding Media."
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Flickr Changes Lives, Launches Photog Careers
With the plethora of social networking sites, it's easy to come to the quick conclusion that what we are doing on these sites -- chatting up strangers, lurking on people's profiles, spying on friends -- is just a waste of time. But there is one site that is more than just an unhealthy habit: Photo-sharing site Flickr is a...
more »Digging Deeper
The Problem with Web Measurement, Part 2
With all the web traffic numbers and metrics floating around -- page views, unique visitors, time spent, sessions -- it's a wonder that anyone can agree to a simple advertising sale on a website. Complicating matters is that the advertising world is used to traditional measurement services such as Nielsen's TV ratings that rely on usage by controlled panels of people. Online, those panel-based services can rarely gauge traffic on sites with less than 500,000 unique visitors per month.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Food Lovers Become Experts at Chowhound, Yelp
Before the web was in widespread use, food lovers would wait patiently for the New York Times restaurant reviews to come out for the hottest new spot in SoHo, or for hometown papers to write up the little Korean joint that just opened down the street. We relied heavily on that system of stars, dollar signs and bells indicating...
more »Digging Deeper
The Problem with Web Measurement, Part 1
On April 19, 2007, the new CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Randall Rothenberg, sent a scathing open letter to the heads of the major web measurement firms, comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings, complaining that they better get their act together: Imagine my surprise when I came to the IAB and discovered that the main audience measurement companies are still...
more »Digging Deeper
Widgets, also known as gadgets or mini-applications, are small software programs or HTML code that people can embed onto social networking pages, blogs or computer desktops. Examples include the iLike music widget for Facebook, the MyBlogLog widget to see a blogger's current audience, and the NPR Addict widget to hear favorite radio shows streamed from your desktop. There are even widgets for mobile phones, including Apple's iPhone.
more »Digging Deeper
Topix Capitalizes on Forums, Reaches Rural Areas
When local news aggregator Topix decided to set up online forums last December for every city and small town in America, they figured the forums would be a loss leader. After all, online forums have a bad reputation for unfettered discussion, gossip and slander, leading most news organizations to abandon them altogether online. And people on forums are usually...
more »Philosophy
10 Reasons There's a Bright Future for Journalism
There's been a lot of debate lately about the future of newspapers, the future of TV, the future of radio -- the future of journalism itself -- in the face of drastic change brought by technology and the Internet. I've asked MediaShift readers whether they thought journalism's metaphorical cup was half empty or half full and most people saw...
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Online Advertising
The term online advertising refers to ads that are served via the Internet. Early online ads ran on dial-up services such as Prodigy, eventually coming to the World Wide Web in the mid-'90s as banner ads or graphical pictures embedded onto sites such as the Global Network Navigator (GNN) and HotWired. Rick Boyce, the director of business development at HotWired (the online arm of Wired magazine) at the time, helped push through the first banner ad campaigns in 1994, including the AT&T banner ad pictured here.
more »Digging Deeper
TechDirt Builds Community of Bloggers to Offer Corporate Analysis
In the world of technology research, firms such as Gartner, Forrester Research and JupiterResearch seem to hold all the cards, knowing markets in-depth and charging firms thousands of dollars for a peek inside. Many small and medium companies, especially startups, are often on the outside looking in, not able to afford the high cost of research firms but still...
more »Your Take Roundup
'Cup Is Overflowing' for Future of Journalism
If there is one overriding debate in the world of journalism, it's whether technology and the Internet are going to doom traditional reporting or strengthen it in the long run. Putting it bluntly, is journalism's cup half full or half empty? The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper has been the nerve center for this debate, with its reporters pushing the...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Orkut, Friendster Get Second Chance Overseas
What do Brazilian and Indian Internet users have in common? A favorite social networking site called Orkut, a Google web property which, when it was launched in 2004 was meant to put its parent company on the social networking map in the U.S. Orkut may not have taken off stateside, but it has exploded in these two countries, and...
more »Digging Deeper
Collaborative Radio Shows Invite Listeners into Creative Process
Long before the term citizen journalism became trendy, ordinary citizens shared the stage for decades with professional journalists in talk radio. They collaborated, they cajoled, they ranted and they often added wit and wisdom to live radio call-in shows. But with the advent of the Internet, public radio shows are finding that websites -- and blogs in particular --...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Online Map Craze Helps People Visualize Data
It's not often that you find an Internet trend based on something ancient. But that's what's happening with maps. Google Maps has gone from innovative to indispensable and highly replicated in a little over two years. Thanks to Google's open map API (appliction programming interface), just about anybody can create a map for just about anything -- from tracking...
more »Digging Deeper
New Media Literacy as Important for Educators as Students
For so long, the focus of media literacy education has been on helping students understand the media they consume. What are the biases? Who owns what outlet? How are news reports produced? But with the rise of new media, perhaps the focus of media literacy education should shift to educating the educators -- and other adults -- about blogs,...
more »Digging Deeper
Placeblog Pioneer Sees Geo-Tagging as Key to Local Aggregation
For the past few years, bloggers have been living in a keyword-based world. When they write a blog post, they can tag the post by putting it into relevant topical categories. A post about the U.S. attorney general firing scandal might be tagged: "U.S. politics," "Alberto Gonzales," "attorney general firings." But the missing element for bloggers has been a...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Reporting from Afar Might Work, But Not for Local News
While much has been made of the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries, until recently the field of journalism had remained largely untouched. Earlier this month local news website Pasadena Now announced its decision to outsource work to India, specifically reporting of City Council meetings. The site's owner, James Macpherson, said the meetings are streamed on the Internet,...
more »Digging Deeper
Twitter Founders Thrive on Micro-Blogging Constraints
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and co-founder Biz Stone have taken executive transparency to new heights, not only using their own Twitter micro-blogging service frequently to share details of their personal lives, but also publishing their own phone numbers and business address on Twitter's Contact page. So it was easy for me to get in touch with them to set...
more »Digging Deeper
Web Leads, Print Pubs Improve Environmental Impact
If you've grown tired of answering the question, "paper or plastic?" you can now consider another nagging environmental question when choosing your news source: "Online or print?" Environmental critics have decried "dead-tree media" for decades, saying that print publications rely on clear-cutting forests, energy produced to run paper mills, and gasoline used to deliver publications to each doorstep.While print...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
U.S. Media Fails to Deliver Spanish News Online
Here in the United States, with over "31 million Spanish speakers", you would think Spanish would be our second language online. And you would think that content for the Spanish-speaking community would be not only available, but also rich and varied, if only for the value it represents to marketers. But that isn't the case.
more »Digging Deeper
'Mr. Magazine' Believes We'll Always Crave Ink on Paper
When Lebanese journalist Samir Husni was teaching students at the University of Mississippi about magazine journalism in 1986, one student had trouble pronouncing his Arabic name and took the simple route, calling him "Mr. Magazine." The student eventually gave Husni a plaque with the moniker engraved, and the name was so apt for the lover of print magazines that...
more »Your Take Roundup
Mixed Feelings on NBC Showing Cho Video Online
The folks at NBC News debated for hours what to do with the video they had received from Cho Seung-Hui, who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus. Eventually, they decided it was prudent to show some of the video on TV and post some snippets online. After an outcry against glorifying the killer, MSNBC decided to stop...
more »Digging Deeper
'Frienemy' Google Not a Threat (Yet) to Traditional Ad Sales
If you browse through Google's job openings, the dozens of advertising sales positions -- from account manager of Print Ads in Chicago to account manager of Google Television in New York -- you'd think Google was a major media conglomerate that owned TV stations and newspapers. Instead, Google has been trying to take its automated online system for selling...
more »PoliticalShift
Online Presidential Debate Distances the Candidates
The handshake at the beginning. The sideways glances and furious note-taking. The occasional interruption. The partisan cheering. These are the hallmarks of presidential debates of years past. Yet, Yahoo, Slate and the Huffington Post believe that having the candidates in distant locations hooked up virtually online will make for a better "user-generated" debate. The troika of websites recently announced...
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Presidential Campaign Videos Online
Candidates running for the U.S. presidency in 2008 have made use of online resources more than ever. With the rise of online video and YouTube, candidates have started to upload formal and informal videos online, and potential voters have tried to engage them in video dialogues.
more »Digging Deeper
Hyper-Local Citizen Media Sites Learn How to Serve Small Communities
In November 2004, I wrote a story for Online Journalism Review profiling various hyper-local citizen media sites such as "Northwest Voice" and "iBrattleboro" that cover local communities with the help of community contributors. Fulton's quote above came from that story, and her Northwest Voice project has been such a success for its owner, the Bakersfield Californian newspaper, that they launched the "Southwest Voice" to cover that neighborhood as well.
more »Digging Deeper
Sunlight Foundation Mixes Tech, Citizen Journalism to Open Congress
When people talk about corporate cutbacks in mainstream journalism organizations, there's almost a fervor about how our very democracy is in jeopardy because of the failings of Big Media in holding our government accountable. What such critiques fail to consider is that as citizens we can and will hold our government accountable, with or without the media apparatus. One...
more »NewspaperShift
How the Online Newspaper Can Become a Community Hub
I was talking with someone the other day about the future of newspapers. That seems like the topic du jour with anyone in the news business, or anyone who follows the media. I brought up the recent imbroglio over people who believe that investigative journalism will die with the newspaper printing presses, and I was asked, "Well, how will...
more »Digging Deeper
Will Video Kill the Audio Podcasting Star? Not Exactly
All the media heat these days is around online video and the YouTube phenomenon. Presidential candidates are sparring through YouTube. Google pays a bundle to buy YouTube, and then Viacom sues for $1 billion. It all makes the online audio phenomenon of podcasting feel like yesterday's news. Audio fans, however, need not despair. Video may have stolen the media...
more »Philosophy
Serious Journalism Won't Die as Newsprint Fades
I was reading my local newspaper today -- yes, I still read it in print -- and came upon this unfortunate passage in an otherwise nice report on a maverick newspaper publisher in rural California: "With classified advertising usurped by the Internet, newspapers across the country are facing mounting losses and, in many cases, cuts in staff and resources....
more »Online Video
The Quirks, Dunks and Crashes of Live Streaming Hoops on CBS Sportsline
The camera pans into the crowd lazily, catching the sight of the painted faces of college basketball fanatics. It then cuts jerkily to cheerleaders getting ready to do a routine. The audio is off, and then suddenly comes to life. The scene cuts to the tunnel below the stadium where the Virginia Tech Hokies are getting ready to take...
more »Legal Drama
Viacom, YouTube Legal Tiff Irrelevant in End
Judging by the sturm und drang roiling the blogosphere and media circles, you'd think that Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google's YouTube is the epic confrontation of old media vs. new, of suits vs. hipsters, of DRM vs. free love, of greed vs. good. It may well be all those things, but it will not change the basic fact...
more »NewspaperShift
USA Today Walks the Talk of Audience Involvement
When a major newspaper announces it is redesigning its print layout or website, it doesn't usually merit much attention. The regular readers usually complain about it, and then get used to it, and life goes on. But in the case of USA Today redesigning its website, there was more at play than a new look; the site added social...
more »Digging Deeper
Web Focus Leads Newspapers to Hire Programmers for Editorial Staff
Whenever journalist-programmer extraordinaire Adrian Holovaty speaks at a conference, newspaper executives approach him to ask, "Where can we find another person like you?" Unfortunately, not a lot of people combine journalism with computer programming to create mash-ups like Holovaty's seminal side project, ChicagoCrime.org, which feeds the city's crime blotter into a searchable online database and onto Google Maps. Holovaty...
more »Your Take Roundup
Photojournalists Will Survive in Era of Citizen Photogs
Newspapers will die. Radio will kick the bucket. The packaged music CD is on death's doorstep. There is an irresistible urge to declare one medium dead because of the rise of the new. And so it is when we consider the plight of photojournalists after the proliferation of cameraphones and digital cameras in the hands of the masses, who can now capture breaking news in every corner of the world.
more »Digging Deeper
Podcasts are audio or video shows that you can subscribe to via the Internet and listen to or watch on your own time on your computer, portable MP3 player or other web-connected device. The power of podcasts is that you can subscribe to the shows you want, and then they automatically appear in your podcast aggregator software such as Juice or Apple's iTunes. When you plug in your portable MP3 player -- which can be an iPod or any other player -- your podcasts can then be uploaded and experienced on the go.
more »Open Source Reporting
Imagining a Future Tense for Newspapers
It's easy to criticize the humble newspaper as being outmoded, out of style and out of business options. What's far more difficult is to imagine how newspapers can take their goodness -- the award-winning investigative reports, the service journalism, the knowledge of the community -- and combine that with new technology and the Internet to reach and interact with an enlightened, empowered audience.
more »Digging Deeper
Reuters Looks to Africa and a Decentralized Future for Media
The 155-year-old Reuters wire service has been reinventing itself for the modern age of decentralized journalism, where millions of people have the tools to capture the news around them. Reuters has made alliances and investments in blog aggregators Global Voices and Pluck, and with Yahoo for the citizen-submitted news site, You Witness News. Plus, Reuters made a high-profile move of putting a correspondent into the virtual world, Second Life.
more »Satellite Radio
Satellite Radio Wants FCC to Save Them From Themselves
The two giants who provide satellite radio services, XM and Sirius, would like to merge in order to provide greater programming choices to consumers as a single entity, according to XM Chairman Gary Parsons in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal points out that the two money-losing enterprises will have to get by the hurdle of the FCC, which has a specific rule against the satellite radio companies merging. I thought the time was right for satellite radio to see a psychiatrist. The following is a partial transcript of its recent visit.
more »TVShift
The heavyweights of the media world are lining up in opposition to YouTube, and supporting Viacom's recent removal of all its clips from the video-sharing service. That removal followed a back-and-forth last fall when Viacom initially asked for clips to be removed, and then went into negotiations with YouTube. Those negotiations turned chilly, and now comes the freeze-out for video clips from MTV and Comedy Central shows such as "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show."
more »Digging Deeper
AP Warms Up to Blogs, Citizen Media at NowPublic
There's something bland and homogeneous about an Associated Press wire story. Just the facts, ma'am, in classic inverted pyramid style. The satirical newspaper The Onion has made a mint mocking the news wire style, and the blogosphere has targeted the AP and Reuters for hidden agendas in their oh-so-perfect objective style.
more »Digging Deeper
Pew Internet Finds Good (and Bad) of Web's Social Impact
For those of us who spend much of our lives online, we get hunches about the way things are. It might seem like everyone is writing a blog, listening to a podcast, or watching home-made video clips. Or we might assume that everyone now uses the Internet to help research big purchases or make big life decisions.
more »MarketingShift
Bomb Scare Tactics in War for Our Attention
For every tactic the world of marketing and advertising dreams up, we have a counter-technology that will block their attempts to reach us. We zap TV ads with the aid of digital video recorders such as TiVo. We subscribe to satellite radio or listen to podcasts to skip radio commercials. Our web browsers have pop-up ad blockers to put those annoying, blinking ads to rest.
more »Digging Deeper
Talent Agencies Evolve to Show Clients the Digital Money
Everything about the Ask a Ninja videoblog phenomenon smacks of a new form of entertainment. Two guys in Los Angeles produce a series of simple, low cost video clips where a ninja character answers profound and ridiculous questions. The comedic series gets popular as a video podcast through iTunes, with viewership of 300,000 to 500,000 per episode, and the show's web presence branches out to include an online store for merchandise.
more »Philosophy
Old Media Company Swears It Really Gets the Web
LOS ANGELES (Goiters) -- Management at the Los Angeles Herald-Gazette newspaper today unveiled an earth-shattering initiative to combine operations of the newspaper and its Internet site -- a change that was crucial to ensuring that the Herald-Gazette appears to finally "get" the web.
more »Digging Deeper
Can Brightcove Solve Net Video for Pros, Big Media?
While YouTube has been the darling of video-sharing sites online -- letting anyone become a video star -- Cambridge, Mass.-based startup Brightcove has quietly been working in the background to become the go-to video services company for professional content owners and media companies such as Dow Jones, Newsweek and The New York Times. Rather than creating a big hub for the world's quirkiest video moments, Brightcove has focused on the technology that will let content owners show video on their own site; sell or rent video downloads; or place advertising on their videos.
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to the Digital Divide
The digital divide is the chasm separating the haves and have-nots in digital technology. On one side are people who can afford or who have access to computers, a high-speed broadband connection and the plethora of services from online banking to social networking to blogging. On the other side of the equation are people who cannot afford the technology, cannot get broadband access because of their location, or who have learning or cultural limitations to using the technology.
more »Digging Deeper
Google Search Snafu Can Have Huge Impact on Niche Blogs
Dear Google,
What happened? Where's the love? You used to bring me flowers, you used to sing me love songs. You used to bring me traffic, at any rate...
Google, baby. Let me back in. Me and my pretty dumb things are shivering out here in the digital ether with no one but Ask.com and Yahoo to keep us warm. We need you honey. We miss you and the 500+ visitors a day you used to send to us. We're lonely. Please, Google. Don't be evil.
kissykiss,
chelsea girl
Digging Deeper
Nielsen BuzzMetrics Tries to Measure Buzz in Social Media
Last year was a watershed for social media, with millions of people creating and sharing their own media on sites such as MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr and turning away from traditional one-way media such as TV, radio and newspapers. But for the proprietors of these new media sites, there's one very big problem: How do you make money off that popularity?
more »MagazineShift
You Deserve More Than Time's Person of the Year
I've had two strong reactions to the big news that Time magazine had chosen "you" as their Person of the Year for 2006. My first reaction is utter amazement that people at Time magazine -- or perhaps, some people -- are starting to understand the digital media revolution, the growing power of average people who can now control and create their own media experience.
more »Digging Deeper
WSJ Gets Comfortable with Blogs, Wants to Boost Community
Historically, the august Wall Street Journal's website has been the antithesis of Web 2.0 and online innovation. The Journal's site, WSJ.com, costs money to access, even if you already pay for the print edition. The site has stressed online columns, as opposed to blogs, and there has been very little multimedia.
more »Your Take Roundup
Traditional Newsrooms Still Need to Walk the Talk
It's much easier to talk about changing than to actually change. That's the lesson everyone learns each year with New Year's resolutions such as "I'm going to lose 20 pounds and exercise more" or "I'll finally start my own business." In the media world, traditional old-world media loves to talk about new media, from podcasts to blogs to citizen journalism. And while many old-line newsrooms have tried out many of these formats, I wondered whether they had really changed their stripes or were just making cosmetic changes.
more »Open Source Reporting
Building the Ultimate Auto Media Center
When it comes to enjoying music or talk radio in the car, why does everything have to be so complicated? First, I have to spend time loading up my iPod with music or podcasts I've downloaded. Then I have to charge my iPod up with power. Then I have to connect my iPod to my car stereo's converter cable. Then I have to fiddle around with the iPod controls to find the music or podcasts I want to listen to -- and NOT while driving.
more »Digging Deeper
YouTube Explains the Mystery of Home Page Picks
Mark Day, a friend of mine in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been trying to break into stand-up comedy for the past year. Recently, he got a big break by having one of his brief video comic bits -- The Smiley Intervention -- featured on the front page of YouTube. Not long after getting in the featured spot, his video shot up to 750,000 views, and he got hundreds of new subscribers to his YouTube channel, the home of his videos.
more »Digging Deeper
Valour-IT, Milblogs Give Hundreds of Laptops to Wounded Soldiers
As I sit here and type this blog post, I pause for a moment to consider how important my fingers and hands are to me as a blogger and writer. If I should be injured or lose the use of my hands in some awful accident, what would I do?
more »Digging Deeper
Newspaper, Bubble Blogs Feed the Real Estate Obsession
Have you ever gone to an open house even though you weren't interested in buying the property? Have you ever pored over housing price data on Zillow or read through housing ads on Craigslist just for fun? You are not alone. There seems to be a growing obsession with real estate in the U.S., as home prices have soared in the past few years, only to come back to earth a bit in the past year.
more »Your Take Roundup
Bloggers Leading Mainstream Journalists in Transparency
Perhaps I was being a bit purposefully provocative in my question to you -- "Should bloggers avoid conflicts of interest as journalists do?" -- but it didn't take long for readers to correct my thinking. While journalists do have a code of ethics they are supposed to follow, no such code exists for bloggers, which is just fine for many of you.
more »Digging Deeper
TPMmuckraker Thrives as Political Corruption Runs Rampant
If Roosevelt lived today, he might add in "blog" to the list of places where muckrakers do their work -- and he probably would be a bit more scared of the work they're doing. One hundred years after Roosevelt coined the "muckraker" term for journalists who uncover corruption and fraud, bloggers have taken the mantle once reserved for investigative print journalists and created a new brand of muckraking that moves at the speed of the Net and involves collaboration with readers.
more »Your Take Roundup
MediaShift Readers Want More MSM, Business Coverage
There's nothing like an anonymous website survey to learn what people really think about your work. That's why I did an online survey to help give me an idea of what direction to take PBS MediaShift in the coming year. Have I done a good job? Have I covered the right type of stories that appeal to you? Is there something else I could be doing to improve the site?
more »Digging Deeper
Pentagon PR Blogger Explains Military's New Media Challenge
The U.S. military is proud of its history and strength as a top-down organization, with a clear chain of command. In fact, you can't talk to anyone in military public affairs (the equivalent of private-sector public relations) without hearing the inevitable phrase "chain of command" in response to a question.
more »PoliticalShift
Live Blogging the U.S. Mid-Term Elections
Today is election day in the United States, so despite my overall bad feelings about politics at the moment, I'm going back to my roots as a political junkie and watching the results as they come in around the country today. I'll be watching on TV and online at the same time, and considering the differences in media coverage in both mediums. The following post will be updated live throughout the day and night, with the most recent information at the top, and the time it was posted.
more »Online Video
Fake Anchor Colbert Gives Best Take on YouTube Takedowns
The last week has been a surreal one for fans of fake news. TV shows such as Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" have had huge boosts in their popularity thanks to online communities, who share video clips and summaries from each show. But the corporate parent to Comedy Central, Viacom, was a bit blind to that fact when it asked video-sharing site YouTube to pull down video clips from those shows that had been posted by fans.
more »Digging Deeper
A wiki is simply a web page that can be written or edited by the public or a group of people. What sets wikis apart from other web pages is the simple way that anyone can edit or add to an existing page, or start a new page.
more »Online Video
Stephen Colbert: Don't Love and Leave YouTube
We in the Colbert Nation are sickened by the recent news that heavy-handed trial lawyers at Viacom, representing Comedy Central, have asked YouTube to force its users to remove video clips from "The Colbert Report," "The Daily Show," and "South Park." While those lawyers have legal standing to do this, it goes against the spirit of Internet sharing and viral promotion -- two phenomena that have helped make your show so popular in the first place. It just doesn't sound like you, Stephen, baby.
more »Digging Deeper
Brian Ross: Foley Story a Watershed for ABC News on the Web
The website navigation on each of the top U.S. broadcaster sites is the same litany of typical news categories: U.S., World, Politics, Business, Health, Science, etc. But at ABCNews.com, the list is slightly different: U.S., International, Investigative -- that's right, the Investigative category lands in the No. 3 slot in the site's navigation, while MSNBC, CBS, Fox News and CNN don't even bother breaking out investigative reports.
more »Digging Deeper
Creative Commons + Flickr = 22 Million Sharable Photos
When I was writing a blog post about Mark Cuban and his ShareSleuth site, I wanted to illustrate it with a good photo of Cuban but didn't like the photo he sent me. So I turned to an invaluable source of photography for a non-commercial blog like MediaShift -- the Flickr Creative Commons pool. On that site, you can search through 22 million photos for shots that are being legally shared by photographers, under flexible copyrights licensed through Creative Commons (CC).
more »Digging Deeper
Cafebabel.com Breaks Down European Borders with Grassroots Media
In all the various efforts to unite Europe under the framework of the European Union, European Commission, and Euro currency, there is still one effort that has largely failed: creating a truly pan-European media outlet.
more »NewspaperShift
Don't Stick Fork In Editorialists Just Yet
At least not until this proud editorialist gets another job, that is! Actually, after reading the case for abolishing traditional editorials presented by the always interesting Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine.com, I have to nod my head in agreement with much of what he says even as I vigorously disagree with his marquee assertion.
more »NewspaperShift
WECAN Harnesses Wisdom of Crowds for Newspaper
One of the biggest reasons I can't wait to get to the newsroom most mornings is the WECAN project --- the Washington Examiner Community Action Network. This project is barely in its infancy but is worth watching because it combines elements of citizen media and open-source journalism, with a semi-traditional daily newspaper.
more »MediaShift
Help Improve MediaShift with Your Feedback
This is the post where I plead with you, offer you crazy schwag, and hope you will take 5 minutes out of your very busy lives to please fill out first ever MediaShift Reader Survey. I know, every other site on the planet is asking you for feedback too this week or this day or this minute.
more »Open Source Reporting
Eliminating Physical Media Sprawl of CDs, DVDs, Books
Lately, I have declared my own personal war on clutter in my life. That means all the paper littering my home office had to go. Those outdated hats from Burning Mans past also were out, as were old loose photos of places I don't remember. But for whatever reason, in each clean sweep I do of my stuff, I can never part with my collections of books, CDs, VHS and DVD movies (not to mention vinyl records and audiocassettes).
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Citizen Journalism
The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube.
more »NewspaperShift
The Case for Citizen Ownership of the Los Angeles Times
Corporate ownership of daily newspapers is reaching the breaking point, especially now at the Los Angeles Times, which is owned by the Chicago-based Tribune Company media conglomerate. The newspaper is facing the same problem that hundreds of other newspapers are facing: Owners and stockholders who want profit growth each year, who want to cut back on editorial staff, and who could care less about the communities and people who actually read and gain insight from the newspaper. And there's that massive problem of people reading dead-tree edition newspapers less and reading electronic online versions more -- leading to smaller profits at the moment.
more »Digging Deeper
Can Witness, Global Voices Make Human Rights Video Go Viral?
There is an impulse when we see quirky videos we like on YouTube to email them on to friends or co-workers. When those catchy videos start accumulating viewers, marketers say it's gone viral through word-of-mouth popularity. So what if you could take videos shot by citizens of human rights violations, such as police brutality or torture, and got them to go viral, bringing more attention to the crimes?
more »Digging Deeper
Associated Press, MSNBC Video to Support Macs, Firefox
There is nothing more frustrating for Macintosh users or those who use the Firefox browser than going to a video site and hitting a wall demanding Windows and the Internet Explorer browser. But when the Associated Press' Online Video Network first launched last spring in conjunction with Microsoft, the requirements for users were just that: Windows and Internet Explorer. The idea behind the OVN is that Microsoft provides the video hosting, technology and ad sales; AP provides the video content; and small and medium news site partners show the videos on their sites for a split of revenue with Microsoft and the AP.
more »Digging Deeper
Journalist Paints Bleak Picture for Media in Zimbabwe
The government shuts down independent newspapers. It jams radio signals from outside the country. Internet access is sporadic. Inflation is out of control. A bill is in Parliament that would allow the government to censor private email communications.
more »Digging Deeper
News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different?
In May 2005, you could almost hear the flourish of trumpets when the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation joined with five prominent journalism graduate schools in pledging $6 million over three years to create the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.
more »Your Take Roundup
Watching Shows on Computers Supplements Your TV Viewing
Let's be clear about one thing. Watching TV shows and movies on computer screens -- as they exist today -- will not replace watching TV and movies on much bigger screens, in much more comfortable environs. Of course there are computers that can function as TV sets, and TV sets that can do some computer functions, but we haven't found nirvana yet, at least on a mass-quantity affordable basis.
more »Philosophy
Your Own Views of the Media Shift
A couple weeks ago, I was trying to come up with a way to sum up some of the many concepts I've been illustrating on this blog. How could I do that in a simple, catchy way? The result was the Oldthink vs. Newthink post, where I simply listed the old ways of doing things in media and the new ways that were being explored.
more »Digging Deeper
Mark Cuban's Sharesleuth Takes Business Reporting to Ethical Edge
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has one of the best named weblogs, Blog Maverick, because he is nothing if not a maverick in the technology, sports and online worlds. He shepherded his Broadcast.com streaming multimedia company through a successful initial public offering in 1998 and sold it to Yahoo in 1999 for more than $5 billion. Cuban used the proceeds to start high-definition TV networks, HDNet, buy Landmark Movie theaters and buy the Dallas Mavericks NBA team. He's probably the only major team owner who asks fans to email him feedback.
more »Your Take
What TV shows would you watch on your computer?
The worlds of TV and the Internet are colliding once more, but unlike in the late '90s, now they have a chance for a peanut butter/chocolate sweet match. Back then, WebTV was a failed experiment at getting people to web surf on their TV sets, while online TV or movies looked horrible on computers with slow Internet connections. But now with broadband becoming more widespread, TV networks have been pushing more content to the Net. ABC started selling episodes of hit shows on iTunes, and streaming shows on its own site. CBS recently announced it would stream shows online in the fall, and would stream the new "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" simultaneously online while it plays on TV. But is this something you really want? Do you watch TV shows on your computer -- when and why? And which shows do you watch on the computer? Would you rather pay for these shows or watch commercials? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and I'll post the best ones in next week's Your Take Roundup.
more »Open Source Reporting
Bloggers Gauge Web 2.0 Features for Newspaper Sites Around World
So this is how open source reporting works. On August 1, The Bivings Group released a research report of how the Top 100 U.S. newspaper websites were implementing features such as blogs, podcasts and social bookmarking. (I summarized the findings here.) By August 10, three bloggers located outside the U.S. took it upon themselves to do a similar study of their own country's top newspaper sites to see how they stacked up to their American counterparts. And one German blogger set up a wiki to track results for German newspaper sites.
more »Digging Deeper
'War Tapes' Film Lets Soldiers Tell Their Stories from Iraq
So many times on the Internet, I've watched a video clip of combat in Iraq that looks like it was shot by a soldier. I hear some talking, the sound of shooting, screams and yelps in the background. But just as often I don't have the context of who was filming, why they are filming and what's going on inside their head. Where are they? What's the situation? Did they succeed or fail?
more »Your Take
Skepticism Rampant Over War 'Fauxtography'
Most people trust that the photos they see of war in their daily newspaper shot by a professional photographer are accurate. The photographer risked his or her life to get the shot, snapped the picture, sent it to a photo editor, who then vetted it for publication.
more »Digging Deeper
Church 2.0: Does a Congregation Know More Than the Pastor?
Sunday morning was bright and warm, as we walked toward the auditorium in South San Jose, Calif. Before we reached the door, we were handed a Polaroid camera and told to photograph ourselves and pass on the camera to the next person coming in. We took the photo, and went inside the building, where there was coffee, bagels and donuts.
more »Your Take
Do you trust photographs from war zones?
Lately, there has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about a Reuters photographer who used Photoshop to double the amount of smoke in a photo of Beirut. The photo was scrutinized by conservative bloggers, starting with Little Green Footballs, and eventually Reuters admitted to the fakery and fired the freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj. The British press has been defending its photos against attack from conservative blog EU Referendum as well. It's very easy for photographers to add Photoshop touches to make a shot more dramatic or to stage photos by asking people to pose in them. However, most media organizations have strict rules against these types of manipulation. As a news watcher and reader, what do you think about the professional photos you have seen from war zones such as Lebanon, Israel and Iraq? Do you trust them or have questions? Do you feel like the photographer has a political bias? Would you rather see photos taken by amateurs at the scene? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and I'll run the best ones in the next Your Take Roundup.
more »Your Take Roundup
Flickr Rules as Photo-Sharing Community
With the rise of cameraphones and cheap digital cameras, we as a society are taking more photos than ever before. But what do we do with all these snapshots? There have been websites devoted to personal photo pages for years, but which ones make photo-sharing and organizing easy?
more »NewspaperShift
Newspaper Sites Hot to Blog, Cool to Podcasts
Newspaper companies are feeling the shift hard, as people go from reading print newspapers to getting their news and classified ads on the Internet. But if there's one thing the Newspaper Association of America can hang their hat on, it's that newspaper websites continue to grow their audiences and advertising revenues. So if people are not reading papers in print, at least they might be getting their news online from the same news source.
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Soldier Videos from Iraq
If the first Gulf War put cable news and CNN on the map, the second Gulf War in Iraq has put video shot by soldiers in the spotlight. I first wrote about these videos in January, focusing on the ones that proliferated at the video-sharing site YouTube. But now, the phenomenon has exploded into the mainstream, with an MTV documentary, Iraq Uploaded and a full-length film, The War Tapes ("the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves").
more »Your Take
What's your favorite site for finding and sharing photos?
Digital technology has changed forever the way we take photos, share them, and print them out. Before, we had to buy 35mm film and pay to get the film developed. Now we can use powerful digital cameras that have no film and allow us to print only the best photos with our own photo printers. Plus, we can post photos online at sites such as Flickr and Shutterfly to share with friends or the world. So tell us which photo sites you like to visit either to see great photography, or to share your own photos. Why do you like the site, and what features set it apart? As a bonus, tell us what features you would like that don't exist yet. Share your thoughts in the comments, and I'll run the best ones in the next Your Take Roundup.
more »Your Take Roundup
True Gritz Videoblog a Comic Fave Among Friends
So this is how you win elections in the South. I asked MediaShift readers to name their favorite sites for comic relief or work breaks, and the True Gritz video blog won in a landslide of 11 votes. But upon further review, two of the votes came from the True Gritz videoblog's stars, Jen Gordon and Grayson Hurst Daughters, with another vote coming from the show's lighting person, Danielle Ayan.
more »Citizen Journalism
Can Investigative Journalism Be Done in Collaboration Online?
Robert Parry, an investigative reporter who broke stories about the Iran-Contra scandal in the '80s, wrote about the importance of investigative journalism for his ConsortiumNews.com site.
more »Digging Deeper
Should Community-Edited News Sites Pay Top Editors?
If there is one push-and-pull balancing act that defines news in the age of Web 2.0, it's the question of how much power to give the audience, the masses, the collective mind, and how much control remains centralized. That balancing act has played a crucial role in the development of community-generated sites such as Wikipedia, Slashdot and even Google, where search results and PageRank depend on people linking to the most authoritative sources on a subject.
more »Digging Deeper
Stanford Fellow Imagines Every Cell Phone as Citizen Media Outlet
Perhaps some day in the not so distant future, every person on the planet who has a cell phone camera will be able to snap a photo of a newsworthy event happening in front of them and easily send it to a web clearinghouse of such news images. That's the dream of Erik Sundelof (pictured at left), a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University, a program that aims to develop technology to advance humanitarian goals in underserved communities.
more »Digging Deeper
PR People Must Balance Consistent Message with Authenticity
Public relations professionals and journalists often work together, and sometimes they even get along. The goal for the PR person is to represent their product or service well, and make sure it gets positive press coverage. The goal for the journalist is to write a balanced account of the company -- not necessarily all positive or all negative.
more »Digging Deeper
From time to time, I'll give an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and hopefully consider trying it out -- even if it's all new to you. I've already covered blogging; this week I'll look at RSS._
more »TVShift
Sleeping With the Enemy::NBC, YouTube Cross-Promotion Off to Crass Start
When I talked to my sister yesterday, she said she had been thinking of me when she saw a report on "NBC Nightly News" about the video-sharing service, YouTube. "I thought that story might interest you, because of what you write about," she said. OK, true enough, and I had heard about the recent promotional deal between NBC Universal...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Blogger-Anchor Brian Williams Defends Nightly Newscasts
After countless months of blissful ignorance, I finally broke down and watched the "NBC Nightly News." OK, so it was at 10:30 pm and it was really a netcast online. I still watched what looked like the evening news. It harked back to a time, perhaps 10 years ago, when I would make sure to end my work day...
more »TVShift
Digging Deeper::Big Media Slowly Giving the Audience Some Control
Have you ever watched your local TV news broadcast and railed against the stream of homicides, car crashes and fires? What if you could have a say in what the station was reporting each day? John Schiumo has made that dream a reality for New Yorkers who watch the local 24-hour cable news station, NY1. Last July, Schiumo helped...
more »TVShift
Open Source Reporting::Designing an On-Demand TV Service That Beats DVDs
We are a culture that thrives on immediate satisfaction. We want what we want when we want it. So the idea that we can order any TV show or movie we want -- for a small fee or with advertising -- appeals to us immensely. Slowly, but surely, the cable and satellite operators are starting to offer "on-demand video,"...
more »Citizen Journalism
Opening Up the Grant Process::Help the Knight Foundation Give Away Millions
The email pitch was so cheesy, that I almost didn't open up the message, thinking it was probably a get-rich-scheme spam email: "Last Chance to Help Spend Someone Else's $$$" was the subject line. But for once, this was no empty come-on. The Knight Foundation -- started by the newspaper moguls Jack and Jim Knight -- is asking for...
more »NewspaperShift
Digging Deeper::Can Newspaper Letter Editors Stop Astroturf Onslaught?
People are so outraged by the Medicare drug program overhaul that they're writing letters to the editors of many newspapers to complain. And people are equally upset by gay marriage and are writing letters in support of the Marriage Protection Amendment. But there's one problem with these two sets of letters: Each set contains largely the same text, taken...
more »NewspaperShift
Opinion-Page Makeover::Turn NY Times Columnists Into Bloggers
Last week I tried to channel Ronald Reagan in asking New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to tear down the TimesSelect pay wall. But perhaps I tried too hard to stick to the original speech, without clarifying my points well. Plus, I wonder what would happen if the Times took the opposite tack, and turned all its columnists...
more »NewspaperShift
Your Take Roundup::Newspaper Blogs Must Break Social Control of Newsroom
Something about the juxtoposition of the words "newspaper blog" doesn't ring true. Newspapers and blogs don't seem to fit together naturally unless you're thinking of a blogger who likes to rip apart the bias of a local newspaper. Yet, if you can set aside the early combative relationship between bloggers and newspaper folk (and other mainstream media types), you...
more »NewspaperShift
Open Letter to the Times::Mr. Sulzberger, Tear Down This (TimesSelect) Wall!
An Open Letter to New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Chairman Sulzberger, if you seek peace in cyberspace, if you seek prosperity for your company, if you seek to spread ideas online: Come here to this TimesSelect gate! Mr. Sulzberger, tear down this pay wall! I understand the fear of losing print subscribers to a free website at...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Blogger Beware: Syndicators Might Offer a Raw Deal
Budding writers often dream of the day their words will reach a wider audience, and that they'll get paid for their hard work. And for many bloggers who toil in obscurity below the radar, the thought of having their blog posts show up on a huge newspaper site such as washingtonpost.com is enticing. But the dream doesn't always match...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Chinese Entrepreneur Downplays Censorship Problem in China
When Google launched its web search engine in China, and admitted having to censor search results, we made a big stink about it here in the U.S. And when Microsoft admitted to censoring its MSN Spaces blogs in China, we made a big stink about it. And when any American technology company was found to have collaborated with the...
more »BookShift
Your Take Roundup::Books Don't Need Digital Reinvention, But...
The promise of digital books or e-books or the universal library is that we can have all the books ever printed available on any device to read. While it's an idea that sounds good in theory, many of you were skeptical that the good old book really needs to be reinvented, scanned and put onto an electronic device. Perhaps...
more »Media Usage
Screen Babies::What Do Kids Lose, Gain from Screen Time?
It's easy to get angry and self-righteous when hearing the results of a study like the recent one from the Kaiser Family Foundation about young kids' media usage. The facts come spewing off your tongue as if you're a preacher in a room full of sinners: 61% of babies aged 1 year or younger watch screen media (TV, videos,...
more »World View
Digging Deeper::Blogs, Wiki, Google Bomb Used to Free Egyptian Activist
Last August, when I was working on a story for Online Journalism Review about activists using technology to organize protests in Egypt, I made the mistake of focusing too much on blogs. One of the people I interviewed, Alaa Abd El Fattah, was quick to pounce on me for asking about blogs and only blogs, when Egyptians were using...
more »Your Take Roundup
Your Take Roundup::YouTube Just the Start for Video Sharing
It's easy to lose yourself in all the video at YouTube. You watch one music video, which leads to a spoof video, which leads to a stupid pet trick, which leads...who knows where. Before you know it, it's time to leave work. Free time just evaporates when you're immersed in a viral video site like YouTube or iFilm, where...
more »Satellite Radio
RIAAin't::Lawsuits Will Not Win Digital Music War
The music and film industries have control issues. For decades, they have been the ones in control. They have told us -- the listeners and viewers -- when and where we can consume their products. They have dictated the terms. Then along came digital technology, and those businesses lost control to technology companies and the people who could now...
more »Guides
Digging Deeper::Your Guide to Blogging
From time to time, I'm going to try to give an overview of one broad new-media topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and hopefully consider participating in some way -- even if it's all new to you. The first topic is the one I'm...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Reuters Looks to Provide 'Spine of Truth' to Blogosphere
In the brave new world of citizen media -- with bloggers, podcasters and video journalists doing it themselves -- what role does the musty old wire service play? An important one, if it can stay relevant, honest and transparent. Because if you eliminate the tell-it-like-it-is wire stories from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France Presse, it's very difficult...
more »Your Take Roundup
Your Take Roundup::Newspapers Are Far From Dead
When I was in London last week, I saw just how connected the populace was in the teeming, multi-cultural city. Everywhere I walked, people were listening to iPods or talking on cell phones or texting their friends. Even San Francisco, where I live, doesn't measure up to the way Londoners are plugged in. But when I went down to...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::'I Want Media' Site Awash in Digital News
I recently got an email newsletter from the I Want Media site, and nearly every single story highlighted was related in some way to technology and the Internet disrupting the traditional media business. I Want Media is mainly an aggregator of media business news -- meaning it points to and summarizes articles from other sites. The stories are broken...
more »DVR
Cool Factor::Slingbox Lets You Place-Shift Your TV
With some gadgets, there's a "wow" factor that you can milk with each person you encounter. But when the "wow"s wear off, you're sitting there with a device that doesn't always have an everyday purpose. That's my feeling with the Slingbox, a cool device that lets you watch your home TV -- including your TiVo or digital video recorder...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Singapore Tries to Squelch Political Blogs, Podcasts
While many Americans have been focused lately on online censorship in China, few have noticed a similar practice in other countries such as Singapore. That island state is a parliamentary republic in theory, but has really been run by one dominant party in its history of independence since 1965 (see a Singapore historical timeline here). The mainstream media is...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::MySpace, Wikipedia Cope With Growing Pains
When a TV show or radio program becomes a hit, the producer usually makes more money and everyone benefits. But when an online community becomes hugely popular, complications arise with the influx of a mainstream audience and trouble-makers who have no history with the site. That's because TV and radio are broadcast or one-to-many outlets, while user-generated content sites...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::TV-B-Gone Device Shuts Public TVs Down
The last time I was in an aiport, I was held hostage by the ubiquitous CNN Airport Network monitors that wouldn't shut up. I ranted about the experience, and then I heard from a former CNN guy, William Jeakle, who explained that these TVs made too much money for CNN to shut them off. But thanks to one commenter...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::YouTube CEO Hails 'Birth of a New Clip Culture'
There is a simple truth about video-sharing site YouTube, and an enigma. The simple truth is that this web startup has bottled up the viral video idea and made it eminently drinkable by anyone -- you go to the site, find the video clip you want to watch, and, voila! you're watching it in seconds. And if you want...
more »Online Video
Fighting for Open Standards::Cox Newspapers Says No to AP Video
Since launching MediaShift in January, the one post I've written that has received the most vehement response so far was about the Associated Press' new online video service requiring Internet Explorer and Windows. And I even followed up on that with a blacklist and a whitelist of other online video services that either shut out alternative browsers or the...
more »AdvertisingShift
Digging Deeper::Go Daddy Gives Podcasters Freedom to Create Ads
Advertisers and marketers spend much of their time (and money) trying to pitch the public on their products and services. Their language includes terms like "mindshare" and "branding" and "conversion rates." It's all about convincing you and me to go out and buy their stuff, and how to motivate us to do it, by any means necessary. But imagine...
more »AdvertisingShift
Insider's Take::Why Public TVs Won't Go Away
You never know where a rant might lead you. Last Monday, I was ranting and raving about the annoying CNN Airport Network as well as other "place-based media" -- TVs that you can't avoid in elevators or checkout lines or airplane gates. I was happy to see that many of you agreed with me, and found the idea of...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Your Guide to Personalized News Sites
The great thing about getting your news online is that you are the person in control of your experience. You can visit the news sites and blogs that you like, and follow a trail of hyperlinks to learn about events happening around the world. And if your niche interests include sumo wrestling or collectible Pez dispensers, then that's what...
more »TVShift
CNN Everywhere::Do We Need TV in Public Spaces?
I spent the past week on a work vacation of sorts in Austin, Texas, which is a good thing. But one annoying thing was when I was stuck in an airport, and couldn't tune out the ubiquitous TV monitors blaring the CNN Airport Network. As a longtime news junkie, I used to consider this TV broadcast in airports to...
more »TVShift
Dear CBS Sportsline::Close Down Live Streams of Tourney for Our Own Good
Open Letter to CBS Sportsline Dear Keepers of the March Madness Tournament Flame, We the college basketball-loving public appreciate all you've done for us. You offer satellite packages with all the games in the men's college basketball tournament. We can go to Las Vegas and watch and bet on all the games. And now, in your crowning moment, you've...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Internet Gives All Sides in Israel-Palestine Debate
Many people living outside the Middle East would like to understand the political situation in Israel and Palestine. But the more you read online at blogs and opinion sites, the more you realize that it's not a simple situation of good vs. evil, or us vs. them. There are many ways to view the highly charged issues in this...
more »TVShift
Digging Deeper::TV Critics Eye Online Content Reviews
Anyone who has spent an afternoon at a site such as iFilm Viral Video or YouTube can attest to how addictive online video can be. Some of it's funny, some of it's stupid, some of it's classic. But the problem is finding the good stuff, as the most popular videos and the ones with the highest user ratings aren't...
more »Online Video
Millions Not Served::AP Video Requires Microsoft Browser
Most people don't realize just how important the Associated Press is. The news cooperative -- owned by its U.S. news organization members -- has been around since 1848, and now supplies 8,500 subscriber news outlets with text wire stories and photos, and 5,000 radio and TV outlets with audio and video content. And online, the service is ubiquitous, popping...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Reporters Without Borders Backs Online Freedom Act
While the Republican-majority U.S. Congress has favored less regulation of big business, one GOP lawmaker, Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, has shown a willingness to regulate technology and Internet businesses in their dealings with China. Smith held prominent hearings on Capitol Hill on Feb. 15, compelling representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco to answer criticism of their...
more »Weblogs
Your Take Roundup::Giving Props to Last-Place Finishers at Olympics
As we are knee-deep in the Winter Olympics games, I wondered how you were experiencing the Olympics online, and asked you to tell me about some quirky sites you liked. The Games so far have been a bit quirky, from the marshmallow-headed mascots Neve and Gliz (pictured here) to the many ice-dancing falls to the Austrian doping raids. But...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::How Does iTunes Pick Featured Podcasts?
While working on last's week's guide to podcast directories, I stumbled onto one of the great mysteries of the podcasting world: Just how exactly does Apple choose the featured podcasts in its popular podcast directory? And the more I looked at other directories, the more I had similar questions about what was chosen and why. So I methodically contacted...
more »NewspaperShift
Citizen Power?::CBS, Wisconsin Newspaper Let Audience Vote
Two recent announcements made me wonder if the mainstream media was really starting to "get" citizen journalism, and starting to allow the former audience into the news process. The Wisconsin State Journal newspaper, run out of the state capital of Madison, decided to let its web visitors vote on one of five articles that would run on the front...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::Your Guide to Podcast Directories
Even though podcasts didn't exist until mid-2004, there are now so many of them that it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number. Yahoo recently listed more than 23,000 podcasts in its News category of podcasts. So what's a listener to do? Luckily there are a few excellent online directories that list and rank podcasts to help you find...
more »TVShift
Super Skip::DVRs Are MVPs for Super Bowl Watchers
Everything is big about the Super Bowl. Advertisements cost $2.6 million for 30 seconds. The average audience was estimated at 90.7 million viewers. And a few bad calls by the referees were magnified to epic proportions. While network executives are clinging to the idea that they are still in charge of what you watch and when you watch it,...
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::CBC Offers Moderated Forum for Every Precinct
The hodge-podge of political discussion boards online can give you a headache. Usually it's a matter of who can scream the loudest and attack the fiercest. And if the subject is economics, someone will spout off on abortion. Plus, how can you find the right forum for the issues that concern you or your locale? The Canadian Broadcasting Corp....
more »MagazineShift
Your Blog Here::SportingNews.com Gives Readers Super Platform
If you're nutty about sports, and live in the U.S., you probably spend a good amount of time on the leading American sports website, ESPN.com. It's flashy, it has attitude, it's filled with good info, and it's awash in video highlights. And for fan involvement, there's ESPN SportsNation with its polls and forums. But the sports leader online could...
more »Citizen Journalism
A year ago, Dan Gillmor was in a plum position. He had been a technology journalist and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, in the heart of Silicon Valley. He had written the Bible of grassroots journalism, We the Media, describing how weblogs and other new media forms were democratizing media and giving power to the "former audience"...
more »NewspaperShift
Washingtonpost.com Walks the Line
The people who run the website for the Washington Post newspaper, washingtonpost.com, really want to empower their readers and give them more online. They offer live online chats with reporters and editors, online forums for readers to discuss Post articles, and a slew of blogs including the Post.Blog, in which "The Editors Discuss Site Policies, Design and Goals." Ah,...
more »Digging Deeper
YouTube Offers Soldier's Eye View of Iraq War
The American public's interest in the War in Iraq has waxed and waned over the years, from intense debate to complete disconnection. So too has the media's interest, as Iraq goes from the front page of the newspaper to someplace buried deep within. But there's one viewpoint of the war that has never diminished: that of the soldier. If...
more »NewspaperShift
USA Today Rules the Travel World
PressThink blogger and NYU professor Jay Rosen asks a good question of me: "If there's a Media Shift, what is it shifting from and what is it shifting to?" In the case of newspapers, it's easy to say that the shift is from costly newsprint to less costly Internet and new media delivery options such as email newsletters, mobile devices...
more »Culture
What kind of video would you watch on a small portable screen?
The video iPod has sent shudders through the media business, because it offers a new way to watch TV, video and movies. You can download video onto the iPod and then watch it on your own clock as you travel. Plus, new cellular phones are adding the capability to watch video and TV as well. While techie types get excited...
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Featured Comment
Improving community interaction is a great way for newspapers to cement themselves in place and increase their online audience -- which many of them are doing with the simple steps of open forums and story comments.
Tracking change at newspapers, radio, TV, and books
Mark Glaser
Mark Van Patten
Simon Owens
Roland Legrand
Tim Peek
Jeffrey D. Neuburger
Mike Rosen-Molina
Bryan Murley
Megan Taylor
Mark Hannah
Julie Posetti
Michael Josefowicz