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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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...
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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...
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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...
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...
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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 »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 »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.
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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.
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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 »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!"
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'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.
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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.
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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 »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...
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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.
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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...
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Front Porch Forum Makes Friends & Neighbors, But Can It Make Money?
We are a society that lives more and more in our technology-induced bubbles. When we go outside, we wear an iPod; we talk on cell phones while driving. In urban areas, we might never meet our neighbors unless there's a fire or earthquake. But can technology also help bring us together in our physical communities, and help us get...
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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.
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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."
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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...
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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 --...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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."
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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 --...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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'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...
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'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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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 »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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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 »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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'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?
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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.
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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").
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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._
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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...
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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...
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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 »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 »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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 »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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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"...
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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...
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