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MediaShift tracks how new media -- from weblogs to podcasts to citizen journalism -- are changing society and culture.
Guides
Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV (Updated 2012 Edition)
This week MediaShift will be doing a special in-depth report on cutting the cord to cable TV -- who's doing it, why and how. For background, we're updating our special guide to cutting the cord we first published in January 2010. That post has been viewed more than 58,000 times, proving that there's an intense interest by the public in...
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Guides
Your Guide to Crowdfunding Public Media Projects
Need $40,000 to produce a local documentary? Just ask your audience. That's what filmmaker Sam Mayfield did, for a film she's working on about last year's protests in Madison, Wis. In a blog post on January 13, she wrote: We are currently trying to raise $40,000 of our $200,000 budget through Kickstarter, the online fundraising platform that facilitates grassroots investment....
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Guides
Your Guide to the Anti-SOPA Protests
Today was an important day in the history of the Internet and activism. While the U.S. Congress expected to quickly pass two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), mounting opposition online has led them to reconsider. That all came to a head today when various sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit decided to black...
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Guides
Your Guide to the U.K. Phone-Hacking Scandal (or 'Hackgate')
From time to time, we provide 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 take action. We've previously covered Twitter, local watchdog news sites, and Net neutrality, among other topics. This week MediaShift U.K. correspondent Tristan Stewart-Robertson looks at the...
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Guides
Your Guide to Next Generation 'Content Farms'
As traditional news outlets continue to lay off journalists, a new generation of companies is betting big on online content. Their approaches differ significantly, but are all built on the common premise that for online content to be profitable, it has to be produced at a truly massive scale. The proliferation of these so-called "content farms" -- a name the companies predictably dislike -- has raised the ire of journalists and pundits alike.
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EducationShift
Your Guide to Digital Training Programs for Mid-Career Journalists
The pace of change in journalism over the last few years has left many experienced journalists feeling as though the profession is passing them by. So how can a mid-career journalist build their digital and multimedia skills? Get training, and fast. Luckily there is a wealth of free or reasonably priced workshops, tutorials and other forms of training available online and in person.
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Guides
Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Landline Phones
The number of landline telephones in the developed world has steadily risen over the past century, but something changed in the last decade: A decline began. The International Telecommunication Union found that there were 57 fixed telephone lines per 100 inhabitants in the developed world in 2001, but that number dropped to 50 lines by 2007. What happened? The mobile phone revolution started displacing landlines as more people relied on cell phones and voice-over-IP (VoIP) services such as Vonage.
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Guides
Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV
Anyone who gets cable TV or satellite in the U.S. has noticed a pronounced trend over the years: their monthly bill keeps going up. Sure, you can get lots of channels, plus HD channels and DVR functions, but those usually cost extra. According to research from Centris, the average digital cable bill was nearly $75 last year, and the average monthly satellite TV bill was $69. What's causing those bills to skyrocket?
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Guides
Your Guide to Iran Election News Online
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 take action. I've already covered Twitter, citizen journalism, alternative models for newspapers and other topics. This week I'll look at Iran election news online. Background...
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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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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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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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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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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 »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.
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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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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 »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.
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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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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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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
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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Your Guide to Micro-Blogging and Twitter
Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. The most popular service is called "Twitter", which was developed last year and became popular among techno-gurus at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. Part of the magic of Twitter is that it limits you to 140 characters per post, forcing you to make pithy statements on the fly.
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
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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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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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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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 »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 »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 »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::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 »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 »Featured Comment
"This issue has gotten lost in the push for computer science and engineering. The ability to build tools is indeed crucial, but without writers and editors, no one will know about, talk about or consider using such tools."
— econwriter5
The Return of the Human: Why Tech Companies Are Tapping Journalism Talent
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