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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...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
4 Reasons I Don't Use Personalized Start Pages (And 3 Reasons Others Do)
When you open up your Internet browser, what's the first thing you see? Many people opt for personalized start pages, portal-like websites that let you pick and choose the content you want, such as news, weather or updates from social networking sites like Facebook. You can add widgets to your start page, and even create widgets for others to use on their pages.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
3 Reasons FriendFeed Is Great -- and 3 Ways It Scares Me
Ask me what my mother is doing right now and I couldn't tell you. Or what my best friend has been up to lately...no idea. But with a quick look at my computer screen, I can see what a staggering number of people I barely know are doing right now, 10 minutes ago, or last night. What they are reading, what they are posting and what they are commenting on -- all in one place.
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 »Wikis
How to Be a Model Wikipedia Contributor
Wikipedia -- like Google or CNN -- is a name we recognize immediately when mentioned in conversation. The collaborative online encyclopedia currently ranks 8th on the Alexa list of top web destinations. Ask anyone sitting in front of a computer to find information for you on any topic. While most might turn first to Google, many others will turn...
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 »Media Usage
The Efficiency (and Shame) of Long-Distance Reporting
My writer friend Marlene once had a dot-com job that seemed odd. She wrote for a travel site about various countries but never traveled to those countries. She simply aggregated information from other websites and did extensive online research before writing about them and putting together guides. But strange as it seemed at the time, I was destined to...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
5 Places to Watch Movies Online Legally -- and Free
The spread of broadband Internet access has made online video a much better experience, allowing movie fans to catch a flick on the Net without having to rent a DVD. Depending on the kind of system and monitor you have, watching films on a computer can become almost as enjoyable as watching them on your television. For instance, with...
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 »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
Our Internet Obsession with Missing People Goes Too Far
Reading online news is a great way to stay constantly updated on what's going on in the world without having to rely on television. And in times of great tragedy the Internet has shown itself to be incomparable in its ability to make information move quickly for the good of public awareness and safety. But for all its positive...
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 »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 »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 »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 »Citizen Journalism
Co-Founder Potts Shares Lessons Learned from Backfence Bust
There has been a lot of speculation about what went wrong at Backfence. To date, the company's investors and I have tried to stay out of the second-guessing in the blogosphere and the trade press, largely because there are private business matters involved that we've chosen not to discuss.
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 »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...
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