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PoliticalShift
How Bloggers, Occupy Wall Street Have Inspired Each Other
From the very beginning, supporters of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have touted its decentralized nature as one of its greatest strengths. The opponents of a political movement commonly attempt to discredit them by pointing to outside powerful interests secretly pulling strings, thereby jeopardizing its grassroots legitimacy. We saw this with the Tea Party, whose opponents very early on argued that...
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BookShift
How a Novelist Bypassed His Publisher and Raised $11,000 on Kickstarter
This week on MediaShift, we are exploring the dramatically changing publishing industry in our Beyond the Book special series. Stay tuned for more pieces like this one in the coming days. Sign up for our new weekly newsletter on e-books and self-publishing here. Tim Pratt was confident enough that his publisher would print a fifth novel in his urban fantasy...
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MagazineShift
Golf Digest Adds Interaction, Depth, E-Commerce to iPad App
It seemed like the first-delivered iPad was hardly unsheathed from its box before News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, apparently unfazed by a rich past of misguided forays into Internet ventures, announced the launch of The Daily, which was immediately labeled the first tablet-only newspaper. And it was mere weeks -- if not days -- after its debut when media critics...
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Social Networking
Susan Orlean Explains How Twitter Affects Her Long-Form Writing
As I spoke to Susan Orlean about the role the social web plays with her long feature articles and books, I couldn't help but compare her to another famous writer for the New Yorker: E.B. White. Like Orlean, White had decided to leave the frantic mania of New York City life for a much quieter one in the country, moving...
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Weblogs
Can H1N1 Flu Bloggers Help Battle Pandemic Misinformation?
Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology at Columbia University Medical Center, remembers the last flu pandemic, which occurred in 1968. "It's a great contrast [with today], because back then you had to wait weeks for information, and the only way you got it was through newspapers and scientific journals, and now of course we have instant dissemination of everything," Racaniello...
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BookShift
Speculative Fiction Novelists Find Success with Online Donations
Over the years, many authors have tried versions of the online donation model, with mixed results. But one specific genre of writers, speculative fiction, seems to be experiencing a moderate level of success. Back in 2000, Stephen King became one of the first major authors to offer a book online using an "honor system" to solicit donations. The book was...
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Business
What Newspaper Cartoonists Can Learn from Web Comics
Earlier this month, Randall Munroe, creator of the hugely popular web comic xkcd, announced on his blog that he would be publishing a book collection of the strip. Given the number of six-figure book deals that major book publishers have thrust upon popular bloggers, there's little doubt that Munroe's millions of monthly readers could have easily garnered him a similar...
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Weblogs
Can Health Care Blogs Fill the Gap Left by Mainstream News Coverage?
Paul Testa recently checked his voicemail and listened to a message from a hospice worker who lives in a conservative district of Ohio. He'd never met or spoken to this person before, but the worker reached out because Testa seemed like the right person to receive some important, inside information about the health care system. Testa doesn't work for a...
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NewspaperShift
Newspaper Editors Want Clear Credit When Bloggers Link to Them
If only every blogger could link to stories the way Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit does. The libertarian blogger, with his hundreds of thousands of readers, offers up dozens of daily snippets that typically consist of a single sentence and a link. Sometimes it's a headline or even a single word -- "Heh." As a result, those being linked by Reynolds...
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Social Media
URL Shorteners Help Track Links, Take Heat for Framing
If there's any doubt that an online titan can be easily overthrown, look no further than the URL shortener Tinyurl.com. For years, it was the most popular of its kind and the dominant (and default) URL shortener for Twitter. Then a few months ago I began to notice that it had all but disappeared from my own Twitter feed. With...
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Public Relations
How PR People Can Tactfully Locate, Pitch Influential Bloggers
Many PR agencies are hesitant to issue any guarantees on whether a particular piece of content or advertisement will "go viral," leading millions of users to toss it around through their various social media platforms. One way that they try to achieve this is by approaching the people often most responsible for the viral spread of content online -- big-name...
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Weblogs
Some Bloggers Welcome FTC Scrutiny for Paid Reviews
When it was reported in 2006 that the FTC would begin forcing word-of-mouth companies -- which paid people to hype products to their peers -- to disclose their marketing campaigns, Brian Clark predicted at the time that these rules would apply to bloggers as well. Now it looks like his prediction is coming true -- and bloggers are taking the...
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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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AdvertisingShift
Will Digg Users Bury New Digg Ads System?
Since its launch in late 2004, Digg has tried its hand with several outside advertising networks, going from an off-the-shelf Google AdSense arrangement to working with Federated Media before finally signing a deal for Microsoft to deliver its display advertisements. But in April of this year, Digg announced it would end its deal with the software giant in favor of...
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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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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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Wikis
Wikipedia Art: Vandalism or Performance Art?
Artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern developed the idea to create a self-referencing Wikipedia article late last year. The plan was to write a new article, titled Wikipedia Art that was wholly devoted to the fact that the page had been created -- an article that was completely meta and self-referential. The axiom that all press is good press 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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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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AdvertisingShift
Political Blogs' Double Whammy: Post-Election, Deep Recession
This week several major bloggers -- most politically right-of-center -- will see the shuttering of their blog ad network. Pajamas Media, which launched in 2004 and provided advertising for conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin, announced earlier this year that it would close down its display advertising for blogs in order to put more focus on its online...
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MarketingShift
'Cluetrain Manifesto' Still Relevant 10 Years Later
When The Cluetrain Manifesto appeared on the web in 1999, neither its supporters nor its authors believed it was trying to say anything particularly new. Rather, the 95 theses and the following chapters -- written in almost a stream of consciousness, psychoanalytic style befitting of something labeled a "manifesto" -- were thought to merely point out the obvious to the...
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Legal Drama
How Crowdsourcing Could Revolutionize Patent-Busting
Ricky James Robertson knew very little about touch-screen personal navigation devices when he first began reviewing patents on them back in November of last year. He was surfing Slashdot when he came across a launch announcement for a company called Article One Partners; the group offered awards for as much as $50,000 to individuals who could invalidate specific patents...
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Weblogs
Diet Bloggers Deal in Brutal Honesty in Quest for Weight Loss
On February 11, Scott Schroeder fell. He'd eaten at a McDonald's for supper and gorged himself on a Big Mac, fries, regular Coke, and a dollar chicken sandwich. And though he managed to pull out of the trenches the next morning, he fell from grace later that day when he stopped at a Taco Bell and ate two soft tacos,...
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Social Networking
How Celebrity Imposters Hurt Twitter's Credibility
By the time the news spread that the Dalai Lama had opened a Twitter account it no longer seemed such a novelty that a high profile individual would join the micro-blogging service, even if he was a divine being. The account gathered nearly 20,000 followers before Twitter pulled the plug two days later when representatives of the Tibetan leader informed...
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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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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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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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Weblogs
Can Blog Awards Identify Quality Online Content?
I met the news that my blog, Bloggasm, had been nominated for a 2008 Weblog Award with a mixture of amusement and apathy. I had watched last year as my RSS feeds became clogged with the incestuous link trolling common with such contests. The Weblog Awards, like others of its kind, are based on a popular vote, guaranteeing that most...
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Weblogs
Can Technorati Beat Google at Blog Search?
"It doesn't matter what Internet business you're in," Richard Jalichandra, the CEO of blog search engine Technorati told me recently. "You're either going to have direct or indirect competition with Google and that's just the way it is...[Google is] not the 800 pound gorilla, it's the 80,000 pound gorilla." But unlike most competitors to Google, Technorati still seems to have...
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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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Social Networking
Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg
It happens several times a day now. Ever since I opened my Twitter account approximately three months ago, the follow alerts have been gradually increasing in frequency to the point that they clutter up my email inbox if I don't clean them out often enough. "Jessica Kositz (jkositz) is now following your updates on Twitter" my latest alert tells me,...
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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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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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Weblogs
Poll Crashers Tilt Unscientific Polls Their Way
During the Republican National Convention, NOW, a PBS weekly TV news magazine, posted an unscientific poll on its website asking viewers to vote on whether they thought vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was qualified for the position. Like most polls the show posts every week, it was taken down from the front page and replaced by a new one after...
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PoliticalShift
Citizens, Media Use Social Media to Monitor Election
In a YouTube video uploaded on October 24, a husband and wife couple from Oregon sit at their kitchen table and fill out their mail-in voting ballots for the 2008 election. The wife explains to the camera that Oregon has had mail-in voting for "about the last 10 years," and the two walk the viewer through the entire voting process,...
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Weblogs
Econ Bloggers Gain Clout in Financial Crisis
Late last month Dean Starkman, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, penned a scathing piece titled "Ouryay Eatbay Just Ewblay Upyay." The essay is addressed to members of the mainstream business press and proclaims dramatically in the opening paragraphs that their beat "just blew up." Starkman wags his finger at economic reporters, chastising the business beat as a group...
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Citizen Journalism
How Political Diarists Power RedState, Daily Kos
In October of last year, a man named Leon H Wolf published a post on the front page of influential conservative blogging community RedState titled, "Attention, Ron Paul Supporters (Life is REALLY Not Fair)." One of a handful of bloggers who run the site, Wolf and his blogging colleagues decided to virtually ban all promotion for then-presidential candidate Ron Paul...
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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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Weblogs
Scott Rosenberg Traces the Blogosphere's Origins
In July of last year, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled "Happy Blogiversary," claiming that it had officially been 10 years since the blog was born. The writer cited Jorn Barger, owner of a site called Robot Wisdom, as the first blogger. After all, it was Barger who first coined the term weblog in 1997, a word that...
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PoliticalShift
How Greenwald's Brave New Films Spreads Its Political Message Online
Last month, Politico's Mike Allen asked presidential hopeful John McCain the seemingly innocent question of how many houses he owned. McCain's response -- "I'll have my staff get to you" -- became a major focus for both the media and Obama's campaign, who repeated it in just about every speech to illustrate that the Republican candidate was "out of...
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PoliticalShift
Digg Puts Focus on Politics, Bringing Charges of Liberal Bias
Last week, Digg CEO Jay Adelson sat in a crowded room in Denver holding a stack of papers while facing a camera and trying to project his voice over the cacophony around him. Next to him sat a tired-looking U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who had taken a break from the Democratic National Convention to meet with Adelson....
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PoliticalShift
Will the Big Tent in Denver Help Bloggers Break Through?
As the 2008 Democratic Convention quickly approaches, thousands of journalists will begin swarming into Denver for what is sure to be an around-the-clock media event. Reporters will interview throngs of convention goers to examine every facet of the political landscape and the implications it has for the upcoming election.
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