There’s been a growing feeling that the AP is not our friend in the media industry, but this week, that feeling seemed to bubble over. We’ve got some rough numbers to show that they’re not helping us, and with the rise of ESPN local sites, the AP is rapidly loosing it’s marketplace. I don’t know if I’m ready to sign their death sentence yet, they do seem to have some smart people working for ‘em (I look to the New Model for News study and their iPhone app). Yet, it’s painfully obvious (after the youtube fiasco) that the AP is a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. These are my links for April 14th through April 18th:

The AP is outdated and increasingly irrelevant; so are Printies

AP thinking of future:http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf – Interesting ‘atomization of news’ but still top-down publishing model. –@GregElin on March 23

• 

  Image via Wikipedia

  Daily Kos: State of the Nation: Newspapers make up 20% of the sources for The Daily Kos, but blogs make up near 13%, the second most. The AP? Less than 1%.

• “On the other hand, I will be gleeful when the AP goes out of business. I’m actually shocked at how little we depend on those jerks.”- Daily Kos: State of the Nation

• Hanging Tough: Financial Page: The New Yorker: This is the mindset the media industry needs to have: take risks, experiment. Either you’re going to fail, or come out on top. Non-risk isn’t gonna make you succeed.
• Why top-down syndication is broken: This is it: the newswire isn’t going to be top down, but bottom up. We’re crowdsourcing news, that means you can’t control abundancy. Take that AP.
• Garca Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin 26 and what to do about it: Common sense on what to do about saving your niche before someone scoops it up from under you. My favorite: fire the management. They’ve failed, bring someone new in.
• Journalism Online Just in case you were wondering what a plan for failure looks like…

• “A strategy is a product of a big vision of the market and where it’s going. It’s about abandoning some markets to concentrate on others. Newspaper companies don’t have a strategy. Newspaper companies have tactics, things they do to respond to other people’s strategies. Until newspapers get a strategy of their own that helps them decide what to do and what not to do, they are doomed to see all the high-potential market strategies owned by everyone else. Which leaves newspaper companies to grumble about unfair everything is and not much more.”- García Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin … and what to do about it

• “Let me be the first to tell you that saying you aim to be a “world-class platform-neutral news information provider” just tells me you haven’t got a clue about the future, are too scared to make a guess and are hoping someone else will get it right so you can copy them.”- García Interactive: How ESPN Chicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin … and what to do about it

• “Instead of feeling diminished by the Huff Post’s excerpts, more publications might want to pre-empt the site by serving distilled versions of their own articles. That’s right: Even the Post and the Times and the Journal can learn something about how to serve readers from the Huffington Post.” –Hey, journalists! Stop getting all huffy about the Huffington Post’s “lifting” of stories. – By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine

Numbers

• Measuring user engagement: Lessons from BusinessWeek: It’s a good breakdown of how to measure user engagement on a story. This is a valuable metric, that we really need.

Engagement is high, now we just need to harness it.

Apparently, there's more demand for opinionated news than unbiased news.

Lest there be any doubt, the internet is used by all age groups.

For Photogs

• Ten Ways To Improve Your Multimedia Production Right Now: Quick tips on how to do a great audio slideshow, a lot of the tips apply to video too.
• Great Questions List | StoryCorps: Questions to ask anyone about anything for Journalism stories

UX Design

• “I realize the extent to which the media economy is moving towards people who give a shit over people who are willing to tolerate something. You know, it’s no longer something that’s just good enough so people don’t change the channel — now it’s something that people pick.”- Jesse Thorn on gathering your online audience in the real world » Nieman Journalism Lab

• Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will – WSJ.com: Kinda nifty, a profile on the guy who created Comic Sans, “It is a punch line: ‘Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your type.””
• Jonathan Mendez’s Blog: New York Times Landing Pages: All the Irrelevance That Fits the Pixels: Great look at how much of newspaper site design doesn’t center around content, but around the excess.
• stevenf has a great post on the future of UI and HMI on computers. The following are excerpts from the text meant to summarize the post.

  Every geek I know shares, to some degree, the notion that the “desktop” metaphor for computers is outdated. What nobody seems to have a solid opinion on is what would take its place. Every once in a while, there is an attempt to obsolete the concept of the hierarchical file system. The Newton had a very unique object storage system — essentially a system-wide “soup” of data objects, such as your calendar events, address book contacts, and so on. Any app could dip into this database and pull out objects, even those put there by other applications. Applications could then look at them, maybe even modify or extend them, without needing the original application to intervene at all. The result was an unprecedented interconnectedness of data among Newton applications, both first and third party, unmatched by any desktop environment that I know of.

• “…a huge portion of iPhone usability training is done via the TV ads, pre-sale. They’re both marketing and instruction.”- stevenf.com – WARNING: A long, rambly exploration of the state…

Good News!

• MediaPost Publications Trending Up: Nielsen Says Online Video Usage Soars 04/14/2009: Online video is up 40% over last year. Looks like the VCs were right, online video is hot. Curious to know if the TV numbers were affected w/Hulu.


CHART OF THE DAY: Internet Ads Growing Faster Than Any Medium In History

• Precision Hacking: Just in case you doubted it, crowdsourcing is an amazing device if leveraged correctly. It can be used for very focused tasks too.

• LINKS | the Rocky Dies and the Daily Emerald Strikes
• China Urges ‘Rational’ Protests – BBC
• BATTLE | What We Need, Is Infastructure
• Hear Hear
• LINKS | Inspiration Only

“Maybe, just maybe, the existing model for generating, distributing and monetizing content could benefit from a Ctrl-Alt-Delete reboot.”- Can the Statusphere Save Journalism?

“You blew it”

• ‘Star Tribune’ Withholds Select Print Content From Web: Talk about Baby Boomers not getting “it.”
• Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online: There’s a lot of fuzzy math done here, and reliance on numbers that may or may not be accurate. (readership is 2+ per copy!?) (avg. person reads 24 pages/day in print!?) Maybe I’m too genY, but I just don’t see how this is possible.
• CIRCLE – A nonpartisan research center studying youth civic engagement and civic education. College Students Talk Politics: It’s a valid point: GenY might not really pay attention to news b/c they feel like it’s not relevant to them. It’s largely just talking heads yelling at each other. Argues against Infotainment and for the masses being smart.
• Streisand effect: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”
• “NCAA: Greet the 21st century” : The Editor’s Log : Blogs : News-Record.com : Greensboro, North Carolina: NCAA is trying to prohibit people from expressing opinions on Facebook!? They need to get over themselves.
• 1. Solve journalism’s data problem. 2. Kill the AP. 3. Invest in the next market. BuzzMachine: Jarvis calls for the disbanding of the AP. In light of how backwards they have been, I’m for it.
• NYTimes-turned-NPR Exec: “Not Very Bullish on People Paying for News Content” – mediabistro.com: WebNewser: CEO of NPR in the news for the second time this week with details on how Times Select was a failure despite making 10 million/year.
• The speech the NAA should hear BuzzMachine: I love a good rant, and Jarvis delivers. I think I’m still hoping he’s wrong – that newspapers still can be re-tooled to work online, but I fear he’s right.
• Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It: A good, old fashion, smack-down of the old fashion old media. “Robert, I’ve been creating original content on the internet for about 12 years longer than you’ve been editor of the WSJ. Shut up. Seriously, shut up. To say something like that simply indicates you really do not understand that all blogs are not echo chambers. I mean echo chamber? Sorry, that’s the mainstream media, too.”
• Google a ‘Tapeworm:’ WSJ Exec: Here’s more of the ‘old media’ mind-fuck.
• New York Times ‘ Policy on Facebook and Other Social Networking Sites: Seriously!? Who the fuck came up with this idiotic approach to social media? In my mind, it shows how the New York Times fundamentally doesn’t ‘get it.’ Summary: signup for an account, but don’t you dare actually use it.

• Newspapers Not Harnessing Readers’ Social Power — Seeking Alpha: ”Key survey findings: • 49% of respondents use general search engines (such as Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO)) once a week or more to find content, but only 20% use search tools built into a newspaper or magazine site. • Only 24% share good content “finds” with friends or others via personal communications – such as e-mail and instant messaging (IM), and a much lower number (7%) say they usually or often share content via embedding into social network sites. • Although many newspapers list their staffers who are on Twitter, few offer Twitter users the ability to tweet stories from their websites. • When asked what they do when they find interesting content online, 52% of respondents say they usually read it immediately. Only 9% said they bookmark it to read later.”
• Disasters: Times Nukes Itself On Google: Great example of how newspapers need to really understand the web, instead of just playing on it.
• Landmark moments in citizen journalism :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews: Good examples of how citizen journalists are effective.

Maybe they get it, a little?

• “Transparency is a mechanism for companies to get better and better. Otherwise, you have to think that marketing is really just a subtle form of deceit, designed to cover up the truth rather than to reveal what distinguishes one product from another in a world where there may be no single best, but a variety of consumer preferences and trade-offs between quality, however defined, and cost, size, performance and other parameters. In a perfect world, consumers will know what they are getting and want precisely that, given the possible choices.”- Digital Marketing: Can Transparency Be a Business Model? – Advertising Age – Digital
• The New York Times Puts Up Its Dukes | The New York Observer: Huh, the New York Times is being a bit more transparent. Is this just happening by default?
• Anatomy of a 21st Century Media Executive – ClickZ: Vin has a great 4 part plan to change j education.

• Twitter Traffic Explodes…And Not Being Driven by the Usual Suspects! (comScore Voices): Proof: young people aren’t on twitter, all ages are.
• Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal on charging for content on Vimeo: Paraphrase: The trick isn’t to put your most popular content behind a paywall, but your most niche products.
• Wikipedia for Spies: The CIA Discovers Web 2.0 – TIME: Just good/cool. There may have been a panic when the president said he wanted to read email, but at least the CIA has been using wikis to great effect.

They already ought to be thinking about…

• Mobile Advertising Is (Finally) Moving – eMarketer: Looks like mobile advertising is going to take off in 2009. Hope newsorgs are ready to take advantage of that.
• Michael Kinsley – Life After Newspapers – washingtonpost.com: Hear hear! Let capitalism rule the industry.
• You’ve got to know what you stand for to survive in journalism online: Good argument: with journalists as experts, why do we need editors?
• Top 10 business mistakes that newspapers must avoid as they go online-only: • get customer feedback, a lot. • produce for your niche, and just your niche • current ad solutions suck. Experiment. • remind adverts on a monthly basis how you’re performing • have an ad sales team that thinks and is web first; print doesn’t translate

Just to proove GenY isn’t perfect…

• MediaShift . College Media Miss Opportunities Covering the Economic Crisis | PBS: Bryan makes a good case for college media to use the wealth of data about the economy and easy tools to make infographics.

Cool links that I couldn’t leave out

• Google uncloaks once-secret server | Business Tech – CNET News: For the first time we know what at Google Data center looks like: It’s in a shipping container, and has proprietary battery technology hooked up to each board.

• Myth: The Smaller News Hole (at the NYT)
• Murdoch Moving to Buy Newsday for $580 Million – New York Times
• A Web Design Critique of Google News
• REPOST | Defined: Newspaper Platform
• Micropayments Lead to Piracy

Things our grandkids will never understand.

Last week has lead me this generalization: Generation Y fundamentally understands the internet, and therefore the current state of the world, in a way that older generations just never will. It’s a generalization and not a maxim, because as folks like John Bryne, Bryan Murley, and even Steve Jobs remind me that us youngin’s aren’t the only ones who get it, we’re just in the majority. These are my links for March 21st through March 27th:

Generation Y, X, BB…

• The following are excerpts from #editorchat from John Bryne of Business Week. I’m throughly impressed with his insight. It gives me much hope for the older generations.

“There will be many Born to the Web enterprises over the next few years that will teach the mainstream media a thing or two. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE “They think that some day online advertising will offset the print decline and help support a broken print model. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE “Online readers also earn more than print readers and are more likely to be female. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE “Of our total audience, about 38% are online only; 31% magazine only & 31% are both online and print. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE “There’s overlap in our print and online readers3 but generally our online users are 10 years younger and more highly educated. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE

• On the other hand, the following is a tweet sent by a Syracuse University student during a lecture by Ryan Sholin on ‘new media.’

  “@ryansholin I’d prefer that we have fewer citizen journalists. You don’t see me trying to be a citizen software engineer or citizen waiter.”- Twitter / benjgc

  Put this up there as Generation Y not “getting it”

10 Ways To Reinvent Your Newsroom Right NowThis is a great presentation. Details some really simple and some more complex things that you could start doing today if you got your newsroom excited about them.
View more presentations from sjcobrien.
• 2020 vision: What’s next for news: A fantastic bit of futurism on the journalism business. • Industry will shrink/re-make itself • The semantic web plays a huge role and datamining becomes key • Collaboration among local news sites for ads and info • New business models like endowments, non-profit, etc • copyright law needs a re-think • The idealist unbiased journalist dies, starts reporting for interest groups
• Newspaper ownership and the fourth generation syndrome | yelvington.com: Steve argues that the current generation of newspaper owners are more interested in spending money than their own business.

• “When I got my first computer back in 1984 or 1985, it was a Mac and there was this program called Hypercard by Bill Atkinson. In a very basic way, Hypercard teaches you the basics of how computers [and software development on them] work.” Being who I am, this obviously struck a chord. I wondered if he has hit upon a simple truth about the evolution of computers… and their users. Early on, the software and tools that were available to users were more about working with the capabilities of the machine than what you could get done with it. That lead to every computer user innately understanding the architecture of the machine. Of course, it also lead to scaring many people off, but for those that stuck around, to this day we all have a very true understanding of the what, why and — most importantly — how a computer can (and can’t!) do the things it does.”- At SXSW Michael Penn Talks iTunes, Film, Music, and Hypercard! – The Mac Observer

• Newspaper Execs: Still Sleepless in Seattle – ClickZ: Vin speaks from personal experience about the staff and history of the Seattle PI. In Vin’s opinion, the staff is top notch, but the Hearst Corp. has shackled them.

Journalism Business Models

• Nonprofit journalism: It’s in the numbers: Presents numbers dating back to 2006 on the average number of bylines, pages, and sections in the local paper. It’s not really good news.
• Md. Senator Proposes Nonprofit Status For Newspapers – Baltimore News Story – WBAL Baltimore: Current rules don’t allow print media to report on political issues (apparently). A senator has stepped forward and suggested that we allow them to do so.
• A scenario for news BuzzMachine: Think of this one more like a “Jarvis Manifesto”
• “The most profitable newspapers have tended to be monopoly markets with circulation of 20,000 to 100,000 readers. These are not sexy papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which have historically have significantly low margins.”- One Banker’s Plan to Save the Newspaper Industry – Deal Journal – WSJ
• Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet: Controversial post by a UPenn Prof. He refers to his own research on how people interact with ads. Most interesting: the break downs of what and how you can sell online.

  “The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed.”- Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet

• A fantastic quote from rev2oh

  “The wonder of the web is that it gives readers more and more control every day over what information they consume. Fighting against that trend is futile. Trying to improve the banner ad is like trying to motorize a horse.”- RevenueTwoPointZero » Advertising on iPhone

Just plain nifty/WTF?

• The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine gets a new data center: Apparently the entire internet can fit into a shipping containter. 4.5 petabytes, 1TB RAM, and 63 servers.
• The 13 Most Essential Plugins for WordPress – Nettuts+: Totally fantastic list.
• What Happened to the Land of the Free?: Very long, very detailed piece arguing that the government has become too powerful. Well researched, well opined.
• BBC NEWS | Americas | US high school ‘held cage fights’: WTF!? A Dallas school was holding cage fighting matches, with students!?
• Goodbye Google | stopdesign: Google’s top designer quits ostensibly because Google doesn’t understand good design. Here’s the thing: they’re still successful. They don’t have Microsoft levels of shitty design, so what’s the…

For the Photogs in the house…

Amy O’Leary is a multimedia producer at the Times. This interview was taped on March 22, 2009, at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, where O’Leary was a speaker.

• LINKS | Newspapers Don’t Need Micropayments
• LINKS | Generation Y Has Inherited the Media
• Yes, “It Is Our Fault”
• LINKS | in Case You Missed It Last Week…
• LINKS | the Rocky Dies and the Daily Emerald Strikes

Spotted: The Chicago Tribune puts Twitter in their masthead

This has been a really inspiring week for me. Everything from my talks with John Lowe, to activity at CoPress, to a phone conversation with Daniel about the future, to progress at The Daily Orange to this fantastic piece at Nieman Labs. With that in mind, I’m going to limit myself to links that inspire this week. (Also, it’s been two weeks since I did one of these posts due to vacation. There’s a lot of links.) These are my links for March 8th through March 20th:

• Joel Kramer: Lessons I’ve learned after a year running MinnPost Nieman Journalism Lab: Great look at how the MinnPost works by its founder, Joel Kramer. • Short form content monetizes better than long form • Uncut video is much less expensive than docu and popular • Have funding for a few years before you start • Donations will be just as important as advertising
• Social Weather Mapping | smalltalk: Great proof of concept: datamine twitter to show the current weather conditions across the country.

• Nick Bilton Keynote O’Reilly Tools of Change 2009 | Metaprinter
• There are stages people go through when they’re introduced to a subject:
  1. Rejection as irrelevant (too much change)
  2. Knowing nothing, and admitting it
  3. Know just enough to hurt themselves
  4. Knowing that you know nothing
  5. Knowledgeable, enough to get by
  6. Respected authority
  7. Master, even the experts defer to you


Bre Pettis | I Make Things - Bre Pettis Blog - The Cult of Done Manifesto

• 

  Image via CrunchBase

  There’s always time to launch your dream – (37signals): A great call for, “don’t sacrifice your education for the sake of school.”
• Printed Matters Five ideas for display ads: 5 crazy and good ideas for how to change online ads.
• RevenueTwoPointZero Improving online display advertising: A summary of how online ads are broken and two suggestions on how to fix it: • Limit to one ad a page. Make it a dominant element again • Make homepages on news websites more like the rest of the web…


Newseum | Today’s Front Pages | Seattle Post-Intelligencer

• “Anyone who runs a newspaper should be watching this experiment under a microscope. Someone should even go so far as to obtain copies of the last month of Seattle PI in print and call up every display advertiser and ask them what they plan to do.”- The Great Seattle Advertising Experiment: What Will Happen to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Print Advertising Dollars? – Publishing 2.0
• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Clay Shirky: Cheers to Clay Shirky, for so eloquently stating what we’ve all be thinking.
• Telecommuting can replace newsrooms | The Journalism Iconoclast: A strong argument to replace the newsroom with telecommuters. It saves money and increases efficiency.
• #FollowFriday: The Anatomy of a Twitter Trend: Look at how twitter trends start. Good research implications.
• The new short film by Blu an ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche) http://www.blublu.org/

• LINKS | Generation Y Takes on the World
• Links for January 6th
• LINKS | Google’s Church
• LINKS | Generation Y Has Inherited the Media
• LINKS | the Rocky Dies and the Daily Emerald Strikes

OMG! (and other news that broke this week)

• EMERALD NEWS STAFF STRIKES – News: The Daily Emerald newsroom unanimously walks out until they’re satisfied their board will not be putting them in a position where they can be censored.
  

  HAHA haha heh hehe… Oh, my. It’s funny ‘cause it’s true.

• What to do if your startup is about fail (or “Don’t Stop Believing”) The Jason Calacanis Weblog: It’s a how-to guide on how to save your VC funded business. Or how to close it down. Told by one who knows, this is a must read _before_ you get into the startup world.

Journalism, Examples of

• Interactive | Taubman Museum of Art: Great example of what an infographic can be. They clearly put a lot of work into this.
• The Geography of a Recession – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com: Fantastic infographic from the New York Times on the unemployment rate nation wide.
• Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Nifty Online Things

• Present Like Steve Jobs:

  Present Like Steve Jobs Apple CEO Steve Jobs is well known for his electrifying presentations. Communications coach Carmine Gallo discusses the various techniques…

• 15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plug-Ins For WordPress | How-To | Smashing Magazine: Some nifty hacks for wordpress and twitter.
• Prez Loves to Work the Phone – Politics news | Newser: Feels good to have a president that is both active and actively using basic technology.
• 85+ Tools & Resources for Freelancers and Web Workers: It’s an okay list that primarily relates to time tracking and billing
• Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019 (montage + video) – istartedsomething
• Google Tasks, a Standalone App: Looks like Google may be introducing a task manager soon. Here’s hoping it allows for some group collaboration!

Online Journalism

• Recession? Local news sites are hanging tough: Great look at some/most? of the successful hyperlocal news startups.
• Online video storytelling and trends : Online Journalism
  View more presentations from Serena Carpenter. (tags: online video)
  
• Hulu Traffic Still Up Big After Super Bowl Spike: Hulu saw a huge spike in traffic after the Superbowl (perhaps because of their ad?), and has seen that traffic stay high – roughly 33% higher. Proves that good advertising not only works, but online,…
• Printed Matters Why SEO is still job #1 at news sites: On Google is your landing page and why your newspapers site needs to be a platform.
• Chicago Reader Blogs: Chicagoland: A long analysis of a Chicago townhall on what todo with the Trib. Points I don’t agree with: aggregation is bad, journalists aren’t to blame. Points I like: journos should be able to brand themselves…

Journalism Business Models

• Newspapers: From No Profit to Non-Profits?: A wrap of how how the endowment business model may come into play.
• Business Models of News :: Innovation in Software :: The Vagueware Blog: Good summary of the current state/failure of newspaper advertising, including a quick macro list of how to fix it.
• Five ways newspapers can improve online ads | Knight Digital Media Center Weblog: I’ve actually mentioned all these ideas before, but this is a really handy list of ways for newspapers to make money. – That they’re not doing!
• Information Wants to Be Expensive – WSJ.com: Basically: information will be paid for if it’s unique and high-value. There’s gotta be a way to leverage this idea for freemium.
• The size of social networks | Primates on Facebook | The Economist: Apparently, Dunbar’s number holds true online as well as physically.
• Poynter Online – NewsPay: Knight CEO Bill Mitchel says: • Make way for a new establishment. • Think of media as a path to activism. • Imagine a smaller world. • Get creative with economic models for sustaining news.
• The ethical journalist’s guide to selling ads on a website: Part one: Ethics and basic introduction for journalists trying to advertise online.

Pew Research Center: Newspapers Face a Challenging Calculus

• Yahoo! Previews Powerful News Advertising Platform: Seems like a good idea to me. Yahoo provides the ad distribution network and newspapers provide the ad selling power.
  • Yahoo Teams With Newspapers to Sell Ads – NYTimes.com: The Yahoo – Newspaper ad collaboration deal seems to be working out well.
• Pew Research Center: Newspapers Face a Challenging Calculus: Apparently, newspaper readership has declined in the last 2 years both online and in print. Though, this number might not include aggregators ∴ who really knows.
• Content Bridges: Paid Newsday? Parsing What It Means…and Those 4.5 Minutes: The reason why Newsday paid content will fail is not because of low engagement, but because the newsroom doesn’t do online right to begin with!

• Links for January 8th Through January 9th
• They Do Care, Right?
• LINKS | Newspapers Don’t Need Micropayments
• Links for January 6th
• How Not to Do Newspaper Video

Photography

• 5 Common photo slideshow mistakes :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews: 5 things to avoid when making an audio slideshow. Rather insightful.

J-School

• Skills training is not enough for the digital journalist: A list of things that journos aren’t doing right in terms on thinking/training. It a topic that’s been overwritten on, but it’s very well thought out.
• brightkite.com: Skills all J-Students need to know. A pic of a whiteboard from what I can only presume was a brainstorming session at News Innovation PDX
• Journalism degree applications up 24%: Apparently, the number of jDegrees are up by 24% in the UK. Makes me wonder how US numbers compare. I suspect that most would guess that US numbers are down, but that never sounded right to me.

Journalism Business Models

• A suggestion for The New York Times: Monetize your superior platform by sharing it with smaller news outlets:Interview at Times Open with Michael Veytsel, founder of a semantic-web startup he’s tentatively calling Factbox.Cast: Nieman Journalism Lab
• 25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers: A really solid list for creating a successful online newsorg that is user-friendly and “open source”
• Op-Ed Columnist – Start Up the Risk-Takers – NYTimes.com: Don’t bail out the failed businesses, use the money to start new ones.
• Printed Matters Paywall madness: Dec. 2008 – Feb. 2009 A roundup of the paywall argument from the last few months.
• Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance: A good look at the problems facing Mass marketing with the rise of the Internet. Basically: the web allows adverts to cut the middle man out of the picture, taking a lot of the wind out of Madison…

  “The online display advertising paradigm was pulled directly from the print industry, the group that originally designed the Web for media. Assumptions were made that simply don’t apply, because the Web is not a one-to-many, mass marketing medium. It’s a place where horizontal connectivity replaces the vertical, top-down model of communications. We weren’t aware of this in the early days of the Web (or at least the media and advertising businesses weren’t aware), so display advertising seemed a logical choice.” - Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance

  
• The follow is a list of quotes from a very long, very in depth article in The New Republic on the state of the newspaper industry. “The other standard means of supporting the production of public goods is through private non-profit organization. In fact, non-profit support of journalism has recently been increasing. But much of the discussion about non-profit journalism has failed to recognize that it can mean at least three different things. The first, though not necessarily the most relevant, is the conversion of newspapers from commercial to non-profit status as a way of preserving their public-service role. …a second approach is philanthropic support of specific kinds of journalism, available through multiple outlets, whether they are commercial or non-profit. The best-known example of this solution is ProPublica. …a third use of non-profits—and it is for underwriting new models of journalism in the online environment. A good example of this approach is the Center for Independent Media.” - Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

“When a society requires public goods, the solution is often to use government to subsidize them or to produce them directly. But if we want a press that is independent of political control, we cannot have government sponsoring or bailing out specific papers.” - Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

“News distributed to the public is a public good in two respects. First, from a political standpoint, news contributes to a well-functioning society inasmuch as it enables the public to hold government and other institutions accountable for their performance. Second, news is a public good in the sense economists use that concept.”

- Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

• Wasting Ink, Beating a Dead Horse – ClickZ: “If the newspaper industry wants to survive, it must begin mass-customizing its products on- and offline, rather than trying to find ways to get people to pay for the obsolete generic package. The…
• Why the debate about financing journalism misses the point. – By Jacob Weisberg – Slate Magazine: A call for for newspapers to embark on Bill Gates’ “creative capitalism” — a business that acts in the public good. In the case of newspapers this would likely involve an hybrid of endowments and…
• Content Bridges: Paid Newsday Site? What’s 4 1/2 Minutes Worth to You? Newsday is now charging for content. Is that such a good idea considering the fact that they have the lowest level of engagement of the top 30 newspaper sites?

Journalism

• JPROF: A superior user experience: A great quote out of the recent manifesto written by Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg on the future of GOOG. The quote suggests that readers need a better UX out of newspaper websites.
• How college media uses Twitter – Innovation in College Media: CICM has a good study on how college media is using Twitter. Conclusion: either you use it wrong, or (a select few) use it very well.
• Journalism is the business of building communities – so newsrooms must hire from within those communities: A call to use local resources for local reporting. Makes sense, you have to use people who know your niche market.
• Newspapers Will Never Get IT Right David Strom’s Web Informant: Here’s the meet of the post: Examine any aspect of any newspaper’s online edition and you will find it botched. Fixed table widths that assume everyone has a 26-inch monitor set to 1024 x 768…
• “Throughout the 20th century, newspaper-reader surveys showed the average reader read only four to six stories per edition, no matter how many stories were in the paper. That hasn’t changed, and it’s worse with newspaper sites. Data from Nielsen Online and comScore Media Metrix show the average newspaper-site user visits only two to eight times per month, reads less than 25 stories all month long, and spends less time on site all month than the average print-edition reader spends on a single edition. The Web isn’t the newspaper industry’s savior.” - Wasting Ink, Beating a Dead Horse – ClickZ
• “The 400-year-old era of traditional newspapers is over. They are obsolete.”- Wasting Ink, Beating a Dead Horse – ClickZ

Common, you know you wanna click on that picture to see where it leads.

• Facebook et al risk ‘infantilising’ the human mind | Media | guardian.co.uk: A British psychologist testified before the House of Lords that short form communication (like twitter) leads to ADD.
• Safari 4 Hidden Preferences – Random Genius: Restore the new Safari UI back to the old one.

• Microsoft has to hit up laid-off workers for money – BusinessWeek: Well, that’s just embarrassing :)
• ““Marijuana already plays a huge role in the California economy,” said Stephen Gutwillig, the group’s California state director. “It’s a revenue opportunity we literally can’t afford to ignore any longer.””- Bill would legalize, tax marijuana – Sacramento News – Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee

• LINKS | Newspapers Don’t Need Micropayments
• Links for January 8th Through January 9th
• Links for January 6th Through January 7th
• LINKS | the Rocky Dies and the Daily Emerald Strikes
• Connecting Another Dot(s)

•  Hulu’s Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight – O’Reilly Radar: “I’m sure Hulu is totally pissed. They pretty much said just that in a somewhat more stilted way. The real insult, though, is calling the people who made them cut Boxee off “content providers.” They…

• Why I dislike micropayments, don’t mind charity, but really have a better idea Network(ed)News: What a fantastically simple idea for a journalism business model: charge for interaction with the content creator. Donate some money to the site, and the chances of your comments etc being responded…
• Walter Isaacson: You’ve got it all wrong | Musings of an Anonymous Geek: Theodor Nelson writes the equivalent of a very long blog post as a response to Walter Isaacson’s use of his name in his argument for micropayments for news. Essentially, Nelson wants to use a…

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  Cover via Amazon

  Interview: Wired’s Chris Anderson on the ‘free’ business model | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: Chris Anderson, author of Long Tail, discusses the Freemium business model.     

• Tech Tools Day 1: Tomorrow’s Journalism and Journalists – The Next Newsroom Project: “Readers have never been willing to support this industry economically,” Fine said. “Her advice for anyone in the news biz was direct: ‘I know that not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur,’ Fine…
• DigiDave | Communication is Key: Journalism Beyond Newspapers – Don’t Become Nonprofits – Work for Them: Dave Cohn makes a good point: journalists can market their services toward non-profits who need the press and often can’t get their message out there.
• Forget Micropayments — Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content: Steve Outing endorses Kachingle, a micro-payment service for websites with one distinct caveat: paying is still optional. The user decides on how much they want to pay for their news, and all the…
• Will paid content work? Two cautionary tales from 2004 Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Good look at the failures of the Paid Content model: LAT, and the Albuquerque Journal. End with a reminder: just because Editors think that they are entitled to make money from content, it doesn’t…
• Op-Ed Contributor – You Can’t Sell News by the Slice – NYTimes.com: A New York Times op-ed on why paid content won’t work. Oh, and that even if it did, the revenue wouldn’t “save newspapers.”

• What does engagement mean for newspapers? – Eat Sleep Publish: A good summary and batch of links on why engagement on sites is important.

• Top 15 of 2008: The leading regional newspaper sites shuffle their ranks Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: The top regional newspapers have seen a significant increase in pageviews.

• lectroid.net Blog Archive Newspapers could actually try online: Really solid advice on how to evolve your print newsroom into a real, online newsorg. Topics include: Staffing, web design, and workflow.
• Reflections of a Newsosaur: How to charge for content. Theoretically.: Alan Mutter jumps on the micropayment bandwagon as the most “logical way” to make money online. He makes the wrong assumption that “Consumers might not like being micro-nickled and nano-dimed for…

Web Journalism

• The Doc Searls Weblog : Saturday, March 24, 2007: Fantastic list of things that newspapers should do on their websites to make them more relevant to users (read: user friendly)

• How an NYT developer built a new way to read the news online: The ‘new’ interface is a great move for the Times. It does distinctly reminds me of http://newser.com and I think corrects one of the major flaws of current online newspaper design: the lack of…

• NYT Article Skimmer: Recreate the Sunday Morning Paper in Your Browser – ReadWriteWeb

• Editing Online News     

  View more presentations from ryan.thornburg. (tags: journalism tutorial)
• Journalism Blogging    

  View more presentations from Paul Bradshaw. (tags: paulbradshaw blogging)
  

• The Public Editor – A Balancing Act on the Web – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com: Online publishing correlates to faster, but not necessarily less accurate reporting.

• Nationwide classroom No. 1: Writing for the Web – Innovation in College Media: A walk-through on how to adapt print journalist thinking to writing for the web. Topics covered: • Headline writing • Excerpt writing • Using links • How to change the Print workflow I would just add one thing: Online headlines need to be a mini-lede on their own.

Journalism

•  Bill Keller — Talk to the Newsroom — The New York Times — Reader Questions and Answers: Bill Keller, The Executive Editor at the New York Times gives an insight into many aspects of how he and the company think about the future of news. Highlights: • Keller describing his typical day…

• David Brooks reveals the mentality of the Beltway journalist – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com: Looking into the activities and attitudes of the DC press does not reveal a fourth estate. More of an institution that has become a part of the political games of the capital.
• A Tale of Two Stimulus Bills – BusinessWeek: A good, brief look at the differences between the House and Senate versions of the latest Stimulus Bill.

•  Obama at Presser Takes Questions from Helen Thomas and Blogger at Huff Post — Says He’s Looking at Media Ban on Showing Coffins: When asked, Obama said that that he would “review” the policy of allowing photos to be taken of the coffins of dead soldiers. IMHO: This policy must be stopped and recognized for it’s…

Tech

• Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling new science | Video on TED.com

• Virtual Collaboration | The Businessweek Video Library: A recorded live webcast on how to effectively communicate using virtual meetings and group work.
•  Consumed – A Successful Failure – Fail Whale – NYTimes.com: The story of the Twitter “fail whale” is a great example of why iStock Photo is not a good idea. The creator received just a few dollars for a very iconic symbol.
• How Google Decides to Pull the Plug – NYTimes.com: A New York Times look at how Google decides which products aren’t working. Conclusion: Google decides very well.
• WSJ Editor Claims Google Devalues Everything | Techdirt: Funny how Old Media folk can be so wrong in their thinking. The publisher of Wall Street Journal claims that Google devalues his content. He’s _very_ wrong because: google adds value by adding…

• David Pogue says “Simplicity sells” | Video on TED.com

• Pew Internet: Twitter and status updating: Claims that twitter-like services are used by 11% of the Internet. However, Pew analyzes the Twitterati, or not | The Social – CNET News: The recent Pew study that claimed that 11% of the Internet uses Twitter is false. That number includes all ‘status-updating’ sites including Facebook and MySpace.

• Jerry Harris Interview: Adobe employees, in an interview, talk about some of the techi details behind Photoshop CS4. Including: how the GPU affects speed, what kind of GPU you need, and how the interface has to do with…

• Maps, spreadsheets, yahoo pipes and post offices by andydickinson.net: How to use a gdoc to create a google map of locations

• What is the biggest problem in your life? | GOP Problem Solver: The web site that will solve all your problems — GOP style :)

J-School

• Message to journalism & broadcast teachers… « VideoJournalism: It’s not just me saying that profs. should be asking their classes for help!

• 10 students that journalists should follow on Twitter: I made the list!

• MediaShift . 5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them | PBS: Byran Murley very nicely sums up the problems of many college media newspapers staffs and even lists a few solutions.

• Responsibility Of Journalism.: Lays out the three main responsibilities of everyone acting as a journo. These are social, legal, and professional.

Photography

• via web.me.com

• A Web Design Critique of Google News
• REPOST | Defined: Newspaper Platform
• Myth: The Smaller News Hole (at the NYT)
• Micropayments Lead to Piracy
• Links for January 16th Through January 19th

• writing track: teaches reporting as any old print/newspaper prof would typically teach it, but with a strong emphasis on writing for the web. This naturally includes social networking, blogging, and audio production.
• visual-content track These are are photogs, broadcast people, & designers. Teach a little bit of print design, but go 40-60% with web design. Photogs and video folk ought to know most of what each other does. Photogs may get some studio and photoshop time that the video folk won’t and the video people ought to focus a little more on how to produce BJ style stories.
• tech track: We need to be teaching/recruiting coders as journalists. Now that we’re on the web, we need people who are capable of running that infrastructure. We ought to be training people in web site design, database management and display, data-mining, website development, etc

Video

Social Media

Old media

Business

Journalism education is … not working

Update Feb 16, 2009 23:15 EST

• The Wall Street Journal Has Their iPhone App All Wrong
• Newspapers Oughta Sell Their New Expertise
• Myth: The Smaller News Hole (at the NYT)
• Joey Joining the NewsTrust Team
• LINKS | Please, Please Don’t Charge for Free Information

Newspaper Business Models

• How to Save Your Newspaper | TIME: Didn’t we already have this debate? Paying for essential information doesn’t work. You can charge a niche audience, (a’la Wall Street Journal) but charging the masses just won’t work. This is the story that initiated the latest debate across the web.
• Death Of Print: How Not to Save Newspapers: A really good argument against the micropayment plan for journalism.
• Lab Book Club: Jay Hamilton, Chapter 2 on Vimeo: As newsorgs rely on less and less sustainable business models, they become more and more biased. Ends with a call for the non-profit business model.
• Please pay us for our news – please? Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Sums up the argument for and against the paid content model and concludes that users never really paid for content anyway, and that newspapers must add some value to the news to be … valued.
• Journalism 2.0 There really are new business models for journalism: A list of some new media orgs that are surviving in today’s economy with off-beat business models.
• Nonprofit Newspapers: Worth a Try – Finance Blog – Felix Salmon – Market Movers – Portfolio.com: A good argument for the non-profit business model through examining an argument against.

Advertising

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  • Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper-site traffic: Weaker than it looks: Engagement at newspaper websites is very, very low, averaging 27 seconds/user. That’s extremely low, and does not help sell advertising.
  • “As of 2007, half of newspaper site visitors were 45 or older. By comparison only 34.4% of the U.S. population is 45 or older, according to the latest data available from the U.S. Census Bureau.”
  • How to grow local revenue, despite the ad inventory glut Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: A really good look at how to leverage new media tech to increase ad sales. More importantly, it calls for a re-examining of how ads are treated online — sell them with the same value as you sell print ads.

Tech

• “The Daily Kos now boasts six quad core Xeons with 8GB of RAM that network boot from a central NFS root, with local scratch disks for logs and other machine specific files, and each running 1GB of memcache shared with a total memcache pool of 6GBs. “With the network file system root and network booting for our Web servers, it’s easy to add new servers to the Web server pool on a moment’s notice,” Bingham said. The database now runs on two eight core Xeons with 16GB of RAM each, and dedicated drives for the operating system and locally mounting /tmp. MySQL runs on six 73GB disks in a RAID-10 configuration, with the two servers are in a master/slave setup, while an additional quad Xeon works with the dual Pentium 4s for outgoing mail and search and acts as the origin point for the content delivery network. A Xen virtual machine runs MySQL enslaved to the master and stores back-up snapshots of the database.”Techworld – How the Kossacks conquered AmericaThat’s is how the big boys play.  
• NYTimes Exposes 2.8 Million Articles in New API – ReadWriteWeb: The New York Timesseems to be moving towards establishing itself as a platform of news. Sharing all of it’s content in this matter is a good indicator that they ‘get it’

Photography & Design

• On Portfolio Reviews (part 2) (Conscientious): Good advice for getting a photography portfolio reviewed from a variety of people who do it.

• Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine: States a lot of basics of web design, but it’s a good textbook like approach.

• LINKS | Please, Please Don’t Charge for Free Information
• LINKS | the Rocky Dies and the Daily Emerald Strikes
• Links for January 6th
• Micropayments Lead to Piracy
• LINKS | Micropayments Don’t Work, but Everyone Has a Better Idea

Lab Book Club: Jay Hamilton, Chapter 2:As newsorgs rely on less and less sustainable business models, they become more and more biased. Ends with a call for the non-profit business model.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper-site traffic: Weaker than it looks: Engagement at newspaper websites is very, very low, averaging 27 seconds/user. That’s extremely low, and does not help sell advertising.“As of 2007, half of newspaper site visitors were 45 or older. By comparison only 34.4% of the U.S. population is 45 or older, according to the latest data available from the U.S. Census Bureau.”- Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper-site traffic: Weaker than it looks

• Penn and Teller Explain Sleight of Hand:

  Penn and Teller Explain Sleight of Hand stop trying to expose how he does the cigarette vanish or your comments will be deleted im sick of hearing “its a thumb tip”…

• Mostly Gloom for Glossies – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com: New York Times infographic on the decline of ad revenue for a huge selection of magazines from 2005-2008
• Why newspapers should manage more like Twitter and less like GM Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: “Let’s Find a New Idea. Let’s Be Willing To Shift Models. Let’s View Investing Into the New As More Critical Than Propping Up the Old.” A great analogy that argues for newspaper survival by moving…
• http://www.photodom.com/fullscreen.php?fotoid=98988
• Stop the irrational negativity: Newspapers are not dead | yelvington.com: Steve Yelvington insists that Newspapers aren’t dead, they _are_ evolving.
• Bloomberg.com: News: The New York Times is thinking about charging for access to information. Here’s hoping it’s just talk.
• The most comprehensive college media online contest evah 2.0: Watch this space – Innovation in College Media
• Gazjango :: The Daily Gazette: The Daily Gazette’s of Swarthmore open source Django newspaper CMS
• I Hate Nature – David Attenborough – I Hate Nature – David Attenborough:

  	I Hate Nature – David Attenborough haha	From: sontronics Views: 11598 36 ratings
  	Time: 02:31	More in Comedy

• Free strategic advice for the @dailyemerald: Good, positive suggestions here Daniel, but I have to disagree with one major point. The paper likely can’t afford to go to one-day-a-week in print. If the Emerald’s ad numbers follow the trend that…
• Why it’s so hard to move print revenue online: The loss of scarcity Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Advertising venues are now plentiful, newspapers are no longer a required middle man. Therefore: “It’s time to take a few lessons from Apple Computer.”
• Journalism.co.uk :: Twitter news channel plans online expansion: BreakingNewsOn, a twitter news service expands to have its own website.
• War Paparazzi: Israel’s War Against Hamas and Still Photographers – The Digital Journalist: An amazing story of photojs doing their job to the chagrin of the Israeli Army — reporting on a war.
• szymon:    

  Business card as search result (from jeffmcneill, via szulima)

• The Newspaper Website Pay Dilemma, Solved – Media Blog – Jeff Bercovici – Mixed Media – Portfolio.com: Pure genius: Borrow from video games and limit the number of pageviews a visitor has to the site. Give them a life bar, and give them more lives the more they explore. Why not? Could be really cool.
• Reflections of a Newsosaur: Small publishers barely feel the pinch: Guess what? Hyperlocal works! Small papers are doing much better than the national-level.
• The White House Spray – The Caucus Blog – NYTimes.com: 1 min video that shows what it’s like to photograph the president with the press pool. Spoiler: they DON’T get much time.
• Syllabus for course studying news biz models:I’ve got a few more case studies for you:Politico: Say what you will about the content, but It’s perhaps the first true web-first business out there that also does print.Talking Point Memo/Daily…
• Davos09: What’s missing in journalism? BuzzMachine: “One of the journalists complained that companies are so opaque they are hard to cover. “There’s not much a journalist can do, or anyone can do, when you don’t know what’s going on.” That’s true. And…
• Rob Forbes on ways of seeing | Video on TED.comThis is why designers and photogs get along so well. Forbes, a designer, keeps talking about why his photographer represent good design. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s talking about why he’s made a good photograph.
• A modest proposal: 21,900 commercials for the price of 1:It’s crazy, but you’ve pitched me. If I had $3mil and a product, I’d do it.
• Slumgullion: Stepping off: Joe Acton writes a sarcastic post on why journalism is so broken.
• Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle: It’s more funny than anything right now… but it does prove the future is coming quick. All it will take is a device like the kindle, with more screen real estate, and print looks even less…
• Natalie MacMaster and Donnell Leahy play the Cape Breton fiddle | Video on TED.com
• Roy Greenslade: Spanish frees close as advertising vanishes | Media | guardian.co.uk: “Let’s face it, if readers want real journalism – news stories, investigations, coherent analysis, challenging polemic and sophisticated commentary – they will not find it in most of the freesheets…
• Nick the Greek:

  Nick the Greek Typographical response taken from the film, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

  From: benwhite1980 Views: 46568

•  If Google Ran Your Business 26: Lessons from the Search Giant – BusinessWeek: A quick summary of What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

• LINKS | Newspapers Don’t Need Micropayments
• Links for January 6th
• Yes, “It Is Our Fault”
• LINKS | the Rocky Dies and the Daily Emerald Strikes
• LINKS | Google’s Church