LINKS | Inspiration Only
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:
- Rejection as irrelevant (too much change)
- Knowing nothing, and admitting it
- Know just enough to hurt themselves
- Knowing that you know nothing
- Knowledgeable, enough to get by
- Respected authority
- Master, even the experts defer to you
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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… - “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/
Bre Pettis | I Make Things - Bre Pettis Blog - The Cult of Done Manifesto
Newseum | Today’s Front Pages | Seattle Post-Intelligencer
LINKS | Micropayments Don’t Work, but Everyone Has a Better Idea
Somehow, I missed the links from the latter part of last week, and have been bookmarking like crazy this last week. So, ya'll get a ton of links. Apologies for the long, long list, but I've broken it up with some good videos — and I've edited down! These are the cream of the crop from February 10th through February 20th:
Journalism Business Models
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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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…
LINKS | Please, Please Don’t Charge for Free Information
These are my links for January 30th through February 5th:
- 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.
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.- NYTimes Exposes 2.8 Million Articles in New API - ReadWriteWeb: The New York Times seems 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’
- On Portfolio Reviews (part 2) (Conscientious): Good advice for getting a photography portfolio reviewed from a variety of people who do it.
- 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.
No Wonder They Don’t Trust Us
Warning: the following is a rant. I'll keep it short.
It drives me crazy to see journalist putting the nail in their own coffin. E&P just republished an AP story that politely complains that Israel still isn't letting journalists into the Gaza war zone.
No wonder 54% of the public doesn't trust the media anymore. Instead of playing Fourth Estate watchdogs, these journalists have been nicely asking the courts of Israel for permission to do their jobs. Nevermind the fact the Israeli government and Hamas are controlling the story and spewing propaganda. It's still a good idea to wait on one of these governments to allow you into a region when they can control what you see.
Grow some balls.
Do your jobs. Please. You're only hurting yourselves through your laziness and ignorance. Don't moan about how hard it is. If were easy, we wouldn't need professional journalists in the first place!
Journalists are expected to add value to what people on the ground tell us in order to curate and inform the mass-public about the actions of governments, industry, and events of the day. How can we do any of that if we're not able to report!?
Journalists. Step up. Now.
The Power of “the Fourth Effect”
If you haven't seen it yet, take a few minutes of your time to view this amazing example of the "fourth effect".
Reverie: The Future
no time for words - let’s let the moving images do the talking
-Without further ado: Reverie « Vincent Laforet’s Blog
Click here to see the video.
This is the future. It's astounding. Amazing. Phenomenal. [Insert your adjectives here.]
Things that stand out to me:
- Wide angle glass (the car scene) distorts in a funky way on video. I'm sure Laforet used a 16-35mm lens to shoot from the hood of the car – it gives a really cool perspective, and the distortion (pretty significant on that lens to begin with) is something else.
- The low light capabilities of this camera are amazing.
- The dynamic range on this camera is just astounding. See: the rearview mirror shot, the shot from the hood of the car.
- The camera can shoot high-speed no problem. See: the tunnel shot.
I probably missed a thing or too, but I'll end with this: I'm really glad it's DSLRs are merging still photography and video instead of video camera companies tackling the problem. It's true that I'm just more used to the DSLR workflow than video camera workflow, but I really think that video cameras have developed some bad practices that I don't like to deal with. Some of these:
- Poor low light performance, the solution has been just to add a light to the top of the camera.
- Using tapes. Video went digital but brought analog tapes along with it. This means slow import times, no-reusability of recording media, the need to use tape, etc
- Video camera lenses tend to do telephoto better than DSLR lens do (they're smaller and lighter), but still camera lenses have much more creative flexibility (eg. fisheyes, wide-angles, lower f-stops, etc). I know some indie videographers that have setup systems to use still camera lenses on their video cameras.
Cheers, to Canon, it looks like you've got a real winner here – let's hope Nikon can replicate the performance.
Why Pro Photographers Are Hired
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| John Shinkle - Politico.com | Evan Vucci - AP |
Both of these photos are part of similar articles about Senator Kennedy returning to the Senate for the first time after being diagnosed with brain cancer to vote on a new Medicare bill.
Of course, there's also this:
Lauren Victoria Burke - APTime 100 Covers – Photo Essays – TIME
-Time 100 Covers - Photo Essays - TIME
TIME hired 6 of the world's top graphic designers to design this year's TIME 100 cover. The first few are very cool (the latter get a bit cliquè), above is my favorite.
In the Jungle With FARC – Alvaro Ybarra Zavala
In the Jungle with FARC - Photo Essays - TIME
…and it is still possible to spend months in the jungle and come back with amazing photos. See here for more.
Freelancers: How Do You Get Work? | Creativebits
- Craigslist
- Word of mouth.
- Referrals from a past job.
- My college buddies. (Especially Chris)
- My colleges job board for alumni
- Comedy Central/MTV job hunt board
- Monster.com
- Krop
- Freelancers Union
- Unsolicited resumes
Freelancers: How do you get work? | creativebits
Great idea for freelance work that I never considered: craigslist. Totally free and really well trafficked.
PopPhoto Flash: Tip of the Day: 8 Habits for Creative Photographers
Sorta cheesy, but inspiring? PopPhoto Flash: Tip of the Day: 8 Habits for Creative Photographers
Examining the ‘Great Paper’ – The New York Times
The NY Times has a great interactive view of the Magna Carta that was recently donated to the US National Archives.
