LINKS | Inspiration Only
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
-
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/
Newsflow: How Journalism Is and Will Be Generated
Steven Johnson, co-founder of outside.in, gave a very good, well thought out, speech at SXSW on the state of the news industry last week. In the transcript on his blog, he shares a slide on how he envisions the future of the news industry.
Steven has a good, albeit simplistic break down of how this new paradigm is working. I'm sure I agree with the flow of the information News → Commentary → Curation → Distribution. Seems to me that you'd have to distribute before you can get comments back, and that you'd need to curate the commentary… Forget it, the the chart is simplistic.
Steven does have the right context for this though:
Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever.
I agree whole heartily with his point and I like the broad strokes of his chart. But, I suggest that this diagram far too simple to describe the new paradigm.
As Steven says, “The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.” What his model is missing is the intricacies of linking, how data will be distributed to not only the customer, but among all of those gathering and generating news.
Hypothesizing on the new newsflow
Yea… not as easy to understand right? I’ve got arrows going all over the place, and there’s not clear rhyme or reason to the way information flows. My apologies, these relationships are chaotic and often have many nodes. Let me make the key points:
Data is key. As Tim Berners Lee has predicted, the future of the web is “linked data.” This is is something that Steven addresses, but only briefly. As the semantic web becomes reality, displaying and accessing data will become the important role for journalism to fill.
LINKS | Google’s Church
Since I've decided to start giving my links rankings, starting next week, I will only be posting links with a 3 star or greater ranking.
Lots of links on journalism this week (not unusual). There's a very long article from The New Republic that's very long, but exceedingly good. Also, check out my post on newspapers as a platform – I promise it's shorter. :)
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
Offbeat

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 | 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…
-
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…
BATTLE | Google Juice Your Blog (Repost)
What is BATTLE?
I've challenged myself to battle the management at my school's newspaper The Daily Orange with a new 'new media' topic every week.
I've been doing this for a few weeks now, and have a bit of a backlog of posts on the subjects we've been talking about.
The following is a post that I just published at copress, that was originally intended for BATTLE. Expect to see more of these posts.

Bloggers are the anti-journalist.
Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among "true" journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of... blogging: consistently producinggood content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.
The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.
Links for January 16th Through January 19th
These are my links for January 16th through January 19th:
- Model for the 21st century newsroom pt.6: new journalists for new information flows | Online Journalism Blog: Breaks down the responsibilities of a new media corp. very smartly. The six roles necessary:
• Data Miner
• Multimedia Producer
• Newsfeed Aggregator
• MoJo
• Networking
• Community Editor - David Ardia: Why news orgs can police comments and not get sued Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: re: user content online and immunity granted by “CDA section 230”
• you do not have remove defamatory material if legal action is brought against you until the court instructs you to do so.
• you can… - Team Obama Told to Ditch Instant Messaging - Politics news | Newser: How backward is this!? We finally bring in a team that wants to use technology in the US government that corporations rely on and the lawyers tell them it would be too embarrassing!?
- Study: Web Ad Prices Fall, Lowering Site Revenue - AppScout: No surprise here: online ad revenue is down in Q4 2008.
- MediaShift Idea Lab . Two Coders Head Off to 'Fix Journalism' | PBS: Why does journalism need programers? “Because it’s fucking important.”
- "Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted recently as saying, “All information wants to be free," - “Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted recently as saying, 'All information wants to be free,'”
- Time for Newspaper Folks to Fight Back! Here’s How - Yahoo BOSS Twitter Google App Engine = fresh news | Webware - CNET: Search meets real-time with by using twitter. You get authority from the press, and news value from crowdsourcing a’la twitter
- Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay? - NYTimes.com: CNN.com is profitable, but they’re still worried about innovation, and how to make money.
- “WHICH brings us to a pivotal issue: money. While audiences for online news sites are growing, “revenue is everyone’s billion-dollar question,” Mr. Brown says.”- Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay? - NYTimes.com
- Twitter May Have Found Its Business Model: Twitter…what is it good for? It turns out this little service is good for a whole lot of things, despite the loud objections of people who’ve never really …
- MediaShift . The Place of Blogs in Journalism Education | PBS “The notion of blogs as immediate, uncensored and unmediated can appear at odds with established journalistic norms and practices. But it provides a valuable learning tool as it makes the students…
- Hulu - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia This is how transparency is supposed to work folks.
Links for January 8th Through January 9th
These are my links for January 8th through January 9th:
- Eyetracking research shows how younger readers view news websites - Eyetracking study summary:
What works
• left sided ads
• sidebars (related links)
• moving ads with women (regardless of side)
What doesn't work
• video
• option to personalize the site
• busy design - DiSEL-Project.org - Somehow I just found this:
Consortium of papers that do 'eye-ball' research — fantastic implications for online advertising, and not in a good way.
- mental_floss Blog 6 Unusual Things Owned by Newspapers - The newspaper business just isn't profitable (anymore), but back when they were rolling in 20% profit margins, they could afford some horizontal growth. 6 things newspapers still own.
- Dan Froomkin: What Google Can Do for Journalism - A much better list of things Google could do for newspapers than http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/five-things-goo.html
- An Oral History of the Bush White House: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com - Fantastic piece on the entire Bush Administration. It's worth the long read.
Format: Short summaries of major events chronologically introduce quotes from major players in the administration on the topic. - Introducing Tweetbacks Plugin for Wordpress | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine - How to stylize the tweetbacks plugin for wordpress
- DigiDave | Communication is Key: Editors and Publishers - In a Battle Against Inertia - "If you have an idea - you should get your organization equipped to execute on it within two weeks, maximum."
- Eyetrack studies: What we've learned and how to conduct your own :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews - Interesting look at how people read newspaper sites.
• People read in an "F" pattern
• Seems like video is not a hot topic
• banner ads are ignored







