LINKS | Down with the AP?

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• The AP is outdated and increasingly irrelevant; so are Printies

• Greg Elin on the AP's

  AP thinking of future: http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf - Interesting 'atomization of news' but still top-down publishing model.

  —GregElin (@GregElin) March 23, 2009

• 

  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.

• 

• 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

• 

• 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.

• 

• 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.