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.

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• 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

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• 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)

• 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…

  —Wasting Ink, Beating a Dead Horse - ClickZ

• 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

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• 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