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MediaShift . State of the News Media: Newspapers Need Initiative, Innovation and Investment | PBS
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Use technology and data to “organize the community’s information.” Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They do that job well. Newspapers can’t compete on the global scale. But most newspapers still have the brand and infrastructure to do some things better in their local community.
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Unpacking the Twisted Thinking of Small Business Self-Service Online | Street Fight
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New-generation business owners have grown up unafraid to try technologies, and realize the potential for technology to be a smart competitive asset. And, we’re finally seeing signs, as noted by BIA/Kelsey, that self-serve is on the brink of breaking through.
It’s also really important to remember that most business owners are really masters of their craft, not technology-literate by vocation.
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We need better entrepreneurial journalism courses. Here’s how to fix them. – SeanBlanda.com
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In journalism school, too many professors and students think that advertising and donations are the only way to make money online. That’s mostly because journalists only read publications about journalism. By getting out of the industry it’s evident that there are other ways to make a living.
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Archive for March, 2012
Today’s links 03/22/2012
Today’s links 03/21/2012
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REVEALED: Most confusing tech words of the decade – Hindustan Times
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SoLoMo - This is not an oh-so-trendy neighborhood like Soho or Dumbo, at least not in the sense of brick-and-mortar. This is the convergence of Social, Local, and Mobile.
The Talk of the Town at SXSWi this week in Austin.
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What Journalists Can Learn From: Startups – Online News Association
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For journalists contemplating creating a media company (like our MJ Bear Fellow Laura Amico), the possibilites feel limitless — until you hit your first cash crunch. Journalists are in a particularly difficult position. Serving the public is not lucrative, and the way the industry has made money in the past is entering a free fall. A recent report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism noted that while digital represents the future of the industry, the present is grim with seven dollars in print revenue lost for every digital dollar gained.
Check out this video from Inc. on seeking investments, and pay special attention to what investors are looking for. The world of journalism and the world of startups may be galaxies apart, but it’s becoming clear to everyone that an ad-based model is a flawed model.
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n0tice: Three tools for journalists
A project I’ve been working on for the past nine months is being launched to world today – n0tice.com has come out of it’s invite-only phase .
This ‘baby’ carries with it the usual hopes and fears of early-days initiatives so I’m expecting to be watching over these first steps with that strange post-launch mixture of anxiety, pride, excitement and over-protectiveness before everything becomes established.
The official announcement can be read here and the thinking behind this social-local-mobile platform is explained far better than I can by founder Matt McAlister here.
But I thought I’d use my blog to highlight some of the features which can help journalists going about their work. There’s plenty of other things going on in there eg. revenue share on ads, community noticeboards, self-serve events listings etc. (more details on those at the n0tice blog), but here I’ll just pull out three useful tools for journalists and bloggers who might be new to it.
1. Liveblogging
Each report, or news posting, has the ability to add updates as and when required making liveblogging easier – or even simply taking notes at a live event. Updates can be a mixture of media eg. pictures, tweets, videos etc. so it’s possible to create a liveblog which is a mixture of content from a variety of sources and intersperse with direct reporting. In this way n0tice can be used a bit like storify to curate others’ activity. Adding the other media doesn’t require any embed coding, simply the URL so, in the case of tweets, just the timestamp detail is enough to include the full tweet in it’s attributable context. Same drill for youtube, flickr etc. – there’s no need to rummage around for the embed code.
2. Collborative story gathering
Because the updates can be made by any user, not just the report’s originator, there’s a great potential for collaboration here. This could stem from simply being in the same place. n0tice works around proximity to place so, even if you do not know other notice users, this location based aspect means you can easily discover who is nearby. Imagine a scenario where a major event is happening eg. a protest. The first person at the scene may have simply reported that fact however, others in the area can quickly add pictures, video, tweets or whatever to quickly build up the story.
Away from live events, the platform makes crowdsourcing from multiple locations around the world easy too. Having a noticeboard for a project with it’s own URL means that contributors can easily post their items from wherever they are. The Guardian Music noticeboard is a good example of this approach, taking submitted reviews from across the UK, but it could also be used to gather evidence for investigative work too.
3. Mobile reporting
There is already a mobile site for quick reporting which is built in html5 and so will be compatible with any phones. It’s a pared down version of the complete site and makes it easy to post a report from a location without having to worry about all the additional features until you get back to base. In the next few weeks we will also launch an iPhone app which will bring a whole new experience to the mobile reporting – watch this space!
Today’s links 03/19/2012
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SoLoMo: CityMaps Nabs $2.5M To Render Your City Social, One Block At A Time | TechCrunch
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The DealMap was one of the first startups to really nail the plotting of daily deals on an interactive map, and unsurprisingly the startup was scooped up by Google last August. There are plenty of awesome deal aggregators out there, but CityMaps wants to be the next generation, the ultimate aggregator not only of location, local business, and deal data, but also of social data, adding another few layers to the interactive map experience.
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Gannett Building Paywalls Around All Its Papers Except USA Today – Forbes
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The model is similar to the metered system adopted by The New York Times a year ago, in which online readers are able to view a limited number of pages for free each month.
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Today’s links 03/18/2012
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Not so fast SEO, Google wants to punish “overly optimized” sites | VentureBeat
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Google’s planning to punish any website that is “overly optimized,” according to Cutts. An audio clip of the discussion was posted by Search Engine Land on Saturday.
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Online newspapers: News of the world | The Economist
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The Mail now has about 30 staff in the United States to create stories for its American readers; the Guardian also has 30 in a new bureau in New York, and has experimented with translation, posting some of its Arab-spring coverage in Arabic. Neither seems to think of itself as essentially British any more, at least online.
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Profile of the Data Journalist: The Homicide Watch – O’Reilly Radar
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Homicide Watch DC started as a spreadsheet. Our start-up kit for newsrooms starting Homicide Watch sites still includes filling out a spreadsheet. The best lesson I learned when I was starting out was to find out what all the pieces are and learn how to manage them in the simplest way possible.
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Today’s links 03/13/2012
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Local newspaper paid-for iPad apps hit Apple’s Newsstand | Media news | Journalism.co.uk
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Archant has released a range of 60 titles, including local papers from its east of England division, plus a range of “Life” brand magazines, including Cotswold Life.
Apps of local Archant titles the Eastern Daily Press, Ipswich Star, Norwich Evening News and East Anglian Daily Times cost £9.99, the same as the price charged by the Guardian and Telegraph.
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Talk About Local » Thanks for the open data promise (but don’t forget our freedom of information)
I posted this at the Talk About Local blog this morning after listening to Radio 4′s piece about open data to make the point about the importance of freedom of information in helping to make government more transparent.
Today’s links 03/09/2012
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Why are companies defecting from Google Maps?
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To be sure, 25,000 map loads per day is a high threshold. Everyday mapping users aren’t going to come anywhere near it, and many businesses and apps that use mapping as an ancillary feature rather than a central component of their service would probably be unaffected. Google estimated that the usage load limits would impact about 0.35 percent of its users. However, if you’re a company like Apple — with over 180 million iPhones and 60 million iPads in the wild, all with Google Maps built in — the fees start to add up. To be sure, Google offers a Maps API Premier option with guaranteed service levels, support, and annual pricing structures: Google doesn’t publish prices for the premier plan, but it’s safe to say it’s not cheap.
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Today’s links 03/08/2012
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An open letter to Vince Cable « countculture
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One vision for the future would include making the UK a genuinely open and transparent place to do business, for example making UK Companies House as open as that in New Zealand, where all data is available openly and without charge.
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Steve Outing: No One’s Got a ‘Magic Bullet’ for Hyperlocal Revenue | Street Fight
“I think the problem with foundation money is that it’s often meant for the first couple of years to get people started and then you have to have a plan after the two years. “
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I think the problem with foundation money is that it’s often meant for the first couple of years to get people started and then you have to have a plan after the two years.
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Q&A: How a hyperlocal site gained 15,000 newsletter subscribers | Editors’ Blog | Journalism.co.uk
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Nearly all our customers are small local businesses and they either have advertising packages which include banner display and newsletter inclusion or listings in our directories.
We also like to be supportive of local independent businesses and like to write positive stories about them. Obviously we are more inclined to cover items about our clients but often feature non-clients as well.
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Today’s links 03/06/2012
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How to create the best Facebook Timeline for your newsroom
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Your newsroom’s Facebook brand Page is getting a facelift. Starting March 30th, all brand Pages on Facebook will go to the new Timeline format. You have between now and then to get your Timeline setup and ready for release. Here are a few tips to get you started:
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For example, a newspaper reporter covering a town meeting might be expected to live-tweet, file quickly, and maybe even get reax on video. That makes it tough to take good notes. Lab developer Charlie Szymanski is building a multi-function note-taking tool called Video Notebook. The software can line up tweets with video recordings of meetings to serve as navigation aids. As the reporter starts typing to transcribe, the video stops, patiently waiting for the typing to finish.
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Jon Slattery: Chris Oakley on who killed the regional press
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“Those newspapers which are not heavily indebted still produce enough cash to provide their family owners with an at least comfortable income, as they have done for generations. New entrepreneurs – and, of course, Sir Ray Tindle – have recognised this and responded by launching highly-localised weekly, sometimes monthly, titles.
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Today’s links 03/05/2012
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Numbers show that newspapers are indeed doing more with less | Poynter.
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- The hiring is happening in nontraditional industries.
- More journalists are self-employed.
- Strong employment figures don’t mean that these people aren’t being asked to work longer or accept lower pay.
The decline in newspaper editorial employment, however, doesn’t signal an overall decrease in journalism-related employment. In 2010, Michael Mandel used Bureau of Labor Statistics figures to show that the number of “news analysts, reporters, and correspondents” had rebounded after dropping.
I think his conclusions are still relevant:
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The hyperlocal blogger’s dilemma. A reader asks you to delete a post. My response. « Cwmbran Life
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It was simply a noticeboard that had not been touched for a year. Noticeboards are a pain as someone has to go out of their way and pin new things to them.
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The Search for a New Business Model | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)
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The study involved 38 newspapers from six different companies providing highly granular data about their digital revenue and sales efforts-creating a robust series of case studies. The data sought were developed in consultation with the partnering newspaper companies after site visits and interviews with multiple executives. After collecting the data, researchers conducted follow-up interviews to confirm whether the findings reflected broader company performance. Those findings, in turn, were shared with executives from seven more companies to test how widely they could be generalized. All data was provided on the basis that it would be anonymous.
This multi-faceted approach allowed researchers to draw broad conclusions and identify specific case studies, which reveal more than can be discerned from public industry data. The research approach also yielded a high level of candor in discussions with executives.
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- Of the papers sharing private data, advertising on mobile devices accounted for only 1% of the digital revenue in 2011. Executives are generally excited by the prospects of mobile, but for now it accounts for a tiny amount of revenue. Executives also believe that due to its ubiquity in the market, the phone ultimately could be more important to mobile revenue than tablets, a sign perhaps of some growing uncertainty about the ability to charge for apps, though some executives are already skeptical about how much money newspapers can make with smartphones.
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MMU launches Manchester Time Machine | News & Events | Manchester Metropolitan University
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Using footage from the university’s film archive, this moving window through time shows historical events such as bombings in 1940 and VE day across the city along with glimpses of the buildings, the people and transport of a bygone age.
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