http://markcoddington.com Transforming journalism for a transformed society Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=928

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This Week in Review: A unique paywall plan in Boston, and ethics at TechCrunch and the Times

This Week in Review: Design and the Times, Google+ growing pains, and the extinction of the mogul

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 23, 2011.] Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times,named its lie of the year this week, and the choice wasn't a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact's reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the widespread belief, as Benen and the New York Times' Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it's biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of "fact-checking" news itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, a "scam of neutral expertise." Forbes' John McQuaid said PolitiFact "is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn't really need a referee." Gawker's Jim Newell was more sweeping: "why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?" He argued that fact-checking sites' designations like "pants on fire" and "Pinocchios" are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And the Washington Post's Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model "unsustainable," because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking "invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call." Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," responded by saying operations like his aren't intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact's Bill Adair stood by the organization's choice and said fact-checking "is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth." — An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she'll get a million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson's forced departure by saying that she didn't get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and e-books. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a "reverse meter" for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn't work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It's talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including the Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter's Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. — Looking back and forward for news: We're getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year's media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that "appification" would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through "versioning." Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon's Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the beginnings of a semi-revival for the newspaper business, accompanied by more paywalls and an feistier defense of their value. On a more ominous front, Dan Gillmor warned of tightening content controls by an oligopoly of copyright holders, government forces, search engines, and others. — Collaboration and curation. Emily Bell saw an increasing realization by news organizations of the importance of networks as part of the reporting process, Burt Herman described the continued emergence of a real-time, collaborative news network, and Paul Bradshaw and Carrie Brown Smith also saw collaboration as central next year. Vadim Lavrusik saw an increasingly sophisticated curation as part of that news environment. — Reading roundup: This is the last review of the year, so here are the bits and pieces to keep up with during the holidays over the next two weeks: — Congress' hearings on the Internet censorship bill SOPA adjourned last Friday, with the vote delayed until next year. Cable news finally began acknowledging the story, and the document company Scribd staging an online protest. Techdirt's Mike Masnick continued to write about the bill's dangers, looking at the ability it gives private companies to shut down any website and the way it sets up the legal framework for broader censorship. — The Wall Street Journal reported on the continued high prices of e-books, a trend that drew criticism from GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen. Elsewhere, Slate's Farhad Manjoo and Wired's Tim Carmody engaged in an interesting discussion about Amazon and independent bookstore — Manjoo praised Amazon for putting independent bookstores into decline, Carmody argued that Amazon has its eyes on a bigger prize, and Manjoo talked about how independent bookstores can fight back. — A big development in the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning cases: Wired reported that U.S. government officials found chat logs with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on the laptop of Manning, the Army private charged with leaking information to WikiLeaks. This could be critical in the U.S.' possible prosecution of Assange if the logs show that he induced Manning to leak the documents. — The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry wrote a series of posts on the practical details of the company's Digital First approach, looking at its journalistic workflow, values, editor's roles, and ways to think like a digital journalist. Meanwhile, Mashable's Lauren Indvik looked at the Atlantic's transformation into a Digital First publication. — Some great discussion about solution-oriented journalism this week: David Bornstein made a case for solution journalism at the New York Times, and Free Press' Josh Stearns put together a fantastic set of readings on solution journalism. NYU grad student Blair Hickman also shared a syllabus for a solution journalism unit.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:30:32 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=924

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This Week in Review: Navigating the Times’ pay-plan loopholes, +1 for social search, and innovation ideas

This Week in Review: Good news for paywalls, and Yahoo joins the personalized news app parade

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 9, 2011.] Do institutions have a place in news innovation?: About three weeks after Dean Starkman's indictment of future-of-news thinkers was posted online by the Columbia Journalism Review, NYU professor Clay Shirky — one of the primary targets of the piece — delivered a response late last week in the form of a thoughtful essay on the nature of institutions and the news industry. Shirky explained the process by which institutions can lapse into rigidity and blindness to their threats, and he argued that there's no way to preserve newspapers' most important institutional qualities in the digital age, so the only option left is radical innovation. Several observers — of a future-of-news orientation themselves — jumped in to echo Shirky's point. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry praised Shirky for waiting and reflecting rather than responding immediately, and media consultant Steve Yelvington seconded Shirky's point that all this talk about traditional journalistic models being overwhelmed by a decentralized, audience-focused digital tidal wave is descriptive, not prescriptive — not necessarily the way things should be, but simply the way they are. Howard Owens of the Batavian took the middle ground, declaring that evolution, not revolution, is the standard vehicle for change in journalism and laying a model for sustainable local journalism that focuses on local ownership, startups, and innovation. In the end, Owens wrote, online journalism will evolve and survive. "It will find ways to make more and more money to pay for more and more journalism.  The audience is there for it, local businesses will always want to connect with that audience, and entrepreneurial minded people will find ways to put the pieces together." The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal raised a good point in the discussion about how to preserve serious journalism: He argued that the primary obstacle won't be so much about paying for journalists to cover important public-affairs issues, but about finding a way for that news to reach a substantial percentage of the population in a given area. That "amplification" problem may be tough to solve, but could be relatively easy to scale once that initial solution is found. — Paywalls picking up steam among smaller papers: Now that the New York Times has bravely served as a paywall guinea pig for the rest of America's newspapers (apparently successfully, judging from the indicators we have so far), we're starting to see more of the nation's mid-sized papers announce online pay plans of their own. This week, Gannett, the U.S.' largest newspaper chain, revealed that it would be expanding its paywalls to more of its papers sometime next year. According to the Gannett Blog, the company began experimenting with paywalls at three newspapers last year, and while we don't know much of anything about those projects, it appears Gannett is pleased enough with them to build out on that model. The Chicago Sun-Times also announced a paywall to begin this week: It'll follow the increasingly popular metered model employed by the Financial Times and New York Times, allowing 20 page views per 30-day period before asking for .99 a month (.99 for print subscribers). PaidContent noted that the plan is being run by Press+ (the system created by Steve Brill's former Journalism Online) and that Roger Ebert has been exempted from the paywall. We also got a couple of updates from existing newspaper paywalls: MinnPost reported that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has come out ahead so far in its new paywall, generating an estimated 0,000 in subscriptions while losing a five-figure total of advertising dollars. And PaidContent reported that three paywalled MediaNews Group papers (now run by John Paton of the Journal Register Co.) have killed their Monday print editions, with a corresponding drop of their online paywall on those days. — Is this blogger a journalist?: Just when you thought the "Are bloggers journalists?" discussion was completely played out, it got some new life this week when an Oregon judge ruled that a blogger being sued for .5 million in a defamation case wasn't protected by the state's media shield law because she wasn't a journalist. As Seattle Weekly initially reported, the judge reasoned that she wasn't a journalist because she wasn't affiliated with any "newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system." This type of ruling typically gets bloggers (and a lot of journalists) riled up, and rightly so. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM gave some great context regarding state-by-state shield laws, noting that several other recent rulings have defined who's a journalist much more broadly than this judge did. These types of distinctions based on institutional affiliation are attempts to hold back a steadily rising tide, he argued. On the other hand, Forbes' Kashmir Hill described some of the case's background that seemed to indicate that this particular blogger was much more intent on defamation than performing journalism, creating dozens of sites to dominate the search results for the company she was attacking, then emailing the company to offer ,500/mo. online reputation management. Hill concluded, "Yes, bloggers are journalists. But just because you have a blog doesn’t mean that what you do is journalism." Libertarian writer Julian Sanchez agreed, saying that while the judge's ruling wasn't well worded, this blogger was not a journalist. — Facebook's new tools: A few Facebook-related notes: The social network began rolling out Timeline, the graphical life-illustration feature it announced back in September this week, starting in New Zealand. It also briefly, vaguely announced plans to extend its Twitter-like Subscribe button into a plugin for websites, a move that TechCrunch said signifies that "the company is directly attacking the entire Twitter model head-on." Cory Bergman of Lost Remote urged news orgs to get on the Subscribe bandwagon as soon as they can, as a way to extend their journalists' brands. Meanwhile, news business consultant Alan Mutter laid out a basic plan for publishers to not just gain audience on Facebook, but make money there, too. The key element of that plan may be a surprising one: "The most intriguing and perhaps most productive approach for making money off Facebook, however, is for newspapers to take over the social media marketing and advertising campaigns for businesses in their markets." — Reading roundup: Pretty slow week this week, but there were a few smaller stories worth keeping an eye on: — As a sort of sequel to the Huffington Post's OffTheBus effort in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Jay Rosen and NYU's Studio 20 are partnering with the Guardian to determine and cover "the citizens' agenda" in the 2012 election. Rosen and NYU will also be working with MediaNews and the Journal Register Co. on the local and regional level. At the Lab, Megan Garber explained what's behind the initiative. — The American Journalism Review published a piece on the journalistic ethics of retweeting that included news that the Oregonian is telling its reporters to consider all retweets as endorsements. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry rounded up (appalled) reaction and argued that editors should consider each case individually. — Ten NBC-owned TV stations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles will work with nonprofit news orgs (public radio in LA and Philly, and the Chicago Reporter and ProPublica) in a new initiative first reported by the LA Times. — The popular iPad news aggregation app Flipboard launched for iPhone this week, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman drew lessons on mobile design for news orgs from it. — The New York Times reported that most of the pack of would-be iPad competitors in the tablet market have fizzled out, though the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet have gotten off to promising starts. — Here at the Lab, longtime newspaper editor Tom Stites is in the midst of an interesting three-part series on the state of web journalism. Part one is a good overview of where we are and where we want to go, and part two looks at the wide-ranging effects of layoffs and cuts into local journalism.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-citizens-occupying-journalism-and-solving-the-copyright-problem/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-citizens-occupying-journalism-and-solving-the-copyright-problem/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:23:45 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=922

This Week in Review: An Internet censorship threat, and news orgs’ one-way Twitter use

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 2, 2011.] We've got two weeks to cover with this review, but since one of those weeks was dominated for many us by football, family and post-turkey stupor, it's a relatively quiet period to catch up on. Here's what you might have missed: Citizen journalism and the Occupy movement: The furor surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protests hit another peak before Thanksgiving, thanks in large part to the police officer who pepper-sprayed seated UC-Davis students at close range. The episode was captured in numerous videos and photos by surrounding students that quickly achieved meme status, and the Lab's Megan Garber argued that the Pepper Spraying Cop meme was crucial in pushing the movement beyond its theme of economic justice and in demanding emotional, empathetic participation by viewers. Zack Whittaker of ZDNet held up the incident as an example of citizen journalism holding authority to account and exposing spin for what it is, and GigaOM's Janko Roettgers argued that while the Arab Spring relied on this type of coverage because many kinds of professional reporting were outlawed, it's being used in the U.S. to supplement the limited resources of the professional press. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen highlighted the work of one of those Occupy citizen reporters, offering some fine advice to young would-be journalists in the process: The most important thing is to put yourself in a "journalistic situation," which is "when a live community is depending on you for regular reports about some unfolding thing that clearly matters to them." Meanwhile, the concern over police's heavy-handed tactics toward reporters—including arrests and removal from the scenes of their Occupy crackdowns—has continued. Numerous New York news organizations called for an investigation into the New York Police Department's brutishness toward journalists, and New York Times columnist Michael Powell made a sharp rebuttal of NYPD's "but they didn't have press passes!" defense. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave some thoughts about how these situations have changed now that journalists are everywhere, and Free Press' Josh Stearns gave a great example of journalistic curation in his explanation of how he's reported on journalist arrests nationwide. The Times has a few miscellaneous angles covered as well: Brian Stelter looked at Occupy coverage from within and outside the mainstream, and David Carr wondered what's next for Occupy, particularly in terms of its media narrative. — SOPA as innovation killer: On the heels of last month's congressional hearing on the U.S.' ominous Stop Online Piracy Act, alarm about the bill's potential to dramatically curtail online speech continues to echo around the web, including from the editorial boards of both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Techdirt's Mike Masnick, who has been the go-to writer on SOPA, billed one of his posts arguing against the bill as the definitive argument, and he's probably right. Masnick's argument had a few parts: 1) Enforcement is the wrong way to prevent copyright infringement; 2) Even if it was the right way, SOPA is an ineffective enforcement strategy; and 3) Along the way, SOPA would do significant collateral damage to the economy and innovation. To the first point, Masnick argued that the problem behind copyright infringement is one of a broken business model, the symptom of an industry that refuses to adjust to meet changing audience demands. "The best way, by far, to decrease infringement is to offer awesome new services that are convenient and useful," he wrote. Alex Howard of O'Reilly Media provided another long post detailing the dangers of SOPA, particularly the chilling effect it will have on innovation. He also explained to the Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran how the bill could hinder innovation in news organizations, especially small ones. In a carefully balanced piece, the Economist touched on some of the same business model issues behind SOPA that Masnick did, while Ars Technica's Timothy Lee argued that this internationally oriented bill would have damaging effects on the U.S.' reputation abroad in technological areas. — Frictionless sharing's pros and cons: Two months after Facebook introduced a new set of social apps that largely centered on automatic sharing, the company announced some of the early stats from news orgs' new apps. All the news Facebook reported is, of course, good news, but Poynter's Jeff Sonderman went a bit deeper into the apps to pull out several lessons for news orgs. Among them, he noted that publishers are finding success both within the walls of Facebook and on their own sites using the social graph. The organizations themselves approve, too: The Guardian said it's had great success reaching younger audiences through the app, and the Independent said it's given fresh attention to stories at least a decade old. Facebook's big changes introduced this fall haven't come without their discontents, though. CNET's Molly Wood argued that Facebook's new "frictionless sharing" through automatically sharing apps like the ones developed by news orgs is actually increasing barriers to sharing, at the same time that it's turning sharing passive. "Frictionless sharing via Open Graph recasts Facebook's basic purpose, making it more about recommending and archiving than about sharing and communicating." Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash chimed in, noting that Facebook is putting up additional barriers even to websites that are using its commenting systems. And ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick argued that with its new sharing functions making indiscriminate sharing the default, Facebook is starting to resemble malware. In other Facebook-related news, a study was published that found that the classic "six degrees of separation" has been reduced to 4.74 degrees between any random users across the world on Facebook. As a New York Times article on the study noted, this raises questions of whether Facebook "friends" actually correspond to real-life relationships, though some scholars defended the idea by noting that these "weak ties" have been shown to be quite important for several functions, including spreading news. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram went into some more detail on the possible effects of these weak ties that are amplified by Facebook. — Reading roundup: Several smaller stories over the past two weeks. Here they are, in short form: — WikiLeaks released a new set of documents this week — the first of a database of documents from the surveillance industry, but it's also delayed the launch of its new online document submission system. Julian Assange ripped news editors for being too subservient to the political powers that be, and the Electronic Freedom Foundation examined WikiLeaks' effects on several global revolutions, as well as the future of the U.S.' First Amendment. — At a time when almost everyone in finance is running away screaming from newspapers, billionaire Warren Buffett announced surprising plans to buy his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici saw the move as a vote of confidence in the financial viability of newspapers, while former World-Herald journalist Steve Buttry said it's about personal attachment, not confidence in the newspaper business. Jim Romenesko noted that the World-Herald's employee-owned model was struggling, which few younger employees buying in. — After at least 10 days of testimony into News Corp.'s phone hacking case, the Guardian has a good, quick summary of what we've found out so far. The company's stock remains surprisingly hot, even if its public image is plummeting: NYU's Jay Rosen wrote an Australia-centric argument that News Corp. has an incontrovertibly corrupt culture. — A couple of (hopefully) final notes about Jim Romenesko's acrimonious departure from Poynter: Romenesko gave his account of the episode, and the Lab's Joshua Benton wrote a fantastic post comparing Romenesko's aggregation practices with the tech world's dichotomy between specs and user experience. Read it, if you haven't already. — In a perceptive post, 10,000 Words' Lauren Rabaino traced the evolution of news stories' development online, and argued for a more wiki-style story format. — I'll leave you with a sharp big-picture piece by the Associated Press' Jonathan Stray, who attempted to define what he called the "digital public sphere" and outlined what we should expect it to do. It's a wonderful starting point (or rebooting point) for thinking about what we're all trying to do here with the future of journalism and information online.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-citizens-occupying-journalism-and-solving-the-copyright-problem/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:20:17 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=920

This Week in Review: Amazon’s challenge to the iPad, and Facebook’s ‘frictionless sharing’

This Week in Review: Talking Bin Laden on Twitter, journos’ online freedom, and Apple gets a taker

This Week in Review: What Twitter does to us, Google News gets more local, and making links routine

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 18, 2011.] A fight for online freedom: A U.S. House committee hearing brought an important three-week old bill on Internet censorship to the spotlight this week. The Stop Online Piracy Act (a companion of the Senate's Protect IP Act), would allow content creators to shut down websites on which people hosted unauthorized copyrighted content, or linked to sites that did. The Atlantic has a good, quick explainer, and the advocacy group Fight for the Future has a sharp video illustrating its implications. If you want to go in-depth, Techdirt has the most thorough continuing coverage of the bill. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that it seems as though pretty much everyone on the Internet hates this bill. Bunches of Internet giants oppose it — Google was a major testifier at this week's hearing (though its rep referenced the WikiLeaks payment blocks favorably, which concerned some) — Tumblr ran an online campaign against the bill by mock-censoring its users' dashboard screens, and loads of online commentators howled against it. Here's why they're so upset: This bill could inflict a ton of collateral damage, some of which could be a crucial blow for free speech on the web. The New America Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon summed up the objections to the bill well, arguing that it would handcuff tech startups, lead to political censorship, and have a chilling effect on speech on the web in general. As Dan Gillmor put it in the Guardian: "The longer-range damage is literally incalculable, because the legislation is aimed at preventing innovation – and speech – that the cartel can't control. If this law had been passed years ago, YouTube could not exist today in anything remotely like the form it has taken." As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noted, you can't have the explosion of creative production, individual empowerment, and democratic potential of the Internet without the downsides of rampant copyright infringement. If you take away the latter, he argued, you take away the former, too. And venture capitalist Brad Burnham made the interesting point that the architecture of the web is based on the assumption that there are more good actors out there than bad, an idea that this bill runs squarely against. This bill poses some potential problems for journalism, too. Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words outlined some of those issues, pointing out that articles could be censored for linking to sites with piracy information, and that citizen journalism and innovation could be stifled. — Twitter as one-way street: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report this week on the way news organizations use Twitter, and the results weren't pretty: News orgs, they found, were using Twitter predominantly as a way to simply broadcast their stories online, not taking much advantage of Twitter's interactive capabilities or its ability to link readers to a wide variety of sources. PEJ said the behavior was reminiscent of the link-phobic early days of the web, and the Lab's Megan Garber called it a "glorified RSS feed." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram was particularly troubled by how little news orgs and their journalists asked readers for news tips and feedback, and media consultant Terry Heaton said this Twitter-as-headline-feed pattern among news orgs is evidence that it really is all about the money. "If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web," he wrote. "When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else." Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, tied the study to another Pew study that reinforced the value of personal recommendations over impersonal ones. There was also quite a bit of talk on Twitter about the study's weaknesses, led largely by media scholars like USC's Robert Hernandez. Still, one j-prof, Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia, pointed out that this report's findings do echo those of several previous studies, both academic and professional. — Occupy Wall Street and scooping the wire: New York police swooped in earlier this week to clear Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters, which in itself wasn't surprising: Similar sweeps have been done in numerous American cities. What drew particular attention among future-of-news folks was the way they did it — by blocking journalists from viewing the action and even arresting 26 of them across the country, of whom seven worked full-time for traditional news orgs and seven had NYPD press credentials. The New York Times and the Atlantic have the most thorough accounts of what went on, and you can check out video of one of the reporter arrests at the Times' The Local. One interesting side story to emerge from those arrests began when AP staff members tweeted that their AP colleagues had been arrested before the news hit the wire. The AP sent out a stern memo admonishing its journalists to beat their own wire reports on Twitter, prompting the New York Times' Brian Stelter to ask, "Shouldn't the wire speed up?!" GigaOM's Mathew said news orgs should consider Twitter the newswire now, and Reuters' Anthony DeRosa argued that policies like the AP's (and Reuters') are the products of head-in-the-sand thinking. (The AP sent out another memo the next day explaining that its initial memo was more about the safety of its arrested reporters than anything.) Elsewhere in Occupy-related media and tech ideas: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal kicked off a series of posts on technology's role in the Occupy protests with a creative description of Occupy as a type of API, ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell praised Storify for its role in Occupy coverage, and New York Times freelancer Natasha Lennard explained why she's ditching the objectivity-based paradigm of the mainstream media to get involved with Occupy. — Romenesko and online attribution: A few of the loose ends from Jim Romenesko's unceremonious departure from the Poynter Institute were tied up since last week's review: Poynter renamed Romenesko's blog MediaWire, and in an interview, Romenesko shed some light on his insistence on resigning: "I worked there for 12 years, and I'm supposed to spend my final days being supervised, having a babysitter, whatever? It just seemed a little bit humiliating." Most notably, the Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry published the article resulting from the reporting that started this bizarre episode. In it, she argued that the attribution problems aren't limited to Romenesko, but are in part of a function of Poynter's move to longer — and, as she put it — "over-aggregated" posts. Several Poynter faculty members also weighed in, with Roy Peter Clark providing the sharpest take: "The standards of attribution we still apply in print may in fact be outdated in the age of sampling, file sharing, and mash-ups." Other media critics continued to defend Romenesko (Reuters' Jack Shafer) and rip Poynter (Terry Heaton, Felix Salmon). The Gender Report's Jasmine Linabary, meanwhile, wondered why we weren't seeing much attention paid to women commenting on the Romenesko story. — Amazon releases the Kindle Fire: Amazon released its much-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet this week, and the reviews were mixed. (PaidContent has a quick roundup of some of the big reviewers.) It got panned by a few places (most notably Wired), but the general sentiment was that while the Fire can't match up the iPad and some of the other top-end tablets, it's still a decent deal at 0. As the New York Times' David Pogue put it: "The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish." A few other notes regarding the Fire: Time Inc. had five of its magazines on the Fire at its launch after some protracted negotiating, and Amazon has made the Fire's source code available to developers to encourage software experimentation. Wired's Steven Levy, meanwhile, had an in-depth discussion with Amazon's Jeff Bezos about the state of the company. — Reading roundup: Bunches and bunches of interesting little stories this week. Here are a few we haven't hit yet: — A federal judge ruled late last week that Twitter has to hand over information about possible WikiLeaks supporters, one of whom, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir, expressed her outrage in the Guardian over the decision's threat to civil rights. ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram were also among those concerned about the future of privacy online. — A few advertising-related tidbits: Reuters' Felix Salmon summarized a fascinating talk he gave on the woeful state of online advertising and what to do about it, Wired looked at Twitter's efforts to make serendipity pay as an advertising model, and the Lab examined newspapers' advertising efforts on Twitter. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an innovative cross-platform interactive ad that also mimicked its news content, which led ACES' Charles Apple and the Columbia Journalism Review's Clint Hendler to question its ethics. The Times told Hendler the ad couldn't realistically be confused with actual Times content. — The Columbia Journalism Review explored a crucial issue in the changing news ecosystem — what happens to all the communities that aren't hubs for innovation? — with a series of pieces on Modesto, California. — Also in CJR, Megan Garber wrote a fascinating article looking back at how journalism has viewed its future over the years. The University of Colorado's Steve Outing decided to add to that tradition of journalistic fortune-telling with his set of predictions about what online news will look like 20 years from now.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

This Week in Review: Design and the Times, Google+ growing pains, and the extinction of the mogul

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 11, 2011.] Google+ courts businesses: After banning businesses for its first four months, Google+ finally let them in this week, launching Google+ Pages, which gives accounts to business and groups. (Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land put together the best walkthrough of what Pages are and how they work.) Businesses jumped right in, including, of course, news orgs: Breaking News put together a running list of news Pages, and one Fox News show announced it would do Hangouts with presidential candidates, starting with Mitt Romney next week. As Business Insider explained, Google has a big carrot to draw businesses in: Direct Connect, which allows users to go directly to a business's Google+ Page if they the business's name preceded by a "+". Lost Remote's Cory Bergman (who also runs the Breaking News Google+ account) said businesses should also get some SEO mojo from users clicking +1 on their Google+ account, which he argued was enough of a payoff to justify maintaining a Google+ account — at least for now, anyway. Social media guru Robert Scoble, on the other hand, was disappointed in Pages, calling them clumsy and difficult to manage. Fast Company's Mark Wilson brought up the same point and added that since Google gives individuals two options of how to engage with businesses instead of Facebook's single "Like," most people will choose the weaker option. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid wondered what exactly that weaker option, giving the business a +1, will do. For Slate's Farhad Manjoo, the addition of Pages was too little, too late for Google+. He declared the social network dead, a victim of Google's launch-then-fix-it model that has worked so well for most of its products. "But a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place," Manjoo wrote, arguing that Google should have let its users be more free to experiment to make up for its initial deficits. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and the New York Times' Nick Bilton countered that it's too soon to give up on the network, because Google+ is designed to be not just another social network, but instead the connective tissue integrating an entire way to experience the web. Google has some pretty good cards still its hand that can help it reach that goal, too, he said. — Romenesko, attribution, and hair-splitting: Jim Romenesko, the dean of media bloggers soon to semi-retire from the Poynter Institute, was pushed into a bizarre little controversy yesterday when his editor, Julie Moos, wrote a post taking him to task for "incomplete attribution" in his posts — essentially, using language from the posts he's summarizing (and linking to) without putting it in quote marks. Moos wrote the post in response to questions from the Columbia Journalism Review as it develops an article on the subject. Romenesko wasn't asked to resign (he offered his resignation twice but Moos rejected it), but he will have to follow stricter attribution guidelines and have his posts edited before they go up. 10,000 Words' Elena Zak praised Poynter's transparency, but to most observers, this was ethical hairsplitting run amok. Media consultant Mark Potts hit many of the main points in his defense of Romenesko, noting that no one has complained to Poynter about this in the decade he's been blogging for them. Reuters' Felix Salmon pointed to Romenesko's stature in the blogosphere and his role in establishing the field's norms: "If your guidelines go against what Jim is doing, then there might well be something wrong with your guidelines." The Awl's Choire Sicha took the opportunity to level a more serious charge at Poynter's handling of Romenesko's blog, saying that "Poynter has worked systematically to erode a fairly noble, not particularly money-making thing as it works to boost 'engagement'" and other online-media buzzwords. For his part, Romenesko himself expressed his frustration in typically understated fashion in an email to the New York Times, then tweeted that "I feel it's time to go." — Is future-of-news talk hurting journalism?: This week, we got the rare opportunity to have a substantive, big-picture (meta)discussion about the way we think about the future of news when the Columbia Journalism Review published a thorough critique by Dean Starkman of 'future of news' thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen. The piece is quite long, but worth a close read: In short, Starkman argued that these thinkers are undermining the most valuable form of journalism — public-service journalism — by disempowering journalists and their institutions and by wasting their limited time (and the public's) with endless, mostly useless experimentation and busywork. Instead, Starkman proposed a model built around maintaining journalism's most valued institutions, arguing that "journalism needs its own institutions for the simple reason that it reports on institutions much larger than itself." Several people objected to Starkman's argument, starting with media strategist Terry Heaton, who countered that it's not institutions the future-of-news people have a problem with, but hierarchical institutions, and former Wall Street Journal writer Jason Fry, who said that some forms of news are indeed a commodity. A few others, like Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and Steve Buttry of the Journal Register Co. argued that deep reporting vs. new media mastery isn't an either/or proposition, pointing to examples of news organizations like the Guardian who do both well. Former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell also wrote about her old paper's efforts in making a similar point, arguing that the spirit of muckraking is being carried on in these digital, networked initiatives. "The opening of electronic ears and eyes is not a replacement for reporting. It should be at the heart of it. And if it is not, then the institutions that Starkman laments might be to blame," she wrote. Starkman responded by arguing that it all boils down to stories, but the future-of-news folks want to talk about something else, and here at the Lab, C.W. Anderson weighed in on with a smart post on the ways in which institutions can be forces for both good and ill. — A force for digital change in the newsroom: The New York Times announced this week the retirement (effective the end of the year) of one of the pioneers of news on the web — Martin Nisenholtz, a senior vice president at the paper. As the Times noted, Nisenholtz has been intimately involved in just about every major technological initiative the Times has undertaken since he came on board in 1995: Launching the website, moving it into mobile media and tablets, and instituting its paywall earlier this year. Poynter's Julie Moos put together a greatest-hits of commentary by and about Nisenholtz over the years, including his prediction in early 2004 that smart phones would be a particularly influential force in changing news delivery. PaidContent's Staci Kramer talked about his lasting impact: No matter how slow (or fast) the transition seemed, "the NYT has an integrated newsroom with an understanding that digital, while it may not always be first, is equal." Dave Winer, who helped create RSS, pointed out that Nisenholtz made the Times the first major publisher to license its stories for RSS, making a significant contribution to the growth of the open web in the process. The Lab's Joshua Benton used that story to illustrate thateven if news orgs can't invent these transformative web tools, they can still play a big role in their evolution and adoption. Media prof C.W. Anderson also noted another contribution Nisenholtz made — by allowing a scholar access to study his paper's digital efforts, he helped revitalize the field of digital media sociology. — A neutral way to tweet: If a few of the most recent sets of social media guidelines are any indication, news organizations are really struggling with the concept of their journalists' retweets on Twitter. Several of those organizations have asked journalists not to retweet opinionated content without comment, lest they be thought of as biased themselves. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman tried to resolve that problem with an idea for an NT, or neutral tweet, which people could use to retweet something while declaring their neutrality about it. Most journalism folks on Twitter didn't like the idea, as Sonderman himself showed in his fine roundup of reaction. Many of them saw it as a way to avoid interacting naturally on Twitter, a "pacifier" or "high tech milquetoast," in the words of j-profs Jay Rosen and Matt Waite. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram expanded on the idea, calling it a solution to the wrong problem. "By pretending that their journalists don’t have opinions, when everyone knows that they do, mainstream media outlets are suggesting their viewers or readers are too stupid to figure out where the truth lies," he wrote. — Reading roundup: Lots of smaller stories and discussions popping in and out of the future-of-news world this week. Here's a few of them: — This week in News Corp. scandal: Rupert Murdoch's son, James, told British Parliament he didn't mislead them last time he talked to them. Or, as Gawker put it, he asserted that everyone's a liar except him. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade doesn't believe him. Murdoch also said the company might still close its British newspaper, the Sun. And we also found out News of the World hired people to spy on their hacking victims' lawyers. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger put the scandal in perspective in a lecture. — New York Times media critic David Carr mused on the decline of WikiLeaks as an organization and its implications for radical transparency as a movement. Dave Winer and Mathew Ingram responded by questioning why the Times hasn't supported WikiLeaks more itself. — Andy Rooney of CBS' 60 Minutes, one of the icons of American broadcast television, died late last week at age 92. You can check out the obituaries from CBS and the New York Times, a set of his classic essays at Gawker, and a thoughtful remembrance by tech entrepreneur Anil Dash. — Finally, two great pieces of advice for two groups of people: Longtime News & Record editor John Robinson for newspaper editors, and MIT's Ethan Zuckerman for media consumers (read: all of us).]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:10:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=915

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 4, 2011.] Should we rethink online paywalls?: It may not be grabbing as many headlines as it was a year ago, but the paid-content train keeps rollin' along, with two more newspapers jumping on board this week: Britain's The Independent is launching a metered paywall for readers outside the U.K. (powered by the Press+ system formerly of Journalism Online), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is launching a metered model similar to that of the New York Times — 20 free page views a month, after which the paywall kicks in. Print subscribers will have unlimited access, and the Strib estimates that it'll eventually get million to million in annual revenue from the plan. On another paywall front, the Lab's Justin Ellis reported that Google, which has been working with publishers on paid content online for a while, has been quietly experimenting with a survey-as-paywall, in which visitors are asked to answer a survey question in order to gain access to the site. This week's quarterly circulation numbers included some positive news about the New York Times' paywall, as Ken Doctor noted at the Lab last week: The New York Times' Sunday circulation actually went up, for the first time in five years. Poynter's Rick Edmonds pointed out that this quarter's numbers are the result of a formula in flux, but the good signs have people like NPR's David Folkenflik rethinking the value of online news paywalls. Not everyone's high on paywalls, of course: After initially being surprised by the high numbers of subscribers to Newsday's online edition, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici found that the number paying for it on its own is still under 1,000. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said that despite its initial success, the Times' paywall is still a stopgap strategy — "an attempt to create the kind of artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy. And if that is all that newspapers are trying to do, the future looks pretty bleak indeed." — Yahoo's new personalized news app: Yahoo jumped into the tablet world this week, announcing the launch of several products for the iPad, including the social TV app IntoNow and Livestand, a "personalized living magazine" (yup, another one). The obvious point of comparison is Flipboard, and opinions were varied as to how well Livestand compares to Flipboard. Mashable's Ben Parr was pretty impressed, though he noted that Livestand and Flipboard are gathering their content in different ways — Flipboard through your social feeds, and Livestand through its content partners. Others weren't quite so wowed. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital said Livestand shouldn't be anything new for Flipboard users, and Wired's Tim Carmody saw the difference between Flipboard and Livestand that Parr mentioned as a fundamental error by Yahoo. Flipboard is built for readers, to allow them to distill the good stuff from their social and RSS feeds, he said. But "Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch." The Lab's Ken Doctor gave several useful areas in which to evaluate Livestand and the coming tablet aggregator wars. Advertising is a big part of what's new with Livestand: With it, they also unveiled Living Ads, which is the latest attempt to create a magazine-like ad on the tablet, using HTML5. As Adweek noted, the ads take up a third of the screen and are interactive, with animation and video available. These ads are pretty expensive, but Yahoo's Blake Irving told Business Insider they get advertisers away from the CPM model, which he believes hasn't served advertisers well. — Is Assange a step closer to the U.S.?: A week after WikiLeaks announced that it would temporarily shut down to raise money, the whistleblowing website got some more bad news when a British high court ruled that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, can be extradited to Sweden on charges of sexual assault, rejecting an appeal of a ruling made earlier this year. Assange can still appeal to Britain's Supreme Court, but it's headed to Sweden to face trial. Assange has opposed the extradition to Sweden because he contends that the rulers of that country are aligned against him, but the specter of another extradition is also looming: As Paul Sawers of The Next Web noted, Assange and his supporters are concerned that a move to Sweden would make it much easier for him to be sent to the United States, where the Obama administration and members of Congress have discussed prosecuting him for releasing sensitive information through WikiLeaks. Forbes' Andy Greenberg argued, however, that Assange would be more likely to be sent to the U.S. from Britain than from Sweden. The Associated Press looked at whether WikiLeaks could survive Assange's extradition — its answer: probably not — and Swedish columnist Karin Olsson wrote in the Guardian that Assange has lost all of his intriguing man-of-mystery status in her country. But Australian journalist Matt da Silva urged people not to let up in their support of Assange, praising him as a crusader against government's efforts to manage and control the media. — Reconciling journalism and political views: What started a couple of weeks ago as yet another public radio conundrum regarding its employees and political opinions morphed into an interesting discussion about journalism and transparency. Two public radio employees, Lisa Simeone of Soundprint and Caitlin Curran of WYNC's The Takeaway, were fired after taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests. Curran told her story at Gawker, and Brooke Gladstone, host of the NPR show On the Media, discussed NPR's policy in a live chat. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf argued that WNYC was wrong to fire Curran, pointing out that several NPR reporters have made essentially the same point she did in her protest sign, and have been praised for it. He and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor also made the case for doing away with the philosophy of viewlessness in the American press. As Gillmor put it, telling journalists they can't even hint at what they believe "puts a barrier between them and their audiences – a serious problem given that news and journalism are evolving from a lecture into a conversation." Though he wasn't discussing the public radio firings, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan did provide a counterargument, defending journalistic facelessness and an institutional writing style. And as if on cue, former New York Sun editor Ira Stoll launched News Transparency, a site that lets people know about journalists' backgrounds as a kind of imposed transparency from the outside, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put it. — The Verge takes off: A new tech blog to watch: The sports blog network SB Nation launched a tech blog called The Verge this week, under the leadership of several former Engadget staffers. As part of the launch, SB Nation and The Verge will both fall under a new parent media called Vox Media. The site got some initial rave reviews over its updating story streams, something that SB Nation has been using for a while. Business Insider has an interview with the folks behind the site, and the Lab's Justin Ellis talked about where SB Nation/Vox will go from here. The Lab's Joshua Benton also pulled three lessons for news orgs out of the site's development, emphasizing bold, tablet-style design, structured data, and community. — Reading roundup: Tons of stuff going on this week. Here's the TL;DR version of the rest: — Google began giving journalists photos next to their stories in Google News — but only if they have a Google+ account. Alexander Howard was OK with it, but Columbia's Emily Bell wasn't, calling it coercion and saying it only helped Google, not journalism. — The St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, announced it will change its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, broadening its geographic focus. Poynter rounded up some of the reaction on social media and compared the decision to other recent newspaper name changes. — Your weekly News Corp. phone hacking update: New documents released by a committee of Britain's Parliament revealed that a company attorney warned of a culture of hacking back in 2008. Here's the summary from News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal and a blow-by-blow from the Guardian. — As GigaOM's Colleen Taylor reported, Twitter has quietly unveiled new Top News and Top People search functions. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman looked at the effect it will have on publishers. — Media analyst Frederic Filloux examined the sad state of web news design, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center said all the ugliness could help push users to the mobile web. — The Guardian launched n0tice, their open community news platform. The Lab's Megan Garber took a look at the new site, and The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined it as a possible replacement for local newspapers. — Finally, here's hoping this inspiring Lab post by Jacob Harris will forever put an end to the insipid question, "Will X save journalism?"]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:05:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=913

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This Week in Review: The FCC’s big compromise, WikiLeaks wrestles with the media, and a look at 2011

This Week in Review: Getting it right on Twitter, analytics and the newsroom, and AOL’s tablet daily

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Oct. 28, 2011.] News consumers and paid content on tablets: We're now a year and a half into the tablet era, so we've started to get a more stable sense of exactly who's using them and how. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism added to that understanding this week with what's probably the most comprehensive study to date on tablet use, particularly for news. The survey's big headline was of the good-news, bad-news variety: 77% of users read news on their tablets at least weekly, and 53% do it daily. That's the good news. The bad news? Only 14% have paid directly for the news they're reading on their tablet — though another 23% get access as part of a print subscription package. And those who haven't paid valued the free-ness of their news sources pretty highly. The fact that people love to read news on their iPads but aren't particularly willing to pay for it didn't seem to worry PEJ director Tom Rosenstiel too much — he told Adweek that things will be different in a year or two as people get used to paying for tablet news, just as they got used to paying for TV. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted that while most users prefer to get their news via browser, many of those in the paying crowd are the ones using mostly apps. He suggested going with a two-tiered paid/free approach, with an ad-driven browser site and a paid, premium app. "Rather than bemoan the small number of people who will pay, or freeze out the large number who won’t, the smart publisher will find ways to capture both audiences," he said. A couple of other tidbits from the study: John Paul Titlow of ReadWriteWeb said it's good news for publishers and e-businesses that tablets are drawing much more of people's undivided attention than desktops or laptops did, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM noted that people aren't sharing much of the news they're reading on their tablets, identifying social features as an area where news orgs could stand to improve on tablets. — WikiLeaks goes into hibernation: WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange announced this week that the site may be forced to close by the end of the year because what he called a "financial blockade" of major banks and credit card companies refusing to process donations for it. The blockade, begun last December after WikiLeaks began releasing its collection of diplomatic cables, has wiped out as much as 95% of the site's revenues, according to Assange, forcing it run on its reserves over the past several months. WikiLeaks has stopped processing leaks and shifted its resources to fundraising, including lawsuits and petitions it has filed in several countries to force the companies to process their donations. As Australia's the Age reported, its leaders hope to back up and running within a month. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor chastised news organizations for their lack of concern about the financial companies' action against WikiLeaks, saying the blockade is "a danger to everyone. It is a harbinger of a future where governments will find new leverage points to shut down the media they don't like." Gawker's Adrian Chen, on the other hand, posed some good questions on WikiLeaks' use of money this year, wondered how the group has used up most of its reserves (reported at .3 million at the end of 2010) without publishing any major new leaks. With WikiLeaks now in rebuilding mode, the Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve reflected on what the site has done for transparency and networked journalism, and her conclusion wasn't a flattering one. She called its experiment in enabling mass document leaking "an abysmal failure," noting that its most consequential leaks all seem to have come from one man — Bradley Manning — who's now in jail. "All those theoretical discussions of an anarchic new citizen press driven by anonymous file-sharing remain academic," she said. Reeve noted that leakers seem to be no safer now than they were a few years ago, and that goes for the ones who give information to traditional news organizations as well as WikiLeaks. Writing in the New York Times, data security expert Christopher Soghoian praised WikiLeaks for its security measures to protect its confidential sources while lamenting how poorly traditional news orgs do at the technical aspects of that job. It's probably not a coincidence, then, that news orgs' efforts at creating WikiLeaks-like leak submission programs have stalled, as Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported. — Murdoch & Co. hang on at News Corp.: The long-simmering outrage at News Corp. over its phone-hacking and circulation inflation scandals may have been expected by some to come to a head last Friday at the company's annual shareholder meeting, but there were relatively few fireworks to be seen. Rupert Murdoch made a defiant address to shareholders, describing the criticism of his company as "both understandable scrutiny and unfair attack." As expected, there were shareholders who called for Murdoch and his sons to step down, and a good number of critical questions parried by Murdoch, as paidContent documented. But the main business of the meeting remained unaffected: Murdoch and his sons were re-elected to the News Corp. board, though there was speculation that an "embarrassingly high" number of shareholders voted against them, according to the Independent. Meanwhile, former Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton testified before a committee of Parliament about the phone hacking and, predictably, gave a whole lot of "I don't recall"s and non-answers. — Reading roundup: This week was one of those weeks without many big stories in the future-of-journalism world, but with a lot of small ones. Here are a few of them: — As Megan Garber reported at the Lab this week, USA Today tried something new that we may see other news organizations doing in the future, licensing the data from the databases it produces on its website to commercial app developers. As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and the Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran pointed out, the real benefit of moves like this may be less about revenue and more about a creating a crowdsourced R&D department. — The death of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was the big news story late last week, and there were a couple of media-oriented angles. The big one was whether news orgs chose to show pictures or video of Gadhafi dead or being beaten. Poynter's Julie Moos found that U.S. newspapers were less likely than European ones to run the gruesome images. Those orgs that did run them ended up having to defend themselves. Meanwhile, Techdirt's Mike Masnick looked at the copyright issues involved with camera-phone footage of Gadhafi's beating. — After Jeff Jarvis and Evgeny Morozov traded blows over the past couple of weeks about Jarvis' new book, "Private Parts," the Lab's Megan Garber weighed in with a brilliant post on why books's ideas aren't truly read and discussed, and how to make it so that they are. Jarvis chimed in with some more ways to disrupt the book/conference cycle. — Gawker's Hamilton Nolan unearthed a sketchy linking-for-pay scheme from a small marketing company that claimed to have pulled it off with the Huffington Post and Business Insider. Those two orgs, naturally, issued denials. — Media/tech entrepreneurs Cody Brown and Katie Ray introduced another venture this week with Scroll, a tool intended to help publishers use a variety of more sophisticated web designs without knowing how to code them. The Lab had a profile of it. — In a masterful column, the New York Times' David Carr suggested that some of the Occupy Wall Street agitation should be directed toward newspaper chains, such as Gannett and the Tribune Co., who give their executives massive bonuses while laying off employees. — Finally, I've linked to a lot of "programming for journalists" guides and tipsheets here, but this one by Jonathan Richards at the Guardian may be the best I've seen at capturing and explaining the coding mentality in simple terms. Give it a read.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-things-get-testier-at-news-corp-google-makes-an-identity-compromise/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-things-get-testier-at-news-corp-google-makes-an-identity-compromise/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:56:15 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=911

This Week in Review: Murdoch’s mess keeps growing, aggregation ethics, and giving context to Google+

This Week in Review: An open-newsroom experiment, and News Corp.’s troubles spread to the WSJ

This Week in Review: The great hurricane hype debate, and Google+ as an ‘identity service’

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Oct. 21, 2011.] Growing tension at News Corp.: We'll be hearing the news from News Corp.'s annual shareholder meeting later today, and media observers are certainly watching the meeting closely, especially after reports late last week that numerous groups representing about a quarter of the company's investors are planning on voting against many of News Corp.'s board members. The list of problems at News Corp. has continued to lengthen over the past three months, and an analyst interviewed by NPR's David Folkenflik asserted that in an ordinary company, the board would have fired the CEO by now. But Rupert Murdoch, of course, is no ordinary CEO. But even in the close-knit top leadership of News Corp., this scandal is leading to significant tension between Murdoch and his son, James, who was until recently the company's heir apparent. A New York Times report this week gave details of the power struggles in the Murdoch family, and Reuters' Jack Shafer pointed out that public family squabbles aren't new for the Murdochs. Both media analyst Alan Mutter and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor were doubtful, however, that the complaints of investors would make any sort of difference in the way News Corp. is run, especially since Murdoch has a 40% share in the company. "As long as Rupert Murdoch is in control, there are only two factors that will lead to change: a genuine threat to his family's money and power," Gillmor said. Without those threats, he argued, shareholders aren't going to see a change in direction. And amid all of this, News Corp.'s various scandals continue to play out publicly. On the phone-hacking front, an attorney who did work for News Corp. told Parliament that he knew the company had misled Parliament about the extent of the hacking but did nothing about it. And on the Wall Street Journal's circulation inflation, News Corp. reportedly knew about the issue almost a year before its executive resigned over it, and Poynter's Steve Myers found that WSJ Asia also relies heavily on deeply discounted issues. But the Journal isn't the only one that relies on those discounted circulation ploys: The Guardian's Roy Greenslade noted that three major U.K. papers do, and Poynter's Rick Edmonds said some U.S. papers do as well. Media analyst Frederic Filloux warned of the effects of this kind of culture of cheating: "such tricks push prices further down because media buyers increasingly distrust the system. Today, they apply the rule 'you cheat, we cut prices'. And the downward spiral continues." — Getting identity right online: Google+ announced a big change in its policies this week, giving word that it will soon amend its real-names-only rule to allow pseudonyms. That policy has been the subject of much debate over the past couple of months, and the coming change prompted Electronic Freedom Foundation to declare victory. Programmer Jamie Zawinski called that statement "shamefully credulous" and wondered why it's going to take months to implement. He predicted that Google+ will still require real names, but will allow nicknames and pseudonyms in addition. Before its change, Google+ had drawn some more criticism for its identity policy. Christopher "moot" Poole has been one of the more prominent advocates for anonymity online — it's central to 4chan, the image-based message board he founded — and he articulated his position again this week in a short tech-conference speech. (Good summaries by VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb.) This time, he targeted the identity policies of Facebook and Google+, saying they try to force-fit people into a single identity, when they're really much more complex than that. "Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, but we’re actually more like diamonds," Poole said. "Look from a different angle, and you see something completely different." He argued that Google+ missed a big opportunity to innovate by allowing users to manipulate who they share with, rather than who they share as. Twitter has a better handle on identity, he said, as an interest-based community, rather than an identity-based one. Wired's Tim Carmody praised Poole's philosophy of identity, arguing that it's practical without surrendering to Facebook's one-identity-for-all-time mantra. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram also praised Twitter's approach, arguing that its commitment to free speech is far more important than whether participants are using their real names. — Making nonprofit news sustainable: The Knight Foundation released a comprehensive report on what makes local nonprofit news organizations work, featuring profiles of eight orgs, including many of the big names in that corner of the news world — Bay Citizen, MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, and so on. The study highlighted three keys to sustainability for local nonprofit news orgs: First, a workable business development strategy, which means that even if they start with foundation support, they need to treat it as something that will diminish over time, rather than an ongoing revenue stream. Second, they need innovative approaches to building engagement both online and offline. And third, they need the skills to go deep into data journalism and interactive features, which "require technological capacity that sits outside the experience of many journalists." Poynter's Rick Edmonds dug deeper into the study, noting a couple of other interesting tidbits: Though the sites are working hard to diversify their funding, more than half of it is still coming from foundations, and another third from donations. He also said these news sites need to have deep community roots and be able to adapt to specific local information needs, rather than just having a general "replace what's gone" goal. — Apple's Newsstand starts strong: It's only been around a little more than a week, but according to a couple of app sellers, the early indicators on Apple's new Newsstand have been quite positive. Exact Editions and Future, two companies that produce and sell apps for publishers, said that sales have more than doubled across the board since Newsstand's launch, according to paidContent. The Daily was the biggest winner, coming out No. 1 on Newsstand's first bestseller list. While noting that it's very early, Jessica Roy of 10,000 Wordscalled the news "incredibly encouraging for digital publishers." At the Knight Digital Media Center, Amy Gahran wondered whether Newsstand's popularity and ease of use will eventually spell the end of standalone iPhone and iPad news apps. That may not be a bad thing, she said: "Standalone news apps may look cool, but cumulatively they’re also a hassle for users who mainly just want access to content, not special interactive features." Meanwhile, another news org, the Economist, has had to give in to Apple's requirements that app payments go through its App Store, rather than through the web. — Reading roundup: Here's what else went on in the world of news and tech in the past week: — Google announced it would shut down a few services: Code Search, which lets people look up open-source code, and two social networks, Jaiku and Google Buzz. ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick reflected on Buzz's privacy problems, and j-prof Josh Braun said Buzz reminds us that a social network site doesn't have to be huge to be priceless. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM wondered if Google has really learned all that much from Buzz and Jaiku. — The New York Times' David Streitfeld wrote on Amazon's burgeoning business as a book publisher, both online and in print. Mathew Ingram told publishers to wake up and realize that they're a middleman that people are figuring out how to eliminate. — The Guardian gave an update after a week its open-newslist experiment, reporting that it's drawn quite a bit of interest from readers and that it's been expanded to include longer-range plans. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry noted that some of his company's papers are doing this, too. — After its initial five-year run ended, the Knight Foundation announced its Knight News Challenge will continue in 2012, being run three times a year. — The real-time web got a real breaking-news test yesterday when the news of former Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi had died broke with numerous conflicting reports. Poynter's Julie Moos looked at how major news sites handled the uncertainty. — It's something that's harped on for at least a decade, but Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore showed that news orgs still have a ways to go in providing accessible contact information for their journalists.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-things-get-testier-at-news-corp-google-makes-an-identity-compromise/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:52:15 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=909

This Week in Review: Things get testier at News Corp., Google+ makes an identity compromise

This Week in Review: Getting it right on Twitter, analytics and the newsroom, and AOL’s tablet daily

]]> [This review was originally posted on Oct. 14, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] The Guardian opens up its news agenda: The Guardian took a significant step in the evolution from a closed to open newsroom this week, allowing the public access to a live account of its internal list of planned news stories. In his announcement of the experiment, Dan Roberts said that it would start with a short trial and that it wouldn't include exclusives, embargoes or legally sensitive unconfirmed material. He also concluded with the rationale behind the bold move: "It seems there are more people wanting to know where their news comes from and how it is made. Painful as it might be for journalists to acknowledge, they might even have some improvements to make on the recipe too." Here's the newslist — yup, it looks pretty much like a simple version of standard newsroom budget. Roberts talked to Mashable about how helpful Twitter has been in pulling the plan off, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM praised the move as one other news organizations should emulate, arguing that not only does it benefit the news organization with more ideas and feedback, but that users are beginning to expect this kind of openness. Others were more skeptical. Elena Zak of 10,000 Words wondered if the Guardian's experiment is just a dressed-up version of the status quo, since the paper's editors are still maintaining all of the control over what gets published and what doesn't. And j-prof Andrew Cline took issue with Roberts' statement that this move is "a bit of a leap," pointing to a student news project that's opened its coverage plans via Facebook since it began. "It was a 'bit of a leap' 10 years ago. Today it’s what I’m teaching my journalism students," Cline wrote. — Circulation scandal at the Journal: News Corp.'s series of scandals reached the Wall Street Journal this week with a report that the Journal channeled money through a European company to buy copies of its own paper, in exchange for favorable coverage in the paper's pages. Just before the report surfaced, the man at the center of the scandal, a European executive at Journal parent company Dow Jones named Andrew Langhoff, resigned, and the whistleblower was fired in January. The Guardian, which broke the story, also reported that the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the circulation watchdog, will investigate the issue. The Journal itself confirmed many of the scandal's elements with its own story published the following day. Poynter's Steve Myers put together a good summary of the story and a quick roundup of the reaction, and Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review provided some more reporting on the Journal's coverage of its alleged circulation-inflating partner. Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that the Journal's favorable coverage was in a special section, where fewer people were likely to read it and take it seriously, and that even with the scandal, Wall Street Journal Europe's circulation only reached 75,000. Several observers pointed out, as Chittum put it, that News Corp. keeps showing a habit of covering up its misdeeds rather than being honest about them. The result of this is that everyone will assume the worst about any possible News Corp. scandal, according to Reuters' Felix Salmon. The next step, Salmon said, is for the scandals to spread beyond newspapers to Fox or Sky or HarperCollins, which would be truly disastrous for Rupert Murdoch. — Steve Jobs, devotion, and control: The tributes to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs continued to pour in late last week after his death last Wednesday. Technology Review editor Jason Pontin continued with the theme of Jobs' love for creating products themselves, and tech guru Guy Kawasaki reflected on 12 business lessons he learned from Jobs. The most interesting of those lessons was that customers can't tell you what they need: "If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, 'Better, faster, and cheaper;—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using." Others reflected on the flood of appreciation for Jobs upon his death and the devotion of Apple fans: TechCrunch's MG Siegler talked about Jobs as "the first truly transformative figure to die in an age of transformative technology, and John Biggs mused about Jobs as a pop-culture artist. At Fast Company, j-prof Adam Penenberg wrote about the way the uniqueness of Apple's products have had an addictive effect on us. Some commentary was more critical. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan pointed to Apple's track record of censorship and authoritarianism and Jobs' brusque personal style, and the Knight Center's Summer Harlow documented Jobs' often strained relationship with journalism. Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey went deeper into Jobs' controlling behavior toward journalists, noting, as Dan Gillmor put it in his piece, Apple's "uncanny ability to get normally skeptical journalists to sit up and beg like a bunch of pet beagles." — New and old media within a protest movement: The Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of the biggest ongoing stories in the U.S. over the past couple of weeks, featuring heavily in online discussion and garnering increasing coverage from traditional media. The story has some relevance for the future-of-news discussion as well: The New York Times' David Carr looked at the production of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, noting with some nostalgic pride the enduring role of newspapers in protest movements. News designer Mario Garcia was also surprised and pleased that so many young protesters would use various media, including a newspaper, as part of their movement's voice. The Times also examined another media tool being used by Occupy Wall Street protesters — Pastebin, a site created as a way for programmers to save and share code, but now being used as a (mostly) anonymous place to share protest information. Nitasha Tiku of BetaBeat pointed out that Pastebin was also used as a hangout for IRC, particularly for the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec, well before Occupy Wall Street came on the scene. Meanwhile, Erika Fry of the Columbia Journalism Review reported on the New York Police Department's efforts to issue and enforce press credentials at the protests, once again raising thorny questions about who is and isn't a journalist. — Reading roundup: It's been a somewhat slower week this week news-wise, but there were still a few other interesting issues that are worth keeping up on: — Facebook released its long-anticipated iPad app this week: The New York Times has some of the basic features (it's free), and All Things Digital detailed the process Facebook developers went through to get their own app and other Facebook-based apps onto Apple devices. — A few bits on news paywalls: PaidContent reported on Press+'s efforts to sell paywalls to college newspapers (Press+ is the name of the now-bought-out Journalism Online's paid-content system). Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explored how news organizations decide whether to take paywalls down for huge news events, and NetNewsCheck examined the market-wide effects of one newspaper's paywall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. — We've heard a lot of talk about "Digital First" lately, particularly from folks within the Journal Register Co. Steve Yelvington, who works within fellow newspaper chain Morris Communications, offered a sharp, succinct explanation of what a Digital First transition entails. One key concept: accepting audience responsibility, not just news responsibility. — The Lab had a few fantastic pieces this week (no, Josh didn't tell me to write that) — j-profs Nikki Usher and Seth Lewis on what journalism can learn from open-source and maker culture, Megan Garber looking for lessons in failed Wikipedia-like efforts, and New York Times developer Jacob Harris went on a delightful rant against word clouds.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com Transforming journalism for a transformed society Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 http://markcoddington.com Transforming journalism for a transformed society Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=928

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This Week in Review: A unique paywall plan in Boston, and ethics at TechCrunch and the Times

This Week in Review: Design and the Times, Google+ growing pains, and the extinction of the mogul

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 23, 2011.] Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times,named its lie of the year this week, and the choice wasn't a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact's reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the widespread belief, as Benen and the New York Times' Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it's biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of "fact-checking" news itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, a "scam of neutral expertise." Forbes' John McQuaid said PolitiFact "is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn't really need a referee." Gawker's Jim Newell was more sweeping: "why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?" He argued that fact-checking sites' designations like "pants on fire" and "Pinocchios" are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And the Washington Post's Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model "unsustainable," because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking "invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call." Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," responded by saying operations like his aren't intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact's Bill Adair stood by the organization's choice and said fact-checking "is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth." — An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she'll get a million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson's forced departure by saying that she didn't get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and e-books. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a "reverse meter" for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn't work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It's talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including the Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter's Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. — Looking back and forward for news: We're getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year's media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that "appification" would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through "versioning." Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon's Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the beginnings of a semi-revival for the newspaper business, accompanied by more paywalls and an feistier defense of their value. On a more ominous front, Dan Gillmor warned of tightening content controls by an oligopoly of copyright holders, government forces, search engines, and others. — Collaboration and curation. Emily Bell saw an increasing realization by news organizations of the importance of networks as part of the reporting process, Burt Herman described the continued emergence of a real-time, collaborative news network, and Paul Bradshaw and Carrie Brown Smith also saw collaboration as central next year. Vadim Lavrusik saw an increasingly sophisticated curation as part of that news environment. — Reading roundup: This is the last review of the year, so here are the bits and pieces to keep up with during the holidays over the next two weeks: — Congress' hearings on the Internet censorship bill SOPA adjourned last Friday, with the vote delayed until next year. Cable news finally began acknowledging the story, and the document company Scribd staging an online protest. Techdirt's Mike Masnick continued to write about the bill's dangers, looking at the ability it gives private companies to shut down any website and the way it sets up the legal framework for broader censorship. — The Wall Street Journal reported on the continued high prices of e-books, a trend that drew criticism from GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen. Elsewhere, Slate's Farhad Manjoo and Wired's Tim Carmody engaged in an interesting discussion about Amazon and independent bookstore — Manjoo praised Amazon for putting independent bookstores into decline, Carmody argued that Amazon has its eyes on a bigger prize, and Manjoo talked about how independent bookstores can fight back. — A big development in the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning cases: Wired reported that U.S. government officials found chat logs with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on the laptop of Manning, the Army private charged with leaking information to WikiLeaks. This could be critical in the U.S.' possible prosecution of Assange if the logs show that he induced Manning to leak the documents. — The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry wrote a series of posts on the practical details of the company's Digital First approach, looking at its journalistic workflow, values, editor's roles, and ways to think like a digital journalist. Meanwhile, Mashable's Lauren Indvik looked at the Atlantic's transformation into a Digital First publication. — Some great discussion about solution-oriented journalism this week: David Bornstein made a case for solution journalism at the New York Times, and Free Press' Josh Stearns put together a fantastic set of readings on solution journalism. NYU grad student Blair Hickman also shared a syllabus for a solution journalism unit.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:30:32 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=924

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This Week in Review: Navigating the Times’ pay-plan loopholes, +1 for social search, and innovation ideas

This Week in Review: Good news for paywalls, and Yahoo joins the personalized news app parade

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 9, 2011.] Do institutions have a place in news innovation?: About three weeks after Dean Starkman's indictment of future-of-news thinkers was posted online by the Columbia Journalism Review, NYU professor Clay Shirky — one of the primary targets of the piece — delivered a response late last week in the form of a thoughtful essay on the nature of institutions and the news industry. Shirky explained the process by which institutions can lapse into rigidity and blindness to their threats, and he argued that there's no way to preserve newspapers' most important institutional qualities in the digital age, so the only option left is radical innovation. Several observers — of a future-of-news orientation themselves — jumped in to echo Shirky's point. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry praised Shirky for waiting and reflecting rather than responding immediately, and media consultant Steve Yelvington seconded Shirky's point that all this talk about traditional journalistic models being overwhelmed by a decentralized, audience-focused digital tidal wave is descriptive, not prescriptive — not necessarily the way things should be, but simply the way they are. Howard Owens of the Batavian took the middle ground, declaring that evolution, not revolution, is the standard vehicle for change in journalism and laying a model for sustainable local journalism that focuses on local ownership, startups, and innovation. In the end, Owens wrote, online journalism will evolve and survive. "It will find ways to make more and more money to pay for more and more journalism.  The audience is there for it, local businesses will always want to connect with that audience, and entrepreneurial minded people will find ways to put the pieces together." The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal raised a good point in the discussion about how to preserve serious journalism: He argued that the primary obstacle won't be so much about paying for journalists to cover important public-affairs issues, but about finding a way for that news to reach a substantial percentage of the population in a given area. That "amplification" problem may be tough to solve, but could be relatively easy to scale once that initial solution is found. — Paywalls picking up steam among smaller papers: Now that the New York Times has bravely served as a paywall guinea pig for the rest of America's newspapers (apparently successfully, judging from the indicators we have so far), we're starting to see more of the nation's mid-sized papers announce online pay plans of their own. This week, Gannett, the U.S.' largest newspaper chain, revealed that it would be expanding its paywalls to more of its papers sometime next year. According to the Gannett Blog, the company began experimenting with paywalls at three newspapers last year, and while we don't know much of anything about those projects, it appears Gannett is pleased enough with them to build out on that model. The Chicago Sun-Times also announced a paywall to begin this week: It'll follow the increasingly popular metered model employed by the Financial Times and New York Times, allowing 20 page views per 30-day period before asking for .99 a month (.99 for print subscribers). PaidContent noted that the plan is being run by Press+ (the system created by Steve Brill's former Journalism Online) and that Roger Ebert has been exempted from the paywall. We also got a couple of updates from existing newspaper paywalls: MinnPost reported that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has come out ahead so far in its new paywall, generating an estimated 0,000 in subscriptions while losing a five-figure total of advertising dollars. And PaidContent reported that three paywalled MediaNews Group papers (now run by John Paton of the Journal Register Co.) have killed their Monday print editions, with a corresponding drop of their online paywall on those days. — Is this blogger a journalist?: Just when you thought the "Are bloggers journalists?" discussion was completely played out, it got some new life this week when an Oregon judge ruled that a blogger being sued for .5 million in a defamation case wasn't protected by the state's media shield law because she wasn't a journalist. As Seattle Weekly initially reported, the judge reasoned that she wasn't a journalist because she wasn't affiliated with any "newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system." This type of ruling typically gets bloggers (and a lot of journalists) riled up, and rightly so. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM gave some great context regarding state-by-state shield laws, noting that several other recent rulings have defined who's a journalist much more broadly than this judge did. These types of distinctions based on institutional affiliation are attempts to hold back a steadily rising tide, he argued. On the other hand, Forbes' Kashmir Hill described some of the case's background that seemed to indicate that this particular blogger was much more intent on defamation than performing journalism, creating dozens of sites to dominate the search results for the company she was attacking, then emailing the company to offer ,500/mo. online reputation management. Hill concluded, "Yes, bloggers are journalists. But just because you have a blog doesn’t mean that what you do is journalism." Libertarian writer Julian Sanchez agreed, saying that while the judge's ruling wasn't well worded, this blogger was not a journalist. — Facebook's new tools: A few Facebook-related notes: The social network began rolling out Timeline, the graphical life-illustration feature it announced back in September this week, starting in New Zealand. It also briefly, vaguely announced plans to extend its Twitter-like Subscribe button into a plugin for websites, a move that TechCrunch said signifies that "the company is directly attacking the entire Twitter model head-on." Cory Bergman of Lost Remote urged news orgs to get on the Subscribe bandwagon as soon as they can, as a way to extend their journalists' brands. Meanwhile, news business consultant Alan Mutter laid out a basic plan for publishers to not just gain audience on Facebook, but make money there, too. The key element of that plan may be a surprising one: "The most intriguing and perhaps most productive approach for making money off Facebook, however, is for newspapers to take over the social media marketing and advertising campaigns for businesses in their markets." — Reading roundup: Pretty slow week this week, but there were a few smaller stories worth keeping an eye on: — As a sort of sequel to the Huffington Post's OffTheBus effort in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Jay Rosen and NYU's Studio 20 are partnering with the Guardian to determine and cover "the citizens' agenda" in the 2012 election. Rosen and NYU will also be working with MediaNews and the Journal Register Co. on the local and regional level. At the Lab, Megan Garber explained what's behind the initiative. — The American Journalism Review published a piece on the journalistic ethics of retweeting that included news that the Oregonian is telling its reporters to consider all retweets as endorsements. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry rounded up (appalled) reaction and argued that editors should consider each case individually. — Ten NBC-owned TV stations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles will work with nonprofit news orgs (public radio in LA and Philly, and the Chicago Reporter and ProPublica) in a new initiative first reported by the LA Times. — The popular iPad news aggregation app Flipboard launched for iPhone this week, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman drew lessons on mobile design for news orgs from it. — The New York Times reported that most of the pack of would-be iPad competitors in the tablet market have fizzled out, though the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet have gotten off to promising starts. — Here at the Lab, longtime newspaper editor Tom Stites is in the midst of an interesting three-part series on the state of web journalism. Part one is a good overview of where we are and where we want to go, and part two looks at the wide-ranging effects of layoffs and cuts into local journalism.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-citizens-occupying-journalism-and-solving-the-copyright-problem/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-citizens-occupying-journalism-and-solving-the-copyright-problem/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:23:45 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=922

This Week in Review: An Internet censorship threat, and news orgs’ one-way Twitter use

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 2, 2011.] We've got two weeks to cover with this review, but since one of those weeks was dominated for many us by football, family and post-turkey stupor, it's a relatively quiet period to catch up on. Here's what you might have missed: Citizen journalism and the Occupy movement: The furor surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protests hit another peak before Thanksgiving, thanks in large part to the police officer who pepper-sprayed seated UC-Davis students at close range. The episode was captured in numerous videos and photos by surrounding students that quickly achieved meme status, and the Lab's Megan Garber argued that the Pepper Spraying Cop meme was crucial in pushing the movement beyond its theme of economic justice and in demanding emotional, empathetic participation by viewers. Zack Whittaker of ZDNet held up the incident as an example of citizen journalism holding authority to account and exposing spin for what it is, and GigaOM's Janko Roettgers argued that while the Arab Spring relied on this type of coverage because many kinds of professional reporting were outlawed, it's being used in the U.S. to supplement the limited resources of the professional press. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen highlighted the work of one of those Occupy citizen reporters, offering some fine advice to young would-be journalists in the process: The most important thing is to put yourself in a "journalistic situation," which is "when a live community is depending on you for regular reports about some unfolding thing that clearly matters to them." Meanwhile, the concern over police's heavy-handed tactics toward reporters—including arrests and removal from the scenes of their Occupy crackdowns—has continued. Numerous New York news organizations called for an investigation into the New York Police Department's brutishness toward journalists, and New York Times columnist Michael Powell made a sharp rebuttal of NYPD's "but they didn't have press passes!" defense. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave some thoughts about how these situations have changed now that journalists are everywhere, and Free Press' Josh Stearns gave a great example of journalistic curation in his explanation of how he's reported on journalist arrests nationwide. The Times has a few miscellaneous angles covered as well: Brian Stelter looked at Occupy coverage from within and outside the mainstream, and David Carr wondered what's next for Occupy, particularly in terms of its media narrative. — SOPA as innovation killer: On the heels of last month's congressional hearing on the U.S.' ominous Stop Online Piracy Act, alarm about the bill's potential to dramatically curtail online speech continues to echo around the web, including from the editorial boards of both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Techdirt's Mike Masnick, who has been the go-to writer on SOPA, billed one of his posts arguing against the bill as the definitive argument, and he's probably right. Masnick's argument had a few parts: 1) Enforcement is the wrong way to prevent copyright infringement; 2) Even if it was the right way, SOPA is an ineffective enforcement strategy; and 3) Along the way, SOPA would do significant collateral damage to the economy and innovation. To the first point, Masnick argued that the problem behind copyright infringement is one of a broken business model, the symptom of an industry that refuses to adjust to meet changing audience demands. "The best way, by far, to decrease infringement is to offer awesome new services that are convenient and useful," he wrote. Alex Howard of O'Reilly Media provided another long post detailing the dangers of SOPA, particularly the chilling effect it will have on innovation. He also explained to the Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran how the bill could hinder innovation in news organizations, especially small ones. In a carefully balanced piece, the Economist touched on some of the same business model issues behind SOPA that Masnick did, while Ars Technica's Timothy Lee argued that this internationally oriented bill would have damaging effects on the U.S.' reputation abroad in technological areas. — Frictionless sharing's pros and cons: Two months after Facebook introduced a new set of social apps that largely centered on automatic sharing, the company announced some of the early stats from news orgs' new apps. All the news Facebook reported is, of course, good news, but Poynter's Jeff Sonderman went a bit deeper into the apps to pull out several lessons for news orgs. Among them, he noted that publishers are finding success both within the walls of Facebook and on their own sites using the social graph. The organizations themselves approve, too: The Guardian said it's had great success reaching younger audiences through the app, and the Independent said it's given fresh attention to stories at least a decade old. Facebook's big changes introduced this fall haven't come without their discontents, though. CNET's Molly Wood argued that Facebook's new "frictionless sharing" through automatically sharing apps like the ones developed by news orgs is actually increasing barriers to sharing, at the same time that it's turning sharing passive. "Frictionless sharing via Open Graph recasts Facebook's basic purpose, making it more about recommending and archiving than about sharing and communicating." Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash chimed in, noting that Facebook is putting up additional barriers even to websites that are using its commenting systems. And ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick argued that with its new sharing functions making indiscriminate sharing the default, Facebook is starting to resemble malware. In other Facebook-related news, a study was published that found that the classic "six degrees of separation" has been reduced to 4.74 degrees between any random users across the world on Facebook. As a New York Times article on the study noted, this raises questions of whether Facebook "friends" actually correspond to real-life relationships, though some scholars defended the idea by noting that these "weak ties" have been shown to be quite important for several functions, including spreading news. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram went into some more detail on the possible effects of these weak ties that are amplified by Facebook. — Reading roundup: Several smaller stories over the past two weeks. Here they are, in short form: — WikiLeaks released a new set of documents this week — the first of a database of documents from the surveillance industry, but it's also delayed the launch of its new online document submission system. Julian Assange ripped news editors for being too subservient to the political powers that be, and the Electronic Freedom Foundation examined WikiLeaks' effects on several global revolutions, as well as the future of the U.S.' First Amendment. — At a time when almost everyone in finance is running away screaming from newspapers, billionaire Warren Buffett announced surprising plans to buy his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici saw the move as a vote of confidence in the financial viability of newspapers, while former World-Herald journalist Steve Buttry said it's about personal attachment, not confidence in the newspaper business. Jim Romenesko noted that the World-Herald's employee-owned model was struggling, which few younger employees buying in. — After at least 10 days of testimony into News Corp.'s phone hacking case, the Guardian has a good, quick summary of what we've found out so far. The company's stock remains surprisingly hot, even if its public image is plummeting: NYU's Jay Rosen wrote an Australia-centric argument that News Corp. has an incontrovertibly corrupt culture. — A couple of (hopefully) final notes about Jim Romenesko's acrimonious departure from Poynter: Romenesko gave his account of the episode, and the Lab's Joshua Benton wrote a fantastic post comparing Romenesko's aggregation practices with the tech world's dichotomy between specs and user experience. Read it, if you haven't already. — In a perceptive post, 10,000 Words' Lauren Rabaino traced the evolution of news stories' development online, and argued for a more wiki-style story format. — I'll leave you with a sharp big-picture piece by the Associated Press' Jonathan Stray, who attempted to define what he called the "digital public sphere" and outlined what we should expect it to do. It's a wonderful starting point (or rebooting point) for thinking about what we're all trying to do here with the future of journalism and information online.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-citizens-occupying-journalism-and-solving-the-copyright-problem/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:20:17 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=920

This Week in Review: Amazon’s challenge to the iPad, and Facebook’s ‘frictionless sharing’

This Week in Review: Talking Bin Laden on Twitter, journos’ online freedom, and Apple gets a taker

This Week in Review: What Twitter does to us, Google News gets more local, and making links routine

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 18, 2011.] A fight for online freedom: A U.S. House committee hearing brought an important three-week old bill on Internet censorship to the spotlight this week. The Stop Online Piracy Act (a companion of the Senate's Protect IP Act), would allow content creators to shut down websites on which people hosted unauthorized copyrighted content, or linked to sites that did. The Atlantic has a good, quick explainer, and the advocacy group Fight for the Future has a sharp video illustrating its implications. If you want to go in-depth, Techdirt has the most thorough continuing coverage of the bill. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that it seems as though pretty much everyone on the Internet hates this bill. Bunches of Internet giants oppose it — Google was a major testifier at this week's hearing (though its rep referenced the WikiLeaks payment blocks favorably, which concerned some) — Tumblr ran an online campaign against the bill by mock-censoring its users' dashboard screens, and loads of online commentators howled against it. Here's why they're so upset: This bill could inflict a ton of collateral damage, some of which could be a crucial blow for free speech on the web. The New America Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon summed up the objections to the bill well, arguing that it would handcuff tech startups, lead to political censorship, and have a chilling effect on speech on the web in general. As Dan Gillmor put it in the Guardian: "The longer-range damage is literally incalculable, because the legislation is aimed at preventing innovation – and speech – that the cartel can't control. If this law had been passed years ago, YouTube could not exist today in anything remotely like the form it has taken." As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noted, you can't have the explosion of creative production, individual empowerment, and democratic potential of the Internet without the downsides of rampant copyright infringement. If you take away the latter, he argued, you take away the former, too. And venture capitalist Brad Burnham made the interesting point that the architecture of the web is based on the assumption that there are more good actors out there than bad, an idea that this bill runs squarely against. This bill poses some potential problems for journalism, too. Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words outlined some of those issues, pointing out that articles could be censored for linking to sites with piracy information, and that citizen journalism and innovation could be stifled. — Twitter as one-way street: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report this week on the way news organizations use Twitter, and the results weren't pretty: News orgs, they found, were using Twitter predominantly as a way to simply broadcast their stories online, not taking much advantage of Twitter's interactive capabilities or its ability to link readers to a wide variety of sources. PEJ said the behavior was reminiscent of the link-phobic early days of the web, and the Lab's Megan Garber called it a "glorified RSS feed." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram was particularly troubled by how little news orgs and their journalists asked readers for news tips and feedback, and media consultant Terry Heaton said this Twitter-as-headline-feed pattern among news orgs is evidence that it really is all about the money. "If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web," he wrote. "When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else." Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, tied the study to another Pew study that reinforced the value of personal recommendations over impersonal ones. There was also quite a bit of talk on Twitter about the study's weaknesses, led largely by media scholars like USC's Robert Hernandez. Still, one j-prof, Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia, pointed out that this report's findings do echo those of several previous studies, both academic and professional. — Occupy Wall Street and scooping the wire: New York police swooped in earlier this week to clear Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters, which in itself wasn't surprising: Similar sweeps have been done in numerous American cities. What drew particular attention among future-of-news folks was the way they did it — by blocking journalists from viewing the action and even arresting 26 of them across the country, of whom seven worked full-time for traditional news orgs and seven had NYPD press credentials. The New York Times and the Atlantic have the most thorough accounts of what went on, and you can check out video of one of the reporter arrests at the Times' The Local. One interesting side story to emerge from those arrests began when AP staff members tweeted that their AP colleagues had been arrested before the news hit the wire. The AP sent out a stern memo admonishing its journalists to beat their own wire reports on Twitter, prompting the New York Times' Brian Stelter to ask, "Shouldn't the wire speed up?!" GigaOM's Mathew said news orgs should consider Twitter the newswire now, and Reuters' Anthony DeRosa argued that policies like the AP's (and Reuters') are the products of head-in-the-sand thinking. (The AP sent out another memo the next day explaining that its initial memo was more about the safety of its arrested reporters than anything.) Elsewhere in Occupy-related media and tech ideas: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal kicked off a series of posts on technology's role in the Occupy protests with a creative description of Occupy as a type of API, ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell praised Storify for its role in Occupy coverage, and New York Times freelancer Natasha Lennard explained why she's ditching the objectivity-based paradigm of the mainstream media to get involved with Occupy. — Romenesko and online attribution: A few of the loose ends from Jim Romenesko's unceremonious departure from the Poynter Institute were tied up since last week's review: Poynter renamed Romenesko's blog MediaWire, and in an interview, Romenesko shed some light on his insistence on resigning: "I worked there for 12 years, and I'm supposed to spend my final days being supervised, having a babysitter, whatever? It just seemed a little bit humiliating." Most notably, the Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry published the article resulting from the reporting that started this bizarre episode. In it, she argued that the attribution problems aren't limited to Romenesko, but are in part of a function of Poynter's move to longer — and, as she put it — "over-aggregated" posts. Several Poynter faculty members also weighed in, with Roy Peter Clark providing the sharpest take: "The standards of attribution we still apply in print may in fact be outdated in the age of sampling, file sharing, and mash-ups." Other media critics continued to defend Romenesko (Reuters' Jack Shafer) and rip Poynter (Terry Heaton, Felix Salmon). The Gender Report's Jasmine Linabary, meanwhile, wondered why we weren't seeing much attention paid to women commenting on the Romenesko story. — Amazon releases the Kindle Fire: Amazon released its much-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet this week, and the reviews were mixed. (PaidContent has a quick roundup of some of the big reviewers.) It got panned by a few places (most notably Wired), but the general sentiment was that while the Fire can't match up the iPad and some of the other top-end tablets, it's still a decent deal at 0. As the New York Times' David Pogue put it: "The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish." A few other notes regarding the Fire: Time Inc. had five of its magazines on the Fire at its launch after some protracted negotiating, and Amazon has made the Fire's source code available to developers to encourage software experimentation. Wired's Steven Levy, meanwhile, had an in-depth discussion with Amazon's Jeff Bezos about the state of the company. — Reading roundup: Bunches and bunches of interesting little stories this week. Here are a few we haven't hit yet: — A federal judge ruled late last week that Twitter has to hand over information about possible WikiLeaks supporters, one of whom, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir, expressed her outrage in the Guardian over the decision's threat to civil rights. ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram were also among those concerned about the future of privacy online. — A few advertising-related tidbits: Reuters' Felix Salmon summarized a fascinating talk he gave on the woeful state of online advertising and what to do about it, Wired looked at Twitter's efforts to make serendipity pay as an advertising model, and the Lab examined newspapers' advertising efforts on Twitter. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an innovative cross-platform interactive ad that also mimicked its news content, which led ACES' Charles Apple and the Columbia Journalism Review's Clint Hendler to question its ethics. The Times told Hendler the ad couldn't realistically be confused with actual Times content. — The Columbia Journalism Review explored a crucial issue in the changing news ecosystem — what happens to all the communities that aren't hubs for innovation? — with a series of pieces on Modesto, California. — Also in CJR, Megan Garber wrote a fascinating article looking back at how journalism has viewed its future over the years. The University of Colorado's Steve Outing decided to add to that tradition of journalistic fortune-telling with his set of predictions about what online news will look like 20 years from now.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

This Week in Review: Design and the Times, Google+ growing pains, and the extinction of the mogul

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This Week in Review: An Internet censorship threat, and news orgs’ one-way Twitter use

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 11, 2011.] Google+ courts businesses: After banning businesses for its first four months, Google+ finally let them in this week, launching Google+ Pages, which gives accounts to business and groups. (Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land put together the best walkthrough of what Pages are and how they work.) Businesses jumped right in, including, of course, news orgs: Breaking News put together a running list of news Pages, and one Fox News show announced it would do Hangouts with presidential candidates, starting with Mitt Romney next week. As Business Insider explained, Google has a big carrot to draw businesses in: Direct Connect, which allows users to go directly to a business's Google+ Page if they the business's name preceded by a "+". Lost Remote's Cory Bergman (who also runs the Breaking News Google+ account) said businesses should also get some SEO mojo from users clicking +1 on their Google+ account, which he argued was enough of a payoff to justify maintaining a Google+ account — at least for now, anyway. Social media guru Robert Scoble, on the other hand, was disappointed in Pages, calling them clumsy and difficult to manage. Fast Company's Mark Wilson brought up the same point and added that since Google gives individuals two options of how to engage with businesses instead of Facebook's single "Like," most people will choose the weaker option. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid wondered what exactly that weaker option, giving the business a +1, will do. For Slate's Farhad Manjoo, the addition of Pages was too little, too late for Google+. He declared the social network dead, a victim of Google's launch-then-fix-it model that has worked so well for most of its products. "But a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place," Manjoo wrote, arguing that Google should have let its users be more free to experiment to make up for its initial deficits. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and the New York Times' Nick Bilton countered that it's too soon to give up on the network, because Google+ is designed to be not just another social network, but instead the connective tissue integrating an entire way to experience the web. Google has some pretty good cards still its hand that can help it reach that goal, too, he said. — Romenesko, attribution, and hair-splitting: Jim Romenesko, the dean of media bloggers soon to semi-retire from the Poynter Institute, was pushed into a bizarre little controversy yesterday when his editor, Julie Moos, wrote a post taking him to task for "incomplete attribution" in his posts — essentially, using language from the posts he's summarizing (and linking to) without putting it in quote marks. Moos wrote the post in response to questions from the Columbia Journalism Review as it develops an article on the subject. Romenesko wasn't asked to resign (he offered his resignation twice but Moos rejected it), but he will have to follow stricter attribution guidelines and have his posts edited before they go up. 10,000 Words' Elena Zak praised Poynter's transparency, but to most observers, this was ethical hairsplitting run amok. Media consultant Mark Potts hit many of the main points in his defense of Romenesko, noting that no one has complained to Poynter about this in the decade he's been blogging for them. Reuters' Felix Salmon pointed to Romenesko's stature in the blogosphere and his role in establishing the field's norms: "If your guidelines go against what Jim is doing, then there might well be something wrong with your guidelines." The Awl's Choire Sicha took the opportunity to level a more serious charge at Poynter's handling of Romenesko's blog, saying that "Poynter has worked systematically to erode a fairly noble, not particularly money-making thing as it works to boost 'engagement'" and other online-media buzzwords. For his part, Romenesko himself expressed his frustration in typically understated fashion in an email to the New York Times, then tweeted that "I feel it's time to go." — Is future-of-news talk hurting journalism?: This week, we got the rare opportunity to have a substantive, big-picture (meta)discussion about the way we think about the future of news when the Columbia Journalism Review published a thorough critique by Dean Starkman of 'future of news' thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen. The piece is quite long, but worth a close read: In short, Starkman argued that these thinkers are undermining the most valuable form of journalism — public-service journalism — by disempowering journalists and their institutions and by wasting their limited time (and the public's) with endless, mostly useless experimentation and busywork. Instead, Starkman proposed a model built around maintaining journalism's most valued institutions, arguing that "journalism needs its own institutions for the simple reason that it reports on institutions much larger than itself." Several people objected to Starkman's argument, starting with media strategist Terry Heaton, who countered that it's not institutions the future-of-news people have a problem with, but hierarchical institutions, and former Wall Street Journal writer Jason Fry, who said that some forms of news are indeed a commodity. A few others, like Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and Steve Buttry of the Journal Register Co. argued that deep reporting vs. new media mastery isn't an either/or proposition, pointing to examples of news organizations like the Guardian who do both well. Former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell also wrote about her old paper's efforts in making a similar point, arguing that the spirit of muckraking is being carried on in these digital, networked initiatives. "The opening of electronic ears and eyes is not a replacement for reporting. It should be at the heart of it. And if it is not, then the institutions that Starkman laments might be to blame," she wrote. Starkman responded by arguing that it all boils down to stories, but the future-of-news folks want to talk about something else, and here at the Lab, C.W. Anderson weighed in on with a smart post on the ways in which institutions can be forces for both good and ill. — A force for digital change in the newsroom: The New York Times announced this week the retirement (effective the end of the year) of one of the pioneers of news on the web — Martin Nisenholtz, a senior vice president at the paper. As the Times noted, Nisenholtz has been intimately involved in just about every major technological initiative the Times has undertaken since he came on board in 1995: Launching the website, moving it into mobile media and tablets, and instituting its paywall earlier this year. Poynter's Julie Moos put together a greatest-hits of commentary by and about Nisenholtz over the years, including his prediction in early 2004 that smart phones would be a particularly influential force in changing news delivery. PaidContent's Staci Kramer talked about his lasting impact: No matter how slow (or fast) the transition seemed, "the NYT has an integrated newsroom with an understanding that digital, while it may not always be first, is equal." Dave Winer, who helped create RSS, pointed out that Nisenholtz made the Times the first major publisher to license its stories for RSS, making a significant contribution to the growth of the open web in the process. The Lab's Joshua Benton used that story to illustrate thateven if news orgs can't invent these transformative web tools, they can still play a big role in their evolution and adoption. Media prof C.W. Anderson also noted another contribution Nisenholtz made — by allowing a scholar access to study his paper's digital efforts, he helped revitalize the field of digital media sociology. — A neutral way to tweet: If a few of the most recent sets of social media guidelines are any indication, news organizations are really struggling with the concept of their journalists' retweets on Twitter. Several of those organizations have asked journalists not to retweet opinionated content without comment, lest they be thought of as biased themselves. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman tried to resolve that problem with an idea for an NT, or neutral tweet, which people could use to retweet something while declaring their neutrality about it. Most journalism folks on Twitter didn't like the idea, as Sonderman himself showed in his fine roundup of reaction. Many of them saw it as a way to avoid interacting naturally on Twitter, a "pacifier" or "high tech milquetoast," in the words of j-profs Jay Rosen and Matt Waite. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram expanded on the idea, calling it a solution to the wrong problem. "By pretending that their journalists don’t have opinions, when everyone knows that they do, mainstream media outlets are suggesting their viewers or readers are too stupid to figure out where the truth lies," he wrote. — Reading roundup: Lots of smaller stories and discussions popping in and out of the future-of-news world this week. Here's a few of them: — This week in News Corp. scandal: Rupert Murdoch's son, James, told British Parliament he didn't mislead them last time he talked to them. Or, as Gawker put it, he asserted that everyone's a liar except him. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade doesn't believe him. Murdoch also said the company might still close its British newspaper, the Sun. And we also found out News of the World hired people to spy on their hacking victims' lawyers. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger put the scandal in perspective in a lecture. — New York Times media critic David Carr mused on the decline of WikiLeaks as an organization and its implications for radical transparency as a movement. Dave Winer and Mathew Ingram responded by questioning why the Times hasn't supported WikiLeaks more itself. — Andy Rooney of CBS' 60 Minutes, one of the icons of American broadcast television, died late last week at age 92. You can check out the obituaries from CBS and the New York Times, a set of his classic essays at Gawker, and a thoughtful remembrance by tech entrepreneur Anil Dash. — Finally, two great pieces of advice for two groups of people: Longtime News & Record editor John Robinson for newspaper editors, and MIT's Ethan Zuckerman for media consumers (read: all of us).]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:10:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=915

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 4, 2011.] Should we rethink online paywalls?: It may not be grabbing as many headlines as it was a year ago, but the paid-content train keeps rollin' along, with two more newspapers jumping on board this week: Britain's The Independent is launching a metered paywall for readers outside the U.K. (powered by the Press+ system formerly of Journalism Online), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is launching a metered model similar to that of the New York Times — 20 free page views a month, after which the paywall kicks in. Print subscribers will have unlimited access, and the Strib estimates that it'll eventually get million to million in annual revenue from the plan. On another paywall front, the Lab's Justin Ellis reported that Google, which has been working with publishers on paid content online for a while, has been quietly experimenting with a survey-as-paywall, in which visitors are asked to answer a survey question in order to gain access to the site. This week's quarterly circulation numbers included some positive news about the New York Times' paywall, as Ken Doctor noted at the Lab last week: The New York Times' Sunday circulation actually went up, for the first time in five years. Poynter's Rick Edmonds pointed out that this quarter's numbers are the result of a formula in flux, but the good signs have people like NPR's David Folkenflik rethinking the value of online news paywalls. Not everyone's high on paywalls, of course: After initially being surprised by the high numbers of subscribers to Newsday's online edition, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici found that the number paying for it on its own is still under 1,000. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said that despite its initial success, the Times' paywall is still a stopgap strategy — "an attempt to create the kind of artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy. And if that is all that newspapers are trying to do, the future looks pretty bleak indeed." — Yahoo's new personalized news app: Yahoo jumped into the tablet world this week, announcing the launch of several products for the iPad, including the social TV app IntoNow and Livestand, a "personalized living magazine" (yup, another one). The obvious point of comparison is Flipboard, and opinions were varied as to how well Livestand compares to Flipboard. Mashable's Ben Parr was pretty impressed, though he noted that Livestand and Flipboard are gathering their content in different ways — Flipboard through your social feeds, and Livestand through its content partners. Others weren't quite so wowed. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital said Livestand shouldn't be anything new for Flipboard users, and Wired's Tim Carmody saw the difference between Flipboard and Livestand that Parr mentioned as a fundamental error by Yahoo. Flipboard is built for readers, to allow them to distill the good stuff from their social and RSS feeds, he said. But "Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch." The Lab's Ken Doctor gave several useful areas in which to evaluate Livestand and the coming tablet aggregator wars. Advertising is a big part of what's new with Livestand: With it, they also unveiled Living Ads, which is the latest attempt to create a magazine-like ad on the tablet, using HTML5. As Adweek noted, the ads take up a third of the screen and are interactive, with animation and video available. These ads are pretty expensive, but Yahoo's Blake Irving told Business Insider they get advertisers away from the CPM model, which he believes hasn't served advertisers well. — Is Assange a step closer to the U.S.?: A week after WikiLeaks announced that it would temporarily shut down to raise money, the whistleblowing website got some more bad news when a British high court ruled that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, can be extradited to Sweden on charges of sexual assault, rejecting an appeal of a ruling made earlier this year. Assange can still appeal to Britain's Supreme Court, but it's headed to Sweden to face trial. Assange has opposed the extradition to Sweden because he contends that the rulers of that country are aligned against him, but the specter of another extradition is also looming: As Paul Sawers of The Next Web noted, Assange and his supporters are concerned that a move to Sweden would make it much easier for him to be sent to the United States, where the Obama administration and members of Congress have discussed prosecuting him for releasing sensitive information through WikiLeaks. Forbes' Andy Greenberg argued, however, that Assange would be more likely to be sent to the U.S. from Britain than from Sweden. The Associated Press looked at whether WikiLeaks could survive Assange's extradition — its answer: probably not — and Swedish columnist Karin Olsson wrote in the Guardian that Assange has lost all of his intriguing man-of-mystery status in her country. But Australian journalist Matt da Silva urged people not to let up in their support of Assange, praising him as a crusader against government's efforts to manage and control the media. — Reconciling journalism and political views: What started a couple of weeks ago as yet another public radio conundrum regarding its employees and political opinions morphed into an interesting discussion about journalism and transparency. Two public radio employees, Lisa Simeone of Soundprint and Caitlin Curran of WYNC's The Takeaway, were fired after taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests. Curran told her story at Gawker, and Brooke Gladstone, host of the NPR show On the Media, discussed NPR's policy in a live chat. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf argued that WNYC was wrong to fire Curran, pointing out that several NPR reporters have made essentially the same point she did in her protest sign, and have been praised for it. He and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor also made the case for doing away with the philosophy of viewlessness in the American press. As Gillmor put it, telling journalists they can't even hint at what they believe "puts a barrier between them and their audiences – a serious problem given that news and journalism are evolving from a lecture into a conversation." Though he wasn't discussing the public radio firings, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan did provide a counterargument, defending journalistic facelessness and an institutional writing style. And as if on cue, former New York Sun editor Ira Stoll launched News Transparency, a site that lets people know about journalists' backgrounds as a kind of imposed transparency from the outside, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put it. — The Verge takes off: A new tech blog to watch: The sports blog network SB Nation launched a tech blog called The Verge this week, under the leadership of several former Engadget staffers. As part of the launch, SB Nation and The Verge will both fall under a new parent media called Vox Media. The site got some initial rave reviews over its updating story streams, something that SB Nation has been using for a while. Business Insider has an interview with the folks behind the site, and the Lab's Justin Ellis talked about where SB Nation/Vox will go from here. The Lab's Joshua Benton also pulled three lessons for news orgs out of the site's development, emphasizing bold, tablet-style design, structured data, and community. — Reading roundup: Tons of stuff going on this week. Here's the TL;DR version of the rest: — Google began giving journalists photos next to their stories in Google News — but only if they have a Google+ account. Alexander Howard was OK with it, but Columbia's Emily Bell wasn't, calling it coercion and saying it only helped Google, not journalism. — The St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, announced it will change its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, broadening its geographic focus. Poynter rounded up some of the reaction on social media and compared the decision to other recent newspaper name changes. — Your weekly News Corp. phone hacking update: New documents released by a committee of Britain's Parliament revealed that a company attorney warned of a culture of hacking back in 2008. Here's the summary from News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal and a blow-by-blow from the Guardian. — As GigaOM's Colleen Taylor reported, Twitter has quietly unveiled new Top News and Top People search functions. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman looked at the effect it will have on publishers. — Media analyst Frederic Filloux examined the sad state of web news design, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center said all the ugliness could help push users to the mobile web. — The Guardian launched n0tice, their open community news platform. The Lab's Megan Garber took a look at the new site, and The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined it as a possible replacement for local newspapers. — Finally, here's hoping this inspiring Lab post by Jacob Harris will forever put an end to the insipid question, "Will X save journalism?"]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:05:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=913

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This Week in Review: The FCC’s big compromise, WikiLeaks wrestles with the media, and a look at 2011

This Week in Review: Getting it right on Twitter, analytics and the newsroom, and AOL’s tablet daily

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Oct. 28, 2011.] News consumers and paid content on tablets: We're now a year and a half into the tablet era, so we've started to get a more stable sense of exactly who's using them and how. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism added to that understanding this week with what's probably the most comprehensive study to date on tablet use, particularly for news. The survey's big headline was of the good-news, bad-news variety: 77% of users read news on their tablets at least weekly, and 53% do it daily. That's the good news. The bad news? Only 14% have paid directly for the news they're reading on their tablet — though another 23% get access as part of a print subscription package. And those who haven't paid valued the free-ness of their news sources pretty highly. The fact that people love to read news on their iPads but aren't particularly willing to pay for it didn't seem to worry PEJ director Tom Rosenstiel too much — he told Adweek that things will be different in a year or two as people get used to paying for tablet news, just as they got used to paying for TV. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted that while most users prefer to get their news via browser, many of those in the paying crowd are the ones using mostly apps. He suggested going with a two-tiered paid/free approach, with an ad-driven browser site and a paid, premium app. "Rather than bemoan the small number of people who will pay, or freeze out the large number who won’t, the smart publisher will find ways to capture both audiences," he said. A couple of other tidbits from the study: John Paul Titlow of ReadWriteWeb said it's good news for publishers and e-businesses that tablets are drawing much more of people's undivided attention than desktops or laptops did, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM noted that people aren't sharing much of the news they're reading on their tablets, identifying social features as an area where news orgs could stand to improve on tablets. — WikiLeaks goes into hibernation: WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange announced this week that the site may be forced to close by the end of the year because what he called a "financial blockade" of major banks and credit card companies refusing to process donations for it. The blockade, begun last December after WikiLeaks began releasing its collection of diplomatic cables, has wiped out as much as 95% of the site's revenues, according to Assange, forcing it run on its reserves over the past several months. WikiLeaks has stopped processing leaks and shifted its resources to fundraising, including lawsuits and petitions it has filed in several countries to force the companies to process their donations. As Australia's the Age reported, its leaders hope to back up and running within a month. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor chastised news organizations for their lack of concern about the financial companies' action against WikiLeaks, saying the blockade is "a danger to everyone. It is a harbinger of a future where governments will find new leverage points to shut down the media they don't like." Gawker's Adrian Chen, on the other hand, posed some good questions on WikiLeaks' use of money this year, wondered how the group has used up most of its reserves (reported at .3 million at the end of 2010) without publishing any major new leaks. With WikiLeaks now in rebuilding mode, the Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve reflected on what the site has done for transparency and networked journalism, and her conclusion wasn't a flattering one. She called its experiment in enabling mass document leaking "an abysmal failure," noting that its most consequential leaks all seem to have come from one man — Bradley Manning — who's now in jail. "All those theoretical discussions of an anarchic new citizen press driven by anonymous file-sharing remain academic," she said. Reeve noted that leakers seem to be no safer now than they were a few years ago, and that goes for the ones who give information to traditional news organizations as well as WikiLeaks. Writing in the New York Times, data security expert Christopher Soghoian praised WikiLeaks for its security measures to protect its confidential sources while lamenting how poorly traditional news orgs do at the technical aspects of that job. It's probably not a coincidence, then, that news orgs' efforts at creating WikiLeaks-like leak submission programs have stalled, as Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported. — Murdoch & Co. hang on at News Corp.: The long-simmering outrage at News Corp. over its phone-hacking and circulation inflation scandals may have been expected by some to come to a head last Friday at the company's annual shareholder meeting, but there were relatively few fireworks to be seen. Rupert Murdoch made a defiant address to shareholders, describing the criticism of his company as "both understandable scrutiny and unfair attack." As expected, there were shareholders who called for Murdoch and his sons to step down, and a good number of critical questions parried by Murdoch, as paidContent documented. But the main business of the meeting remained unaffected: Murdoch and his sons were re-elected to the News Corp. board, though there was speculation that an "embarrassingly high" number of shareholders voted against them, according to the Independent. Meanwhile, former Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton testified before a committee of Parliament about the phone hacking and, predictably, gave a whole lot of "I don't recall"s and non-answers. — Reading roundup: This week was one of those weeks without many big stories in the future-of-journalism world, but with a lot of small ones. Here are a few of them: — As Megan Garber reported at the Lab this week, USA Today tried something new that we may see other news organizations doing in the future, licensing the data from the databases it produces on its website to commercial app developers. As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and the Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran pointed out, the real benefit of moves like this may be less about revenue and more about a creating a crowdsourced R&D department. — The death of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was the big news story late last week, and there were a couple of media-oriented angles. The big one was whether news orgs chose to show pictures or video of Gadhafi dead or being beaten. Poynter's Julie Moos found that U.S. newspapers were less likely than European ones to run the gruesome images. Those orgs that did run them ended up having to defend themselves. Meanwhile, Techdirt's Mike Masnick looked at the copyright issues involved with camera-phone footage of Gadhafi's beating. — After Jeff Jarvis and Evgeny Morozov traded blows over the past couple of weeks about Jarvis' new book, "Private Parts," the Lab's Megan Garber weighed in with a brilliant post on why books's ideas aren't truly read and discussed, and how to make it so that they are. Jarvis chimed in with some more ways to disrupt the book/conference cycle. — Gawker's Hamilton Nolan unearthed a sketchy linking-for-pay scheme from a small marketing company that claimed to have pulled it off with the Huffington Post and Business Insider. Those two orgs, naturally, issued denials. — Media/tech entrepreneurs Cody Brown and Katie Ray introduced another venture this week with Scroll, a tool intended to help publishers use a variety of more sophisticated web designs without knowing how to code them. The Lab had a profile of it. — In a masterful column, the New York Times' David Carr suggested that some of the Occupy Wall Street agitation should be directed toward newspaper chains, such as Gannett and the Tribune Co., who give their executives massive bonuses while laying off employees. — Finally, I've linked to a lot of "programming for journalists" guides and tipsheets here, but this one by Jonathan Richards at the Guardian may be the best I've seen at capturing and explaining the coding mentality in simple terms. 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This Week in Review: Murdoch’s mess keeps growing, aggregation ethics, and giving context to Google+

This Week in Review: An open-newsroom experiment, and News Corp.’s troubles spread to the WSJ

This Week in Review: The great hurricane hype debate, and Google+ as an ‘identity service’

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Oct. 21, 2011.] Growing tension at News Corp.: We'll be hearing the news from News Corp.'s annual shareholder meeting later today, and media observers are certainly watching the meeting closely, especially after reports late last week that numerous groups representing about a quarter of the company's investors are planning on voting against many of News Corp.'s board members. The list of problems at News Corp. has continued to lengthen over the past three months, and an analyst interviewed by NPR's David Folkenflik asserted that in an ordinary company, the board would have fired the CEO by now. But Rupert Murdoch, of course, is no ordinary CEO. But even in the close-knit top leadership of News Corp., this scandal is leading to significant tension between Murdoch and his son, James, who was until recently the company's heir apparent. A New York Times report this week gave details of the power struggles in the Murdoch family, and Reuters' Jack Shafer pointed out that public family squabbles aren't new for the Murdochs. Both media analyst Alan Mutter and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor were doubtful, however, that the complaints of investors would make any sort of difference in the way News Corp. is run, especially since Murdoch has a 40% share in the company. "As long as Rupert Murdoch is in control, there are only two factors that will lead to change: a genuine threat to his family's money and power," Gillmor said. Without those threats, he argued, shareholders aren't going to see a change in direction. And amid all of this, News Corp.'s various scandals continue to play out publicly. On the phone-hacking front, an attorney who did work for News Corp. told Parliament that he knew the company had misled Parliament about the extent of the hacking but did nothing about it. And on the Wall Street Journal's circulation inflation, News Corp. reportedly knew about the issue almost a year before its executive resigned over it, and Poynter's Steve Myers found that WSJ Asia also relies heavily on deeply discounted issues. But the Journal isn't the only one that relies on those discounted circulation ploys: The Guardian's Roy Greenslade noted that three major U.K. papers do, and Poynter's Rick Edmonds said some U.S. papers do as well. Media analyst Frederic Filloux warned of the effects of this kind of culture of cheating: "such tricks push prices further down because media buyers increasingly distrust the system. Today, they apply the rule 'you cheat, we cut prices'. And the downward spiral continues." — Getting identity right online: Google+ announced a big change in its policies this week, giving word that it will soon amend its real-names-only rule to allow pseudonyms. That policy has been the subject of much debate over the past couple of months, and the coming change prompted Electronic Freedom Foundation to declare victory. Programmer Jamie Zawinski called that statement "shamefully credulous" and wondered why it's going to take months to implement. He predicted that Google+ will still require real names, but will allow nicknames and pseudonyms in addition. Before its change, Google+ had drawn some more criticism for its identity policy. Christopher "moot" Poole has been one of the more prominent advocates for anonymity online — it's central to 4chan, the image-based message board he founded — and he articulated his position again this week in a short tech-conference speech. (Good summaries by VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb.) This time, he targeted the identity policies of Facebook and Google+, saying they try to force-fit people into a single identity, when they're really much more complex than that. "Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, but we’re actually more like diamonds," Poole said. "Look from a different angle, and you see something completely different." He argued that Google+ missed a big opportunity to innovate by allowing users to manipulate who they share with, rather than who they share as. Twitter has a better handle on identity, he said, as an interest-based community, rather than an identity-based one. Wired's Tim Carmody praised Poole's philosophy of identity, arguing that it's practical without surrendering to Facebook's one-identity-for-all-time mantra. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram also praised Twitter's approach, arguing that its commitment to free speech is far more important than whether participants are using their real names. — Making nonprofit news sustainable: The Knight Foundation released a comprehensive report on what makes local nonprofit news organizations work, featuring profiles of eight orgs, including many of the big names in that corner of the news world — Bay Citizen, MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, and so on. The study highlighted three keys to sustainability for local nonprofit news orgs: First, a workable business development strategy, which means that even if they start with foundation support, they need to treat it as something that will diminish over time, rather than an ongoing revenue stream. Second, they need innovative approaches to building engagement both online and offline. And third, they need the skills to go deep into data journalism and interactive features, which "require technological capacity that sits outside the experience of many journalists." Poynter's Rick Edmonds dug deeper into the study, noting a couple of other interesting tidbits: Though the sites are working hard to diversify their funding, more than half of it is still coming from foundations, and another third from donations. He also said these news sites need to have deep community roots and be able to adapt to specific local information needs, rather than just having a general "replace what's gone" goal. — Apple's Newsstand starts strong: It's only been around a little more than a week, but according to a couple of app sellers, the early indicators on Apple's new Newsstand have been quite positive. Exact Editions and Future, two companies that produce and sell apps for publishers, said that sales have more than doubled across the board since Newsstand's launch, according to paidContent. The Daily was the biggest winner, coming out No. 1 on Newsstand's first bestseller list. While noting that it's very early, Jessica Roy of 10,000 Wordscalled the news "incredibly encouraging for digital publishers." At the Knight Digital Media Center, Amy Gahran wondered whether Newsstand's popularity and ease of use will eventually spell the end of standalone iPhone and iPad news apps. That may not be a bad thing, she said: "Standalone news apps may look cool, but cumulatively they’re also a hassle for users who mainly just want access to content, not special interactive features." Meanwhile, another news org, the Economist, has had to give in to Apple's requirements that app payments go through its App Store, rather than through the web. — Reading roundup: Here's what else went on in the world of news and tech in the past week: — Google announced it would shut down a few services: Code Search, which lets people look up open-source code, and two social networks, Jaiku and Google Buzz. ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick reflected on Buzz's privacy problems, and j-prof Josh Braun said Buzz reminds us that a social network site doesn't have to be huge to be priceless. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM wondered if Google has really learned all that much from Buzz and Jaiku. — The New York Times' David Streitfeld wrote on Amazon's burgeoning business as a book publisher, both online and in print. Mathew Ingram told publishers to wake up and realize that they're a middleman that people are figuring out how to eliminate. — The Guardian gave an update after a week its open-newslist experiment, reporting that it's drawn quite a bit of interest from readers and that it's been expanded to include longer-range plans. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry noted that some of his company's papers are doing this, too. — After its initial five-year run ended, the Knight Foundation announced its Knight News Challenge will continue in 2012, being run three times a year. — The real-time web got a real breaking-news test yesterday when the news of former Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi had died broke with numerous conflicting reports. Poynter's Julie Moos looked at how major news sites handled the uncertainty. — It's something that's harped on for at least a decade, but Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore showed that news orgs still have a ways to go in providing accessible contact information for their journalists.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-things-get-testier-at-news-corp-google-makes-an-identity-compromise/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:52:15 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=909

This Week in Review: Things get testier at News Corp., Google+ makes an identity compromise

This Week in Review: Getting it right on Twitter, analytics and the newsroom, and AOL’s tablet daily

]]> [This review was originally posted on Oct. 14, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] The Guardian opens up its news agenda: The Guardian took a significant step in the evolution from a closed to open newsroom this week, allowing the public access to a live account of its internal list of planned news stories. In his announcement of the experiment, Dan Roberts said that it would start with a short trial and that it wouldn't include exclusives, embargoes or legally sensitive unconfirmed material. He also concluded with the rationale behind the bold move: "It seems there are more people wanting to know where their news comes from and how it is made. Painful as it might be for journalists to acknowledge, they might even have some improvements to make on the recipe too." Here's the newslist — yup, it looks pretty much like a simple version of standard newsroom budget. Roberts talked to Mashable about how helpful Twitter has been in pulling the plan off, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM praised the move as one other news organizations should emulate, arguing that not only does it benefit the news organization with more ideas and feedback, but that users are beginning to expect this kind of openness. Others were more skeptical. Elena Zak of 10,000 Words wondered if the Guardian's experiment is just a dressed-up version of the status quo, since the paper's editors are still maintaining all of the control over what gets published and what doesn't. And j-prof Andrew Cline took issue with Roberts' statement that this move is "a bit of a leap," pointing to a student news project that's opened its coverage plans via Facebook since it began. "It was a 'bit of a leap' 10 years ago. Today it’s what I’m teaching my journalism students," Cline wrote. — Circulation scandal at the Journal: News Corp.'s series of scandals reached the Wall Street Journal this week with a report that the Journal channeled money through a European company to buy copies of its own paper, in exchange for favorable coverage in the paper's pages. Just before the report surfaced, the man at the center of the scandal, a European executive at Journal parent company Dow Jones named Andrew Langhoff, resigned, and the whistleblower was fired in January. The Guardian, which broke the story, also reported that the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the circulation watchdog, will investigate the issue. The Journal itself confirmed many of the scandal's elements with its own story published the following day. Poynter's Steve Myers put together a good summary of the story and a quick roundup of the reaction, and Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review provided some more reporting on the Journal's coverage of its alleged circulation-inflating partner. Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that the Journal's favorable coverage was in a special section, where fewer people were likely to read it and take it seriously, and that even with the scandal, Wall Street Journal Europe's circulation only reached 75,000. Several observers pointed out, as Chittum put it, that News Corp. keeps showing a habit of covering up its misdeeds rather than being honest about them. The result of this is that everyone will assume the worst about any possible News Corp. scandal, according to Reuters' Felix Salmon. The next step, Salmon said, is for the scandals to spread beyond newspapers to Fox or Sky or HarperCollins, which would be truly disastrous for Rupert Murdoch. — Steve Jobs, devotion, and control: The tributes to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs continued to pour in late last week after his death last Wednesday. Technology Review editor Jason Pontin continued with the theme of Jobs' love for creating products themselves, and tech guru Guy Kawasaki reflected on 12 business lessons he learned from Jobs. The most interesting of those lessons was that customers can't tell you what they need: "If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, 'Better, faster, and cheaper;—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using." Others reflected on the flood of appreciation for Jobs upon his death and the devotion of Apple fans: TechCrunch's MG Siegler talked about Jobs as "the first truly transformative figure to die in an age of transformative technology, and John Biggs mused about Jobs as a pop-culture artist. At Fast Company, j-prof Adam Penenberg wrote about the way the uniqueness of Apple's products have had an addictive effect on us. Some commentary was more critical. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan pointed to Apple's track record of censorship and authoritarianism and Jobs' brusque personal style, and the Knight Center's Summer Harlow documented Jobs' often strained relationship with journalism. Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey went deeper into Jobs' controlling behavior toward journalists, noting, as Dan Gillmor put it in his piece, Apple's "uncanny ability to get normally skeptical journalists to sit up and beg like a bunch of pet beagles." — New and old media within a protest movement: The Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of the biggest ongoing stories in the U.S. over the past couple of weeks, featuring heavily in online discussion and garnering increasing coverage from traditional media. The story has some relevance for the future-of-news discussion as well: The New York Times' David Carr looked at the production of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, noting with some nostalgic pride the enduring role of newspapers in protest movements. News designer Mario Garcia was also surprised and pleased that so many young protesters would use various media, including a newspaper, as part of their movement's voice. The Times also examined another media tool being used by Occupy Wall Street protesters — Pastebin, a site created as a way for programmers to save and share code, but now being used as a (mostly) anonymous place to share protest information. Nitasha Tiku of BetaBeat pointed out that Pastebin was also used as a hangout for IRC, particularly for the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec, well before Occupy Wall Street came on the scene. Meanwhile, Erika Fry of the Columbia Journalism Review reported on the New York Police Department's efforts to issue and enforce press credentials at the protests, once again raising thorny questions about who is and isn't a journalist. — Reading roundup: It's been a somewhat slower week this week news-wise, but there were still a few other interesting issues that are worth keeping up on: — Facebook released its long-anticipated iPad app this week: The New York Times has some of the basic features (it's free), and All Things Digital detailed the process Facebook developers went through to get their own app and other Facebook-based apps onto Apple devices. — A few bits on news paywalls: PaidContent reported on Press+'s efforts to sell paywalls to college newspapers (Press+ is the name of the now-bought-out Journalism Online's paid-content system). Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explored how news organizations decide whether to take paywalls down for huge news events, and NetNewsCheck examined the market-wide effects of one newspaper's paywall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. — We've heard a lot of talk about "Digital First" lately, particularly from folks within the Journal Register Co. Steve Yelvington, who works within fellow newspaper chain Morris Communications, offered a sharp, succinct explanation of what a Digital First transition entails. One key concept: accepting audience responsibility, not just news responsibility. — The Lab had a few fantastic pieces this week (no, Josh didn't tell me to write that) — j-profs Nikki Usher and Seth Lewis on what journalism can learn from open-source and maker culture, Megan Garber looking for lessons in failed Wikipedia-like efforts, and New York Times developer Jacob Harris went on a delightful rant against word clouds.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=928

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This Week in Review: A unique paywall plan in Boston, and ethics at TechCrunch and the Times

This Week in Review: Design and the Times, Google+ growing pains, and the extinction of the mogul

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 23, 2011.] Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times,named its lie of the year this week, and the choice wasn't a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact's reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the widespread belief, as Benen and the New York Times' Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it's biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of "fact-checking" news itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, a "scam of neutral expertise." Forbes' John McQuaid said PolitiFact "is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn't really need a referee." Gawker's Jim Newell was more sweeping: "why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?" He argued that fact-checking sites' designations like "pants on fire" and "Pinocchios" are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And the Washington Post's Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model "unsustainable," because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking "invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call." Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," responded by saying operations like his aren't intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact's Bill Adair stood by the organization's choice and said fact-checking "is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth." — An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she'll get a $15 million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson's forced departure by saying that she didn't get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and e-books. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a "reverse meter" for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn't work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It's talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including the Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter's Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. — Looking back and forward for news: We're getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year's media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that "appification" would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through "versioning." Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon's Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the beginnings of a semi-revival for the newspaper business, accompanied by more paywalls and an feistier defense of their value. On a more ominous front, Dan Gillmor warned of tightening content controls by an oligopoly of copyright holders, government forces, search engines, and others. — Collaboration and curation. Emily Bell saw an increasing realization by news organizations of the importance of networks as part of the reporting process, Burt Herman described the continued emergence of a real-time, collaborative news network, and Paul Bradshaw and Carrie Brown Smith also saw collaboration as central next year. Vadim Lavrusik saw an increasingly sophisticated curation as part of that news environment. — Reading roundup: This is the last review of the year, so here are the bits and pieces to keep up with during the holidays over the next two weeks: — Congress' hearings on the Internet censorship bill SOPA adjourned last Friday, with the vote delayed until next year. Cable news finally began acknowledging the story, and the document company Scribd staging an online protest. Techdirt's Mike Masnick continued to write about the bill's dangers, looking at the ability it gives private companies to shut down any website and the way it sets up the legal framework for broader censorship. — The Wall Street Journal reported on the continued high prices of e-books, a trend that drew criticism from GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen. Elsewhere, Slate's Farhad Manjoo and Wired's Tim Carmody engaged in an interesting discussion about Amazon and independent bookstore — Manjoo praised Amazon for putting independent bookstores into decline, Carmody argued that Amazon has its eyes on a bigger prize, and Manjoo talked about how independent bookstores can fight back. — A big development in the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning cases: Wired reported that U.S. government officials found chat logs with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on the laptop of Manning, the Army private charged with leaking information to WikiLeaks. This could be critical in the U.S.' possible prosecution of Assange if the logs show that he induced Manning to leak the documents. — The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry wrote a series of posts on the practical details of the company's Digital First approach, looking at its journalistic workflow, values, editor's roles, and ways to think like a digital journalist. Meanwhile, Mashable's Lauren Indvik looked at the Atlantic's transformation into a Digital First publication. — Some great discussion about solution-oriented journalism this week: David Bornstein made a case for solution journalism at the New York Times, and Free Press' Josh Stearns put together a fantastic set of readings on solution journalism. NYU grad student Blair Hickman also shared a syllabus for a solution journalism unit.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com Transforming journalism for a transformed society Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=928

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This Week in Review: A unique paywall plan in Boston, and ethics at TechCrunch and the Times

This Week in Review: Design and the Times, Google+ growing pains, and the extinction of the mogul

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 23, 2011.] Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times,named its lie of the year this week, and the choice wasn't a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact's reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the widespread belief, as Benen and the New York Times' Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it's biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of "fact-checking" news itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, a "scam of neutral expertise." Forbes' John McQuaid said PolitiFact "is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn't really need a referee." Gawker's Jim Newell was more sweeping: "why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?" He argued that fact-checking sites' designations like "pants on fire" and "Pinocchios" are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And the Washington Post's Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model "unsustainable," because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking "invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call." Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," responded by saying operations like his aren't intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact's Bill Adair stood by the organization's choice and said fact-checking "is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth." — An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she'll get a million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson's forced departure by saying that she didn't get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and e-books. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a "reverse meter" for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn't work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It's talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including the Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter's Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. — Looking back and forward for news: We're getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year's media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that "appification" would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through "versioning." Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon's Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the beginnings of a semi-revival for the newspaper business, accompanied by more paywalls and an feistier defense of their value. On a more ominous front, Dan Gillmor warned of tightening content controls by an oligopoly of copyright holders, government forces, search engines, and others. — Collaboration and curation. Emily Bell saw an increasing realization by news organizations of the importance of networks as part of the reporting process, Burt Herman described the continued emergence of a real-time, collaborative news network, and Paul Bradshaw and Carrie Brown Smith also saw collaboration as central next year. Vadim Lavrusik saw an increasingly sophisticated curation as part of that news environment. — Reading roundup: This is the last review of the year, so here are the bits and pieces to keep up with during the holidays over the next two weeks: — Congress' hearings on the Internet censorship bill SOPA adjourned last Friday, with the vote delayed until next year. Cable news finally began acknowledging the story, and the document company Scribd staging an online protest. Techdirt's Mike Masnick continued to write about the bill's dangers, looking at the ability it gives private companies to shut down any website and the way it sets up the legal framework for broader censorship. — The Wall Street Journal reported on the continued high prices of e-books, a trend that drew criticism from GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen. Elsewhere, Slate's Farhad Manjoo and Wired's Tim Carmody engaged in an interesting discussion about Amazon and independent bookstore — Manjoo praised Amazon for putting independent bookstores into decline, Carmody argued that Amazon has its eyes on a bigger prize, and Manjoo talked about how independent bookstores can fight back. — A big development in the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning cases: Wired reported that U.S. government officials found chat logs with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on the laptop of Manning, the Army private charged with leaking information to WikiLeaks. This could be critical in the U.S.' possible prosecution of Assange if the logs show that he induced Manning to leak the documents. — The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry wrote a series of posts on the practical details of the company's Digital First approach, looking at its journalistic workflow, values, editor's roles, and ways to think like a digital journalist. Meanwhile, Mashable's Lauren Indvik looked at the Atlantic's transformation into a Digital First publication. — Some great discussion about solution-oriented journalism this week: David Bornstein made a case for solution journalism at the New York Times, and Free Press' Josh Stearns put together a fantastic set of readings on solution journalism. NYU grad student Blair Hickman also shared a syllabus for a solution journalism unit.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:30:32 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=924

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This Week in Review: Navigating the Times’ pay-plan loopholes, +1 for social search, and innovation ideas

This Week in Review: Good news for paywalls, and Yahoo joins the personalized news app parade

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 9, 2011.] Do institutions have a place in news innovation?: About three weeks after Dean Starkman's indictment of future-of-news thinkers was posted online by the Columbia Journalism Review, NYU professor Clay Shirky — one of the primary targets of the piece — delivered a response late last week in the form of a thoughtful essay on the nature of institutions and the news industry. Shirky explained the process by which institutions can lapse into rigidity and blindness to their threats, and he argued that there's no way to preserve newspapers' most important institutional qualities in the digital age, so the only option left is radical innovation. Several observers — of a future-of-news orientation themselves — jumped in to echo Shirky's point. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry praised Shirky for waiting and reflecting rather than responding immediately, and media consultant Steve Yelvington seconded Shirky's point that all this talk about traditional journalistic models being overwhelmed by a decentralized, audience-focused digital tidal wave is descriptive, not prescriptive — not necessarily the way things should be, but simply the way they are. Howard Owens of the Batavian took the middle ground, declaring that evolution, not revolution, is the standard vehicle for change in journalism and laying a model for sustainable local journalism that focuses on local ownership, startups, and innovation. In the end, Owens wrote, online journalism will evolve and survive. "It will find ways to make more and more money to pay for more and more journalism.  The audience is there for it, local businesses will always want to connect with that audience, and entrepreneurial minded people will find ways to put the pieces together." The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal raised a good point in the discussion about how to preserve serious journalism: He argued that the primary obstacle won't be so much about paying for journalists to cover important public-affairs issues, but about finding a way for that news to reach a substantial percentage of the population in a given area. That "amplification" problem may be tough to solve, but could be relatively easy to scale once that initial solution is found. — Paywalls picking up steam among smaller papers: Now that the New York Times has bravely served as a paywall guinea pig for the rest of America's newspapers (apparently successfully, judging from the indicators we have so far), we're starting to see more of the nation's mid-sized papers announce online pay plans of their own. This week, Gannett, the U.S.' largest newspaper chain, revealed that it would be expanding its paywalls to more of its papers sometime next year. According to the Gannett Blog, the company began experimenting with paywalls at three newspapers last year, and while we don't know much of anything about those projects, it appears Gannett is pleased enough with them to build out on that model. The Chicago Sun-Times also announced a paywall to begin this week: It'll follow the increasingly popular metered model employed by the Financial Times and New York Times, allowing 20 page views per 30-day period before asking for .99 a month (.99 for print subscribers). PaidContent noted that the plan is being run by Press+ (the system created by Steve Brill's former Journalism Online) and that Roger Ebert has been exempted from the paywall. We also got a couple of updates from existing newspaper paywalls: MinnPost reported that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has come out ahead so far in its new paywall, generating an estimated 0,000 in subscriptions while losing a five-figure total of advertising dollars. And PaidContent reported that three paywalled MediaNews Group papers (now run by John Paton of the Journal Register Co.) have killed their Monday print editions, with a corresponding drop of their online paywall on those days. — Is this blogger a journalist?: Just when you thought the "Are bloggers journalists?" discussion was completely played out, it got some new life this week when an Oregon judge ruled that a blogger being sued for .5 million in a defamation case wasn't protected by the state's media shield law because she wasn't a journalist. As Seattle Weekly initially reported, the judge reasoned that she wasn't a journalist because she wasn't affiliated with any "newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system." This type of ruling typically gets bloggers (and a lot of journalists) riled up, and rightly so. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM gave some great context regarding state-by-state shield laws, noting that several other recent rulings have defined who's a journalist much more broadly than this judge did. These types of distinctions based on institutional affiliation are attempts to hold back a steadily rising tide, he argued. On the other hand, Forbes' Kashmir Hill described some of the case's background that seemed to indicate that this particular blogger was much more intent on defamation than performing journalism, creating dozens of sites to dominate the search results for the company she was attacking, then emailing the company to offer ,500/mo. online reputation management. Hill concluded, "Yes, bloggers are journalists. But just because you have a blog doesn’t mean that what you do is journalism." Libertarian writer Julian Sanchez agreed, saying that while the judge's ruling wasn't well worded, this blogger was not a journalist. — Facebook's new tools: A few Facebook-related notes: The social network began rolling out Timeline, the graphical life-illustration feature it announced back in September this week, starting in New Zealand. It also briefly, vaguely announced plans to extend its Twitter-like Subscribe button into a plugin for websites, a move that TechCrunch said signifies that "the company is directly attacking the entire Twitter model head-on." Cory Bergman of Lost Remote urged news orgs to get on the Subscribe bandwagon as soon as they can, as a way to extend their journalists' brands. Meanwhile, news business consultant Alan Mutter laid out a basic plan for publishers to not just gain audience on Facebook, but make money there, too. The key element of that plan may be a surprising one: "The most intriguing and perhaps most productive approach for making money off Facebook, however, is for newspapers to take over the social media marketing and advertising campaigns for businesses in their markets." — Reading roundup: Pretty slow week this week, but there were a few smaller stories worth keeping an eye on: — As a sort of sequel to the Huffington Post's OffTheBus effort in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Jay Rosen and NYU's Studio 20 are partnering with the Guardian to determine and cover "the citizens' agenda" in the 2012 election. Rosen and NYU will also be working with MediaNews and the Journal Register Co. on the local and regional level. At the Lab, Megan Garber explained what's behind the initiative. — The American Journalism Review published a piece on the journalistic ethics of retweeting that included news that the Oregonian is telling its reporters to consider all retweets as endorsements. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry rounded up (appalled) reaction and argued that editors should consider each case individually. — Ten NBC-owned TV stations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles will work with nonprofit news orgs (public radio in LA and Philly, and the Chicago Reporter and ProPublica) in a new initiative first reported by the LA Times. — The popular iPad news aggregation app Flipboard launched for iPhone this week, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman drew lessons on mobile design for news orgs from it. — The New York Times reported that most of the pack of would-be iPad competitors in the tablet market have fizzled out, though the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet have gotten off to promising starts. — Here at the Lab, longtime newspaper editor Tom Stites is in the midst of an interesting three-part series on the state of web journalism. Part one is a good overview of where we are and where we want to go, and part two looks at the wide-ranging effects of layoffs and cuts into local journalism.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-citizens-occupying-journalism-and-solving-the-copyright-problem/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-citizens-occupying-journalism-and-solving-the-copyright-problem/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:23:45 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=922

This Week in Review: An Internet censorship threat, and news orgs’ one-way Twitter use

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 2, 2011.] We've got two weeks to cover with this review, but since one of those weeks was dominated for many us by football, family and post-turkey stupor, it's a relatively quiet period to catch up on. Here's what you might have missed: Citizen journalism and the Occupy movement: The furor surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protests hit another peak before Thanksgiving, thanks in large part to the police officer who pepper-sprayed seated UC-Davis students at close range. The episode was captured in numerous videos and photos by surrounding students that quickly achieved meme status, and the Lab's Megan Garber argued that the Pepper Spraying Cop meme was crucial in pushing the movement beyond its theme of economic justice and in demanding emotional, empathetic participation by viewers. Zack Whittaker of ZDNet held up the incident as an example of citizen journalism holding authority to account and exposing spin for what it is, and GigaOM's Janko Roettgers argued that while the Arab Spring relied on this type of coverage because many kinds of professional reporting were outlawed, it's being used in the U.S. to supplement the limited resources of the professional press. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen highlighted the work of one of those Occupy citizen reporters, offering some fine advice to young would-be journalists in the process: The most important thing is to put yourself in a "journalistic situation," which is "when a live community is depending on you for regular reports about some unfolding thing that clearly matters to them." Meanwhile, the concern over police's heavy-handed tactics toward reporters—including arrests and removal from the scenes of their Occupy crackdowns—has continued. Numerous New York news organizations called for an investigation into the New York Police Department's brutishness toward journalists, and New York Times columnist Michael Powell made a sharp rebuttal of NYPD's "but they didn't have press passes!" defense. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave some thoughts about how these situations have changed now that journalists are everywhere, and Free Press' Josh Stearns gave a great example of journalistic curation in his explanation of how he's reported on journalist arrests nationwide. The Times has a few miscellaneous angles covered as well: Brian Stelter looked at Occupy coverage from within and outside the mainstream, and David Carr wondered what's next for Occupy, particularly in terms of its media narrative. — SOPA as innovation killer: On the heels of last month's congressional hearing on the U.S.' ominous Stop Online Piracy Act, alarm about the bill's potential to dramatically curtail online speech continues to echo around the web, including from the editorial boards of both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Techdirt's Mike Masnick, who has been the go-to writer on SOPA, billed one of his posts arguing against the bill as the definitive argument, and he's probably right. Masnick's argument had a few parts: 1) Enforcement is the wrong way to prevent copyright infringement; 2) Even if it was the right way, SOPA is an ineffective enforcement strategy; and 3) Along the way, SOPA would do significant collateral damage to the economy and innovation. To the first point, Masnick argued that the problem behind copyright infringement is one of a broken business model, the symptom of an industry that refuses to adjust to meet changing audience demands. "The best way, by far, to decrease infringement is to offer awesome new services that are convenient and useful," he wrote. Alex Howard of O'Reilly Media provided another long post detailing the dangers of SOPA, particularly the chilling effect it will have on innovation. He also explained to the Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran how the bill could hinder innovation in news organizations, especially small ones. In a carefully balanced piece, the Economist touched on some of the same business model issues behind SOPA that Masnick did, while Ars Technica's Timothy Lee argued that this internationally oriented bill would have damaging effects on the U.S.' reputation abroad in technological areas. — Frictionless sharing's pros and cons: Two months after Facebook introduced a new set of social apps that largely centered on automatic sharing, the company announced some of the early stats from news orgs' new apps. All the news Facebook reported is, of course, good news, but Poynter's Jeff Sonderman went a bit deeper into the apps to pull out several lessons for news orgs. Among them, he noted that publishers are finding success both within the walls of Facebook and on their own sites using the social graph. The organizations themselves approve, too: The Guardian said it's had great success reaching younger audiences through the app, and the Independent said it's given fresh attention to stories at least a decade old. Facebook's big changes introduced this fall haven't come without their discontents, though. CNET's Molly Wood argued that Facebook's new "frictionless sharing" through automatically sharing apps like the ones developed by news orgs is actually increasing barriers to sharing, at the same time that it's turning sharing passive. "Frictionless sharing via Open Graph recasts Facebook's basic purpose, making it more about recommending and archiving than about sharing and communicating." Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash chimed in, noting that Facebook is putting up additional barriers even to websites that are using its commenting systems. And ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick argued that with its new sharing functions making indiscriminate sharing the default, Facebook is starting to resemble malware. In other Facebook-related news, a study was published that found that the classic "six degrees of separation" has been reduced to 4.74 degrees between any random users across the world on Facebook. As a New York Times article on the study noted, this raises questions of whether Facebook "friends" actually correspond to real-life relationships, though some scholars defended the idea by noting that these "weak ties" have been shown to be quite important for several functions, including spreading news. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram went into some more detail on the possible effects of these weak ties that are amplified by Facebook. — Reading roundup: Several smaller stories over the past two weeks. Here they are, in short form: — WikiLeaks released a new set of documents this week — the first of a database of documents from the surveillance industry, but it's also delayed the launch of its new online document submission system. Julian Assange ripped news editors for being too subservient to the political powers that be, and the Electronic Freedom Foundation examined WikiLeaks' effects on several global revolutions, as well as the future of the U.S.' First Amendment. — At a time when almost everyone in finance is running away screaming from newspapers, billionaire Warren Buffett announced surprising plans to buy his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici saw the move as a vote of confidence in the financial viability of newspapers, while former World-Herald journalist Steve Buttry said it's about personal attachment, not confidence in the newspaper business. Jim Romenesko noted that the World-Herald's employee-owned model was struggling, which few younger employees buying in. — After at least 10 days of testimony into News Corp.'s phone hacking case, the Guardian has a good, quick summary of what we've found out so far. The company's stock remains surprisingly hot, even if its public image is plummeting: NYU's Jay Rosen wrote an Australia-centric argument that News Corp. has an incontrovertibly corrupt culture. — A couple of (hopefully) final notes about Jim Romenesko's acrimonious departure from Poynter: Romenesko gave his account of the episode, and the Lab's Joshua Benton wrote a fantastic post comparing Romenesko's aggregation practices with the tech world's dichotomy between specs and user experience. Read it, if you haven't already. — In a perceptive post, 10,000 Words' Lauren Rabaino traced the evolution of news stories' development online, and argued for a more wiki-style story format. — I'll leave you with a sharp big-picture piece by the Associated Press' Jonathan Stray, who attempted to define what he called the "digital public sphere" and outlined what we should expect it to do. It's a wonderful starting point (or rebooting point) for thinking about what we're all trying to do here with the future of journalism and information online.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-citizens-occupying-journalism-and-solving-the-copyright-problem/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:20:17 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=920

This Week in Review: Amazon’s challenge to the iPad, and Facebook’s ‘frictionless sharing’

This Week in Review: Talking Bin Laden on Twitter, journos’ online freedom, and Apple gets a taker

This Week in Review: What Twitter does to us, Google News gets more local, and making links routine

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 18, 2011.] A fight for online freedom: A U.S. House committee hearing brought an important three-week old bill on Internet censorship to the spotlight this week. The Stop Online Piracy Act (a companion of the Senate's Protect IP Act), would allow content creators to shut down websites on which people hosted unauthorized copyrighted content, or linked to sites that did. The Atlantic has a good, quick explainer, and the advocacy group Fight for the Future has a sharp video illustrating its implications. If you want to go in-depth, Techdirt has the most thorough continuing coverage of the bill. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that it seems as though pretty much everyone on the Internet hates this bill. Bunches of Internet giants oppose it — Google was a major testifier at this week's hearing (though its rep referenced the WikiLeaks payment blocks favorably, which concerned some) — Tumblr ran an online campaign against the bill by mock-censoring its users' dashboard screens, and loads of online commentators howled against it. Here's why they're so upset: This bill could inflict a ton of collateral damage, some of which could be a crucial blow for free speech on the web. The New America Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon summed up the objections to the bill well, arguing that it would handcuff tech startups, lead to political censorship, and have a chilling effect on speech on the web in general. As Dan Gillmor put it in the Guardian: "The longer-range damage is literally incalculable, because the legislation is aimed at preventing innovation – and speech – that the cartel can't control. If this law had been passed years ago, YouTube could not exist today in anything remotely like the form it has taken." As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noted, you can't have the explosion of creative production, individual empowerment, and democratic potential of the Internet without the downsides of rampant copyright infringement. If you take away the latter, he argued, you take away the former, too. And venture capitalist Brad Burnham made the interesting point that the architecture of the web is based on the assumption that there are more good actors out there than bad, an idea that this bill runs squarely against. This bill poses some potential problems for journalism, too. Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words outlined some of those issues, pointing out that articles could be censored for linking to sites with piracy information, and that citizen journalism and innovation could be stifled. — Twitter as one-way street: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report this week on the way news organizations use Twitter, and the results weren't pretty: News orgs, they found, were using Twitter predominantly as a way to simply broadcast their stories online, not taking much advantage of Twitter's interactive capabilities or its ability to link readers to a wide variety of sources. PEJ said the behavior was reminiscent of the link-phobic early days of the web, and the Lab's Megan Garber called it a "glorified RSS feed." GigaOM's Mathew Ingram was particularly troubled by how little news orgs and their journalists asked readers for news tips and feedback, and media consultant Terry Heaton said this Twitter-as-headline-feed pattern among news orgs is evidence that it really is all about the money. "If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web," he wrote. "When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else." Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center, meanwhile, tied the study to another Pew study that reinforced the value of personal recommendations over impersonal ones. There was also quite a bit of talk on Twitter about the study's weaknesses, led largely by media scholars like USC's Robert Hernandez. Still, one j-prof, Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia, pointed out that this report's findings do echo those of several previous studies, both academic and professional. — Occupy Wall Street and scooping the wire: New York police swooped in earlier this week to clear Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters, which in itself wasn't surprising: Similar sweeps have been done in numerous American cities. What drew particular attention among future-of-news folks was the way they did it — by blocking journalists from viewing the action and even arresting 26 of them across the country, of whom seven worked full-time for traditional news orgs and seven had NYPD press credentials. The New York Times and the Atlantic have the most thorough accounts of what went on, and you can check out video of one of the reporter arrests at the Times' The Local. One interesting side story to emerge from those arrests began when AP staff members tweeted that their AP colleagues had been arrested before the news hit the wire. The AP sent out a stern memo admonishing its journalists to beat their own wire reports on Twitter, prompting the New York Times' Brian Stelter to ask, "Shouldn't the wire speed up?!" GigaOM's Mathew said news orgs should consider Twitter the newswire now, and Reuters' Anthony DeRosa argued that policies like the AP's (and Reuters') are the products of head-in-the-sand thinking. (The AP sent out another memo the next day explaining that its initial memo was more about the safety of its arrested reporters than anything.) Elsewhere in Occupy-related media and tech ideas: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal kicked off a series of posts on technology's role in the Occupy protests with a creative description of Occupy as a type of API, ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell praised Storify for its role in Occupy coverage, and New York Times freelancer Natasha Lennard explained why she's ditching the objectivity-based paradigm of the mainstream media to get involved with Occupy. — Romenesko and online attribution: A few of the loose ends from Jim Romenesko's unceremonious departure from the Poynter Institute were tied up since last week's review: Poynter renamed Romenesko's blog MediaWire, and in an interview, Romenesko shed some light on his insistence on resigning: "I worked there for 12 years, and I'm supposed to spend my final days being supervised, having a babysitter, whatever? It just seemed a little bit humiliating." Most notably, the Columbia Journalism Review's Erika Fry published the article resulting from the reporting that started this bizarre episode. In it, she argued that the attribution problems aren't limited to Romenesko, but are in part of a function of Poynter's move to longer — and, as she put it — "over-aggregated" posts. Several Poynter faculty members also weighed in, with Roy Peter Clark providing the sharpest take: "The standards of attribution we still apply in print may in fact be outdated in the age of sampling, file sharing, and mash-ups." Other media critics continued to defend Romenesko (Reuters' Jack Shafer) and rip Poynter (Terry Heaton, Felix Salmon). The Gender Report's Jasmine Linabary, meanwhile, wondered why we weren't seeing much attention paid to women commenting on the Romenesko story. — Amazon releases the Kindle Fire: Amazon released its much-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet this week, and the reviews were mixed. (PaidContent has a quick roundup of some of the big reviewers.) It got panned by a few places (most notably Wired), but the general sentiment was that while the Fire can't match up the iPad and some of the other top-end tablets, it's still a decent deal at 0. As the New York Times' David Pogue put it: "The Fire deserves to be a disruptive, gigantic force — it’s a cross between a Kindle and an iPad, a more compact Internet and video viewer at a great price. But at the moment, it needs a lot more polish." A few other notes regarding the Fire: Time Inc. had five of its magazines on the Fire at its launch after some protracted negotiating, and Amazon has made the Fire's source code available to developers to encourage software experimentation. Wired's Steven Levy, meanwhile, had an in-depth discussion with Amazon's Jeff Bezos about the state of the company. — Reading roundup: Bunches and bunches of interesting little stories this week. Here are a few we haven't hit yet: — A federal judge ruled late last week that Twitter has to hand over information about possible WikiLeaks supporters, one of whom, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir, expressed her outrage in the Guardian over the decision's threat to civil rights. ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram were also among those concerned about the future of privacy online. — A few advertising-related tidbits: Reuters' Felix Salmon summarized a fascinating talk he gave on the woeful state of online advertising and what to do about it, Wired looked at Twitter's efforts to make serendipity pay as an advertising model, and the Lab examined newspapers' advertising efforts on Twitter. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an innovative cross-platform interactive ad that also mimicked its news content, which led ACES' Charles Apple and the Columbia Journalism Review's Clint Hendler to question its ethics. The Times told Hendler the ad couldn't realistically be confused with actual Times content. — The Columbia Journalism Review explored a crucial issue in the changing news ecosystem — what happens to all the communities that aren't hubs for innovation? — with a series of pieces on Modesto, California. — Also in CJR, Megan Garber wrote a fascinating article looking back at how journalism has viewed its future over the years. The University of Colorado's Steve Outing decided to add to that tradition of journalistic fortune-telling with his set of predictions about what online news will look like 20 years from now.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-internet-censorship-threat-and-news-orgs%e2%80%99-one-way-twitter-use/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:26 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=917

This Week in Review: Design and the Times, Google+ growing pains, and the extinction of the mogul

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This Week in Review: An Internet censorship threat, and news orgs’ one-way Twitter use

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 11, 2011.] Google+ courts businesses: After banning businesses for its first four months, Google+ finally let them in this week, launching Google+ Pages, which gives accounts to business and groups. (Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land put together the best walkthrough of what Pages are and how they work.) Businesses jumped right in, including, of course, news orgs: Breaking News put together a running list of news Pages, and one Fox News show announced it would do Hangouts with presidential candidates, starting with Mitt Romney next week. As Business Insider explained, Google has a big carrot to draw businesses in: Direct Connect, which allows users to go directly to a business's Google+ Page if they the business's name preceded by a "+". Lost Remote's Cory Bergman (who also runs the Breaking News Google+ account) said businesses should also get some SEO mojo from users clicking +1 on their Google+ account, which he argued was enough of a payoff to justify maintaining a Google+ account — at least for now, anyway. Social media guru Robert Scoble, on the other hand, was disappointed in Pages, calling them clumsy and difficult to manage. Fast Company's Mark Wilson brought up the same point and added that since Google gives individuals two options of how to engage with businesses instead of Facebook's single "Like," most people will choose the weaker option. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid wondered what exactly that weaker option, giving the business a +1, will do. For Slate's Farhad Manjoo, the addition of Pages was too little, too late for Google+. He declared the social network dead, a victim of Google's launch-then-fix-it model that has worked so well for most of its products. "But a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place," Manjoo wrote, arguing that Google should have let its users be more free to experiment to make up for its initial deficits. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and the New York Times' Nick Bilton countered that it's too soon to give up on the network, because Google+ is designed to be not just another social network, but instead the connective tissue integrating an entire way to experience the web. Google has some pretty good cards still its hand that can help it reach that goal, too, he said. — Romenesko, attribution, and hair-splitting: Jim Romenesko, the dean of media bloggers soon to semi-retire from the Poynter Institute, was pushed into a bizarre little controversy yesterday when his editor, Julie Moos, wrote a post taking him to task for "incomplete attribution" in his posts — essentially, using language from the posts he's summarizing (and linking to) without putting it in quote marks. Moos wrote the post in response to questions from the Columbia Journalism Review as it develops an article on the subject. Romenesko wasn't asked to resign (he offered his resignation twice but Moos rejected it), but he will have to follow stricter attribution guidelines and have his posts edited before they go up. 10,000 Words' Elena Zak praised Poynter's transparency, but to most observers, this was ethical hairsplitting run amok. Media consultant Mark Potts hit many of the main points in his defense of Romenesko, noting that no one has complained to Poynter about this in the decade he's been blogging for them. Reuters' Felix Salmon pointed to Romenesko's stature in the blogosphere and his role in establishing the field's norms: "If your guidelines go against what Jim is doing, then there might well be something wrong with your guidelines." The Awl's Choire Sicha took the opportunity to level a more serious charge at Poynter's handling of Romenesko's blog, saying that "Poynter has worked systematically to erode a fairly noble, not particularly money-making thing as it works to boost 'engagement'" and other online-media buzzwords. For his part, Romenesko himself expressed his frustration in typically understated fashion in an email to the New York Times, then tweeted that "I feel it's time to go." — Is future-of-news talk hurting journalism?: This week, we got the rare opportunity to have a substantive, big-picture (meta)discussion about the way we think about the future of news when the Columbia Journalism Review published a thorough critique by Dean Starkman of 'future of news' thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen. The piece is quite long, but worth a close read: In short, Starkman argued that these thinkers are undermining the most valuable form of journalism — public-service journalism — by disempowering journalists and their institutions and by wasting their limited time (and the public's) with endless, mostly useless experimentation and busywork. Instead, Starkman proposed a model built around maintaining journalism's most valued institutions, arguing that "journalism needs its own institutions for the simple reason that it reports on institutions much larger than itself." Several people objected to Starkman's argument, starting with media strategist Terry Heaton, who countered that it's not institutions the future-of-news people have a problem with, but hierarchical institutions, and former Wall Street Journal writer Jason Fry, who said that some forms of news are indeed a commodity. A few others, like Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and Steve Buttry of the Journal Register Co. argued that deep reporting vs. new media mastery isn't an either/or proposition, pointing to examples of news organizations like the Guardian who do both well. Former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell also wrote about her old paper's efforts in making a similar point, arguing that the spirit of muckraking is being carried on in these digital, networked initiatives. "The opening of electronic ears and eyes is not a replacement for reporting. It should be at the heart of it. And if it is not, then the institutions that Starkman laments might be to blame," she wrote. Starkman responded by arguing that it all boils down to stories, but the future-of-news folks want to talk about something else, and here at the Lab, C.W. Anderson weighed in on with a smart post on the ways in which institutions can be forces for both good and ill. — A force for digital change in the newsroom: The New York Times announced this week the retirement (effective the end of the year) of one of the pioneers of news on the web — Martin Nisenholtz, a senior vice president at the paper. As the Times noted, Nisenholtz has been intimately involved in just about every major technological initiative the Times has undertaken since he came on board in 1995: Launching the website, moving it into mobile media and tablets, and instituting its paywall earlier this year. Poynter's Julie Moos put together a greatest-hits of commentary by and about Nisenholtz over the years, including his prediction in early 2004 that smart phones would be a particularly influential force in changing news delivery. PaidContent's Staci Kramer talked about his lasting impact: No matter how slow (or fast) the transition seemed, "the NYT has an integrated newsroom with an understanding that digital, while it may not always be first, is equal." Dave Winer, who helped create RSS, pointed out that Nisenholtz made the Times the first major publisher to license its stories for RSS, making a significant contribution to the growth of the open web in the process. The Lab's Joshua Benton used that story to illustrate thateven if news orgs can't invent these transformative web tools, they can still play a big role in their evolution and adoption. Media prof C.W. Anderson also noted another contribution Nisenholtz made — by allowing a scholar access to study his paper's digital efforts, he helped revitalize the field of digital media sociology. — A neutral way to tweet: If a few of the most recent sets of social media guidelines are any indication, news organizations are really struggling with the concept of their journalists' retweets on Twitter. Several of those organizations have asked journalists not to retweet opinionated content without comment, lest they be thought of as biased themselves. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman tried to resolve that problem with an idea for an NT, or neutral tweet, which people could use to retweet something while declaring their neutrality about it. Most journalism folks on Twitter didn't like the idea, as Sonderman himself showed in his fine roundup of reaction. Many of them saw it as a way to avoid interacting naturally on Twitter, a "pacifier" or "high tech milquetoast," in the words of j-profs Jay Rosen and Matt Waite. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram expanded on the idea, calling it a solution to the wrong problem. "By pretending that their journalists don’t have opinions, when everyone knows that they do, mainstream media outlets are suggesting their viewers or readers are too stupid to figure out where the truth lies," he wrote. — Reading roundup: Lots of smaller stories and discussions popping in and out of the future-of-news world this week. Here's a few of them: — This week in News Corp. scandal: Rupert Murdoch's son, James, told British Parliament he didn't mislead them last time he talked to them. Or, as Gawker put it, he asserted that everyone's a liar except him. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade doesn't believe him. Murdoch also said the company might still close its British newspaper, the Sun. And we also found out News of the World hired people to spy on their hacking victims' lawyers. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger put the scandal in perspective in a lecture. — New York Times media critic David Carr mused on the decline of WikiLeaks as an organization and its implications for radical transparency as a movement. Dave Winer and Mathew Ingram responded by questioning why the Times hasn't supported WikiLeaks more itself. — Andy Rooney of CBS' 60 Minutes, one of the icons of American broadcast television, died late last week at age 92. You can check out the obituaries from CBS and the New York Times, a set of his classic essays at Gawker, and a thoughtful remembrance by tech entrepreneur Anil Dash. — Finally, two great pieces of advice for two groups of people: Longtime News & Record editor John Robinson for newspaper editors, and MIT's Ethan Zuckerman for media consumers (read: all of us).]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-romenesko%e2%80%99s-exit-turns-ugly-and-google-is-open-for-business/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:10:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=915

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Nov. 4, 2011.] Should we rethink online paywalls?: It may not be grabbing as many headlines as it was a year ago, but the paid-content train keeps rollin' along, with two more newspapers jumping on board this week: Britain's The Independent is launching a metered paywall for readers outside the U.K. (powered by the Press+ system formerly of Journalism Online), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is launching a metered model similar to that of the New York Times — 20 free page views a month, after which the paywall kicks in. Print subscribers will have unlimited access, and the Strib estimates that it'll eventually get million to million in annual revenue from the plan. On another paywall front, the Lab's Justin Ellis reported that Google, which has been working with publishers on paid content online for a while, has been quietly experimenting with a survey-as-paywall, in which visitors are asked to answer a survey question in order to gain access to the site. This week's quarterly circulation numbers included some positive news about the New York Times' paywall, as Ken Doctor noted at the Lab last week: The New York Times' Sunday circulation actually went up, for the first time in five years. Poynter's Rick Edmonds pointed out that this quarter's numbers are the result of a formula in flux, but the good signs have people like NPR's David Folkenflik rethinking the value of online news paywalls. Not everyone's high on paywalls, of course: After initially being surprised by the high numbers of subscribers to Newsday's online edition, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici found that the number paying for it on its own is still under 1,000. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said that despite its initial success, the Times' paywall is still a stopgap strategy — "an attempt to create the kind of artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy. And if that is all that newspapers are trying to do, the future looks pretty bleak indeed." — Yahoo's new personalized news app: Yahoo jumped into the tablet world this week, announcing the launch of several products for the iPad, including the social TV app IntoNow and Livestand, a "personalized living magazine" (yup, another one). The obvious point of comparison is Flipboard, and opinions were varied as to how well Livestand compares to Flipboard. Mashable's Ben Parr was pretty impressed, though he noted that Livestand and Flipboard are gathering their content in different ways — Flipboard through your social feeds, and Livestand through its content partners. Others weren't quite so wowed. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital said Livestand shouldn't be anything new for Flipboard users, and Wired's Tim Carmody saw the difference between Flipboard and Livestand that Parr mentioned as a fundamental error by Yahoo. Flipboard is built for readers, to allow them to distill the good stuff from their social and RSS feeds, he said. But "Yahoo’s Livestand only solves problems for publishers and advertisers: how to display content and advertising to readers without having to have everyone write their own code from scratch." The Lab's Ken Doctor gave several useful areas in which to evaluate Livestand and the coming tablet aggregator wars. Advertising is a big part of what's new with Livestand: With it, they also unveiled Living Ads, which is the latest attempt to create a magazine-like ad on the tablet, using HTML5. As Adweek noted, the ads take up a third of the screen and are interactive, with animation and video available. These ads are pretty expensive, but Yahoo's Blake Irving told Business Insider they get advertisers away from the CPM model, which he believes hasn't served advertisers well. — Is Assange a step closer to the U.S.?: A week after WikiLeaks announced that it would temporarily shut down to raise money, the whistleblowing website got some more bad news when a British high court ruled that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, can be extradited to Sweden on charges of sexual assault, rejecting an appeal of a ruling made earlier this year. Assange can still appeal to Britain's Supreme Court, but it's headed to Sweden to face trial. Assange has opposed the extradition to Sweden because he contends that the rulers of that country are aligned against him, but the specter of another extradition is also looming: As Paul Sawers of The Next Web noted, Assange and his supporters are concerned that a move to Sweden would make it much easier for him to be sent to the United States, where the Obama administration and members of Congress have discussed prosecuting him for releasing sensitive information through WikiLeaks. Forbes' Andy Greenberg argued, however, that Assange would be more likely to be sent to the U.S. from Britain than from Sweden. The Associated Press looked at whether WikiLeaks could survive Assange's extradition — its answer: probably not — and Swedish columnist Karin Olsson wrote in the Guardian that Assange has lost all of his intriguing man-of-mystery status in her country. But Australian journalist Matt da Silva urged people not to let up in their support of Assange, praising him as a crusader against government's efforts to manage and control the media. — Reconciling journalism and political views: What started a couple of weeks ago as yet another public radio conundrum regarding its employees and political opinions morphed into an interesting discussion about journalism and transparency. Two public radio employees, Lisa Simeone of Soundprint and Caitlin Curran of WYNC's The Takeaway, were fired after taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests. Curran told her story at Gawker, and Brooke Gladstone, host of the NPR show On the Media, discussed NPR's policy in a live chat. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf argued that WNYC was wrong to fire Curran, pointing out that several NPR reporters have made essentially the same point she did in her protest sign, and have been praised for it. He and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor also made the case for doing away with the philosophy of viewlessness in the American press. As Gillmor put it, telling journalists they can't even hint at what they believe "puts a barrier between them and their audiences – a serious problem given that news and journalism are evolving from a lecture into a conversation." Though he wasn't discussing the public radio firings, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan did provide a counterargument, defending journalistic facelessness and an institutional writing style. And as if on cue, former New York Sun editor Ira Stoll launched News Transparency, a site that lets people know about journalists' backgrounds as a kind of imposed transparency from the outside, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put it. — The Verge takes off: A new tech blog to watch: The sports blog network SB Nation launched a tech blog called The Verge this week, under the leadership of several former Engadget staffers. As part of the launch, SB Nation and The Verge will both fall under a new parent media called Vox Media. The site got some initial rave reviews over its updating story streams, something that SB Nation has been using for a while. Business Insider has an interview with the folks behind the site, and the Lab's Justin Ellis talked about where SB Nation/Vox will go from here. The Lab's Joshua Benton also pulled three lessons for news orgs out of the site's development, emphasizing bold, tablet-style design, structured data, and community. — Reading roundup: Tons of stuff going on this week. Here's the TL;DR version of the rest: — Google began giving journalists photos next to their stories in Google News — but only if they have a Google+ account. Alexander Howard was OK with it, but Columbia's Emily Bell wasn't, calling it coercion and saying it only helped Google, not journalism. — The St. Petersburg Times, a newspaper owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, announced it will change its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, broadening its geographic focus. Poynter rounded up some of the reaction on social media and compared the decision to other recent newspaper name changes. — Your weekly News Corp. phone hacking update: New documents released by a committee of Britain's Parliament revealed that a company attorney warned of a culture of hacking back in 2008. Here's the summary from News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal and a blow-by-blow from the Guardian. — As GigaOM's Colleen Taylor reported, Twitter has quietly unveiled new Top News and Top People search functions. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman looked at the effect it will have on publishers. — Media analyst Frederic Filloux examined the sad state of web news design, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center said all the ugliness could help push users to the mobile web. — The Guardian launched n0tice, their open community news platform. The Lab's Megan Garber took a look at the new site, and The Next Web's Martin Bryant examined it as a possible replacement for local newspapers. — Finally, here's hoping this inspiring Lab post by Jacob Harris will forever put an end to the insipid question, "Will X save journalism?"]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-good-news-for-paywalls-and-yahoo-joins-the-personalized-news-app-parade/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:05:04 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=913

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This Week in Review: The FCC’s big compromise, WikiLeaks wrestles with the media, and a look at 2011

This Week in Review: Getting it right on Twitter, analytics and the newsroom, and AOL’s tablet daily

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Oct. 28, 2011.] News consumers and paid content on tablets: We're now a year and a half into the tablet era, so we've started to get a more stable sense of exactly who's using them and how. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism added to that understanding this week with what's probably the most comprehensive study to date on tablet use, particularly for news. The survey's big headline was of the good-news, bad-news variety: 77% of users read news on their tablets at least weekly, and 53% do it daily. That's the good news. The bad news? Only 14% have paid directly for the news they're reading on their tablet — though another 23% get access as part of a print subscription package. And those who haven't paid valued the free-ness of their news sources pretty highly. The fact that people love to read news on their iPads but aren't particularly willing to pay for it didn't seem to worry PEJ director Tom Rosenstiel too much — he told Adweek that things will be different in a year or two as people get used to paying for tablet news, just as they got used to paying for TV. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted that while most users prefer to get their news via browser, many of those in the paying crowd are the ones using mostly apps. He suggested going with a two-tiered paid/free approach, with an ad-driven browser site and a paid, premium app. "Rather than bemoan the small number of people who will pay, or freeze out the large number who won’t, the smart publisher will find ways to capture both audiences," he said. A couple of other tidbits from the study: John Paul Titlow of ReadWriteWeb said it's good news for publishers and e-businesses that tablets are drawing much more of people's undivided attention than desktops or laptops did, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM noted that people aren't sharing much of the news they're reading on their tablets, identifying social features as an area where news orgs could stand to improve on tablets. — WikiLeaks goes into hibernation: WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange announced this week that the site may be forced to close by the end of the year because what he called a "financial blockade" of major banks and credit card companies refusing to process donations for it. The blockade, begun last December after WikiLeaks began releasing its collection of diplomatic cables, has wiped out as much as 95% of the site's revenues, according to Assange, forcing it run on its reserves over the past several months. WikiLeaks has stopped processing leaks and shifted its resources to fundraising, including lawsuits and petitions it has filed in several countries to force the companies to process their donations. As Australia's the Age reported, its leaders hope to back up and running within a month. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor chastised news organizations for their lack of concern about the financial companies' action against WikiLeaks, saying the blockade is "a danger to everyone. It is a harbinger of a future where governments will find new leverage points to shut down the media they don't like." Gawker's Adrian Chen, on the other hand, posed some good questions on WikiLeaks' use of money this year, wondered how the group has used up most of its reserves (reported at .3 million at the end of 2010) without publishing any major new leaks. With WikiLeaks now in rebuilding mode, the Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve reflected on what the site has done for transparency and networked journalism, and her conclusion wasn't a flattering one. She called its experiment in enabling mass document leaking "an abysmal failure," noting that its most consequential leaks all seem to have come from one man — Bradley Manning — who's now in jail. "All those theoretical discussions of an anarchic new citizen press driven by anonymous file-sharing remain academic," she said. Reeve noted that leakers seem to be no safer now than they were a few years ago, and that goes for the ones who give information to traditional news organizations as well as WikiLeaks. Writing in the New York Times, data security expert Christopher Soghoian praised WikiLeaks for its security measures to protect its confidential sources while lamenting how poorly traditional news orgs do at the technical aspects of that job. It's probably not a coincidence, then, that news orgs' efforts at creating WikiLeaks-like leak submission programs have stalled, as Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported. — Murdoch & Co. hang on at News Corp.: The long-simmering outrage at News Corp. over its phone-hacking and circulation inflation scandals may have been expected by some to come to a head last Friday at the company's annual shareholder meeting, but there were relatively few fireworks to be seen. Rupert Murdoch made a defiant address to shareholders, describing the criticism of his company as "both understandable scrutiny and unfair attack." As expected, there were shareholders who called for Murdoch and his sons to step down, and a good number of critical questions parried by Murdoch, as paidContent documented. But the main business of the meeting remained unaffected: Murdoch and his sons were re-elected to the News Corp. board, though there was speculation that an "embarrassingly high" number of shareholders voted against them, according to the Independent. Meanwhile, former Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton testified before a committee of Parliament about the phone hacking and, predictably, gave a whole lot of "I don't recall"s and non-answers. — Reading roundup: This week was one of those weeks without many big stories in the future-of-journalism world, but with a lot of small ones. Here are a few of them: — As Megan Garber reported at the Lab this week, USA Today tried something new that we may see other news organizations doing in the future, licensing the data from the databases it produces on its website to commercial app developers. As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and the Knight Digital Media Center's Amy Gahran pointed out, the real benefit of moves like this may be less about revenue and more about a creating a crowdsourced R&D department. — The death of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was the big news story late last week, and there were a couple of media-oriented angles. The big one was whether news orgs chose to show pictures or video of Gadhafi dead or being beaten. Poynter's Julie Moos found that U.S. newspapers were less likely than European ones to run the gruesome images. Those orgs that did run them ended up having to defend themselves. Meanwhile, Techdirt's Mike Masnick looked at the copyright issues involved with camera-phone footage of Gadhafi's beating. — After Jeff Jarvis and Evgeny Morozov traded blows over the past couple of weeks about Jarvis' new book, "Private Parts," the Lab's Megan Garber weighed in with a brilliant post on why books's ideas aren't truly read and discussed, and how to make it so that they are. Jarvis chimed in with some more ways to disrupt the book/conference cycle. — Gawker's Hamilton Nolan unearthed a sketchy linking-for-pay scheme from a small marketing company that claimed to have pulled it off with the Huffington Post and Business Insider. Those two orgs, naturally, issued denials. — Media/tech entrepreneurs Cody Brown and Katie Ray introduced another venture this week with Scroll, a tool intended to help publishers use a variety of more sophisticated web designs without knowing how to code them. The Lab had a profile of it. — In a masterful column, the New York Times' David Carr suggested that some of the Occupy Wall Street agitation should be directed toward newspaper chains, such as Gannett and the Tribune Co., who give their executives massive bonuses while laying off employees. — Finally, I've linked to a lot of "programming for journalists" guides and tipsheets here, but this one by Jonathan Richards at the Guardian may be the best I've seen at capturing and explaining the coding mentality in simple terms. Give it a read.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-getting-tablet-news-to-pay-and-wikileaks-steps-back-to-fight-%e2%80%98blockade%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-things-get-testier-at-news-corp-google-makes-an-identity-compromise/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-things-get-testier-at-news-corp-google-makes-an-identity-compromise/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:56:15 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=911

This Week in Review: Murdoch’s mess keeps growing, aggregation ethics, and giving context to Google+

This Week in Review: An open-newsroom experiment, and News Corp.’s troubles spread to the WSJ

This Week in Review: The great hurricane hype debate, and Google+ as an ‘identity service’

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Oct. 21, 2011.] Growing tension at News Corp.: We'll be hearing the news from News Corp.'s annual shareholder meeting later today, and media observers are certainly watching the meeting closely, especially after reports late last week that numerous groups representing about a quarter of the company's investors are planning on voting against many of News Corp.'s board members. The list of problems at News Corp. has continued to lengthen over the past three months, and an analyst interviewed by NPR's David Folkenflik asserted that in an ordinary company, the board would have fired the CEO by now. But Rupert Murdoch, of course, is no ordinary CEO. But even in the close-knit top leadership of News Corp., this scandal is leading to significant tension between Murdoch and his son, James, who was until recently the company's heir apparent. A New York Times report this week gave details of the power struggles in the Murdoch family, and Reuters' Jack Shafer pointed out that public family squabbles aren't new for the Murdochs. Both media analyst Alan Mutter and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor were doubtful, however, that the complaints of investors would make any sort of difference in the way News Corp. is run, especially since Murdoch has a 40% share in the company. "As long as Rupert Murdoch is in control, there are only two factors that will lead to change: a genuine threat to his family's money and power," Gillmor said. Without those threats, he argued, shareholders aren't going to see a change in direction. And amid all of this, News Corp.'s various scandals continue to play out publicly. On the phone-hacking front, an attorney who did work for News Corp. told Parliament that he knew the company had misled Parliament about the extent of the hacking but did nothing about it. And on the Wall Street Journal's circulation inflation, News Corp. reportedly knew about the issue almost a year before its executive resigned over it, and Poynter's Steve Myers found that WSJ Asia also relies heavily on deeply discounted issues. But the Journal isn't the only one that relies on those discounted circulation ploys: The Guardian's Roy Greenslade noted that three major U.K. papers do, and Poynter's Rick Edmonds said some U.S. papers do as well. Media analyst Frederic Filloux warned of the effects of this kind of culture of cheating: "such tricks push prices further down because media buyers increasingly distrust the system. Today, they apply the rule 'you cheat, we cut prices'. And the downward spiral continues." — Getting identity right online: Google+ announced a big change in its policies this week, giving word that it will soon amend its real-names-only rule to allow pseudonyms. That policy has been the subject of much debate over the past couple of months, and the coming change prompted Electronic Freedom Foundation to declare victory. Programmer Jamie Zawinski called that statement "shamefully credulous" and wondered why it's going to take months to implement. He predicted that Google+ will still require real names, but will allow nicknames and pseudonyms in addition. Before its change, Google+ had drawn some more criticism for its identity policy. Christopher "moot" Poole has been one of the more prominent advocates for anonymity online — it's central to 4chan, the image-based message board he founded — and he articulated his position again this week in a short tech-conference speech. (Good summaries by VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb.) This time, he targeted the identity policies of Facebook and Google+, saying they try to force-fit people into a single identity, when they're really much more complex than that. "Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, but we’re actually more like diamonds," Poole said. "Look from a different angle, and you see something completely different." He argued that Google+ missed a big opportunity to innovate by allowing users to manipulate who they share with, rather than who they share as. Twitter has a better handle on identity, he said, as an interest-based community, rather than an identity-based one. Wired's Tim Carmody praised Poole's philosophy of identity, arguing that it's practical without surrendering to Facebook's one-identity-for-all-time mantra. And GigaOM's Mathew Ingram also praised Twitter's approach, arguing that its commitment to free speech is far more important than whether participants are using their real names. — Making nonprofit news sustainable: The Knight Foundation released a comprehensive report on what makes local nonprofit news organizations work, featuring profiles of eight orgs, including many of the big names in that corner of the news world — Bay Citizen, MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, and so on. The study highlighted three keys to sustainability for local nonprofit news orgs: First, a workable business development strategy, which means that even if they start with foundation support, they need to treat it as something that will diminish over time, rather than an ongoing revenue stream. Second, they need innovative approaches to building engagement both online and offline. And third, they need the skills to go deep into data journalism and interactive features, which "require technological capacity that sits outside the experience of many journalists." Poynter's Rick Edmonds dug deeper into the study, noting a couple of other interesting tidbits: Though the sites are working hard to diversify their funding, more than half of it is still coming from foundations, and another third from donations. He also said these news sites need to have deep community roots and be able to adapt to specific local information needs, rather than just having a general "replace what's gone" goal. — Apple's Newsstand starts strong: It's only been around a little more than a week, but according to a couple of app sellers, the early indicators on Apple's new Newsstand have been quite positive. Exact Editions and Future, two companies that produce and sell apps for publishers, said that sales have more than doubled across the board since Newsstand's launch, according to paidContent. The Daily was the biggest winner, coming out No. 1 on Newsstand's first bestseller list. While noting that it's very early, Jessica Roy of 10,000 Wordscalled the news "incredibly encouraging for digital publishers." At the Knight Digital Media Center, Amy Gahran wondered whether Newsstand's popularity and ease of use will eventually spell the end of standalone iPhone and iPad news apps. That may not be a bad thing, she said: "Standalone news apps may look cool, but cumulatively they’re also a hassle for users who mainly just want access to content, not special interactive features." Meanwhile, another news org, the Economist, has had to give in to Apple's requirements that app payments go through its App Store, rather than through the web. — Reading roundup: Here's what else went on in the world of news and tech in the past week: — Google announced it would shut down a few services: Code Search, which lets people look up open-source code, and two social networks, Jaiku and Google Buzz. ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick reflected on Buzz's privacy problems, and j-prof Josh Braun said Buzz reminds us that a social network site doesn't have to be huge to be priceless. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM wondered if Google has really learned all that much from Buzz and Jaiku. — The New York Times' David Streitfeld wrote on Amazon's burgeoning business as a book publisher, both online and in print. Mathew Ingram told publishers to wake up and realize that they're a middleman that people are figuring out how to eliminate. — The Guardian gave an update after a week its open-newslist experiment, reporting that it's drawn quite a bit of interest from readers and that it's been expanded to include longer-range plans. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry noted that some of his company's papers are doing this, too. — After its initial five-year run ended, the Knight Foundation announced its Knight News Challenge will continue in 2012, being run three times a year. — The real-time web got a real breaking-news test yesterday when the news of former Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi had died broke with numerous conflicting reports. Poynter's Julie Moos looked at how major news sites handled the uncertainty. — It's something that's harped on for at least a decade, but Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore showed that news orgs still have a ways to go in providing accessible contact information for their journalists.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-things-get-testier-at-news-corp-google-makes-an-identity-compromise/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:52:15 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=909

This Week in Review: Things get testier at News Corp., Google+ makes an identity compromise

This Week in Review: Getting it right on Twitter, analytics and the newsroom, and AOL’s tablet daily

]]> [This review was originally posted on Oct. 14, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] The Guardian opens up its news agenda: The Guardian took a significant step in the evolution from a closed to open newsroom this week, allowing the public access to a live account of its internal list of planned news stories. In his announcement of the experiment, Dan Roberts said that it would start with a short trial and that it wouldn't include exclusives, embargoes or legally sensitive unconfirmed material. He also concluded with the rationale behind the bold move: "It seems there are more people wanting to know where their news comes from and how it is made. Painful as it might be for journalists to acknowledge, they might even have some improvements to make on the recipe too." Here's the newslist — yup, it looks pretty much like a simple version of standard newsroom budget. Roberts talked to Mashable about how helpful Twitter has been in pulling the plan off, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM praised the move as one other news organizations should emulate, arguing that not only does it benefit the news organization with more ideas and feedback, but that users are beginning to expect this kind of openness. Others were more skeptical. Elena Zak of 10,000 Words wondered if the Guardian's experiment is just a dressed-up version of the status quo, since the paper's editors are still maintaining all of the control over what gets published and what doesn't. And j-prof Andrew Cline took issue with Roberts' statement that this move is "a bit of a leap," pointing to a student news project that's opened its coverage plans via Facebook since it began. "It was a 'bit of a leap' 10 years ago. Today it’s what I’m teaching my journalism students," Cline wrote. — Circulation scandal at the Journal: News Corp.'s series of scandals reached the Wall Street Journal this week with a report that the Journal channeled money through a European company to buy copies of its own paper, in exchange for favorable coverage in the paper's pages. Just before the report surfaced, the man at the center of the scandal, a European executive at Journal parent company Dow Jones named Andrew Langhoff, resigned, and the whistleblower was fired in January. The Guardian, which broke the story, also reported that the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the circulation watchdog, will investigate the issue. The Journal itself confirmed many of the scandal's elements with its own story published the following day. Poynter's Steve Myers put together a good summary of the story and a quick roundup of the reaction, and Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review provided some more reporting on the Journal's coverage of its alleged circulation-inflating partner. Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that the Journal's favorable coverage was in a special section, where fewer people were likely to read it and take it seriously, and that even with the scandal, Wall Street Journal Europe's circulation only reached 75,000. Several observers pointed out, as Chittum put it, that News Corp. keeps showing a habit of covering up its misdeeds rather than being honest about them. The result of this is that everyone will assume the worst about any possible News Corp. scandal, according to Reuters' Felix Salmon. The next step, Salmon said, is for the scandals to spread beyond newspapers to Fox or Sky or HarperCollins, which would be truly disastrous for Rupert Murdoch. — Steve Jobs, devotion, and control: The tributes to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs continued to pour in late last week after his death last Wednesday. Technology Review editor Jason Pontin continued with the theme of Jobs' love for creating products themselves, and tech guru Guy Kawasaki reflected on 12 business lessons he learned from Jobs. The most interesting of those lessons was that customers can't tell you what they need: "If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, 'Better, faster, and cheaper;—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using." Others reflected on the flood of appreciation for Jobs upon his death and the devotion of Apple fans: TechCrunch's MG Siegler talked about Jobs as "the first truly transformative figure to die in an age of transformative technology, and John Biggs mused about Jobs as a pop-culture artist. At Fast Company, j-prof Adam Penenberg wrote about the way the uniqueness of Apple's products have had an addictive effect on us. Some commentary was more critical. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan pointed to Apple's track record of censorship and authoritarianism and Jobs' brusque personal style, and the Knight Center's Summer Harlow documented Jobs' often strained relationship with journalism. Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey went deeper into Jobs' controlling behavior toward journalists, noting, as Dan Gillmor put it in his piece, Apple's "uncanny ability to get normally skeptical journalists to sit up and beg like a bunch of pet beagles." — New and old media within a protest movement: The Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of the biggest ongoing stories in the U.S. over the past couple of weeks, featuring heavily in online discussion and garnering increasing coverage from traditional media. The story has some relevance for the future-of-news discussion as well: The New York Times' David Carr looked at the production of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, noting with some nostalgic pride the enduring role of newspapers in protest movements. News designer Mario Garcia was also surprised and pleased that so many young protesters would use various media, including a newspaper, as part of their movement's voice. The Times also examined another media tool being used by Occupy Wall Street protesters — Pastebin, a site created as a way for programmers to save and share code, but now being used as a (mostly) anonymous place to share protest information. Nitasha Tiku of BetaBeat pointed out that Pastebin was also used as a hangout for IRC, particularly for the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec, well before Occupy Wall Street came on the scene. Meanwhile, Erika Fry of the Columbia Journalism Review reported on the New York Police Department's efforts to issue and enforce press credentials at the protests, once again raising thorny questions about who is and isn't a journalist. — Reading roundup: It's been a somewhat slower week this week news-wise, but there were still a few other interesting issues that are worth keeping up on: — Facebook released its long-anticipated iPad app this week: The New York Times has some of the basic features (it's free), and All Things Digital detailed the process Facebook developers went through to get their own app and other Facebook-based apps onto Apple devices. — A few bits on news paywalls: PaidContent reported on Press+'s efforts to sell paywalls to college newspapers (Press+ is the name of the now-bought-out Journalism Online's paid-content system). Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explored how news organizations decide whether to take paywalls down for huge news events, and NetNewsCheck examined the market-wide effects of one newspaper's paywall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. — We've heard a lot of talk about "Digital First" lately, particularly from folks within the Journal Register Co. Steve Yelvington, who works within fellow newspaper chain Morris Communications, offered a sharp, succinct explanation of what a Digital First transition entails. One key concept: accepting audience responsibility, not just news responsibility. — The Lab had a few fantastic pieces this week (no, Josh didn't tell me to write that) — j-profs Nikki Usher and Seth Lewis on what journalism can learn from open-source and maker culture, Megan Garber looking for lessons in failed Wikipedia-like efforts, and New York Times developer Jacob Harris went on a delightful rant against word clouds.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-an-open-newsroom-experiment-and-news-corp-%e2%80%99s-troubles-spread-to-the-wsj/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:30:32 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=924

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This Week in Review: Navigating the Times’ pay-plan loopholes, +1 for social search, and innovation ideas

This Week in Review: Good news for paywalls, and Yahoo joins the personalized news app parade

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 9, 2011.] Do institutions have a place in news innovation?: About three weeks after Dean Starkman's indictment of future-of-news thinkers was posted online by the Columbia Journalism Review, NYU professor Clay Shirky — one of the primary targets of the piece — delivered a response late last week in the form of a thoughtful essay on the nature of institutions and the news industry. Shirky explained the process by which institutions can lapse into rigidity and blindness to their threats, and he argued that there's no way to preserve newspapers' most important institutional qualities in the digital age, so the only option left is radical innovation. Several observers — of a future-of-news orientation themselves — jumped in to echo Shirky's point. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry praised Shirky for waiting and reflecting rather than responding immediately, and media consultant Steve Yelvington seconded Shirky's point that all this talk about traditional journalistic models being overwhelmed by a decentralized, audience-focused digital tidal wave is descriptive, not prescriptive — not necessarily the way things should be, but simply the way they are. Howard Owens of the Batavian took the middle ground, declaring that evolution, not revolution, is the standard vehicle for change in journalism and laying a model for sustainable local journalism that focuses on local ownership, startups, and innovation. In the end, Owens wrote, online journalism will evolve and survive. "It will find ways to make more and more money to pay for more and more journalism.  The audience is there for it, local businesses will always want to connect with that audience, and entrepreneurial minded people will find ways to put the pieces together." The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal raised a good point in the discussion about how to preserve serious journalism: He argued that the primary obstacle won't be so much about paying for journalists to cover important public-affairs issues, but about finding a way for that news to reach a substantial percentage of the population in a given area. That "amplification" problem may be tough to solve, but could be relatively easy to scale once that initial solution is found. — Paywalls picking up steam among smaller papers: Now that the New York Times has bravely served as a paywall guinea pig for the rest of America's newspapers (apparently successfully, judging from the indicators we have so far), we're starting to see more of the nation's mid-sized papers announce online pay plans of their own. This week, Gannett, the U.S.' largest newspaper chain, revealed that it would be expanding its paywalls to more of its papers sometime next year. According to the Gannett Blog, the company began experimenting with paywalls at three newspapers last year, and while we don't know much of anything about those projects, it appears Gannett is pleased enough with them to build out on that model. The Chicago Sun-Times also announced a paywall to begin this week: It'll follow the increasingly popular metered model employed by the Financial Times and New York Times, allowing 20 page views per 30-day period before asking for $6.99 a month ($1.99 for print subscribers). PaidContent noted that the plan is being run by Press+ (the system created by Steve Brill's former Journalism Online) and that Roger Ebert has been exempted from the paywall. We also got a couple of updates from existing newspaper paywalls: MinnPost reported that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has come out ahead so far in its new paywall, generating an estimated $800,000 in subscriptions while losing a five-figure total of advertising dollars. And PaidContent reported that three paywalled MediaNews Group papers (now run by John Paton of the Journal Register Co.) have killed their Monday print editions, with a corresponding drop of their online paywall on those days. — Is this blogger a journalist?: Just when you thought the "Are bloggers journalists?" discussion was completely played out, it got some new life this week when an Oregon judge ruled that a blogger being sued for $2.5 million in a defamation case wasn't protected by the state's media shield law because she wasn't a journalist. As Seattle Weekly initially reported, the judge reasoned that she wasn't a journalist because she wasn't affiliated with any "newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system." This type of ruling typically gets bloggers (and a lot of journalists) riled up, and rightly so. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM gave some great context regarding state-by-state shield laws, noting that several other recent rulings have defined who's a journalist much more broadly than this judge did. These types of distinctions based on institutional affiliation are attempts to hold back a steadily rising tide, he argued. On the other hand, Forbes' Kashmir Hill described some of the case's background that seemed to indicate that this particular blogger was much more intent on defamation than performing journalism, creating dozens of sites to dominate the search results for the company she was attacking, then emailing the company to offer $2,500/mo. online reputation management. Hill concluded, "Yes, bloggers are journalists. But just because you have a blog doesn’t mean that what you do is journalism." Libertarian writer Julian Sanchez agreed, saying that while the judge's ruling wasn't well worded, this blogger was not a journalist. — Facebook's new tools: A few Facebook-related notes: The social network began rolling out Timeline, the graphical life-illustration feature it announced back in September this week, starting in New Zealand. It also briefly, vaguely announced plans to extend its Twitter-like Subscribe button into a plugin for websites, a move that TechCrunch said signifies that "the company is directly attacking the entire Twitter model head-on." Cory Bergman of Lost Remote urged news orgs to get on the Subscribe bandwagon as soon as they can, as a way to extend their journalists' brands. Meanwhile, news business consultant Alan Mutter laid out a basic plan for publishers to not just gain audience on Facebook, but make money there, too. The key element of that plan may be a surprising one: "The most intriguing and perhaps most productive approach for making money off Facebook, however, is for newspapers to take over the social media marketing and advertising campaigns for businesses in their markets." — Reading roundup: Pretty slow week this week, but there were a few smaller stories worth keeping an eye on: — As a sort of sequel to the Huffington Post's OffTheBus effort in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Jay Rosen and NYU's Studio 20 are partnering with the Guardian to determine and cover "the citizens' agenda" in the 2012 election. Rosen and NYU will also be working with MediaNews and the Journal Register Co. on the local and regional level. At the Lab, Megan Garber explained what's behind the initiative. — The American Journalism Review published a piece on the journalistic ethics of retweeting that included news that the Oregonian is telling its reporters to consider all retweets as endorsements. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry rounded up (appalled) reaction and argued that editors should consider each case individually. — Ten NBC-owned TV stations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles will work with nonprofit news orgs (public radio in LA and Philly, and the Chicago Reporter and ProPublica) in a new initiative first reported by the LA Times. — The popular iPad news aggregation app Flipboard launched for iPhone this week, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman drew lessons on mobile design for news orgs from it. — The New York Times reported that most of the pack of would-be iPad competitors in the tablet market have fizzled out, though the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet have gotten off to promising starts. — Here at the Lab, longtime newspaper editor Tom Stites is in the midst of an interesting three-part series on the state of web journalism. Part one is a good overview of where we are and where we want to go, and part two looks at the wide-ranging effects of layoffs and cuts into local journalism.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com Transforming journalism for a transformed society Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:36:50 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=928

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This Week in Review: A unique paywall plan in Boston, and ethics at TechCrunch and the Times

This Week in Review: Design and the Times, Google+ growing pains, and the extinction of the mogul

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 23, 2011.] Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times,named its lie of the year this week, and the choice wasn't a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact's reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the widespread belief, as Benen and the New York Times' Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it's biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of "fact-checking" news itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it, a "scam of neutral expertise." Forbes' John McQuaid said PolitiFact "is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn't really need a referee." Gawker's Jim Newell was more sweeping: "why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?" He argued that fact-checking sites' designations like "pants on fire" and "Pinocchios" are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And the Washington Post's Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model "unsustainable," because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking "invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call." Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," responded by saying operations like his aren't intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact's Bill Adair stood by the organization's choice and said fact-checking "is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth." — An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she'll get a million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall) that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson's forced departure by saying that she didn't get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and e-books. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a "reverse meter" for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn't work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It's talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including the Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter's Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. — Looking back and forward for news: We're getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year's media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that "appification" would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through "versioning." Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon's Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the beginnings of a semi-revival for the newspaper business, accompanied by more paywalls and an feistier defense of their value. On a more ominous front, Dan Gillmor warned of tightening content controls by an oligopoly of copyright holders, government forces, search engines, and others. — Collaboration and curation. Emily Bell saw an increasing realization by news organizations of the importance of networks as part of the reporting process, Burt Herman described the continued emergence of a real-time, collaborative news network, and Paul Bradshaw and Carrie Brown Smith also saw collaboration as central next year. Vadim Lavrusik saw an increasingly sophisticated curation as part of that news environment. — Reading roundup: This is the last review of the year, so here are the bits and pieces to keep up with during the holidays over the next two weeks: — Congress' hearings on the Internet censorship bill SOPA adjourned last Friday, with the vote delayed until next year. Cable news finally began acknowledging the story, and the document company Scribd staging an online protest. Techdirt's Mike Masnick continued to write about the bill's dangers, looking at the ability it gives private companies to shut down any website and the way it sets up the legal framework for broader censorship. — The Wall Street Journal reported on the continued high prices of e-books, a trend that drew criticism from GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen. Elsewhere, Slate's Farhad Manjoo and Wired's Tim Carmody engaged in an interesting discussion about Amazon and independent bookstore — Manjoo praised Amazon for putting independent bookstores into decline, Carmody argued that Amazon has its eyes on a bigger prize, and Manjoo talked about how independent bookstores can fight back. — A big development in the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning cases: Wired reported that U.S. government officials found chat logs with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on the laptop of Manning, the Army private charged with leaking information to WikiLeaks. This could be critical in the U.S.' possible prosecution of Assange if the logs show that he induced Manning to leak the documents. — The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry wrote a series of posts on the practical details of the company's Digital First approach, looking at its journalistic workflow, values, editor's roles, and ways to think like a digital journalist. Meanwhile, Mashable's Lauren Indvik looked at the Atlantic's transformation into a Digital First publication. — Some great discussion about solution-oriented journalism this week: David Bornstein made a case for solution journalism at the New York Times, and Free Press' Josh Stearns put together a fantastic set of readings on solution journalism. NYU grad student Blair Hickman also shared a syllabus for a solution journalism unit.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-a-referendum-on-fact-checking-and-the-times-co-in-transition/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-institutions-and-news-innovation-and-papers%e2%80%99-paywall-experiments-roll-on/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:30:32 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=924

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This Week in Review: Navigating the Times’ pay-plan loopholes, +1 for social search, and innovation ideas

This Week in Review: Good news for paywalls, and Yahoo joins the personalized news app parade

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Dec. 9, 2011.] Do institutions have a place in news innovation?: About three weeks after Dean Starkman's indictment of future-of-news thinkers was posted online by the Columbia Journalism Review, NYU professor Clay Shirky — one of the primary targets of the piece — delivered a response late last week in the form of a thoughtful essay on the nature of institutions and the news industry. Shirky explained the process by which institutions can lapse into rigidity and blindness to their threats, and he argued that there's no way to preserve newspapers' most important institutional qualities in the digital age, so the only option left is radical innovation. Several observers — of a future-of-news orientation themselves — jumped in to echo Shirky's point. The Journal Register Co.'s Steve Buttry praised Shirky for waiting and reflecting rather than responding immediately, and media consultant Steve Yelvington seconded Shirky's point that all this talk about traditional journalistic models being overwhelmed by a decentralized, audience-focused digital tidal wave is descriptive, not prescriptive — not necessarily the way things should be, but simply the way they are. Howard Owens of the Batavian took the middle ground, declaring that evolution, not revolution, is the standard vehicle for change in journalism and laying a model for sustainable local journalism that focuses on local ownership, startups, and innovation. In the end, Owens wrote, online journalism will evolve and survive. "It will find ways to make more and more money to pay for more and more journalism.  The audience is there for it, local businesses will always want to connect with that audience, and entrepreneurial minded people will find ways to put the pieces together." The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal raised a good point in the discussion about how to preserve serious journalism: He argued that the primary obstacle won't be so much about paying for journalists to cover important public-affairs issues, but about finding a way for that news to reach a substantial percentage of the population in a given area. That "amplification" problem may be tough to solve, but could be relatively easy to scale once that initial solution is found. — Paywalls picking up steam among smaller papers: Now that the New York Times has bravely served as a paywall guinea pig for the rest of America's newspapers (apparently successfully, judging from the indicators we have so far), we're starting to see more of the nation's mid-sized papers announce online pay plans of their own. This week, Gannett, the U.S.' largest newspaper chain, revealed that it would be expanding its paywalls to more of its papers sometime next year. According to the Gannett Blog, the company began experimenting with paywalls at three newspapers last year, and while we don't know much of anything about those projects, it appears Gannett is pleased enough with them to build out on that model. The Chicago Sun-Times also announced a paywall to begin this week: It'll follow the increasingly popular metered model employed by the Financial Times and New York Times, allowing 20 page views per 30-day period before asking for .99 a month (.99 for print subscribers). PaidContent noted that the plan is being run by Press+ (the system created by Steve Brill's former Journalism Online) and that Roger Ebert has been exempted from the paywall. We also got a couple of updates from existing newspaper paywalls: MinnPost reported that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has come out ahead so far in its new paywall, generating an estimated 0,000 in subscriptions while losing a five-figure total of advertising dollars. And PaidContent