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-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-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-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:45:40 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=905

This Week in Review: Facebook goes deeper into information sharing, and news orgs go with it

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 30, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] A heavyweight enters the tablet ring: Amazon became the latest company to jump into the tablet market this week, unveiling the Kindle Fire, a 9 tablet that will run on Google's Android system. It's a 7" touch-screen tablet that's essentially a knockoff of the BlackBerry Playbook — much smaller and cheaper than Apple's iPad. Amazon also revealed three new Kindle models ranging from to 9, two of them touch-screen, as well as a new Kindle Fire-only web browser, Silk (more on that at the LA Times). The two most comprehensive early looks at the Fire came from Wired's Steven Levy and Bloomberg's Brad Stone. Levy looked more at the device itself, describing it as a way for Amazon to spotlight its non-book media library and saying its biggest challenge is to Netflix. Stone looked more at the corporate strategy behind the Fire, noting that it "funnels users into Amazon’s meticulously constructed world of content, commerce, and cloud computing." (Sounds like a certain other tablet we know.) By the end of launch day, several tech sites like TechCrunch and ZDNet had already declared the Fire the winner of the hypercompetitive Android tablet market, and Ad Age said it would soon have tablet consumption taking off. The bigger question, then, was whether the Fire would present the first real threat to Apple's iPad. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal summed up the Fire's challenge to the iPad — smaller, cheaper, and the first media experience as thoroughly integrated as Apple's App Store. As the Atlantic's Alesh Houdek put it, the Fire may do most everything tablet owners really want, only for a lot less than the iPad. But ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow said the Fire can't match up to the iPad, and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and paidContent's Tom Krazit both said it's not even directly competing with the iPad — it's in a more utilitarian market, where the iPad is more about luxury. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM argued that to content producers, Amazon and Apple are going to look very similar: They both see their devices as ways to sell their own content, which puts them in competition with the content providers themselves. The Fire also launched with a newsstand, with big magazine publishers Conde Nast, Hearst, and Meredith among the first to sign deals with Amazon, under similar terms to Apple's 30% cut of revenue. (News Corp. also signed a deal to put Fox TV shows on the Fire.) The New York Observer's Emily Witt noted that the Fire could be the mobile-content Apple competitor publishers have been looking for, and the Lab's Martin Langeveld said the Fire will present a fresh disruption for content providers, furthering the growth of direct-to-consumer marketing and eliminating the need for third-party advertising. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman posed several questions journalists should be asking about the Fire, looking at things like paid content, customer data, and app development. — Objections to 'frictionless sharing': Reactions continued to pour in about Facebook's latest overhaul, announced late last week. Many of those concerns centered around the same theme: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's brave new world of ubiquitous, "frictionless" sharing. The New York Times' Somini Sengupta and the LA Times' Jessica Guynn gave us a picture of what this world might look like, and Slate's Farhad Manjoo explained why sharing should still be a choice. Needless to say, this brought up another round of complaints about privacy on Facebook: Tech pioneer Dave Winer said Facebook has crossed the privacy Rubicon by seeking out information about you to post to others, rather than just using information you've chosen to share. Entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic pointed out that Facebook can track every page you visit even when you're logged out. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter argued that this type of involuntary sharing should be a concern for every news organization that works with Facebook, and former New York Times developer Michael Donohoe said the Times refused to implement that kind of sharing via Facebook. There was one (non-Facebook) voice countering that the passive sharing isn't that big of a deal: Forbes' Jeff Bercovici. A couple of deeper thoughts on the issue: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal wrote on Facebook as "the Meaning Machine," and media prof Mark Deuze argued that living our lives inside of a mediated environment (like Facebook encourages to) can actually help us to see ourselves as deeply connected to others, if we're willing to let go of our self-absorption. As I touched on a bit earlier, there's also the question of what news organizations should do with Facebook: Gawker's Ryan Tate explained why many media companies are so eager to be part of Facebook's plans (huge audiences, huge amounts of data), and Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik explained at the Lab and at the Online News Association conference how journalists can take advantage of these changes. But Jeff Sonderman was a bit more skeptical, urging news organizations to weigh the costs as well as the benefits. Finally, these changes probably aren't good news for Google and its own network Google+, as Facebook begins collecting loads of valuable personal data that Google can't touch, Mathew Ingram explained. Twitter does its own thing (real-time news) too well to be too worried, Ingram said, but the New York Times' Nick Bilton wrote that Twitter isn't user-friendly enough to be for everyone, as Facebook is. — Media trust and the new local news: The Pew Research Center released two surveys over the past week or so: The first was the latest in a regular series of looks at the American public's views of the press, and results weren't pretty. The press hit record lows in the public's mind in terms of fairness, accuracy, bias, morality, professionalism, and impact on democracy. (Poynter has a good, quick summary.) Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that many of the poll respondents get most of their news from TV, which he said isn't a particularly substantive media diet. "The media assessments of the TV-favoring Pew respondents are about as valuable as the restaurant advice of that guy who has eaten 25,000 Big Macs," he wrote. One other nugget: j-prof Alfred Hermida pointed outthat many social media say they get the same news there as on traditional news. The second study examined the platforms on which people get their local news. There were a few different takeaways from this one: The New York Times focused on the fact that a broad range of platforms have joined TV as predominant local news sources, while the LA Times and Poynter's Rick Edmonds centered on the paradox that many people were very dependent on their local newspaper but still wouldn't care much if it were gone. O'Reilly Radar's Alex Howard had a fine analysis of the study, using it as a jumping-off point for a piece on the Internet as the future of local news. Other notes from the data: Broadcasting & Cable looked at the areas where local TV did well, Poynter's Julie Moos noticed that many people follow local news even when nothing big is going on, and paidContent focused on the role of mobile media in local news consumption. — More over-aggregation accusations: The business news site Business Insider announced some happy news late last week — it had recently raised  million in funding. But that announcement prompted a wave of criticism about the ethics of their aggregation efforts. Reuters' Ryan McCarthy laid out the basic accusation: Business Insider, he said, routinely lifts large chunks of stories from other outlets while only providing scant attribution or links. Others, like former Business Insider employee Ben Popper of BetaBeat, echoed the complaint. So did Instapaper founder Marco Arment, who noted how little traffic he gets from Business Insider republishing his stories. Business Insider's Henry Blodget responded twice to Arment, the second time in a massively long, detailed post essentially blaming the aggregation problems on some weird content management system glitches. Based on that post, Reuters' Felix Salmon said Business Insider still falls on the wrong side of "over-aggregation," drawing a distinction between human-edited and automatically driven aggregation pages. There was some praise for Business Insider in light of their funding, though — CNBC.com and the Guardian both looked at what makes the site work so well. — Reading roundup: Other stuff to keep an eye on this week: — The Wall Street Journal changed its website's privacy policy to connect personally identifiable data with browsing history without user permission. Yeah, people weren't crazy about that, especially since the Journal has been one of the big crusaders in reporting on corporate violations of privacy online. Here's New York magazine's and Dan Gillmor's takes. — Google launched Google News Standout, which allows news organizations to flag their top work. The Lab's Megan Garber examined the way it rewards generosity, and Wired's Tim Carmody looked at the increasing integration between Google News and Google+. — This Week in Patch: Patch's local site editors are reportedly being asked to drum up sales leads, and the Batavian's Howard Owens said if you're going to work that hard on local news, you might as well start your own site. Patch President Warren Webster pushed backagainst the criticism. — The Financial Times said its web-based app has been a higher seller than the Apple App Store version, and ReadWriteWeb called it abig early victory for HTML5-based app developers in their battle against Apple. — An update on News Corp.'s daily tablet publication, The Daily: It has about 120,000 weekly readers, well below Rupert Murdoch's targets for it. — Finally, a trio of super helpful/valuable posts for journalists: J-prof Paul Bradshaw wrote on what should make up journalists' network infrastructure online, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia's Jon Whiten gave a guide to making longform writing work online, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman urged news organizations to start building apps that solve problems.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:41:19 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=903

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This Week in Review: Murdoch’s defense, objectivity in nonprofit news, and a new paid news project

]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 23, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] Facebook ramps its sharing up even further: We had been hearing all week about a big announcement Facebook would be making this Thursday at its annual conference — about how it would mark the social network's rebirth and leave the competition in the dust. So here's what we got (in a handy roundup from Gizmodo): A Twitter-like mini-feed called Ticker (meant to make the News Feed look more like "your own personal newspaper"), apps on Facebook's Open Graph, sharing music and games through integration with services like the music player Spotify, and Timeline, essentially a one-page Facebook life story. It's pretty clear what Facebook's goal is with all of this: Put charitably, as Wired's Mike Isaac did, it's "allowing for the Facebook page to be a sort of one-stop shop, scooping up all of your activities and displaying them in one grand, blue and white frame." Put more skeptically, as the New Yorker's Nicholas Thompson did, Facebook wants to eat up a large chunk of the Internet, which has some real consequences: "The more our online lives take place on Facebook, the more we depend on the choices of the people who run the company—what they think about privacy, how they think we should be able to organize our friends, what they tell advertisers (and governments) about what we do and what we buy." Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher made the point a different way, arguing that Facebook is trying to combat the natural slowdown in how much we're willing to share online by making it more frictionless and ubiquitous. Reactions were similar in displaying two sides of the same coin: The ability to pull together a lot of old social information into a single Timeline was either "something a lot of users wanted without much of a voice asking for it" (ZDNet's Rachel King) or a fix to "a problem absolutely no one was clamoring about" (Gawker's Adrian Chen). We'll get more of a sense of which side is more accurate over the next several months. — Facebook meets news apps: Another one of the changes announced by Facebook on Thursday was the addition of several new Facebook-based news apps, the first of which was the Wall Street Journal's WSJ Social, unveiled on Tuesday. (Others, like the Washington Post's and Yahoo's, were announced on Thursday.) As the Lab's Megan Garber explained, the app allows each user to edit their own stream of Journal material, and to follow and rank others based on their editing. As Forbes' Jeff Bercovici pointed out, the app seems to serve both the Journal's and Facebook's interests quite nicely: It keeps people's news consumption and interaction within Facebook, but allows the Journal to sell its own ads within the app and keep the money. (Facebook gets everything for the ads outside the app.) There were questions about the app — Adweek's Dylan Byers wondered how fond people would be of an app that curates content from only one source, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram questioned how well the socially oriented app would work with a hard paywall, and more generally, whether it's wise for news organizations to leave so much of their user interaction inside Facebook. — AOL's struggles and the future of online content: The AOL/TechCrunch saga seems to be (mercifully) winding down this week — the last real drama took place late last week, when one TechCrunch writer, Paul Carr, quit with a scorched-earth post directed at new editor Erick Schonfeld, and Schonfeld disputed his claims. But the bad news continues to roll in for AOL: The sales director for its hyperlocal news project, Patch, left — the second top AOL ad exec to bolt in the past month. Business Insider reported that AOL may lose million on Patch this year. And AOL's prospects as a content-based company in general don't look rosy, as paidContent's Robert Andrews pointed out, looking at the declining revenues for AOL Europe once it dropped Internet access from its business model. AOL execs remain positive in the face of all the bad news: Arianna Huffington said her Huffington Post's merger with AOL has been a boon for both HuffPo and Patch, thanks to the new synergies between the two operations. On the advertising side, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said he hopes to catch Microsoft and Google in online display ads, a tall task. Outside the company, of course, skeptics still abound. Bloomberg Businessweek's Peter Burrows declared AOL and its fellow web portal Yahoo dead companies walking, saying they "have tried to live by Old Media rules while masquerading as New Media powerhouses." And at Adweek, Michael Wolff pointed to AOL and Yahoo's struggles as evidence that online content can't sustain a business model. The only content that can still do that, he said, is TV or video: "What still works, what advertisers and audiences still seek, is superexpensive content." — Netflix's big split: It wasn't related to journalism per se, but the big story at the intersection of media and tech this week was the announcement of Netflix's split into two businesses — one for streaming video online, and a new one, Qwikster, to continue its DVD-by-mail service. The change was welcomed by approximately no one: Not users or investors, as the New York Times reported, not analysts like Business Insider's Henry Blodget (who said it's bad for customers) and paidContent's Robert Andrews (who said it's bad for business), and not the Oatmeal's Matthew Inman, who summed up the head-scratching nature of the move as well as anyone. Of course, Netflix had to have a reason for doing this, and there were several popular guesses, rounded up well by Tim Carmody of Wired. As Carmody explained, there are two main theories: 1) Separating DVDs and streaming makes it easier and cheaper for Netflix to negotiate rights with Hollywood (best articulated by venture capitalist Bill Gurley), and 2) Netflix wants to let its DVD business die in peace, without taking streaming down with it (argued in two posts by tech writer Dan Frommer). Along the lines of the latter theory, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram likened Netflix's situation to the news business and wondered who would be the first newspaper company to spin off its print product from its digital side. — The News Corp. scandal and a press freedom threat: It's been a couple of months since News Corp.'s phone-hacking scandal was making big headlines, but the problems stemming from it continue to spread week by week. Deadline New York's David Lieberman looked at some of the financial signs indicating that the fallout may not be isolated to News Corp.'s British newspaper division. This week, a couple of aspects of the scandal heated up as another wound down: News Corp. is expected to settle its highest-profile hacking case (with the family of a murdered 12-year-old girl) for .7 million, while the U.S. Justice Department reportedly began asking the company for information in its investigation into bribery charges, and new allegations of hacking into a former government official's voicemail emerged. Meanwhile, apart from News Corp., the story briefly sparked a press freedom fight when Scotland Yard invoked an espionage law to threaten the Guardian to give up its anonymous sources on one of the hacking cases. Journalists across Britain, including some from competitors like the Daily Mail, rose up to defend the Guardian, and within a few days, police dropped their threat. The backlash was strong enough that members of Parliament will question one of Scotland Yard's top officials over the plan. — Reading roundup: Tons of other little things going on this week. Here's a quick tour: — Some interesting media fallout from WikiLeaks' recent diplomatic cable release: Al Jazeera's news director resigned after the cables showed that he had modified the network's Iraq war coverage based on pressure from the U.S. This, of course, raised questions about Al Jazeera's independence and credibility. Elsewhere, British journalism thinker Charlie Beckett talked about what WikiLeaks can tell us about where news is headed. — Though its changes were trumped by Facebook, Google+ unveiled several new features and announced that it's open to everyone. J-prof Dan Reimold declared the new social network dead, but Wired's Tim Carmody explained how Google+'s changes are meant to change that. — The Washington Post's Monica Hesse wrote a thought-provoking piece on journalists' tendency to obsess with things happening on social networks, leading to insights that ... aren't that insightful. If you're interested in using social media in a way that's actually worthwhile, Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore has a good guide to ways journalists can use Twitter before, during, and after reporting a story. — At Silicon Valley Watcher, Matthew Buckland did a fascinating Q&A with Wired editor Chris Anderson — the first half on the decline of the open web, and the second on what journalism is now. — This week's most interesting piece of media-related research comes from NYU's Tim Libert, who looked at thousands of comments about the online hacking group LulzSec, finding that the discourse indicated that the group is "in the position of villain rather than the champion of the people’s rights, as they would presumably like to be seen." — Finally, the AP's Jonathan Stray wrote a stirring piece on what it would look like if we merged journalism with "maker culture," concluding, "This is a theory of civic participation based on empowering the people who like to get their hands dirty tinkering with the future. Maybe that’s every bit as important as informing voters or getting politicians fired."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:29:27 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=890

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

This Week in Review: AOL’s purge, aggregation v. original reporting, and a Times pay plan defense

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Sept. 16, 2011.] Paid and free, side by side: The Boston Globe became the latest news organization to institute an online paywall this week, but it did so in an unprecedented way that should be interesting to watch: The newspaper created a separate paid site, BostonGlobe.com, to run alongside its existing free site, Boston.com. PaidContent has the pertinent details: A single price (.99 a week), and Boston.com gets most of the breaking news and sports, while BostonGlobe.com gets most of the newspaper content. The Lab's Justin Ellis, meanwhile, has a look at the lab that designed it all. As the Globe told Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, the two sites were designed with two different types of readers in mind: One who has a deep appreciation for in-depth journalism and likes to read stories start-to-finish, and another who reads news casually and briefly and may be more concerned about entertainment or basic information than journalism per se. The first thing that caught many people's attention was new site's design — simple, clean, and understated. Tech blogger John Gruber gave it a thumbs-up, and news design guru Mario Garcia called it "probably the most significant new website design in a long time." The Lab's Joshua Benton identified the biggest reasons it looks so clean: Far fewer links and ads. Benton (in the most comprehensive post on the new site) also emphasized a less noticeable but equally important aspect of BostonGlobe.com's design: It adjusts to fit just about any browser size, which eliminates the need for mobile apps, making life easier for programmers and, as j-prof Dan Kennedy noted at the Lab, a way around the cut of app fees required by Apple and others. If the Globe's people "have figured out a way not to share their hard-earned revenues with gatekeepers such as Apple and Amazon, then they will have truly performed a service for the news business — and for journalism," Kennedy said. Of course, the Globe could launch the most brilliantly conceived news site on the web, but it won't be a success unless enough people pay for it. Poynter's Sonderman (like Kennedy) was skeptical of their ability to do that, though as the Atlantic's Rebecca Rosen pointed out, the Globe's plan may be aimed as much at retaining print subscribers as making money off the web. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple wondered if readers will find enough at BostonGlobe.com that's not at Boston.com to make the site worth their money. — The TechCrunch conflict and changing ethical standards: Last week's flap between AOL and TechCrunch over the tech site's ethical conflicts came to an official resolution on Monday, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington parted ways with AOL, the site's owner. But its full effects are going to be rippling for quite a while: Gawker's Ryan Tate called the fiasco a black eye for everyone involved, but especially AOL, which had approved Arrington's investments in some of the companies he covers just a few months ago. Fellow media mogul Barry Diller also ripped AOL's handling of the situation. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said that while he doesn't trust TechCrunch much personally, it's the audience's job to sort out their trust with the help of transparency, rather than traditional journalism's strictures. Others placed more of the blame on TechCrunch: Former Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons said TechCrunch's people should have expected this type of scenario when they sold to a big corporation, and media analyst Frederic Filloux said TechCrunch is a perfect example of the blogosphere's vulnerability to unchecked conflicts of interest. There was more fuel for those kinds of ethical concerns this week, as the winning company at TechCrunch's annual Disrupt competition was one that Arrington invests in. But Arrington had an ethical accusation of his own to make at the conference, pointing out that the New York Times invests in a tech venture capital fund which has put .5 million into GigaOM, a TechCrunch competitor. Poynter's Steve Myers detailed the Times' run-ins between the companies it invests in and the ones it covers (and its spotty disclosure about those connections), concluding that even if the conflict is less direct than in blogging, it's still worth examining more closely. As it plunged further into its battle with TechCrunch late last week, AOL was also reported to be talking with Yahoo, which recently fired its CEO, about a merger between the two Internet giants. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher said there's no way the deal would actually happen, and Wired's Tim Carmody called it a "spectacularly crazy idea" and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram agreed, while Business Insider reminded us that they said a year ago that AOL and Yahoo should merge. Meanwhile, the New York Times' David Carr homed in on the core problem that both companies are facing: The fact that people want information online from niche sites, not giant general-news portals. "As news surges on the Web, giant ocean liners like AOL and Yahoo are being outmaneuvered by the speedboats zipping around them, relatively small sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information," he wrote. — Facebook opens to subscribers: It hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as some of its other moves, but Facebook took another step in Twitter's direction this week by introducing the Subscribe Button, which allows users to see other people's (and groups') status updates without friending or becoming a fan of them. As GeekWire's Monica Guzman and many others noted, Facebook's "subscribe" looks a heck of a lot like Twitter's "follow." When asked about similar Google+ features at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, a Facebook exec said it wasn't a response to Google+. Guzman said Facebook is putting down deeper roots by going beyond the limits of reciprocal friendship, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingrampinpointed the reason why this could end up being a massive change for Facebook: It's beginning to move Facebook from a symmetrical network to an asymmetrical one, which could fundamentally transform its dynamics. Still, Ingram said Twitter is much better oriented toward being an information network than Facebook is, even with a "Subscribe" button. The change could have particularly interesting implications for journalists, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explained in his brief outline of the feature. As he noted, it may eliminate the need for separate Facebook profiles and pages for journalists, and while Lost Remote's Cory Bergman said that should be a welcome change for journalists who were trying to manage both, he noted that shows and organizations may want to stick with pages. — News Corp.'s scandal widens: An update on the ongoing scandal enveloping News Corp.: A group of U.S. banks and investment funds that own shares in News Corp. expanded a lawsuit to include allegations of stealing, hacking, and anti-competitive behavior by two of the company's U.S. subsidiaries — an advertiser and a satellite TV hardware manufacturer. As the Washington Post's Erik Wemple noted, these are old cases, but they're getting fresh attention, and that's how scandals gain momentum. James Murdoch, the son of News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, was also recalled to testify again before members of Britain's Parliament later this fall, facing new questions about the breadth of News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal. The Wall Street Journal examined the scandal's impact on the elder Murdoch's succession plan for the conglomerate, especially as it involves James. The company's executives also announced this week that they've found tens of thousands of documents that could shed more light on the phone hacking cases. — Reading roundup: Here's what else went on this week: — The biggest news story this week, of course, is actually 10 years old: Here's a look at how newspapers marked the anniversary of 9/11, how news orgs used digital technology to tell the story, and a reflection on how 9/11 changed the media landscape. — Twitter introduced a new web analytics tool to measure Twitter's impact on websites. Here's an analysis from Mathew Ingram of GigaOM. — At an academic conference last weekend, Illinois j-prof Robert McChesney repeated his call for public funding for journalism. Here are a couple of good summaries of his talk from fellow j-profs Axel Bruns and Alfred Hermida. — Finally, here's a relatively short but insightful two-part interview between two digital media luminaries, Henry Jenkins and Dan Gillmor, about media literacy, citizen journalism and Gillmor's latest book. Should make for a quick, thought-provoking weekend read.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:07:14 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=854

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

This Week in Review: Murdoch and Wall Street, AOL takes a dive, and Tribune takes a stab at tablets

This Week in Review: Twitter and big ideas, praise for the NYT’s pay plan, and more trouble for Murdoch

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 18, 2011.] News Corp.'s scandal keeps growing: Rupert Murdoch might have hoped News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal would die down when he closed the British tabloid News of the World last week, but it only served to fuel the issue's explosion. This past week, the scandal's collateral damage spread to News Corp.'s proposed takeover of the British broadcaster BSkyB: Faced with increasing pressure from the British government and the revelation that News Corp. journalists tried to get private records of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, News Corp. dropped the BSkyB bid, which had been a huge part of the company's U.K. strategy. Plenty of other problems are cropping up for News Corp., too. The top lawyer for its U.K. newspaper branch, News International, quit. The company's stock lost billion in four business days at one point. A pre-existing U.S. shareholders' suit expanded to cover the hacking scandal. The Murdochs have to testify before British Parliament this week about the scandal, and the FBI started investigating U.S.-related aspects of the issue. That's all in addition to the ongoing problems News Corp. faces, as detailed by Poynter's Rick Edmonds. The scandal has led quite a few writers to criticize the culture that Murdoch has created at News Corp. Capital New York's Tom McGeveran and Reuters' John Lloyd railed on Murdoch and News Corp.'s character, Carl Bernstein called this Murdoch's Watergate, and the Observer's editorial board called for systemic reforms in Britain so Murdoch's influence can never be so strong. Members of the Bancroft family said they wouldn't have sold the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch in 2007 if they'd have known the hacking was going on. On the other hand, the New York Times pointed out that sleazy British tabloid tactics are hardly limited to Murdoch, and media critic Howard Kurtz noted that they're very much alive in the U.S. mainstream press, too. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen defended Murdoch, saying he's been good for journalism on the whole, and Gawker's John Cook defended those tabloid reporting tactics. Meanwhile, j-prof Jeff Jarvis and the Telegraph's Toby Harnden urged the British government not to respond by enacting more regulation. News Corp.'s retreat might not stop with News of the World and BSkyB. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff and others have reported that the company's execs are debating whether to get out of Britain's newspaper business entirely, and several observers chimed in to say that might actually make a good deal of business sense. Media analyst Ken Doctor said News International is losing steam, and the Financial Times' John Gapper said newspapers are becoming far more trouble than they're worth to Murdoch. Not only that, but the New Yorker's John Cassidy said dropping his U.K. newspapers could let Murdoch revive his BSkyB bid, and Jeff Jarvis speculated that when Murdoch chooses between the power that the papers give him and the money saved by getting rid of them, he'll choose the money. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch called the rumors of a newspaper sell-off "rubbish." But just because News of the World and News International may be dead and dying, that doesn't mean newspapers as a whole are, argued David Carr of the New York Times. As he noted, it was the Guardian's dogged reporting that finally broke this story open. Murdoch "prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect," Carr wrote. The Atlantic also had praise for the Guardian, and Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore interviewed one of its editors about the lonely journey of covering the phone hacking story. — HuffPo aggregation under the microscope: A lively discussion about the rights and wrongs of aggregation developed last week out of a column by Ad Age media critic Simon Dumenco, who complained that the Huffington Post had extensively summarized one of his posts, buried the link to the original, and — contrary to Arianna Huffington's argument that her site benefits those they aggregate by sending them readers — gave him just 57 page views. The Huffington Post responded by apologizing and suspending the article's writer. HuffPo business editor Peter Goodman told Adweek the piece was a fully formed article when it should have been a simple introduction and a link, but Dumenco responded to the apology by arguing that the writer did nothing out of the ordinary — this is just how HuffPo tells its writers to do it. Dumenco's point was echoed by several others: The Awl's Choire Sicha said the suspended writer was doing what she was taught, Gawker's Ryan Tate, drawing on a revealing quote from a former HuffPo writer, made the same point: "This is pretty ridiculous, given HuffPo's systematic, officially-sanctioned approach to rewriting too much of people's news articles." British journalist Kevin Anderson called HuffPo's summary-heavy aggregation "a pretty cynical strategy," and paidContent's Staci Kramer said HuffPo needs to respect its sources, rather than treating a link as a favor. Gabe Rivera, whose news site, Techmeme, was compared to HuffPo favorably by Dumenco, looked for terms to distinguish what his site does from what HuffPo does. Poynter's Julie Moos said some measure of originality will always make for better journalism and a better business model than heavy aggregation, and ZDNet's Tom Foremski pined for the old blogging mentality whose goal was to add value. In a short podcast, author Steven Rosenbaum said this is a logical time to step back and evaluate exactly what constitutes ethical aggregation. There were a few dissenters, though: GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and Slate's Jack Shafer both argued that the type of aggregation that HuffPo does has been around for ages in traditional media (especially in Britain, according to Forbes' Tim Worstall). In fact, Shafer said, news orgs could learn a something valuable from the Huffington Post: "That a huge, previously ignored readership out there wants its news hot, quick, and tight." — Comparing Google+, Facebook, and Twitter: It's been just about three weeks since Google+ launched, and Google's new social network is growing like a weed, with estimates of as many as 10 million users so far. (Its number of active users may soon be approaching Twitter's figures.) Google+ news has dominated Twitter, and Google's also working on integrating it with Gmail. With Plus' incredible growth, tech observers have been going back and forth about what social network Google+ is disrupting most. PCWorld's Megan Geuss wondered whether Google+ and Facebook can coexist, and PC Magazine's John Dvorak posited that all the excitement about Google+ is more or less just pent-up frustration with Facebook. The New York Times' David Pogue and Technology Review's Paul Boutin both compared Google+ favorably to Facebook, largely because of its superior privacy controls (though GigaOM's Mathew Ingram pointed out that it may not be a privacy improvement for some people). Meanwhile, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan said Google+ is more comparable to Twitter, then went ahead and made a thorough, smart comparison between the two. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal said Google+ might end up being more conversational than Twitter, which he called more of a call-and-response: Google+ "won't be as good at connecting people to information or each other quickly, but it might be better at longer form discussions and whatever we call the process by which people pull reasoned thoughts from their networks into public discourse." Hutch Carpenter said Google+ resembles both Facebook and Twitter, and Computer World's Mike Elgan wrote that it'll disrupt just about everything. Still, Google+ has its limits: ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick explained why he'd never move his personal blog there as some are doing, and Instapaper's Marco Arment and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor both urged readers to keep a space for their own online identity outside of spaces like Google+ or Facebook. For journalists feeling out Google+, Meranda Watling of 10,000 Words put together a preliminary guide. — Reading roundup: Here's what else people were talking about this past week: — The newspaper chain MediaNews made a distinctive play for the tablet news market last week, announcing the launch of TapIn, a location-based news app made specifically for tablets. It'll start in the Bay Area in partnership with the San Jose Mercury News. Ken Doctor, Jeff Sonderman, and Mathew Ingram all wrote about what makes it worth watching. — The Economist continued running pieces all week in its series on the future of the news industry. You can check out several writers'reasons for optimism or read the opening statements in an ongoing debate between NYU's Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr about whether the Internet has been good for journalism. — Boston Globe developer Andy Boyle made his pitch for young journalists to go into web development, or as he put it, "learn to make the internets." — Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together two great social media how-to's for journalists: One on verifying information on social media, and the other on strategies for engagement on Facebook. — Finally, NYU's Clay Shirky gave us another thoughtful essay on the unbundling of news and why the news ecosystem needs to be chaotic right now. In the end, though, here's what he believes news should be: "News has to be subsidized because society’s truth-tellers can’t be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market"; "news has to be cheap because cheap is where the opportunity is right now"; and "news has to be free, because it has to spread."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:05:59 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=815

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This Week in Review: Paying up with Apple and Google, Twitter and activism, free labor for HuffPo

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 27, 2011.] Censorship, the law, and Twitter: If we hadn't already learned how social media are opening the traditional media's gatekeeping role to the masses, we got a pretty good object lesson this week in Britain. Here's what happened: To keep the British tabloids from digging into an alleged affair with a reality TV star, Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs took out a British court provision called a super-injunction that prohibits media from identifying him and reporting on both the story and the very fact that a super-injunction exists. But the super-injunction was no match for Facebook, Twitter, and soccer forums, where thousands of people talked about Giggs and the affair in spite of (and because of) the order. Since then, a Scottish newspaper and a member of Parliament have both named Giggs, rendering the super-injunction essentially ineffective and causing quite a bit of handwringing over whether gag orders are a lost cause in the Twitter age, and whether or not that's a good thing. Giggs sued Twitter for the breach, and some members of Parliament started looking for ways to control the site. Prime Minister David Cameron said Twitter made Britain's injunctions "unfair" and "unsustainable" for traditional media and urged Parliament to change them. Some people, including World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and the Guardian's Richard Hillgrove, said the problem lies with Twitter, not the law, with Hillgrove (rather absurdly) suggesting a delay mechanism to monitor posts before they go up: "Twitter and Facebook are not blank sheets of paper. They are media publishers like any other." Others faulted the law instead: At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said it allows the wealthy to play by different rules, and the Telegraph'sHarry Mount said that thanks to the web, "a form of people power has been effectively absorbed into that new body of privacy law." The Vancouver Sun's Mario Canseco documented the failure of gag orders in the Internet age in Canada, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM advised courts and governments to quit trying to enforce antiquated laws, saying they "may not like the implications of a totally distributed real-time information network, but they are going to have to start living with it sooner rather than later." Then, of course, there's the question of whether the anonymous online super-injunction violators have any legal repercussions to worry about. As the New York Times noted, Twitter has been resistant to turning over its users' identities in the past, though a Twitter official said this week it will hand over user info to the authorities if it's legally required to. But even with Twitter's compliance, there would still be hurdles to clear in identifying users, the Telegraph explained. — iPad channels for big and small media: Several big-media publications neared or hit iPad milestones this week: On stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, The Daily's Greg Clayman said it's nearing a million downloads since it was launched in January. Clayman wouldn't say how many paid subscribers the News Corp. iPad-only publication has (a far more interesting figure in determining The Daily's viability), but Adweek's Lucia Moses said The Daily will announce its number of paid downloads — it only started charging in March — once it hits a "target level." Meanwhile, Wired and GQ were made available for in-app subscriptions through Apple App Store this week, after their owner, Condé Nast, became one of the first major publishers to strike a deal with Apple for in-app subscriptions earlier this month. Another major publication, Playboy, launched an iPad subscription outside the App Store, because it obviously has some difficulty complying with Apple's "no nudity" policy. Playboy's app is essentially an iPad-optimized website, which might seem like a tempting option for publishers who don't want to deal with Apple's restrictions, but as Mashable and GigaOM explained, Playboy might be uniquely positioned to pull this off where others can't. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram looked at those cases and weighed the pluses and minuses for publishers of getting into bed with Apple. Of course, big publishers aren't the only ones getting into the iPad game: At paidContent, Ashley Norris, CEO of a small publishing company that just released an iPad app, argued that indie publishers could play a key role in developing the tablet magazine. Flipboard is a pretty ideal model for those publishers: It's valued at 0 million, and SiliconAngle's Tom Foremski said it exemplifies the current en vogue tech-bubble business plan: "find free content and organize it into a useful interface." That niche might not play as big of a part in the iPad market as we think, though: As Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted via ReadWriteWeb, news apps make up only 3% of all the apps in the App Store. — Driving more traffic from Facebook: Facebook has been working hard lately to cozy up to news organizations, and this week it provided some statistics that may have some of those organizations looking more closely at integrating Facebook into their sites. According to stats Search Engine Land got from Facebook (so grain of salt, etc.), the average media site integrated with Facebook has gotten a 300% jump in Facebook referral traffic, and ABC News, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post have all reportedly doubled their traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins. Meanwhile, Fortune's Peter Lauria talked to Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik about the possibility of news orgs charging on Facebook using Facebook credits, like some Facebook games do now. As it's been known to do, Facebook played a big role in the aftermath of another natural disaster this week when a tornado hit Joplin, Missouri. The local newspaper, the Joplin Globe, told Poynter about how they set up a Facebook page to help people find family and friends in the tornado's wake. Elsewhere in social media and news, the New York Times experimented this week with a human-powered Twitter feed, as opposed to its usual mostly automatically driven style. The Times' Liz Heron (and a couple of other newspaper social media editors) talked to Poynter's Jeff Sonderman about their Twitter strategies, and Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words looked at how the experiment changed the Times' Twitter feed. Heron also revealed the Times' informal social media guidelines at the BBC's Social Media Summit: "Use common sense and don't be stupid." — Reading roundup: Not a lot of big future-of-news stories this week, a several smaller things worth keeping an eye on: — Google notified publishers late last week that it's abandoning its project to scan and archive hundreds of years of old newspapers. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes lamented the decision, and Paul Balcerak urged newspapers to pick up where Google left off. — This week's AOL/Huffington Post bits and pieces: Huffington Post Canada has been launched, AOL's Daily Finance has been made over, and some HuffPo staff are reportedly leaving because they're upset with how the AOL/HuffPo marriage has gone so far. Meanwhile, even though AOL's content is free, CEO Tim Armstrong expressed his general belief in paid content online. — Ben Huh of the Cheezburger network of comedy sites announced he's working on what he's calling the Moby Dick Project — an effort to reform the way news is presented and consumed online. ReadWriteWeb gave more details of the type of software he's developing. — A couple of addenda to last week's linking discussion: Former Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Fry wrote about solving the workflow issue at newspapers, and at the Guardian, Dan Gillmor called out lazy linking — linking to a summary, rather than the original piece — in online aggregation. — CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis made a case for news as conversation and the value of comments, and at 10,000 Words, Alex Schmidt wrote about the way poisonous online comments can affect reporters. — Finally, Canadian media consultant Ken Goldstein issued a paper looking at decline circulation of newspapers in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. He included a possibly remarkably prescient 1964 quotation by media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-new-business-models-and-traffic-drivers-in-online-news-and-wrangling-over-app-ads/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-new-business-models-and-traffic-drivers-in-online-news-and-wrangling-over-app-ads/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:57:01 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=808

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 13, 2011.] Leaving the old ad model behind: Much of the commentary about digital news this week was generated by two big reports, one on the business of digital journalism and the other on its consumption. We'll start on the business side, with the Columbia j-school's study on what we know so far about the viability of various digital journalism business models. As Poynter's Bill Mitchell suggested, the best entry point into the 146-page report might be the nine recommendations that form its conclusion. Mitchell summed the report up in three themes: The audience for journalism is growing, though translating that into revenue is a challenge; the old model of banner ads isn't cutting it, and news orgs need to look for new forms of advertising; and news orgs need to play better with aggregators and sharpen their own aggregation skills. In his response to the study, Reuters' Felix Salmon focused on the advertising angle, arguing that journalism and advertising have too long been linked by mere adjacency and that "when you move away from the ad-adjacency model, however, things get a lot more interesting and exciting." The New York Times' story on the report centered on advertising, too, particularly the growing need for journalists to learn about the business side of their products. (That was media consultant Mark Potts' main takeaway, too.) Emily Bell, a scholar at the center that released the study, said that while journalists need to understand the business of their industry, integrating news and sales staffs isn't necessarily the way to go. The J-Lab's Jan Schaffer recommended that news orgs respond to their business problems by learning from smaller startups and incorporating them more thoroughly into the journalism ecosystem. And paidContent's Staci Kramer advised news orgs to focus on regular audiences rather than fly-by visitors: "Outwardly we like to complain about content farms; in reality, a lot of what news outlets are doing to the side of those front-page stories isn’t very different." — Facebook's growth as news driver: The other major report was released by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and looked at how people access news on the web. This study, too, found that despite a small core of frequent users, news sites are dependent on casual users who visit sites infrequently and don't stay long when they're there. Poynter's Rick Edmonds conveniently distilled the study into five big takeaways. The study also found that while Google is still the top referrer to major news sites, Facebook is quickly emerging as a significant news driver, too. University of British Columbia j-prof Alfred Hermida said this lines up with recent research he's done among Canadians, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said it showed that while Google is a dominant source for online news now, Facebook is primed to succeed it. Meanwhile, the study also found that surprisingly little traffic to news sites is driven by Twitter. Lauren Dugan of All Twitter said this finding casts some doubt on the idea that Twitter is "a huge link-sharing playground," though the Wall Street Journal's Zach Seward said the study misses that Twitter referrals are undercounted. The Twitter undercounting was one of several problems that TBD's Steve Buttry had about the study, including inconsistent language to characterize findings and a bias toward large news organizations. "This study probably has some helpful data. But it has too many huge holes and indications of bias to have much value," Buttry wrote. — Pricing ads and subscriptions on tablets: Condé Nast became the third major magazine publisher to reach an agreement with Apple on app subscriptions, and one of the first to offer an in-app subscription, with The New Yorker available now. (Wired subscriptions are coming next month.) Time Inc., which reached a deal with Apple last week, clarified that it won't include in-app subscriptions, which would be where Apple takes that now-infamous 30% cut. The Financial Times, meanwhile, is still negotiating with Apple. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici explained why publishers may be warming to Apple's deal: Turns out, more people are willing to share their personal data with publishers feared. Still, Mathew Ingram of GigaOM used iFlowReader's bad Apple experience as a warning to other companies about the dangers of getting into bed with Apple. Now that Apple-publisher relations have thawed, the New York Times' David Carr moved to the next issue: Negotiations between publishers and advertisers over how valuable in-app ads are, and how much those ads should cost. Time.com's Chris Gayomali wondered why magazines are more than giving away app subscriptions with print subscriptions, and concluded that it's about getting more eyeballs on the print product, not the app, in order to maintain the all-important ad rate base. In other words, Carr said in another post, publishers are following the old magazine model, where the product is priced below cost and the money is made off advertising instead. He questioned the wisdom of applying that strategy to tablets: "the rich advertising opportunity that will produce may be a less durable and less stable business than grinding out highly profitable circulation over the long haul." — A postmortem on Bin Laden coverage: It's now been close to two weeks since the news of Osama bin Laden's death broke on Twitter, but plenty of folks were still discussing how the story was broken and covered. Gilad Lotan and Devin Gaffney of SocialFlow put together some fascinating visualizations of how the news spread on Twitter, especially the central roles of Donald Rumsfeld staffer Keith Urbahn and New York Times reporter Brian Stelter. Mashable's Chris Taylor concluded from the data that trustworthiness and having active followers (as opposed to just lots of followers) are more important than ever on Twitter. Media consultant Frederic Filloux was mostly reassured by the way the traditional news outlets handled the story online: "For once, editorial seems to evolve at a faster pace than the business side." There were still folks cautioning against going overboard on Twitter-as-news hype, while the Telegraph's Emma Barnett wondered why pundits are still so surprised at the significant role Twitter and Facebook play in breaking news. ("It's exactly what they were designed for.") New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane gave the blow-by-blow of how his paper responded to the story, highlighting a few tweets by Times reporters and editors. Reuters' Felix Salmon chastised Brisbane for not including Brian Stelter's tweets, which were posted a good 15 minutes before the ones he included. The exclusion, Salmon surmised, might indicate that the Times doesn't see what Stelter did on Twitter as reporting. Google News founder Krishna Bharat compared the way Google handled 9/11 and Bin Laden's death, marveling at how much more breaking-news coverage is available on the web now. The Lab's Megan Garber used the occasion to glean some insights from Bharat about trusting the authority of the algorithm to provide a rich palette of news, but at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan used the Bin Laden coverage to point out some flaws in Google News' algorithm. — Reading roundup: Lots of interesting little rabbit trails to choose from this week. Here are a few: — ComScore's April traffic numbers are out, and there were a number of storylines flowing out of them: Cable news sources are beating print ones in web traffic, the New York Times' numbers are down (as expected) after implementation of its paywall, and Gawker's numbers are starting to come back after dropping last year with its redesign. — Last week, ESPN columnist Rick Reilly told graduating students at the University of Colorado's j-school to never write for free. That prompted Jason Fry of the National Sports Journalism Center and Craig Calcaterra of MSNBC.com's Hardball Talk to expound on the virtues of writing for free, though Slate's Tom Scocca took Reilly's side. — Two thoughtful pieces on brands and journalism: Jason Fry at Poynter on assessing the value of organizational and personal brands, and Vadim Lavrusik at the Lab on journalists building their brands via Facebook. — Late last week, Google lost an appeal to a 2007 Belgian ruling forcing it to pay newspapers for gaining revenue for linking to their stories on Google News. — Finally, the Huffington Post's Mandy Jenkins offered a helpful list of 10 ways journalists can use Storify. It's full of great examples and should spark an idea or two.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-new-business-models-and-traffic-drivers-in-online-news-and-wrangling-over-app-ads/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-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-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-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:45:40 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=905

This Week in Review: Facebook goes deeper into information sharing, and news orgs go with it

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 30, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] A heavyweight enters the tablet ring: Amazon became the latest company to jump into the tablet market this week, unveiling the Kindle Fire, a 9 tablet that will run on Google's Android system. It's a 7" touch-screen tablet that's essentially a knockoff of the BlackBerry Playbook — much smaller and cheaper than Apple's iPad. Amazon also revealed three new Kindle models ranging from to 9, two of them touch-screen, as well as a new Kindle Fire-only web browser, Silk (more on that at the LA Times). The two most comprehensive early looks at the Fire came from Wired's Steven Levy and Bloomberg's Brad Stone. Levy looked more at the device itself, describing it as a way for Amazon to spotlight its non-book media library and saying its biggest challenge is to Netflix. Stone looked more at the corporate strategy behind the Fire, noting that it "funnels users into Amazon’s meticulously constructed world of content, commerce, and cloud computing." (Sounds like a certain other tablet we know.) By the end of launch day, several tech sites like TechCrunch and ZDNet had already declared the Fire the winner of the hypercompetitive Android tablet market, and Ad Age said it would soon have tablet consumption taking off. The bigger question, then, was whether the Fire would present the first real threat to Apple's iPad. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal summed up the Fire's challenge to the iPad — smaller, cheaper, and the first media experience as thoroughly integrated as Apple's App Store. As the Atlantic's Alesh Houdek put it, the Fire may do most everything tablet owners really want, only for a lot less than the iPad. But ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow said the Fire can't match up to the iPad, and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and paidContent's Tom Krazit both said it's not even directly competing with the iPad — it's in a more utilitarian market, where the iPad is more about luxury. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM argued that to content producers, Amazon and Apple are going to look very similar: They both see their devices as ways to sell their own content, which puts them in competition with the content providers themselves. The Fire also launched with a newsstand, with big magazine publishers Conde Nast, Hearst, and Meredith among the first to sign deals with Amazon, under similar terms to Apple's 30% cut of revenue. (News Corp. also signed a deal to put Fox TV shows on the Fire.) The New York Observer's Emily Witt noted that the Fire could be the mobile-content Apple competitor publishers have been looking for, and the Lab's Martin Langeveld said the Fire will present a fresh disruption for content providers, furthering the growth of direct-to-consumer marketing and eliminating the need for third-party advertising. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman posed several questions journalists should be asking about the Fire, looking at things like paid content, customer data, and app development. — Objections to 'frictionless sharing': Reactions continued to pour in about Facebook's latest overhaul, announced late last week. Many of those concerns centered around the same theme: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's brave new world of ubiquitous, "frictionless" sharing. The New York Times' Somini Sengupta and the LA Times' Jessica Guynn gave us a picture of what this world might look like, and Slate's Farhad Manjoo explained why sharing should still be a choice. Needless to say, this brought up another round of complaints about privacy on Facebook: Tech pioneer Dave Winer said Facebook has crossed the privacy Rubicon by seeking out information about you to post to others, rather than just using information you've chosen to share. Entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic pointed out that Facebook can track every page you visit even when you're logged out. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter argued that this type of involuntary sharing should be a concern for every news organization that works with Facebook, and former New York Times developer Michael Donohoe said the Times refused to implement that kind of sharing via Facebook. There was one (non-Facebook) voice countering that the passive sharing isn't that big of a deal: Forbes' Jeff Bercovici. A couple of deeper thoughts on the issue: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal wrote on Facebook as "the Meaning Machine," and media prof Mark Deuze argued that living our lives inside of a mediated environment (like Facebook encourages to) can actually help us to see ourselves as deeply connected to others, if we're willing to let go of our self-absorption. As I touched on a bit earlier, there's also the question of what news organizations should do with Facebook: Gawker's Ryan Tate explained why many media companies are so eager to be part of Facebook's plans (huge audiences, huge amounts of data), and Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik explained at the Lab and at the Online News Association conference how journalists can take advantage of these changes. But Jeff Sonderman was a bit more skeptical, urging news organizations to weigh the costs as well as the benefits. Finally, these changes probably aren't good news for Google and its own network Google+, as Facebook begins collecting loads of valuable personal data that Google can't touch, Mathew Ingram explained. Twitter does its own thing (real-time news) too well to be too worried, Ingram said, but the New York Times' Nick Bilton wrote that Twitter isn't user-friendly enough to be for everyone, as Facebook is. — Media trust and the new local news: The Pew Research Center released two surveys over the past week or so: The first was the latest in a regular series of looks at the American public's views of the press, and results weren't pretty. The press hit record lows in the public's mind in terms of fairness, accuracy, bias, morality, professionalism, and impact on democracy. (Poynter has a good, quick summary.) Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that many of the poll respondents get most of their news from TV, which he said isn't a particularly substantive media diet. "The media assessments of the TV-favoring Pew respondents are about as valuable as the restaurant advice of that guy who has eaten 25,000 Big Macs," he wrote. One other nugget: j-prof Alfred Hermida pointed outthat many social media say they get the same news there as on traditional news. The second study examined the platforms on which people get their local news. There were a few different takeaways from this one: The New York Times focused on the fact that a broad range of platforms have joined TV as predominant local news sources, while the LA Times and Poynter's Rick Edmonds centered on the paradox that many people were very dependent on their local newspaper but still wouldn't care much if it were gone. O'Reilly Radar's Alex Howard had a fine analysis of the study, using it as a jumping-off point for a piece on the Internet as the future of local news. Other notes from the data: Broadcasting & Cable looked at the areas where local TV did well, Poynter's Julie Moos noticed that many people follow local news even when nothing big is going on, and paidContent focused on the role of mobile media in local news consumption. — More over-aggregation accusations: The business news site Business Insider announced some happy news late last week — it had recently raised  million in funding. But that announcement prompted a wave of criticism about the ethics of their aggregation efforts. Reuters' Ryan McCarthy laid out the basic accusation: Business Insider, he said, routinely lifts large chunks of stories from other outlets while only providing scant attribution or links. Others, like former Business Insider employee Ben Popper of BetaBeat, echoed the complaint. So did Instapaper founder Marco Arment, who noted how little traffic he gets from Business Insider republishing his stories. Business Insider's Henry Blodget responded twice to Arment, the second time in a massively long, detailed post essentially blaming the aggregation problems on some weird content management system glitches. Based on that post, Reuters' Felix Salmon said Business Insider still falls on the wrong side of "over-aggregation," drawing a distinction between human-edited and automatically driven aggregation pages. There was some praise for Business Insider in light of their funding, though — CNBC.com and the Guardian both looked at what makes the site work so well. — Reading roundup: Other stuff to keep an eye on this week: — The Wall Street Journal changed its website's privacy policy to connect personally identifiable data with browsing history without user permission. Yeah, people weren't crazy about that, especially since the Journal has been one of the big crusaders in reporting on corporate violations of privacy online. Here's New York magazine's and Dan Gillmor's takes. — Google launched Google News Standout, which allows news organizations to flag their top work. The Lab's Megan Garber examined the way it rewards generosity, and Wired's Tim Carmody looked at the increasing integration between Google News and Google+. — This Week in Patch: Patch's local site editors are reportedly being asked to drum up sales leads, and the Batavian's Howard Owens said if you're going to work that hard on local news, you might as well start your own site. Patch President Warren Webster pushed backagainst the criticism. — The Financial Times said its web-based app has been a higher seller than the Apple App Store version, and ReadWriteWeb called it abig early victory for HTML5-based app developers in their battle against Apple. — An update on News Corp.'s daily tablet publication, The Daily: It has about 120,000 weekly readers, well below Rupert Murdoch's targets for it. — Finally, a trio of super helpful/valuable posts for journalists: J-prof Paul Bradshaw wrote on what should make up journalists' network infrastructure online, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia's Jon Whiten gave a guide to making longform writing work online, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman urged news organizations to start building apps that solve problems.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:41:19 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=903

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This Week in Review: Murdoch’s defense, objectivity in nonprofit news, and a new paid news project

]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 23, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] Facebook ramps its sharing up even further: We had been hearing all week about a big announcement Facebook would be making this Thursday at its annual conference — about how it would mark the social network's rebirth and leave the competition in the dust. So here's what we got (in a handy roundup from Gizmodo): A Twitter-like mini-feed called Ticker (meant to make the News Feed look more like "your own personal newspaper"), apps on Facebook's Open Graph, sharing music and games through integration with services like the music player Spotify, and Timeline, essentially a one-page Facebook life story. It's pretty clear what Facebook's goal is with all of this: Put charitably, as Wired's Mike Isaac did, it's "allowing for the Facebook page to be a sort of one-stop shop, scooping up all of your activities and displaying them in one grand, blue and white frame." Put more skeptically, as the New Yorker's Nicholas Thompson did, Facebook wants to eat up a large chunk of the Internet, which has some real consequences: "The more our online lives take place on Facebook, the more we depend on the choices of the people who run the company—what they think about privacy, how they think we should be able to organize our friends, what they tell advertisers (and governments) about what we do and what we buy." Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher made the point a different way, arguing that Facebook is trying to combat the natural slowdown in how much we're willing to share online by making it more frictionless and ubiquitous. Reactions were similar in displaying two sides of the same coin: The ability to pull together a lot of old social information into a single Timeline was either "something a lot of users wanted without much of a voice asking for it" (ZDNet's Rachel King) or a fix to "a problem absolutely no one was clamoring about" (Gawker's Adrian Chen). We'll get more of a sense of which side is more accurate over the next several months. — Facebook meets news apps: Another one of the changes announced by Facebook on Thursday was the addition of several new Facebook-based news apps, the first of which was the Wall Street Journal's WSJ Social, unveiled on Tuesday. (Others, like the Washington Post's and Yahoo's, were announced on Thursday.) As the Lab's Megan Garber explained, the app allows each user to edit their own stream of Journal material, and to follow and rank others based on their editing. As Forbes' Jeff Bercovici pointed out, the app seems to serve both the Journal's and Facebook's interests quite nicely: It keeps people's news consumption and interaction within Facebook, but allows the Journal to sell its own ads within the app and keep the money. (Facebook gets everything for the ads outside the app.) There were questions about the app — Adweek's Dylan Byers wondered how fond people would be of an app that curates content from only one source, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram questioned how well the socially oriented app would work with a hard paywall, and more generally, whether it's wise for news organizations to leave so much of their user interaction inside Facebook. — AOL's struggles and the future of online content: The AOL/TechCrunch saga seems to be (mercifully) winding down this week — the last real drama took place late last week, when one TechCrunch writer, Paul Carr, quit with a scorched-earth post directed at new editor Erick Schonfeld, and Schonfeld disputed his claims. But the bad news continues to roll in for AOL: The sales director for its hyperlocal news project, Patch, left — the second top AOL ad exec to bolt in the past month. Business Insider reported that AOL may lose million on Patch this year. And AOL's prospects as a content-based company in general don't look rosy, as paidContent's Robert Andrews pointed out, looking at the declining revenues for AOL Europe once it dropped Internet access from its business model. AOL execs remain positive in the face of all the bad news: Arianna Huffington said her Huffington Post's merger with AOL has been a boon for both HuffPo and Patch, thanks to the new synergies between the two operations. On the advertising side, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said he hopes to catch Microsoft and Google in online display ads, a tall task. Outside the company, of course, skeptics still abound. Bloomberg Businessweek's Peter Burrows declared AOL and its fellow web portal Yahoo dead companies walking, saying they "have tried to live by Old Media rules while masquerading as New Media powerhouses." And at Adweek, Michael Wolff pointed to AOL and Yahoo's struggles as evidence that online content can't sustain a business model. The only content that can still do that, he said, is TV or video: "What still works, what advertisers and audiences still seek, is superexpensive content." — Netflix's big split: It wasn't related to journalism per se, but the big story at the intersection of media and tech this week was the announcement of Netflix's split into two businesses — one for streaming video online, and a new one, Qwikster, to continue its DVD-by-mail service. The change was welcomed by approximately no one: Not users or investors, as the New York Times reported, not analysts like Business Insider's Henry Blodget (who said it's bad for customers) and paidContent's Robert Andrews (who said it's bad for business), and not the Oatmeal's Matthew Inman, who summed up the head-scratching nature of the move as well as anyone. Of course, Netflix had to have a reason for doing this, and there were several popular guesses, rounded up well by Tim Carmody of Wired. As Carmody explained, there are two main theories: 1) Separating DVDs and streaming makes it easier and cheaper for Netflix to negotiate rights with Hollywood (best articulated by venture capitalist Bill Gurley), and 2) Netflix wants to let its DVD business die in peace, without taking streaming down with it (argued in two posts by tech writer Dan Frommer). Along the lines of the latter theory, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram likened Netflix's situation to the news business and wondered who would be the first newspaper company to spin off its print product from its digital side. — The News Corp. scandal and a press freedom threat: It's been a couple of months since News Corp.'s phone-hacking scandal was making big headlines, but the problems stemming from it continue to spread week by week. Deadline New York's David Lieberman looked at some of the financial signs indicating that the fallout may not be isolated to News Corp.'s British newspaper division. This week, a couple of aspects of the scandal heated up as another wound down: News Corp. is expected to settle its highest-profile hacking case (with the family of a murdered 12-year-old girl) for .7 million, while the U.S. Justice Department reportedly began asking the company for information in its investigation into bribery charges, and new allegations of hacking into a former government official's voicemail emerged. Meanwhile, apart from News Corp., the story briefly sparked a press freedom fight when Scotland Yard invoked an espionage law to threaten the Guardian to give up its anonymous sources on one of the hacking cases. Journalists across Britain, including some from competitors like the Daily Mail, rose up to defend the Guardian, and within a few days, police dropped their threat. The backlash was strong enough that members of Parliament will question one of Scotland Yard's top officials over the plan. — Reading roundup: Tons of other little things going on this week. Here's a quick tour: — Some interesting media fallout from WikiLeaks' recent diplomatic cable release: Al Jazeera's news director resigned after the cables showed that he had modified the network's Iraq war coverage based on pressure from the U.S. This, of course, raised questions about Al Jazeera's independence and credibility. Elsewhere, British journalism thinker Charlie Beckett talked about what WikiLeaks can tell us about where news is headed. — Though its changes were trumped by Facebook, Google+ unveiled several new features and announced that it's open to everyone. J-prof Dan Reimold declared the new social network dead, but Wired's Tim Carmody explained how Google+'s changes are meant to change that. — The Washington Post's Monica Hesse wrote a thought-provoking piece on journalists' tendency to obsess with things happening on social networks, leading to insights that ... aren't that insightful. If you're interested in using social media in a way that's actually worthwhile, Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore has a good guide to ways journalists can use Twitter before, during, and after reporting a story. — At Silicon Valley Watcher, Matthew Buckland did a fascinating Q&A with Wired editor Chris Anderson — the first half on the decline of the open web, and the second on what journalism is now. — This week's most interesting piece of media-related research comes from NYU's Tim Libert, who looked at thousands of comments about the online hacking group LulzSec, finding that the discourse indicated that the group is "in the position of villain rather than the champion of the people’s rights, as they would presumably like to be seen." — Finally, the AP's Jonathan Stray wrote a stirring piece on what it would look like if we merged journalism with "maker culture," concluding, "This is a theory of civic participation based on empowering the people who like to get their hands dirty tinkering with the future. Maybe that’s every bit as important as informing voters or getting politicians fired."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:29:27 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=890

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

This Week in Review: AOL’s purge, aggregation v. original reporting, and a Times pay plan defense

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Sept. 16, 2011.] Paid and free, side by side: The Boston Globe became the latest news organization to institute an online paywall this week, but it did so in an unprecedented way that should be interesting to watch: The newspaper created a separate paid site, BostonGlobe.com, to run alongside its existing free site, Boston.com. PaidContent has the pertinent details: A single price (.99 a week), and Boston.com gets most of the breaking news and sports, while BostonGlobe.com gets most of the newspaper content. The Lab's Justin Ellis, meanwhile, has a look at the lab that designed it all. As the Globe told Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, the two sites were designed with two different types of readers in mind: One who has a deep appreciation for in-depth journalism and likes to read stories start-to-finish, and another who reads news casually and briefly and may be more concerned about entertainment or basic information than journalism per se. The first thing that caught many people's attention was new site's design — simple, clean, and understated. Tech blogger John Gruber gave it a thumbs-up, and news design guru Mario Garcia called it "probably the most significant new website design in a long time." The Lab's Joshua Benton identified the biggest reasons it looks so clean: Far fewer links and ads. Benton (in the most comprehensive post on the new site) also emphasized a less noticeable but equally important aspect of BostonGlobe.com's design: It adjusts to fit just about any browser size, which eliminates the need for mobile apps, making life easier for programmers and, as j-prof Dan Kennedy noted at the Lab, a way around the cut of app fees required by Apple and others. If the Globe's people "have figured out a way not to share their hard-earned revenues with gatekeepers such as Apple and Amazon, then they will have truly performed a service for the news business — and for journalism," Kennedy said. Of course, the Globe could launch the most brilliantly conceived news site on the web, but it won't be a success unless enough people pay for it. Poynter's Sonderman (like Kennedy) was skeptical of their ability to do that, though as the Atlantic's Rebecca Rosen pointed out, the Globe's plan may be aimed as much at retaining print subscribers as making money off the web. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple wondered if readers will find enough at BostonGlobe.com that's not at Boston.com to make the site worth their money. — The TechCrunch conflict and changing ethical standards: Last week's flap between AOL and TechCrunch over the tech site's ethical conflicts came to an official resolution on Monday, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington parted ways with AOL, the site's owner. But its full effects are going to be rippling for quite a while: Gawker's Ryan Tate called the fiasco a black eye for everyone involved, but especially AOL, which had approved Arrington's investments in some of the companies he covers just a few months ago. Fellow media mogul Barry Diller also ripped AOL's handling of the situation. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said that while he doesn't trust TechCrunch much personally, it's the audience's job to sort out their trust with the help of transparency, rather than traditional journalism's strictures. Others placed more of the blame on TechCrunch: Former Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons said TechCrunch's people should have expected this type of scenario when they sold to a big corporation, and media analyst Frederic Filloux said TechCrunch is a perfect example of the blogosphere's vulnerability to unchecked conflicts of interest. There was more fuel for those kinds of ethical concerns this week, as the winning company at TechCrunch's annual Disrupt competition was one that Arrington invests in. But Arrington had an ethical accusation of his own to make at the conference, pointing out that the New York Times invests in a tech venture capital fund which has put .5 million into GigaOM, a TechCrunch competitor. Poynter's Steve Myers detailed the Times' run-ins between the companies it invests in and the ones it covers (and its spotty disclosure about those connections), concluding that even if the conflict is less direct than in blogging, it's still worth examining more closely. As it plunged further into its battle with TechCrunch late last week, AOL was also reported to be talking with Yahoo, which recently fired its CEO, about a merger between the two Internet giants. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher said there's no way the deal would actually happen, and Wired's Tim Carmody called it a "spectacularly crazy idea" and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram agreed, while Business Insider reminded us that they said a year ago that AOL and Yahoo should merge. Meanwhile, the New York Times' David Carr homed in on the core problem that both companies are facing: The fact that people want information online from niche sites, not giant general-news portals. "As news surges on the Web, giant ocean liners like AOL and Yahoo are being outmaneuvered by the speedboats zipping around them, relatively small sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information," he wrote. — Facebook opens to subscribers: It hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as some of its other moves, but Facebook took another step in Twitter's direction this week by introducing the Subscribe Button, which allows users to see other people's (and groups') status updates without friending or becoming a fan of them. As GeekWire's Monica Guzman and many others noted, Facebook's "subscribe" looks a heck of a lot like Twitter's "follow." When asked about similar Google+ features at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, a Facebook exec said it wasn't a response to Google+. Guzman said Facebook is putting down deeper roots by going beyond the limits of reciprocal friendship, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingrampinpointed the reason why this could end up being a massive change for Facebook: It's beginning to move Facebook from a symmetrical network to an asymmetrical one, which could fundamentally transform its dynamics. Still, Ingram said Twitter is much better oriented toward being an information network than Facebook is, even with a "Subscribe" button. The change could have particularly interesting implications for journalists, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explained in his brief outline of the feature. As he noted, it may eliminate the need for separate Facebook profiles and pages for journalists, and while Lost Remote's Cory Bergman said that should be a welcome change for journalists who were trying to manage both, he noted that shows and organizations may want to stick with pages. — News Corp.'s scandal widens: An update on the ongoing scandal enveloping News Corp.: A group of U.S. banks and investment funds that own shares in News Corp. expanded a lawsuit to include allegations of stealing, hacking, and anti-competitive behavior by two of the company's U.S. subsidiaries — an advertiser and a satellite TV hardware manufacturer. As the Washington Post's Erik Wemple noted, these are old cases, but they're getting fresh attention, and that's how scandals gain momentum. James Murdoch, the son of News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, was also recalled to testify again before members of Britain's Parliament later this fall, facing new questions about the breadth of News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal. The Wall Street Journal examined the scandal's impact on the elder Murdoch's succession plan for the conglomerate, especially as it involves James. The company's executives also announced this week that they've found tens of thousands of documents that could shed more light on the phone hacking cases. — Reading roundup: Here's what else went on this week: — The biggest news story this week, of course, is actually 10 years old: Here's a look at how newspapers marked the anniversary of 9/11, how news orgs used digital technology to tell the story, and a reflection on how 9/11 changed the media landscape. — Twitter introduced a new web analytics tool to measure Twitter's impact on websites. Here's an analysis from Mathew Ingram of GigaOM. — At an academic conference last weekend, Illinois j-prof Robert McChesney repeated his call for public funding for journalism. Here are a couple of good summaries of his talk from fellow j-profs Axel Bruns and Alfred Hermida. — Finally, here's a relatively short but insightful two-part interview between two digital media luminaries, Henry Jenkins and Dan Gillmor, about media literacy, citizen journalism and Gillmor's latest book. Should make for a quick, thought-provoking weekend read.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:07:14 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=854

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

This Week in Review: Murdoch and Wall Street, AOL takes a dive, and Tribune takes a stab at tablets

This Week in Review: Twitter and big ideas, praise for the NYT’s pay plan, and more trouble for Murdoch

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 18, 2011.] News Corp.'s scandal keeps growing: Rupert Murdoch might have hoped News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal would die down when he closed the British tabloid News of the World last week, but it only served to fuel the issue's explosion. This past week, the scandal's collateral damage spread to News Corp.'s proposed takeover of the British broadcaster BSkyB: Faced with increasing pressure from the British government and the revelation that News Corp. journalists tried to get private records of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, News Corp. dropped the BSkyB bid, which had been a huge part of the company's U.K. strategy. Plenty of other problems are cropping up for News Corp., too. The top lawyer for its U.K. newspaper branch, News International, quit. The company's stock lost billion in four business days at one point. A pre-existing U.S. shareholders' suit expanded to cover the hacking scandal. The Murdochs have to testify before British Parliament this week about the scandal, and the FBI started investigating U.S.-related aspects of the issue. That's all in addition to the ongoing problems News Corp. faces, as detailed by Poynter's Rick Edmonds. The scandal has led quite a few writers to criticize the culture that Murdoch has created at News Corp. Capital New York's Tom McGeveran and Reuters' John Lloyd railed on Murdoch and News Corp.'s character, Carl Bernstein called this Murdoch's Watergate, and the Observer's editorial board called for systemic reforms in Britain so Murdoch's influence can never be so strong. Members of the Bancroft family said they wouldn't have sold the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch in 2007 if they'd have known the hacking was going on. On the other hand, the New York Times pointed out that sleazy British tabloid tactics are hardly limited to Murdoch, and media critic Howard Kurtz noted that they're very much alive in the U.S. mainstream press, too. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen defended Murdoch, saying he's been good for journalism on the whole, and Gawker's John Cook defended those tabloid reporting tactics. Meanwhile, j-prof Jeff Jarvis and the Telegraph's Toby Harnden urged the British government not to respond by enacting more regulation. News Corp.'s retreat might not stop with News of the World and BSkyB. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff and others have reported that the company's execs are debating whether to get out of Britain's newspaper business entirely, and several observers chimed in to say that might actually make a good deal of business sense. Media analyst Ken Doctor said News International is losing steam, and the Financial Times' John Gapper said newspapers are becoming far more trouble than they're worth to Murdoch. Not only that, but the New Yorker's John Cassidy said dropping his U.K. newspapers could let Murdoch revive his BSkyB bid, and Jeff Jarvis speculated that when Murdoch chooses between the power that the papers give him and the money saved by getting rid of them, he'll choose the money. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch called the rumors of a newspaper sell-off "rubbish." But just because News of the World and News International may be dead and dying, that doesn't mean newspapers as a whole are, argued David Carr of the New York Times. As he noted, it was the Guardian's dogged reporting that finally broke this story open. Murdoch "prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect," Carr wrote. The Atlantic also had praise for the Guardian, and Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore interviewed one of its editors about the lonely journey of covering the phone hacking story. — HuffPo aggregation under the microscope: A lively discussion about the rights and wrongs of aggregation developed last week out of a column by Ad Age media critic Simon Dumenco, who complained that the Huffington Post had extensively summarized one of his posts, buried the link to the original, and — contrary to Arianna Huffington's argument that her site benefits those they aggregate by sending them readers — gave him just 57 page views. The Huffington Post responded by apologizing and suspending the article's writer. HuffPo business editor Peter Goodman told Adweek the piece was a fully formed article when it should have been a simple introduction and a link, but Dumenco responded to the apology by arguing that the writer did nothing out of the ordinary — this is just how HuffPo tells its writers to do it. Dumenco's point was echoed by several others: The Awl's Choire Sicha said the suspended writer was doing what she was taught, Gawker's Ryan Tate, drawing on a revealing quote from a former HuffPo writer, made the same point: "This is pretty ridiculous, given HuffPo's systematic, officially-sanctioned approach to rewriting too much of people's news articles." British journalist Kevin Anderson called HuffPo's summary-heavy aggregation "a pretty cynical strategy," and paidContent's Staci Kramer said HuffPo needs to respect its sources, rather than treating a link as a favor. Gabe Rivera, whose news site, Techmeme, was compared to HuffPo favorably by Dumenco, looked for terms to distinguish what his site does from what HuffPo does. Poynter's Julie Moos said some measure of originality will always make for better journalism and a better business model than heavy aggregation, and ZDNet's Tom Foremski pined for the old blogging mentality whose goal was to add value. In a short podcast, author Steven Rosenbaum said this is a logical time to step back and evaluate exactly what constitutes ethical aggregation. There were a few dissenters, though: GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and Slate's Jack Shafer both argued that the type of aggregation that HuffPo does has been around for ages in traditional media (especially in Britain, according to Forbes' Tim Worstall). In fact, Shafer said, news orgs could learn a something valuable from the Huffington Post: "That a huge, previously ignored readership out there wants its news hot, quick, and tight." — Comparing Google+, Facebook, and Twitter: It's been just about three weeks since Google+ launched, and Google's new social network is growing like a weed, with estimates of as many as 10 million users so far. (Its number of active users may soon be approaching Twitter's figures.) Google+ news has dominated Twitter, and Google's also working on integrating it with Gmail. With Plus' incredible growth, tech observers have been going back and forth about what social network Google+ is disrupting most. PCWorld's Megan Geuss wondered whether Google+ and Facebook can coexist, and PC Magazine's John Dvorak posited that all the excitement about Google+ is more or less just pent-up frustration with Facebook. The New York Times' David Pogue and Technology Review's Paul Boutin both compared Google+ favorably to Facebook, largely because of its superior privacy controls (though GigaOM's Mathew Ingram pointed out that it may not be a privacy improvement for some people). Meanwhile, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan said Google+ is more comparable to Twitter, then went ahead and made a thorough, smart comparison between the two. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal said Google+ might end up being more conversational than Twitter, which he called more of a call-and-response: Google+ "won't be as good at connecting people to information or each other quickly, but it might be better at longer form discussions and whatever we call the process by which people pull reasoned thoughts from their networks into public discourse." Hutch Carpenter said Google+ resembles both Facebook and Twitter, and Computer World's Mike Elgan wrote that it'll disrupt just about everything. Still, Google+ has its limits: ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick explained why he'd never move his personal blog there as some are doing, and Instapaper's Marco Arment and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor both urged readers to keep a space for their own online identity outside of spaces like Google+ or Facebook. For journalists feeling out Google+, Meranda Watling of 10,000 Words put together a preliminary guide. — Reading roundup: Here's what else people were talking about this past week: — The newspaper chain MediaNews made a distinctive play for the tablet news market last week, announcing the launch of TapIn, a location-based news app made specifically for tablets. It'll start in the Bay Area in partnership with the San Jose Mercury News. Ken Doctor, Jeff Sonderman, and Mathew Ingram all wrote about what makes it worth watching. — The Economist continued running pieces all week in its series on the future of the news industry. You can check out several writers'reasons for optimism or read the opening statements in an ongoing debate between NYU's Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr about whether the Internet has been good for journalism. — Boston Globe developer Andy Boyle made his pitch for young journalists to go into web development, or as he put it, "learn to make the internets." — Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together two great social media how-to's for journalists: One on verifying information on social media, and the other on strategies for engagement on Facebook. — Finally, NYU's Clay Shirky gave us another thoughtful essay on the unbundling of news and why the news ecosystem needs to be chaotic right now. In the end, though, here's what he believes news should be: "News has to be subsidized because society’s truth-tellers can’t be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market"; "news has to be cheap because cheap is where the opportunity is right now"; and "news has to be free, because it has to spread."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:05:59 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=815

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This Week in Review: Paying up with Apple and Google, Twitter and activism, free labor for HuffPo

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 27, 2011.] Censorship, the law, and Twitter: If we hadn't already learned how social media are opening the traditional media's gatekeeping role to the masses, we got a pretty good object lesson this week in Britain. Here's what happened: To keep the British tabloids from digging into an alleged affair with a reality TV star, Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs took out a British court provision called a super-injunction that prohibits media from identifying him and reporting on both the story and the very fact that a super-injunction exists. But the super-injunction was no match for Facebook, Twitter, and soccer forums, where thousands of people talked about Giggs and the affair in spite of (and because of) the order. Since then, a Scottish newspaper and a member of Parliament have both named Giggs, rendering the super-injunction essentially ineffective and causing quite a bit of handwringing over whether gag orders are a lost cause in the Twitter age, and whether or not that's a good thing. Giggs sued Twitter for the breach, and some members of Parliament started looking for ways to control the site. Prime Minister David Cameron said Twitter made Britain's injunctions "unfair" and "unsustainable" for traditional media and urged Parliament to change them. Some people, including World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and the Guardian's Richard Hillgrove, said the problem lies with Twitter, not the law, with Hillgrove (rather absurdly) suggesting a delay mechanism to monitor posts before they go up: "Twitter and Facebook are not blank sheets of paper. They are media publishers like any other." Others faulted the law instead: At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said it allows the wealthy to play by different rules, and the Telegraph'sHarry Mount said that thanks to the web, "a form of people power has been effectively absorbed into that new body of privacy law." The Vancouver Sun's Mario Canseco documented the failure of gag orders in the Internet age in Canada, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM advised courts and governments to quit trying to enforce antiquated laws, saying they "may not like the implications of a totally distributed real-time information network, but they are going to have to start living with it sooner rather than later." Then, of course, there's the question of whether the anonymous online super-injunction violators have any legal repercussions to worry about. As the New York Times noted, Twitter has been resistant to turning over its users' identities in the past, though a Twitter official said this week it will hand over user info to the authorities if it's legally required to. But even with Twitter's compliance, there would still be hurdles to clear in identifying users, the Telegraph explained. — iPad channels for big and small media: Several big-media publications neared or hit iPad milestones this week: On stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, The Daily's Greg Clayman said it's nearing a million downloads since it was launched in January. Clayman wouldn't say how many paid subscribers the News Corp. iPad-only publication has (a far more interesting figure in determining The Daily's viability), but Adweek's Lucia Moses said The Daily will announce its number of paid downloads — it only started charging in March — once it hits a "target level." Meanwhile, Wired and GQ were made available for in-app subscriptions through Apple App Store this week, after their owner, Condé Nast, became one of the first major publishers to strike a deal with Apple for in-app subscriptions earlier this month. Another major publication, Playboy, launched an iPad subscription outside the App Store, because it obviously has some difficulty complying with Apple's "no nudity" policy. Playboy's app is essentially an iPad-optimized website, which might seem like a tempting option for publishers who don't want to deal with Apple's restrictions, but as Mashable and GigaOM explained, Playboy might be uniquely positioned to pull this off where others can't. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram looked at those cases and weighed the pluses and minuses for publishers of getting into bed with Apple. Of course, big publishers aren't the only ones getting into the iPad game: At paidContent, Ashley Norris, CEO of a small publishing company that just released an iPad app, argued that indie publishers could play a key role in developing the tablet magazine. Flipboard is a pretty ideal model for those publishers: It's valued at 0 million, and SiliconAngle's Tom Foremski said it exemplifies the current en vogue tech-bubble business plan: "find free content and organize it into a useful interface." That niche might not play as big of a part in the iPad market as we think, though: As Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted via ReadWriteWeb, news apps make up only 3% of all the apps in the App Store. — Driving more traffic from Facebook: Facebook has been working hard lately to cozy up to news organizations, and this week it provided some statistics that may have some of those organizations looking more closely at integrating Facebook into their sites. According to stats Search Engine Land got from Facebook (so grain of salt, etc.), the average media site integrated with Facebook has gotten a 300% jump in Facebook referral traffic, and ABC News, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post have all reportedly doubled their traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins. Meanwhile, Fortune's Peter Lauria talked to Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik about the possibility of news orgs charging on Facebook using Facebook credits, like some Facebook games do now. As it's been known to do, Facebook played a big role in the aftermath of another natural disaster this week when a tornado hit Joplin, Missouri. The local newspaper, the Joplin Globe, told Poynter about how they set up a Facebook page to help people find family and friends in the tornado's wake. Elsewhere in social media and news, the New York Times experimented this week with a human-powered Twitter feed, as opposed to its usual mostly automatically driven style. The Times' Liz Heron (and a couple of other newspaper social media editors) talked to Poynter's Jeff Sonderman about their Twitter strategies, and Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words looked at how the experiment changed the Times' Twitter feed. Heron also revealed the Times' informal social media guidelines at the BBC's Social Media Summit: "Use common sense and don't be stupid." — Reading roundup: Not a lot of big future-of-news stories this week, a several smaller things worth keeping an eye on: — Google notified publishers late last week that it's abandoning its project to scan and archive hundreds of years of old newspapers. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes lamented the decision, and Paul Balcerak urged newspapers to pick up where Google left off. — This week's AOL/Huffington Post bits and pieces: Huffington Post Canada has been launched, AOL's Daily Finance has been made over, and some HuffPo staff are reportedly leaving because they're upset with how the AOL/HuffPo marriage has gone so far. Meanwhile, even though AOL's content is free, CEO Tim Armstrong expressed his general belief in paid content online. — Ben Huh of the Cheezburger network of comedy sites announced he's working on what he's calling the Moby Dick Project — an effort to reform the way news is presented and consumed online. ReadWriteWeb gave more details of the type of software he's developing. — A couple of addenda to last week's linking discussion: Former Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Fry wrote about solving the workflow issue at newspapers, and at the Guardian, Dan Gillmor called out lazy linking — linking to a summary, rather than the original piece — in online aggregation. — CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis made a case for news as conversation and the value of comments, and at 10,000 Words, Alex Schmidt wrote about the way poisonous online comments can affect reporters. — Finally, Canadian media consultant Ken Goldstein issued a paper looking at decline circulation of newspapers in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. He included a possibly remarkably prescient 1964 quotation by media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-new-business-models-and-traffic-drivers-in-online-news-and-wrangling-over-app-ads/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-new-business-models-and-traffic-drivers-in-online-news-and-wrangling-over-app-ads/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:57:01 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=808

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 13, 2011.] Leaving the old ad model behind: Much of the commentary about digital news this week was generated by two big reports, one on the business of digital journalism and the other on its consumption. We'll start on the business side, with the Columbia j-school's study on what we know so far about the viability of various digital journalism business models. As Poynter's Bill Mitchell suggested, the best entry point into the 146-page report might be the nine recommendations that form its conclusion. Mitchell summed the report up in three themes: The audience for journalism is growing, though translating that into revenue is a challenge; the old model of banner ads isn't cutting it, and news orgs need to look for new forms of advertising; and news orgs need to play better with aggregators and sharpen their own aggregation skills. In his response to the study, Reuters' Felix Salmon focused on the advertising angle, arguing that journalism and advertising have too long been linked by mere adjacency and that "when you move away from the ad-adjacency model, however, things get a lot more interesting and exciting." The New York Times' story on the report centered on advertising, too, particularly the growing need for journalists to learn about the business side of their products. (That was media consultant Mark Potts' main takeaway, too.) Emily Bell, a scholar at the center that released the study, said that while journalists need to understand the business of their industry, integrating news and sales staffs isn't necessarily the way to go. The J-Lab's Jan Schaffer recommended that news orgs respond to their business problems by learning from smaller startups and incorporating them more thoroughly into the journalism ecosystem. And paidContent's Staci Kramer advised news orgs to focus on regular audiences rather than fly-by visitors: "Outwardly we like to complain about content farms; in reality, a lot of what news outlets are doing to the side of those front-page stories isn’t very different." — Facebook's growth as news driver: The other major report was released by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and looked at how people access news on the web. This study, too, found that despite a small core of frequent users, news sites are dependent on casual users who visit sites infrequently and don't stay long when they're there. Poynter's Rick Edmonds conveniently distilled the study into five big takeaways. The study also found that while Google is still the top referrer to major news sites, Facebook is quickly emerging as a significant news driver, too. University of British Columbia j-prof Alfred Hermida said this lines up with recent research he's done among Canadians, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said it showed that while Google is a dominant source for online news now, Facebook is primed to succeed it. Meanwhile, the study also found that surprisingly little traffic to news sites is driven by Twitter. Lauren Dugan of All Twitter said this finding casts some doubt on the idea that Twitter is "a huge link-sharing playground," though the Wall Street Journal's Zach Seward said the study misses that Twitter referrals are undercounted. The Twitter undercounting was one of several problems that TBD's Steve Buttry had about the study, including inconsistent language to characterize findings and a bias toward large news organizations. "This study probably has some helpful data. But it has too many huge holes and indications of bias to have much value," Buttry wrote. — Pricing ads and subscriptions on tablets: Condé Nast became the third major magazine publisher to reach an agreement with Apple on app subscriptions, and one of the first to offer an in-app subscription, with The New Yorker available now. (Wired subscriptions are coming next month.) Time Inc., which reached a deal with Apple last week, clarified that it won't include in-app subscriptions, which would be where Apple takes that now-infamous 30% cut. The Financial Times, meanwhile, is still negotiating with Apple. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici explained why publishers may be warming to Apple's deal: Turns out, more people are willing to share their personal data with publishers feared. Still, Mathew Ingram of GigaOM used iFlowReader's bad Apple experience as a warning to other companies about the dangers of getting into bed with Apple. Now that Apple-publisher relations have thawed, the New York Times' David Carr moved to the next issue: Negotiations between publishers and advertisers over how valuable in-app ads are, and how much those ads should cost. Time.com's Chris Gayomali wondered why magazines are more than giving away app subscriptions with print subscriptions, and concluded that it's about getting more eyeballs on the print product, not the app, in order to maintain the all-important ad rate base. In other words, Carr said in another post, publishers are following the old magazine model, where the product is priced below cost and the money is made off advertising instead. He questioned the wisdom of applying that strategy to tablets: "the rich advertising opportunity that will produce may be a less durable and less stable business than grinding out highly profitable circulation over the long haul." — A postmortem on Bin Laden coverage: It's now been close to two weeks since the news of Osama bin Laden's death broke on Twitter, but plenty of folks were still discussing how the story was broken and covered. Gilad Lotan and Devin Gaffney of SocialFlow put together some fascinating visualizations of how the news spread on Twitter, especially the central roles of Donald Rumsfeld staffer Keith Urbahn and New York Times reporter Brian Stelter. Mashable's Chris Taylor concluded from the data that trustworthiness and having active followers (as opposed to just lots of followers) are more important than ever on Twitter. Media consultant Frederic Filloux was mostly reassured by the way the traditional news outlets handled the story online: "For once, editorial seems to evolve at a faster pace than the business side." There were still folks cautioning against going overboard on Twitter-as-news hype, while the Telegraph's Emma Barnett wondered why pundits are still so surprised at the significant role Twitter and Facebook play in breaking news. ("It's exactly what they were designed for.") New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane gave the blow-by-blow of how his paper responded to the story, highlighting a few tweets by Times reporters and editors. Reuters' Felix Salmon chastised Brisbane for not including Brian Stelter's tweets, which were posted a good 15 minutes before the ones he included. The exclusion, Salmon surmised, might indicate that the Times doesn't see what Stelter did on Twitter as reporting. Google News founder Krishna Bharat compared the way Google handled 9/11 and Bin Laden's death, marveling at how much more breaking-news coverage is available on the web now. The Lab's Megan Garber used the occasion to glean some insights from Bharat about trusting the authority of the algorithm to provide a rich palette of news, but at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan used the Bin Laden coverage to point out some flaws in Google News' algorithm. — Reading roundup: Lots of interesting little rabbit trails to choose from this week. Here are a few: — ComScore's April traffic numbers are out, and there were a number of storylines flowing out of them: Cable news sources are beating print ones in web traffic, the New York Times' numbers are down (as expected) after implementation of its paywall, and Gawker's numbers are starting to come back after dropping last year with its redesign. — Last week, ESPN columnist Rick Reilly told graduating students at the University of Colorado's j-school to never write for free. That prompted Jason Fry of the National Sports Journalism Center and Craig Calcaterra of MSNBC.com's Hardball Talk to expound on the virtues of writing for free, though Slate's Tom Scocca took Reilly's side. — Two thoughtful pieces on brands and journalism: Jason Fry at Poynter on assessing the value of organizational and personal brands, and Vadim Lavrusik at the Lab on journalists building their brands via Facebook. — Late last week, Google lost an appeal to a 2007 Belgian ruling forcing it to pay newspapers for gaining revenue for linking to their stories on Google News. — Finally, the Huffington Post's Mandy Jenkins offered a helpful list of 10 ways journalists can use Storify. It's full of great examples and should spark an idea or two.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-new-business-models-and-traffic-drivers-in-online-news-and-wrangling-over-app-ads/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-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-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-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:45:40 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=905

This Week in Review: Facebook goes deeper into information sharing, and news orgs go with it

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 30, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] A heavyweight enters the tablet ring: Amazon became the latest company to jump into the tablet market this week, unveiling the Kindle Fire, a 9 tablet that will run on Google's Android system. It's a 7" touch-screen tablet that's essentially a knockoff of the BlackBerry Playbook — much smaller and cheaper than Apple's iPad. Amazon also revealed three new Kindle models ranging from to 9, two of them touch-screen, as well as a new Kindle Fire-only web browser, Silk (more on that at the LA Times). The two most comprehensive early looks at the Fire came from Wired's Steven Levy and Bloomberg's Brad Stone. Levy looked more at the device itself, describing it as a way for Amazon to spotlight its non-book media library and saying its biggest challenge is to Netflix. Stone looked more at the corporate strategy behind the Fire, noting that it "funnels users into Amazon’s meticulously constructed world of content, commerce, and cloud computing." (Sounds like a certain other tablet we know.) By the end of launch day, several tech sites like TechCrunch and ZDNet had already declared the Fire the winner of the hypercompetitive Android tablet market, and Ad Age said it would soon have tablet consumption taking off. The bigger question, then, was whether the Fire would present the first real threat to Apple's iPad. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal summed up the Fire's challenge to the iPad — smaller, cheaper, and the first media experience as thoroughly integrated as Apple's App Store. As the Atlantic's Alesh Houdek put it, the Fire may do most everything tablet owners really want, only for a lot less than the iPad. But ReadWriteWeb's John Paul Titlow said the Fire can't match up to the iPad, and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor and paidContent's Tom Krazit both said it's not even directly competing with the iPad — it's in a more utilitarian market, where the iPad is more about luxury. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM argued that to content producers, Amazon and Apple are going to look very similar: They both see their devices as ways to sell their own content, which puts them in competition with the content providers themselves. The Fire also launched with a newsstand, with big magazine publishers Conde Nast, Hearst, and Meredith among the first to sign deals with Amazon, under similar terms to Apple's 30% cut of revenue. (News Corp. also signed a deal to put Fox TV shows on the Fire.) The New York Observer's Emily Witt noted that the Fire could be the mobile-content Apple competitor publishers have been looking for, and the Lab's Martin Langeveld said the Fire will present a fresh disruption for content providers, furthering the growth of direct-to-consumer marketing and eliminating the need for third-party advertising. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman posed several questions journalists should be asking about the Fire, looking at things like paid content, customer data, and app development. — Objections to 'frictionless sharing': Reactions continued to pour in about Facebook's latest overhaul, announced late last week. Many of those concerns centered around the same theme: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's brave new world of ubiquitous, "frictionless" sharing. The New York Times' Somini Sengupta and the LA Times' Jessica Guynn gave us a picture of what this world might look like, and Slate's Farhad Manjoo explained why sharing should still be a choice. Needless to say, this brought up another round of complaints about privacy on Facebook: Tech pioneer Dave Winer said Facebook has crossed the privacy Rubicon by seeking out information about you to post to others, rather than just using information you've chosen to share. Entrepreneur Nik Cubrilovic pointed out that Facebook can track every page you visit even when you're logged out. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter argued that this type of involuntary sharing should be a concern for every news organization that works with Facebook, and former New York Times developer Michael Donohoe said the Times refused to implement that kind of sharing via Facebook. There was one (non-Facebook) voice countering that the passive sharing isn't that big of a deal: Forbes' Jeff Bercovici. A couple of deeper thoughts on the issue: The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal wrote on Facebook as "the Meaning Machine," and media prof Mark Deuze argued that living our lives inside of a mediated environment (like Facebook encourages to) can actually help us to see ourselves as deeply connected to others, if we're willing to let go of our self-absorption. As I touched on a bit earlier, there's also the question of what news organizations should do with Facebook: Gawker's Ryan Tate explained why many media companies are so eager to be part of Facebook's plans (huge audiences, huge amounts of data), and Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik explained at the Lab and at the Online News Association conference how journalists can take advantage of these changes. But Jeff Sonderman was a bit more skeptical, urging news organizations to weigh the costs as well as the benefits. Finally, these changes probably aren't good news for Google and its own network Google+, as Facebook begins collecting loads of valuable personal data that Google can't touch, Mathew Ingram explained. Twitter does its own thing (real-time news) too well to be too worried, Ingram said, but the New York Times' Nick Bilton wrote that Twitter isn't user-friendly enough to be for everyone, as Facebook is. — Media trust and the new local news: The Pew Research Center released two surveys over the past week or so: The first was the latest in a regular series of looks at the American public's views of the press, and results weren't pretty. The press hit record lows in the public's mind in terms of fairness, accuracy, bias, morality, professionalism, and impact on democracy. (Poynter has a good, quick summary.) Reuters' Jack Shafer noted that many of the poll respondents get most of their news from TV, which he said isn't a particularly substantive media diet. "The media assessments of the TV-favoring Pew respondents are about as valuable as the restaurant advice of that guy who has eaten 25,000 Big Macs," he wrote. One other nugget: j-prof Alfred Hermida pointed outthat many social media say they get the same news there as on traditional news. The second study examined the platforms on which people get their local news. There were a few different takeaways from this one: The New York Times focused on the fact that a broad range of platforms have joined TV as predominant local news sources, while the LA Times and Poynter's Rick Edmonds centered on the paradox that many people were very dependent on their local newspaper but still wouldn't care much if it were gone. O'Reilly Radar's Alex Howard had a fine analysis of the study, using it as a jumping-off point for a piece on the Internet as the future of local news. Other notes from the data: Broadcasting & Cable looked at the areas where local TV did well, Poynter's Julie Moos noticed that many people follow local news even when nothing big is going on, and paidContent focused on the role of mobile media in local news consumption. — More over-aggregation accusations: The business news site Business Insider announced some happy news late last week — it had recently raised  million in funding. But that announcement prompted a wave of criticism about the ethics of their aggregation efforts. Reuters' Ryan McCarthy laid out the basic accusation: Business Insider, he said, routinely lifts large chunks of stories from other outlets while only providing scant attribution or links. Others, like former Business Insider employee Ben Popper of BetaBeat, echoed the complaint. So did Instapaper founder Marco Arment, who noted how little traffic he gets from Business Insider republishing his stories. Business Insider's Henry Blodget responded twice to Arment, the second time in a massively long, detailed post essentially blaming the aggregation problems on some weird content management system glitches. Based on that post, Reuters' Felix Salmon said Business Insider still falls on the wrong side of "over-aggregation," drawing a distinction between human-edited and automatically driven aggregation pages. There was some praise for Business Insider in light of their funding, though — CNBC.com and the Guardian both looked at what makes the site work so well. — Reading roundup: Other stuff to keep an eye on this week: — The Wall Street Journal changed its website's privacy policy to connect personally identifiable data with browsing history without user permission. Yeah, people weren't crazy about that, especially since the Journal has been one of the big crusaders in reporting on corporate violations of privacy online. Here's New York magazine's and Dan Gillmor's takes. — Google launched Google News Standout, which allows news organizations to flag their top work. The Lab's Megan Garber examined the way it rewards generosity, and Wired's Tim Carmody looked at the increasing integration between Google News and Google+. — This Week in Patch: Patch's local site editors are reportedly being asked to drum up sales leads, and the Batavian's Howard Owens said if you're going to work that hard on local news, you might as well start your own site. Patch President Warren Webster pushed backagainst the criticism. — The Financial Times said its web-based app has been a higher seller than the Apple App Store version, and ReadWriteWeb called it abig early victory for HTML5-based app developers in their battle against Apple. — An update on News Corp.'s daily tablet publication, The Daily: It has about 120,000 weekly readers, well below Rupert Murdoch's targets for it. — Finally, a trio of super helpful/valuable posts for journalists: J-prof Paul Bradshaw wrote on what should make up journalists' network infrastructure online, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia's Jon Whiten gave a guide to making longform writing work online, and Poynter's Jeff Sonderman urged news organizations to start building apps that solve problems.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-amazon%e2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-ipad-and-facebook%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98frictionless-sharing%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:41:19 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=903

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This Week in Review: Murdoch’s defense, objectivity in nonprofit news, and a new paid news project

]]> [This review was originally posted on Sept. 23, 2011, at the Nieman Journalism Lab.] Facebook ramps its sharing up even further: We had been hearing all week about a big announcement Facebook would be making this Thursday at its annual conference — about how it would mark the social network's rebirth and leave the competition in the dust. So here's what we got (in a handy roundup from Gizmodo): A Twitter-like mini-feed called Ticker (meant to make the News Feed look more like "your own personal newspaper"), apps on Facebook's Open Graph, sharing music and games through integration with services like the music player Spotify, and Timeline, essentially a one-page Facebook life story. It's pretty clear what Facebook's goal is with all of this: Put charitably, as Wired's Mike Isaac did, it's "allowing for the Facebook page to be a sort of one-stop shop, scooping up all of your activities and displaying them in one grand, blue and white frame." Put more skeptically, as the New Yorker's Nicholas Thompson did, Facebook wants to eat up a large chunk of the Internet, which has some real consequences: "The more our online lives take place on Facebook, the more we depend on the choices of the people who run the company—what they think about privacy, how they think we should be able to organize our friends, what they tell advertisers (and governments) about what we do and what we buy." Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher made the point a different way, arguing that Facebook is trying to combat the natural slowdown in how much we're willing to share online by making it more frictionless and ubiquitous. Reactions were similar in displaying two sides of the same coin: The ability to pull together a lot of old social information into a single Timeline was either "something a lot of users wanted without much of a voice asking for it" (ZDNet's Rachel King) or a fix to "a problem absolutely no one was clamoring about" (Gawker's Adrian Chen). We'll get more of a sense of which side is more accurate over the next several months. — Facebook meets news apps: Another one of the changes announced by Facebook on Thursday was the addition of several new Facebook-based news apps, the first of which was the Wall Street Journal's WSJ Social, unveiled on Tuesday. (Others, like the Washington Post's and Yahoo's, were announced on Thursday.) As the Lab's Megan Garber explained, the app allows each user to edit their own stream of Journal material, and to follow and rank others based on their editing. As Forbes' Jeff Bercovici pointed out, the app seems to serve both the Journal's and Facebook's interests quite nicely: It keeps people's news consumption and interaction within Facebook, but allows the Journal to sell its own ads within the app and keep the money. (Facebook gets everything for the ads outside the app.) There were questions about the app — Adweek's Dylan Byers wondered how fond people would be of an app that curates content from only one source, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram questioned how well the socially oriented app would work with a hard paywall, and more generally, whether it's wise for news organizations to leave so much of their user interaction inside Facebook. — AOL's struggles and the future of online content: The AOL/TechCrunch saga seems to be (mercifully) winding down this week — the last real drama took place late last week, when one TechCrunch writer, Paul Carr, quit with a scorched-earth post directed at new editor Erick Schonfeld, and Schonfeld disputed his claims. But the bad news continues to roll in for AOL: The sales director for its hyperlocal news project, Patch, left — the second top AOL ad exec to bolt in the past month. Business Insider reported that AOL may lose million on Patch this year. And AOL's prospects as a content-based company in general don't look rosy, as paidContent's Robert Andrews pointed out, looking at the declining revenues for AOL Europe once it dropped Internet access from its business model. AOL execs remain positive in the face of all the bad news: Arianna Huffington said her Huffington Post's merger with AOL has been a boon for both HuffPo and Patch, thanks to the new synergies between the two operations. On the advertising side, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said he hopes to catch Microsoft and Google in online display ads, a tall task. Outside the company, of course, skeptics still abound. Bloomberg Businessweek's Peter Burrows declared AOL and its fellow web portal Yahoo dead companies walking, saying they "have tried to live by Old Media rules while masquerading as New Media powerhouses." And at Adweek, Michael Wolff pointed to AOL and Yahoo's struggles as evidence that online content can't sustain a business model. The only content that can still do that, he said, is TV or video: "What still works, what advertisers and audiences still seek, is superexpensive content." — Netflix's big split: It wasn't related to journalism per se, but the big story at the intersection of media and tech this week was the announcement of Netflix's split into two businesses — one for streaming video online, and a new one, Qwikster, to continue its DVD-by-mail service. The change was welcomed by approximately no one: Not users or investors, as the New York Times reported, not analysts like Business Insider's Henry Blodget (who said it's bad for customers) and paidContent's Robert Andrews (who said it's bad for business), and not the Oatmeal's Matthew Inman, who summed up the head-scratching nature of the move as well as anyone. Of course, Netflix had to have a reason for doing this, and there were several popular guesses, rounded up well by Tim Carmody of Wired. As Carmody explained, there are two main theories: 1) Separating DVDs and streaming makes it easier and cheaper for Netflix to negotiate rights with Hollywood (best articulated by venture capitalist Bill Gurley), and 2) Netflix wants to let its DVD business die in peace, without taking streaming down with it (argued in two posts by tech writer Dan Frommer). Along the lines of the latter theory, GigaOM's Mathew Ingram likened Netflix's situation to the news business and wondered who would be the first newspaper company to spin off its print product from its digital side. — The News Corp. scandal and a press freedom threat: It's been a couple of months since News Corp.'s phone-hacking scandal was making big headlines, but the problems stemming from it continue to spread week by week. Deadline New York's David Lieberman looked at some of the financial signs indicating that the fallout may not be isolated to News Corp.'s British newspaper division. This week, a couple of aspects of the scandal heated up as another wound down: News Corp. is expected to settle its highest-profile hacking case (with the family of a murdered 12-year-old girl) for .7 million, while the U.S. Justice Department reportedly began asking the company for information in its investigation into bribery charges, and new allegations of hacking into a former government official's voicemail emerged. Meanwhile, apart from News Corp., the story briefly sparked a press freedom fight when Scotland Yard invoked an espionage law to threaten the Guardian to give up its anonymous sources on one of the hacking cases. Journalists across Britain, including some from competitors like the Daily Mail, rose up to defend the Guardian, and within a few days, police dropped their threat. The backlash was strong enough that members of Parliament will question one of Scotland Yard's top officials over the plan. — Reading roundup: Tons of other little things going on this week. Here's a quick tour: — Some interesting media fallout from WikiLeaks' recent diplomatic cable release: Al Jazeera's news director resigned after the cables showed that he had modified the network's Iraq war coverage based on pressure from the U.S. This, of course, raised questions about Al Jazeera's independence and credibility. Elsewhere, British journalism thinker Charlie Beckett talked about what WikiLeaks can tell us about where news is headed. — Though its changes were trumped by Facebook, Google+ unveiled several new features and announced that it's open to everyone. J-prof Dan Reimold declared the new social network dead, but Wired's Tim Carmody explained how Google+'s changes are meant to change that. — The Washington Post's Monica Hesse wrote a thought-provoking piece on journalists' tendency to obsess with things happening on social networks, leading to insights that ... aren't that insightful. If you're interested in using social media in a way that's actually worthwhile, Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore has a good guide to ways journalists can use Twitter before, during, and after reporting a story. — At Silicon Valley Watcher, Matthew Buckland did a fascinating Q&A with Wired editor Chris Anderson — the first half on the decline of the open web, and the second on what journalism is now. — This week's most interesting piece of media-related research comes from NYU's Tim Libert, who looked at thousands of comments about the online hacking group LulzSec, finding that the discourse indicated that the group is "in the position of villain rather than the champion of the people’s rights, as they would presumably like to be seen." — Finally, the AP's Jonathan Stray wrote a stirring piece on what it would look like if we merged journalism with "maker culture," concluding, "This is a theory of civic participation based on empowering the people who like to get their hands dirty tinkering with the future. Maybe that’s every bit as important as informing voters or getting politicians fired."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/12/23/this-week-in-review-facebook-goes-deeper-into-information-sharing-and-news-orgs-go-with-it/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:29:27 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=890

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

This Week in Review: AOL’s purge, aggregation v. original reporting, and a Times pay plan defense

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Sept. 16, 2011.] Paid and free, side by side: The Boston Globe became the latest news organization to institute an online paywall this week, but it did so in an unprecedented way that should be interesting to watch: The newspaper created a separate paid site, BostonGlobe.com, to run alongside its existing free site, Boston.com. PaidContent has the pertinent details: A single price (.99 a week), and Boston.com gets most of the breaking news and sports, while BostonGlobe.com gets most of the newspaper content. The Lab's Justin Ellis, meanwhile, has a look at the lab that designed it all. As the Globe told Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, the two sites were designed with two different types of readers in mind: One who has a deep appreciation for in-depth journalism and likes to read stories start-to-finish, and another who reads news casually and briefly and may be more concerned about entertainment or basic information than journalism per se. The first thing that caught many people's attention was new site's design — simple, clean, and understated. Tech blogger John Gruber gave it a thumbs-up, and news design guru Mario Garcia called it "probably the most significant new website design in a long time." The Lab's Joshua Benton identified the biggest reasons it looks so clean: Far fewer links and ads. Benton (in the most comprehensive post on the new site) also emphasized a less noticeable but equally important aspect of BostonGlobe.com's design: It adjusts to fit just about any browser size, which eliminates the need for mobile apps, making life easier for programmers and, as j-prof Dan Kennedy noted at the Lab, a way around the cut of app fees required by Apple and others. If the Globe's people "have figured out a way not to share their hard-earned revenues with gatekeepers such as Apple and Amazon, then they will have truly performed a service for the news business — and for journalism," Kennedy said. Of course, the Globe could launch the most brilliantly conceived news site on the web, but it won't be a success unless enough people pay for it. Poynter's Sonderman (like Kennedy) was skeptical of their ability to do that, though as the Atlantic's Rebecca Rosen pointed out, the Globe's plan may be aimed as much at retaining print subscribers as making money off the web. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple wondered if readers will find enough at BostonGlobe.com that's not at Boston.com to make the site worth their money. — The TechCrunch conflict and changing ethical standards: Last week's flap between AOL and TechCrunch over the tech site's ethical conflicts came to an official resolution on Monday, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington parted ways with AOL, the site's owner. But its full effects are going to be rippling for quite a while: Gawker's Ryan Tate called the fiasco a black eye for everyone involved, but especially AOL, which had approved Arrington's investments in some of the companies he covers just a few months ago. Fellow media mogul Barry Diller also ripped AOL's handling of the situation. At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said that while he doesn't trust TechCrunch much personally, it's the audience's job to sort out their trust with the help of transparency, rather than traditional journalism's strictures. Others placed more of the blame on TechCrunch: Former Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons said TechCrunch's people should have expected this type of scenario when they sold to a big corporation, and media analyst Frederic Filloux said TechCrunch is a perfect example of the blogosphere's vulnerability to unchecked conflicts of interest. There was more fuel for those kinds of ethical concerns this week, as the winning company at TechCrunch's annual Disrupt competition was one that Arrington invests in. But Arrington had an ethical accusation of his own to make at the conference, pointing out that the New York Times invests in a tech venture capital fund which has put .5 million into GigaOM, a TechCrunch competitor. Poynter's Steve Myers detailed the Times' run-ins between the companies it invests in and the ones it covers (and its spotty disclosure about those connections), concluding that even if the conflict is less direct than in blogging, it's still worth examining more closely. As it plunged further into its battle with TechCrunch late last week, AOL was also reported to be talking with Yahoo, which recently fired its CEO, about a merger between the two Internet giants. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher said there's no way the deal would actually happen, and Wired's Tim Carmody called it a "spectacularly crazy idea" and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram agreed, while Business Insider reminded us that they said a year ago that AOL and Yahoo should merge. Meanwhile, the New York Times' David Carr homed in on the core problem that both companies are facing: The fact that people want information online from niche sites, not giant general-news portals. "As news surges on the Web, giant ocean liners like AOL and Yahoo are being outmaneuvered by the speedboats zipping around them, relatively small sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information," he wrote. — Facebook opens to subscribers: It hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as some of its other moves, but Facebook took another step in Twitter's direction this week by introducing the Subscribe Button, which allows users to see other people's (and groups') status updates without friending or becoming a fan of them. As GeekWire's Monica Guzman and many others noted, Facebook's "subscribe" looks a heck of a lot like Twitter's "follow." When asked about similar Google+ features at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, a Facebook exec said it wasn't a response to Google+. Guzman said Facebook is putting down deeper roots by going beyond the limits of reciprocal friendship, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingrampinpointed the reason why this could end up being a massive change for Facebook: It's beginning to move Facebook from a symmetrical network to an asymmetrical one, which could fundamentally transform its dynamics. Still, Ingram said Twitter is much better oriented toward being an information network than Facebook is, even with a "Subscribe" button. The change could have particularly interesting implications for journalists, as Poynter's Jeff Sonderman explained in his brief outline of the feature. As he noted, it may eliminate the need for separate Facebook profiles and pages for journalists, and while Lost Remote's Cory Bergman said that should be a welcome change for journalists who were trying to manage both, he noted that shows and organizations may want to stick with pages. — News Corp.'s scandal widens: An update on the ongoing scandal enveloping News Corp.: A group of U.S. banks and investment funds that own shares in News Corp. expanded a lawsuit to include allegations of stealing, hacking, and anti-competitive behavior by two of the company's U.S. subsidiaries — an advertiser and a satellite TV hardware manufacturer. As the Washington Post's Erik Wemple noted, these are old cases, but they're getting fresh attention, and that's how scandals gain momentum. James Murdoch, the son of News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, was also recalled to testify again before members of Britain's Parliament later this fall, facing new questions about the breadth of News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal. The Wall Street Journal examined the scandal's impact on the elder Murdoch's succession plan for the conglomerate, especially as it involves James. The company's executives also announced this week that they've found tens of thousands of documents that could shed more light on the phone hacking cases. — Reading roundup: Here's what else went on this week: — The biggest news story this week, of course, is actually 10 years old: Here's a look at how newspapers marked the anniversary of 9/11, how news orgs used digital technology to tell the story, and a reflection on how 9/11 changed the media landscape. — Twitter introduced a new web analytics tool to measure Twitter's impact on websites. Here's an analysis from Mathew Ingram of GigaOM. — At an academic conference last weekend, Illinois j-prof Robert McChesney repeated his call for public funding for journalism. Here are a couple of good summaries of his talk from fellow j-profs Axel Bruns and Alfred Hermida. — Finally, here's a relatively short but insightful two-part interview between two digital media luminaries, Henry Jenkins and Dan Gillmor, about media literacy, citizen journalism and Gillmor's latest book. Should make for a quick, thought-provoking weekend read.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/09/16/this-week-in-review-a-unique-paywall-plan-in-boston-and-ethics-at-techcrunch-and-the-times/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:07:14 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=854

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

This Week in Review: Murdoch and Wall Street, AOL takes a dive, and Tribune takes a stab at tablets

This Week in Review: Twitter and big ideas, praise for the NYT’s pay plan, and more trouble for Murdoch

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on July 18, 2011.] News Corp.'s scandal keeps growing: Rupert Murdoch might have hoped News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal would die down when he closed the British tabloid News of the World last week, but it only served to fuel the issue's explosion. This past week, the scandal's collateral damage spread to News Corp.'s proposed takeover of the British broadcaster BSkyB: Faced with increasing pressure from the British government and the revelation that News Corp. journalists tried to get private records of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, News Corp. dropped the BSkyB bid, which had been a huge part of the company's U.K. strategy. Plenty of other problems are cropping up for News Corp., too. The top lawyer for its U.K. newspaper branch, News International, quit. The company's stock lost billion in four business days at one point. A pre-existing U.S. shareholders' suit expanded to cover the hacking scandal. The Murdochs have to testify before British Parliament this week about the scandal, and the FBI started investigating U.S.-related aspects of the issue. That's all in addition to the ongoing problems News Corp. faces, as detailed by Poynter's Rick Edmonds. The scandal has led quite a few writers to criticize the culture that Murdoch has created at News Corp. Capital New York's Tom McGeveran and Reuters' John Lloyd railed on Murdoch and News Corp.'s character, Carl Bernstein called this Murdoch's Watergate, and the Observer's editorial board called for systemic reforms in Britain so Murdoch's influence can never be so strong. Members of the Bancroft family said they wouldn't have sold the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch in 2007 if they'd have known the hacking was going on. On the other hand, the New York Times pointed out that sleazy British tabloid tactics are hardly limited to Murdoch, and media critic Howard Kurtz noted that they're very much alive in the U.S. mainstream press, too. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen defended Murdoch, saying he's been good for journalism on the whole, and Gawker's John Cook defended those tabloid reporting tactics. Meanwhile, j-prof Jeff Jarvis and the Telegraph's Toby Harnden urged the British government not to respond by enacting more regulation. News Corp.'s retreat might not stop with News of the World and BSkyB. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff and others have reported that the company's execs are debating whether to get out of Britain's newspaper business entirely, and several observers chimed in to say that might actually make a good deal of business sense. Media analyst Ken Doctor said News International is losing steam, and the Financial Times' John Gapper said newspapers are becoming far more trouble than they're worth to Murdoch. Not only that, but the New Yorker's John Cassidy said dropping his U.K. newspapers could let Murdoch revive his BSkyB bid, and Jeff Jarvis speculated that when Murdoch chooses between the power that the papers give him and the money saved by getting rid of them, he'll choose the money. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch called the rumors of a newspaper sell-off "rubbish." But just because News of the World and News International may be dead and dying, that doesn't mean newspapers as a whole are, argued David Carr of the New York Times. As he noted, it was the Guardian's dogged reporting that finally broke this story open. Murdoch "prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect," Carr wrote. The Atlantic also had praise for the Guardian, and Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore interviewed one of its editors about the lonely journey of covering the phone hacking story. — HuffPo aggregation under the microscope: A lively discussion about the rights and wrongs of aggregation developed last week out of a column by Ad Age media critic Simon Dumenco, who complained that the Huffington Post had extensively summarized one of his posts, buried the link to the original, and — contrary to Arianna Huffington's argument that her site benefits those they aggregate by sending them readers — gave him just 57 page views. The Huffington Post responded by apologizing and suspending the article's writer. HuffPo business editor Peter Goodman told Adweek the piece was a fully formed article when it should have been a simple introduction and a link, but Dumenco responded to the apology by arguing that the writer did nothing out of the ordinary — this is just how HuffPo tells its writers to do it. Dumenco's point was echoed by several others: The Awl's Choire Sicha said the suspended writer was doing what she was taught, Gawker's Ryan Tate, drawing on a revealing quote from a former HuffPo writer, made the same point: "This is pretty ridiculous, given HuffPo's systematic, officially-sanctioned approach to rewriting too much of people's news articles." British journalist Kevin Anderson called HuffPo's summary-heavy aggregation "a pretty cynical strategy," and paidContent's Staci Kramer said HuffPo needs to respect its sources, rather than treating a link as a favor. Gabe Rivera, whose news site, Techmeme, was compared to HuffPo favorably by Dumenco, looked for terms to distinguish what his site does from what HuffPo does. Poynter's Julie Moos said some measure of originality will always make for better journalism and a better business model than heavy aggregation, and ZDNet's Tom Foremski pined for the old blogging mentality whose goal was to add value. In a short podcast, author Steven Rosenbaum said this is a logical time to step back and evaluate exactly what constitutes ethical aggregation. There were a few dissenters, though: GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and Slate's Jack Shafer both argued that the type of aggregation that HuffPo does has been around for ages in traditional media (especially in Britain, according to Forbes' Tim Worstall). In fact, Shafer said, news orgs could learn a something valuable from the Huffington Post: "That a huge, previously ignored readership out there wants its news hot, quick, and tight." — Comparing Google+, Facebook, and Twitter: It's been just about three weeks since Google+ launched, and Google's new social network is growing like a weed, with estimates of as many as 10 million users so far. (Its number of active users may soon be approaching Twitter's figures.) Google+ news has dominated Twitter, and Google's also working on integrating it with Gmail. With Plus' incredible growth, tech observers have been going back and forth about what social network Google+ is disrupting most. PCWorld's Megan Geuss wondered whether Google+ and Facebook can coexist, and PC Magazine's John Dvorak posited that all the excitement about Google+ is more or less just pent-up frustration with Facebook. The New York Times' David Pogue and Technology Review's Paul Boutin both compared Google+ favorably to Facebook, largely because of its superior privacy controls (though GigaOM's Mathew Ingram pointed out that it may not be a privacy improvement for some people). Meanwhile, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan said Google+ is more comparable to Twitter, then went ahead and made a thorough, smart comparison between the two. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal said Google+ might end up being more conversational than Twitter, which he called more of a call-and-response: Google+ "won't be as good at connecting people to information or each other quickly, but it might be better at longer form discussions and whatever we call the process by which people pull reasoned thoughts from their networks into public discourse." Hutch Carpenter said Google+ resembles both Facebook and Twitter, and Computer World's Mike Elgan wrote that it'll disrupt just about everything. Still, Google+ has its limits: ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick explained why he'd never move his personal blog there as some are doing, and Instapaper's Marco Arment and the Guardian's Dan Gillmor both urged readers to keep a space for their own online identity outside of spaces like Google+ or Facebook. For journalists feeling out Google+, Meranda Watling of 10,000 Words put together a preliminary guide. — Reading roundup: Here's what else people were talking about this past week: — The newspaper chain MediaNews made a distinctive play for the tablet news market last week, announcing the launch of TapIn, a location-based news app made specifically for tablets. It'll start in the Bay Area in partnership with the San Jose Mercury News. Ken Doctor, Jeff Sonderman, and Mathew Ingram all wrote about what makes it worth watching. — The Economist continued running pieces all week in its series on the future of the news industry. You can check out several writers'reasons for optimism or read the opening statements in an ongoing debate between NYU's Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr about whether the Internet has been good for journalism. — Boston Globe developer Andy Boyle made his pitch for young journalists to go into web development, or as he put it, "learn to make the internets." — Poynter's Jeff Sonderman put together two great social media how-to's for journalists: One on verifying information on social media, and the other on strategies for engagement on Facebook. — Finally, NYU's Clay Shirky gave us another thoughtful essay on the unbundling of news and why the news ecosystem needs to be chaotic right now. In the end, though, here's what he believes news should be: "News has to be subsidized because society’s truth-tellers can’t be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market"; "news has to be cheap because cheap is where the opportunity is right now"; and "news has to be free, because it has to spread."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/08/13/this-week-in-review-murdochs-mess-keeps-growing-aggregation-ethics-and-giving-context-to-google/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:05:59 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=815

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This Week in Review: Paying up with Apple and Google, Twitter and activism, free labor for HuffPo

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

]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 27, 2011.] Censorship, the law, and Twitter: If we hadn't already learned how social media are opening the traditional media's gatekeeping role to the masses, we got a pretty good object lesson this week in Britain. Here's what happened: To keep the British tabloids from digging into an alleged affair with a reality TV star, Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs took out a British court provision called a super-injunction that prohibits media from identifying him and reporting on both the story and the very fact that a super-injunction exists. But the super-injunction was no match for Facebook, Twitter, and soccer forums, where thousands of people talked about Giggs and the affair in spite of (and because of) the order. Since then, a Scottish newspaper and a member of Parliament have both named Giggs, rendering the super-injunction essentially ineffective and causing quite a bit of handwringing over whether gag orders are a lost cause in the Twitter age, and whether or not that's a good thing. Giggs sued Twitter for the breach, and some members of Parliament started looking for ways to control the site. Prime Minister David Cameron said Twitter made Britain's injunctions "unfair" and "unsustainable" for traditional media and urged Parliament to change them. Some people, including World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and the Guardian's Richard Hillgrove, said the problem lies with Twitter, not the law, with Hillgrove (rather absurdly) suggesting a delay mechanism to monitor posts before they go up: "Twitter and Facebook are not blank sheets of paper. They are media publishers like any other." Others faulted the law instead: At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor said it allows the wealthy to play by different rules, and the Telegraph'sHarry Mount said that thanks to the web, "a form of people power has been effectively absorbed into that new body of privacy law." The Vancouver Sun's Mario Canseco documented the failure of gag orders in the Internet age in Canada, and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM advised courts and governments to quit trying to enforce antiquated laws, saying they "may not like the implications of a totally distributed real-time information network, but they are going to have to start living with it sooner rather than later." Then, of course, there's the question of whether the anonymous online super-injunction violators have any legal repercussions to worry about. As the New York Times noted, Twitter has been resistant to turning over its users' identities in the past, though a Twitter official said this week it will hand over user info to the authorities if it's legally required to. But even with Twitter's compliance, there would still be hurdles to clear in identifying users, the Telegraph explained. — iPad channels for big and small media: Several big-media publications neared or hit iPad milestones this week: On stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, The Daily's Greg Clayman said it's nearing a million downloads since it was launched in January. Clayman wouldn't say how many paid subscribers the News Corp. iPad-only publication has (a far more interesting figure in determining The Daily's viability), but Adweek's Lucia Moses said The Daily will announce its number of paid downloads — it only started charging in March — once it hits a "target level." Meanwhile, Wired and GQ were made available for in-app subscriptions through Apple App Store this week, after their owner, Condé Nast, became one of the first major publishers to strike a deal with Apple for in-app subscriptions earlier this month. Another major publication, Playboy, launched an iPad subscription outside the App Store, because it obviously has some difficulty complying with Apple's "no nudity" policy. Playboy's app is essentially an iPad-optimized website, which might seem like a tempting option for publishers who don't want to deal with Apple's restrictions, but as Mashable and GigaOM explained, Playboy might be uniquely positioned to pull this off where others can't. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram looked at those cases and weighed the pluses and minuses for publishers of getting into bed with Apple. Of course, big publishers aren't the only ones getting into the iPad game: At paidContent, Ashley Norris, CEO of a small publishing company that just released an iPad app, argued that indie publishers could play a key role in developing the tablet magazine. Flipboard is a pretty ideal model for those publishers: It's valued at 0 million, and SiliconAngle's Tom Foremski said it exemplifies the current en vogue tech-bubble business plan: "find free content and organize it into a useful interface." That niche might not play as big of a part in the iPad market as we think, though: As Poynter's Jeff Sonderman noted via ReadWriteWeb, news apps make up only 3% of all the apps in the App Store. — Driving more traffic from Facebook: Facebook has been working hard lately to cozy up to news organizations, and this week it provided some statistics that may have some of those organizations looking more closely at integrating Facebook into their sites. According to stats Search Engine Land got from Facebook (so grain of salt, etc.), the average media site integrated with Facebook has gotten a 300% jump in Facebook referral traffic, and ABC News, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post have all reportedly doubled their traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins. Meanwhile, Fortune's Peter Lauria talked to Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik about the possibility of news orgs charging on Facebook using Facebook credits, like some Facebook games do now. As it's been known to do, Facebook played a big role in the aftermath of another natural disaster this week when a tornado hit Joplin, Missouri. The local newspaper, the Joplin Globe, told Poynter about how they set up a Facebook page to help people find family and friends in the tornado's wake. Elsewhere in social media and news, the New York Times experimented this week with a human-powered Twitter feed, as opposed to its usual mostly automatically driven style. The Times' Liz Heron (and a couple of other newspaper social media editors) talked to Poynter's Jeff Sonderman about their Twitter strategies, and Jessica Roy of 10,000 Words looked at how the experiment changed the Times' Twitter feed. Heron also revealed the Times' informal social media guidelines at the BBC's Social Media Summit: "Use common sense and don't be stupid." — Reading roundup: Not a lot of big future-of-news stories this week, a several smaller things worth keeping an eye on: — Google notified publishers late last week that it's abandoning its project to scan and archive hundreds of years of old newspapers. The Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes lamented the decision, and Paul Balcerak urged newspapers to pick up where Google left off. — This week's AOL/Huffington Post bits and pieces: Huffington Post Canada has been launched, AOL's Daily Finance has been made over, and some HuffPo staff are reportedly leaving because they're upset with how the AOL/HuffPo marriage has gone so far. Meanwhile, even though AOL's content is free, CEO Tim Armstrong expressed his general belief in paid content online. — Ben Huh of the Cheezburger network of comedy sites announced he's working on what he's calling the Moby Dick Project — an effort to reform the way news is presented and consumed online. ReadWriteWeb gave more details of the type of software he's developing. — A couple of addenda to last week's linking discussion: Former Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Fry wrote about solving the workflow issue at newspapers, and at the Guardian, Dan Gillmor called out lazy linking — linking to a summary, rather than the original piece — in online aggregation. — CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis made a case for news as conversation and the value of comments, and at 10,000 Words, Alex Schmidt wrote about the way poisonous online comments can affect reporters. — Finally, Canadian media consultant Ken Goldstein issued a paper looking at decline circulation of newspapers in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. He included a possibly remarkably prescient 1964 quotation by media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold."]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-confounding-censors-with-twitter-and-space-for-big-and-small-media-on-the-ipad/feed/ 0 http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-new-business-models-and-traffic-drivers-in-online-news-and-wrangling-over-app-ads/ http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-new-business-models-and-traffic-drivers-in-online-news-and-wrangling-over-app-ads/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:57:01 +0000 Mark http://markcoddington.com/?p=808

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

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]]> [This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 13, 2011.] Leaving the old ad model behind: Much of the commentary about digital news this week was generated by two big reports, one on the business of digital journalism and the other on its consumption. We'll start on the business side, with the Columbia j-school's study on what we know so far about the viability of various digital journalism business models. As Poynter's Bill Mitchell suggested, the best entry point into the 146-page report might be the nine recommendations that form its conclusion. Mitchell summed the report up in three themes: The audience for journalism is growing, though translating that into revenue is a challenge; the old model of banner ads isn't cutting it, and news orgs need to look for new forms of advertising; and news orgs need to play better with aggregators and sharpen their own aggregation skills. In his response to the study, Reuters' Felix Salmon focused on the advertising angle, arguing that journalism and advertising have too long been linked by mere adjacency and that "when you move away from the ad-adjacency model, however, things get a lot more interesting and exciting." The New York Times' story on the report centered on advertising, too, particularly the growing need for journalists to learn about the business side of their products. (That was media consultant Mark Potts' main takeaway, too.) Emily Bell, a scholar at the center that released the study, said that while journalists need to understand the business of their industry, integrating news and sales staffs isn't necessarily the way to go. The J-Lab's Jan Schaffer recommended that news orgs respond to their business problems by learning from smaller startups and incorporating them more thoroughly into the journalism ecosystem. And paidContent's Staci Kramer advised news orgs to focus on regular audiences rather than fly-by visitors: "Outwardly we like to complain about content farms; in reality, a lot of what news outlets are doing to the side of those front-page stories isn’t very different." — Facebook's growth as news driver: The other major report was released by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and looked at how people access news on the web. This study, too, found that despite a small core of frequent users, news sites are dependent on casual users who visit sites infrequently and don't stay long when they're there. Poynter's Rick Edmonds conveniently distilled the study into five big takeaways. The study also found that while Google is still the top referrer to major news sites, Facebook is quickly emerging as a significant news driver, too. University of British Columbia j-prof Alfred Hermida said this lines up with recent research he's done among Canadians, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram said it showed that while Google is a dominant source for online news now, Facebook is primed to succeed it. Meanwhile, the study also found that surprisingly little traffic to news sites is driven by Twitter. Lauren Dugan of All Twitter said this finding casts some doubt on the idea that Twitter is "a huge link-sharing playground," though the Wall Street Journal's Zach Seward said the study misses that Twitter referrals are undercounted. The Twitter undercounting was one of several problems that TBD's Steve Buttry had about the study, including inconsistent language to characterize findings and a bias toward large news organizations. "This study probably has some helpful data. But it has too many huge holes and indications of bias to have much value," Buttry wrote. — Pricing ads and subscriptions on tablets: Condé Nast became the third major magazine publisher to reach an agreement with Apple on app subscriptions, and one of the first to offer an in-app subscription, with The New Yorker available now. (Wired subscriptions are coming next month.) Time Inc., which reached a deal with Apple last week, clarified that it won't include in-app subscriptions, which would be where Apple takes that now-infamous 30% cut. The Financial Times, meanwhile, is still negotiating with Apple. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici explained why publishers may be warming to Apple's deal: Turns out, more people are willing to share their personal data with publishers feared. Still, Mathew Ingram of GigaOM used iFlowReader's bad Apple experience as a warning to other companies about the dangers of getting into bed with Apple. Now that Apple-publisher relations have thawed, the New York Times' David Carr moved to the next issue: Negotiations between publishers and advertisers over how valuable in-app ads are, and how much those ads should cost. Time.com's Chris Gayomali wondered why magazines are more than giving away app subscriptions with print subscriptions, and concluded that it's about getting more eyeballs on the print product, not the app, in order to maintain the all-important ad rate base. In other words, Carr said in another post, publishers are following the old magazine model, where the product is priced below cost and the money is made off advertising instead. He questioned the wisdom of applying that strategy to tablets: "the rich advertising opportunity that will produce may be a less durable and less stable business than grinding out highly profitable circulation over the long haul." — A postmortem on Bin Laden coverage: It's now been close to two weeks since the news of Osama bin Laden's death broke on Twitter, but plenty of folks were still discussing how the story was broken and covered. Gilad Lotan and Devin Gaffney of SocialFlow put together some fascinating visualizations of how the news spread on Twitter, especially the central roles of Donald Rumsfeld staffer Keith Urbahn and New York Times reporter Brian Stelter. Mashable's Chris Taylor concluded from the data that trustworthiness and having active followers (as opposed to just lots of followers) are more important than ever on Twitter. Media consultant Frederic Filloux was mostly reassured by the way the traditional news outlets handled the story online: "For once, editorial seems to evolve at a faster pace than the business side." There were still folks cautioning against going overboard on Twitter-as-news hype, while the Telegraph's Emma Barnett wondered why pundits are still so surprised at the significant role Twitter and Facebook play in breaking news. ("It's exactly what they were designed for.") New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane gave the blow-by-blow of how his paper responded to the story, highlighting a few tweets by Times reporters and editors. Reuters' Felix Salmon chastised Brisbane for not including Brian Stelter's tweets, which were posted a good 15 minutes before the ones he included. The exclusion, Salmon surmised, might indicate that the Times doesn't see what Stelter did on Twitter as reporting. Google News founder Krishna Bharat compared the way Google handled 9/11 and Bin Laden's death, marveling at how much more breaking-news coverage is available on the web now. The Lab's Megan Garber used the occasion to glean some insights from Bharat about trusting the authority of the algorithm to provide a rich palette of news, but at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan used the Bin Laden coverage to point out some flaws in Google News' algorithm. — Reading roundup: Lots of interesting little rabbit trails to choose from this week. Here are a few: — ComScore's April traffic numbers are out, and there were a number of storylines flowing out of them: Cable news sources are beating print ones in web traffic, the New York Times' numbers are down (as expected) after implementation of its paywall, and Gawker's numbers are starting to come back after dropping last year with its redesign. — Last week, ESPN columnist Rick Reilly told graduating students at the University of Colorado's j-school to never write for free. That prompted Jason Fry of the National Sports Journalism Center and Craig Calcaterra of MSNBC.com's Hardball Talk to expound on the virtues of writing for free, though Slate's Tom Scocca took Reilly's side. — Two thoughtful pieces on brands and journalism: Jason Fry at Poynter on assessing the value of organizational and personal brands, and Vadim Lavrusik at the Lab on journalists building their brands via Facebook. — Late last week, Google lost an appeal to a 2007 Belgian ruling forcing it to pay newspapers for gaining revenue for linking to their stories on Google News. — Finally, the Huffington Post's Mandy Jenkins offered a helpful list of 10 ways journalists can use Storify. It's full of great examples and should spark an idea or two.]]> http://markcoddington.com/2011/06/01/this-week-in-review-new-business-models-and-traffic-drivers-in-online-news-and-wrangling-over-app-ads/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 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-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 reputati